“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again….. The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that–well, lucky you.
Early in American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s stand-in Nathan Zuckerman reflects thus in the midst of recounting his dinner encounter with The Swede. I think Roth/Zuckerman are right that it’s common to undertake this kind of presumption about people, and common to feel all too alive as a result. No doubt people are free to presume like this….
But what’s most interesting to me are the last two sentences, the idea that (i) people might be better off not to presume like this, and (ii) we might have a choice about it (not to mention (iii) that getting people badly wrong might do them injustice). It would be no surprise to me if Roth himself can’t help his long flights of speculation, if upon seeing someone he immediately begins constructing a narrative about him or her, full of family, inner life, and childhood sources of persistent angst. Roth’s objective in doing so is presumably to entertain, either to entertain a present or future audience, or just to entertain himself. If I were to launch into such a flight of speculation about, say, a professional acquaintance, I could be detrimentally distracted from the substantive content of our interactions. It would be better for me to concentrate on the equilibrium we’re discussing than to imagine whether his parents made his favorite baked ziti often enough when he was a kid.
… So to react to Roth’s last sentence above, I guess I think many of us are “lucky”– but lucky in a deliberate way, lucky to be able to concentrate on what matters to us about other people, lucky to be able to concentrate on the substance and character they choose to put forth. And if “unlucky,” we have a choice about how to speculate, too. I most often choose to speculate sympathetically– and if wrong, sure, plenty content to be alive.
