Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past–Harry, The Duke of Sussex
Crimenutely.
The above passage, taken from Harry’s autobiography, Spare, is being used by his ghostwriter to explain away the increasing number of divergences that are being uncovered between Prince Harry’s version of his life and the demonstrable, unarguable facts.
I think the first of those facts to have been brought forward has to do with Harry’s clear recollection of being at school at Eton, studying, when he received a phone call informing him of the death of his great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother:
I recall that it was just before Easter, the weather bright and warm, light slanting through the window, filled with vivid colours.
Unfortunately, the record says differently. Photos taken by the press pool of Charles, William and Harry confirm that they were on a skiing holiday in Switzerland on the day of the Queen Mother’s death (schools were closed for the Easter holiday), and a photo taken the next day (Easter Sunday) shows the trio deplaning at RAF Northolt on their return to the UK.
“Some recollections,” as the late Queen memorably observed, “may vary.”
Perhaps the most recent debunking of one of Harry’s claims is that which states that he’s a direct descendent of King Henry VI. (He claims Henry was his six-times great-grandfather.) This, in spite of the fact that any self-respecting Brit of my age and beyond knows that Henry VI had only one son, Edward, who died as a teenager at the Battle of Tewkesbury. (For those of you in Rio Linda, that’s in Gloucestershire, not Massachusetts.) Henry himself was probably murdered while imprisoned in the Tower, by his successor, King Edward IV. He had no other offspring.
In between, someone has noticed Harry’s assertion that Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, gifted him an X-Box for his thirteenth birthday in 1997. (I haven’t read this portion of the book, but reliable reports indicate that Harry further claims that the X-Box was purchased for him by his mother before she died in August, 1997, a clever bit of premonitory prestidigitation on Diana’s part, since the X-Box wasn’t released into the wild for another three years.)
And thick and fast, they came at last, And more, and more, and more–Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter
What’s notable about all these examples–as will probably be true of a great many more in this heinous tome as further inconsistencies are laid bare, is 1) how easy they would have been to fact-check, especially given the tens of millions of dollars, and undoubtedly scores of researchers, that Penguin Random House invested in this project, 2) how simple it would have been to get the facts straight, and 3) given Harry’s privileged and storied life, how unnecessary it was to invent such superfluous embellishments at all.
And, of course, ultimately, all these disputed and, if they are proven false, memories will do, is cast doubt on everything else Harry says in the book.
Such behavior–fabulism–is one of the key characteristics of the narcissist–the seeker of attention and adulation who lives a life of perpetual disappointment and resentment when others don’t recognize him as the special person he pretends to be, and to shore up whose image he embroiders and embellishes the details of his life. (When it’s not an exhibition of grandiosity, it’s often a cover-up for conscious or unconscious self-loathing.) A narcissist’s attitude can be summed up in the humorous conversational quip:
Well, enough about me! What do you think about me?
Harry’s book in a nutshell.
Because, when it comes right down to it, it’s all about Harry. And when he’s not talking about himself and–as my mother used to say–“reading his own bumps,” all he talks about is what everyone else is doing to oppress and victimize him:
William and Kate became vindictive and jealous because they knew they were going to have to live the rest of their lives in Harry and Meghan’s “resplendent” shadow. Camilla devoted decades to destroying Harry, even turning his bedroom into her dressing room after he moved out–when he was 28 years old. Charles has spent his life as a father uplifting William (the heir) and deprecating Harry (the spare)–why, he went so far as to give William the window in their childhood bedroom! All the members of the Royal household were dedicated to backstabbing and exiling Harry and Meghan. The British press and the royal family conspired to destroy Harry and Meghan, and when the royal family wasn’t taking its cues directly from the tabloid headlines, it was ordering the press barons to print what it wanted them to print. The racist British people who voted for Brexit hate Meghan. Everybody who isn’t Harry or Meghan must be lying, planting stories, and leaking. Anybody who disagrees, asks questions, or attempts to point out incontrovertible facts is “dangerous.” It’s petty, banal, boring, predictable and so much of it–resentment of the older sibling, sisters-in-law who don’t get on, the wicked stepmother, competition for a father’s attention–is so utterly commonplace. And yet Harry drones on as if he finds himself and his situation unique in all of human history. It’s the psychological equivalent of projectile vomiting, page after page. And “round and round it goes: Where it stops, nobody knows.”
This brings me back to the quote of the day. Harry’s justification for “his truth.” His conviction that details of fact, time, space, chronology, cause, and effect matter not in the telling of his story, because it’s his story, and the rest of us can either accept it or go to hell.
The trouble is that it’s not just Harry’s story. That is not how the human story works:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind–John Donne, Mediations
Oliver Sacks wrote a very interesting article about the phenomenon of false memory in the February, 2013 edition of the New York Review of Books. (It’s behind a paywall now, but I read the whole thing years ago.) I believe he’s right, and that sometimes–for one reason or another–people do remember, sometimes with great conviction and not always consciously, a series of events differently from others who lived through them, and sometimes in ways which contravene the facts. And I think anyone who’s ever been part of a family around the dinner table when memories are discussed has lived through a “that’s not the way it happened!” moment.
Mostly, it doesn’t matter, and we shrug our shoulders and say, “well, I think you’re just wrong,” and we change the subject. Because we don’t believe our parents, siblings, or children are trying to destroy us with “their truth.” Very likely, we love them, and although we think they’re mistaken and quirky, we know they’re doing their best, and that if it were that important, and if we presented them with verifiable facts, we could probably agree on the actual “truth” of the matter, because we’re reasonable, decent, people. Mostly, though, the book isn’t worth the candle, and so we smile and move on.
But when “the stakes are this high” (to quote Meghan who–let’s face it–has got form when it comes to dysfunctional and fractured family relationships), when you refuse to change the subject, because the subject is the only thing in the world that’s important to you–yourself–and nothing else matters; when you refuse to countenance the “false” in “false memory”; and when you stake your life on “your” truth, which you seek to impose on the world at the cost of every relationship that’s ever been dear to you and no matter the consequences to those you once professed to love–then you’d damn-well better make sure you’re on the side of truth and the angels. And that you can back up what you say and what you do. Because people will only put up with your false and destructive nonsense for so long, before the next thing you hear is that bell tolling.
And it’ll be tolling for you.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence–John Adams
Boy howdy. Please compare this quote with the one by Prince Harry at the top of the post. And tell me who you think has sussed the matter out correctly. (Your response will tell me more about you than it does either Prince Harry or John Adams.)
For the record, John Adams, the second President of the United States, made this statement in 1770, at the conclusion of his successful defense of the British soldiers who fired upon the crowd during the Boston Massacre.
I have no idea how the story of Prince Henry Charles Albert David will end. Happily I hope. But in order for that to happen, he’s going to have to pull his head out of his posterior, put down the telescope and have a look in the mirror, give the great majority of the 150 or so egregious hangers-on that it apparently takes to keep him self-centered, “focused,” and afloat the old heave-ho, look the world in the eye, acknowledge some painful home truths, sort his wife out, stop betraying the most private and intimate details of his birth family and washing his dirty laundry in public, approach that birth family from a place of humility and respect for its privacy, and–late in life–come to terms with reality.
I’m not holding my breath.
It didn’t have to be this way–Harry, Duke of Sussex
Too right. It almost never does.
Truth may be the daughter of time, but–without strenuous opposition–it almost never survives the vindictive self-absorption of the narcissist–RightWingKnitJob**
I’m reminded of research from Dacher Keltner out of UC, Berkeley here. Dacher posits that awe deserves a place with the other 6 basic emotions identified in 1972 (anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness). Dacher’s research points at how awe has different body responses than those other emotions and operates differently at the neurological level too.
The connection here is how he defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world and frequently challenges us to rethink our previously held ideas.” His research indicates awe has actual benefits at the mind/body level – most significantly in its ability to shut down parts of the neural processing involved in how we perceive ourselves. It also deepens breathing, relieves digestion, and lowers the heart rate.
Other researchers explain awe as “the absence of self-preoccupation.”
In other words, it seems to me (I’m no neuroscientist .. just a linguist) that pursuing and engaging in experiences that take us out of ourselves and/or cause us to focus on others or on the far loftier or far more elemental things (thing stunning vistas, moral beauty, or the intricate math of a snowflake) is the antidote to narcissism.
Further, it seems our systems are geared – at root neurological levels – to reward us for not being narcissists.
Makes one wonder what happens in the brain when that piece of the neural processing system goes unchecked. Except one needn’t wonder, given that the internet itself has provided a free platform for narcissists everywhere to gleefully out themselves.
Quite interesting. I’m not a neuroscientist either, but it seems to me that a catalyst which lowers what is–one might say–the natural human inclination to focus on our own needs, much as a baby can’t help doing, and which directs our gaze outward to the mysteries and grandeur of the universe beyond ourselves, even if only in very simple ways, can’t be other than a good thing.
Reminds me a bit of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (worth reading all the way through to the end):
Or even of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, and his consideration of “[his] cat, Jeoffry.”
As my dear friend Andrea said, just before she died: “Blake was crazy. And Smart was really crazy. But they knew something about what it takes and what it means to be human.”
Yeah. They might have been a bit out-of-round and conflicted (that’s clear from some of their poetry), but they did their best to turn their attention to good rather than evil, life rather than death, and love rather than hate.
Bless.
As for the narcissists on the Internet, as I’m wont to say: “Live by social media; die by social media.” (See Andrew Tate for a recent example of this phenomenon.) I’m only sorry that so many children and adolescents get caught up in the maelstrom, and that some of them become collateral damage as a result. The adults who burn, and–in turn–get burned? They ought to know better.
There is, as a member of my family once pointed out, some use to be made of the “negative example” as a construct in our lives. (I think our grandparents knew this, but the idea seems to have fallen out of favor recently.) My post on the subject, one which arose from our conversation, is here: Cautionary Tales, Both Imaginary and Real.