I’ve often said that the major tension in my life is that between retreat from ‘the outside world’ and engagement with it. While (tellingly) it remains unresolved, it is indeed the central preoccupation of my latest novel. And I believe all true artists live permanently, and uncomfortably, in this uncertain state.
I’ve grown accustomed to trotting up and down the line between the end points of total privacy and complete exposure, and at times have even found a kind of peace in that routine movement. But last year I read my friend Lucinda Holdforth’s short, excoriating treatise on the bullshit of contemporary life, 21stCentury Virtues: How they are failing our democracy. It’s an analysis of how our culture is embracing self-absorption as an aspirational virtue, and the danger this poses to leadership and democracy. I loved all this book’s provocations, but one in particular set a personal warning bell ringing in the back of my mind – and its toll has only grown louder with the passing of the months.
Among Lucinda’s surprising targets – ‘authenticity’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘empathy’, ‘humility’ and others – was ‘transparency’. I was confronted and confused by this: how could transparency possibly be a bad thing? Well, you need to read the book to see how very convincingly Lucinda argues that ‘transparency’ is a pernicious threat to democracy (hint: fascists love surveillance, and self-surveillance most of all).
But alongside that societal threat, I’ve come to see, is a deeply personal one for me – the danger that our contemporary worship of ‘openness’ will totally destroy the deep privacy of the inner life, a privacy that is essential if art is to flourish.
In this digital and therapeutic era, we should not be astonished at just how much of their private lives modern people are willing to disclose. To anyone. To everyone. Especially for money, but often for free. The veil between the home and the world has now been lifted … The mania for self-explanation and self-exposure means that the concept of a valuable private life is almost meaningless today. At no small cost. ‘A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes … shallow,’ wrote political theorist Hannah Arendt.
These observations hit me hard. And the more I think about it, the more I see that too much voluntary ceding of privacy may threaten to completely extinguish what I call ‘the art spirit’ within myself.
I’m aware, of course, of the irony that I’m attempting to figure out this personal problem here, in such a public way. But like others before me, I also find that writing for an audience is sometimes the only way I can articulate and process my thoughts. As EM Forster and others have said, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ And I’m hoping my attempt to think seriously about this here might circumvent some of the shallowness Hannah Arendt warns us about.
Because I know this shallowness, and increasingly I feel its corrosive force.
I feel this shallowness in the Instagram posts I make several times a week. I feel it when I answer inane questions to help fill magazine columns or social media feeds (If you could have three famous people to dinner who would they be? If you were a character in a book who would it be? What’s a book you hate? Who would play you in the movie of your life? What’s your favourite swearword?) I feel this shallowness, too, in interview questions designed to elicit banal expressions of emotion, and I feel it in the rote, faux-profound remarks we writers routinely dole out about the value of reading, the importance of empathy, blah blah blah.
THE MEMBRANE BETWEEN the private and public self has always been a difficult one for artists to keep intact. My mortgage broker’s private self is of no interest to me, for it has no bearing on her work at hand. But do I love to see inside the artist’s studio, to hear about her childhood, her dreams? Of course I do - for is this deeply personal experience not the wellspring of their work? Is not their art itself, in fact, the deepest expression of that private self? I think it is. But that doesn’t mean I’m owed access to any of it outside my experience of their work. And I’m growing more convinced that the artist’s inner world must be held close if good work is to continue to be made.
Too many of us have allowed the membrane to rupture in both directions. That we put too much of our private selves into the public world is bad enough, but I think the second type of privacy breach is worse: we’ve allowed too much of the public world into our inner lives.
But how does this happen? And how should we address it?
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