Others and I

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: