Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love Read Online Free

Kant’s complete works. As Atik remarks in a memoir of their beautiful friendship, ironically sandwiched between the pages of the Critique of Pure Reason was a short manuscript of a poem entitled Petit Sot , which means Little Fool. The poem dealt with Samuel Beckett’s earliest conscious feeling of guilt. 12 As a child of maybe five or six, Beckett had innocently placed a hedgehog in a shoe box. He dearly loved and truly wanted to protect the animal he had found and even fed it daily with worms, but one morning, to his infinite dismay, he discovered it dead. Anne Atik says that, as an adult, Beckett told his friends this story on several occasions. This regrettable episode had haunted him throughout his life and he had never been able to repress it. It touched him so deeply that he felt the need to express it in a poem.
    Emotions in general entertain a special relationship with memory. Episodes void of emotional importance are easily forgotten. On the contrary, those laden with strong emotions, positive or negative, grow strong roots. Guilt punctuates our autobiography. It dots it with memories that reach far into remote moments of our past. I still remember several childhood episodes that induced a sense of guilt, even those children’s ‘little crimes’ – as Darwin called them when describing guilt in his son. For instance, I can’t forget the time that I whipped away the chair as my sister was sitting down, causing her a somewhat painful landing and a huge bruise, even though it happened long ago. My parents scolded me and punished me for that.
    Several studies have investigated the autobiographical recollection of guilt-linked memories. One in particular looked at their distribution across time. 13 Are memories connected to moral actions different from other kinds of emotional memories? In other words, can the burden of blame weighing on an event, an action or an omission of an action influence their memorability?
    A team of psychologists elicited moral memories in a group of people by cueing them with words connected to moral feelings or actions, positive as well as negative: for example, ‘honest’, ‘responsible’, ‘virtuous’ and ‘compassionate’ as well as ‘stealing’, ‘unfaithful’, ‘cheating’ and ‘sneaky’. It turned out that their memories of positively moral feelings or actions mostly related to the recent past, while the memories connected to negative moral events were mostly confined to more remote periods in their lives. These results, while they give added evidence that morally heavy actions, including those associated with guilt, can’t be easily forgotten and that we are capable of recollecting them even if they took place in the remote past, also raise another interesting point. There is a certain bias in the recollection of morally problematic memories. It seems that we have a tendency to re-create our autobiographies, associating with our recent past mostly actions that make us appear as ‘good’ people, whereas the negative deeds are pushed back into the remoter past. It is as if we acknowledge the fact that, yes, we have been bad, but we prefer to believe that we are currently a better person than we used to be. A preference to believe that we are improving accords with the idea of moral feelings such as guilt having a reparative role in our lives.
    Choices and more choices
    Consider the following dilemma. It’s a fresh, sparkling spring Sunday afternoon and you are attending a friend’s wedding celebrations in a beautiful house out of town. 14 While everyone else is hovering over the buffet indoors, you decide to take a breath of fresh air and check out the surrounding gardens until the queue for the food recedes. As you are walking around, you notice that in a small shallow stream, a child is about to drown. Desperate, she is waving her hands to demand help, as she struggles to keep her head out of the water. What do you do? Your first impulse is to save the child