When Wrong Is Right

Happy New Year to all. Life has been interesting, and more offline than usual for me lately. Changing up your life is good – it helps you figure out what’s real about you and shed some of the made up stuff. Well, at least that’s how it’s been for me.

I was visiting with my family a few days ago and picked up Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. I’m in the middle of three different books right now, but this one grabbed my attention away from Tropic of Cancer Capricorn and gave me an excuse to postpone digging in to the new(ish) translation of Swann’s Way. The point of all this being that I read this passage and it resonated so much that I typed in a good deal of it and emailed it off to a dear friend, and then thought hell, Personism can be about whatever I want it to be, and since I’m reading more lately, maybe I’ll throw some bookish stuff into the mix.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance… You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home and tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision each other’s interior workings and invisible aims?… The fact is that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.