How Should a Person Be?

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Sheila Heti / How Should a Person Be?

“You remember the ‘Puer Aeternus’ - the eternal child - Peter Pan - the boy who never grows up who never becomes a man? Or it’s like in The Little Prince - when the prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep.

The narrator tries and tries again, but each time he fails to do it as well as he wishes. He believes himself to be a great artist and can not understand why it’s not working. In a fit of frustration, he instead draws a box - something he can do well. When the prince asks how it’s a picture of a sheep, the narrator replies that it’s a picture of a sheep in a box. He is arrogantly proud of his solution and satisfied with his efforts. This response is typical of all puers.

Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it in the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose because people who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny, shared with others of this type - though such people do not believe they represent a type, but feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man, who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world. But while others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world. But — and here is the hope — there is a solution for people of this type, and it’s perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work — without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don’t mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process. They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger.

Puers don’t need to check themselves into analysis. If they can just remember this - It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose - they might consider themselves saved. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering - which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life - living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life. They must give themselves completely to the experience. One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered. If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy - really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.”