Other people are so unknowable, and for some reason I can't stop trying to "solve" them, as though they--you--were all finite, and if I just tried hard and long enough I could truly figure them out. I have always been like this, and it is a weird quality: this insatiable curiosity about even people I do not know well or even at all, combined with an unsophisticated ability to be regularly surprised by details that don't mesh with my in-the-moment picture of who a person is. Why, when I know this is true, do I feel the same jolt of astonishment every time I learn that the friend of a friend I'd deemed a strident intellectual is passionate about a particular dopey TV show, that an acquaintance I'd pegged as an old school lefty is actually a bit of a hawk, that someone I'd envisioned heating up a frozen dinner makes pasta from scratch?
I both love being surprised by the details and am over and over again dismayed or thrown off guard by them. Maybe this is a typical problem people have, and I have just never discussed it with anyone before. I want to be surprised by people, always. I believe it is what makes the many moments that constitute our ordinary days worth living, worth remembering, what makes us interested in each other. And so often the details that surprise me flesh out my notion of a person in the most interesting and appealing ways--people are never as simple, or as understandable, or as knowable--that word again--as I think they are. And, it does seem true to me that in many cases the more you get to know someone, the more you like them because you begin to understand them, to learn the little unusual unpredictable details that distinguish them from your preconceived portrait, often massively so.
But then, why the frustration? Why should it bother me that I have to continually reassess, revaluate my portraits of both the people I know and those I want to or encounter without knowing. This is so vague, I know. To tell the truth, I'm not even sure what I'm getting at, or why. I was looking at Facebook before I started to write, and before that I was at Jersey Boys, the Broadway show, with my father and sister, and both things made me think about unknowability. And knowability. At the show, my dad was sitting between us; this was his third time seeing it. I took him before it got big, because he is a huge Frankie Valli fan. My sister wanted to see it (I will write about this another time, this inherited love of the music of the 50s and 60s and its connection for us to my dad), so she and he went together. And then my dad wanted to see it with us both, so although once was enough for me, I went back tonight.
And we sat there, in our bad, high seats, watching the unknown performers sing songs we knew all the words to, and I felt like a unit, like we were members of a very small, very tight tribe (another concept I will come back to), and I thought to myself: this is my life, this moment, these people, it is happening now, in the mezzanine of a theater on 52nd Street. And we walked out together afterward, and down into the subway, and I stood holding a pole while they sat next to each other on the bench seat. Alison started talking about Las Vegas. I had tuned out, had something else on my mind, and then I tuned back in, and all of sudden had another revelation: We were not a unit at all. Although she is one of the people closest to me in the entire world, she is no more knowable, really, than anyone else. I went to Las Vegas once, on a cross-country drive with a friend, and I hated it. I said to myself as we drove out of town: I never need to go there again. And here was Alison, not just talking about how much she loved it but how much she knew I would love it, and I watched her mouth moving and thought: I am as unknowable as anybody else.
And it only kept going like that all night. (I am starting to feel as though somebody might have spiked my bottled water with hallucinogens, but what can you do?) My father confessed to having bought himself a very expensive coat, a luxury item he'd coveted for years, and I thought it again: Why? What pleasure did this give him? What need did it fill? Did it fill a need at all? Does that question reveal more about me than him? I was really making myself a little crazy with this, and then we got home, and I logged onto Facebook--which started out as a conduit to online Scrabble but has now become for me a bit of an anthropological study. You see, Facebook allows you to see your "Friends'" profiles, but also their Friends' profiles, and on and on until you are so removed from your original point of contact that you are reading the favorite books and movies of a 50 year old man who lives in Norway and being surprised that he expresses such antipathy for John McCain. Or at least it allows me to do this, because I can't help myself. It has something to do with this quest to know people--Who are their friends, anyway? Will knowing that help, will it lock another tiny piece into the infinite puzzle?
Enough. More tomorrow. Maybe more coherent more.
Must add: It's a Total Lunar Eclipse. Not a Total Eclipse of the Heart. Very cool.
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2 comments:
As written before, I love that too - when people surprise you. You focus on pleasant surprises, which I like too. But it's also interesting how much it can piss people off when you don't fit into the image/stereotype they have of you. I'm thinking about how gay or black Republicans can be vilified as hypocritical. Or how disappointed I felt when I learned that someone I respected truly believed in a literal Creationism. I'm not sure of what my point is. But while I totally agree with you that generally the more you get to know someone, the more you like them, it doesn't always hold true. (this is just a comment - re-reading your OP, I see that you do brush upon feeling dismayed)
I like how you link this to Facebook. It's hard for me to browse in Facebook without thinking of the people I don't know as sort of quasi-fictional characters. Their quirks make them both more "real" and sometimes less believeable.
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