The Awful Necessity of Misreading Other People

When we were parents of school age children, my wife and I found ourselves socializing mostly with the parents of our children’s friends. Whereas children in fabled, olden times were expected to provide free labor to the family’s farm or shop or foul smelling tannery (in the case of Ulysses S. Grant), in contrast, at the dawn of the 21st century, my wife and I relied on our children to furnish our social life.

There was one particular school parent couple who stood out to us as a target to befriend. They had interesting careers; i.e., they had nothing to do with business or finance or corporate law. They enjoyed talking about topics other than the school and our collective children, a rare and much to be sought after distinction. We went out with them a few times and thought the four of us meshed well. That we had held our own. Perhaps our friendship would grow into something foundational.  

We hadn’t seen the couple for some time, and so when we bumped into them during the course of a parent-teacher conference day, we felt that lapse of contact keenly. We suggested we get together soon, perhaps even that weekend. They gave each other a look of dread and mumbled something to the effect of “we’ll get back to you.” There was no doubt. They had cut us.

We were crushed.  Were we too ordinary, too boring? Had they found other parents more to their liking, less conventional, more similar to them? Had our social reach exceeded our grasp?

We soon learned the couple had separated and were getting divorced. We had completely misread their look of dismay and their off-putting response. Naturally, we had made it about us. Because we are, all of us, natural narcissists. How could it be otherwise, when we react to anything first and foremost as to how it affects us? How it reflects upon us?

That natural reaction is certainly a hinderance to understanding other people, to exercising the virtue of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. But, really, how plausible is that? How many people will we ever know well enough “to wear their shoes?”  And even with people I think I know well, my first assumption on being presented with an unusual mood is that it’s a reaction to something I’ve done or said and has nothing to do with them. I tend to think of people as fixed in their aspect and myself as variable depending upon mood, hunger, weather, worry, whatever.

I thought about all this after I read an evocative scene in “Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant,” Volume Five of Anthony Powell’s twelve volume “A Dance to the Music of Time.”

The scene is set in 1930s London at an upper class party in honor of Moreland who has composed a new symphony. Stringham, about thirty years old, drunk and dissolute, has arrived, uninvited, to the party, taking place at his mother’s house. Able to hold his liquor for the moment, Stringham is holding commanding and charming court, entrancing a group of strangers with his badinage. Only Nick, our narrator and Stringham’s friend from school, knows how far his old friend has fallen. How well Stringham can put on the act of a brilliant, wealthy young man with all of life’s possibilities still open to him.  

Seeing Stringham’s virtuoso performance, Stringham’s bumptious stepfather Buster, past victim of Stringham’s scorn, has summoned a woman named Tuffy to remove Stringham from the party. It is both an act of revenge and a pre-emptive move in case Stringham’s behavior careens out of control. The summoned Tuffy, a professional family “retainer” of reputable upbringing, has become Stringham’s self-appointed Warden.

The italicized excerpt below begins as Stringham is introducing one of the strangers in his instant entourage to Tuffy:

“I don’t know your name, Mr.–––?”

“Moreland,” said Moreland, absolutely enchanted by Stringham’s complete ignorance of his identity.”

“Moreland!” said Stringham. “this is Mr. Moreland, Tuffy. Mr. Moreland for whom the whole party is being given. What a superb faux pas on my part. A really exquisite blunder. How right it is that I should emerge but rarely. Well, here we are–and this, I nearly forgot to add, Mr. Moreland is Tuffy.”

He was still perfectly at ease. There was not the smallest sign to inform a casual observer that Stringham was now looked upon by his own family, by most of his friends, as a person scarcely responsible for his own actions; that he was about to be removed from his mother’s house by a former secretary who had taken upon herself to look after him, because––I suppose––she loved him.

We are hardly ever the omniscient narrator, rather almost always the ”casual observer,” not privy to the backstory of the behavior we are observing, unaware of the subtle subtext. In a word we are fooled.

I can apply these observations to myself. Every so often, I’ll have a day or two of intense mental and physical lethargy, the cause of its onset sometimes obvious to me, sometimes mysterious. On those days, I will tend to be quiet, I may be disagreeable, and I will yearn to be alone.  

On the one hand, I know that these moods of mine have sometimes made people mistake my mood for a distaste for their company (houseguests reacting to my overly early disappearance for the evening). On the other hand, sometimes it’s necessary for me to pretend all is right with my world and fake it as best I can. To engage and suppress my desire to flee human connection and curl up into a metaphorical (or real) fetal position.  

So for the most part we are doomed to misread others just as others are doomed to misread us. But that is for the best!

Think how unbearable life would be if everyone detailed the reasons for their shifting moods or declared they were pretending one mood when they felt another. Or in the worst hypothetical, if everyone felt compelled to announce every inner thought.

Think of those few people you know who lack any filter. If everyone was like that, I would have to agree with Sartre that indeed, “hell [would be] other people.”