“I surprised myself,” says the woman who courageously fights off a mugger, the wife caught in an affair, the student who pipes up to disagree with the celebrity professor, the father dismayed by his rage at an unruly child.
It’s such a common expression that we fail to see how odd it is. Is self-surprise really possible? Is the expression hyperbole, and self-satisfied hyperbole at that? Does it mean “If you had seen me, you would have been surprised”?
The best option, I think, is to take it literally. Every week, if not every day, we are surprised to see virtue and vice break out from unchartable depths. What else would we expect from creatures made in the image of the incomprehensible Creator?
“Know Thyself,” said the Delphic oracle, but the Greeks were never so smug as to think they achieved this aim. The French philosophy Jacques Paliard spoke from a deeper wisdom, a wisdom of self-suspicion as well as of self-surprise: “We do not know all that we are, nor are we exactly what we know.”
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