THE 'REAL WORLD'
Though I'm as shy, introverted, or autistic as most of you who will read this
(when I was a boy I even fit SM or 'selective mutism'), I've had decades of
experience in that strange place social people like to call the 'real world' and I
want to share some of what I've learned with you.
Thinking about what to say, it occurred to me that I had already described
that world in my book The Birdcatcher, especially in Chapt XVII where
Christopher Stone explains how he entered the social universe and some of
what he saw there. I can't improve on that, so I've decided to put the full
chapter on this site.
There are other ways to enter the social world than Chris Stone's. Most
common is the practice of imitating extroverts. The people who do this have
varying success - some, especially those who are relentless with it, can have
spectacular success (Adolf Hitler was an example), but they have never
impressed me. When I see naturally shy people talking excessively, trying
hard to be like people they can't hope to match in social skill, I find it one of
the saddest things. No, I don't recommend that route, but read what Chris
Stone has to say and decide for yourself:
CHAPTER XVII
Though I didn't get home until six-thirty that evening, I changed my clothes
and went to run again along the river. The sun was up late now and warmer
weather had things coming out in a rush. Alongside the path the first red
clover, buttercups and daisies were open, and, in low spots seen through the
stems of the tall new grasses, there were bright blue mats of forget-me-nots.
Beneath the big black willows along the river, I saw ghostly sprays of white,
violet and purple dame's rocket, a flower once popular in ancient Roman
gardens. There were more of them than the year before and their soft scent
often drifted over the path.
While I ran, I thought about the mediation and how strange it was that
someone like me, so shy by nature, a loner always through and through,
should be asked to do it, and be comfortable with the prospect. I might not
welcome the extra work, but the mediation itself wouldn't be a problem for
me. No one who knew me when I was young would ever have expected it,
but I knew perfectly well how I'd come to be that way.
Towards the end of high school, I began to have misgivings about myself.
I'd discovered the beauty of women and I was afraid they would remain off
limits to me forever unless I did something about my isolation.
At first, I thought I'd just fallen into a trap of inexperience, that, because of
my long boyhood aloneness, I hadn't learned any social skills. To acquire
them, I thought I simply had to set my mind to it, that I was just late off the
mark in the social race and only needed to run hard to catch up to those
ahead of me.
The army forced me to live and work with other men. It did a lot for me,
but it was too much too soon and I think that's why I had to make that long
journey alone after my discharge. Once that year was over though, and I
returned to Toronto in the spring of 1973, I was still determined to prove that
I could be like other people.
I saw a newspaper ad for claims adjuster trainees. After thinking about it for
a couple of days, I decided, following the logic of Stein in Conrad's book, that
the way around my fear of people might be to surrender to them, to take a
final plunge into the human ocean and either sink or swim. So I applied for
the job, got it, and began the long odyssey that wasn't over yet.
Just north of the railway trestle that passes over the river valley, there is an
arched wooden bridge. West of the bridge, for a hundred meters or so until a
bend takes the river north, the banks are heavily treed, the branches leaning
over the water. What you see from the bridge looks as wild and beautiful as it
would have centuries ago.
This night I had to stop there because the shoe of my bad foot needed
adjusting. As I untied the lace, a couple who looked to be in their mid-thirties
and a girl about five years old rode up on bicycles. They stopped to look at
the river where the sun was still shining on the riffles above the bridge and the
water just below them.
"I wonder if there are any fish," the man said.
"I don't see any fish," the woman replied immediately, as if the fish should
have been floating on the surface, waving their fins to catch her attention.
The little girl didn't say anything, but started to watch the water intently.
The lace of the shoe retied, I resumed my run, wondering how that couple
would have responded if I had explained to them that, when you're looking
into a river with the sun on the water, you don't look for the fish themselves
but for their shadows, which are more distinct, or for the silver flashes they
give off when they rub their flanks against stones in the river bed.
They probably wouldn't have understood what I was talking about. No, only
the little girl would be able to learn something like that. There were fish in the
river, but only she was ever likely to see them.
My thoughts returned to my long attempt to understand people.
A couple of years earlier I had read of the encounter between the neurologist
Oliver Sacks and the autistic animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin. She
told him that, in addition to her lifelong work with cattle, she'd studied people
as well. Throughout her life she'd watched people closely in hope of
understanding them. Doing that, she said, often made her feel like 'an
anthropologist on Mars', the phrase Sacks would use for the title of his book.
I too had studied the human race.
In the course of investigating motor vehicle accidents and other
misadventures, I had met thousands of people. I'd interrogated the drivers,
the witnesses, and so many who were injured. I'd met the rich and the poor,
famous people and street people, scientists and artists, working men and
women of every sort, bikers and mafia, drug dealers, prostitutes and, a couple
of times, people who might have been angels come down to earth. I saw them
when they were up and when they were down and, in the case of some
injured claimants, followed their lives for years.
In the midst of all that, I lost my fear of people. I discovered that I could
like them. But I also learned that they had something I didn't - a social
instinct. That's what allowed them to work and play together so easily. That
was the source of the generosity and good humor that flowed between them.
The humor was especially seductive. The strangely ambiguous language at the
heart of it fascinated me. Though the practice of humor always lay beyond
my reach, I was often a delighted spectator.
But most of the time I stood outside the social residence, looking in.
Sometimes I was allowed in the front door, even into the main room where
the never-ending party of modern life was going on. But I was never allowed
into the back rooms where things really happened.
When people shunned me or were hostile to me, that didn't bother me. I
was used to that. What I didn't understand was someone wanting to know
me, to be my friend.
I had friends, but not friendships. That is, I couldn't be the friend to them
that they were to me. The friends I had were good ones, but eventually they
all became impatient. They would accuse me of keeping them at arms length,
never understanding that I was incapable of doing anything else. They didn't
know that I couldn't share my life with them, or that I couldn't be helped, that
I had to do everything myself because, for me, that was the only way.
One by one, I lost them all.
But I wasn't overly impressed by the friendships I saw. So much of
friendship seemed mechanical and opportunistic. In public school and high
school many of the friendships were political unions for self-protection or
aggrandizement. The adult practice wasn't much different. Friendships in the
claims industry were often keys to advancement, or a means of acquiring and
keeping business.
Even love could be something of a commodity. Many people were selective
about their affairs. They chose them carefully, using their lovers as stepping
stones to promotion, to solidify positions they already had, or just to impress
their friends.
Love was different for me. It happened once in a while, but it always came
out of nowhere, almost magically, and usually disappeared just as fast.
Love is always different for solitary people. In his book, Oliver Sacks
commented on the remarkable feeling Temple Grandin showed for cattle.
When they entered a field, he said the animals came to her with little urging,
and the gentle way she responded to them impressed him so much that he
thought she must have been experiencing something akin to love.
I knew that what she felt for the cattle, and probably what they felt for her
in return, was love pure and simple. Where did the idea come from that love
can only exist between human beings?
I knew that I could love anything – not only animals of all kinds, but
flowers, trees and, especially, places that were dear to me.
Temple Grandin told Sacks that her study of humankind had taught her
enough to get through school and deal with people in the course of her work,
but that was as far as it went. She had never dated men because she'd found
human interaction too complex and confusing. Now, in middle age, she lived
alone, resolved to remain that way.
When I read that, I wanted to jump up and shout it to the world. While I
had struggled to adapt with so little success, here was a woman who had
simply said 'no thanks' and walked away. It was so much braver than what I
had done, and probably wiser too. For what had I accomplished, except to
enter the human labyrinth and become hopelessly lost in it?
What confused me most was the discovery that relationships depended less
upon truth than illusion. People didn't see the reality of each other; they saw
only what they wanted to see. It was a dance of deception, in which they
showed only what they wanted to show, heard only what they wanted to
hear, believed only what they wanted to believe, and the ways in which they
did all of that were infinitely complex.
And it wasn't confined to their relations with one another.
They had this conviction that if they believed something was true, that is, if
enough of them believed it, then it was true. The great religions had been
created that way. Those at least had something redeeming to them, values
that were inspiring and much that was beautiful. But now people seemed to
be throwing them aside for the sake of a new one, one in which I could find
nothing redeeming at all - the religion of money. Money and its vassal gods –
progress, economics, consumerism and the financial markets - were growing
in power day by day.
There was so much about money that confused me. For example, men with
fine clothes, expensive cars and financial power were magnets for women.
How had the nomadic hunter-gathering existence that humanity led for
hundreds of thousands of years led to that? I wanted this to be something
false and artificial, yet it had been common throughout history, in every
culture, on every continent. It seemed too strong not to have instinct behind
it.
Money seemed to be a factor in every equation. What was called love
between men and women usually depended on the presence of money. When
a woman was looking for a husband, his income was high priority. If a man
wasn't affluent already, he at least had to show some ambition for it.
A diamond, the most expensive of all jewels, was supposed to be the best
proof of love. In the minds of most people, it was essential to the completion
of the marriage transaction.
The philosopher Schopenhauer once said that people loved money because,
like the god Proteus, it could change its shape, turn itself into anything they
wanted. Though people in the year 2000 didn't like to admit it, most of them
thought that way. They believed money could buy them anything, even love
and happiness, if they only had enough of it.
Neither did I understand the preference of women for men who had a lot to
say, the kind who could put on a show, who were full of opinions and ready
speeches. It didn't seem to matter what they said, as long as they said it well.
But I'd come to accept that too, along with the aversion of most women for
men who were silent.
Talking was central to everything they did, yet it seemed to obscure the
truth more than communicate it. Deceit was built into conversation at every
level - not just in overt lying, but in exaggeration, flattery and the almost
universal desire to reinvent the past, to re-work it until it was more palatable
to the memory. They routinely hid the truth, even from themselves.
Solitary people aren't like that. If we have a god other than nature, it's
probably truth. We prefer the hardest facts, even about ourselves, to any
illusion.
There was this faith that anything could be talked about, that talking could
solve any problem. Couples who wanted to break up were encouraged to talk
about it first, to discuss their difficulties as long as possible, though it usually
did no more than keep their simmering pot from coming to a boil. Political
debates went on interminably, while the issues discussed never went away.
Insurance executives met in their boardrooms day after day, year after year,
discussing the same problems facing their companies, yet, at least for those
who worked under them, little ever changed for the better.
Words meant so much to them. Unless a man told a woman that he loved
her, the woman usually couldn't feel his love. In fact, the words 'I love you'
could serve as a substitute for the real thing.
I liked words, but I had always preferred the written word to the spoken
one. In high school, while other students partied and dated and boasted about
their alcoholic and sexual adventures, I read book after book and studied
dictionaries with a devotion that was partly due to the immense world reading
had opened to me, and partly to my naive belief that I was, in that way,
catching up with my peers.
I learned to read well, though I remained slower at it than most people.
Books became one of the consolations of my life, but I think they separated
me from other people more than they brought me closer to them. For the
average person wasn't much of a reader, and no one was interested in the
books I read.
Besides that, a time came when, in spite of all my reading, I was forced to
admit to myself that I would never have full access to words, not the way
other people did.
For words had meanings that were not in any dictionary. Phrases and
questions that seemed so empty to me – 'Good morning', 'How are you?',
'Did you have a good weekend?' - meant something to other people. They
were a means they had of stroking one another, a way of speaking that made
further conversation possible. The dictionary couldn't explain that. I think it
was for the same reason that I couldn't understand the constant joking and
teasing and the way they were always on the lookout for some underlying
sexual content in everything that was said, one more thing that they could all
laugh at together.
My mind didn't contain any of that.
There was something below the surface in conversation that I didn't
understand. Words came so easily out of people, so naturally, the way plants
emerge from the soil. A guidebook to trees will tell you about the shape and
color of a tree's leaves, the pattern of its branching, the texture of its bark, but
nothing about the roots. In the same way, the dictionary, my guidebook to
words, told me only what words did on the surface. It didn't explain how they
were rooted in the minds of people.
People who weren't conscious of this, who had never once in their lives
thought about it, could talk and talk and be so successful doing it. But I
couldn't use words the way they did. The same phrases that drew women to
other men didn't work for me.
There was a greater dictionary, one that had never been put into print, one
that I would never be allowed to read.
Maybe the soil of the solitary mind isn't deep enough to grow the forests of
social language. Maybe that's why we prefer simple writing, prose that is all
verbs and nouns, that leaves out the modifiers and fancy phrases.
Most children learn words easily, as if they're programmed for it, but
solitary children are different. We encounter words as if they're pebbles and
shells we've found on a beach. We may pick them up and marvel at the
beauty and mystery in them, and we may carry them lovingly home with us,
but we never fully know what to do with them.
Simone Weil, the beautiful French philosopher who died during World War
II, saw language as something separate from people. She said it came
innocently into the world, hoping only to express the relationship between
things, but it was corrupted by its encounter with the human race. People, she
said, preferred to use it for deception, or to inflict pain.
There was still more that I didn't understand.
Most people were unhappy. This world, the human one, was their world,
not mine, yet most of them seemed more dissatisfied with it than I was. They
all seemed to be longing for something – a job with more money, a bigger
home, a vacation to some place they hadn't been before, to find a new
partner or to get away from their present one. But when they got what they
wanted, it was never long before they wanted something else.
After a few drinks, so many of them would become maudlin and confess to
you that they thought they had misused their lives, as if they'd been put on
this earth for some specific purpose and they had betrayed it.
In some way that I didn't understand, they were all lonely. When Conrad
wrote those famous words – 'we live, as we dream, alone' – he didn't only
strike a chord in solitary people. He touched something in the others
too.
Popular culture was full of mysteries. There was the cult of the famous, the
adoration of sports heroes, film stars, pop singers and business moguls. Those
were ordinary enough people, yet they were worshipped, and financially
rewarded, as if they were gods.
And why, despite their hostility towards us, did social men admire men who
were loners? Social women were rarely attracted to us, yet their men had
made the solitary man a folk hero in Western culture from the age of Homer's
Odyssey to the Clint Eastwood films of our time.
There was meaning in it all, but it was beyond me.
The sociologist Willard Waller said North Americans conducted their
relationships according to the 'principle of least interest'. Because the partner
least emotionally involved in a relationship was best equipped to exploit the
other, he said the goal of most people was to persuade another to fall in love
with them while they kept their own emotions in check.
Wasn't it Proust who said that when two people are saying goodbye it's the
one who makes the tender speeches that isn't in love?
Of course Waller was vilified by his peers for saying what he'd said. It fit
well enough with what I'd seen, but, if he was right, how had it come about
that a species which prided itself on being the highest of all earth's social
animals should be so ruled by selfishness?
And how did it happen that, inside this elaborate civilization, there should
exist individuals like me who couldn't understand what was going on?
I felt helpless, like an orphaned child thrown among a troop of professional
actors, except that there were millions of them, the whole world was the
stage, and no one had given me a script, or even told me what the story was
about.
But I had come to understand that people played their parts in this great
theater by wearing masks. They created a set of personas for themselves that
they put on or took off according to the situation. In any office, in the voice
of someone working beside you, you could hear it done. The tone of their
voice and their choice of words would change with each telephone call. A
claimant was talked to one way, a spouse another, a supervisor, a friend or a
prospective lover still differently.
They had cheerful masks for when they were sad, masks of indifference to
hide their anger, masks of concern, trust, optimism or disgust ready for any
situation where they might be useful.
Many 'self help' psychology books were little more than collected acting
lessons, prepared instructions about how to enter a room, when to smile,
what to say and when to say it, as if all that pretending enhanced your worth
as a person.
In the great wasteland of modern life, people wanted only mirages of each
other.
They put on the masks for each other, then pretended they were real. I
wondered if some of them, when they looked in a mirror, saw only the mask.
Maybe they'd forgotten that there was something behind it. Maybe they kept
their masks on even while they slept, unable, even in their dreams, to be
themselves. Maybe they'd got so tangled up that they didn't know who they
were anymore.
That would explain why there was so much talk about the need to 'find
oneself', as if it were taken for granted that all of us were lost.
Some people seemed to live in marriages that way, the masks always on,
year after year. But if two people lived together without really knowing each
other, could you still say they loved one another? I didn't know the answer to
that question.
That all of this might be perfectly natural, that illusion, deception and
hypocrisy might have been necessary for social evolution, indispensable
building blocks for this civilization, was another idea I resisted for a long time.
But I finally accepted that too.
When I was young, in those first years after I returned from the war, I tried
the masks on myself. I experienced their power, even when worn by
someone as inept as me. But, like all solitary people, I didn't like deception. I
was never comfortable when people perceived me to be different than I was.
That was why I'd often had to discontinue friendships and leave woman after
woman.
No, although I got used to being among people, it became evident that I
could never really share their world. It had been a mistake to think I could.
As I ran through some places on the path that were still damp from rain that
had fallen that afternoon, I noticed the first of those land snails, the kind
about the size of a quarter, with pale green or pale yellow shells striped with
spirals of brown and black.
They were trying to cross the path. Many of them would be crushed by
bicycle wheels, roller blades, or the shoes of runners and walkers who didn't
see them, or simply didn't care. Those snails that did get across the path
would meet nothing visibly different from what they left behind on the other
side, yet they insisted on the journey.
Once I timed a snail. It took fifteen minutes for it to cross the two meters of
asphalt. And that was a direct crossing. Those that set out at an angle take
longer. Sometimes they get onto dry pavement where they soon run out of
the mucous they need to move over the surface. Forced to stop, they
withdraw into their shells to enter a dormant state and wait for rain to rescue
them. Before that happens, they're usually crushed, their remains left to be
eaten by the swarms of tiny reddish brown ants that have colonized the edges
of the path.
Walking back this evening I came upon a snail that had stopped. I picked it
up and examined the foot in the shell opening. When the seal is dried and
sunken, you know they're dead. This one was still alive.
"What happened?" I asked. "Did you give up?"
I carried it in my hand until I found a damp spot on the side of the path
where I dropped it gently in the vegetation.
Yes, the snails insisted on crossing the path. Later in the summer, on damp
evenings, I would encounter them by the dozens, when I'd have to do some
footwork to avoid them. I wondered again about the meaning this journey
must have for them, what made it so important that they pursued it at such
cost. But I would never know the answer, just as I would never understand
why people did the things they did.
At least the snails were clear about where they were going. Once they set
out, they continued in a remarkably straight line, never varying their course,
never turning back. They went on until they reached the other side or
perished.
People aren't like that. If human beings were snails, they might try to cross
the path, but they would do it differently. Their paths would wander,
following every new whim or desire. They would have to stop to mingle and
talk with one another, whether they were just being friendly or hoping to gain
something from the encounter. Some would stop without apparent reason and
refuse to go on, just give up completely. Some would try to convince others
that the only way that made any sense was their way, even if they were
headed straight down the middle of the path to perdition.
They might divide the path into territories and fight over the boundaries. Or
they might find something attractive on the asphalt, some glittering grit or
sand that they would grow fond of, that they would begin to collect and trade
for other things. They might call it money, and then they really would be lost,
for then they would forget why they entered the path in the first place.
Wasn't that the biggest illusion of all? Money. Nothing but paper and an
idea, yet since western governments introduced the large scale use of it to
finance the wars of the eighteenth century, and every war they'd fought since,
the use of paper money had spread throughout the world. People believed so
profoundly in it now. That's where it got its power, in their belief. There was
no skepticism at all. Even the paper aspect of it was disappearing, that last
slender connection with the physical universe, yet, to most people, money still
seemed as solid a foundation for the modern world as the deep rock on which
the continents sat.
Oh, money was real enough all right. It forced its reality on you. I had
worked as hard for its sake as anyone else, but I had always distrusted it. I
still didn't know what to make of it, whether it really was a god, or just
another kind of mask hiding the truth.
By the time I was thirty, I felt defeated by the human world, and disgusted
with it. I decided then that I would simply be myself, whether it separated me
from other people or not. I threw my masks away, all except one – that of the
insurance adjuster, the detached investigator and negotiator. For that one
wasn't false. Like the iron masks worn by ancient soldiers, it concealed in
order to protect, not to deceive. For many years it provided me with the only
role I was able to play honestly in the human theater, one I'd resigned myself
to and played as well as I could. It was my mask, the one I still wore
whenever I needed it, and it was the reason that I would be able to perform at
Xenia Kirkwood's mediation.
HOME