Topical Guide 511
Mark Dorset
Style and Attitude
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 5:
“He’s wearing a gray suit,” says Matthew. Matthew’s wearing a gray suit, too, but the young man’s is better tailored. It drapes in a relaxed way that Matthew has always admired but never achieved, though he fusses over the fit of his jackets for months after he begins wearing them, and again and again he trots them over to a seamstress — a Swiss woman, as it happens — to have buttons shifted and reshifted, sleeves shortened or lengthened, or to have the linings, which have an infuriating habit of hanging below the back, shortened.
Perhaps, Matthew, whispers BW, this relaxed drape is more a matter of attitude than fabric and tailoring — insouciance, friend, insouciance. When you don’t care how it hangs, then, and only then, it will hang with that careless perfection you pursue by shifting buttons.
Talking to Oneself (“Self-Talk”)
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 5:
Leave me alone.
Then, too, adds BW, the fellow is considerably younger than you are, and in better shape. That would have something to do with it.
“How old?” asks Leila.
“What?” says Matthew, startled. Jesus! I’m going nuts. I’m starting to talk to myself. Leave me alone.
WebMD Editorial Contributors, “Why Do People Talk to Themselves?”
Most people talk to themselves regularly. This may happen when thinking through ideas, when debating decisions, or when in need of a pep talk. Some people feel that self-talk creates a “presence” around them that makes them feel better. This can help with loneliness. […]
It’s more common for people to talk to themselves than to not. According to one study, 96% of adults say they have an internal dialogue. While self-talk out loud is less common, 25% of the adults say they do it. […]
Inner dialogue usually sounds similar to the way you would speak to others. This kind of self-talk can occur quietly inside your head or be spoken out loud. Either way, it’s a passive activity—simply listening to your own thoughts.
Another type of internal self-talk happens when you’re debating something with yourself—not just listening to your thoughts. Some people feel their inner dialogue [comes] from a specific place in their body. This could be in their chest or certain parts of their head. […]
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:
The gods were in no sense “figments of the imagination” of anyone. They were man’s volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then “told” the man what to do. […]
Let it be stressed parenthetically here that the Muses were not figments of anyone’s imagination. […] The beautiful Muses with their unison “lily-like” voice, dancing out of the thick mists of evening, thumping on soft and vigorous feet about the lonely enraptured shepherd, these arrogances of delicacy were the hallucinatory sources of memory in late bicameral men, men who did not live in a frame of past happenings, who did not have “lifetimes” in our sense, and who could not reminisce because they were not fully conscious. […]
The advantage of an idea of your self is to help you know what you can or can’t do or should or should not do. Bicameral individuals had stable identities, names to which they or others could attach epithets, but such verbal identity is a far shallower form of behavior than the consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.
See also:
Aesthetics: TG 462; Aesthetic Choices TG 49; Aesthetics; Style TG 82, TG 461
Self-Presentation (or Presentation of the Self) TG 427, TG 508; Voice of Reason, Man of Action, Madman, the Engagé and the Dégagé TG 430; Altruist TG 443; Devil-May-Care Bon-Vivants, Self-Denying Elder, and Outspoken Rebel TG 446
Style: Flooring TG 141
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