Perfect
Stranger
April 24 2021
She was a
perfect stranger.
But then,
what stranger isn't?
Before
you've met,
when you
naturally project on them
all your
wants and needs and desires.
When she
was just hypothetical
and I was
free to conjure
my
idealized woman,
perfect in
every way.
Or perhaps
it's “perfect”, as in absolute --
when
there's not a chance
that
you've met before,
or have
the slightest sense
of who
they are.
And later
when the
disillusion sets in
and the imperfections
are plain
the
strangeness remains.
The
unknowability of others
when we
can only guess.
When even
loved ones
remain
inscrutable,
and
friends and acquaintances
are too
distant to say.
How
unknowable the other,
and really
how little
we know ourselves.
Of course,
I knew her better when she left.
No longer
a stranger, then,
and a long
way from perfection.
Estranged
and flawed.
Gone . . .
without a word.
And for
me, a world of perfect strangers
if I'm
willing to try.
I think that in the infatuated beginning of love, we are susceptible to this process of projection and idealization. The less well you know someone new, the more perfect they seem. And the more familiar we become, the more we acknowledge the flaws.
I also think that there is this essential unknowability of other
people. Even someone we're intimate with. A philosophical question a cognitive
scientist might ask is: “How do I know that I am not the only one who is
conscious? Who's to say that while I am conscious, sentient, and self-aware,
everyone else is simply impersonating a human, that they are all cleverly
programmed artificial intelligence machines?” I suppose that would be the
ultimate in unknowability: imagining
consciousness, when there is none; seeing depth, when there is really only
surface.
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