by Joe Moran
A common myth about evolution is that it works like clockwork, with a clear design and purpose, and that it always achieves ideal answers to the problems of existence. In fact, all that billions of years of evolution have done is to turn nature into a beautiful, glorious mess. Natural selection rarely alights on perfect solutions. It just eliminates the unworkable, and we end up with billions of different solutions to the problem of being alive. Perhaps that is all shyness is: just one of those billions of different solutions to this problem. No one would call it an optimal solution. But it is a solution, part of what the nature writer Richard Mabey calls the “redundant embroidery” of existence.18 Shyness is another piece of evolutionary happenstance, an unplanned derivative of our strange human capacity for thinking about ourselves. And rather like lower back pain, which may ease with time but is prone to recur, it can ebb and flow, afflicting us without warning.
Without shyness, I suppose people might be happier, in the same way that they might be happier without back twinges or other random defects like acne, myopia, varicose veins, and dandruff. But perhaps the world would also be a little blander, less creative, and less interesting. Nature may be a mess, but it has an ingenious capacity for making the best of a bad job. Evolution’s incremental tinkerings do improve things. The lower vertebrae of our backs, for instance, have grown gradually bigger over millennia to sustain better the weight they have to bear. If, as Morgan puts it, “the first few million years of bipedalism were the worst,” then the same could be said for shyness: after living with it for so long, we should have learned to rub along with and even make use of it.19 And just as the natural world needs unlovely things such as peat bogs and earthworm colonies to maintain its equilibrium, so perhaps the world needs the shy—and the bold, and all shades in between—to make up the delicately balanced ecosystem of human behavior.
Shyness is part of our awareness that we share the world with other living creatures and that coexisting with them is awkward but unavoidable. Even nonthinking life forms seem to have some inkling of this, as an English forestry expert called Charles Lane Poole discovered when, in the early 1920s, he undertook extensive, solitary surveys of the timber resources of Australia and Papua New Guinea, then under Australian rule. Despite a teenage shooting accident that had left him with a hook instead of a left hand, he was a brilliant and brave tree-climber, and he explored the forest canopy in a way that no scientist had done before.
When viewed from the rainforest floor, the canopy looks like a single mass of tangled vines and foliage. But Lane Poole discovered that even in a fully stocked forest, there were gaps at the top where the leading shoots of neighboring trees left a respectful distance of a few feet between them. This occurred often among trees of the same species, as if they were looking out for their own, but it also occurred between trees of different species—and in the rainforest there could be hundreds of species per acre. Lane Poole, a cavalier character with no trace of English reserve, came up with a sweet name for this phenomenon: crown shyness.20
Although scientists have in recent years had ample opportunity to explore the rainforest canopy, on inflatable research platforms delivered by airship and resting on treetops, they have yet to solve the mystery of why crown shyness occurs. One theory is that it is caused by wind sway, which leads to the abrasion and death of the sensitive growing tips. Another is that the tips sense greater shade when they are near other leaves and stop growing to increase their share of sunlight. Yet another is that trees can ward against leaf-eating caterpillars and other pests by keeping their distance—the equivalent of refusing to shake hands for fear of catching someone’s germs. But no one is sure, just as no one knows why a similar phenomenon occurs in the sea, among coral reefs.
Crown shyness is a metaphor replete with anthropomorphism. Trees and corals are not really shy of each other, any more than violets really shrink. But for Richard Mabey, crown shyness is a handy metaphor. It points, he says, to a basic truth about life on earth: that it is pragmatic and collaborative, not ruled by the kill-or-be-killed logic that we are used to thinking of as the law of the jungle.21 More than half the earth’s plant and animal species live in forest canopies, and most of them live synergistically, respecting each others’ space. Life is a matter of negotiation and adjustment to conditions rather than of destroying competitors in pursuit of that much misconstrued Darwinian ideal, the survival of the fittest.
I prefer to see shyness like this. Just like the tips of trees in the rainforest, we are shy because we know we are different from other living things. And because we humans also carry around with us this rare cargo of self-consciousness, we are uniquely aware that, for all our need for intimacy, we face the world alone. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, the journey from one brain to another is the most difficult we will ever make, and every attempt at conversation is a gamble, with no guarantee we will be understood or even heard. Given these unbending realities, isn’t a little shyness around each other forgivable?
All my life I have fought the sense that being shy is a personal affliction that has left me viewing life from its edges. This feeling was acquired early on and now seems hardwired, for no amount of mature reflection seems entirely to rid me of it. But at least I now see in my more lucid moments that it is an illusion. Not only is shyness essentially human, it may even be the master key that unlocks our understanding of those sociable creatures, Homo sapiens, lumbered with this strange capacity for turning in and reflecting on themselves. Shyness isn’t what alienates me from the rest of herd-loving humankind; it links me to them.
NOTES
To keep the notes to a minimum, I have not referenced quotations from ancient or out-of-copyright texts that are easily searchable online and have only referenced direct quotations and important information. Where the information is taken from a text I have also quoted, I indicate this after the reference to the quotation with “see also.”
Chapter 1
A Tentative History
1. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber, 1996), 121.
2. Susie Scott, “The Shell, the Stranger and the Competent Others: Towards a Sociology of Shyness,” Sociology 38, no. 1 (2004): 128.
3. Eliza Edmonston, Sketches and Tales of the Shetland Islands (Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1856), 79.
4. Fridtjof Nansen, The First Crossing of Greenland, vol. 1, trans. Hubert Majendie Gepp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 188.
5. Helen Mahut, “Breed Differences in the Dog’s Emotional Behavior,” Canadian Journal of Psychology 12, no. 1 (1958): 37, 39.
6. Jeffrey P. Kahn, Angst: Origins of Anxiety and Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 51.
7. Reid Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 114; J.T.F., “Biographical Sketch of the Author,” in Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici: A Letter to a Friend, Christian Morals, Urn-Burial, and Other Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), xiii–xiv.
8. Barbour, Sir Thomas Browne, 411.
9. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in Thomas Browne: 21st-Century Oxford Authors, ed. Kevin Killeen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 42–43.
10. Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia or Urn-Burial, in Killeen, Thomas Browne, 533.
11. Theodore Zeldin, “Personal History and the History of the Emotions,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 3 (1982): 345.
12. Vicky Allan, “It’s Good to Talk,” Scotland on Sunday, August 22, 1999.
13. W. Compton Leith [Ormonde Maddock Dalton], Apologia Diffidentis (London: Bodley Head, 1917), 2.
14. Compton Leith, Apologia, 2, 73.
15. Compton Leith, Apologia, 60, 62.
16. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1857), 235.
17. Compton Leith, Apologia, 72.
18. See Carlin A. Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 224, 226.
20. Compton Leith, Apologia, 52, 55.
21. Reginald John Farrer, Alpines and Bog-Plants (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), 252.
22. Quoted in Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 223.
Chapter 2
This Odd State of Mind
1. See Randal Keynes, “Anne Elizabeth Darwin,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, online edition); Charles Darwin, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” in Charles Darwin: An Anthology, ed. Marston Bates and Philip S. Humphrey (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 409–410.
2. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), 330.
3. William Bryant, The Birds of Paradise: Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006), 32–33.
4. Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), 59, 258.
5. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 310; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), 200.
6. Thomas H. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (London: John Churchill, 1839), 7, 173, 156, 48.
7. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 338, 345.
8. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 155.
9. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 180, 226.
10. Langford, Englishness Identified, 188, 176. See also 177, 185.
11. Langford, Englishness Identified, 103. See also 106, 104, 102.
12. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), 28–29.
13. Alexander Kinglake, Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (London: John Ollivier, 1844), 264.
14. Kinglake, Eothen, 266–68.
15. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part 2: The Social Influence of Democracy, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: J and HG Langley, 1840), 178.
16. Rev. W. Tuckwell, A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary Study (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), 21.
17. Kinglake, Eothen, 248, 251.
18. Kinglake, Eothen, 276.
19. Gerald de Gaury, Travelling Gent: The Life of Alexander Kinglake (1809–1891) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 129.
20. A. W. Kinglake, letter to the Times (London), July 14, 1860.
21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, in The Portable Emerson, ed. Mark Van Doren (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 415.
22. David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34, 48–49.
23. Michael McCarthy, Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo (London: John Murray, 2009), 141–142; R. A. W. Rhodes, Everyday Life in British Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 198–199.
24. Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England, trans. W. F. Rae (New York: Holt and Williams, 1872), 66.
25. Taine, Notes on England, 161.
26. Tuckwell, A. W. Kinglake, 125.
27. Gaury, Travelling Gent, 128–129.
28. “The Orang-outang at Westminster,” Dundee Courier and Argus, September 7, 1880.
29. Siegfried Sassoon, The Weald of Youth (London: Faber, 1942), 234.
30. Philip Hoare, Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), 91; Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915–1918, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (New York: Knopf, 1975), 121.
31. Sassoon, Weald of Youth, 230.
32. Siegfried Sassoon, Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber, 1972), 509.
33. Richard Slobodin, W. H. R. Rivers: Pioneer Anthropologist, Psychiatrist of “The Ghost Road” (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1997), 17.
34. Sassoon, Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 533–534.
35. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, a Biography (1918–1967) (London: Duckworth, 2003), 188.
36. Mark Amory, Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1998), 63.
37. Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon, 115.
38. Stephen Tennant, “Be Smart, and Grace will Follow of Its Own Accord,” Daily Mail, June 15, 1928.
39. Ferdinand Mount, Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 139–140.
40. Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 192.
41. Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon, 199.
42. David Foot, Beyond Bat and Ball: Eleven Intimate Portraits (London: Aurum, 1995), 43–44.
43. Philip Hoare, “Where Did the Joke End?,” Spectator, November 22, 2008, 54; Christopher Isherwood, The Sixties: Diaries, vol. 2: 1960–1969 (London: Chatto and Windus, 2010), 77.
44. Nicholas Shakespeare, “Standing Back from Life,” Times (London), March 11, 1987.
45. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Penguin, 1987), 53, 95.
46. Naipaul, Enigma of Arrival, 70, 191.
47. Sarah Checkland, “Final Glorious Days of Eccentric’s Dream House,” Times (London), October 8, 1987.
48. Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (London: Penguin, 1999), 166, 165; Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 126.
49. Adam Phillips, “Mr Phillips,” in Equals (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 205.
Chapter 3
How Embarrassing
1. B. Jack Copeland, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64.
2. Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16; Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 23–24, 26.
3. David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (London: Phoenix, 2007), 119.
4. “The Mechanical Brain,” Times (London), June 11, 1949.
5. Hodges, Alan Turing, 478.
6. William Newman, “Viewpoint: Alan Turing Remembered,” Communications of the ACM 55, no. 12 (December 2012): 40.
7. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 121; C. P. Snow, “Foreword,” in Hardy, Mathematician’s Apology, 16.
8. W. P. Livingstone, Shetland and the Shetlanders (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1947), 79–80.
9. Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 2.
10. Erving Goffman, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1953), 183. See also 186, 181, 188, 194–195, 187, 263–264.
11. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 105, 107. See also 101–102.
12. Rom Harré, Key Thinkers in Psychology (London: Sage, 2006), 183–184.
13. Greg Smith, Erving Goffman (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 12–13; Goffman, “Communication Conduct,” 2, 5.
14. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), 324.
15. Henry J. Heimlich, “The Heimlich Maneuver,” Clinical Symposia 31, no. 3 (1979): 4.
16. William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 95. See also 15–16, ix–x.
17. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 111.
18. Elias, Civilizing Process, 493.
19. Nicola Beauman, The Other Elizabeth Taylor (London: Persephone Books, 2009), 39.
20. Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Book of Letters, ed. Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxi–xxii; Elizabeth Taylor, “The Letter-W
riters,” in Complete Short Stories (London: Virago, 2012), 182.
21. Robert Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy (London: Peter Owen, 1985), 81.
22. Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy, 74; Beauman, Other Elizabeth Taylor, 224.
23. Roger Manvell, “Britain’s Self-Portraiture in Feature Films,” Geographical Magazine, August 1953, 222.
24. Philip Hoare, Noël Coward: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 361; “Germans Boo British film,” Manchester Guardian, November 16, 1946.
25. Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek (London: Virago, 2009), 243.
26. Elizabeth Jane Howard, “Introduction,” in Taylor, Game of Hide and Seek, vii.
27. Geoffrey Nicholson, “The Other Elizabeth Taylor,” Sunday Times (London), September 22, 1968; Elizabeth Taylor, letter to Elizabeth Bowen, February 12, 1951, in Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration, ed. N. H. Reeve (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 106.
28. Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness (London: Virago, 1983), 216; Taylor, “Hester Lilly,” in Complete Short Stories, 11; Taylor, “The Rose, the Mauve, the White,” in Complete Short Stories, 219.
29. “Contenders for the Golden Crown of British Fiction,” Times (London), November 22, 1971.
30. Elizabeth Taylor, “The Blush,” in Complete Short Stories, 179.
31. Michael Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 403.
32. Clifford Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 64.
33. Michael Young, Fighting with Food (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 262, 51.
34. Sue King and Angela Clifford, eds., Local Distinctiveness: Place, Particularity and Identity (London: Common Ground, 1993), 19.
35. Herbert Hendin, Suicide and Scandinavia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Culture and Character (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1964), 43.