An Actor's Discontent

"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?