Me, Myself, and a Dazzling Carbuncle

There’s an article in the New York Times magazine today about lying and I read it the way I read most everything--by paragraph in no particular order. I may start with the second to last paragraph, and then read a paragraph in the middle, and then read the intro, and so on until I finish. Like most of my engrained habits, I like to speculate on why I do this. What truth am I illustrating or pursuing? Perhaps its because I enjoy reading things I don’t fully grasp. If you just start reading in the middle of the paragraph, names are dropped without introduction, the fine points of concepts are deliberated over before you know the basics, the deviations are mentioned before you know the quintessential, and all this in a tone that implies that you should be “with” the author by this point. Now, if I were Hawthorne, I’d say that reading in this manner is a fine mimicry of the human predicament. Human beings, at in any one epoch, are thrust into a world that has already been ongoing (like reading the middle of an article first) and therefore have no sense of the set-up or “introduction” that might give the present meaning. Yet we all behave as if everything could be inferred from the present moment, just as I relish getting the gist of an article by beginning at the midpoint. I like a gist that’s hard won. Hawthorne responds: Perhaps so. But mankind has never been content with getting just the world‘s “gist” as you call it, though that’s all we should expect, given we’re permitted only a partly glimpse of the design in our short lives.
Oh that Hawthorne! Sometimes I think that if ideas were buildings and avenues thoughts, Hawthorne would appear on every street corner. He wouldn’t own a particular building or dominate a neighborhood as another mind might; instead, he’d just appear as a small detail at every intersection. You’d be racing down a street, trying to flee an idea or skid into the closing doors of another, and there’d be Hawthorne, leaning against a light post, staring idly into the streets. He would turn to you with a look of amusement and gentle pity, as if to say “Why run-through all these thoughts and ideas as if one would lead “somewhere else? Just as I am, you’re already at every point. You race through the streets in the hopes that you may find a corner free of yourself--something untouched by your own mind and lacks. But no corner can be free of you once you’re there! The only way to see things clearly and fully would be to have no self at all. No self to obscure anything, but sadly no self to see anything,either.”
On to a most Hawthornian topic: lying and secrets. In the NY Times article, there was a paragraph about a women who “lied for the sake of lying.” If her husband asked who she had lunch with, she say “June” instead of “Nancy” for no reason whatsoever. She lied like this everyday, with no motive or meaning, just ‘cause. Now, why would someone do this? Obviously, she isn’t trying to hide any one thing because the lies are arbitrary and lacking the uniformity to conceal anything substantial. Yet she does it naturally. The Times article speculated that it may have been her upbringing: she was raised in a loud, competitive house where lying to get attention or preemptive lying to avoid conflict may have made sense. Maybe. But I’d always thought that liars like this probably find a great deal of comfort in the idea that no one knows all the facts on them. Not one person knows what they do during a day. So much is kept to themselves that perhaps it feels like there’s more self in which to keep it all. I figure that’s why people lie--to make their selves feel more full and definitive. “I am,” they can say to themselves “all the little secrets I keep, all the stuff that no one knows.” They furnish the self with all that they withhold.
It would be easy enough to disapprove of lying for self-hood’s sake, but why? The contrary isn’t much better. I’m the opposite of a habitual liar. I’m a habitual discloser, which certainly doesn’t make me any morally sounder or mentally healthier. I hate keeping anything to myself. For the brief moments in my life when I had a secret, I hated it. Having something “all to myself” only reminded me of how lonely having a self is at all. It was like sitting alone in a room with a perfect gem, a dazzling carbuncle. At first, you’d feel great that it was all yours, but then you’d realize it had no value--it had no meaning at all--unless someone else sees it and sees that you have it. Once you’d realize this, you’d want to display it to the world, even if it meant the possibility of having it stolen. Being alone with either something of value or something terrible strikes me as equally painful. As I like to say, I wouldn’t want to see the ideal unless I had someone with me to nudge and say “look, there it is, the Ideal!!” I suppose, for me, I want to clear everything out of the “self” to give room for someone, or something, else to move in. Unlike the habitual liar, I try to empty myself out and keep myself ready for potential tenants to walk through. But just like the habitual liar, I’m sure I’m no more successful in that as they are in building the self through omission, lies, and secrets.