I once had a student who, after we read Katherine Mansfield’s "The Garden Party", said that if he found himself in the same situation of the story he would be fine with continuing on to the appetizers. The situation is this: you’re hosting a garden party as the richest person in town in the biggest house atop the highest hill and a working class neighbor falls dead on your driveway in the middle of it all.
Even the other students in the class who probably would have also let the party carry on in such a circumstance wouldn’t dare admit it to themselves, let alone to their classmates.
First, I waited to see how the other students would respond to him, but only one did, and a bit timidly. They looked to me. It was a student who had also expressed certain political beliefs. I didn’t really want to deal with something like this, because it’s delicate, and because I knew it would lead to a political discussion. But mostly because I knew he was just saying it to be extreme and hoping to provoke a political discussion. Plus, there was no way that this student was going to have a life-changing a revelatory moment where he was shown the truth of goodness and the full understanding of right and wrong then and there by a teacher in English class that day. So instead I said, You’re so young. You’re 15. You have so much time to change your mind, and many times. All of you do. I hope you remember that, and just keep an open mind.
I’m sure if I were older and wiser I would’ve thought of a better response. But that’s what came to me in the moment.
I still agree with it. I think that one of the best parts about being alive is that at any moment, you can change your mind.
Unlike a text, which in many ways, dies once it’s published, at least as a singular opinion, for the second after it’s published, the author’s thinking must shift a little bit, even by the slightest nuance, if not in grand leaps and bounds, and so it’s no longer their living reflection. The text instead becomes something dead, but a dead thing to interact with. A cadaver for readers to dissect, or resurrect.
I often think of essays as being little monologues that interrupt the middle of a cultural conversation, or monologues that start a conversation about something. Which is contradictory, because monologues shouldn’t exist in conversations. After these little monologues are published people get to respond with comments and messages, or sometimes other essays, and say things the writer might not have considered, maybe changing the writer’s mind. But the essay is still there, dead and left behind, reflecting what the writer thought at that moment, just like the thing you said at the dinner table.
When does changing your mind mean you’re wise, and when does it mean you’re a simple-headed conforming asswipe, a bandwagoner? Is there a certain amount of time that must pass in order for it to seem okay to change your mind? An hour, three years?
In theory, I admire someone who is able to change their mind mid-conversation. Someone who’s humble enough to be open like that. But in practice, I think I wouldn’t believe them. Imagine it: someone, in the middle of what they’re saying, in the middle of a civil debate, or a rowdy one, just says, Nevermind. I take it back. I agree with you.
It would feel mercurial, a gauzy opinion unsubstantial. Made on a whim.
How does it make sense? Being open-minded is a sign of wisdom, and yet, if someone were to truly be, so much so that they change their mind mid-conversation, it would make them seem unstable and untrustworthy.
Maybe changing our minds happens most often in the middle of a conversation, but we’re not aware of it until after the fact. Maybe it requires a buffer of reflection. Or, maybe we know what someone said changed our mind, but don’t want to admit it, because it first means admitting we’re wrong.
I think of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty—the academic rivalry that ensues because one professor points out a simple mistake another professor made in his work which then dissolves his entire thesis and life’s research, and eventually his self. A dissolving of an argument, an opinion, as a destruction of self.
In spending three semesters of undergrad on the East Coast and then the rest on the West Coast, I often analyzed the differences and conducted my own personal ethnography on the two subsets of the same subculture (American liberal arts colleges).
I can say I was rarely in a room or classroom filled with people from the West Coast where everyone thought something different. Usually a couple of the more outspoken ones would have strong opinions, say them aloud, then every other person in the room would have to decide which side (team) they’re on.
While in my experience on the East Coast, there wasn’t one person with whom another person exactly agreed. Everyone had to pile on their own caveat, or edit something slightly, before agreeing or disagreeing.
This is most likely a reflection of differing values: groupthink vs. individual; being a part of something vs. being solid on your own.
In a way, making art is freezing yourself in time. So is saying something, like an opinion. Writing something is like that, too.
If you don’t cringe at your past self (opinions/writing/work), does that mean you’re accepting and mature, or does it mean you haven’t grown?
I think of Kierkegaard who was always philosophizing against himself, arguing against his own opinions and then arguing against those arguments, too.
This is the problem with writing. We’re always changing, and so we’re always changing our minds. We haven’t thought all the thoughts we’ll think about the thing we wrote about or the thing we talked about.
This is also the beauty of writing and conversations. They’re ephemeral, they capture what we thought and who we were in real time.
Sometimes after a conversation, or after I write something, I want to know which parts of what I said are lies, and which parts are still true. After time has passed, I usually wish I could go back and edit it. But it’s impossible to edit past conversations (Imagine). And if I edited every past piece of writing I did, the work would become constant and superfluous, impossible, and I would never have time to make anything new. I have to let it be, honor my past self, things like that.
Still, I wish I knew how to package an explanation of everything I think, a narrative of everything that’s happened in my life, all nice and neat. Even though as I think about it, I know that’s ridiculous.
Stories and essays are neat because what happened is fixed on the page, is published, not because they’re true. Rather, in life, what happens is a continual morphing and shifting. Imagine if the words on this page were continually evolving to become new letters, sentences, sections rearranging. Life is more like that.
On Beauty is potentially my fave of Zadie Smith's, for all that academia exploration!