On the finish of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the much less well-known of the novel’s two primary protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving household. Not like Anna, he has a contented marriage. His spouse, Kitty, and son, Mitya, deliver him nice pleasure, and he feels that his existence “has the unquestionable that means of the nice.” Nonetheless, he’s seen that there’s a “wall between my soul’s holy of holies and different folks, even my spouse.” There are limits to the intimacy that helps give his life that means, and so they vex him.
Does anyone actually know you? It’s a query that arises at odd moments—typically, perversely, after we’re surrounded by individuals who know us nicely. Immediately, we grow to be aware of an internal sanctum they’ve by no means breached. Like Levin, we’d really feel subtly personal. Extra dramatically, we’d understand ourselves as misplaced, deserted, as if we’re passing by means of the world unnoticed. Maybe we’re carrying a masks that others are too inattentive to look behind; or possibly we’re simply too deep to know. There are numerous variations on a central theme: others sail to our shores, they even disembark, however they by no means fairly enterprise into our unexplored interiors. This could be a supply of sorrow, or a aid.
Like many individuals, I felt most unknown once I was a teen-ager. (“I’m a rock / I’m an island,” as Simon and Garfunkel sang.) It’s straightforward to suppose that nobody actually is aware of you in adolescence, when your life is altering quick. However a sensation of unknownness has typically stolen over me in midlife, too. A couple of years in the past, whereas clearing some belongings out of my mom’s home, I found containers of my outdated diaries, letters, and images; embarrassed, I threw most of them away. For days afterward, the discarded issues weighed on me, not due to what they contained however as a result of they represented elements of my life that nobody besides me would ever learn about. Extra not too long ago, confronted with too many obligations at work and at dwelling, I had the impression that the “actual me” was changing into submerged beneath a cheerful, bustling exterior. Because the weeks handed, I virtually appeared to be dwelling a secret life. I puzzled why nobody noticed what was occurring with me. Apparently, I used to be extra unknown than I’d thought.
These had been small episodes of unknownness: within the latter case, my feeling dissipated as quickly as I shared it with my spouse. Nevertheless it’s attainable, possibly even frequent, to really feel that no one actually is aware of you in a extra basic, even existential approach. Like the principle character within the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” you might discover that the passage of time has rendered you unknowable: your life story is so lengthy that folks surprise who you might be and the place you’ve come from. Often, we find out about individuals who maintained a second household hidden from the primary; presumably, this scattered, duplicitous lifestyle made them inconceivable to know. After which there are those that, just like the Most Attention-grabbing Man within the World, from the Dos Equis commercials (“His beard alone has skilled greater than a lesser man’s total physique”), lead lives so epic that others can’t actually comprehend them.
You could really feel that you simply’re unknown due to your nature, your circumstances, or your story. However the feeling itself, for all its intuitiveness, conceals some strangeness. What, precisely, is there to know? And who’re you, anyway?
At a current dinner, the group of individuals I used to be with carried out a survey. About half of us felt that there was someone who actually knew us. “I image a Venn diagram,” a person stated. One circle contained all there was to learn about him, and the opposite what another person knew. The extra the circles overlapped, the extra he was actually identified.
Is that how being identified by different folks works? Presumably. It stands to purpose that the individuals who actually know us additionally know so much about us. Then again, it’s attainable for somebody to know so much about you with out actually understanding you; their information may not cross a sure threshold. Take your dad and mom: they know so much about you, and have the naked-baby photos to show it, however they could not know the belongings you need them to. Maybe they’re extra linked with the “outdated you” than with you as you are actually; they see you, frustratingly, as a child. Or they may maintain an unrealistic view of you, motivated partly by love, each for you and for themselves. They wish to be the dad and mom of a sure form of particular person, and they also don’t wish to learn about sure features of their precise little one.
What’s true about our dad and mom is true about lots of the folks in our intimate circle. Merely understanding so much about an individual doesn’t lead, routinely, to actually understanding that particular person. In “The Truman Present,” Jim Carrey performs a person who lives inside a secret reality-TV program, which has allowed thousands and thousands of individuals to watch him consistently since delivery. In a way, their circles and his are congruent. Nonetheless, Truman wouldn’t be mistaken if he claimed that nobody actually knew him. An awesome deal hinges on the angle of different folks. Viewership is principally passive; if passively buying information about somebody counts as actually understanding them, then Google actually is aware of you. We wish to be actually identified by folks—spouses, biographers, even frenemies—who’ve labored for that information. We might even need them to maintain working: you’ll be able to’t be actually identified by somebody who takes you with no consideration.
A pair years in the past, when my grandmother died, on the age of ninety-nine, her three sons—my dad and uncles—delivered eulogies. Standing to talk on the Fort Gibson Nationwide Cemetery, in Oklahoma, her youngest son spoke movingly about what she’d been like as a father or mother, recalling moments from his childhood, together with a time when she dived to rescue him from the underside of a lake. Her center son, my father, described the privations she and my grandfather had skilled as poor Brooklyn Jews who, quickly after they had been married, had been separated when he went to the Pacific within the Second World Conflict. And her eldest son took an virtually sociological strategy, explaining how her life had unfolded inside a bigger tradition formed by the currents of the pre- and postwar many years. Taken collectively, the eulogies had been satisfying as a result of they aimed to see my grandmother within the spherical—not simply as an intimate member of the household however as an individual in historical past. In addition they mirrored effort: the kids, as adults, had grown interested in their mom, and had sought to see her in a mature approach, deepening their sense of her with time. Her sons actually knew her—no less than, that’s the way it appeared to me.
Levin imagined a wall between himself and others. As a picture, that is likely to be too stark; it’s in all probability extra correct to say that we view one another by means of lenses that make clear some issues and deform others. Psychoanalysts use the time period “transference” to explain how, after we know different folks, we superimpose onto them the pictures of different folks we’ve identified. We would see our spouses by means of the lenses of our dad and mom, for instance. So, for somebody to actually know you, they may need to work at seeing you as you, and never as a model of another person. Conversely, if we really feel that nobody actually is aware of us, it’s attainable that we’re expressing one thing about what we’ve skilled previously, when somebody vital to us left us feeling unknown. Perhaps, if we let go of our lingering disappointment, we’d be capable of acknowledge being identified now.
We see ourselves by means of lenses, too. In my household, I’m the photographer, and in consequence I hardly ever seem in our photos. Nonetheless, each from time to time, somebody snaps a photograph of me, and I’m usually shocked by how I look: Oh, that’s what I’m like. One thing comparable could also be true about ourselves extra broadly. Do we actually know what we’re like? An out of doors view of you that appears unusual may not be mistaken; it is likely to be proper, in reality, as a result of it’s an outdoor view. It may very well be our circles that have to shift.
“Does anyone actually know you?” is likely to be too slim, or too inflexible, a query, with a passive development that belies actuality. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we might not settle into any explicit approach of being till somebody research us. Different folks assist us to know ourselves, working with us to create a shared thought of who we’re. So, as an alternative of asking whether or not we’re identified, it could be extra fruitful to ask whether or not we’ve arrived, in collaboration with folks we care about, at a conception of ourselves that we acknowledge.
That collaborative work is tough. The thinker Stanley Cavell describes it superbly in an essay about Frank Capra’s film “It Occurred One Night time.” Within the film, an heiress named Ellie has fallen in love with Peter, a reporter, however hasn’t instructed him but; she asks him if he’s ever fallen in love. (“Haven’t you ever considered it in any respect? Appears to me you would make some lady splendidly completely satisfied.”) He’s dreamed about assembly the proper of lady, he says, and imagined taking her away to a wonderful tropical island, however “the place you gonna discover her? Someone that’s actual. Someone that’s alive.” She’s proper there in entrance of him, in fact. “Why can he not permit the girl of his desires to enter his dream?” Cavell asks. The reply, he thinks, is that “to stroll within the course of 1’s dream is essentially to danger the dream.” If Peter and Ellie are to actually know each other, they need to merge desires and actuality. That is like “placing collectively night time and day.” It’s scary.
Levin, in “Anna Karenina,” does one thing like this. He has lengthy confided “what tormented him” in a diary, which he’s all the time imagined as addressed to his future fiancée; earlier than getting married, he takes the step of sharing the diary together with her. Levin is considerably shocked that Kitty, who’s non secular, is unbothered by the skepticism the diary reveals. She’s devastated, nevertheless, by his “impurity.” “Take them, take these horrible books!” she tells him, weeping, when he visits her. “Why did you give them to me! . . . No, all the identical it’s higher. . . . I’ve forgiven you, but it surely’s horrible!” Levin is ashamed and horrified—but, on the identical time, “his happiness was so nice that this confession didn’t destroy it, however solely added a brand new shade to it.” They don’t know all the pieces about one another—that’s inconceivable. They don’t know themselves utterly, both. However they wish to know. ♦