Last week I came upon this quote from the English novelist John Fowles: “There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.”
This immediately brought to mind a key scene in Ibsen’s poetic drama Peer Gynt. At one point in the play, Peer is given the opportunity to become a troll and marry the troll king’s daughter. He balks at the final condition. He cannot quite bring himself to go along with what proves to be the essential difference between trolls and men. Among men the maxim is “to thine own self be true.” Among trolls, however, it is “to thine own self be …enough.”
What this has in common with what Fowles said is a peculiarly static understanding of self. My own sense of myself seems to have coalesced when I was about 15, but what coalesced is probably best thought of as a set of themes.
Those familiar with classical music will know that the opening movement of a symphony is usually in what is called sonata-allegro form. One part of this is the exposition, during which a set of themes in contrasting keys are laid out for development in the next section. I would suggest that by adolescence the fundamental characteristics of our personalities have been established. But, like musical themes, those characteristics are dynamic, not static. They are capable of endless development, especially in relation to the ever-changing flow of circumstance.
That is why one’s self so often seems to be less a single entity than a repertory company of characters. Remember Eliot’s line about preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
We all find ourselves having to play roles in life, but we all object to being identified with any one of them. That is because all of us have a sense of what another poet, Walt Whitman, called “the real Me.” This, presumably, is the self to which we are encouraged to remain true.
A couple of times in my life, I have made choices that were not at all to my advantage. I made them because I felt they were the right thing to do. I am not sure, however, if I made them in order to be true to myself or simply in order to maintain a certain view of myself. There are, after all, all sorts things many of us would not do because, if we did them, we would think less of ourselves.
Nevertheless, like everyone else, I tend to think that there is a “real Me.” The problem is that the nearer I come to an experience of it, the more my everyday me seems to dissolve.
We never feel more alive than when we are absorbed in a task. Upon finishing such a task we are often surprised to discover how much time has passed. During the task being and action had become one and time had disappeared, along with … our sense of self. We were what we were doing while we were doing it.
Something similar happens when we are in what I suppose is thought of as a meditative state. I don’t exactly do meditation myself, but often, in the morning, while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew, I’ll stare blankly out my kitchen window and, in a bit, I’ll be aware of the sparrows chirping, and the wind chimes, the flowers, the light, while I myself seem to have been reduced to just a point around which all these other things are happening. It is as if I had dissolved into a state or process of awareness. And yet, at such times, I feel intensely alive. Or maybe it is simply that life at such times seems more intensely real. Either way, my ordinary everyday me seems absent.
It is then that I wonder how real that ordinary me is. And I understand what Whitman was getting at when he wrote of his “real Me” standing “untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, / Withdrawn far …”
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Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [5])
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