Notes From the Legal Pad #2
Body-image and shame
While I was listening to 100 audiobooks in a month, I took notes on a yellow legal pad. Here, I share some of those notes and expand on them.
“Depth and profundity does NOT equal difficulty and denseness. If it can’t be explained to a 10-year old, it’s not worth explaining.”
While listening to Consolations of Philosophy, the author Alain de Botton discussed Michel de Montaigne, the 16th century French philosopher. Montaigne despised pomp in all its forms, and he believed that anything convoluted wasn’t worth his time. As a rule, he thought, simplicity is best.
People often fall into the trap of using fancy jargon and splendiferous sesquipedalianism when in fact the messages they are trying to express are quite simple. This bravado is even used intentionally to dissemble one’s listeners and beguile them into believing something utterly unintelligible.
Montaigne called this for what it is: bullshit.
He considered it symptomatic of a broader issue, namely that we are ashamed of our baseness. We may use highfalutin words and wear posh clothes and comport ourselves with our heads held aloft, but underneath it all, we’re just animals.
We eat and shit and fuck and burp — we’re afraid of the dark and we are terrified of death. No one can escape the innermost essence of our humanity, and those characteristics cannot be masked with gold.
Montaigne was a funny dude, and he had lots of quirky little observations about life. He loved farts and sneezes, and he wrote that “It is most uncouth to loathe our own nature.”
Couldn’t agree more, Michel!
We all deal with body-image issues and shame surrounding the most mundane daily trifles with our bodies. We cover our yawns, we shave our armpits, we try to hide our scent, and so much more.
I remember once when I was dancing at House of Yes in Brooklyn, a woman came up to me and pointed to my chest and said “Dude! I love your chest hair!” I responded, “Thanks! To be honest, I was always a little self-conscious about it.” And then she looked me dead in the eye and said something I’ll never forget:
“You don’t have to love the things about your body that other people love about your body.”
If that’s not the most brilliant philosophical advice ever, I don’t know what is. Wisdom lies not in the Lyceum, but on the dance floor.
I think Montaigne would’ve loved this woman’s attitude: yes, we’re all animals and we all have aspects of our bodies that we consider flaws, but the trick is to find people who love those aspects about ourselves and help us overcome our shame.
With their guidance, we can come to see that those flaws were never such a big deal in the first place.
