My friend and I are guiltily wondering together why we both find it easiest to look after ourselves, to eat well and sleep well and focus properly on what we’re doing, when we’re alone. Although I sometimes long for solitude, when I get it the first day is blissful, the second is fine as long as I can have a long phone conversation and on the third I need real human company.
As writers go, I’m a crap introvert. But I do like to have the house to myself, to cook what I want to eat when I want to eat it, to get up and go to bed when I feel like it, to stay out or in exactly as long as suits my mood. In reality, no one in my house actively prevents any of this when they’re there. One of the things I enjoy about being the family cook is that mostly we eat what I feel like making, and mostly the others are happy to be fed. They’re not watching me. The voices in my head criticising a late rising or early (or late) bedtime, too long indoors or outdoors, are coming from another country in another century, but they’re still quieter when there’s no one watching.
It’s like mirrors, my friend says, I’m just happier without them, it’s not that I hate the sight of myself, I just don’t want to have to think about it. Me too, I say, one by the door to check that we’re respectable before we leave the house, otherwise best not. I remember a dark Victorian house in England that we tried to brighten with mirrors opposite the windows, hoping to bounce sunlight into an unnaturally cold and gloomy place. The mirrors just made me slightly nervous as well as cold and gloomy, always catching myself unawares, always half-glimpsing something or other that might have been just a person walking down the road outside. I don’t need to see myself. I don’t wear makeup, most of my clothes are old friends and I know how to braid my hair. There’s enough self-surveillance in my head without putting it up on the wall.
We’re talking, I realise, about reflections, the similar discomforts of mirrors, photos and the gaze of others
We talk about how much we dislike photos of ourselves, and I wonder again how differently people thought of themselves in all the centuries before there were clear mirrors or even flat glass in every house, when the sight of one’s own face was rare and almost always distorted.
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When someone takes a group photo at a book event, I often notice a clear generational distinction between those who more or less grew up with social media and phone cameras that look both ways, and those who came to this kind of solipsism in adulthood, who are less likely to know what to do with their faces and bodies in front of a camera.
I have never used social media and was always the family photographer, firmly behind the camera. When I am photographed I look awkward, wooden, smiling like someone who just wants this to stop now (see above). But still, I remind my friend, older photos are fine, when I look at the ones we took at university I can’t imagine why we thought ourselves anything but young and lovely, maybe in another 30 years it’ll be the same. But neither of us really believes in ourselves or the world in another 30 years.
We’re talking, I realise, about reflections, the similar discomforts of mirrors, photos and the gaze of others. Both of us live pretty well-examined lives, and also both of us want more windows than mirrors in our material and metaphorical homes. We aspire to look out more than in, to meet the world frankly, from behind our eyes, between our ears, with our hearts and hands and feet, not through the uncanny reversal of the mirror and the turned camera. And one of the obstacles to that frankness is the tendency to imagine other people as our own mirrors, to see in their faces and hear in their voices the fears and fantasies we bring from early life. We can’t get away from our own shadows, nor meet others without bringing ourselves, but I think as my friend and I pay for our coffee and go out into the city that it is important to keep trying.