Introspection is mistaken for self-absorption. By self-absorption I mean narcissism, doting on that face in the mirror.
The opposite is true. Introspection means looking past one’s appearance into one’s actuality, past seems into is. It is not self-admiring, but curious, critical. Who am I really, it wants to know.
Introspection was abominated in my boyhood home. We were schooled to “think of others,” never ourselves. Feelings were anathema. How one behaved was what mattered, not one’s messy confusion. Psychiatry was shameful: if prescribed, so be it, but hush hush.
As a boy I did not question this teaching. What my parents said was how things were. But then I noticed anxiety, hostility, doubt beneath my parents’ careful composure. To claim “I noticed” isn’t accurate. I snapped mental pictures of concerning clues which I reviewed years later, which suggested my parents hadn’t been as cozy as they’d let on. Did they love, or even like, one another? That I don’t know the answer to this question demonstrates the determination of their deception. Love in my childhood was a word to end letters with (hand-written letters – imagine!). One might love one’s pony or dog. That parents loved each other was stipulated, never demonstrated.
This emphasis on appearances appalls me in hindsight. Jane chides me for reverting to the topic – and she’s right – but some mysteries are to the mind like a bloody bone to a dog: one can’t stop gnawing them. More and more my childhood’s mandatory insincerity looms like a primal crime, which explains my emotional evolution and obsession – yes, obsession – with love and truth as life’s essential good.
Introspection is neither disgrace nor mistake but, in my experience, the sole and irreplaceable route to intelligence. How, without self-awareness, can one wake to the world? How understand others’ emotions without assessing one’s own? My parents eschewed introspection, I’m persuaded, less from propriety, than from fear of what they might find. The truth behind their social masks might have disrupted, so “Don’t ask – don’t tell!”
Truth has ever fascinated me: initially, the truth in music. Beauty doesn’t lie. Shakespeare, to whom my grandmother introduced me at age eight, dumbfounded me with his candor. His characters said what they were feeling, no polite prevarication. How much more vivid a world so forthright!
On my father’s premature deathbed – he was forty-seven and I sixteen – his polite mask shattered. He inveighed against God, who had hitherto been his go-to guy. He expressed bitter resentment of others who’d outlive him. His edifice of politesse collapsed like a stack of pick-up sticks. It was hard to watch, impossible at my formative age to understand, but salutary in hindsight. If perfect manners didn’t protect one from panic in one’s final hours, what might? How about truth, love – and introspection, the only route to these?
Propriety demands compliance with a communal consensus; introspection invites investigation. Introspection asks, What do I think of this or that – and why? Introspection measures our performance against an ideal and finds it wanting. Introspection teaches humility. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “is humility. Humility is endless.”
My life’s great good fortune was to find myself in the nick of time, to graduate from propriety to sincerity, to meet and reconcile myself to the person behind the mask. Introspection, like any mental practice, takes effort and patience. Words have been my GPS. I’d teach introspection, only it can’t be taught, each must find their own way to awareness. As the poet put it:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHow we get to who we areis farther than the farthest star.