Richard Greenberg - Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions

The young womana girl, really: eighteenwas touching. She was writing plays and frustrated that they were invariably about herself.

I failed her. My advice boiled down to There, there. She was young; later she would be old. Things would sort themselves out.

On the ride home from her question, I gave myself a do-over. Make a helpful answer. In the mirage of a second draft I said this:

Acknowledge that youre the center of the universe, then radiate.

She wanted a specific exercise; she wanted out!

Go online, I told her, and bring up the front page of the New York Times from the day you were born. Read every article. In amazement.

True, we no longer believe that A caused B then C happened, as playwrights who thought they were emulating Ibsen did. This should not be taken to mean that nothing causes anything. More that everything causes everything. We travel through clouds of influence. The New York Times will show you some of the influences into which you were born.

Do they stun you? Does any of it seem familiar? The New York Times was already guessing what would be happening now; was it naive? Does anything explain that thing your dad is always saying? Does some fact interest you for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with you? Pursue it. In some distant manner, its connected to you.

The best thinking says the self is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet its a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe its nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is comforting. So that the self is just the consolation of our tendencies. This is too deep for me.

The reason I never write personal essays is that I have no idea who I is. Setting out to write some, I had to locate my main tendencies and, for the sake of convenience, label them.

I would say I am an Urban Recluse.

The phrase is problematic, luckily. My brother, who trained as an economist, once accused me, as though I transgressed, of being the kind of human integer that screwed up his quantitative analyses (at last, a virtue!). Maybe so. My life goes heavy on the interiors; still, its crucial that their windows look out on the densest, most complex, most confounding system of social arrangements yet devised. Its what I like to watch. Then I make up stories about it.

My tendency.

When I call myself an Urban Recluse, I know the phrase doesnt constitute an identity, much less a self. Its the angle from which I radiate, and thats all I have to say about it.

MANIFESTO