Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to feel no impulse to share with others my experience. I am always taking pictures, preparing a narration of my journey to recount later, noting which parts of my experience might interest a particular person so that I will remember to give them those details. What if I could just live my life, and my own experience of life would be enough for me? What if I didn’t feel compelled to capture, frame, package it for others to see later?
And, there’s no denying it, when I imagine becoming this other, more self-possessed individual, I imagine myself a bit more manful. Like the taciturn protagonist of some action film, perhaps The Outlaw Josey Wales or Mad Max: Fury Road. There is no doubt that vices and virtues are gendered for us, so that a greedy person appears male in my mind while a gossipy person is more likely feminine. The archetype of the tourist who must take selfies at every monument, whose experiences are only ever fodder for Instagram, seems most likely to be a her in my mind, regardless of what the reality might be.
In this way, disdain for how social media encourages us to mediate our every experience for a hypothetical adoring online public has a touch of misogyny behind it. I’m reminded of the work of Ann Douglas, author of The Feminization of American Culture and Terrible Honesty, who suggests that, driven by the concerns of women, a cultural transformation in the 19th century arrived via popular literature, the mass media innovation of its day—and the modernist movement which followed was a reaction to that perceived feminization. Modernism was meant to be more serious, less consumerist and less sentimental.
I genuinely believe that there is something virtuous about the willingness to be satisfied with experiencing life for yourself, without the need to transmute it into something that may be passed around, but on the other side of that virtue is a vice—a kind of stinginess that shuts us off from our fellow travelers. (It is worth noting that both the masculine protagonists of the two movies I mention above are emotionally scarred by trauma and loss, unable to connect with anyone for that reason.) And if the compulsion to capture every moment in order to share it later is a vice, then there is also a virtuous version of the same impulse—a kind of generosity of spirit that makes connection possible between people who otherwise might remain isolated. There isn’t, in our culture, a good word for this virtue, though we have many ways to devalue it.
I am thinking now of Mrs. Ramsay, a character from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, which I re-read recently, sometimes while dining alone at a restaurant in a foreign city. One of the central characters, Mrs. Ramsay, lives a somewhat traditional life as housewife with her professor husband, Mr. Ramsay, a well-known intellectual and university professor. The book again and again draws us to compare the work Mrs. Ramsay does with the work Mr. Ramsay does. Her concerns might seem frivolous to some, as she fusses at matchmaking and the details of keeping house. She makes sure that dinner is served, that it is tasty, that her children behave themselves at table—but also that her guests feel welcome, that they make connections with one another, that the right young woman is drawn into conversation with the right bachelor or widower. One has the sense, as the novel continues, that the work Mrs. Ramsay does, though it remains invisible to many who benefit from it, has a deeper significance than the work of her renowned husband. Yet even Mrs. Ramsay devalues her own work, despite its difficulty and despite her sincere belief that it is essential to their lives. Essential to living. I think of Mrs. Ramsay often.
Perhaps then rather than longing to become some other, more self-contained person, I will indulge my feminine urge to share my experience with anyone who might find it of interest. It is true that at every moment of my extraordinary travels I want to tell everyone about everything I am seeing even as I see it. Having lost all patience with the various social media platforms, I am trying out this email newsletter format instead. We will see how it goes. I tried something like this once before on tumblr and I only made a few posts before forgetting all about it. Inconstance, another feminine sin.
We will think no more of sin—only of what is fabulous, bewitching, tasteful and inviting. Please join me on my travels.