Hiding acoustically

Aren’t you excited about the party you’re at, what, with all the small talk and the mingling and the catching up on life and work? People are decked out in ill-fitting jeans and comfortable shoes, cracking dad jokes while eating focaccia flavoured with haste and regret. The kids have gotten so big! Weren’t they just babies? Time flies, except now, you think. You keep your eye on the man who drinks his first beer too fast for our age and you know he’s doing it to be able to bear us, bear himself, bear life, bear it all until the party’s over. Someone likes a show on Netflix; we smile and nod and the conversation peters out. We sit in lounge chairs and chat, pretending to relate, acting like something meaningful can happen at this barbecue, but the good part never comes. The time passes and eventually you can leave without being rude.
Do you ever get tired of your own skin? Do you dream that in people’s entryways there could be a mask rack, like a coat rack for false faces? I think of humans as the walking wounded, so why do we go around hiding our sores? I’m pretty good at detecting a pair of sad eyes, but I don’t acknowledge them because I think their host is hoping no one will notice. I’m not the first wackadoo to diagnose humanity with dread or despair, but I am a contemporary philosopher standing atop a pyramid of dead existentialists who said that humans are built to feel scared and sad and anxious and worried and angry. And yet, we geniuses have designed a society in which expressing true feelings in public is discouraged. So, like amateur magicians, we tuck our lamentations into our waistcoat pocket while bantering about the rain. If we’re good enough, our audience doesn’t notice the sleight of hand.
Seven years before he died, Søren Kierkegaard accused his fellow Danes of “idle chat,” which, he said, “dreads the moment of silence that would make the emptiness plain.” Kierkegaard knew about emptiness – he called off his engagement to spare his beloved a life filled with his depression and anxiety. Members of the “present age,” he wrote in 1848, fear silence and are uncomfortable in a world without distractions. For Kierkegaard, the age was altogether too “sensible,” “reflective,” and “dispassionate,” “eruptive in its fleeting enthusiasms and prudently indolent in its relaxation.” People were fans of chatter then and not much has changed in almost 200 years. Today, we still fill our emptiness with noise and have gotten used to hiding from everyone while talking about nothing.
It’s not a moral condemnation, clarified Martin Heidegger less than a hundred years later. We engage in “idle talk” because it’s our everyday mode of discourse; it’s the skin on a conversation. If we didn’t engage in small talk or gossip or, what Heidegger called “passing the word along,” we would not be able to hang together for long. Existentialists may hate all this covering up, but it’s necessary, and, in truth, revealing ourselves is also exhausting. So what if chatter is our way of fleeing from death, emptiness, despair, and truth; who doesn’t love to blink? A little inauthenticity can provide a lot of relief, and our pain is none of anyone’s business anyway.
Still, I would pay to huddle in a dark bar on a sunny day with my other existential ancestors like Albert Camus and Emil Cioran, to compare lesions and laugh at ourselves, and most of all to wonder how the people outside can stand to talk sports and square footage for as long as they do.
I recently subjected my philosophy students to Arthur Aron’s set of 36 questions to get to know a person better, in an attempt to challenge Simone Weil, who had said that our personalities are not as important as we like to think. The questions were divided into three rounds, each growing more intimate. Since there were an uneven number of students, I had to get real with a soul barely older than my kids. The first round felt noisy, as chit-chat often is, with questions like: “Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?” The second round got quieter, with us sharing our best and worst memories. In the third round, after some giggling, we practically whispered our answers to the question: When was the last time you cried?
I had only allotted five minutes to each set of questions, as per game rules. One group out of ten got to the end of the questions in any round; the rest ignored the clock and lingered in vulnerability. When we debriefed as a class, some students reported that they liked the exercise; they appreciated the chance to share their inner selves. You hardly ever show yourself to people you see on a regular basis, they said, because you never know who is going to judge you. Like the rest of us, these young people have memories of having been shamed for saying the true thing. They would reveal more of themselves, they reported, if they could know ahead of time that they would not be seen as weird.
Is this why we choose barbecues over existentialist bars? Are we all just afraid of people judging us for being too…emotional, cynical, odd, ordinary, dorky, intense, frivolous, dark? What would it take for us to take the risk, to exchange small talk for big talk? In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker talks about intentional gatherings, where guests are invited for a specific purpose, not just to pass the time. All-day dates, cooking parties, pottery classes – these at least seem designed to elicit more authenticity than your standard barbecue. Of course, we are perfectly capable of hiding ourselves from each other here too, but at least we’d be trying to get quieter.
Here’s my modest proposal: whatever, whenever and however we gather, we push ourselves and tempt each other to be 1% more honest, 1% more vulnerable, 1% more real with each other. It doesn’t have to involve revealing secrets to one another, and we can start slowly. We can take a cue from the American singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who in a recent interview reported that once a year she and her long-distance best friend get together and don’t talk. On their most recent visit, they caulked together for six hours without any conversation at all. They didn’t fill the silence; they didn’t hide in noise. We can start here, by simply being present.