Explanations for Yourself
When you watch yourself lie.
Self-Portrait, Rome 2016
From a curious little book, here’s a curious little passage:
At least I myself have only recently resolved to recall some of my former adventures, which till now I have always avoided, even with a certain uneasiness. Now, however, when I not only recall them but am even resolved to write them down, now I want precisely to make a test: is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?
Right before these sentences, there’s a suggestion that truth is revealed by relationship—some friends learn some truths, other friends learn other truths, but nobody sees the full picture. The natural endpoint, for Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground, is to head inward. Long before any outward lie or concealment or omission comes that more tricky dilemma of self-deception.
I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me. And among external sensations the only one possible for me was reading. Reading was, of course, a great help—it stirred, delighted, and tormented me.
In the volley of conversation, in any attempted dialogue, there’s the common but forever challenging objective of transparency, the desire to be candid about motivations, emotions, thoughts. If you’ve ever exchanged a few sentences with another person, however, you recognize this as a straightforward yet always elusive goal.
Rather than strain, that outward honesty probably requires tranquility, a calmness of mind, clarity in your purpose. Achieving your ideal of honesty is more like being a violinist than a drummer: if you grip the strings tighter, the sound isn’t better.
It is not at all to justify myself that I’ve been doing all this talking … But no! That’s a lie! I precisely wanted to justify myself. I make this little note for myself, gentleman. I don’t want to lie. I’ve given my word.
A typical conversation—even with good intentions—commonly involves elisions, calculations, oversights, a little gap between what’s first thought and what’s eventually said. In many situations this is mere politeness. A desire to speak with kindness. Yet mere politeness can also become an excuse for those inexcusable omissions, all the misrepresentations that supposedly keep the temperature lower.
Most people employ a personal censor, a private homunculus who endlessly calculates the potential affect of words, trims phrases, alters word choices—forever striving to match the right words with the right audience. What people typically overlook, rather interestingly, is the mediocre results of this internal homunculus. It shows up late, works erratically, and regularly fails: little mistakes, faults of communication, and offenses still spew from the lips, almost without fail. Even when the homunculus allows only partial truths and polite fictions, misunderstandings still come, leaving the paradoxical situation of defending words that are only partly believed.
Our silence had already lasted some five minutes. The tea sat on the table; we didn’t touch it: it went so far that I purposely refused to begin drinking, so as to make it still harder for her; and it would have been awkward for her to begin. Several times she glanced at me in sad perplexity. I was stubbornly silent. The chief martyr, of course, was myself, because I was fully conscious of all the loathsome baseness of my spiteful stupidity, and at the same time I simply could not restrain myself.
Surely the most difficult part of outward honesty comes from the difficulty of inward honesty. Thus the subject of Dostoevsky’s lonely, pitiful narrator. If you don’t know what you really think, you’re certainly not able to tell other people.
I simply could not get hold of myself, could not find the loose ends. Something in my soul was rising, rising, ceaselessly, painfully, and refused to be still. I returned home throughly upset. Like as if some crime lay on my soul.
Although there’s an understandable focus on honesty today, the more subtle nature of self-deception seems a more apt, even vital, subject for most people, especially since so few people posses the ability to convey what they actually desire. Many arguments ensue from worries about hidden meanings, what’s concealed, even motivations—yet hardly anyone trusts their own voice, as they sense the capricious nature of thoughts, how they change from morning to night, from Monday to Tuesday. In most cases, when someone lies to you, you’re simply watching them lie to themselves out loud. Delusions are what you hear. The opening lines of Notes from Underground are at least clear on this point:
I am a sick man … I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me.
One intriguing aspect to the Underground Man’s challenge—“to be perfectly candid with oneself”—is the personal, solitary, and introspective nature of the objective, but the results of this objective redound in service of others. The confrontation is at first internal: against all those personal mysteries, those unacknowledged desires, those paradoxical complexes. Only after the internal lies are conquered can a public face be considered true. And then the real target comes into view: making the ability to articulate the only barrier between thoughts and words.
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