There are people who spend their lives walking a thin divide between something they strive to present to the world—a carefully nurtured persona—and what they really are. There is neither deception nor necessarily conceipt involved—they are men and women simply keen to be seen in a certain way by the people with whom they deal. They are, in a sense, contextual people, assuming one character for the world in which we know them and another, perhaps, when they are with other people.
Take Snapper, for instance, a journalist and a magnificent editor I knew in my younger years. I have thought about Snapper recently, since reading his obituary in a newspaper. Snapper thrived on a reputation firmly grounded in every nuance of his nickname. Snap he would, at each and every affront to the impeccable skills and standards he brought to big-league journalism. And he was also a master of the snap decision, a man with a unique and unfailing talent for taking a difficult problem or issue and instantly delivering a verdict that was invariably true and right.
The young people coming to the newspaper at the outset of uncertain careers would see this diminutive, wiry, grey-haired god of the newsroom with his unconquerable self-confidence, match that countenance with the nickname and with the folklore that depicted him as an expert in weaponry and a masterful hunter, and instantly decide he was not a man to be trifled with. That, no doubt, is at least in part what Snapper had in mind. It took years of getting to know Snapper to learn that he was about as kind and gentle a human being as ever strode across a newsroom floor. He tolerated no fools, but then few in his generation did. He snapped like a pit-bull but I never, ever, knew him to bite.
We judge and assess people—how else?—by what they give us to work with. The people we know, work with, love or dislike, are multifaceted entities that divulge themselves to us only to the extent that they wish to. Most people, to varying degrees, have a concept of themselves which is how they wish to be appreciated. Some want to appear arrogant and self-assured, while others thrive in gentleness and forever seen in need of help. Some wish to draw people in while others, like Snapper, prefer them kept at bay. And yet, for all the time we spend with the people we work with and people we know in our social lives, we probably know them very little, unless we are privileged to see them in another context, with families and loves ones, for instance. I once saw a movie in which a character started to theorize on how another character probably behaved when he was alone with his wife. The person this character was speaking to cut him off with the very sage aphorism: “No one—No One—knows how it is between two people who are married.”
All this is by way of offering some caution. Can the movie's aphorism be taken any farther? Can anyone ever really absorb enough of the complexities of another person's character and life to offer the definitive judgment on such fundamental things as motives and purposes? Or it is all guesswork, a matter of perceptions and splendid delusions leading to conclusions that might be astute some times and horrendously off the mark other times? We try the best we can and we must, in that process, ever be aware that we read people in a language unique to our own minds and souls. We can't ever, ever get it all right. There is too much involved that must rely on our own perceptions and our own intuitions and on our own inbred fallacies. We get some stuff right and we get plenty wrong and only the very naive ever hope that one day the world will be a homogenous thing visible to everyone the way they see it.
Like colors. I read a book about colors this summer, and I was fascinated to learn that some people actually profess to hear colors. I don't. But it's amusing to think that one person's green concerto is another person's ballad or that my red rap song is your aria.
It has long been hypothesized that people perceive colors in different ways, and the idea that they have a sound too, open to our imaginations and to our hearts, adds a delightful element to the mystery of how we manage to coexist in several billion subjective worlds. People are like colors. We see them differently. We hear some and not others.
No one is ever fully right or fully wrong in the way they receive things in the world. And no one should ever be so self-assured as to easily inject right or wrong or truth or falsehood in a world with so many subjective variables. My truth is your myth. My vision is your dream.
When I was very young, I remember I had a friend older by two grades who once took pains to assure me that by the time I reached the point in school where he was—I believe Grade 10—there would be very little left that I did not know. I was skeptical then and I remain skeptical now. Snapper, a man who was probably farther along on the journey to knowledge than most, would have made short work of the boy's presumptions.
