The Things We Don’t Tell People…

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” – George Orwell

Apologies to people arriving here in the hope of some dirt, some unadulterated drunken admissions that upon waking, deliver you into a fresh world of unrepairable fury and decimation. It’s not a confessional. It’s too early in my life for that.

There’s so much we don’t tell people, and frankly, it’s probably for the best. I’m not just referring to first dates when you neglect to mention your favorite past time is lying passed out on the sofa in front of 24hours live-feed of World Golf tournaments. I’m referring to all those bits of us that tick-over in our heads unbeknown to anyone. Our lives are like that John Arnold quote about war as ‘long periods of boredom punctuated by short moments of excitement,’ only the excitement is not spilling take-away coffee over yourself on the packed-commuter train.

A significant reason for not telling anyone how mundane our thoughts are is because everyone else is too busy doing it too. I spend my time saying things like ‘there’s a tree’, considering what occasional tables are up to when not being a table, and every time I find myself behind a Nissan Micra curious if they actually have a third gear. It’s also stuff like a wondering how painful a finger cut will be now since I took a paracetamol for a toothache; will I even feel it?

The internal commentary whiles away the days, like punting carelessly on a slow-flowing river, although I’d prefer to be perfecting the design for a silently levitating chair (it has to be silent or you’d be unable to hear the golf on TV), but in fact I’m just looking at the world and naming stuff, stuff that is already named, so I keep it to myself. I’d freely admit to composting teabags as being an early highlight of the day, but it’s with the same internal comment about how I’m anticipating digging it into the garden. It’s probably at the same time every day. The inside of my head is like the ongoing wittering of local radio Drive Time, where they have a phone in about the countywide poor availability of fish.

I guess this is why pop stars and film stars are so appealing. They have a script unless it’s a Mike Leigh, which cuts out all the ‘did you get any milk? stuff out and cuts to the chase of a plot. Our lives don’t have a plot until the end, and you’re left asking who the hell was writing it, why were they so obsessed with tea and sex and could you have a refund?

It’s probably why reading remains so popular (as all writers keep telling themselves) because there’s never a queue at the taxi rank, there’s always milk in the fridge and there’s extra-marital sex in showers without anyone having to mop up afterward, neither literally or metaphorically. The characters have a mind focused entirely on the thrust of the story, at least they do once the writer works out what the hell the story is, and if their characters do comment dopily on the weather you can delete and pretend it never happened.

That’s how most writers operate, but then there is always Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose recently published final book My Struggle, goes into so much detail that this 6th volume needs to be fitted with wheels like luggage does these days. He considers description and the minutiae of thoughts as crucial and shares them. Perhaps there is some sense of life to be found in the mundane, in our endearing preoccupations and simple aspirations. His description of cornflakes is as detailed as his love affairs, which suggests either my cornflakes prep needs looking at or my affairs do. We think of lives as lines, but in fact, they are dots, and as Henry James recommended, be one of those people on whom nothing is lost, and these seemingly anodyne thoughts are what make us, so embrace them and smile.

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Originally published on Idle blogs of an idle fellow

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Photo by Maxi Carre on Unsplash

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