Major minor

'You could have told me earlier. Why did you keep it from me?'
'Because I couldn't face one of your eruptions. David, I can't run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. Not any more. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn't make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions.'

- Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee

I know that I have been quoting Disgrace quite a bit, but it has given me many insights, like literature usually does. Life may be objective in the scientific sense but experiences are subjective and because there is no rehearsal for life, literature gives us a taste of experiences to come, be it good or bad, and lessons from the lives of others that are relevant to our lives as well.

Of couse, this may entail overanalyzing at points in time and not going with the flow of life, not actually living in the moment. But that's another train of thought altogether that I may deal with another time.

Back to the quoted text. Sometime this year, when I was carefully examining ideas in my head (more than ever before, it's a pity that I didn't note them down with the busyness and all), I came to the realization that the world does not revolve around me.

I sound like a selfish jerk now but you'll see what I mean in awhile.

It's the idea of whole lives existing out there, and my sudden appreciation of the full extent of the existence of other people who are major characters in their lives as well. Take friends. We don't see our friends as them, the very mere title of 'friends' indicate their (technical term here) function in our lives. We see them in relation to our lives and not existing in their own right. We can criticize Berkeley's "To be is to be perceived" but really we act on it in our everyday lives. We are conscious of their existence, only when we meaningfully perceive them, which is when they are relevant to our lives. I think this is also why fresh couples spend most of their time together and wonder about what the other is doing in the time they are not. Because the other, once a calefare, now a major character, is consuming a large part of one's time, and has taken on such a huge significance in one's life, that the existence of them is just so cherished that the full appreciation of them needs to be realized. You just want more. It sadly also explains why Feist sings

"It was hard to tell just how I felt
To not recognize myself

I started to fade away"
- Let It Die

Because the large intersection of each other's lives never negates the fact that you're what you are in relation to that person's life, and if you let that define your identity, then you lose your own.

By extension, I cannot claim to know someone, because it is never possible that spheres of both lives in a relationship will completely overlap. This is especially so if he/she's expresses many facets of his/her character in other spheres of his/her life, of which I have no access to, apart from the human medium of news.

This may sound rather convoluted but I do hope to touch up on it sometime again. If it sound slightly incoherent, it just goes to prove that this is not something to explore at 1:03am in the morn. Hope this post was thought-provoking though.

[edited]

This major-minor character concept that I've been pondering about also explains why we found it odd to meet teachers with their families at shopping malls (found being past tense because we're past that naive stage, into a general acceptance of overlapping spheres in our lives). Because we saw teachers as teachers, we never really went out of our way to imagine them having families and having children like ourselves. Also, it doesn't occur to us enough that our parents were once kids and right now, they're just older kids, role-playing the character of a parent they assume is the best way how, perhaps even drawing lessons from their own parents. There isn't a manual, and they weren't born parents. It's strange to view my parents as anything other than parents, for example middle-age people as vulnerable as us to life's trials and maybe not coping much better though we assume it gets better with age and experience.

Still, I wouldn't go so far as to deliberately fuse spheres of my life if I can help it, such as say through a party. Every group of friends I know, met me at a different point in my life, and know a different facet of me (remember Hume's fluidity of identity?) But we were friends because I was that person and we had a common history. But the various personalities that I took on over the years reflect themselves in the choice of friends so it wouldn't be unfair to say now, that they're extremely different and some may be even polar opposites. Someone I wouldn't consider a good friend now, was a good friend then because of who I was then.It really is all about timing. The polar opposites thought irks me slightly, it indicates a change in personality, value system, character, however nuanced it may be, and though many have stated I remained fairly consistent (where k is a constant, haha Karthi) all these years.

to be cont'd again?