For once, there are a great many things in my life I’d rather not discuss. I don’t know how to describe the vast relational distance between my heart and anyone else’s. I can say it’s been a convergence of deluges from the past, present, and future all in one month. Again and again, I tire of explaining the same diddly disappointments. I love people whose behavior I cannot reconcile with the stories they tell about themselves. And I’m tired of turning things I’ve survived into material. I have made a career, or something resembling one, out of telling the truth. Lately, I’ve been wondering how much of it I owe anyone if they can’t meet me with their own.
Avoidance, since we are on the topic, seems to be the most purchased of all the little black dresses. It’s also a peculiar kind of artistic constraint. Artists are accustomed to working within limitations. But avoiding so much else has left me thinking about one particular conversation, held downtown over port, well past nine, an hour when I’m rarely out anymore. Someone recently told me that, after nearly a decade, they had finally acquired more humility. I believed them in that somehow still-naive, heart-on-my-sleeve way that the kids call “cringe.” Only later did I begin to suspect that this person still had miles to go.
The French call it humilité, a word descended from the Latin humilitas, itself rooted in humus, the earth. To be humble is, quite literally, to be brought down to earth. But when did being brought down become fashionable? Greatness might lie not in rising above others, but in refusing to do so. A peculiar arrogance lies in believing we have finished understanding another human being. Even when their behavior has disappointed us. It might ask us to leave room for the possibility that a person is more than the worst thing we know about them.
In art, humility has its own visual language. Small figures beneath enormous skies suggest the individual’s insignificance against creation’s vastness. But twentieth-century artists also began asking how little a painting could contain before it stopped being a painting at all. Agnes Martin made delicate grids and pale fields of color, paintings that appear almost empty until we approach them. In On a Clear Day, the repetition of lines becomes something closer to meditation than decoration. She described painting as accepting “the necessity of the simple.” Restraint can express discipline, but it can also become its own form of authority. Look how little I require. Look how much I have learned to do without. I see something similar in friends who never ask for help or admit weakness, year after year. There is a difference between appearing humble and being humble.
The hours of my life have been running thin lately. I can almost see them curling inward like the roly-polies that kept me company as a child, drawing themselves into little armored balls because of time.
I have spent much of my life trying to make myself understood. As a writer, a mother, and a woman in relationships that have sometimes demanded far more explanation than understanding, I have developed an almost professional fluency in defending my intentions. I wonder how much more of my life I want to spend explaining myself to people who have already decided who I am. And I wonder how often I’ve done the same to them, mistaking a judgment for an understanding, a pattern for a permanent identity. Maybe humility is knowing when to put down the argument, even the one we are certain we could win.
