Take how we celebrate Christmas.
Zadie Smith addressed just this point in her recent collection of occasional essays Changing My Mind:
Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream … You know [there is an animating spirit to Christmas rituals] when you start your own little family … he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family & you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building. It is a moving & comic thing …. To watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare.
People are people everywhere, across both space & time. But those most difficult to understand are often those who are closest to us, who share our upbringing, environment, genes & love.
A friend of mine, an academic, likes to say that marriage represents the biggest challenge to philosophy that there is.
You spend all your time pondering questions such as:
- How can I prove that the world exists?
- How do I know what I know?
- Do I exist?
Then you meet, or suddenly recognise, your other half.
Validation! Someone who thinks just like you, sees the same things as you do, knows how you feel before you even know it yourself.
But – there will always be that first moment. Big or small – the declaration of World War III or squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle.
How can that possibly happen? How can someone exist in the same world as you, even live in the same house as you .. how can all that be true & yet they think/behave LIKE THAT!
Related post
The speech of Aristophanes
