To neglect ourselves is to fail to gather ourselves together. Such failure most often derives from ignorance. In turn, that ignorance itself is sometimes imposed upon us, in which case we are not to blame for our self-neglect. Even then, however, once we become aware of our self-neglect, we are responsible for our own recovery from it. No one else can do it for us; we must do it ourselves.
At other times, the ignorance at the root of our self-neglect is not imposed upon us but is instead a manifestation of our own stupidity. Then our self-neglect derives from our own willful refusal to let ourselves see what is in front of us. It derives from our own motivated blindness, as I call it in my book The Irrelevance of Power (available in the “Shop” at the top of this blog-site). When that is our situation, then we are indeed to blame for our own self-neglect; and we add greatly to our own blameworthiness by refusing to assume responsibility for recovering from our neglecting of ourselves.
In either case, whether our self-neglect is imposed upon us or is our own fault, to recover from neglecting ourselves is always a matter of self-recollection. That is, to recover from neglecting ourselves is always a matter of collecting ourselves back together from out of the dispersal of ourselves. Recovery from self-neglect is always and only such self-recollection. If we are ever to recover from neglecting ourselves, whether by our own fault or by the fault of others, we must glean the fields wherein the seeds of ourselves have taken root and then grown.
In short, to recover from neglecting ourselves we must — either once again or for the very first time — harvest our very selves.
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neglect (v.): from ne- as negative prefix, plus PIE root *leg- “to collect, to gather.”
recollect (v.): from Latin recollectus, past participle of recolligere "to take up again, regain," etymologically "to collect again," from re- "again" + colligere “gather” (see collect (v.)).
re- (prefix): directly from Latin re- an inseparable prefix meaning "again; back; anew, against." Often merely intensive.
collect (v.): from Latin collectus, past participle of colligere "gather together," from assimilated form of com "together" + legere "to gather," from PIE root *leg- "to collect, gather."
glean (v.): "to gather by acquisition, scrape together," especially grains left in the field after harvesting, but the earliest use in English is figurative, from Old French glener "to glean" (14c., Modern French glaner) "to glean," from Late Latin glennare "make a collection," of unknown origin.
harvest (n.): Old English hærfest "autumn," as one of the four seasons, "period between August and November," from Proto-Germanic harbitas (source also of Old Saxon hervist, Old Frisian and Dutch herfst, German Herbst "autumn," Old Norse haust "harvest"), from PIE root *kerp- "to gather, pluck, harvest."
All the above entries have been collectively harvested from the Online Etymology Dictionary. If one does not neglect them but keeps them firmly in one’s recollection and then rereads the preceding section of this blog, one may well glean more from crossing back over that section than one did from one’s first crossing.
Concepts, just like individuals, have their history and are no more able than they to resist the dominion of time, but in and through it all they nevertheless harbor a kind of homesickness for the place of their birth.
—Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (trans. Howard V. & Edna H. Hong)
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Now my head was like permanently located halfway between being bummed from no dope and unconscious from too much, only it was like my true self that I’d locked onto there, the self that hadn’t been fucked up by my childhood and all and the self that wasn’t completely whacked in reaction.
— Russell Banks
As Faulkner once famously said, well-crafted fiction is truer than the most accurate journalistic account. If one wants to experience the truth of neglecting oneself, and the truth of then hearing and obeying the command to assume responsibility for one’s self-neglect by pulling one’s self together from out of one’s scatteredness, one can glean a rich harvest from reading Russell Banks’s fine novel Rule of the Bone, first published in 1995, from which I have myself harvested the quotation at the beginning of this section of today’s post.
That novel is the story told through the voice of a teenager who. . .
Well, read it yourself and find out!
Russell Banks at the 2011 Texas Book Festival