"Unless
you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man -- that
is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself -- yourself,
yourself, yourself -- the only companion that is never satisfied --
and never satisfactory."
Michael Moon
had it entirely right, I think. In particular, he understood very
well what it means to spend too much time with oneself, perhaps
because he was a man given to introspection, a very helpful thing
that--like a good many helpful things--can become quite the opposite
when taken too far.
I think Oscar
Wilde would also have agreed, at least judging from an entry in The
Devil's Dictionary: Alone, adj. In bad company.
In any case,
sometimes one tires so much of being with the unsatisfactory and
unsatisfied--and sometimes downright unpleasant--companion that is
oneself that he wishes for nothing but to be rid of him. No doubt he
would divorce him if he could. However, so far as I know, one cannot
yet do this, though I have read that it is possible to marry oneself
(which seems to me a matter of the greatest ludicrousness).
The next best
thing, naturally, is to be someone else.
Now this
thought may cause laughter, as if I were joking, but I assure any
lingering readers that I am quite serious. Perhaps I can ask you
this question: have you ever longed with an insatiable desire to be
someone else?
Now of course
there may be various reasons one wishes to be someone else. Envy for
instance is a very compelling reason--even if there is little reason
to its madness.
However, my
thought allies itself more firmly with another consideration: the
life of an actor. For, after all, that is just his business: to
spend his life being someone else. Of course the paradox of this is
that in some sense he is never more himself than when he is someone
else. As soon as he accepts the bounds of the character he is to
play, suddenly he becomes free to be whatever he will within that
framework, no longer imprisoned by his own thoughts and needs and
desires, nor by what he "should" do, and most of all no
longer shackled by that incapacitating consideration of what he wants
himself to be. This becoming of someone one else then is how he
learns who he truly is, or at the very least--if he will remain blind
to it--he reveals to others the depths of his soul.
I cannot help
but wonder whether that desire for acting--one might say even the
vocation to this great art--comes from that need to be someone other
than oneself. And that in turn raises another question: are we only
actors because of the restlessness of our nature and our discontent
with what we are--in short because we cannot bear to be ourselves?
