What we do

This is what we do. We hide ourselves behind masks. Hiding gives us an edge. Hiding protects us from social harm. We lie, in garbled screeches, sending out a false echo,, and the reflection emitted is not as we are but what we wish to be. Are we as inseparable from our veils as bark from a tree? 


 

Am I too hard on the human race? Perhaps. Yet don't we bend the truth in real time as if our mouth extrudes everything that comes out of it shaping the words of the moment to more befit our "look"? Could altruism or philanthropy exist without an audience? Are we nothing more than cunning organisms that have exploited each other for milenia? Are we driven by a genetic pulse that motivates us so we act with one another as if in a grand theater, the only plot, self preservation,,, the only comfort coming from wearing a mask. The mask define us as humans. We go on talking, pretending to understand each other yet all the while we are plotting. We are drowning in contradiction,, trading our freedom for a preservative "cover".  On the other hand perhaps the mask is more real than the face beneath it. The mask is so much a part of our make up that we may not be able to function in the world without it.


  
    
     Yet the need for a mask has evolved with us. We choose it like a hermit crab chooses a home. Perhaps more than any other unique human trait, even more than our capacity for cooperation, our artificiality demonstrates our superiority on the planet. 

 
    

 

Luigi Pirandello who often spoke of the masks in our existence said: 
"I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you."

                  

Luigi Pirandello wrote in his diary in 1934, the year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and only two years before his death. ''There is a someone else living my life, and I know nothing about him.''