A few years before, Chloe had for a time gone out with an academic at London University. The analytical philosopher, who had written five books and contributed to many scholarly journals, had left her with a sense of total mental inadequacy. How had he done this? Chloe couldn't tell. Without ever expressly saying anything critical, he had succeeded in shaping the amoeba according to his preconceptions, namely, that Chloe was a beautiful young student who should leave matters of the mind to him. And so, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Chloe had begun unconsciously acting on the verdict of her character, handed out like a covert end-of-term report by the wise philosopher who had written five books and contributed to many scholarly journals. She had ended up feeling exactly as stupid as she was believed to be.
Children are always described from a third-person perspective ('Isn't Chloe a cute/ugly/intelligent/stupid kid?') before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood. Most people get us wrong, either out of neglect or prejudice. Even being loved implies a gross bias - a pleasant distortion, but a distortion nevertheless. Like Narcissus, we are doomed to disappointment in gazing at our reflection in the watery eyes of another. No eye can wholly contain our ‘I’. We will always be chopped off in some area or other, fatally or not.
When I told Chloe my idea that people's personalities in relationships were a bit like amoebas, she laughed and told me she'd loved drawing amoebas at school.
"Here, give me the newspaper,' she said, reaching in her bag for a pencil. I’ll draw you the difference between what shape my amoeba-self has at the office and what shape it has with you.'
Then she drew the following:
0100090000037800000002001c00000000000400000003010800050000000b0200000000050000000c0287049a08040000002e0118001c000000fb021000070000000000bc02000000000102022253797374656d00049a080000cabf00006454110070838239b8eb16000c020000040000002d01000004000000020101001c000000fb029cff0000000000009001000000000440001254696d6573204e657720526f6d616e0000000000000000000000000000000000040000002d010100050000000902000000020d000000320a5a00000001000400000000009808840420002d00040000002d010000030000000000
'What are all the wiggly bits?' I asked.
'Oh, that's because I feel wiggly around you.'
'What?'
'Well, you know, you give me space. I feel more complicated than in the office. You're interested in me and you understand me better, so that's why I made it wiggly, so that it's sort of natural.'
'OK, I see, so what's this straight side?'
'Where?'
'Up in the north-west of the amoeba.'
'You know I never did much geography. But yeah, I think I see it. Well, you don't understand everything about me, do you? So I thought I'd better make it more realistic. The straight line is all the sides of me you don't understand or don't have time for and stuff.'
Oh.'
'Christ, don't make that long face, you wouldn't want to know what could happen if that line went squiggly! And don't worry, if it was that serious, I wouldn't be squidged here with you being such a happy amoeba.'
What did Chloe mean by her amoebic straight line? Just that I could not wholly understand her, an unsurprising but still sobering reminder of the limits of empathy. What was frustrating my efforts? Perhaps that I was constrained to fathoming her through my existing conceptions of human nature. My knowledge of her was necessarily filtered through my own past. Like a European who orients himself in a Rocky Mountain landscape by saying, 'This looks just like Switzerland,' I might only have grasped the source of one of Chloe's depressed moods by thinking, 'It's because she's feeling x. . . like my sister when . . .' To comprehend her, I had to rely on an understanding of human nature that had been shaped by my biology, class, and psychological biography.
To illustrate how we can only ever pick up on certain elements in our beloveds' characters, we might compare the way we look at them to a barbecue skewer. For instance, I was able to skewer (or appreciate or relate) to Chloe's:
irony – colour of eyes – gap between two front teeth
intellect – talent for baking bread – relationship with her mother – social anxiety – love of Beethoven – hatred of laziness – taste for camomile tea – objection to snobbery – love of woollen clothes – claustrophobia – desire for honesty
Yet this was far from comprising everything about her. Had I been a different barbecue skewer, I might have had more time for her:
interest in healthy eating – ankles – love of outdoor markets – mathematical talent – relationship with her brother
love of nightclubs – thoughts on God– enthusiasm for rice
Degas – skating – long country walks – objection to music in the car – taste for Victorian architecture –»
Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe's nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand. I was responsible for the greatest but most unavoidable abbreviation of all, that of only being able to participate in Chloe's life as an outsider, someone whose inner world I could imagine, but never directly experience. However close we might be, Chloe was in the end another human being, with all the mystery and distance this implied, the inevitable distance embodied in the thought that we must die alone.
We long for a love in which we are never reduced or misunderstood. We have a morbid resistance to classification by others, to others placing labels on us (the man, the woman, the rich one, the poor one, the Jew, the Catholic, etc.). To ourselves, we are after all always un-labelable. When alone, we are always simply 'me', and shift between sides of ourselves effortlessly and without the constraints imposed by the preconceptions of others. But hearing Chloe one day talk of 'this guy I was seeing a while back', I was saddened to imagine myself in a few years' time (another man facing her across the tuna salad) being described merely as 'this architect guy I was once seeing . . .' Her casual reference to a past lover provided the necessary objectification for me to realize that, however special I was to her, I still existed within certain definitions ('a guy', 'my boyfriend') – and that in Chloe's eyes, I was necessarily a simplified version of myself.
19- But as we must be labelled, characterized, and defined by others, the person we end up loving is the good-enough barbecue skewerer, the person who loves us for more or less the things we deem ourselves to be lovable for, who understands us for more or less the things we need to be understood for. That Chloeba and I were together implied that, for the moment at least, we had been given enough room to expand in the ways our complexities demanded.
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