Appearances are deceiving

Before answering who the other is or appears to be, remember the maxim “do not judge so that you will not be judged...

What kind of person are you?

This question is very open and the answer requires a set of factors that involve emotions, professional routine, social life, family... The list is extensive.

That's a complex personal description; but does your definition of yourself harmonize with others' descriptions of you?

Then ask:

“What kind of person did I appear to be?”

“What adjectives do people use to describe me?”.

Interesting is how we define people by isolated and specific points, but forget the whole; we usually rate people reactively, that is, we qualify the other the way the other makes us feel. However, these reactive responses tend to use similar parts of different individuals to help or hurt the individual based on how the evaluator feels about the interaction; that is, we use selectivity and convenience.

As an example, let's analyze the lives of two great writers:

Fyodor Dostoevsky, a man who suffered many losses throughout his life (father, mother, wife, son), had a gambling addiction. Because of this, he got into a lot of debt and even fled the city with his second wife to get rid of the charge; he also turned out to be a revolutionary man and was arrested (a political prisoner).

Now, taking this brief description, analyze (in isolation and without connection with the writer), a person addicted to games, "deadbeat" and ex-convict. These traits don't inspire confidence, do they? However, our connection or influential contact with Dostoevsky is restricted to the books he wrote. Precisely because of this, his life becomes secondary. The productions of this writer have an effect of easy identification of the reader with the characters, his writing technique deals in an extraordinary way with themes of the complexities of the human psyche and this makes his readers secret accomplices.

In the opposite direction, we find Friedrich Nietzsche. A German writer, raised to be a pastor, from a young age stood out in academia, so much so that he became an educator at a very young age and even with his fragile health, he spent his life affirming life. Nietzsche fought the denials of life and being an atypical writer – as he describes himself –, with his hammer philosophy, he caused a reactive action in his time and until today we find critics inflamed by his ideas. Again, it is our contact with the works that dictates the impression we create of the author; and that being so, a sick young professor is weightless when what he writes falls like dynamite to sensitive ears.

However, there is a peculiar similarity between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Both had, to some degree, nervous disorders. In Nietzsche, for example, due to advanced stage syphilis, he suffered a gradual loss of his lucidity.

Fyodor, on the other hand, describes his mental breakdown as fuel for writing in a letter addressed to his brother, while awaiting his trial dated 27 August 1849:

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“For some time now I have had the impression that the floor is shaking under my feet and I am in my room as if I were in the cabin of a steamship. The conclusion I draw from this is that my nerves are shaken. Before, when I was taken by that state of nerves, I took the opportunity to write – in that state it was always possible to write more and better –, but now I try to contain myself so as not to destroy myself completely”. (DOSTOIÉVSKI, 1849).

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As can be seen, although both suffered from mental weaknesses, reasons are still pointed out today as reasons to invalidate or disparage Nietzsche's work, but in the case of Dostoevsky this fact is rarely pointed out, and this discrepancy in dealing with a similar point leads me to thinking about the motivations of the reader that he qualifies, in a different way, as a pure reactive instinct to what he felt about reading.

It makes me wonder how many people are reactively taxed; so easily do we use the instinct of self-preservation and annul the whole that makes up the other to catch an isolated action (or a detail) that particularly bothers us. With that, we label the other permanent as “a type” that does not translate the whole and, therefore, does not say what kind of person he is.

Sometimes it is necessary to review what kind of person I am and what kind of person I appear to be. But, before answering who the other is or appears to be, remember the maxim “do not judge so that you will not be judged”.

Cleisianne Leite.

Fomanda in Librarianship.