Is it good to be authentic?

7/19/16


        In my review of Alice Munro's 'Dear Life' (7/7/16), I described a story in which a young girl has thoughts of strangling her younger sister.  This is kind of an extreme case, but it makes the point that sometimes each of us has thoughts that we would just as soon not have, and which seem unworthy.  How many of us, upon hearing that a friend just got a promotion, feel at the same time happy for the friend but also just a little bit jealous? Upon hearing  about a sexual scandal involving an otherwise forthright high official, how many of us feel both sad to see his downfall, but also titillated by the glimpse of his private life?    I bring this up because it bears on the topic of being true to yourself.  Adam Grant had an interesting piece in the New York Times with the provocative title, "Unless you're Oprah, 'Be Yourself' is terrible advice" (June 4, 2016).  He makes the point that being authentic can get you into trouble.  There might not be a happy outcome, for instance, to expressing your authentic feeling to the in-laws that their conversation is boring, or telling a colleague that you would try to sleep with her if you were younger and single. 
         Grant emphasizes the social hazards of being authentic.  To me, it goes deeper than that.  We each have mixed thoughts, some desirable, some not so much. When Shakespeare has Polonius advise his son Laertes 'To thine own self be true.', the question is: to which self should one be true?  To the part of oneself that is happy at a friend's promotion, or the part that is a bit jealous? The answer Grant suggests is to follow the advice of Lionel Trilling, the literary critic and teacher whose 1972 book 'Authenticity and sincerity' offered an alternative.  Rather than being authentic (focusing on discovering and expressing oneself), he suggests that we try to understand how we present ourselves to the world, and then strive to be sincere-- to try to make our behavior consistent with how we would like others to see us. As Grant phrases it, instead of trying to bring our inner world outside, we might benefit from bringing our outer world inside.  It goes deeper than being a way of staying out of trouble, emphasizing instead trying to live up to our better selves, the way we would like others to see us.  It is such good advice that it seemed worthy of repeating here.

 


Be the first to post a comment.



Book Review: Dear Life: Stories (Alice Munro)

7/7/16

In this 2012 collection of short stories by Alice Munro, the last section  is set apart with this preface: 'The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.'  What a remarkable thought: an autobiography, not of events in one's life, but rather of feelings.
Among these stories is one called 'Night', which is well worth re-telling.  It is about a fourteen year old girl who develops a pain in her side and is rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon, prepared to find an inflamed appendix, discovers and removes a growth the size of a turkey egg.  Once she is home, the tumor is clearly on everybody's mind, but it is not talked about.  'The only way I can explain our failure to speak of it was that there must have been a cloud around that word like the cloud around the mention of sex.'  Nonetheless, it hangs in the air.  She is treated differently, excused from her chores, and comes to feel like a guest in her own house.  She begins to have trouble sleeping, and lying awake in her bunk bed recalls childishly tormenting her nine year old sister, pretending that she might spit down upon her in the lower bed. At one point, she  begins to feel that she is not herself.  'Something was taking hold of me and it was my business, my hope, to fight it off. I had the sense to do that, but only barely, as it seemed. Whatever it was was trying to tell me to do things, not exactly for any reason but just to see if such acts were possible. It was informing me that motives were not necessary.'  
       One of those intrusive thoughts was that she could strangle her little sister.  Horrified, she gets out of bed, and takes a long walk outside. This recurs nightly, until once in the early morning hours, she discovers her father, sitting outside as well, waiting for dawn and dressed in his going-to-town clothes.  They talk about how hard it is to have disturbed sleep, until ultimately she confesses that the is bothered by a bad thought, and reveals what it is. In a calm voice, he said not to worry. 'People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.' 
'He did not say, specifically, that I was in no danger of doing any such thing. He seemed more to be taking it for granted that such a thing could not happen. An effect of the ether, he said. Ether they gave you in the hospital. No more sense than a dream. It could not happen, in the way that a meteor could not hit our house (of course it could, but the likelihood of its doing so put it in the category of couldn’t). He did not blame me, though, for thinking of it. Did not wonder at me, was what he said.'
         With his words of acceptance, she felt calmer. Although traditionally she thought of him primarily as the source of painful and embarrassing disciplinary strappings with his belt, she began to wonder what things were like for him.  'I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning appointment to go to the bank, to learn, not to his surprise, that there was no extension to his loan. He had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn around and he had to find a new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at the same time. Or he may have found out that there was a name for my mother’s shakiness and that it was not going to stop. Or that he was in love with an impossible woman. Never mind. From then on I could sleep.'
As Munro comments, if she herself were a parent, an appointment with a psychiatrist might have been the response 'a generation and an income further on'.  Instead, it appears that her father understood that sometimes demons come to us in the night.  In a girl who feels that life may be punishing her, even lethally in the guise of a turkey egg-sized tumor in her belly, it might not be surprising to have fantasies of punishing others. In a well put-together person, these remain fantasies, and a lesson to accept that each of us is made up of all sorts of feelings, not all of which are noble.   In her words, 'People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.'  For all his failings, this time her father rose to the occasion.  Sometimes all it takes is an expression of confidence and acceptance, to help us go back to sleep again.

 


Be the first to post a comment.

Previously published:

All 21 blog entries