EmailOn Being Nothing
Every man looketh that his companion should value him at the same rate he sets upon himself. -Thomas Hobbes
As a carryover from childhood camps, I still instinctively check my mailbox with excitement. At camp, when I felt homesick, the arrival of mail from family was a reminder that I was not forgotten, that somewhere in the great world, though not here, my existence was written boldly in another's ledger. Now, despite my Pavlovian reflex, browsing my mail is not merely unexciting but depressing. What am I in this world but a pawn of others' projects? The utility companies require the payments they are owed. The stores have new products they invite me to come and buy. A speaker has planned a lecture and seeks an audience. I owe taxes to the government for making money, for spending that money, for owning a home, for owning a car to leave that home. I am not a name but an account number, a social security number, a customer ID, a "current resident" of this address. Every day I am sought out by people who do not know me but who want something from me. I matter to the world merely as the owner of a bank account from which others wish to withdraw. Most annoying are subscription solicitations I receive from literary magazines that got my name from rejecting work I submitted. They do not want my writing, but might I send them my money—so I can read the writers they chose over me? They thwart my project and subsume me into theirs. Not that, on reflection, I can blame any of these solicitors. A store needs customers, a speaker needs listeners, a publisher needs subscribers. I use others as surely as others use me. They are not my enemies but individuals trying to live and succeed, just as I am. Nevertheless, all those individuals added together make up the world, and the world is cruel.
At every stage of life, we desire to be noticed and affirmed by others. Infants are born craving affection as much as milk. Children playing do not require the active involvement of nearby adults, but if you try to leave they demand that you watch them play. Adolescents, in their perpetual anxiety to be popular, do not so much look at others through their own eyes as look constantly at themselves through others' eyes. The dying worry about being remembered after death, though when dead how can they care if they're forgotten? As adults, our successes give us little pleasure unless sweetened by others' admiration. If we dress up, there must be others to see us or our work seems wasted—no one wears a tuxedo at home. A marvelous gardener once told me (speaking for human nature) that he takes more delight in a single garden visitor's compliment than in all the shrubs and flowers he has ever planted. What is this craving for another's eye to rest upon us?
On reflection, a desire for recognition seems irrational. Since we live in our own mind, why should we care what thoughts are in another's? Is this not like a Canadian fretting about the weather in Mexico? How to explain this need for notice is debatable. Are we so doubtful of our worth that others must attest to it? Conversely, are we so certain of our worth that others must bow down to it?
Growing up in a small town, my life had an audience. I knew everyone at church, at school, on opposing sports teams. Everyone else knew everyone too. Thus we were all each other's audience. This did not always make life pleasant; one had an audience for one's failures as well as one's successes. But it made life meaningful. Everything counted because someone was watching. In high school, the bliss of getting a pretty girlfriend consisted less in having the girl herself than in walking the halls with her on your arm, for others to see. The chief motivation to score goals in sports was not to beat the other team but to impress the fans. To score a goal or get a girl on a desert island would have been a paltry pleasure. Small town life resembled the medieval universe in which saints and angels looked down on the adventures of humankind. Your actions might lead to heaven or hell, but because all eyes were on you, even damnation possessed a coziness.
I see a decisive break in my life occurring when I left town after high school. My well-nurtured ego thought of the outside world as the waiting arena of my actions, where all humanity was expectantly assembled for me, yet when I arrived I found that no one knew my name nor wished to learn it; I was a king without any subjects. Arriving at college was like stepping out of the medieval world into the modern. The campus was a chaos of otherness with nothing at the center, least of all me. Unknown students from unknown places lived unknown lives, unconnected to mine. What did my actions matter anymore, since no one was keeping track of me but me? I studied anomie in my sociology classes and experienced it alone in my dorm room. Though I made friends, I no longer had an audience.
I remember lying awake in my dorm bed the first night I arrived on campus. The thought gripped me that no one on campus or in the city knew I had come or required that I be there in order to function. The local restaurants had been in business for twenty years without my patronage. The dorm where I slept had been housing students since before I was born. If I died tonight, the city would not miss me or pause from its busy routines except for someone to call my family to fetch my body. I felt frightened to be so unnecessary. The one comfort I clung to was that the college had admitted me and, more importantly, had offered me a scholarship, implying it wanted me. For what is the proof of being wanted except being paid?
I began noticing every small sign of my insignificance to others, and minor episodes made deep impressions. One day I was issued a $100 citation for parking seven feet from a fire hydrant, when the law required fifteen feet. I thought the ticket was unreasonable, for although common sense told me not to block a fire hydrant, how was I to know the precise distance required, when no one had posted a sign? I appealed the ticket using this argument but was informed in a formal letter that the law does not bend for the ignorant, and I had to pay. Reading the brief, austere sentences from an authoritative stranger gave me a view of myself through the law's eyes, as a nameless citizen. I had duties more than rights; the law's only concern was that the human herd keep inside the fences, excuses irrelevant.
Another time, having a problem with my television service, I called the cable company and waited on hold for thirty minutes for assistance, and vented my frustration when my call was finally answered. Hearing the polite but wearied apology of the employee, it occurred to me that for her I was just another angry customer adding to her bad day, that she wanted to solve my problem only so that I, who was her problem, would go away. At the time I was taking a seminar on existential philosophers, who advocate being a distinctive individual instead of one of the masses. Such advice appeared hollow, for each of us seems distinctive to ourselves, but to everyone else we are part of the crowd.
Society is adroit at disillusioning newcomers, and many self-assured children grow up to be bitter adults. But bitterness, instead of a form of disillusionment, is really the refusal to give up your childhood illusions of importance. Ignored instead of welcomed by the world, you fault the world as blind and evil in order not to fault yourself as naïve. Bitterness is a child's coddling narcissism within the context of an adult's harsh life. Instead, I knew that the world only trampled me as a street crowd does an earthworm—not out of malice or stupidity, but because no one sees it. Thus my pain was not to feel wrongly slighted, but to feel rightly slighted.
A newspaper article I read about an unemployed man crystallized my sense of society's accidental cruelty toward individuals. There is often a catch-22 of poverty. One needs money to get on one's feet, but one must get on one's feet to make money. Having lost his job, the man could not pay numerous parking tickets and so was finally thrown in jail overnight, causing him to miss a job interview the next morning that would have enabled him to pay parking tickets. I groaned in pity for his snowballing hardships, yet who could be blamed? The employer who did not hire him, when the candidate did not show up? The police officer who jailed him, when social order requires laws, however unfair their particular application? Because we are no single person's or institution's responsibility, we may suffer an unjust fate, although no one has acted unjustly.
Though far less egregiously than the poor, everyone suffers somewhat from peer neglect. Social life is a fierce battle to be heard, in which each person is a tone of sound contributing to the white noise of society. The first requirement of any success is getting others' attention amid the clamor. Therefore smart companies do not so much invest in great products as in great marketing of them, plastering their ads on billboards, magazines, bus stops, trash cans, grocery receipts, anything plasterable—pouring their money into persuading us to give them ours. City-dwelling individuals, like low-budget companies, staple bulletins to telephone poles to advertise their talents and ideas, unashamed to brag since modesty is a liability to success. But since everyone wants to be noticed, there is no one available to do the noticing. How many pedestrians, all hurrying on their own errands, pause to read those bulletins? Only a few, perhaps, as they hastily staple their own bulletin on top. Stores open their doors daily for business, but since most people are also working, there is only a trickle of customers. At town meetings, people only come to share some burning comment, and so, planning their wording while they wait and weighing their words' effectiveness once done, no one listens to anyone else's comment. At conferences and orientations, each newcomer walks in the room and worries what others are thinking of him—a needless anxiety since the others are too worried about themselves to notice his entrance.
In our universal mutual oblivion of each other, fame is a fool's pursuit—but there are many fools. Point a television camera at any sport spectator, and he will gasp and grin and furiously wave, delighted to have his image transmitted to so many retinas. Yet since no one heeds a stranger's face on television, it being a common sight, only his friends who are watching notice him—the very people whose notice does not make him famous. True, a few people achieve real stardom, yet look closer and you will see, each celebrity is his own greatest fan. The crowds clamoring for autographs have not followed the actress's career so closely as she has. Who else has attended every premiere, heard every interview, sat in court through every divorce? Biographers devote whole books to rock stars, but a rock star devotes his whole life to himself. Nor is that rock star so essential to the worshiping world as he believes. Though he struts the stage like a human god, he is in fact a beggar to his fans. Without them, he would have no one to perform to, whereas, without him, they would simply go to other concerts. Wandering in the library, I will sometimes stop by a classic book like Crime and Punishment. Would the shelves be any less crammed, or readers any less busy, if Dostoevsky had not written it? The riches of literature are infinite, and the infinite minus the finite would still be infinite. But always my last thought is, if the great and famous are nothing, what am I?
Some days I feel so insubstantial that I am startled by signs of my visible presence in the world. On a recent afternoon walk, when my thoughts on these matters had gone somewhat too far, a dog rooting in the grass turned its head and barked at me. I turned my head toward the sound in surprise: I had made the rooting dog look up—therefore I did exist. True, the dog hated me, but in its bark I heard a vicious compliment, for it is better to be hated than ignored, hate being a form of acknowledgement, albeit negative.
I can interpret parts of my life as an effort to be a causer of change. I suppose I write to impact others' minds, not for their sake but because, if things give when I push, I will know I have a solid body. Certainly no writer chiefly writes for the love of truth or beauty; we read perhaps for the love of truth or beauty. Writing produces the entirely different pleasure of self-assertion—a pleasure less noble but more intense. What can reading another's fine sentence compare to crafting your own? Writers fatten their self-sense upon their writings. Thanks to them, an order of words exists which was not previously in the world. How could they then be nobody?
Yet the world is a very big ball to budge using only words. Before I started writing, with the faith of a beginner, I vaguely supposed that I would not only succeed but succeed precisely where others had failed, that the problems that had stumped past thinkers were only unsolved because I had not yet worked on them, and I would find the way forward for lost modernity. My future words glimmered as things always do which are not seen but foreseen, and I imagined the distant day when the public would receive my pages, my mind given body. Instead, my first publication punctured my dreaming ego like a pin. The magazine arrived in the mail, I thumbed the pages, I read my name in print, I looked around the silent room. Outside my window cars drove by, unaware of my accomplishment. I reflected that even much greater successes than my small one must always be local and limited, since most of humanity remains ignorant of them. For example, who besides some colleagues can name last year's Nobel Prize winner in economics?
Anyway, art is long, and my patience is short. I make my head hurt trying to catch subtleties of thought and feeling, and a week's labors yield a few paltry paragraphs. In magazines, I see critics scribbling book reviews every month, highlighting the errors and toppling the hopes of some new author, and I reflect on the wisdom of critics. To destroy is vastly easier than to create, yet it affects the world as powerfully. An author's years of labor lift him tentatively toward respect; a critic's hour of faultfinding sinks him back into scorn, which soon reverts to oblivion.
Destruction is a surrogate for creation—self-assertion for the uncreative. Normally, instead of squashing bugs I find in my house, I transfer them outside in respect of life. My example and inspiration are the Jains of India, who stare at the ground to avoid trampling and wear masks to avoid swallowing any brother in being. Yet I have killed, and not solely for convenience, the door being too far away, or because I find a fellow creature loathsome, like the roach. There is a fascinating feeling of power in destruction. A beetle that just now lived and moved, its matrix of tiny organs and muscles and nerves unutterably complex, is now a smudge of yellow slime, and I have done it. God planned the beetle before the world and in the fullness of time knit its body in its mother's egg, but with a tap of my foot I have stained the ground with guts and thwarted providence.
Alas, such episodes of petty Satanism are a poor consolation. We do not want to stamp on the world's throat to get its attention, but to be freely received. We want to be wanted and welcomed, not for our money or as a means to any end, nor even for any traits or characteristics, but for our rock bottom being, that irreducible essence of us which is best outwardly symbolized by our having a particular name. I give thanks for a wife, family, and friends, a few beings among the world's six billion, who know my name. While a child's and parent's bond is intrinsic, based on blood, a wife's and husband's is extrinsic, built on time. When I first met my wife, we fell in love not so much with each other but with whatever qualities we liked about each other, and if we had woken before our wedding day to find each other altered, we might have split. But five years later, already those traits we fell in love with have become predicates attached to the subject hidden within, and we love the traits because they belong to the subject, rather than the subject because of the traits. Thus in old age, when a man and woman are ugly and senile and bear no resemblance to the boy and girl who got married, they care for each other not less tenderly but more, because time has tied them with a bond that is stronger than blood.
Besides in my marriage, I find affirmation in my church (the Episcopal). Let others write of the hypocrisy of churches, in the fashion of modernity. I walk through the great wood doors and gladly leave the world of market relations behind. I am welcomed, not as the first step toward trying to get something from me, but simply because here it is the order of things to welcome, as outside it is the order of things to try to get. Unlike the pocket-picking by corporations, the passing of church offering plates and sign-up sheets does not seem base since they are passed among peers for the good of the group. At its best, church community can be more heartening than a family. Whereas a family affirms you because of your special tie with them, at church you can shake hands and exchange peace with total strangers, because universal welcome is written into the canons and statutes like a law of nature. Thus whereas family is a haven from a hostile world, church is a vision of a better world.
Nevertheless, I am no monk or homebody, I cannot be content to live in retreat. I must make peace with the world or have no peace. Nor should this be difficult. I can easily accept the insignificance of others without doubting their right to exist. A toothless woman takes my change at a gas station. At the beach, a dandy loafs on his father's yacht. They are not destined for history books, but this does not invalidate them, for the rich and various world, to be complete, needs toothless clerks and loafing dandies as much as statesmen and celebrities. Yet, regarding myself, I seem to think I should be Caesar and, not being, I reproach myself for taking up six feet of space, ricocheting from absurd hope to absurd despair. This shows how self-love can not only make us too easy on ourselves, but also too hard, for we cannot accept in ourselves the inevitable limitations which, in others, seem natural and uncatastrophic.
There must be a Copernican revolution of the self. Instead of pointlessly cursing the sun to go around me, my chance of contentment is learning to orbit, being the world's audience instead of demanding the world be mine. If the world is a stage, then everyone's an extra, acting minor roles in simultaneous scenes in which no one has the lead. With so much happening, society is poorly made to satisfy pride, but well-made to satisfy interest, if we will let go of vanity and join the swirl of activity.
Thus reason tries to teach me, but experience must show me. For several years I have traded stocks, and some days trading converts me into commending the cutthroat world. On a typical morning, after a jog and breakfast, I turn on my computer to check the markets and consider if I will make any trades that day. At precisely 9:30, the silent symbols and numbers covering my screen begin to flicker furiously. Stock quotes flash green or red, bid prices and ask prices feint and jockey against each other, volume of shares traded jumps upward by thousands. As I watch this sudden electronic burst of life, I think of all the anonymous traders whom the flickering numbers represent, each trying to outsmart and defeat the others from the hidden command center of his or her desk, each of us believing we can succeed though the odds say some must lose. Pausing from my contest with other traders, I browse the internet for news, and almost every headline tells of some similar contest between feuding parties: politicians campaigning for limited votes, athletes negotiating with team owners for more lucrative contracts, litigants suing over someone's supposed error, startup companies stealing market share from established rivals. Meanwhile, through my open window come the shouts of nearby middle school children at recess, screaming and battling to be the best at soccer or kickball, while, inside the classrooms, they train and study to decide who in fifteen years will work for whom. How many aspirers there are, for how few prizes! Yet on the days I speak of, when my soul is sturdy, this universal strife and rivalry does not offend me; on the contrary, I pause to praise it. Is there not something sublime in competition? I admire the free market somewhat as I admire the world of the Iliad, not for any moral virtues, but for the strength and fierce ambition of the participants, what might be called their masculine virtues. Like the heroism of Greeks and Trojans who go into battle although most likely they will die, all people seem heroic as they strive to succeed in a vast society, though out of five hundred children, four hundred ninety nine will grow up to be less than they dreamed.
On such days, I acquiesce in being nothing, yet this acquiescence involves no passivity. If everyone is battling for a foothold in life, then my proper business is to battle too, and neither to be vain nor self-disparaging about the outcome. I make my peace with the world by embracing war.