The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  [3]

  How can people lose their illusions about themselves?

  WHEN PAINTING A PORTRAIT, Lucian Freud (1922–2011) often used to shade his eyes and look at his sitter’s face and body a few yards away, as though he was a sailor searching for a distant land or an explorer confronted by an impenetrable forest. Every detail held his attention, every texture, every fragment of clothing was special; nothing was seen as an example of something more general or ideal. Even when painting an egg, he found that each egg was different. A sitter was a mystery, a puzzle to be solved. He made no plans in advance as to how his painting would take shape. ‘The point of painting a picture is that you don’t know what will happen.’ The aim was certainly not to produce a resemblance.

  Instead, he wanted to create a figure that was ‘disturbing, by which I mean alive’. To be ‘alive’, a portrait had to ‘involve’ those who looked at it, making them imagine that there was something of themselves in the painting. He himself was less concerned with looking at his models than with ‘being them’. Likewise, he appreciated a novel when it made him ‘almost feel as if I had written it myself’. Did he mean that making a portrait of other people is the way to discover oneself, or to become a different person?

  Though he conceded that shocking the public might sometimes be necessary to get its attention, ‘I always thought truth-telling was more exciting.’ He wanted above all to know the truth, ‘to see things as they really are’. But what truth was that? He said of his wife Caroline, whom he famously painted several times, ‘I never knew Caroline that well.’ How then does one get to know another person well, or indeed to know oneself well? ‘Being in love’, he said, ‘is complete, absolute concern, where everything about the other person interests, worries or pleases you.’ But how mistaken can one be about the person with whom one is in love?

  Lucian Freud often took a year or even longer to finish a painting, watching his sitters with ‘piercing eyes’, charming and entertaining them with wide-ranging talk, sometimes turning them into lovers, and fathering fourteen children in the process. He observed their every gesture, even when they were hungry, tired or drunk, searching for the ‘glow’. The woman fifty years his junior who was the subject of his ‘Naked Portrait’ remembered that sitting for him went on for seven days a week, night and day, for a whole year; they became lovers, but when the sittings ended, so did the affair. Though Lucian Freud often began a conversation by saying ‘Tell me about your childhood’, and though genitals feature so often in his pictures, his purpose and method were different from that of his grandfather Sigmund, the inventor of psychoanalysis. Not only did he tell his sitters a great deal about himself, and try to include a joke in every painting, but he shunned making judgements, let alone finding cures, and once he had finished a painting, he was not interested in thinking any more about it. ‘My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record.’ It was, however, about himself only insofar as it was about what he chose to observe and notice. ‘I don’t want the picture to come from me. I want it to come from them.’ There was no message he wished to convey, no symbolism or rhetoric. ‘I like it if people say very contradictory things about my work.’

  This is one of the crossroads, not pointing in any clear direction, at which the art of portraiture arrived in the twenty-first century. Whenever people develop new aspirations, they need a new kind of portrait. In the Middle Ages, when they were more concerned with a person’s ancestors and property than individual talent, it was enough to have a coat of arms rather than the likeness of a face. The flattering portrait, making one look as rich and beautiful as possible, was invented to satisfy the search for higher status and the hunger for admiration. A longing for immortality produces the impassive boardroom portraits which are like tombstones made to be hung on a wall. When every individual is perceived as a psychological enigma, the artist becomes an interpreter of the mystery, and is glorified even more than the subject. The instant photographic snapshot coincides with the belief that everyone can be interesting, but also that everything is relative and disposable.

  Today, the rejection of role-playing and deception in relationships, the discrediting of political and business heroes who lie, the condemnation of racism and discrimination, mean that appearances count for much less than they used to. A portrait has to say much more when transparency and honesty become supreme values, and when there is a growing awareness that humans are infinitely complicated, that they are not entirely, or even remotely, what they appear to be.

  However, we are all obliged to have a portrait of ourselves in a passport or identity card in which our government describes what it thinks is important about us. Why is it not possible for us to create our own passports, saying what we want others to understand or appreciate about us? Why may we not add new pages and pictures as we meet more people who enrich or modify our view of our place in the world? Why cannot we cut pages out when our hopes die? Of course we may mislead or lie, or be misunderstood. But why cannot our self-portrait passport be accepted as our own original work of art, which says something about our illusions and our dreams and what is not normally obvious? Why cannot we choose the shape of our passport for ourselves, and encase or frame or bind it in whatever idea of beauty we have? Why cannot we draw inspiration from the painter Wan Shou-ch’i (1603–1652), who was also a furniture designer, porcelain manufacturer, carpenter, gardener, temple renovator, poet and musician, and who left thirty-four self-portraits in different costumes to record his many and varied personalities?

  It is possible to conceive a passport that would be more useful than a curriculum vitae, which is a misleading boast, excluding any hopes or opinions which might make one unemployable. A passport could be more informative than a business card, which is an advertisement of status, and proof that one is the property of an organisation more worthy of respect than oneself. The compulsory national passport, a relic of monarchical despotism, was abolished as an insult to freedom by the French Revolution, and by many countries subsequently, so that in the nineteenth century people prided themselves on not having a certificate from a bureaucrat judged a better proof of who one was than one’s own word. Even Napoleon III declared that the passport never stops the criminal but merely obstructs the free passage of the innocent. But paranoia about spies in the First World War resurrected passports; and they gradually resumed their role as instruments of control rather than of enlightenment.

  This book is my own kind of passport, which allows you to enter my imagination. I need your visit, because my thoughts are nourished by those who cross my path, for otherwise I would be a stagnant swamp of prejudices. My passport is the product of conversations which stimulate my preoccupations and sympathies, and make me aware of other forms of existence. I offer you my passport because I should like to see yours. The world is what is revealed when we each say what we see, when we all shine our faint torches on it.

  But why reveal who you really are? The world is filled with polite, shy, inscrutable, unintelligible, tight-lipped, superficial, dishonest and also honest people who are increasingly difficult to decipher, and who for one reason or another do not make public what goes on inside them. Many do not reveal their thoughts or feelings because they are not sure what they think or feel. Many would be braver in their speech if they were more certain of a sympathetic hearing. Many are schooled to believe that they need to be hypocrites. The hidden thoughts in other people’s heads are the great darkness that surrounds us.

  According to the teaching of the European Enlightenment, superstition and prejudice are the main obstacles to discovering what the world is really like, and education and legislation can eliminate them. But it is still very difficult to understand the motivations and implications of what others say and feel. The many darknesses that remain still await a second and more ambitious Enlightenment.

  There are thoughts that are still-born because the mind is not sufficiently stimulated to bring them full
y into being. The pressures of ordinary life are so preoccupying that the more fundamental problems of the art of living are avoided in normal conversation. What is most important is often least discussed. The struggle against censorship is never won, but self-censorship is even more insidious. From the beginning of time, people have wittingly or unwittingly been using contraceptives against thought.

  If thoughts are left to themselves, they remain lonely and limp. They become meaningful to others only when they are fertilised by interaction. Throughout history the focus has been on instilling conventional ideas into supposedly empty heads, failing to realise that making ideas is like making love. Ideas cannot just be fed into people. Every individual has sensitivities and memories that shape what they absorb. And until ideas have met many different kinds of ideas, they cannot know their own value. The thoughts that the world hides in its head are only very superficially glimpsed in votes and polls. Only a tiny minority have even a portion of their ideas published in the media or in books. Confession in religion and psychiatry is strictly private. The study of the habits and mentalities of nations, classes and groups does not necessarily reveal what goes on in the mind of wayward individuals. Could there be some other way to bring thoughts out of hiding?

  Private thoughts are among humanity’s most important assets, containing the essence of its experiences. A large portion of them are not shared with others, for fear of offence or the damage they might cause, or in the name of privacy, or from an inability to make a personal experience relevant to others. What is recorded in history is only the tip of an iceberg. Too many people never really get to know their own parents, or never pass on their intimate thoughts to their children, and regret it. Too many governments set an example of secretiveness, claiming that chaos would follow if their motives or their incompetence were revealed. All the learned studies of lying are adamant that social relations would collapse if people stopped lying. Business and politics have been relying increasingly on half-truths, employing more and more experts to conceal as much as to reveal. Even sport has been contaminated. Even scientific research is plagued by assertions that are not evidence-based. Intimate relations in private life collapse when pretence replaces trust. Secrecy is the illegitimate child of fear. Who will have the courage to insist that we do not have to live in a world held together by lies?

  Individuals have recently been crawling hesitatingly out of the burrows they call privacy, painting a portrait of themselves in words or music of many kinds, proclaiming on the internet that they exist and want to know what other existences there are in the vast unknown space around them. On the web’s social networks they have mainly specialised in brief and superficial exchanges with hundreds of ‘friends’ they have never met. Of the over a hundred million bloggers who are effectively writing non-stop autobiographies of sorts, half say they feel misunderstood outside their own small community. Their monologues, like those of autobiographers, cannot be the last word in self-expression. Self-expression cannot be the last child that freedom will bear. Introspection cannot be the only path to self-knowledge.

  I think in response to the thoughts of others. Of the millions of thoughts that enter my mind, a few impregnate it and give birth to new thoughts. Ideas are never sure who exactly their parents are, since they are ceaselessly matchmaking, flirting and making love in search of congenial partners. I cherish the moments when other people’s thoughts do not arrive simply asking for a quiet place to sit in my memory, but seem to press a button in my head that switches on the light, illuminating my beliefs on that particular subject, clarifying them by juxtaposing a contrasting view and stimulating a modification I had not previously imagined. I like them above all to forge a link to people or ideas that previously seemed irrelevant.

  I give no time to the solitary pursuit of that age-old riddle, ‘Who am I?’ I find other people much more interesting than the repetitive or self-deceiving reflections I can have by scraping the barrel of my own memories, or the labels I stick on myself in my efforts to establish my so-called identity. ‘If I knew myself, I would run away,’ said Goethe. I feel even more strongly, I cannot know myself. Though self-knowledge has from the beginning of time been paraded as the indispensable tool for a successful life, it remains as elusive as ever. The self-portraits from which I have quoted in the previous chapter are examples of how blurred is the vision that people have of themselves when they rely on introspection. There must be many more ways of talking or writing about oneself still to be tried, or of painting, sculpting, filming oneself, which are not narcissistic, self-indulgent, nostalgic or complaining. The art of portraiture and self-portraiture is waiting to be reinvented.

  Instead of ‘Who am I?’ the question I prefer is ‘Who are you?’ That is how a conversation starts and how a self-portrait is born. Few people will or can just sit down and write an autobiography which they feel does them justice, and is not mere reminiscence and anecdote or an exercise in egoism. Many more enjoy a conversation, and in a conversation they sometimes find themselves trying to explain who they are, which is in effect the beginning of a rough sketch for a self-portrait.

  I am interested in people who feel starved of the kind of conversation that is not just superficial chat, or gossip, or argument, or professional shop talk. I have no desire to revive the supposedly lost art of conversation, because so much of what passed for conversation in previous centuries was ruled by etiquette, where you said what you were expected to say, flattering the powerful and trying to show your superiority over those you despised. I do however want to discover how other people see the world and what is most important to them, as well as what is important to myself. When two people converse with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, and to get inside their skin, the world becomes a different place, even if it is only by a minute amount. They lift the mask behind which almost every person hides, even if only partially, which is more effective in establishing equality between two people who have the courage to be open with each other than any law can be. It is possible to confess one’s sins to priests, but they will not confess their sins in return. One can pour out one’s anxieties to psychiatrists, but they will not ask one for opinions about their own anxieties.

  New kinds of conversation have in the past opened up new phases in human relations, as when parliaments were invented. When the word parlement was originally used, it meant conversation between two (and occasionally four) individuals meeting for a discussion, to parley. It took a long time for larger numbers to learn how to converse. So long as hierarchical status dominated all activities, people spoke in order of precedence. So long as violence was the usual method for settling disputes, discussions often ended in fights, as they still did in 1992, when some members of the Russian Duma started punching each other. Only gradually were rules introduced to dissuade people from all talking at the same time, cursing, cat-calling, breaking out into song or challenging opponents to a duel. The Protestant Reformation made a big difference because it regularly brought people from different social classes together. The American Revolution also reshaped conversation. Tocqueville in the 1840s wrote that ‘to discuss [was the] biggest concern and . . . the only pleasure an American knows,’ and that American women loved attending public meetings ‘as a recreation from their household labours . . . Debating clubs are, to a certain extent, a substitute for theatrical entertainments. An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he were addressing a public meeting.’ As literary, scientific, political and other associations were established in many countries, they developed their own styles; battling variously with aggressive, long-winded, arrogant, waffling and bee-in-bonnet orators. Then the ‘meeting expert’ appeared, skilled in controlling and reducing disagreement to innocuous compromise. But meetings can now occupy half of a business executive’s time, often with little benefit, leaving participants wo
ndering what is really going on in each other’s heads and what sort of characters are concealed behind the public performance.

  Could a new kind of conversation open up a new phase in human relations? That may sound too ambitious. But a series of experiments I have conducted, involving over two thousand people in a dozen different countries, have demonstrated that when conversations are carefully prepared and structured, the results are surprising. Guests are randomly seated in pairs so that they each face a stranger or someone they barely know, often drawn from a completely different background. Each is given a Menu of Conversation, which looks like a restaurant menu, divided into Starters, Fish, Grills, Salads, etc., but instead of dishes, it lists about two dozen topics for discussion, in the form of questions. For example, ‘What are the limits of your compassion?’, or ‘How have your priorities changed over the years?’, or ‘What moral, intellectual, aesthetic and social effects does the work you do have on others and on yourself?’ The participants are invited to exchange their experiences, to reflect on how these could be of value to other people, to compare them with attitudes to the same problems in other civilisations, and to search for practical applications that might emerge from their conclusions. The range of topics discussed is widened with other Menus, sometimes composed at the request of specific organisations or occupations. The rules of the game ensure that the conversation does not lapse into a monologue by either party or into a regurgitation of pet obsessions.

  The results, despite the big variations in the kind of people who participated, have been consistently similar. The guests welcome having questions that raise issues they habitually leave half-answered at the back of their minds, they remark that they particularly appreciate the questions being difficult and demanding a lot of thought, which gives the conversation unusual solidity, and they value having a structure, which prevents them from being distracted into aimless chat. They wonder why there are so few opportunities to talk honestly to one person for two hours or more without interruption. ‘I’m amazed at the frankness with which people were saying things to each other within minutes,’ said the CEO of a confederation of employers. A refugee living in a hostel for the homeless said, ‘This is the first real conversation I have had in the five years of my exile.’ ‘While I learned much about my colleague, I learned even more about myself. She helped me reveal more about myself that can prove helpful for me,’ said a man working for a mobile phone company. ‘I thought things I haven’t thought before and maybe realised things I didn’t know,’ said a science researcher. ‘I do not remember when was the last time I had this kind of conversation with anyone,’ said a social worker. A trade union leader paired with someone half his age said, ‘I enjoyed meeting, talking and listening to my conversational partner and she has restored my faith in younger people.’ ‘I found it thought-provoking and inspiring,’ said a chief superintendent of police. ‘I sat next to a guy who is a work colleague. I’ve known him for twenty years on and off but I found out more tonight from speaking to him than I did in twenty years of working near him and passing him by.’ ‘We talked about things we would never discuss with work mates, and rank did not play any part,’ said a local government clerk. ‘Fascinating and enjoyable; hidden depths uncovered,’ wrote a doctor in charge of a national health system. ‘I’ve lived in six countries and work in English, French and Chinese,’ said a lawyer, ‘and feel keenly the appropriateness of this project.’ ‘It opened up areas of dialogue that people in the work environment would be reluctant to open up,’ said an accountant.