The First Person Singular

16. You

72 16 You To make contact with you whose physical body I see is not to grasp your identity conceptually and respect your boundaries and inner space. It is first by the tone of voice that we make contact. I catch on to your excited or bored, complicit or aggressive tone; your voice modulates my own. Greeting you with “Hey man!” the cocky tone of those words hail the man you are for yourself, committed to manly deeds—not an official, a waiter, or a stranger. To answer the engaging or dismayed tone with which someone addresses me with the measured tone of a controlled and selfcontained life is, before I refuse to understand really what she will tell me, to refuse her tone—to refuse her. “For my part, I think . . . ,” you say. “I will do it.” Beneath the “I” that simply designates the one now putting forth the utterance is “I am a mother,” “I am a dancer,” “I am an adventurer,” that secret and solitary word you have put on yourself. When I address you, I do have a sense of the inner resonance and force of that word. In the tone with which she says “Don’t worry, I’ll be there,” I sense the caregiver the nurse is for herself, has committed herself to be. In his jeans and plaid shirt, his mud-caked work shoes, his bared arms and bronzed face, in his awkward, uningratiating way of speaking, I sense that this youth who has come to apply for my construction job is really a builder, a man committed to work with his hands on stone, cement, and wood. I went to this camp of biologists in Peruvian Amazonia that accepts paid visitors to supplement their resources, and as soon as I see her, a thirty-five-ish woman with uncombed blond hair and rough hands, greeting me in her California accent, I know she is for herself an outdoorswoman, a rain forest dweller. To turn to someone who says, “For my part, I think . . . ,” “I am not going to . . .” is to honor someone who is as good as her word. Men or women of honor will not tolerate insult; they will stand with their body, their life against anyone who impugns their honor. It is with her body on the dance floor that the dancer will answer the sneers of critics. With his body in the rioting slums, and not with arguments in the clubs and salons, the doctor answers the insults of racists. But she and he disdain to answer those who do not stand in their words. He whom I address also can disconnect himself from his “I”—from 73 R E C O G N I Z I N G O T H E R S , C O N T A C T I N G Y O U his “I think . . . ,” “I am telling you . . .”—as I can, when speaking with him, disconnect myself from what I am saying. My interlocutor can be insincere, as I can be, can dissimulate, can lie. It is she who stands in her words when she says, “Let me tell you . . .” that I will answer when she questions the me who says “I will go”; it is he who is a dancer whose demands on the dancer I say I am that I will recognize; it is he who has never sold out—Che Guevara at forty, Nelson Mandela at eighty—and who contests the youth I say I still am that I know I have to answer. I also sometimes know that you have abandoned the word you planted in yourself in your youth to take on a purely social and successful existence. “He was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down,” Gustave Flaubert writes. “So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”1 But then there is a visionary in every strong and healthy person, in the youth, that is, the insolence, impetuousness, brashness, and bravado of that person. In my hypocritical or aggressive insistence to address an official identity I nevertheless do divine who you are for yourself. I speak to you as the dean, colleague, and...