"The Ordinary Doom"

I found this essay on the web - I have no idea what search elements I had entered to get to it! But it is interesting - and applicable:

The Ordinary Doom

He never spoke out. –Matthew Arnold on Thomas Gray

If we judge from history, we are doomed not to show our feelings; not to have them known. There have been many, many persons who have lived rather long lives, and who have been in many conversations; who yet did not show what was in their minds, what feelings they truly had. When people can't show their emotion, they are disappointed and resentful. So disappointment and resentment have been big things in social history; which means the history of individuals.
There are three large reasons, which are in close relation, for people's not having shown their feelings. The first is, feelings are hard to know; we don't know a feeling just because we have it. The second is, there is a kind of triumph or satisfaction in not showing the feelings we may know–in making them our own secret property. The third is, people have not been adequately interested in seeing, thoroughly, how we felt.
It is by now pretty well accepted that we are just as unknown to ourselves as something else may be. We may not know the mind of George Washington or Stendhal or Cleopatra; but we may not know our own mind or self, so well, either. The phrase once so much used of our minds–"the dark continent"–is not so often heard these days, but the truth in the phrase has hardly gone. To know ourselves is hard; and to say just what it is we feel is, therefore, hard. A person who knows just what he feels is as rare as a person who knows both Sanskrit and jazz, fully. Besides, we are afraid to know our feelings; we don't know what awaits us. So what with the difficulty in knowing and the disinclination to know our feelings, we go through our lives quite far away from what is in our minds; from what we wholly feel about specific things, the world and ourselves. This means that the doom I have talked about is in the making: our not knowing our own feelings is certainly no assistance to their being known by others.
I have mentioned the disinclination to know our feelings, because we fear the result. Fear is a great motive. But there is also a triumph in having our feelings out of circulation, even as to ourselves. Moreover, there is a triumph in withholding the feelings we may be aware of. Concealment is equated, unknowingly to ourselves, with individuality: the more we conceal the more it seems we are asserting our very personality, resisting a somewhat repellent, unwelcome intrusion of other things into ourselves. The desire for secrecy is a deep thing in a child and in a grownup. Through secrecy, we can be defying the world and deceiving it. That is attractive to the profound, if spurious or evil, tendency towards autonomy or separation in us. With this going on, it is even harder for our feelings to be seen.
Yet, even though there is a triumph in keeping our feelings apart from external existence, the situation is sad. In our triumph we become lonely. Our achievement is our curtailment. And, even in our triumph, we are disappointed; we have a sense of failure; we feel we have been thwarted. There is a certain relation between affirmation of life and the desire to be known as we are; so if this desire is not honored, our being alive is that much interfered with or defeated. We live not only in our minds, but in other minds; our minds depend for their full existence, on being apprehended by other minds justly, beautifully. If this does not happen, there is misfortune.
Thirdly, other people are not too interested in knowing us. It is true that we don't ask enough that they do; but at any one time the desire on the part of most people to know the feelings of another is rather sluggish, and it is impure; for where there is a desire to know, it is for the purpose of using a person, not for the purpose of knowing a person so that the knower feels his awareness is greater; his experience of reality deeper; his pride in his own existence surer.
Consequently, there is a tepidity in the matter of minds knowing minds, people knowing people. So far in history, individuality has meant a curtailment of interest in other instances of individuality. There is a good deal of subterranean fraud in the matter; people act as if they were interested in knowing others, but the interest could not bear rigid, comprehensive examination.
And so, there are many mothers lying in their graves, whose feelings were not known by their sons or daughters. Husbands lie in their graves whose feelings were not known by their wives. Wives unknown to husbands also lie at rest all over the world. It is very disappointing.
In the greatest moments of literature, we feel we know someone or something (the difference between knowing a person and something else isn't as big as may be supposed). When we know another person, we meet another way of taking the world. This can bring form to our own. When we feel that our own way of taking the world is seen by another, that way, here too, is encouraged to take on more form. One great advantage in knowing ourselves rather honestly is, that we have an idea of what another person would feel if he knew us. Meanwhile, we can use the manifestations of another person, even if they do not arise from adequate knowledge of ourselves, or are not accompanied by adequate knowledge, as a means of knowing ourselves better.
The self wants to be an object. It participates, but it wants to be participated in. Awareness helps it. The self is a to-be-known reality. If that knowing does not take place, the deep and ordinary doom I have mentioned occurs.
Our desire for praise, so common and often so hurtful, is really a substitute for our desire to be known as we are. It is quite clear that if we are praised and we do not feel we are known, that praise cannot be satisfactory. It is true that most people seem to prefer being praised without being known, to being known without being praised; nevertheless, our greatest desire is to be known first. If we are praised without being known, no matter how intense and multitudinous the praise may be, we are not wholly alive. To be taken for someone else is hardly a way to be alive in one's own right.
This is why authors, painters, composers, actors, and others have not taken, often, the praise they have received as happily as they might. They could not see the praise as entirely of them. Certainly they accepted it, but the acceptance was not entire. Anyone who praises us without knowing us confuses our fundamental selves. To be known is to be seen in relation with all things: and when we can see our relation with all things, we like ourselves. The largest purpose of every person is to become what one is, entirely, by making accurate relations between what one is and all other realities.
We do not fight enough to have our feelings known. We are like Gray, poet of the eighteenth century, of whom Arnold says so often in the essay on him: "He never spoke out." The cemeteries consist of people who never spoke out. The streets are everywhere walked on by people who don't speak out.
To be able to show our feelings and to have them seen, is full expression. We cannot express ourselves in certain specific situations of moment or unusualness; but there is an insufficiency of expression which is constant. We early come to feel we are not seen right, and it appears we never will be. So we accommodate ourselves to this. It is dull, basic tragedy. In the long run, it is unnecessary.
Some of the prettiest lines of Shakespeare are about one's feelings not seen. Viola in Twelfth Night (II. 4.) describes a woman not esteemed, or not loved:
She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat, like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
We can presume that the woman here didn't wholly want her feelings, or herself, to be known. There is something admirable about the easy, though enduring way, she takes being seen badly. But really we could not love a person who did not want to see us justly. We in some way collaborate with the person not seeing us truly. We may not see how we do, but the grief we get from someone's not appreciating us, partly arises from our not wanting wholly to be known.
However, whether we are "smiling at grief" or not, there is an intangible sense of doom in us, where, we think, our feelings are not known. That doom is so customary, so ordinary, we do not see it as doom. But it is. It has befallen many, many men and women. The aim of this paper is to have us more against it.

NOTE. "The Ordinary Doom" first appeared in the journal Definition (1961), and was reprinted in A Book of Non-fiction, ed. Rev. Joseph T. Browne (NY: The Macmillan Company, 1965). The Preface was written to accompany the essay's publication in The Frances Sanders Lesson and Two Related Works (NY: Definition Press, 1974).

Realizations

"We Must learn Our Limits. We are all Something, but none of us are Everything." Blaise Pascal

I've realized a few things recently. "Real-ized," - it is an interesting word - to perceive reality. When I realize something it seems to mean that I've been living and acting (and hoping and expecting - and most dangerously of all - Loving) within one impression of reality, and then suddenly discover that impression is not completely accurate. It doesn't necessarily follow that my next impression of reality (my "realization") is any more accurate than my first - but it does mean that I now understand life is not how I understood it to be prior to my realization.

I can't speak for anyone else, but, for me this process of continuous realization - of assessing life and adjusting to the realized is painful. There is nothing comfortable about discovering that things are not what I had believed them to be. I have no great choices when faced with a realization. I can either accept the newly comprehended reality or I can continue on as if I had not experienced the insight hoping to avoid the consequent pain. So, either experience the pain of adjustment or attempt to live delusionally! Both suck - one does result in growth and new opportunities, though.

I would suggest that this concept of realiztion is at its most powerful within relationships. The only experience we have of the world is our own, individual, experience. We can never see the world fully through the eyes of another, can never - directly - experience the hopes, dreams, disappointments, despair or joy of another. The closest approach of experiencing life as another person is through our observation of them, through our own sense of reality, of these reactions in the other. Observation requires some level of relationship, though - and here we bring our own sense of reality into the equation.

This is the point where "realizations" become most operative. Our sense of life necessarily includes our own emotional and spiritual state - these dispositions form the greater curvature of the lens through which we view life, if you will. As an illustration, a tree in full fall foliage - the brightest reds, yellows and oranges caught in a ray of autumn sun - inspires some to love God more deeply and others it drives to greater depths of despair in that they cannot participate in the beauty expressed by nature. Of course, the tree is completely senseless to these reactions - it's just following its nature as a tree. And, the two people in reaction to this scene will look at each other and wonder at the other's reaction. They may realize, at that point, that their individual reactions say more about them then they do about the tree - what does a tree "mean," anyway? This is not to say that there are not appropriate emotional responses to be had - fall foliage ought to evoke a sense peace, at the least. But these scenes will still be refracted through an emotional and spiritual lens - resulting in our own, internal, responses.

I've entered a relationship, recently, that I have been viewing through my own emotional and spiritual state - and I have given very little room for an objective reality of it, or the emotional and spiritual state of the other, to penetrate through to my internal response.

That is my realization. As with all other realizations in my life it is neither "good" nor "bad." It just is.