The Limit
A certain combination of events or people forces us to realize what we are not capable of: continuing.
It is of course painful to meet one’s limits, no matter the situation or circumstance. When I say limits I speak in the most general sense. Every personality is encircled by its prohibitive rind, by the extreme that makes it impossible to go further. The moment when one thinks, “no more,” or more truthfully, “I can’t”—that is the limit. It is the moment one rears back, like a spooked horse, in biological reflex. People find this painful because the final pronouncement is a pronouncement that, rising within the self, speaks of the self’s constitutional inadequacy. One realizes one is “not cut out for this.” The relief or loss of tension that ensues feels paradoxically bad. Certainly, to cease attempting the untenable often means a happier, or at least saner, future. But to have to cease in the first place is tragic, because at the limit no choice or even surrender is available. “Surrender” is, believe it or not, too agential a term for limits. “Failure” may not even be right. It’s just a stop—a cutting of the engines.
It is especially painful when the limit presents itself as a new discovery. Some limits we know and can espy from a distance. Others jut out at us suddenly, as if from a seismic crack in the ground. A certain combination of events or people forces us to realize what we are not capable of: continuing. This can be shocking, even permanently wounding, for it exposes both our debility and our previous obliviousness to that debility. Debility, after all, is what so idiosyncratically marks personhood; to not know of its prior existence is to really not know the self. Then we see that we must meet some of our debilities in real time, that they can only be discerned through practice, that others help us to their secret and in turn render moot our privacy. All of this feels like a mugging; what is forever wrested away is the illusion of safety. I think of the following lines from Henry James, a man who understood that the dawn of knowledge frequently meant the loss of peace and a consignment to unfreedom: “She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life.” This is from Portrait of a Lady. There’s no bleaker statement on how costly it can be to take the measure of things, or of yourself; how when it happens, it places you in a more or less airless room.
For we are used to understanding—keeping an eye on—our faults. We inventory them, then plan and negotiate how and when they will appear in our daily lives. To find a fault or deficiency by chance thus feels violent, and prompts the “incredulous terror” that James’ narrator speaks of. Some may think I am now being melodramatic, that life most obviously and mundanely requires a continuous sighting of one’s faults. I believe this objection proves the point. The faults are identified and accumulated as one ages—this makes it a protocol of mortality, not of life, and the accumulation can only orient us towards the final and least flexible limit of death. Death being, here, the logical endpoint of any steady shrinkage of possibility.
And so it is odd that the enjoinder to “know one’s limits” is in our culture repeated most frequently with reference to substances, to drugs and alcohol. It is odd because we are liable to rush towards these limits on our physical bodies—as with extreme exercise or exertion—and find them somehow more forgivable or less damning than the limits of personality. And though physical limits are attended by real danger, they seem—unlike non-physical limits, which never portend real immediate death—somehow more able to change or inch outwards. They in fact often do, which can make the self feel unpredictable in a joyous way, just as the abrupt setting of a limit on our mental qualities (fortitude, bravery, patience) makes the self feel unknowable in an appalling way. This unknowability is not simply unpleasant—it threatens dysfunction, and seems like a precondition that cannot be welcomed if we are to proceed in the world. For how could we proceed, without first knowing our inner selves? How can we live in a world that shows us mercilessly who we are, and shows us over and over again that who we are is unprepared, exposed, reactive, much too sensitive to the touch? People are attached, as Stanley Cavell writes, to “the idea that we can save our lives by knowing them.” Most of us subscribe to this theory of knowledge and potential—I do. But in finding our limits, the points beyond which we are incapacitated, we see that knowledge is not always prepossessed, and that its belated arrival sentences us to something definitive and sad. In these scenarios, knowledge becomes restrictive, not transformative.
If it’s not clear already, I am writing this because I have recently been feeling old, and less capable all around. I see myself in the mirror and can tell something in my face has changed—or that my face has, rather, settled into a new and irreversible stage or aspect. Then when I think of myself as incapable, I feel most strongly the self-pity that I am prone to in my worst moments. Self-pity is odd, too, because it marshals all the grievances and insecurities and examples that, if one could only look at them differently, would serve as the very reasons why one should behave more generously with oneself. To pity myself for being fatigued, for having no reserves, for having no resources, for having exerted myself and then buckled at the end—shouldn’t these facts of existence help me to tolerate the limit rather than lament it? “I did everything I could.” These words could be uttered in peace or, even better, under the blessed shade of rational deliberation. Instead they are cried out in protest and petulance. I suspect the self-pity persists because of what I have been describing—the knowledge of the limit, the way it comes from the outside like a blow to the mouth.
The basic condition is that of being acted upon. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it is possible to not be acted upon. Obviously, it is not. What then can we do? One option is to attempt to feel awe or love, instead of self-pity, in response to the world’s power over the definition of our personalities. We would feel love not so much for our shortcomings as for the obscurity in which they dwell, inside of us. We would be accepting of, though consciously and gratefully unprepared for, the time of their surfacing. Perhaps we would be still able to love what we cede when we meet a limit—the things that cannot be, the people who we must realize we are not.
I fear, however, that now we’re just talking about some state of grace, or madness. If that is the case, there’s not much else to say, and we have reached the limit once more.
I leave us with another quote from Stanley Cavell:
“In the typical situation of tragic heroes, time and space converge to a point at which an ultimate care is exposed and action must be taken which impales one’s life upon the founding care of that life—that in the loss of which chaos is come, in the loss of which all is but toys, in the loss of which there is nothing and nothing to come, and disgust with the self, natural enough at any time, becomes overwhelming. Death, so caused, may be mysterious, but what founds these lives is clear enough: the capacity to love, the strength to found a life upon a love. That the love becomes incompatible with that life is tragic, but that it is maintained until the end is heroic. People capable of such love could have removed mountains; instead it has caved in upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it. Our tragedy differs from this classical chain not in its conclusion but in the fact that the conclusion has been reached without passing through love, in the fact that no love seems worth founding one’s life upon, or that society—and therefore I myself—can allow no context in which love, for anything but itself, can be expressed. In such a situation it can look as if the state is the villain and all its men and women merely victims. But that picture is only a further extension of the theatricality which causes it. Our problem is that society can no longer hear its own screams. Our problem, in getting back to beginnings, will not be to find the thing we have always cared about, but to discover whether we have it in us always to care about something.”