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Nobody Knows "Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliche that's so insufferable. What we know id that, in an uncliched was, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. - Philip Roth in The Human Stain I am really enjoying my first Philip Roth novel. I will talk more about the book itself once I finish it but this small passage made me think of my friends. As I mentioned before, many of my friends are going through divorces or seperations lately. One of the first ideas that crossed my mind when I read the excerpt was how little we know the people we think we know. This doesn't just apply to our partners. We have so many people in our lives friends, lovers, even family members whom we think we're close to. Whom we think we know quite well. Yet, we don't. Or at least, we might not. I am recently becoming more and more amazed at how easy it is for people to hide parts of their current or past life. We tend to be inherently trusting. We give people the benefit of the doubt. When we meet someone new, we take what they tell us about themselves to be true. We don't go off and do background searches on people. We don't double-check their 'story.' In my opinion, that's one of the reasons we get to incredibly shocked and hurt when someone we love turns out to be doing something behind our back. It's not the jealousy. It's the lack of intimacy that we felt was there. It's the fact that there's a part of this person's life that we knew absolutely nothing about. The betrayal. The fact that we can't deny the truth: that we didn't know this person as well as we thought we did, after all. Which then leads us to wonder what else we don't know about this person... May 05, 2004 | relationships | share[] |
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