Welcoming the Shadow Brother

This is the bright home

in which I live.

This is where

I ask

my friends

to come,

this is where I want

to love all the things

it has taken me so long

to learn to love.

From David Whyte,

“The House of Belonging”

During late morning summer breakfasts on the patio with my wife, I typically spend fifteen minutes admiring the yard in bloom and musing on whatever comes to mind. I get to do this because my wife has advanced dementia and can no longer speak coherently or understand what is spoken to her and because she takes much longer to eat than I do. While she almost endlessly stirs her spoon in the cereal, I look at the yard and think.

One recent morning I realized something I should have noticed years ago, namely that for much of my life the extrovert in me has been selling out the introvert, not totally of course, but enough that the introvert had been living, let us say, on limited rations. Why, I found myself wondering this sunny morning, had I done this all these decades?

In part, of course, it was because the culture overwhelmingly encourages this. We are a society of doers and getters, spenders and owners. What’s out there is what matters. Our interior spaces are for dreamers and layabouts, or so the reasoning goes. Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, superbly documents the gaping No Man’s Land between these two ways of being. But the extrovert in me has been able to get away with selling out his shadow brother for selfish reasons too: my wish to be a dynamic teacher, my wish to be popular, to be liked, to gather to me friends; the need to make money, the need to get on in the world, the need to fit in.

But now that I am retired and have enough money and no longer wish to find extroverted friends with whom, I’ve finally come to realize, I really have little in common; now that I have less desire to fit in than I used to have (all those jokes about seniors no longer caring what others think are at least half true), the introvert has quietly been taking back territory it had ceded without even knowing it had done so. In a backdoor kind of way my wife’s advancing dementia has also been a lever pushing the introvert forward. Social engagements are far fewer now because she is so confused and cannot speak coherently, so that I find myself largely alone even when I am with her, and she must have someone with her at all hours.

What do I mean by these words introvert and extrovert? In everyday speech these words get thrown around pretty loosely. All too often introvert is taken to mean a shy person, someone afraid of speaking to others and terrified of speaking to large audiences, while extrovert often means someone who likes to schmooze, glad-hand, and backslap. But introversion and extroversion have little to do with how easily one speaks to others or even to large groups of people. Ever since I began teaching forty-six years ago (I retired ten years ago), I loved talking to classes. Even today, I think it would be a huge kick to address an audience of ten thousand (though scaring up an audience of ten these days would be a bit of a feat). These terms have little to do with the comfort or ability to talk with people or even with how much one loves to do so. Rather, these terms introvert and extrovert have to do with what one values most deeply. These are value terms, not action terms.

The introvert deeply values the interior world, the world of thought and feeling, the world of truth and beauty. I am speaking here, of course, about personal truth, the truths one discovers about feelings, the intricacies of one’s being, and the nature of humanity, God, and the universe, not about objective truths such as the distance to the moon or the depth of the Mariana Trench, though if such objective truths lead to deeper reflections, the introvert welcomes such objective truths too.

A concrete illustration will help. Many years ago I discovered Timothy Ferris’s marvelous book, Coming of Age in the Milky Way. In that book I was stunned by the following two passages:

If we possessed an atlas of our galaxy that devoted but a single page to each star system, so that the sun and all its planets were crammed on one page, that atlas would run to more than 10 million volumes of 10,000 pages each. It would take a library the size of Harvard’s to house the atlas, and merely to flip through it at the rate of one page per second would require over 10,000 years. . . . And there are 100 billion other galaxies.

Our solar system harbors fewer than one 10 billionth of the total number of planets that exist in our galaxy alone.

Those passages exploded inside me. Decades later I still think about these facts every week. Or rather, I live with them every week, for these passages are not only objective truths out there in the universe but subjective truths in here within me. They have caused the introvert in me to reflect on who I am, what humanity is, and the nature of God every week for decades. Meanwhile, the extrovert in me is merely dazzled and would like to see it all made into a movie.

Beauty too is deeply at issue. Extroverts seem to be content to go to beautiful places—places that are officially beautiful, that the brochures tell us we must see before we die—and collect their names on a personal roster of accomplishments, and move on. I took the Amalfi Drive, I trekked the Himalayas, I saw the Edward Hopper show, the extroverts like to say, as if these things were accomplishments they are now done with, things they can check off their bucket list. Yes, it was beautiful—but the experience hasn’t gone down deeply, it hasn’t take their breath away, it hasn’t stopped them in their tracks and made them wonder who they are and why they are here and where they might be going. A single Edward Hopper painting can do all these things, as can a clear night sky full of stars anywhere in the world. The introvert in those people is either absent or buried too deeply to be reached.

The introvert, on the other hand, lives for such experiences, and for that reason he or she finds them much closer to hand, finds them everyday in his or her so-called ordinary life. I say so-called because there is no such thing as “ordinary” if one is really looking and listening. And much of that looking and listening will reveal the presence of beauty living at the end of one’s eyes and ears almost anywhere anytime. While the extrovert might need to travel the Amalfi Drive or cruise the Norwegian fjords to experience beauty, the introvert will treasure the beauty that is right here right now.

That morning on the patio, for example, just watching the light playing on the leaves of the trees was almost heartbreaking. If only I could freeze this moment, I thought, and then I thought: but I don’t need to freeze it—it or another version of it will be back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Still, I wanted to bottle it up and take it with me so that I might uncork its effervescence in sad moments.

Another example. When I was nineteen, I awoke one morning in late July or early August and went outside amidst the house trailers beside a lake that was my parents’ summer home community. Only a minute into my walk I noticed something I had never seen before: the color of the light wasn’t right; it was an autumn light, but it was high summer, and I did not know what to make of what I was experiencing. I was too young and green. I did not have the necessary context or understanding or words for this experience. I was simply astonished—and then went on about my day.

Eight years later, sitting in a graduate seminar on Whitman and Dickinson, I heard the professor say something about an Emily Dickinson poem set in summer but about the light of autumn. In that instant, for the first time in eight years, I remembered back to that moment when I was nineteen. From that day forward I have been watching for this same early autumn light every summer, remembering the feeling I had, and thinking about what that light foretold. When I was in my sixties, more than forty years after the original moment—that is, when the introvert in me was finally allowed his vision—I wrote an essay about that moment called “A Certain Slant of Light.” Beauty becomes radiant only when it touches deeply into a soul, and the part of the soul that is touched belongs to the introvert.

One last example. A few weeks ago I went to Chicago’s Art Institute to take in four shows. One of those shows displayed the photography of Josef Koudelka, a photographer I had never heard of, but since I was going to take in the René Magritte show, I would take in the Koudelka show too. The moment I walked through the doors to that show, however, the incidental nature of the show disappeared, and I was rocked back on my heels. Mr. Koudelka’s photographs were huge and wide and depicted, among other things, classical ruins. Some were places I had actually been to in Italy without being moved: you know, one broken column after another and soon your feet are tired and you’re ready for lunch or a nap.

But here they were again, huge and grainy and black & white, and I instantly understood what I had not when I was looking with unaided eyes at the actual scene itself decades earlier. That afternoon Mr. Koudelka’s photographs seared into me an understanding of how limited is our time on this planet and how temporary is our existence. Ozymandias was speaking through each stunning photograph: we are mere strands of hair and particles of dust who have settled for a few moments on the calendar of the centuries. We are but wisps of being passing through, and the best thing we can do in our brief time here is pay deep attention and be grateful. The extrovert had looked at the boring ruins in Italy years earlier; the introvert was now looking at the living ruins in Mr. Koudelka’s photographs.

I relate these three examples to describe how an introvert rather than an extrovert experiences beauty. But of course I am exaggerating, for there are no pure forms of introversion or extroversion, only a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are the viewers who were merely touching base, passing though the exhibit, and for whom the photographer’s name would disappear by the next day; at the other end are those who were riveted and would remember this show the rest of their lives.

Since that breakfast in the yard with my wife, I have continued to reflect on the hitherto sometimes neglected introvert inside me, the fellow wanting to look in rather than out. The first thing I realized is that I am almost singular in my family. My father was an extreme extrovert. Facts, dollars, and doings were his world all day every day. I have no recollection of him ever looking within. Though my mother was a withdrawn woman whom I never once heard string three sentences in a row, I also never witnessed her looking within either. My sister too is an extrovert. So are my three sons and their wives. So is my ex-wife. None would think to read a serious novel and reflect on it, or go to the Art Institute for a show and be moved, or pick up a volume of essays for the sheer pleasure of contemplation. For them the world is out there; for me, increasingly, it is in here. So I have become aware over the last twenty years that I am in a deep way alone in my own family. And family, it must be said with emphasis, is the last place one wants to know one is alone.

Though many people in my extended family were quiet and kept to themselves, I am aware of only one who was very likely a feeling-toned introvert. I never met him, but I heard stories. My Uncle Sam was my father’s father’s brother. He was born in Sicily and immigrated to America with his family when still a boy. He never married, was a careful manager of money, and retired from work in his forties. What he did in those years when he no longer worked I have no idea, except that he often went to the forest preserves to paint. He had no lessons that I know of, only a desire to be with nature and depict its beauty. Eventually he developed arthritis of the spine and one day in 1952 was found dead in his tiny basement apartment of a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head.

Decidedly not a cheery story. In fact, the story scares me when I reflect that in the last decade I too have taken up painting. I have no skill, but I like laying thick bright paint on large canvases and making simple images appear. I have painted only four pictures so far, but one might stand for them all. On that canvas I have painted a simple white house—the same simple house I drew when I was in third grade—standing large and alone on the left side of a green hill. Its windows all show blue inside the house, the same color blue as the sky. The sun sits in the upper right-hand corner. I call the picture “House Full of Sky.” It sits above a sofa in my summer home. Though I wasn’t aware of it when I painted the picture some eight or nine years ago, I recently realized that that house is a picture of me. I am a house full of sky—a being full of dreaming, wondering, reflecting. It is a portrait of an introvert.

Without realizing it, my art purchases too have had a similar bent. In a large painting over the living room mantle of my year-round home, a lone young man sits at the edge of a lawn gazing out to a body of water. Close to the land is an empty yellow rowboat with its tether drifting free in the water. In a second painting in that same room a young man gazes out of a house door and into the distance while a young woman watches him. In a third painting in that room a boy dressed in washed-out blues and whites stands in a white rowboat looking in the direction of the viewer but not making eye contact, while two girls dressed in white in the rowboat dreamily peer down into the water. In the last painting in the living room we simply see a yellow house standing all alone in a very wide horizontal painting.

In our bedroom over my dresser a lone young woman dressed in white sits with her back to us beside a white house looking out to sea. Across the room from this Jamie Wyeth print is Georgia O’Keefe’s famous Ladder to the Moon. The only things in the painting are a sliver of mountainous horizon at the bottom and a ladder reaching through the sky to the moon.

On the stairwell to the second floor are two large photos, each depicting a lone man with a shaved head, his back to the viewer, looking out on a body of water.

I bought these works at various times over a period of more than three decades. I was not attempting to find a common theme; I wasn’t even aware of a common theme; I was simply buying works that deeply appealed to me. Only recently have I come to realize that all of these works are depictions of an introvert dreaming, wondering, reflecting. Though the extrovert in me may have been selling out his introverted brother during these years, the introvert was furnishing his house.

Retirement and my wife’s dementia, both of which began at the same time ten years ago, were the major levers shoving the introvert forward. It is no accident that at that moment ten years ago, I began to devote myself to writing the essays I had been merely thinking about and dabbling with during earlier decades. In the last ten years I have written dozens of long essays, all of them reflective in nature. Or rather I should say the introvert in me has written them. Earlier in my life I published a couple hundred small objective articles, virtually none of them reflective, and wrote (but did not publish) a zillion small reflections, but none of them grew into full essays. The introvert in me hadn’t yet been given his proper space. Even today he has to compete for it against the myriad hourly demands of life that we all face—and he often loses out: the skinny kid on the beach with sand kicked in his face. But sometimes now he wins.

My personal life has also been affected by the advent of the introvert. I am thinking in particular of three relationships. The first of these is with my best friend during our Army days more than half a century ago. He came from a rich family and lived in a luxurious home in a fancy Chicago suburb. He had polish and manners. I came from a tiny working-class home in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago and had no polish whatsoever. Somehow we bonded—every life has its mysteries—but several years after the Army we lost touch with each other. Then, nine years ago, quite by accident, we met up again. He had become a vice-president of AT&T and I a college teacher of English. In the years since, we have shared long lunches twice a year. In these conversations we now talk to each other with our eyes and ears more than with our mouths. Conversations that once were merely fun are now sacred.

A similar phenomenon happened with a summer home neighbor. John and I also met quite by accident about nine years ago one afternoon while he was out for a walk. The instant we began to talk I knew this was a man with a profound ability to listen with utter attention and then to speak reflectively. I had never met anyone quite like him before. He was an obstetrician/gynecologist, but within a few conversations I knew he had the makings of a superb psychotherapist. Until a falling out two or three years ago—which I still do not understand—we had some of the richest and deepest conversations of my life. During those conversations he listened as much with his intense blue eyes as he did with his ears. They were conversations that could not have happened if the introvert in me had not come into his own free space.

Now, writing this, I think I may see why my friend turned a cold shoulder at the end. In reflection I recall too many occasions when the extrovert in me took over our conversation with fancy verbal tap-dancing, carrying on as though he were entertaining a classroom again, telling stories, making witty remarks, trying to dazzle. I thought because I was getting laughs I was succeeding. In those moments I ceased to look within and to talk with my ears. The muscular kid on the beach, the extrovert, had buried the quiet introvert in the sand.

During those seven years our conversations and friendship reminded me of Bertrand Russell’s description of his first conversation with Joseph Conrad: “At our very first meeting,” Russell says, “we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other I have known. We looked into each other’s eyes half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region.” I don’t mean to suggest that my friend and I had the depth of Russell or Conrad; rather, that we had a similar capacity to allow the introverted parts of our beings to speak and listen. Or rather I should say I sometimes had this capacity. Unfortunately, the extrovert in me too often refused to shut up and listen. It was a remarkable seven-year run.

I am reminded of one more relationship in which the introvert and extrovert struggle. A few weeks after Christmas, 2012, motivated by Christmas cards that brought back people from the past, on a whim I wrote a card and short letter to a woman who had been a dear friend a quarter-century earlier and whom I had not seen in all that time. Last I knew, her sons were teenagers and she was married to a Chicago Fire Department battalion chief. She wrote back a short letter telling me of the success of her sons, her move to Arizona, and the death of her husband from complications of dementia and strokes.

Over the last two years, due in part to our spouses suffering from the same disease, we have exchanged scores of very long e-mail letters. Over time, but especially of late, I have become aware of several dynamics in our letters. Two are apropos. The first is that my letters are often those of an introvert wondering, reflecting, speculating, while hers are nearly always those of an extrovert telling me of her and her loved ones’ doings. On several occasions I urged her to write closer to her self. Then, one day recently, I realized this is who she is. In that moment a barrier fell and I accepted her as she was: a lovely, caring extrovert. Perfectly fine.

I also became aware of a second dynamic, this one entirely within me. My letters swung between the thoughtful reflections of an introvert and—how I hate to admit this—showing off. There he was again, the extrovert, the class clown, the teacher entertaining his class, the witty one. That may be the most damning sentence I’ve ever written about myself. I wish it weren’t true, but it is. Inside me, sorry to say, the introvert will always be the shadow brother. He will always need to whisper to his more muscular brother: “Please, it’s my turn. Besides, who do you imagine wants to hear how wonderful you are?”

For answer, allow me to share one last observation. During communion procession at Sunday mass, several women often do what I have never seen done in a church; they stop, lean over, and hug my wife. Though she is nearly always confused and has never had a conversation with any of these women, she understands the language of love perfectly. She breaks into an enormous smile reflecting the smiles of these women and says, “Thank you. I love you.”

Who do I imagine wants to know how wonderful I am? No one. No one at all. One of the most valuable lessons in the world is that everyone would rather be with a soul who sees the wonder of the other and who attends and talks with his eyes and ears more than his mouth. That part of the soul is the domain of the shadow brother whom I have neglected for too long and who even now must still whisper in my ear: my turn.

 Image Credit: “House With Blue Sky”