At the end of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the less famous of the novel’s two main protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving family. Unlike Anna, he has a happy marriage. His wife, Kitty, and son, Mitya, bring him great joy, and he feels that his existence “has the unquestionable meaning of the good.” Still, he’s noticed that there is a “wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife.” There are limits to the intimacy that helps give his life meaning, and they vex him.
Does anybody really know you? It’s a question that arises at odd moments—sometimes, perversely, when we’re surrounded by people who know us well. Suddenly, we become conscious of an inner sanctum they’ve never breached. Like Levin, we might feel subtly private. More dramatically, we might perceive ourselves as lost, abandoned, as though we’re passing through the world unnoticed. Perhaps we’re wearing a mask that others are too inattentive to peer behind; or maybe we’re just too deep to know. There are many variations on a central theme: others sail to our shores, they even disembark, but they never quite venture into our unexplored interiors. This can be a source of sorrow, or a relief.
Like many people, I felt most unknown when I was a teen-ager. (“I am a rock / I am an island,” as Simon and Garfunkel sang.) It’s easy to think that no one really knows you in adolescence, when your life is changing fast. But a sensation of unknownness has sometimes stolen over me in midlife, too. A few years ago, while clearing some belongings out of my mother’s house, I discovered boxes of my old diaries, letters, and photographs; embarrassed, I threw most of them away. For days afterward, the discarded things weighed on me, not because of what they contained but because they represented parts of my life that no one except me would ever know about. More recently, faced with too many obligations at work and at home, I had the impression that the “real me” was becoming submerged beneath a cheerful, bustling exterior. As the weeks passed, I almost seemed to be living a secret life. I wondered why no one saw what was going on with me. Apparently, I was more unknown than I’d thought.
These were small episodes of unknownness: in the latter case, my feeling dissipated as soon as I shared it with my wife. But it’s possible, maybe even common, to feel that nobody really knows you in a more fundamental, even existential way. Like the main character in the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” you may find that the passage of time has rendered you unknowable: your life story is so long that people wonder who you are and where you’ve come from. Occasionally, we learn about people who maintained a second family hidden from the first; presumably, this scattered, duplicitous way of life made them impossible to know. And then there are those who, like the Most Interesting Man in the World, from the Dos Equis commercials (“His beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man’s entire body”), lead lives so epic that others can’t really comprehend them.
You may feel that you’re unknown because of your nature, your circumstances, or your story. But the feeling itself, for all its intuitiveness, conceals some strangeness. What, exactly, is there to know? And who are you, anyway?
At a recent dinner, the group of people I was with performed a survey. About half of us felt that there was somebody who really knew us. “I picture a Venn diagram,” a man said. One circle contained all there was to know about him, and the other what someone else knew. The more the circles overlapped, the more he was really known.
Is that how being known by other people works? Possibly. It stands to reason that the people who really know us also know a lot about us. On the other hand, it’s possible for someone to know a lot about you without really knowing you; their knowledge might not cross a certain threshold. Take your parents: they know a lot about you, and have the naked-baby pictures to prove it, but they may not know the things you want them to. Perhaps they’re more connected with the “old you” than with you as you are now; they see you, frustratingly, as a kid. Or they might hold an unrealistic view of you, motivated partly by love, both for you and for themselves. They want to be the parents of a certain kind of person, and so they don’t want to know about certain aspects of their actual child.
What’s true about our parents is true about many of the people in our intimate circle. Simply knowing a lot about a person doesn’t lead, automatically, to really knowing that person. In “The Truman Show,” Jim Carrey plays a man who lives inside a secret reality-TV program, which has allowed millions of people to observe him constantly since birth. In a sense, their circles and his are congruent. Still, Truman wouldn’t be wrong if he claimed that no one really knew him. A great deal hinges on the attitude of other people. Viewership is basically passive; if passively acquiring knowledge about someone counts as really knowing them, then Google really knows you. We want to be really known by people—spouses, biographers, even frenemies—who’ve worked for that knowledge. We may even want them to keep working: you can’t be really known by someone who takes you for granted.
A couple years ago, when my grandmother died, at the age of ninety-nine, her three sons—my dad and uncles—delivered eulogies. Standing to speak at the Fort Gibson National Cemetery, in Oklahoma, her youngest son spoke movingly about what she’d been like as a parent, recalling moments from his childhood, including a time when she dived to rescue him from the bottom of a lake. Her middle son, my father, described the privations she and my grandfather had experienced as poor Brooklyn Jews who, soon after they were married, were separated when he went to the Pacific in the Second World War. And her eldest son took an almost sociological approach, explaining how her life had unfolded within a larger culture shaped by the currents of the pre- and postwar decades. Taken together, the eulogies were satisfying because they aimed to see my grandmother in the round—not just as an intimate member of the family but as a person in history. They also reflected effort: the children, as adults, had grown curious about their mother, and had sought to see her in a mature way, deepening their sense of her with time. Her sons really knew her—at least, that’s how it seemed to me.
Levin imagined a wall between himself and others. As an image, that might be too stark; it’s probably more accurate to say that we view each other through lenses that clarify some things and distort others. Psychoanalysts use the term “transference” to describe how, when we know other people, we superimpose onto them the images of other people we’ve known. We might see our spouses through the lenses of our parents, for example. So, for someone to really know you, they might have to work at seeing you as you, and not as a version of someone else. Conversely, if we feel that no one really knows us, it’s possible that we’re expressing something about what we’ve experienced in the past, when someone important to us left us feeling unknown. Maybe, if we let go of our lingering disappointment, we’d be able to acknowledge being known now.
We see ourselves through lenses, too. In my family, I’m the photographer, and as a result I rarely appear in our pictures. Still, every once in a while, someone snaps a photo of me, and I’m often surprised by how I look: Oh, that’s what I’m like. Something similar may be true about ourselves more broadly. Do we really know what we’re like? An outside view of you that seems strange might not be wrong; it might be right, in fact, because it’s an outside view. It could be our circles that need to shift.
“Does anybody really know you?” might be too narrow, or too rigid, a question, with a passive construction that belies reality. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we may not settle into any particular way of being until someone studies us. Other people help us to know ourselves, working with us to create a shared idea of who we are. So, instead of asking whether we are known, it may be more fruitful to ask whether we’ve arrived, in collaboration with people we care about, at a conception of ourselves that we recognize.
That collaborative work is difficult. The philosopher Stanley Cavell describes it beautifully in an essay about Frank Capra’s movie “It Happened One Night.” In the movie, an heiress named Ellie has fallen in love with Peter, a reporter, but hasn’t told him yet; she asks him if he’s ever fallen in love. (“Haven’t you ever thought about it at all? Seems to me you could make some girl wonderfully happy.”) He’s dreamed about meeting the right kind of girl, he says, and imagined taking her away to a beautiful tropical island, but “where you gonna find her? Somebody that’s real. Somebody that’s alive.” She’s right there in front of him, of course. “Why can he not allow the woman of his dreams to enter his dream?” Cavell asks. The answer, he thinks, is that “to walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.” If Peter and Ellie are to really know one another, they have to merge dreams and reality. This is like “putting together night and day.” It’s scary.
Levin, in “Anna Karenina,” does something like this. He has long confided “what tormented him” in a diary, which he’s always imagined as addressed to his future fiancée; before getting married, he takes the step of sharing the diary with her. Levin is somewhat surprised that Kitty, who is religious, is unbothered by the skepticism the diary reveals. She’s devastated, however, by his “impurity.” “Take them, take these terrible books!” she tells him, weeping, when he visits her. “Why did you give them to me! . . . No, all the same it’s better. . . . I’ve forgiven you, but it’s terrible!” Levin is ashamed and horrified—yet, at the same time, “his happiness was so great that this confession did not destroy it, but only added a new shade to it.” They don’t know everything about each other—that’s impossible. They don’t know themselves completely, either. But they want to know. ♦
