Like
it or not, we can’t live a normal life without society. We depend on a lot of
people for a lot of things. My food comes from other people, my dress does,
most of the things that I cannot do without come from other people. Yes, other
people are ineluctable.
“Hell is other people!” One of Jean-Paul
Sartre’s characters exclaimed when he realised that the hell he had arrived in
had no torture chambers or fire and brimstone as he had been taught in catechism
classes. “There’s no need for red-hot pokers,” he says because we are the
hells.
Each one of us is a consciousness that has
to accommodate itself with other minds. Shame is the original feeling in that
accommodation, Sartre says. I begin to see myself as others would see me. I
become an object of their gazes. I am an object of their perception and
assessment.
I experienced that shame for years when I
was young. There was a period in my life when I was like the clown in a circus.
My own follies and personal clumsiness put me in that status. I was in my early
thirties but had the immaturity of an adolescent. Shame became my abiding
companion, shame heaped on by people who pretended to be friends and
well-wishers but were actually the spectators of the circus. Ringmasters too.
I grew up, however. One has to. That is one
of the things that the society does to you. It won’t let you be a child. It won’t
let you be anything much, in fact, except what it wants you to be. Society is an
unavoidable straitjacket that is part of your inheritance here on this planet.
You can loosen up that straitjacket,
however. I do that. A pull here and a push there, some jerks and a few quirks,
and then you have the necessary leeway.
For the most part, I live in isolation. You
don’t need the straitjacket in your private space. In that space you can write
these things and get away with it. That getting away is my paradise.
PS.
Written for:
awesome story telling
ReplyDeleteVery interesting string of thoughts. We are all individuals and at the same time part of a society.
ReplyDeleteUnavoidable but a part too. One of the paradoxes of life.
DeleteThe very same society torments us even in our privacy.
ReplyDeleteVery good thoughts expressed here.
Privacy is effectively possible only if you can isolate yourself totally from society. Ordinary mortals don't have much choice in that regard, I think.
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