Another possibility: one yilds out of protest.

Do you think it is necessary to engage in the game to gain such insights or does it suffice to watch?
Or to speak with Zuza Bánk "If I watch someone experiencing something, do I experience it, too?".

Politeness, decency, decadence... I find it strange to see you sustain these traditional rules, while it seems they all lead to terrible situations in your own books.
I hope you ripp off some curtains in a classroom again one day.

Sasja

Please, explain.

Juliane

There is a distinction between witnessing and experiencing.

Z

Please explain the word "traditional".

@Arnon. "Yielding out of politeness" Well put! Not wanting to put the other person through the embarassment of rejection.

Arnon

No! You don't say. Could've never imagined.

Be that as it may, what I wanted to know is, if, according to your much valued opinion, it suffices to just watch people and with a bit of empathy extract knowledge and/or emotional traces from it. To give a blunt example, if a friend of mine experiences the death of a good friend or a family member they seek solace in my company. I pat their shoulder, I try to find comforting words, I feel uncomfortable and sorry for them. Now, in my case it's highly probably that I will take part of it home with me when I leave them. In some cases quite a big part, even. Their grief just rubs off on me. If I collect experiences like that, I surely don't possess the same set as the people who went through them, but maybe quite a similar one.
What all this drivel boils down to is the question if I could sort of live on it.

Something established, in this case a particular old custom: politeness.

Arnon

Yielding out of protest – depriving the other person of the possibility to convince you or the pleasure of overcoming your resistance.

Juliane

I think you cannot experience a similar emotion if you haven’t been through something similar yourself. What you feel then is a pain of feeling sorry for your friend. But if you do have a similar experience yourself, you feel your own pain anew.

Juliane

If you are unable to make the distinction between witnessing and experiencing you most probably suffer from hysteria.

Arnon

Thank you for your diagnosis, doctor Grunberg, but I never said I equalized the terms.

Nonetheless, I'll let you know when the men with the strait jacket have arrived.
And to use a slightly modified version of a thing you said in an earlier post: You really hurt me. You should not call people hysterical. People don’t like it.

Juliane

I apologize -- I didn't mean to hurt you. It is possible I misunderstood your question.
Coetzee writes in "Elizabeth Costello": "She can think her way into other people."
Even if that's possible, it's rare, I believe that the the position of the person who experiences something is fundamentally different from the position of the person who witnesses the experience.
You pain didn't rub off on me, I'm sorry, all I could think was : I have to calm her down, otherwise she won't sleep with me tonight.
(As a novelist of course the pain of my characters sometimes rubs off on me; or is it the other way around?)

Arnon

Never mind. But you very narrowly escaped sleeping in the bathtub tonight, Sportsfreund.

So a kind of platonic living through witnessing is not possible according to you? Are we this secluded? I know everything getting into one system can never enter another in the same way, or moving unaltered from one to the next. Still I somehow thought it possible that witnessing could yield insights. But it might as well just kick off utterly different reactions according to the preconditions.

Concerning characters I assume it's a circuit.

Juliane

Don't get me wrong: I never said that observing cannot yield insights.

Sasja

Are you sure that the other party will interpret your yielding as a form of protest.

Juliane

When did you last sleep in the bathtub?

Arnon

You can never be sure how the other party interprets whatever you do or say. But in many cases it works.

Dear Sasja Mirskikh,

Please excuse me for interfering but your answer is rather weak.

yours,

Eric

Eric W.

Dear Eric W.,

Maybe this is better: "Zijn lievelingsvijandin, de vrouw met wie hij zijn oorlog had willen uitvechten, zijn laatste, maar ze vocht niet terug." (I am sorry for the Dutch quote, I have the book in Dutch.)

Arnon / Oscar

@ Arnon
But you don't think living on insights and emotions gained via witnessing is possible?

@ Oscar
I never did. But I drove others to it (I didn't force them).

Juliane

I love to be the peeping Tom in your life and I have full confidence that the insights I will gain and the emotions I will feel will make for a wonderful novel. When can I start peeping? Is immortality enough for you or should I pay you twenty euros a day?

Sasja

To stop fighting is not necessarily the same as yielding to seduction.

Arnon

Am I to take you with me everywhere I go? Would there be any private moments?

Concerning payment, immortality might be a desirable thing, but since the first rejections of applications for work experience placements (not even real jobs) are coming in these days I probably could do with some extra money soon.

Arnon

No, not necessarily.

Juliane

Private moments are the most interesting to peep at. ;)

Juliane

I won't follow you to the bathroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Arnon

That's very kind, thank you.
I still have some questions and information for you.

Would you like to have some space in the wardrobe or rather sleep between me and my boyfriend when I'm at home?

Be prepared to get tripped over when sleeping on an air mattress in my dorm. My room is very small.

Do I have to pay for you train tickets (Frankfurt-Münster, Münster-Frankfurt) or will you buy them on your own?

How shall I introduce you to the people (lecturers, friends and family) asking who the man is that follows me around.

Do you have any allergies or special needs?

And last but not least, tea or coffee for breakfast?

There's really quite a lot to bear in mind when making room for a peeping Tom.

Dear Sasja Mirskikh ,

I wouldn't say this sentence is better, apart from the quality of the sentence itself, it touches a different matter.
Who is the author, if I may ask.

yours,

Eric

Eric

Arnon Grunberg, "De azielzoeker"

Dear Sasja Mirskikh,

thank you,

yours,

Eric