We’ve spent too long trying to downplay what others think of us, to how they see us, and failing for it. Is not easy kill with indifference those looks that fall on one. Sooner or later, you wonder what goes through people’s heads when they look at you, and if they save you or damn you. Last week I took a shower and, for the first time in years, let my hair air dry without combing it in front of the mirror. And I went out into the street without further ado, to pick up my daughter at school. As soon as I set foot on the sidewalk, I ran into one of my aunts, who blurted out “Now do you part your hair in the middle?” I looked horrified in the window of the shoe store below the house. “Holy crap,” I said, and I came home and asked my wife to please pick up the girl because I had bad hair. “Are you sure it’s not for going out on the street with a shirt torn in fourteen places?”, asked.
Of course some people show more concern than others for what others will think of their appearance. In ‘A gentleman adrift’, by Herbert Clyde Lewis, these days I came across a fascinating character, concerned with always making a good impression on the world. The novel, written eighty years ago, and forgotten, and now recovered in Spanish by the Periférica publishing house, tells the story of Henry Preston Standisch, a highly educated and sophisticated businessman who spends a few days on vacation on a boat, when he unexpectedly slips. in a grease slick on the deck and falls into the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Panama. Even though it’s five in the morning, and he’s up to watch the sunrise, Standisch is wearing one of his classic business suits. He is not a “bad pants” man, not even when he travels on a freighter adapted for passengers, and everything on board is lacking in splendor.
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Physically fit at thirty-five, he finds staying afloat easy at first, even amusing, optimistic that they will soon realize a missing passenger and turn around to pick him up safe. and saved. Clothes are a problem, but the protagonist faces it with courage. He isn’t about to part with the shoes or the suit, under which he wears a sports shirt and blue-and-yellow striped boxer shorts. “Apart from natural masculine modesty, that was another reason why he had decided that he would rather drown than allow himself to be rescued in striped underwear.” In his opinion, “a man’s sense of decency was as important as his life”.
The moment when you stop caring what others think of you, and when no ideas or judgments from others can affect your life, I imagine it triggers a great release. Learning to say “I don’t care” and actually don’t care about something is an indisputable victory. Who knows if the great achievement of intelligence is to decide that many things, many ideas, many scrutinies that condition us, do not really have any importance.