“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…
this not-so-little bird let me get quite close at the animal park this weekend and didn’t even ruffle his feathers.
One word. Wow!
OK cool! too.
You’re right- it hurts most to discover that some person you thought you knew, had the capacity to act in a totally different way. In effect, you did not know the person at all.
I also tend to take people at ‘face value’. And that’s not always safe. No wonder, now I always want to ‘know’ as much as I can about any new person.
I think love tends to breed familiarity. So, when we love someone, we are blinded into thinking that we know them, even though we don’t.
Another thing: When say the husband of so many years leaves for another woman, most people instantaneously think, “this is not the person I know, I’ve been deceived all these years”. Although it’s hard to be in that situation and although that might be partially true or true in some situations, it may not always be true. Change, including a change of heart, is for people, it does not necessarily mean we’ve been deceived all along.
I like these thoughts — they ring true in my life at the moment. I just went through a strange break-up. I think it’s strange when you see a change in patterns, but you refrain from saying anything because you just don’t want to belive it — surely you must be imagining things. Then, when things turn out to be true, you ask yourself why you didn’t listen to that inner voice — the one that’s never let you down… Love makes us all a little crazy…