DAY FIFTY THREE

"Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!" 

 

This is a line from the film Carry On Cleo, and according to some sources was voted the best one line joke in film history. By people who hadn't seen many films presumably. 

 

It's not so much infamy that's been on my mind today, but rather fame, or more precisely, the desire for such, which for our purposes here I will conflate with vanity.  You'll need to be patient for a moment or two while I give some background; I have to tread a little carefully because I am speaking about a family member. 

 

This person produced a small book some years ago, of which more below, and while they would not for one second consider themselves vain, and indeed do not fit what I imagine is many people's mental image of a vain person, is nonetheless one of the vainest people I know.  Unwittingly so. For this person to be knowingly vain they would need to have significantly more self-awareness than they do.

 

To put it in a single phrase, this person's conversation is at least fifty per cent humble-bragging. They seem to have no awareness that that is in fact what they are doing. In their case, banging on about themselves and the things they do, the things which interest them and which they obsess about, blowing their own trumpet pretty much to the exclusion of all else and anyone's actual interest in them or their trumpet appears to be pathological. At any and every opportunity they try to turn the conversation to me, me, me, and they do not seem to notice, or if they do, do not seem able to help themselves. After more than fifty years of patience and indulgence of them, over which time the situation has gotten worse and worse, I've latterly reached the conclusions I'm sharing here.

 

The irony of complaining about someone going on about themselves while I sit writing a personal blog is not lost on me, but here we at last get to the point of this post. No one knows about this blog, and, so far, I have managed it in such a way that the chances of it ever being discovered are pretty slim. It is a private matter between me and an imaginary reader who a significant part of me hopes never gets to read it. That may change at some point but that's how it is for now. It is not out of an excess of humility, simply that I enjoy exploring my thoughts and it amuses me to write a blog which nobody is intended to read. In short I have no interest in being known or recognised in any way, whereas the person I've described is to my mind desperate (insatiably so) for both those things.         

 

It is the contrast between my approach and this relative's which started to intrigue me the more I thought about it.

 

While not being all that significant, it is not that this person's achievements in producing the book are slight either. They are something, and in the creative/making sense, more than many, including myself, have managed. But their work is diminished by their constant going on about it; the work just isn't that significant, or important. Far more important and praiseworthy are the funds now raised for charity on the back of it, though this wasn't the original aim. The book was in large part motivated by a desire on the part of this relative to talk about themselves - inevitably - and their childhood home. It's hard not to think of it as one event in a long history of desperate appeals to be noticed by someone who, in their heart of hearts and in contrast to the self-effacing manner with which they like to present themselves, believes (hopes) they are really rather special and someone more than usually deserving of notice. This is what I call vanity. Solipsistic would also work.

 

It just so happens that the childhood home is of some historical interest, perhaps even in some degree because of my relative's efforts to publicise it; that's no mean achievement either, if so. In any event I think the work has come to be seen as something of a contribution to the social history of the area by those still living there. I stress, this was not why it was written. The difficulty now is that the person concerned mistakes an interest in the subject matter for an interest in themselves.

 

Thinking about all this it seems to me there is a spectrum with unwarranted pride or arrogance at one end, and an equally unwarranted compulsion to hide one's work under a bushel at the other.  Somewhere in the middle is a justified pride in your work and achievements, however humble they may be. That is the sweet spot and somewhere all parties would do well to aim for.

 

Onwards...unsolipsistically (I hope).

Picture credit: Man Playing Trumpet. CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons