These lines have been ringing in my ears all week.
I’ve been listening to ‘The age of innocence’ (by Edith Wharton) on my way to work and driving has never been so much fun, with my finishing a book a week! I’ve particularly taken to listening to the classics, as these are books I take the longest to read in paperback. ‘The age of innocence’ follows ‘A room with a view’ which follows ‘Stumbling upon happiness’ (not a classic, not even that good come to think about it). Given the subjects I’ve been listening to all month – the human brain's capacity for self-deception; enforcing conformity being society’s primary purpose; prudishness; perception and its loopholes and so on – its little wonder that Shakespeare’s ‘To thine own self be true’ keeps popping up in my conscious mind ever so often. In the midst of busy workday I pluck out this line, examine it, and although I am two hours behind schedule in finishing a particular task, here I am writing this blog.
It’s funny, really, but given that we spend so much time with ourselves it seems to me a fundamental flaw in design that one can lie to the one person one cannot escape from. If the man above was a software engineer he would have made the reality object immutable because, as it stands now, nothing is as easy, nothing is as self-serving as pretending that one is what one isn’t.
I knew this woman once who told elaborate stories about how she could not do the one thing she wanted to do – paint. She had it rehearsed so well that it was near-impossible to find a chink in her armor, to make her see that the fabrications were a mechanism to avoid reality because reality is bitter; reality means struggling with oneself and facing up to what a slacker, what an escapist, what a lying, deceptive piece-of-goods one really is. That kind of admission hurts. It is said that meditation, when done near-continuously, reveals to one the disastrous traps of ones mind, and many a strong-willed person have been reduced to tears at the harsh, unsolicited clarity that they have had to look in the face. As for this woman, she eventually honed her stories into a moral-superiority thing, labeling her inaction as ‘sacrifice, in the name of family’ – which is good and virtuous, especially in a woman.
It happened that one day we were lunching together when a mutual acquaintance walked in on us. We had not met her in a long time and invited her to join us. Over coffee, we found that she was a cartoonist now, freelancing with several newspapers and the recipient of many awards. At the very moment this fact was revealed, I saw a look of red-hot jealousy pass through the eyes of the erstwhile painter. It was shrouded and stifled instantly but at that moment it was like looking into her soul. And I did not like what I saw there. Minutes after the cartoonist had left the only thing my friend could bring herself to say was “Now that she is divorced I suppose she has all the time in the world to spend on herself.” I could see it so clearly. Her mind was hunting for an escape clause, some salve with which to soothe her aching ego, some proof that the cartoonist had paid a heavier price for her success than was warranted and that she was better off for not rising to the bait.
My friend, the painter, is as normal, or abnormal, as any one of us. She could be me. Or you. We are all mostly like this, authors of our own failures, passing it off as virtue or bad luck or destiny. No one is fooled but us; No one stands to lose but us, or even cares about our loss. They are all busy lying down on the bed of lies they have made for themselves.
These are the things that occupy my mind as I drive to work everyday, invariably late for my meetings and telling myself - lying to myself - that chronic unpunctuality does not matter in the bigger scheme of things.
I desperately need to listen to some whodunits.
I’ve been listening to ‘The age of innocence’ (by Edith Wharton) on my way to work and driving has never been so much fun, with my finishing a book a week! I’ve particularly taken to listening to the classics, as these are books I take the longest to read in paperback. ‘The age of innocence’ follows ‘A room with a view’ which follows ‘Stumbling upon happiness’ (not a classic, not even that good come to think about it). Given the subjects I’ve been listening to all month – the human brain's capacity for self-deception; enforcing conformity being society’s primary purpose; prudishness; perception and its loopholes and so on – its little wonder that Shakespeare’s ‘To thine own self be true’ keeps popping up in my conscious mind ever so often. In the midst of busy workday I pluck out this line, examine it, and although I am two hours behind schedule in finishing a particular task, here I am writing this blog.
It’s funny, really, but given that we spend so much time with ourselves it seems to me a fundamental flaw in design that one can lie to the one person one cannot escape from. If the man above was a software engineer he would have made the reality object immutable because, as it stands now, nothing is as easy, nothing is as self-serving as pretending that one is what one isn’t.
I knew this woman once who told elaborate stories about how she could not do the one thing she wanted to do – paint. She had it rehearsed so well that it was near-impossible to find a chink in her armor, to make her see that the fabrications were a mechanism to avoid reality because reality is bitter; reality means struggling with oneself and facing up to what a slacker, what an escapist, what a lying, deceptive piece-of-goods one really is. That kind of admission hurts. It is said that meditation, when done near-continuously, reveals to one the disastrous traps of ones mind, and many a strong-willed person have been reduced to tears at the harsh, unsolicited clarity that they have had to look in the face. As for this woman, she eventually honed her stories into a moral-superiority thing, labeling her inaction as ‘sacrifice, in the name of family’ – which is good and virtuous, especially in a woman.
It happened that one day we were lunching together when a mutual acquaintance walked in on us. We had not met her in a long time and invited her to join us. Over coffee, we found that she was a cartoonist now, freelancing with several newspapers and the recipient of many awards. At the very moment this fact was revealed, I saw a look of red-hot jealousy pass through the eyes of the erstwhile painter. It was shrouded and stifled instantly but at that moment it was like looking into her soul. And I did not like what I saw there. Minutes after the cartoonist had left the only thing my friend could bring herself to say was “Now that she is divorced I suppose she has all the time in the world to spend on herself.” I could see it so clearly. Her mind was hunting for an escape clause, some salve with which to soothe her aching ego, some proof that the cartoonist had paid a heavier price for her success than was warranted and that she was better off for not rising to the bait.
My friend, the painter, is as normal, or abnormal, as any one of us. She could be me. Or you. We are all mostly like this, authors of our own failures, passing it off as virtue or bad luck or destiny. No one is fooled but us; No one stands to lose but us, or even cares about our loss. They are all busy lying down on the bed of lies they have made for themselves.
These are the things that occupy my mind as I drive to work everyday, invariably late for my meetings and telling myself - lying to myself - that chronic unpunctuality does not matter in the bigger scheme of things.
I desperately need to listen to some whodunits.
