"We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our
heads," Lillian Hellman once wrote. "It is considered unhealthy in
America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them,
psychotic to dwell upon them." Yet who in their lifetime has never
regretted a lost love, a missed opportunity, a path not taken?
Indeed, regret is perhaps a universal experience, but while poets
and novelists have long explored its complexities, very little has
been written from a scholarly perspective that examines this
emotion. Now, in Regret, Janet Landman takes a lively and
perceptive look at this multifaceted phenomenon.
Much as Anthony Storr did in his best-selling Solitude, Landman
here provides an insightful anatomy of an emotion, ranging far and
wide to illuminate the nature of regret--what it is, how it changes
you, how you experience it. She draws on a breathtaking variety of
sources, ranging from psychology, economics, philosophy, and
anthropology, to classic works of literature. We learn what people
regret most--lack of education comes first, followed by employment,
marriage, and children--and how regret differs from other emotions,
such as remorse, disappointment, sadness, or guilt. In one of the
most fascinating sections, Landman examines four "worldviews" of
regret--the Romantic, the Tragic, the Comic, and the Ironic--as
exemplified in four major novels: Great Expectations, Notes From
Underground, The Ambassadors, and Mrs. Dalloway. In Dostoevsky, for
instance, regret is a "poison of unfulfilled desires turned
inward," destructive, incurable. Though it is common to regard
regret as painful and destructive--being "stuck in the past" or
"ruled by emotions"--Landman reveals some surprising benefits. At
best regret is a dynamic changing process--one can transcend
regret, and thus transform the self. In Anne Tyler's Breathing
Lessons, for example, we witness how the characters Ira and Maggie
Moran find themselves ready to move forward in their relationship
only after they have accepted life's limits and losses without
resignation or despair.
"It is a good thing," Landman writes, "that the human mind is not
limited by what actually exists, but works in such a way that it
draws comparisons between what happens and what might have
happened. It is in this ability to imagine alternatives, and the
capacity to care about the particularities of experience, that we
accomplish the task of becoming fully human." For anyone who has
ever questioned, experienced, or avoided regret, here is a
provocative and challenging look at this enduring emotion.
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