Once in awhile, I’ll notice a topic or theme appear in multiple places, nearly all at once. That happened recently on three different interviews I heard, one on TV and two on the radio. When it happens it makes me think something is happening in our culture that’s worth paying attention to. In this case, the connecting thread of these broadcast conversations was how much a mystery other people can often be to us, and how much we often hide from people around us.
The first time this came up was in the 60 Minutes interview with Ruth Madoff and her youngest son, Andrew Madoff. Their experiences and stories are different, but both claim they knew nothing about the enormous fraud being perpetrated by their husband and father, Bernie Maddoff. Because Andrew worked for one of his father’s companies, his shock and anger comes from believing he was intentionally duped. He says he will never forgive his father or ever speak to him again.
Ruth’s reaction was different. She seems more stunned by the events, and resigned to her social fall and now very bleak future. From this and other stories about her, she apparently played a role as Bernie Madoff’s wife which included very little involvement in his business affairs. From an early age she was enthralled with him, but despite having lived with him most of her life, Ruth actually knew her husband at only a superficial level.
Another interview, this time on radio, was with British actor Bill Nighy. He plays the role of a spy in a new BBC drama, Page Eight, which airs this month on PBS. In a short excerpt played from the show, his daughter dismisses his concern for her when she realizes he is simultaneously trying to get information from her. “You’re working! Hell, you’re not even talking to me. You’re working…. Do you have any honest relationships in your life at all?”
Nighy goes on to describe his character’s dilemma as never being able to be fully honest, especially with this family. He is always keeping important parts of his life hidden from them. In an excerpt from another of his films, the comedy Love Actually, Nighy is an aging rock star being interviewed on the radio. Nighy’s character startles the radio host with the bluntness of his answers, as he reflects on his life near the end of his career. “Wow. We don’t get many honest answers on this show. Thanks for that.”
The most powerful of the interviews I heard was with author Joan Didion. Most recently Didion’s life and writing have been focused on dealing first with the death of her husband (The Year of Magical Thinking), and then with the death of her adult daughter, which occurred a few years later. She began the interview reading from the introduction to her new book, Blue Nights:
When I began writing these pages, I believed their subject to be children: the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances, the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them, the ways in which our investments in each other remain too frayed ever to see the other clear, the ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.
As the pages progressed, it occurred to me that the actual subject was not children at all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children. Their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in this contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death, this fear. Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.
Just this small selection makes evident the depth of Didion’s writing, which comes from her clear vision and honesty. And yet she is admitting here her own weakness in not knowing her own child and susceptibility to the temptation to intentionally not see what she doesn’t want to see—in other words, her lack of vision and honesty.
What sets Didion apart, however, is her remarkable ability and willingness to recognize such things in herself. She is willing to double back on her own life and say, “I wasn’t honest here. I only saw what I wanted to there. I hid things from myself I didn’t want to know or understand.” Thus, we see the enormous gulf between a Joan Didion and a Ruth Madoff. Anyone can be deceived, or even deceive them self. But who has the courage to recognize and admit it, to them self or to others?
The challenge of honestly understanding others or ourselves is not a new one. It’s a major theme of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Bible’s story of David, and even a folk talk like The Emperor’s New Clothes. The stories I heard perhaps only pointed to the new permutations on this common human foible, made possible in our unique time.
They certainly make clear that, however else we may have advanced as a culture, the temptations of ego and deceit certainly are alive as ever. They also illustrate the healing truth of one the Bible’s most profound insights and promise, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
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