The Meaning of Persons

I’m writing this from a balcony overlooking Charleston Harbor. I’m at a lovely resort with a beautiful swimming pool, bunches of palm trees, a few dozen docked pleasure boats, and a view of the City of Charleston across the water. It’s morning, the time of day when this balcony happens to be in the shade, and though it’s only April, the sun already is becoming that constant presence that I try, at times, to avoid.

I am on a road trip that has taken me from Cape Cod to Manhattan to Baltimore and now to Charleston. Soon I’ll make my first-ever trip to Savannah, then head back north through Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Washington County, Pennsylvania; Rochester and Schenectady, New York; and back home to Massachusetts. You won’t find this trip on any other travel itineraries. I designed it myself, and it is almost entirely built around the people I’ll be seeing – family and friends at just about every stop along the way. (By the time this posts I will be on my way home.)

This trip has reminded me of a book I read in college, entitled “The Meaning of Persons.” It was written by a Swiss physician named Paul Tournier. Unfortunately, I parted ways with the book a few years ago, as I was thinning my collection and the cover of this particular paperback had completely detached from its pages. I now wish I had kept it and I might replace it soon. For now, I can only rely on my ragged memory to describe it to you.

Persons and Personas

There are two themes that I especially recall from Tournier’s book, one large and one more focused. The large theme is the difference between a person and a persona. The former is self-explanatory. In fact, it is the self, the real, authentic, individual human being, complete with all its complex and often invisible characteristics. The latter, according to Merriam-Webster, is “the personality that a person (such as an actor or politician) projects in public.” In other words, it is not the private, hidden self, but an individual’s projection of themselves to the outside world. Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams come to mind as two very public people who had happy, even carefree, personas that masked their private but at times intense suffering. (Does anyone here remember the Bobby Goldsboro song, “The Funny Little Clown?”)

To some extent, we all have personas that we allow others to see while we also protect the privacy of our inner selves. We don’t have to be suffering to have a persona. We just have to separate our public selves from our private selves, which we all do naturally and unavoidably. Tournier’s approach to healing was to help people eliminate or reduce that separation, integrating the person with the persona.

Recently, I have become more conscious of the differences between the persons I encounter and their personas. When I observe someone these days, I sometimes remind myself that I am seeing only a small fragment of who they are. Of course, the longer I’ve known them and the closer their relationship to me, the more I can get past their persona and see more of their true selves. Conversely, if they are a stranger, a recent acquaintance, or simply someone with whom I interact at only a mundane or superficial level, I have to remind myself that there is much more to them than meets the eye.

When I can, I try to form an image of the person from the limited evidence available to me, always recognizing that the image will be incomplete except for those rare people with whom my relationship has been both long-term and intimate. I try to achieve as close to an “I see you” experience with the real person as I can within the confines of our finite time and interactions. My conscious effort to do so is mostly a new endeavor, but it’s one in which I find considerable value.

I won’t be able to get very far past the persona with most people, but with a little effort I might find cracks that allow me to see them more genuinely than I otherwise would. Most important, I try to remind myself that the persona I see is only an imperfect image of the person it reveals. And I give myself that reminder not only with the people I like, but also with those I dislike.

As a former colleague once told me, “everyone has their cross to bear.” We can’t know what experiences or influences make a person the way they are or cause them to adhere to a view of the world that we don’t share. Unless they are an intimate friend or family member, we are unlikely to fully grasp why someone behaves the way they do or believes what they believe. And though a person might seem to be on top of the world, we can never be sure if they are experiencing a private struggle. That’s why the wisdom of “judge not lest ye be judged” is so important. And why it is important to be kind.

In all cases, we need to remember that the persona we observe is not completely reflective of the person’s true self. And that what makes up that self is wrapped up in an individual’s unique and complicated history and current struggles of which we are mostly, and most often entirely, unaware. If that realization isn’t humbling, I don’t know what is.

The Meaning of Travel

My other memory of the Tournier book is what he said about travel. As I recall it, Tournier said that the purpose of travel is to encounter other people. He placed that goal above all other goals of travel. I don’t remember the context or details of Tournier’s travel advice, and am probably misunderstanding and mischaracterizing it to some extent, but it’s been on my mind as I’ve been planning this trip. I chose most of my destinations based on the people I know who live in each of them, all of whom I want to see – aging and afflicted siblings; young and enterprising son, niece, and nephew; old and new friends.

My first stop was for a meeting of a law school council I am part of. Even there I had the privilege of seeing friends from my law school days, as well as lawyers who clerked for the same federal judge as I did, people I’ve recently gotten to know through alumni activities, and some of the school’s very capable and welcoming administrative leaders. So much of the value of connecting to institutions and other organizations through volunteer service or otherwise is the relationships we develop with the people we encounter.

I think that Tournier had more in mind than that, though. I think he had in mind our encounters with people we’ve never met before and may never see again as we circumnavigate our large or little worlds. As I write this, I know that I will soon be having lunch with a couple my wife and I met a few years ago on a culinary trip to Sicily. That new friendship has survived and matters to us even though we’ve only seen them twice over the last five years.

And just yesterday as I was shopping in downtown Charleston, a friendly sales clerk struck up a conversation with me that was brief and necessarily superficial but in which I made an effort to see what I could of the other person, in this case the stranger. We won’t realistically get past personas in such brief encounters, but we can at least be conscious that each person we meet has a past, a present, and a personality of which we may, at best, catch a fleeting glimpse. At the very least, we should always try to appreciate that every person is a fellow traveler, who just like us is muddling their way through time and space, and who is just as deserving as we are of attention and respect.