Don’t Worry: It’s Not You; It’s Always Me

Squibs and Blurbs

by Jerry Zimmerman

“I yam what I yam.”—Popeye the Sailor

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—10/10/11—Many years ago, my late wife Rhona was working at a furniture store with a whole group of crazy characters optimistically dubbed “furniture salespeople.” This particular sub-set of workers is worth a MacArthur Grant of specialized study, but I won’t even touch on that right now.

Rhona had been telling one of her co-workers that her husband (me) loved doing crossword puzzles and that I had a very good vocabulary. This small tidbit of information seemed instantly to trigger some primal competitive reaction within this gentleman, whereupon he insisted that she immediately phone me so he could possibly prove otherwise.

Incredibly, this had happened before to Rhona at other “furniture salespeople” jobs (let’s just say that this work environment fosters the kind of aggressive competitiveness found most often at barely-wet water holes in the deepest jungle during a drought). I had been phone-quizzed before and I had passed those tests with flying colors.

My self-appointed etymological umpire was ready with what was, I suspect, his go-to question; “What’s the definition of ‘solipsism?’”

This time, I was stuck.

Hmmmm. I knew the word and could vaguely place its meaning, but I could not actually define it. Man, was this guy happy—the sounds coming from the other end of the phone seemed to signify some sort of Nobel-Prize-winning celebration! Ah, the agony of defeat, or at least a bit of embarrassment for not winning the day for my fair maiden.

Solipsism: a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing; also, extreme egocentrism.

This rather novel way of discovering the definition of a word really imprinted its meaning into my brain, as you might imagine. For this reason, and just for the sheer mystery of the concept, I have often found myself thinking about solipsism, probably a lot more than the average bear.

The idea of everything in life coming into being through my own perceptions is intriguing, seductive and possibly even the truth. After all, when I try to sort through the important questions of my life and of LIFE, whether it’s deciding when to go to the grocery store, or how to discipline my child, or whether God actually does exist, I wonder who is doing that? What mechanisms are working within me to come up with a, with any, decision?

Exactly who or what is it that can see the world, gather information, and then act on it?

I’m thinking, and truly counting on the fact that it is ME doing this work, and not that messy, furtive neighbor down the block that I don’t know too well, or some mind-control cult beaming invisible rays out from the second highest peak in the Swiss Alps.

Let’s assume that the whole other world out there, everything that is not me, is there for some unfathomable reason yet to be pinned down. It may be a very important place but, for me, it doesn’t have quite the same panache without, ah . . . me!

Does this make me a solipsist, or even that very negative-sounding word, an egocentric? Does this mean that I think I am the most important human on the planet, that the sun spins around Earth to keep me warm and cozy and it is the great good luck of my friends and family that they are close enough to share the heat?

Well, like most answers in life that seem to contain real truth, yes and no—the truth is usually much more slippery and several categories weirder than we would wish.

The sense that only I, from the inside, can make the important quotidian and psychic decisions about how my life will look as I progress from birth to death, does not preclude my awareness of, my caring for, and my responsibility to those around me and the world in which I live.

So, maybe I’m not a solipsist at all. Maybe I’m actually an existentialist. Or possibly a Deist. Or maybe, deep down, a Buddhist.

I’m still working on all this but, what the hey, I think I’ll call up that furniture guy—if he’s so smart, let’s see if he can give me the correct definition for existentialism!

* Existentialism: the belief that an individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely.