Explaining Oneself

 There is a scene early on in Sartre's Nausea, in which the angst-ridden narrator sits regarding a group of young people at a nearby café table. He wonders at the seemingly effortless flow of their conversation. One will ask a question, and the other does not struggle to answer. How, he wonders, are they able to provide such ready accounts of themselves? "[T]hey tell clear, plausible stories," he remarks. "If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren't embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd fall over myself." (Alexander trans.)

This is, as they say, the story of my life. In any social situation involving people I don't know well, I struggle mightily to answer even the most basic questions. "How was your weekend? What did you do?" "What's that book in your hand? What's it about?" It's not that these questions have no answers, or that I could not possibly supply them. It's that the answers defy any simple explanation that could be conveyed in the setting of a light conversation. To every one of these innocuous bids for small talk, I'm inclined to reply: "I'd love to tell you; how many hours can you spare?" 

Getting off a plane one time with a colleague on a work trip, for instance, she asked how I'd spent the flight. "Oh, reading mostly," I said. That part was simple enough. But then she gestured to the book in my hand: "What were you reading?" I peered down at it. It was a biography of the Regency-era arch-dandy George "Beau" Brummell. It suddenly seemed utterly impossible to reconstruct the chain of association and gut instinct that had led me to possess or want to read this book in the first place. How to explain it all in the next few seconds my interlocutor would be willing to devote to the subject? 

Lots of people read books on planes, of course. It shouldn't feel so impossible to explain why I would be reading one, too. But, I think most people spend their reading time on books that are connected in some rational, readily-explicable way to their public-facing identity. 

Another example: asked the same question by a different co-worker on another work trip, I peered down at the book in my hand yet again. And, once again, I found that the book wasn't about human rights, or policy analysis, or even just a suspense plot that anyone might find compelling. It was, in short, none of the things that a normal person with my particular job might be spending their time reading. To the contrary, it was a biography of the eccentric gay novelist and disappointed would-be Catholic priest "Baron Corvo" (a.k.a. Frederick Rolfe). 

How to explain in a few words why this book—despite the apparently great distance separating my public-facing professional identity from its contents—somehow actually did explain something about my core self? How to convey, without wasting someone's whole afternoon, that slumbering within me, papered over by a thin layer of traits ascribed to the officially-ordinary citizen and job-holder that I am, lay a sort of Decadent aesthete, a wild Romantic at odds with modern society and perennially seeking escape into the perfumed realms of the senses?

Such, at least, was the secret self who prompted the reading of the Rolfe book. And if that were the only secret self, then it might still be possible to explain it to the idle questioner. But the fact is there are a thousand other secret selves, each clamoring for their own books. I might be able to provide a coherent account of any one of them, if I were caught out holding one of the books they had requested. But to be forced into a state of readiness to explain all of these multitudinous selves, at a moment's notice, is a task too demanding to be sustained. 

As a result, when asked about myself or what I'm reading, I often try to dodge the question. I relate in this regard to the artistic protagonist of William Gaddis's The Recognitions. His wife at one point in the novel spots him carrying a tome. "What are you reading?" she asks. "Nothing," he replies. "You can't read nothing," she fires back. "It's a book on mummies," he confesses. "Why are you reading a book on Egyptian mummies?" she wants to know. And to this, of course, he has no answer. Perhaps there isn't one.

Or, perhaps there is, but it would take a lifetime to explain. It would require understanding his whole life up to that moment in order to explain it. (Gaddis had, by the way, very clearly read many strange books in preparation for his great encyclopedic novel, so one suspects this incident of the mummy book may be drawn from life.)

This problem is particularly acute when it comes to explaining my reading choices, but—as I say—it is not limited to that. There are many dimensions of my life that appear to me similarly impossible to explain or else hedged round with perils. Take my work, for instance. Most people, when asked what they do, are able to answer in one or two sentences, if not one or two words. "Engineer," "landscaper," "dentist," etc. But my previous job was nearly impossible even to mention without instantly introducing two highly dangerous topics: politics and religion. 

The question of how I might be able to explain these basic facts about myself, without either wasting hours of my interlocutor's time or inviting vehement controversy, is not purely academic. I will be starting law school in a few weeks, during which I will be forced to meet many new people, survive innumerable episodes of small talk, and somehow have to produce a reasonable account of myself on multiple occasions. How is it to be done? 

My dad provided some helpful advice. Apropos of his own efforts to explain his current work (which also involves the perilous topic of religion), he noted: "I just keep in mind that most people aren't very interested." 

He advised me to offer as short and honest an answer to these questions as possible. Most people will in fact be satisfied by the brief response, he said, because they were just making conversation. They will accept an answer like "It's a book on mummies," and not really need to know more. Perhaps, therefore, when confronted with my colleague's question about the Beau Brummell book, I could have just said: "It's a biography of Beau Brummell," and left it at that. 

This, at last, is the key insight into human affairs that redeems all of the embarrassments and humiliations of social life. So often, in these matters, one is paralyzed by anxiety over the potential thoughts of others. What are they thinking of me? Are they impressed? Do they like me? The answers to both of those questions may, sadly, be no. But there is ultimate consolation to be found in the realization that they also don't particularly dislike you or hold you in contempt. In short, they are far less interested in you, one way or the other, than you either hope or fear. 

Thomas Hardy says it best, in his Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in a scene that finds his heroine nursing her infant child during a break from work in the fields. Tess's child is the product of an illicit union and therefore, in the eyes of Victorian morality, visible outward proof of her inward "ruination." How, then, could she bear the potentially reproachful eyes of her colleagues? Hardy argues that she need not have feared their judgment or contempt. And this was not because her contemporaries were so empathetic; rather, it was because they barely thought of her at all. 

"She might have seen," Hardy writes, "that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought."

So it is with any of us, and this is what saves us in the end from fear of the world's judgment, incomprehension, or scorn. We just have to remember that each of our interlocutors is, to themselves, the center of their own universe. We are at best asteroids that have briefly strayed into their orbit. 

When they ask us a question about ourselves, therefore, it is not truly because they demand a coherent answer. Indeed, they may only half-listen to the one that is supplied, whether it is coherent or not. To the contrary, they are just making conversation. Therefore, when asked to explain oneself, one should reply as honestly but as briefly as one can. If they are truly interested, they will press for more. But chances are, they won't. And so the explanations that seem so impossible to supply need never be prepared—for they will never be demanded.