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Bonds That
Make Us Free, Part 6
by C. Terry
Warner
When we betray
ourselves, we undergo a transformation. By seeing others suspiciously,
accusingly, or fearfully, we become suspicious, accusing,
or fearful ourselves. By no longer seeing them with care, delight,
and generosity, we ourselves cease to be caring, delighted, and
generous. The kind of people we are cannot be separated from
how we interpret the world around us. "Adam is Adam's world,"
wrote the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Who we are is
how we are in relation to others.
I must have
been about ten years old when I first caught hold of the thought
that my character--the kind of person I was--might have something
to do with how I thought about others. My family was living near
San Francisco. My parents and another couple had gone out for the
evening, and I was left in the other couple's apartment to sit up
with their sleeping baby (which nowadays would be illegal, but it
wasn't then). I took a book from the shelf and read. One of the
sentences I encountered there made such an impression on me that
I still can recall the book's color and heft, the names of its authors,
Harry and Bonaro Overstreet (though I do not remember the name of
the book itself), and the feeling I had as I read from it. The sentence
seemed to stand out from the page about three-quarters of an inch
and to be lit from behind. I was sure it had been written just for
me. It said: "To the immature, other people are not real."
Those eight
words pierced me. I knew that, aside from my mother, other people
were not especially real for me. Their feelings and desires did
not matter to me as much as my own; a lot of the time they didn't
matter to me at all. Yet I was sensitive enough to be disturbed
by my insensitivity. At that moment, it seemed to me supremely important
to be a person who cared about people.
Each of us chooses
whether or not to be an individual for whom others are real. As
I indicated in the preceding chapter, we don't make this choice
deliberately, in the same way we decide which color of sweater to
buy. Rather, the choice is made subtly, in a process that cannot
be distinguished from life itself, the process of responding or
refusing to respond to others as we feel we should. For to the
extent that we act toward others as we feel we might, we open ourselves
to their inner reality, and their needs and aspirations seem as
important to us as our own. We hope their hopes will be fulfilled
and need to see their needs satisfied. Their happiness makes us
happy, and we are pained to see them hurt. We resonate with them
and delight in their prosperity. Few of us consistently live this
way, it is true, but far fewer never live this way at all. At least
some of the time most people have a resonant relationship with a
child, a mate, or a beloved sibling or friend. Living resonantly
is not limited to the most saintly among us.
Still, some
embody this ideal to a remarkable and memorable degree. When our
family moved to England for a year, a couple we scarcely knew, Julie
and Joseph, found us a house to rent, picked us up at the airport,
got us situated in the village, and befriended and encouraged our
children. It was clear that they never considered any of this a
sacrifice; everything they did for us they did joyfully. And even
though they were busy with their own lives, they treated everyone
else this way, too. If you have had the sort of feelings we enjoyed
in their presence, you understand why, each time we prepared to
leave them, we did so reluctantly. When we returned from England,
our boys wanted to find a woman like Julie when they grew up and
our girls a man like Joseph. Anyone who has never known such people
is still basically unacquainted with humanity.
By contrast,
to the extent that others are not real to us, we are guarded, alienated,
and hardened. These words describe a more brutish way of being.
They suggest something of the way we grow numb and anxious when
we betray ourselves, as if darkness were descending and the landscape
were becoming desolate, foreboding, and cold. We get wrapped up
in ourselves, worried about gathering evidence of our worth, such
as the company we keep or the possessions we have accumulated or
the public image we have managed to project. We cannot spare ourselves
to care very much about others' hopes and fears and feelings because
of our intense preoccupation with our own.
When we live
in this guarded way of being, we attend to others only when they
can help us get what we want or when they stand in our way. This
goes not only for the cashier at the store, the teller at the bank,
and the neighbor next door, but also for the son or daughter we
want to behave well in public and the spouse we wish would hurry
up. While others are talking, we are thinking about what we want
to say next or about what we have to do today. We see everything
and everyone in terms of how they fit into our program, our agenda
for ourselves. We have become absorbed in ourselves and commensurately
suspicious, mistrustful, or fearful of others.
To live in the
first, open, generous, resonant way is to live for others;
in the second, accusing, self-absorbed, alienated way, for ourselves.
There are no other possibilities. In a famous book published in
1923 entitled I and Thou, Martin Buber tries to express this
important truth by inventing a special vocabulary. He applies the
name I-It to the self-absorbed, guarded way of being into
which, I have suggested, self-betrayers plunge themselves. By this
term he suggests that when we live in this mode, we regard others
as if they are objects existing primarily for our use. In contrast
is the sensitive and responsive way of being, which he calls I-You,
or I-Thou, signifying how we are when we regard others as
having their own inward lives and when we respect their hopes and
needs as we do our own.
Self-absorption
diminishes our capacity to give ourselves with abandon to other
people, to our work, to play, to God, and to the beauty of nature.
One evening when I was nineteen, I was walking along upper Broadway
in Manhattan with Suzanne Miller, talking and looking in store windows.
I had met Suzanne in one of Stella Adler's acting classes at Stella's
studio, which at that time was located on Central Park West. Suzanne
had a fierce integrity and a vigilance against humbug in herself
that impressed me from the first moments I knew her. These qualities
had already exercised a strong influence upon me. Nevertheless,
she caught me completely by surprise that night by asking me: "Do
you love yourself in the theater or the theater in yourself?"
The question
stopped me in midstep. I knew I couldn't answer it the way I wanted
to be able to answer it. I didn't have to search my memory to discover
that I couldn't; I knew it immediately--or possibly I should say,
I knew it already, even before she asked. Indeed, I knew
that this had been the question for me all my life, though I had
refused to acknowledge it before. It wasn't a question about the
theater only, but about my motivations for everything I had ever
done. Did I love what I was doing, or did I love myself in doing
it?
In that moment
a choice lay clearly before me. I could spend my life assembling,
feeding, and protecting the egotistical, ravenous, and addictive
fiction I called my self--or I could refuse it every sort
of nurture and let it die an unregretted death. I knew that unless
I somehow could leave off my project of promoting and protecting
myself and instead open myself to life, I would be doomed to a lifetime
of self-involvement. I could see that self-absorption is poison
to the spirit.
Bonded, One
Way Or the Other
When we actively
relate to people as rivals or enemies, we foster the false belief
that we and they stand independent of one another. The truth is
that we bind ourselves to them as if by an invisible tether, and
we do so by our negative thoughts and feelings.
Years ago, before
it became fashionable for young people to dress in torn and faded
clothes, a freshman student showed up at an honors program social
at our university wearing dirty jeans and a logger's shirt. She
stretched herself conspicuously on a couch and read James Joyce's
formidable novel Ulysses. A "true intellectual,"
she thought herself above our frivolous socializing. But to make
the point she had to come where we had all gathered; she needed
us in order to show that she didn't need us. Like concern for others,
self-concern is a way of relating to people.
I have already
alluded to the manipulative quality of the I-It connection with
others. We see them in terms of our own self-centered agenda; as
far as we are concerned, they exist for our use. In relation to
our quest to get what we want, they become (1) obstacles standing
in the way, (2) vehicles able to help us, or (3) simply irrelevant.
If we see them as obstacles in our way, we will tend to react to
them in frustration and feel angry, resentful, irritated, or fearful
toward them. If we see them as vehicles helpful for accomplishing
our purposes, we will ingratiate ourselves with them and indulge
them manipulatively--or punish them if they let us down. If we consider
them irrelevant to getting what we want, we will treat them arrogantly,
find them boring, or scarcely notice them at all. One way or the
other, we become bullies, manipulators, sycophants, or snobs.
When we stand
in relation to others or nature or God as an I to a You, the You
is vibrantly real to us; we give ourselves to such a relationship
with our whole being. But when we stand to others or nature or God
as an I to an It, the It is an object in our eyes, a mere he
or she--not a being whose own inner life is important to
us. In this kind of relationship we cannot give ourselves completely.
When others are Its to us, we ourselves are different from who we
are when others are Yous for us. We are different depending on how
we address, understand, appreciate, and respond to them. We cannot
think of them as objects without becoming I-It, or as real persons
without being I-You. We cannot find them irritating without becoming
irritated persons ourselves, nor can we find them worthwhile without
becoming appreciative persons ourselves. Who we are is who we are
with others. How they seem to us is a revelation of ourselves.
Buber captures
this idea with the hyphen inserted in each of the terms I-It
and I-You. The hyphen in I-It makes this term a single
word, to show that whenever this word applies, the I is not
separate from regarding others as Its. So too for the hyphen in
I-You; intrinsic to the I in this word is its way
of perceiving others as Yous. Making each of these terms a single
word signifies that the self cannot be pried apart from how he or
she sees and feels about others. Personal identity and personal
relationships are the same thing seen from two different angles.
Buber's neat lexical invention helps us express and remember this
important truth.
Here we discover
something significant about the kind of profound personal transformation
we are seeking to understand. To the extent that we can come
to see others differently, we can undergo a fundamental change,
a change in our being, a change of our emotions and attitudes, a
change of heart.
Next time,
we will study how a person slips into the hardened, self-absorbed
way of being.
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