TITLE: Pretending
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 30, 2011 11:05 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
Kurt Vonnegut never hesitated to tell his readers the morals
of his stories. The frontispiece of his novel Mother
Night states its moral upfront:
We are what we pretend to be,
so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Pretending is a core thread that runs through all of Vonnegut's
work. I recognized this as a teenager, and perhaps it is what
drew me to his books and stories. As a junior in high school,
I wrote my major research paper in English class on the role
fantasy played in the lives of Vonnegut's characters. (My
teachers usually resisted my efforts to write about authors
such as Kafka, Vonnegut, and Asimov, because they weren't part
of "the canon". They always relented, eventually, and I got to
spend more time thinking about works I loved.)
I first used this sentence about pretending in
my eulogy for Vonnegut,
which includes a couple of other passages on similar themes.
Several of those are from Bokononism, the religion created in
his novel Cat's Cradle as a way to help the natives of
the island of San Lorenzo endure their otherwise unbearable lives.
Bokononism had such an effect on me that I spent part of one
summer many years ago transcribing
The Books of Bokonon
onto the web. (In these more modern times, I share Bokonon's
wisdom
via Twitter.)
Pretending is not just a way to overcome pain and suffering. Even
for Vonnegut, play and pretense are the ways we construct the sane,
moral, kind world in which we want to live. Pretending is, at its
root, a necessary component in how we train our minds and bodies
to think and act as we want them to. Over the years, I've written
many times on this blog about the formation of habits of mind and
body, whether as a computer scientist, a student, or a distance
runner.
Many people quote Aristotle as the paradigm of this truth:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act,
but a habit.
I like this passage but prefer another of his, which I once quoted
in a short piece,
What Remains Is What Will Matter:
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not
act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we
have those because we have acted rightly.
This idea came charging into my mind this morning as I read
an interview with Seth Godin.
He and his interviewers are discussing the steady stream of
rejection that most entrepreneurs face, and how some people seem
able to fight through it to succeed. What if a person's natural
"thermostat" predisposes them to fold in the face of rejection?
Godin says:
I think we can reset our inclinations. I'm certain that
pretending we can is better than admitting we can't.
Vonnegut and Aristotle would be proud. We are what we pretend to
be. If we wish to be virtuous, then we must act rightly. If we
wish to be the sort of person who responds to rejection by working
harder and succeeding, then we must work harder. We become the
person we pretend to be.
As children, we think pretending is about being someone we aren't.
And there is great fun in that. As teenagers, sometimes we feel
a need to pretend, because we have so little control over our
world and even over our changing selves. As adults, we tend to
want to put pretending away as child's play. But this obscures
a truth that Vonnegut and Aristotle are trying to teach us:
Pretending is just as much about being who we are as
about being who we aren't.
As you and I consider the coming of a new year and what we might
resolve to do better or differently in the coming twelve months
that will make a real difference in our lives, I suggest we take
a page out of Vonnegut's playbook.
Think about the kind of world you want to live in, then live as
if it exists.
Think about the kind of person you want to be, then live as if you
are that person.
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