Montaigne, uncontested genius and inventor of the essay, in a typical passage critiquing his stupidity and ignorance. I do not compare myself to him when I note that his complaint struck me as familiar, despite the esteem in which he was held. It reminded me of Nudawn’s description of me, which Sydney and others (and I) found amusing.
This thought has occupied me for some time: why is it that I am certain of my detestability, incompetence, fraudulence, and stupidity even when others generously compliment me? I feel ashamed of this arrogance: why should I ignore their kindness? Were they to recommend a writer to me, I’d be ecstatic; but if they recommend me to myself, I think merely that they are inexplicably mistaken.
Of course there are basic psychological reasons for insecurity, which are universal enough to be uninteresting; beyond those, a few points occur to me:
- Consider the ubiquity of quotes concerning ignorance: we hear often that the intelligence to which we aspire consists of knowing that you know little. I know I know very little, less even than I appear to, and much of that knowledge is debatable, wrong, predicated on what I want to believe.
- To whom do we compare ourselves? I do not look at my middling photography and think, “Well, this is better than what I did five years ago.” Perhaps I should. Instead, I think: this is not as good as what Riaz makes; this is inferior to nearly everything I like to see; this is not what I wanted it to be. It is the same with my writing, my conversation, my appearance, my habits. How could it be otherwise? Compared to our idols or our ideated paradigms, don’t we all seem rather silly?
- I fear I know what drives my creativity: the desire for affection, for reassurance, for the externalization of an imagined beauty I can conjure but not exemplify, dream but not embody. How satisfied can one be with what one makes when it is merely a screen for what one wants? A personality is an assembly of coping mechanisms, and creativity is an expression of their deformation, it sometimes seems.
Lately, I have been interested in how impermeable our senses of self are, how resistant they are to praise. When people compliment me, I enjoy perhaps a few moments of elevated glee and then a sense of gratitude and happiness: happiness that we should labor to find nice things in one another, happiness that we search our peers for things to praise. In other words: my sense of self remains the same, but my impression of others improves.
That’s its own sort of gift, of course, one I think more valuable than a change in one’s conception of oneself, which, in the end, matters less than I used to think.
