Can You Reclaim Your Mind?

Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called “impersonality,” meant to reclaim their mental lives from the habits they unknowingly followed. The philosopher Raymond Geuss has a story that captures the idea nicely. Geuss recalls a mentor—a school teacher of his—dispensing advice about becoming a visual artist. “Set aside half an hour or forty-five minutes a day,” the mentor said, and then draw, while ignoring “all the exercises and principles and things one might have learned.” Afterward, instead of judging your drawing, look at it and say to yourself, “So, this is what-I-do-on-a-day-like-this.” That’s not unlike observing how a river looks after a heavy rain, Geuss explains. You might say, That’s how the Hudson looks on a rainy day. And you might notice that this is the kind of drawing you make when you’re sad, or elated, or apprehensive, or when money’s tight, or when you’ve just played with your kids, called your mom, gone for a run, or watched “One Battle After Another.”

Impersonality is one of those big ideas that scholars can elucidate forever. It sounds abstract, but on some level it has a simple meaning: seeing yourself less as a fixed point and more as a container. In her book “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World,” the writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff identifies “the self-consistency fallacy” as “the assumption that ‘I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.’ ” She suggests making adventurous “pacts” with yourself and seeing where they lead. You’re not a musician, but you can still decide to write a song every week for six weeks; you’re not a poet, but you can still try writing a poem every day for ten days; you’ve never started a business, but you can still sell something on Etsy. Maybe it will turn out that, actually, you “are” a musician, writer, or entrepreneur. But why focus on what you “are”? It might be enough to find that, for a few minutes here and there, your mind can contain music, poetry, and ambition. Something new can happen in that quiet room.

Truman Capote titled his first novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms.” The book is about a teen-age boy who, after a family tragedy, goes to live in a faraway house with relatives he hardly knows. The title evokes the discovery, in adolescence, that the world is full of strangers with their own concerns; the knowledge that life is full of secret stories and languages; and the understanding that, in society, the voices we know would be drowned out if we could hear the ones that go unheard. It also captures a sense of possible transformation. Of his protagonist, Capote writes, “A flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door.”

If, like me, you’re decades past adolescence, it can be hard to remember the scary thrill of hearing other voices in other rooms. You may no longer want to hear them: there’s something to be said for laying down rugs, hanging curtains, and listening intently to what’s happening in the specific room you happen to inhabit. Still, feeling a little too well insulated, I’ve had my ear to the wall. I’ve been eavesdropping on my friend J., who’s taught himself a new art form, and on W., a musician I know whose unself-conscious, intuitive creativity I’ve long admired, among others. Psychologists and guidance counsellors talk about role models, but that’s not quite what I’m after. In an essay called “The Good of Friendship,” from 2010, the philosopher Alexander Nehamas notes that our friends don’t necessarily act in ways that inspire us; in fact, hanging out with them often involves activities that are “trivial, commonplace, and boring.” Nevertheless, our friendships offer us “opportunities to try different ways of being.” That’s closer.

What does it really mean to be in charge of your own mind? In many aspects of life, it’s easier to say what we don’t want than it is to say what we do. We don’t want to be screen-addled, apocalypse-minded nervous wrecks, incapable of reading for more than a quarter-hour at a time—fair enough. But who do we want to be? Maybe we just want to be people for whom that’s a live question. Reclaiming your mind might come down to reasserting your right to wonder what it’s for. ♦