Lately I've been thinking a little about my uncle, and about the strange ripply reflections of the internet, and how we know and don't know the people in our lives. There isn't really a point to this post so you can skip it if you're not into navel-gazing right now. That's all this is.
Anyway, my uncle: I don't actually know him very well. He was often around when I was little, but I never got the impression that he was especially at ease with kids (also, it will surprise you to learn!, I was a particularly difficult brat as a kid [and now, yes yes]), and then we moved away, so I never really saw him once I got older. And now I live on the opposite side of the country and don't have much occasion to talk, so we fell out of contact and I figured that was that.
From half-remembered and maybe-inaccurate family stories I have the impression that my uncle lived a life that could have made a rich novel. A difficult childhood, an escape to the Army, exotic adventures and searing experiences as a young man, then outwardly quiet years beset by subdued heartbreaks later. Whether this is true, I don't know; family stories often aren't. But that's always been my vague understanding: that there *are* stories there, a lifetime's worth, or at least the possibility of them.
In my head, in these stories, my uncle is one of those middle-American protagonists beset by inarticulate yearnings and frustrations, reaching for elusive things never quite to be grasped, experiencing enormous events with immediacy and at close range, never with historical remove. I think of him this way not based on real knowledge, but because of its absence: it's easier to fill a personality you don't really know with watercolors. It's harder to draw strong lines with confidence when you don't even know their contours.
A couple of years back he reached out to friend me on Facebook. It was a surprise, but a welcome one. I thought: oh, now maybe I'll finally get to know who this person is, and instead of having this cloudy Updike knockoff in my head, I'll come to know a real personality.
Except that never happened.
A funny thing about Facebook (all social media, really, but especially FB, with its pictures/words, long/short versatility) is this: it reflects who people are in ways they intend and ways that they don't. Yes, it's a curated version of your life, but what people choose to include and what they omit is telling; whether they construct themselves primarily in pictures or words is telling; whether they present themselves in their own original selves or repeat what others create is telling.
At its best, you hear insights and thoughts from people you'd never otherwise talk to (or not in such depth), and you see glimpses of textured and colorful lives. People like to complain about dinner pictures, but I think they're fascinating: what people eat, how they prepare it, what they think worthy of presentation (the dish itself or the values it represents? a complicated showpiece meal or an everyday family dinner?). At its best, all these lives make a brilliant and unique mosaic.
At its worst... you wonder whether the person *has* an interior life of their own, or how unpleasant it must be to dwell there. If all that's shown is seething resentment packaged up into grotesque and inaccurate pictures, and other people's borrowed chants of anger repeated over and over again -- if those are the pictures that person chooses to make the wallpaper of their mind, and the interior world where they choose to live... then that's an ugly place to be.
Social media giveth, and social media taketh away. Through the internet I've met many wonderful, reflective, brilliant people whose thoughts I respect and enjoy. Facebook lets you peek inside people's heads, sort of, and that's often a curious and wonderful thing.
But other times it isn't. Other times you feel like you know someone less than you ever did before.
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