Читать книгу All About Me: Loving a narcissist - Simon Crompton - Страница 6

You can’t talk about narcissism without telling the story of Narcissus, the beautiful son of a minor Greek god. The story is found (appropriately enough for a concept that has undergone regular transformation over the decades) in a collection of stories called Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. It’s the story of a boy who can’t stop staring at his reflection in a pond, while the woman who loves him pines away, ignored.

That in itself tells us a lot about the modern meaning of narcissism. It’s not just about vanity, but about the terrible human consequences for yourself and those around you if you are so transfixed by yourself that you are unable to understand the feelings of others, or engage with them.

The details of the story give rise to other fundamental notions of narcissism. It’s about glamour, isolation and terrible unspoken suffering. Self-absorption is at the very root of its tragedy.

Narcissus, the 16-year-old son of the river god Cephissus, is so beautiful that all the nymphs in the woods where he hunts fall in love with him. But he rejects them all. One of the nymphs, Echo, becomes so distraught over his indifference that she withdraws to a lonely spot and, as she fades away in her grief, she prays that one day Narcissus might feel for himself what it is like to love and not have that love returned.

The avenging goddess Nemesis hears Echo’s words, and grants her wishes.

Soon after, while Narcissus is out hunting, he comes to a clear fountain that he has never seen before, and bends down to drink. In the water, he sees his own reflection – and thinking that the image belongs to some beautiful spirit living in the pool, he gazes at the face adoringly. He doesn’t know it, but he has fallen in love with his own reflection.

When he tries to kiss the spirit, it disappears in the ripples. It vanishes when he tries to hold it, thrusting his hands into the water. But, almost instantly, it returns as the water smoothes, renewing his fascination and tantalising him once again.

Narcissus cannot tear himself away from the water, or stop looking into it, and he is so infatuated that he loses all thought of food or drink. But the more he longs, the more he cries. And as his tears fall in the water, they send the beautiful face away again, making him even more inconsolable. As the poet Ted Hughes wrote, in his translation of Ovid: ‘He was himself/ The torturer who now began his torture.’⁴

Like Echo, Narcissus loses his vigour and beauty. He pines away and dies. But when the mourning nymphs come to collect his body to put it on the funeral pyre, they cannot find it. In its place, at the spot where he died, there is only a beautiful white flower.