The Private Self

All Soul's Day

     The man who cuts my hair, a Russian barber, teases me about my mustache.  I never thought it was that noticeable, but Vassily notices.  He jokingly points out that I have one, never thinking that I would take offense, as I never do anything but laugh.  He probably just thinks that its funny that I don't wax it, or have electrolysis to get rid of it.  If I were an adolescent girl, I probably wouldn't find it so funny, and as he is the father of three, it makes me wonder what he teases them about.

     It is for the most part, impossible to know how what we say strikes others.  In Vassily's case, he would probably be deeply apologetic to he think he had offended me, as Vassily's pretty sensitive to slights himself.  Not so the case of a partner at a Wall Street law firm I once worked for, who introduced a perky and efficient female associate to clients as "The Jessica Hahn of our firm", referencing the woman at the center of a 1987 sex scandal, when he meant (according to the associate) to compare her to Fawn Hall, Oliver North's loyal (if equally controversial) secretary.

     The partner made the remark in front of clients, the associate and the senior associate on the transaction.  The associate interpreted the remark in the best possible light, but the senior associate (who detested the partner) told other associate attorneys in the firm, who told others, revealing the partner (to those who did not already hold that opinion) to be an unredeemable boor.  The associate had to accommodate herself to working with an insensitive boss if she wanted to remain at the firm.

     For most of us who worked or work in the corporate world, being subject to insensitive bosses is part of the consideration exchanged in return for higher than average salaries.  Not that less well-paid environments are necessarily gentler.  The work place is a war zone, and luckily most of us can retreat to a refuge of choice at day's end.  Our private self has a chance of being reconstituted there.

     Yet for many of us that reconstitution is no escape from the isolation that characterizes the world we live in more than ever before.  E.M. Forster summarized his moral imperative in two words: "Only connect" --but how many of us do connect with each other at any meaningful level?

     This afternoon I went to hear "Two Boys", Nico Mulhy's opera about an Internet-addicted teenager driven to murder.  The piece was both creepy and enormously subtle.  "Everything's ironic, there's no tenderness", sings Inspector Strawson, referring to the tone of the exchanges in the chat rooms her suspect built his life around.  I was sitting behind a retired teacher, and having taught at the secondary level myself, asked her whether the world depicted resonated with her experience.

     "Oh, I retired from teaching thirty-five years ago, before there were computers in the classrooms", she said.  "I will say that it seems that now the computer's the third parent, the most important one, so kids don't have to work at having relationships with their biological parents. And parents don't understand that the computer doesn't relieve them of the responsibility of knowing what is inside their kid's head."

    Call it a dystopian view, but when face to face interaction pales in comparison to the thrill of being able to text in real time, how can the wellsprings of humanity not run dry?  As most of us know, people write things to each other when they are using a Web-created vehicle --be it e-mail, a tweet or a chat-- they would not say to a person's face.  The things said are more harsh, and more impulsively driven, with predictable consequences.  Internet bullying has been legislated a crime in several states when teenagers killed themselves after being victimized by Internet-disseminated ridicule and abuse.

       Community --it used to be a more felt presence in most of our lives.  And it made sure the bully was stopped before he hurt someone vulnerable irreparably.  The bully, in those days, was someone from a home where the parents were not good citizens.  Today the bully can be --as "Two Boys" demonstrates-- a good student, one whose middle-class parents are glad he doesn't give them much to do, spending most of his hours in front of his computer, not interfering --or interacting-- with his progenitors.

      In the old days before the Internet dominated our lives, the private self was inseparable from the community, in the sense that although the private self reached its fulfillment out of the reach of the public sphere, it defined itself in relation to it, yin, to the community's yang.  What we have now is neither an inviolate private self, nor an inviolate community, just isolated individuals coming together in groups defined not by their broad reach, but by narrow, specific obsessions.  It is a little like what happened to television once the networks' lost dominance to cable channels:  Where once there was a more-or-less common television culture, now there are only segments.  The individuation of preferences, the abundance of choice, has not necessarily produced an equally cohesive culture of community.

     When I was a child, I would have preferred that my parents watch "Wonderful World of Disney" to Ed Sullivan, but I had a lot of company in my childish discontent.  Today, I just walk out of my parents' viewing range, turn on the television in my room, and watch my program.