I always really liked Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” It was the one coming of age book, the one Bildungsroman, that really resonated with me. Ironically, Catcher in the Rye always came off as phony to me, which I’m sure would have upset Holden to absolutely no end. But I always found Charlie to be more believable, because he was less guarded. He was devastatingly, and often heart-wrenchingly honest with us as readers.
At his core though, Charlie is struggling with something that I’ve been struggling with lately: the relationship between thought and action. In my last post, I sang the praises of the intellectual, the thoughtful life. But I’m aware that there is more to life than thinking, and analyzing. That’s what I hope to explore in this post. Indeed, the first line on the back of the book cuts right to the heart of the matter: “Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.”
That small, seemingly frivolous passage opens up a whole world of insight. Have you ever been to a dance, or party, and not really danced that much? I know at my first dance in middle school, nearly everyone was way too terrified to ask anyone to dance. I’d say most of us, myself included, got over it by the next dance, but there’s always that kid who takes laps around the dance floor, searching, but never finding, some unseen goal. And sometimes we are that person. Maybe we’re having a bad night, maybe we’re in a fight with a significant other and we’re closely monitoring our phone. But it all ends the same way, we remove ourself from the present, and relinquish our roles as actors in the world. We’ve become passive and brooding, indeed, a wallflower, in the most basic sense of the term.
Wallflowers have a certain elitism to them. I should know, I often am one. We’re content to sit back and see what’s going on. We run endless diagnostics of the social situation. We like to see how people interact. We like to try to figure them out. Many times, wallflowers are so deep in our own thoughts, that we balk at “descending,” into the banalities of everyday chit chat. In fact, I had this conversation with a friend just last week. I told him I’ve always been a bit jealous of his ability to ease into conversation with people. He’s much better at accepting people for what they are than I am. He doesn’t expect much from his everyday encounters. I on the other hand, always hold on to the hope that we might get past trivialities, and talk about something important, even with people I’ve recently met. Consequently, when I meet a new group of people, I often find myself listening more than talking. That changes a lot once I grow comfortable with a group though. I’m much more willing to talk and have my views heard. People who know me well are aware that I’m only too willing to lay out a whole argument, or proselytize on some obscure sociological point.
In trying to sum up myself, and people like myself, namely, wallflowers, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of us are intellectuals in one way or another. We like to spend time in our heads, and when we do interact with other people, we’re principally concerned with ideas. I’ve had dozens of conversations with people just because I like the game of baiting them into saying things. It’s a strange little game, that even becomes a ritual with some of my close friends who realize I’m doing it to them.
The common thread through all this is self-absorption, and at its worst, solipsism. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll gladly sing the praises of a thoughtful, intellectual life. At the same time, it’s a dangerous and course way to live, if taken too far. The life of pure thought is dangerous precisely because of its beauty. It’s very clearly unhealthy to treat people like toys, baiting them into saying something you find amusing or funny.
In Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain, his main character Hans Castorp, spends seven years cut off from society at a sanatorium high in the mountains. He contemplates all the different philosophies influencing, or afflicting, modern Europe prior to World War One. Ideas become personified on the Mountain, and they war for Castorp’s soul, as collectivism battles liberal democracy, and duty squares off against love and lust. At the novel’s climax though, Castorp goes skiing, in an effort to bring some action to his sedentary, intellectual life. He becomes caught in a blizzard, and as tries to ride it out, in a near dream he arrives at a conclusion about ideas. The snowflakes falling around him in droves are very much like ideas. Each one is unique, finely crafted, and individual. They capture our imagination. They demand our attention, and the really beautiful ones, can even lull us into a trance-like state.
But ideas, with their siren call, can lead us to crash upon their rocks. Snowflakes, like ideas, are individually beautiful, but in too great a concentration, can become suffocating. The snows threaten to bury Castorp’s body, just as the moral ambiguity brought about by dozens of competing ideologies threatens to bury his soul. It’s the classic case of man over-reaching his abilities. We believe we control our ideas, that we can shape them to our will. But we can only process so much. Ideas mutate and change character in the blink of an eye. While helpful, ideas and paradigms can also box us in, and prevent us from understanding truth as it is really experienced. The idea of the geocentric universe helped man in his quest to find a place in the cosmos. It was nice, it was safe, it made sense. It was a beautiful idea in that it tied up loose ends, and made everything make sense. However, it clearly hindered him in understanding the truth of the world, and even held him back from discovering the truth. We can quickly find ourselves on the wrong end of the leash, beholden to our ideas, imprisoned within a conceptual cage of our own creation.
And the reason for that is that ideas are easy. Ideas chop up, and pack up the world for our own consumption. Oh, you want to understand why there’s inequality in the world? Here’s a nice idea about social stratification based on gender and race. There you go, no more thinking! You’ve got all your answers now. I’m not saying that ideas can’t answer some of our questions, just that we shouldn’t subscribe to these massive, all-explaining gestalts. Is some inequality rooted in social stratification based on race and gender? Undoubtedly. The danger comes when we take one idea as the only explanation, or even worse, the only possible explanation.
Paradoxically, ideas often let us refrain from thinking. A beautiful, and well formed idea is tempting. It’s tempting to apply such ideas universally, and for all time. Every English or Philosophy course has a guy I call Nietzsche Kid. To Nietzsche Kid, everything is Nietzsche. The German philosopher’s ideas are so well formed and attractive, that Nietzsche Kid finds ways to apply them in the most ridiculous and out of place circumstances. But we can’t really blame Nietzsche kid, because he, like so many of us, has succumbed to the allure of ideas. Why? Because they’re easy. It’s nice to have all-encompassing explanations. It’s comforting. But most importantly, it’s very dangerous and backwards.
The world of the mind is not necessarily concerned with the outside world at all. Within the breathtaking vistas of our consciousness, we’re free to fashion any explanatory tools we see fit and apply them to the world. Unfortunately, this, is the essence of solipsism. One of Western canon’s greatest heroes, Lucifer, describes it best when he says: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell or a Hell of Heaven.” This is the solipsist’s declaration of independence. It declares opposites can be each other, that A can equal A, but in the freedom of the mind, it can also equal B or anything else. At its core, it is the credo of anti-reason. It gives the mind carte-blanche to do as it pleases, with no restrictions.
This can seem liberating, but in the end, we have to reject such ideas, simply, because they are not real. They do not square with the world as we live it. Ideas are attractive because they’re easy, and they’re easy because they aren’t real. The real world is a difficult and ambiguous place. There aren’t a lot of easy answers. There aren’t any explanations that explain everything, although we long after them, as can be seen in religion. Ideas are perfect, in fact, they’re too perfect to be real. Have you ever seen something, too perfect, on an advertisement or a magazine cover? It’s inherently off-putting. We intuitively sense the hollowness, of this unreal object, its inability to participate in reality.
We have to break out of that comfort zone, and “see what life is like from the dance floor.” It’s much easier to hang back and analyze a situation. There’s no room to offend anyone. There’s no chance of a social faux-paus. Safe in our minds, we control everything. The world, and most importantly, other human beings, are extraordinarily difficult to deal with. They don’t do as we’d like all the time. Sometimes they can be downright obstinate. But at least they’re real. They exist outside of our own solipsistic conceptions. And so, we have to be willing to take the thinking cap off for a while, and experience what else the world has to offer. It can be hard to do, but it’s necessary, if we’re to participate in, and understand, the world fully. And with that, I’ll stop writing and thinking, and go out and experience. Life is pretty from the sidelines. It’s a lot more fun on the dance floor.
