I don’t feel guilty very often. More just pervasive shame. When I do feel guilty, it doesn’t feel like much – just like forgetting, mostly, because I repress the memory of the act that made me feel guilty. This year I haven’t felt guilty, because I don’t think I’ve done anything I consider wrong. If I have, then I don’t remember it – this whole repression thing works pretty well until it bursts out in the form of neuroses.
I think that guilts that can never be removed are the ones you cannot bring yourself to ask forgiveness for, and the ones that are by their very nature ineradicable. The latter are the ones that stem from an action which, after you perform it, you can never again be the same person you were before you did it because you have violated a fundamental self-concept – you have torn apart something that you believe in so deeply, it is part of what makes you, you. I have no experience with this sort of guilt; I take my words from Rorty. The example he uses to illustrate this is Winston and O’Brien in 1984 – Winston was broken by the rats because he said “Do it to Julia!” to keep O’Brien from letting them eat his face. And after he had given Julia to the rats, he could no longer be Winston, because Winston was the person who loved Julia.
Good question for the new year, I think – this is why we Jews have Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) 10 days after Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year).