One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

“Huh! small wonder in that! Doesn’t everybody know what wives are for? Made, precisely, for discovering a husband’s faults.”

Solitude is never where you are; it is always where you are not, and is only possible with a stranger present;

True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself. This was the way in which I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean to say, without that self which I already knew, or which I thought I knew.

If I was not for others what up to then I had believed myself to be to myself, what was I?

From that time on, I had one despairing obsession : to go in pursuit of that stranger who was in me and who kept fleeing me; whom I could not halt in front of a mirror, without his at once becoming the me that I knew; the one who lived for others and whom I could not know; whom others beheld living and not I. I wanted to see and know him, too, as others saw and knew him.

The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a “mine,” that is to say, that was not for me!)—a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate—this idea gave me no rest.

could feel them—those eyes. I could see them there, confronting me, but I also could feel them here, in me; I felt them mine, not fixed upon me now but as existing in themselves. And if, for a little, I succeeded in not being thus intimately conscious of them, I did not see them anymore. Alas, that was precisely the way it was: I could see them as a part of me, I no longer could see them.

Reflections: 1. That I was not to others what up to then I had believed that I was to myself; 2. That I could not see myself living; 3. That, not being able to see myself living, I remained a stranger to myself, that is, one whom others believed they saw and knew, each after his own fashion, but not I; 4. That it was impossible to stand this stranger up in front of me, in order to see and know him. I could see myself, but could no longer see him; 5. That my body, if I regarded it from without, was like an apparition from a dream, a thing that did not know how to live, but which remained waiting there for someone to take it; 6. That, just as I took this my body, to be from time to time what I wished or felt myself to be, so another similarly might take it, to confer upon it a reality of his own; 7. That, finally, this body in itself was so near to being nothing and nobody that a draught of air might cause it to sneeze today and tomorrow might carry it off. Conclusions: These two for the time being: 1. I was beginning to understand at last why it was my wife, Dida, called me Gengé; 2. I made up my mind to find out who I was, at least to those closest to me, acquaintances so-called, and to amuse myself by maliciously decomposing the I that I was to them.

For reality is not a thing conferred upon us or which exists; it is something that we have to manufacture ourselves, if we will to be; and it will never be one for all, one forever, but continuous and subject to infinite mutations. The faculty of deluding one’s self that today’s reality is the only true one, if on the one hand it affords us a support, on the other hand hurls us into a bottomless void, for the reason that today’s reality is destined to discover itself an illusion tomorrow. And life knows no conclusion. It cannot know any. If tomorrow there were to be a conclusion, all would be over.

Reflect a moment. There was nothing about your old friend, in himself, to justify your sending him away when the new one came. The two of them, as a matter of fact, were not acquainted with each other; it was you who introduced them; and they might have gone on and had a pleasant little chat for a half-hour or so, in your parlor, with no embarrassment to either of them. It was you who felt the embarrassment, and your embarrassment grew until it became unendurable, as you saw the two of them little by little drawing nearer to each other, and you perceived that they were getting on very well together. Why was this? Why it was because you—you (won’t you understand?)—upon the arrival of your new friend, suddenly discovered that you were two separate persons, each of them different from the other; and as a result, not being able to endure it any longer, you simply had to send one of them away at a certain point. Not your old friend, no; it was yourself that you sent away, the self that you are to your old friend, for the reason that you felt that self to be altogether different from the one that you are, or would like to be, to your new friend.

Each one wants to impose upon others that world he has within, as if it were an outward entity, as if all ought to see it after his fashion, it being impossible for others to exist there save as he sees them.”

how you can rest quietly when you reflect that there is someone who is doing his utmost to persuade others that you are as he sees you, endeavoring firmly to establish you in the estimation of others in accordance with his judgment of you, and to prevent others from seeing and judging you in any other manner?”

Pause for a moment and stare at someone who is performing the most ordinary and obvious act in life, stare at him in such a manner as to cause the suspicion to arise in his mind that what he is doing is not clear to us, and that it may similarly not be clear to himself; do this, and his self-assurance at once is overcast and begins to waver. No crowd could be more disconcerting than that pair of unseeing eyes, eyes that do not see us, or which do not see the same thing that we do.