That's a line from a suicidal caucasian professor in Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited. A significant factor in his descent toward suicide is his "realization" that culture, art, and philosophy are in reality quite "fragile" and valueless. The quote above is a response to the observation that his education seems to be at least partly responsible for his desire to kill himself. The observer notes that his reasons sound very impersonal since they all concern rather abstract ideas about "the world", so it's "nothing personal", right? The professor responds that it IS personal. Education makes the world personal, he says.
This is fascinating little passage to me. The professor is utterly convinced that abstract ideas are "personal". To me this is in part a play on the word "personal". There is a colloquial sense to this word whereby the professor is saying something akin to "it is very important to me" but in a very special way. The play on "personal" is that there is obviously not another person involved. "The world" is not a person, so in a sense we can take the professor to be confused about what a personal issue would be - he has lost a sense of person. Still a third use of "personal" is akin to "private". It's another way to say "it's about me, not you." In this case the professor is saying that education makes the world about him, a rather narcissistic, if not solipsistic claim. Rolling all three into a single meaningful statement I think sums up the professors dilemma: Abstractions have become important to him in a way that has taken the place of other people as interlocutors. The world has been reduced to his relationship with abstractions, and now he finds no reason to live.
His psychosis then butts up against the concreteness of a man standing in his way on the train platform as he tries to throw himself in front of the train. "The world" can't offer him a reason not to end his life or even reach out to grab his collar to stop him. Instead a person does this, albeit a stranger. There's nothing abstract about the ex-convict on the platform who inadvertently foils the suicide. It is even darkly comic that the professor fails even to see the man standing on the platform when he rushes toward the oncoming train. He is so taken with his "personal abstractions" that he fails to see the one impediment to the culmination of his view of the world: a person standing between him and self-annihilation. This is significant I think.
The debate that follows this encounter makes up the entirety of the book. I won't spoil the rest. I will just say something about the reviewers. Several reviews that I have read of the book seem to find the professor with the upper hand in the debate with the ex-convict when their interaction concludes. One states that "McCarthy draws down the darkness" and another that the book is "a poem in celebration of death". Without going into more detail here (though I plan to later), I think the reviewers are rather daft. That's in part to say that I don't think McCarthy stoops to offer us a winner and a loser in the debate. The book may be more about incommensurability (and maybe Kierkegaard's "leap of faith") than it is an endorsement of any "worldview". It is, I think, in with the very best of literature because it faithfully renders the complexity of trying to negotiate life (when death is a choice) in the face of uncertainty. He doesn't lower himself into the abysmal politics of using the book to make a point. Instead, I think he's trying to point at something that can't be said directly; he can only point to this conversation and say "It's there, if you'll see it - even if I can't say what 'it' is."
It makes me wonder if McCarthy is a reader of Wittgenstein...
