On sharing

(This post is obliquely related to my post on the feelings of connectedness).

Someone has recently extolled to me the deep satisfaction which followed upon his having shared with someone -- a rather emotionally distant acquaintance as it turned out, but (perhaps not insignificantly) one of opposite sex -- his feelings in the matter of the impending birth of his first child. "I could tell her", he tells me, "things I could not tell my wife".

When I probed further in order to to establish just what was so great about the experience, I learned that the person of opposite sex in question (shall we say, "the receptacle of the sharing activity"? or perhaps "the sharee", for short?) did not really have anything significant to contribute in return, and that her entire role consisted of nothing other than having heard out the sharing verbiage and then responded "adequately" to my acquaintance's sharing activity (which was, it seems, something along the lines of: "oh, that's wonderful, thank you for sharing", or: was it "I know, I know!"?) When probed further, my acquaintance admitted that the whole experience was not a matter of him learning anything interesting in return for his sharing efforts, but a matter of, er, "emotional intercourse" (as he described it, though his formulation resorted to significantly cruder terminology).

When he then, in the course of our conversation, accused me of not sharing -- being "closed", as he put it, or "secretive" -- as a matter of character, he said -- I answered that I simply saw no point in it. Bland drivel like "That's wonderful, thank you for sharing" (or "I know! I know!") has no therapeutic effect on my soul; I prefer my titillating interactions with members of opposite sex to be more consciously erotic in nature on both sides (even if it leads nowhere); but, most crucially, I can never ever ever expect any sharee of mine to have anything in the least interesting to contribute to any description of my internal states. This is, in part, because of my seven languages and nine countries (and forty-six years) on three continents (I do not know anyone who can match this sort of experience); and because of my vast reading in numerous fields (how many people do you know who read 1200 pages of non-fiction a week?); but mainly because everyone I ever speak to appears to follow the same age-long thought models which I have long since discovered to be false.

(These models assume all sorts of wrong things about the reality that surrounds us: such as that human beings search for love, that love is selfless, that parents selflessly love their children, that religion develops in us a high moral tone, blah blah blah).

Thus, in my last engagement on the subject of sharing, I described to someone my efforts on behalf of my aunt, who needs to find an apartment, a telephone, a computer, etc., all in a strange Asian country and tongue and who relies for all these things on me. Now, I genuinely like this aunt of mine, even though she bores me to tears with her conversation: I engage in that conversation, all the same, I told my interlocutor, with the sense of filial piety: yes, I am bored, but, what the heck, let her have it, I think to myself.

Replying to this, the sharee in question observed that my aunt being the only member of my family to give the least care about me, I better feel filial towards her. This, as far as I was concerned, exhausted our conversation: I had no intention of telling the sharee that human motivations are a mysterious tangle of all sorts of threads, and that not even Confucius himself could ever hope to disentangle just the extent to which my aunt actually cared for me for my own sake and to what extent she simply needed my help in her new, strange home.

Nor was I going to tell him that there was not a damn thing I ever wanted from my aunt, nor could I think of anything I might want from her, my aunt having very little of practical nature to offer; and that therefore I was indeed acting out of pure, unalloyed filial piety: not because she cared for me, as he put it, or more accurately speaking, was nice to me, but because I am generous and kind and filial and loyal. Which are, all of them, things that I am because I am a chivalrous knight.

Which is something no one I have ever met -- no living person -- seems ever to know diddly squat about.

Which is another reason not to bother sharing: what is the point of dumping on a sharee whose mental capacities are guaranteed to be exceeded by the dumping action?

Angelica says people will read the way one behaves and treat him accordingly; Angelica is mistaken: the so called people, having no conception of knighthood, cannot possibly treat me according to my behavior because they have not the brain capacity to understand it. To them I am merely odd.