Being Earnest
The truth is, people don’t see you for who you are. They see you for who they need you to be.
I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
I first met Oscar Wilde through his fairy tales.1 At a time when I was surrounded by Cinderella and Peter Pan, his stories, with their tragic undertones, stood out to me. The Happy Prince with his jewels ripped away, blind and alone in the winter cold, the Nightingale with her chest pierced, dying of blood loss: their suffering was inspiring.
I suppose my inclination for tragedy emerged at a young age. In fact, I’ve always dreaded comedies: shallow and boring with no insights nor wisdom. I like books that make me feel wistful and ashamed and stupid and sad, but not happy. Happy endings do end up depressing me so much. To this day, I still don’t get the point of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that generates no profound reflections and (not that I’m proud) remains the sole production that brought me to sleep in a packed auditorium. I enjoy Macbeth much better, for it not only warns against power and ambition, but also brings legendary advice such as “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” Chris McCandless is a wandering legend because he dies on his travels, Madame Bovary is a cautionary classic because Emma fails her romantic endeavors at self-reinvention. A story without misery is a soulless one, I thought.
All of this means there was no logical reason for me to read The Importance of Being Earnest — few plays are more comedic. I picked it up as a palate cleanser after Long Day’s Journey into Night, found it genuinely funny, and moved on. That was the first time.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
On a rare work-free night, I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley. Matt Damon’s face as he plays piano in a borrowed jacket, posing for a world that isn’t his. I couldn’t stop thinking about the impersonation of a rich playboy and pretending to be Ernest, so I made the midnight decision to read The Importance of Being Earnest again. This time around, no longer the palate cleanser between two dismal plays, it brought me considerations of my own hypocrisy.
I hated the first couple of weeks of college when we were herded like cattle in our froco groups. I hated never having time to collect my thoughts since we were either at some random workshop or on the way to one. I hated that all of this mandatory socialization has a glorious name of “Camp Yale.” Now, after two semesters of refamiliarizing myself with the fast-paced cycle of lectures-homework-exam which reminds me, more than anything, of the terrors of high school, I miss it and think I was an idiot for hating weeks of having no work whatsoever.
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
What I have only recently noticed, though, is how social I had been during Camp Yale. Eager to meet new people through childish scavenger hunts. Enthusiastic to introduce myself in awkward icebreakers. It’s not until my introverted self began to show, as the cordiality receded like an ebb tide, that I realized it might have been no more than a grand façade — the outgoingness grossly unrepresentative of me in my natural habitat. In retrospect, it was tiring to seem naturally versed in social functions: Talking to people was mentally draining, going out was physical exhausting, and having people forget your name every time you see them was draining and exhausting. It was all an overwhelming display.
How I survived those weeks as a high-spirited creature remains a mystery to me, but I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I was constantly surrounded by such an illustrious and gregarious crowd — some of whom believers of once a week is quite enough to dine with one’s own relations2 — that I felt like I needed to change myself to conform, to blend in, to seem like I belonged and deserved to be here, as if socialness equated cleverness.3
Imposter syndrome, I guess. I feel like one sometimes, when I pretend like I care, or that I’m nice, or that I’m actually interested in what the person sitting across from me in the dining hall is saying. “Fake it till you make it.” Side effects of which include becoming addicted to pretense. You lose focus, because for as long as you haven’t made it, you would be faking it. Lies lead to lies lead to more lies. For example, I haven’t actually seen The Talented Mr. Ripley, I just needed an excuse to talk about Oscar Wilde. And now I have to spend my entire life terrified of someone asking me about the movie. That’s the tax.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The truth is, people don’t see you for who you are. They see you for who they need you to be. Masking myself in protective veneers is not going to be bothersome for other people as it would be for me: they don’t have the time nor the effort to discover the real me. Other people may never know that I was introverted, or that I loathed socialization — I was the one under pressure. I cannot decide what other people see in me, but I can change how I act. It is my own responsibility to lead a genuine life, to be earnest.
That said, it would be quite boring if I look back at the end of my life and realize I have always told the truth. It makes a terrible story. In the play, Jack has two identities, and Algernon has the perpetually unwell friend Bunbury, both ploys to help them escape their responsibilities. To an extent, we are all hypocrites: nobody behaves exactly the same in front of his buddies at a bachelor’s party and his parents at his grandma’s birthday. We are inherently capricious creatures: our thoughts and actions depend greatly on our company and surroundings. Sometimes we are honest, other times we pretend like we are honest. The diametrically opposed concepts of truth and untruth coexist in our psyche. That is how we survive.
And that is my lesson to do what makes me feel comfortable. I don’t force myself to attend superfluous events. I don’t go out of my way to talk to people. I don’t fear missing out. I don’t pretend like I care. I choose when to be blatantly truthful and when to keep my silence. In doing so, I see a fine world worth being earnest for.
Fun fact: at the time, I thought he was Chinese, since his name was Wang Erde (phonetic) according to the stories in translation I read in my childhood, and it wasn’t until later, when I looked up the author of The Importance of Being Earnest on the internet that I realized they are the same person.
This is my favorite line from the play, but I never realized there are people who live by it until I came to Yale - people who are simply too busy to have more than one meal with their friends every week, or who always cancel dinner plans last minute because of matters of graver importance. To them, I would like to quote Oscar Wilde: “I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”
I am now “sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”