Darn My intellectual side was showing again! I don't particularly think of myself as an intellectual, per se. And yet, I always seem to default to the odd, the obscure, the off-kilter. (and when did choosing the unusual become intellectual anyway? Believe me when I say I do not possess the rigor of mind required for a true intellectual)
The above poster, of a painting by Picasso, was given to me in college. The person who gave it to me said it reminded him of me. I still love the poster. At times I am perplexed at how it has anything to do with me, because I see myself as a fairly simple person. But here's the rub. I increasingly we think we all see ourselves as simple people because we all know our own inmost desires. We see our own simple selves, but we do not present those simple selves to the world. I know for a fact that some of the most complex people I know also see themselves as simple souls.
Today, I see the complexities, and the similarities more readily. But these too are not unique to me. We also all have disparate bits folded in ourselves, perhaps some of us more obviously so than others. But there is also something universally human in that painting, in the seeing and wanting and doing and all the competing urges that make us who we are
Thursday evening I was at a dinner welcoming newcomers to the parish community. Part of our introduction was to say who we would like to be if we could be anyone from history. At times I fret with those things, the girl who was accused of being too serious comes out, and I really don't want to be anyone but myself. But this time I didn't hesitate. If I could be anyone, I would be Henriette-Lucy Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, although I just said Lucie de la Tour du Pin. Leave it to me to chose someone no one has ever heard of. Lucie de la Tour du Pin was smart, and resourceful, and not an intellectual; she also had gumption, started over more than once, and survived a turbulent period of history. She was, or at least gave the impression of being, at ease being herself. Equally obviously, no one had any idea of whom I was speaking. Admittedly, that too, may be one of the reasons I chose her.
And yet, in retrospect I am also somewhat bemused that I was so ready to leap. That very morning I had held back in another discussion simply because my choices were going to be "out there" compared to the rest of the discussion. My morning study group had reconvened after its summer break, and we were discussing books we had read over the summer. As people talked about Karen Kingsbury and other popular authors, authors whom I have read, and enjoy, much the way I enjoy an occasional chocolate cupcake, I pulled back. Of the thirty or so books I read this summer, some of which were popular fiction, the two that stood out, the two I would most love to discuss were Lincoln in the Bardo and Elmet. They were the two books that would have most marked me as an intellectual, an outsider, and I didn't want to be on the fringes, I was happy to be back in the group, and I wanted to stay there, safely hidden in the middle.
Obviously all such concerns had fled my brain by evening. Or the group was different. For whatever reason I was much more comfortable letting my edges show.
I've admired Lucie, Marquise de la Tour du Pin since I first read her memoirs, Memoris of Madame de la Tour du Pin, when I was sixteen, and this is not the first time I have written about her. I still admire her. I reread her memoirs when we were packing to move to Knoxville. At the moment that volume is in a box in the basement, or I would be rereading the memoirs yet again.. There is also a biography by Caroline Moorehead, Dancing to the Precipice. I haven't read that, but it is on my list of books to be read, a list so long as to be massive.
I'd still simply prefer to be myself. I suppose with maturity comes some sort of accommodation to wisdom. I'd no longer like to be someone else when I grow up, I'd just like to be the best self I can be. And I'm not convinced that we ever really grow up, we are constantly en route to being our next best selves. If my best self is likely to leap in without thought and take the slightly off-kilter path, so be it. At least it is my own path.
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