Austen×Socrates

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I confess I find the premise of our conversation somewhat indelicate. We are to discuss persons we loved but could not keep, as though one might itemize the contents of one's heart for public inspection.
2. 00:12
   Socratesshare moment

   And yet you have made a career, have you not, of describing precisely such hearts for public inspection? Though perhaps you mean that it is different when the heart is one's own.
3. 00:24
   Jane Austenshare moment

   The distinction is not insignificant. One may observe and render the emotions of invented persons without the particular exposure that attends confession.
4. 00:34
   Socratesshare moment

   Then let me ask: when you write of a Marianne Dashwood or an Anne Elliot, do you draw upon no knowledge of loss? Or do you find that invention requires no such foundation?
5. 00:46
   Jane Austenshare moment

   You know perfectly well that I draw upon observation and experience both. But experience transformed through art is not the same as memoir.
6. 00:55
   Socratesshare moment

   I wonder, though, whether the transformation truly conceals what it purports to conceal. When Anne Elliot is persuaded to give up the man she loves, and spends eight years regretting it, might not some readers detect the author's own acquaintance with persuasion and regret?
7. 01:14
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Some readers detect all manner of things, most of them nonsense. I wrote of what I observed in the world around me.
8. 01:21
   Socratesshare moment

   Of course. And you observed nothing in your own mirror.
9. 01:25
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I observed a woman of modest fortune and no particular beauty, who wrote novels and remained unmarried. The facts are not romantic.
10. 01:36
    Socratesshare moment

    But tell me, was there never a man whose absence you felt? Not as a heroine feels it, with fainting spells and poetry, but as Jane Austen felt it, in her own unremarkable life?
11. 01:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    There was a man. Very briefly. He died quite suddenly.
12. 01:53
    Socratesshare moment

    And did you love him?
13. 01:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I had reason to believe I might have, given time. But time was not granted.
14. 01:59
    Socratesshare moment

    How interesting that you phrase it so. Not 'I loved him,' but 'I might have loved him, given time.' Do we require a certain duration before we grant the name of love to our feelings?
15. 02:12
    Jane Austenshare moment

    We require sense. One cannot build an entire edifice of emotion upon three weeks' acquaintance, no matter what my Marianne might think.
16. 02:21
    Socratesshare moment

    Yet you said he was a man you could not keep. If you did not love him, what precisely could you not keep? The possibility of him?
17. 02:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. The possibility. Which is perhaps more painful than the actuality, since one is left to imagine all that might have been, without the corrective of reality.
18. 02:42
    Socratesshare moment

    Spoken like someone who has given the matter considerable thought. And was there no other? Your sister Cassandra burned many of your letters, I understand. Perhaps there were confidences she wished to protect.
19. 02:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Cassandra protected my privacy, which I value far more than posterity's curiosity. But if you must know, there was one other matter. A gentleman who proposed marriage, whom I accepted one evening and refused the next morning.
20. 03:10
    Socratesshare moment

    An entire courtship conducted between sunset and sunrise. Was he very objectionable?
21. 03:16
    Jane Austenshare moment

    He was perfectly unobjectionable. Respectable family, adequate fortune, good connections. He would have secured my future and my mother's and Cassandra's.
22. 03:26
    Socratesshare moment

    And yet you refused him. Might we conclude, then, that there are things you valued more than security?
23. 03:33
    Jane Austenshare moment

    We might conclude that I valued honesty. It would have been dishonest to marry where I felt nothing beyond mild esteem.
24. 03:40
    Socratesshare moment

    So you gave up security rather than violate your sense of what a marriage ought to be. And did you not, in doing so, give up something you loved? Not him, perhaps, but the very possibility of the domestic life you wrote of so thoroughly?
25. 03:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is an uncomfortable observation.
26. 03:58
    Socratesshare moment

    The most interesting ones usually are. Do you think you loved the idea of marriage more than you loved any particular man?
27. 04:06
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think I loved the idea of what marriage could be—a true union of minds and affections. And I would not accept the pale imitation that was offered.
28. 04:16
    Socratesshare moment

    So your loss was not a person but an ideal that remained unrealized. Is that not its own kind of grief?
29. 04:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is. Though one is not encouraged to mourn such things. One is meant to be grateful for spinsterhood's dignities and occupy oneself with useful work.
30. 04:34
    Socratesshare moment

    And did you? Occupy yourself usefully?
31. 04:37
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote novels. Whether that constitutes usefulness, I leave to others to determine.
32. 04:43
    Socratesshare moment

    But here is what puzzles me: your novels all end in marriage. Your heroines find their proper partners, their true unions of mind and affection. Was this not painful to write?
33. 04:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It would have been more painful to write that such things were impossible. Fiction allowed me to insist that they were not—merely that I had not found mine.
34. 05:05
    Socratesshare moment

    Then your novels were not escapes from your circumstances but arguments against them. You wrote what should be true, rather than what was true.
35. 05:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote what was true for some people, and might have been true for others. Including, perhaps, myself, in some other arrangement of fortune and fate.
36. 05:24
    Socratesshare moment

    Now I must ask you something more difficult. Do you think you lost these possibilities, or do you think you chose to release them?
37. 05:32
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I imagine you believe there is an important distinction.
38. 05:35
    Socratesshare moment

    There is. To lose a thing suggests it was taken from you. To release a thing suggests you had agency in its departure. Which is closer to the truth?
39. 05:48
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Both. The young man died; I had no choice in that. But I chose to refuse the proposal. So I know both kinds of inability to keep.
40. 05:57
    Socratesshare moment

    And which is worse? The loss that comes from without, or the loss that comes from one's own hand?
41. 06:03
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The first allows for blameless grief. The second requires one to believe that one's choice was worth the cost, every day thereafter.
42. 06:11
    Socratesshare moment

    And do you? Believe it was worth the cost?
43. 06:16
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have six published novels and died in my sister's arms at forty-one, having never married. You may draw your own conclusions about whether I found sufficient compensation.
44. 06:25
    Socratesshare moment

    Ah, but I am not asking what I might conclude. I am asking what you concluded.
45. 06:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I concluded that one cannot have everything. And that some of us are formed by temperament and circumstance to pour our longing into pages rather than parlors.
46. 06:40
    Socratesshare moment

    Is that truly an answer? Or is it another elegant evasion?
47. 06:44
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is the only answer I have. I regretted what I lost and did not regret refusing what was insufficient. Both things are true simultaneously.
48. 06:53
    Socratesshare moment

    Then perhaps loss is not always a matter of keeping or not keeping. Perhaps it is sometimes the price of keeping faith with oneself.
49. 07:04
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How uncharacteristically declarative of you. Have you at last abandoned the interrogative mode?
50. 07:10
    Socratesshare moment

    Only for a moment. I should ask: do you think the people we cannot keep ever truly leave us? Or do they persist in the work we do after they are gone?
51. 07:22
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think they persist as questions we continue to turn over. What might have been. Whether we chose rightly. Whether the compensation was adequate.
52. 07:31
    Socratesshare moment

    And you are comfortable, then, living with questions rather than answers?
53. 07:36
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have no choice. One does not arrive at certainty about such matters. One simply continues.
54. 07:42
    Socratesshare moment

    Then we are not so different, you and I. I have spent my life asking questions and receiving no final answers. You have spent yours observing hearts and finding them endlessly complex.
55. 07:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The difference is that you seem to enjoy the uncertainty. I merely learned to write in its presence.
56. 08:02
    Socratesshare moment

    And what do you think that makes you? A victim of loss, or its chronicler?
57. 08:08
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Must I choose? I think I was both, and that the chronicling was how I survived the loss. Or at least made it useful.
58. 08:15
    Socratesshare moment

    Useful to whom?
59. 08:16
    Jane Austenshare moment

    To myself, certainly. And perhaps to those readers who find in my novels some echo of their own hearts and their own accommodations with disappointment.
60. 08:25
    Socratesshare moment

    Then the person you could not keep became, in some sense, all the persons you reached through your work. A curious multiplication of presence through absence.
61. 08:36
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is either very profound or complete nonsense. I have not yet determined which.
62. 08:41
    Socratesshare moment

    Perhaps both, like your regret and your lack of regret. Tell me one last thing: if you could speak to that young man now, the one who died, what would you say to him?
63. 08:54
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I would thank him for the possibility. And apologize that I have made him, in however small a way, material for this discussion.
64. 09:01
    Socratesshare moment

    Do you think he would object?
65. 09:03
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think he would understand that the dead do not object. They simply become what the living make of them, in memory and in art.
66. 09:12
    Socratesshare moment

    As I have become a character in Plato's dialogues, and you have become the author rather than the woman. We are all transformed by what survives us.
67. 09:22
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. Though I confess I preferred to control the transformation while I lived. One writes one's novels precisely to shape what will be remembered.
68. 09:32
    Socratesshare moment

    And yet you left us no memoir, no confession, no direct account of your heart. Only the novels, which you insist are not autobiography.
69. 09:42
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Because they are not. But neither are they unrelated to the woman who wrote them. We contain multitudes, as I believe someone will eventually write.
70. 09:52
    Socratesshare moment

    Then perhaps the person you loved but could not keep was not any man at all, but some possible version of yourself. The one who might have married, who might have had different sorrows and different satisfactions.
71. 10:06
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is disturbingly astute. I think we should conclude before you extract any more uncomfortable truths.
72. 10:13
    Socratesshare moment

    As you wish. Though I suspect the truths remain uncomfortable whether we speak them or not.
73. 10:19
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Indeed. But some of us prefer our discomforts private. Good evening, Socrates.
74. 10:25
    Socratesshare moment

    Good evening, Miss Austen. Thank you for keeping what you could, and for sharing what you chose to share.