“I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes.”
Oscar Wild, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The fear of being known is a human experience. People strive to hide their inner selves, to protect and shield their innermost values – the parts most revered and shameful. Yet it is just as human to long to be known, to wish that someone could climb inside one’s mind if only to finally be understood in all one’s quirks and joys and sorrows. It is the intersection of these desires, the clash of fear and relief, that bring about suffering and, ultimately, contentment.
I cannot claim to be very broadly lived, or experienced, or even knowledgeable about human nature and common journeys. I am 18 years old, quarantined for one and still young enough to be unfamiliar with heartbreak and life’s tests. But I know myself, and I know my friends and family. The nights that have been trapped in my memory like bees in honey are those where I confess the things my heart and mind shout, when I bare my deepest thoughts to their inspection and find understanding or at least a further exploration. And I cannot help but treasure the discussions I have been part of, deep at night but slowly fading to sunlight, when I can learn the intricate ways my friends see their world and learn to feel among its currents. There is no soul like another; there is no one world as we all see it, but many worlds seen many different ways, meshing together in a lattice of thoughts and feelings and observations.
There have been days I wished that I could enter someone’s mind, if only that I could better understand how they see the world, and how they see me. There is a fear that lives in me, quelled after years of self-coaching and calm talking-downs, that wonders what my peers think of me, who they see me to be. There is a constant thrumming under my perception of the world that works vigilantly and almost unnoticed in its efforts to always be monitoring and shifting the way I act in accordance to the people around me. In this I understand when Oscar Wilde, through Dorian Gray, expresses the fear of being bared to the world; there is a shame that lives under the skin, a fear that we are not as we should be, that we are wholly other to the rest of the world. But there is also a pride and understanding, that our souls run so much deeper than seems possible, that our inner selves are built upon currents of feelings and thoughts and memories that run in complex patterns towards the whole we are – even if that whole is only visible through a peephole to the rest of the world.
It is this understanding that the inner self runs far deeper than meets the eye that creates a need to hide it away. It is almost like the awareness of the depths of our souls, hidden away through circumstance and intention, is what makes us fear its being known – in making it unknown, it becomes like a lie we tell the world instead of something that the right people will uncover with patience.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa feels this same fear that Wilde expresses. She has hidden away her inner self – her memories of freedom with Sally, her regrets about Peter, her insecurities left unvoiced – in order to protect herself from society’s scrutiny and finding herself lacking in their testing eyes. But Clarissa finds no security in this strategy, instead only a deeper spiral into herself and her somber ponderings. Clarissa fails to distinguish between friendly and “shallow, prying” eyes.
Wilde may have been correct – or, at the very least, relatable – in expressing the fear and evasion of baring oneself to scrutiny, but this epitaph leaves another perspective unacknowledged. It is unhealthy to isolate oneself and hide one’s soul away: man thrives on connection and meaningful interaction. A life empty of this is no life at all. So it may be prudent to fear being known, but it is nonetheless a profound relief and joy to share one’s inner workings with others deserving and patient enough to appreciate it.