Me, Myself, and Whoever Else Is Living This Life of Mine

Once upon a time -- in Wales, I believe it was --  Aelred found himself seated at dinner beside a pleasant elderly man, an Anglican priest. During the course of the dinner, Aelred managed to discover that in addition to being a clerk in holy orders, the man also was a tertiary of some order, or a member of some confraternity, or something, with a peculiarly restrictive rule of life. I say that he managed to find this out, because the only part of this rule which I remember now, indeed the only part of the rule relevant to this story, was that tertiaries, or confreres, or whatever they were, were forbidden ever to talk about themselves.

As Aelred said later, this made for maddening dinner conversation. Course after course after course to get through, and all his neighbor would say in response to any remotely personal question was, "Oh, really, that's not important." By the end of the evening, Aelred said, he was torn between an unnatural degree of burning curiosity to know the man's life story, and the temptation to strangle him. To this day I don't know how he actually found out about the rule of life;  possibly someone else told him. At any rate, if I ever knew anything about the other people at that dinner, I've long since forgotten it. The only enduringly memorable person at the table -- besides Aelred himself, of course -- was the self-effacing man.

Max Lindenman, subbing for The Anchoress this week, takes on the idea of narcissism and the role of the I in a writer's voice.

[S]peaking as both a reader and a writer, I have to say that a certain amount of self-consciousness — if not self-centeredness — has its value. Many spiritual writers, or so I’ve noticed, tend to default to the first-person plural: “We should do X”; “We know well that Y.” Personally, I’ve always found that very off-putting; I have a bad case of “we-ennui.” At best, it sounds too normative and prescriptive — in a nutshell, preachy. If the writer slips, switching from objective truths to subjective experience, it sounds presumptuous. Who’s ‘We,” lady?

Phillip Lopate has written that a good personal essay involves an interrogation and dissection of self. The writer should question himself constantly, digging for the real reasons he believes this or does that. To be sure, that sort of writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s mine. I find it very comforting to know that someone so much cleverer than I is no less a confused clod.

I like Phillip Lopate, and I think that what he says here is essentially true. Write what you know, as the wheezy maxim goes, and what do I know simultaneously best and least of all, except myself? I'm my own homeland;  at the same time, I feel like an alien in my own skin. Why did I say that? Why did I think that? Why can't I read that scene in Prince Caspian, where the trees almost come to life but don't, without crying, which disturbs my children no end? And why should I pretend that this is normal behavior?

Lindenman's essay recalled to me the principal of the public high school where, in my early twenties, I briefly taught. Like many people, I suspect, he was allergic to the first-person pronoun, so that all his announcements over the PA system went like this:

Teachers, just wanna remind you . . . 

Students, just wanna let you know . . . 

"WHO?" I used to want to shout at the loudspeaker above my desk. "WHO wants to remind me?"

He was a non-entity as an authority figure. I would send disruptive students to the office, and they'd laugh all the way, knowing they'd score a no-first-person kind of talking to, after which they'd dawdle back through the halls to make trouble in class again. Lather, rinse, repeat. The worse that could happen to them was to partay for an hour in detention after school, or goof around in in-school suspension.

To me at the time the no-first-person thing seemed emblematic of this whole dreary cycle, though the vice-principal who favored the Royal We fared no better:

Students, we have noticed that some of you think it's funny to put milk in the salt shakers. We have removed them, and if this doesn't stop, we'll take away the ketchup and mustard, too. 

While I suppose it can be solipsistic to talk or to write about the self, what choice do we -- all of us -- really have? As a writer, you -- you know, you -- can use the second person to intimate that your experience is mine, that you are under my skin, that you know me. Which you don't. And I don't know you, not that way. Not that that stops me from writing frequently in that voice, but it's good to consider that like anything else, it's a rhetorical affect.(really, I think I mean something more like the idea that no matter where we locate the voice of our writing -- first, second, third person -- all good writing is driven by an I. As one of Max's commenters points out, C.S. Lewis tends to talk a lot about what we should do, or do do, as Christians;  at the same time, what makes his writing so effective is that you, the reader, never lose the sense that there's an I at the back of it all, that a real, singular, embodied person is saying all these things. In the case of Mere Christianity, of course, that may be a function of the book's having begun as a series of radio talks. But that sense is always there. It's not jarring, in the Narnia books, when the narrative voice interrupts the story to remark that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy's return to Narnia is like King Arthur's to England -- "and the sooner the better, I say." You knew he was there all the time;  someone has been telling you the story. The fact that the story takes precedence most of the time does not utterly efface the person recounting it.)

  Meanwhile, what are the other choices? You can sound like Queen Victoria -- We Are Not Amused -- or Prince Charles. One Enjoys A Good Polo Match, What? One Is Forced To. Either way the writer sounds afraid to own his or her experience, to risk being laid bare.

Sort of like being afraid to go to confession . . .

As usual, all this amounts to notes for something to write more seriously later, like in ten or fifteen years, when time presumably will hang heavy on my hands. At the moment, a child all set to get her driver's license tomorrow has just discovered that she needs some additional piece of paperwork from the state, so I need to call a number and leave a message and have it sent. Here, on my very doorstep, is an experience;  now I have to go own it.