People spy into you more than you guess, but less than they guess. They spot that part of you that you were so keen to hide but no more than that, and they try to ferret out all but what
matters. They love to pry out a few shadowy secrets, but can make nothing of the best and most luminous part of you. Most of what we strive to conceal lies on our outside, and onlookers catch sight of it more readily than we do, since we see ourselves from within. Our secrets form our outlying precincts, which all comers get a glimpse of as they near us.
How hastily others see through me, yet how little of the truth they bring to light. Those who boast that they’re an open book would be dismayed by how much or how little those who read them find in them.
Some people put on a front of secrecy to hide that they have no secrets, and some put on a front of unreserve to hide that they do. They hoist a bright curtain of ostentatious directness in order to screen their real selves.
Few of us are alert to all the secrets that we’re attempting to hide. If we were, we might not be able to hide them so well. Those who don’t know what mischief they do still have the craft to conceal it. How deftly we parry truths that we don’t even perceive.
I want others to watch me and feel for me, but not to see through me. I waste my days
fabricating an effigy of myself for them to gaze at, and then curse them when they do so from an angle that I don’t like. I long to be seen and heard but not read, to be exhibited but not exposed, displayed but not disclosed, and famous but not fathomed. I like to be illuminated by a bright stage light, but not revealed by a harsh search light.
How do the blind fend off the importunate eyes of others?
Some people have nothing to teach you, save what they don’t know of their own minds and motives. They do their best to make you share in their self-deceits, but in doing so they show you the truths that they dare not face. You learn to grasp what you are by observing those who don’t grasp what they are. Why bother to set them right? Their witless misunderstandings are more amusing and instructive than their dry correctness, and you can learn more by cultivating their self-deceptions than you would by correcting them.
PSYCHOLOGY
After a few hundred years we may be close to the uttermost frontiers of scientific learning, though its propositions are hard to grasp and lie far from day to day use. But in thousands of years of conversation, observation and experience, we have explored so little of the heart. And yet it is not a complicated organ. We know how to astonish it, thrill it, please it and stab it, yet we are still at a loss to understand it. Like the weather, its delicately poised agitation is formed by simple but erratic variables. It’s made of a jumble of ill-assorted details. So it seems complex, but isn’t it merely miscellaneous and overloaded? It’s not more intricate than the world of matter, but more elusive and enigmatic. We don’t live below the surface, but we do live on a medley of them.
Our souls writhe with perversities and incongruities. So how could an incisive analysis of motives, such as Dostoyevsky’s, be anything but a thicket of paradoxes? ‘All contradictions can be found in me,’ wrote Montaigne, ‘depending on some twist or attribute.’
Our being is sewn up from offcuts and oddments, ‘fragments from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothes, patched together as is the human soul,’ as Strindberg put it. We dream of a wholeness which we will never reach. Our disposition is all things but uniform and indivisible. ‘We are entirely made up of bits and pieces,’ the amorphous Montaigne says, ‘so diversely and so shapelessly, that each one of them pulls its own way at each moment.’ Live in consonance with human nature, the stoics urge us, that is, be unalterable and variable, unbalanced and moderate, prying and listless, soppy and hard-hearted, cocksure and diffident, spendthrift and mean, circumspect and foolhardy, spirited and cold, pliant and unappeasable, all colours by turns but not one of them consistently. It is the discords that make the music of humanity worth listening to. ‘There is nothing stable in the world,’ as Keats wrote.
‘Uproar’s your only music.’
Emotions narrow us, and so we conclude that they make us whole.
When we conjecture what has led people to act as they have, we first restrict the field of determinants to motives, and then search for one that appertains to us and that casts us in a bright light. We bring to bear first our general human self-obsession and then our own private self-obsession. We guess that they do things because they desire us or envy us, when they are not thinking of us at all.
Our emotions are the body heat of our egoism.
We get most of our emotions third-hand from the way others evaluate the appearance of things.
Some people use distressing feelings, such as anger or self-reproach, to syphon off their thoughts from the real source of their distress. They work up a sham mood to switch their own or others’ gaze from the real one that they do feel. They weep for a deep loss, to steer their thoughts clear of the shallower ones which touch them so much more deeply.
Whether or not we look on the animals as automata, it’s probable that this is how they look on us.
Mind and body may well be one substance, but it is through their felt duality that we take hold of the world.