Sol Luckman
As a relatively established indie writer who has never so much as posted my photo online, I’m in a better position than most to innerstand JD Salinger of CATCHER IN THE RYE fame.
I don’t even own a cell phone—and neither would have Salinger if such invasive, time-wasting contraptions had existed in his time.
What emerged from reports from inside the lines of Salinger’s legendary reclusiveness was a snapshot of, frankly, just another eccentric artistic genius who probably felt similar to his iconic protagonist Holden Caulfield who said,
“I was surrounded by phonies … They were coming in the goddam [sic] window.”
Salinger was into certain controversial “alternative medicine” practices (and that was back in the day), preferred health menus to the terribly SAD Standard American Diet, loathed the media with every fiber of his being, leaned toward the kinky with his love interests—you get the picture.
The jury’s still out on the breadth and scope of his erotic proclivities, and honestly, at this stage of Western decadence when the worst perversions are rubbed in our collective faces daily, who really cares?
What impresses me most about his biography isn’t the talent or even the wild overnight success it engendered, but the fact that as his fame grew to superhuman proportions, he cared less and less about it.
Maybe other celebrities experience this kind of nonattachment, but rarely do they just drop below the radar of the world like an extraterrestrial submarine—and stay there.
As time went by, in fact, though he kept writing copiously, he simply stopped publishing.
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” he told one lucky reporter in a rare interview. “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
Elsewhere, Salinger admitted to an overabundance of literary inspiration even as his publishing days came to an untimely end: “I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.”
Photos of Salinger are nearly as unfindable as his last manuscripts, though a handful of images have emerged over time.
I’m confident he’d hate that. He seemed hell-bent on “erasing personal history” in an almost shamanic fashion.
His journey was an inward one, not an outward one. Many belonging to today’s Lost Generation could learn from his example.
His inwardness set him squarely against the current of a world culture spinning quickly into extravagant eddies of public narcissism with widespread access to photography and eventually video just downstream.
Over the decades of my own intentional inaccessibility, every now and then I’ve fielded a comment from a reader of one of my books to this effect:
“I find it hard to connect with you without being able to see your face.”
To which I always wanted to—but never did—reply with something along these lines:
“I totally understand. I’m sure the earliest readers of printed text in the post-Gutenberg era experienced a massive disconnect with only faceless authors to read.”
Occasionally, similar criticism has been completely over the top, brutal even:
“If you’re not willing to show your face, you must have something to hide. I wish you were a more authentic person.”
Which brings me to my topic for today: authenticity and facelessness.
“Authenticity” has become a buzzword in certain spiritually oriented content-creation circles.
But if I’m to be truly authentic here, at the risk of exposing myself to further character assassination, I must confess:
I tend to find anyone giving other people instructions on how to be authentic … inauthentic.
Again, as Salinger knew all too well, the majority are on a Ship of Fools sailing self-consciously unconscious through the clown show of this “reality.”
They’ve forgotten the kind of worthwhile advice, if they ever knew it, expressed by the likes of Albert Camus when he stated, “But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”
Or as Wallace Stevens phrased a similar notion a bit more poetically in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Let be be finale of seem.”
Me, I have no idea how to tell anyone else with any degree of specificity how to be “authentic.” That’s like telling children who they should be when they grow up.
Such facile judgment drips with hubris and isn’t just worthless—it can be psychologically damaging.
“We are all different,” wrote Roy T. Bennett. “Don’t judge, understand instead.”
I’m a contrarian by nature, so perhaps that makes me a bit judgmental. I prefer to think of this quality as discernment.
Be that as it may, I’m naturally inclined to look at things from an unpopular perspective.
With this as context, I suggest that—compared to anonymity with its lack of social pressure fostering extraordinary personal freedom—people plastering their face all over the internet are far more likely to be phonies.
These famous lines from TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” perfectly elucidate this dynamic:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
Oh, the subliminal irony.
Today’s online narcissists making viral videos touting the virtues of authenticity and how to embody them to the letter remind one of plastic insects “pinned and wriggling on the wall” for inspection by the scrutiny of the public gaze.
Gone is their liberty to be anything other than what they’re assessed as being by the “eyes” forever watching and judging.
Their public identity is now “pinned” down and “fixed” by the “formulated” phrases used to describe it—phrases that speak to the domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species of the insectoid under examination.
This is especially sad given that, as Carl Jung sagely observed, the “privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
I wonder if Gregor Samsa, living today, as he freakishly metamorphosed into a dung beetle before dying with a whimper and being unceremoniously disposed of, would regret posting all those stupid selfies online.
(P. S. Just so you know, narcissists who lack authenticity are inclined to skip liking, sharing and commenting on things, like this, that actually matter.)
Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
📖 This article develops ideas from the author’s controversial new book, THE WORLD CULT & YOU: YOUR PLACE IN IT & YOUR WAY OUT OF IT. Read or listen to it today with your FREE TRIAL.
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