The veneer

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

I grew up watching The Wizard of Oz. Not by choice, and not because my mother's siblings teased her by naming her The Wicked Witch of the West, but because my younger sister was obsessed with the film, and so we watched it over and over again, at all hours of the day, twice a day, the kind of soundtrack to a childhood that in a bygone era might have been the gossiping of the Italian ladies making pasta on the bedsheets while everyone else was at work.

That revelatory moment—Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain—didn't strike a chord in me then, but rather it imprinted something, the ruts in the road of a life, an echo life would summon again and again.

But the curtain. What is the "the curtain"? 

The purpose of a curtain is to obscure. In Heian-era Kyoto, curtains and drapes (kichō) were drawn across palace rooms to divide spaces into smaller, darker ones. The curtain is flexible; it can be moved and shifted to obscure as the subject needs. But the curtain does not offer total privacy: even the thickest drapes cannot keep out the sound of the surrounding world, nor can they obstruct the truth within.

I am Oz. The Great and Powerful.

I call this the veneer.

In banal terms, we lie to ourselves and others. Our entire world is a construct, an artifice: art(if)ice, like a sculpture that melts unless it remains under perfect, frozen conditions. Did you know your brain makes up a portion of your visual field? The ocular nerve exists in the field of conic receptors, creating a "blind spot" in your sight; your brain guesses at what to fill in.

Biology and physics seem to reinforce this; our ability to perceive the whole world, as human beings, is limited, imperfect. And perhaps so it should remain. But I've also come to believe that we have a responsibility to see beyond the veneer, at least when it concerns ourselves and others.

I wonder how many of us go throughout life with these sorts of curtains draped around us, projecting a persona. And I wonder how much the inverse is true: We are not covering ourselves, but we cover each other.

I wonder how inevitable it is that we rehearse stories to suit our version of events. To repair the truth of the matter.

Brushing against the veneer

Any New Yorker will tell you autumn is the most inviting time. But autumn is also the time of revelation, the moment the midsummer night's dream comes to an end: the trees reveal their true colors and fall; the revelry and ritual of the summer fade away as the world wakes. These leaf-loosening trees are deciduous, from the Latin decidere, meaning to cut off or to decide. The Japanese have a term that encompasses the beauty of this leaf-shedding phenomenon: mono no aware refers to the awareness of impermanence, the ability to see the beauty in the dying of the leaves, in nature's decision to shed the cocoon of the veneer.

Because here's the thing about veneers: they don't last. There is always an eschatology to the veneer: the apocalyptic moment, and I mean that in the etymological sense: apo/calyptic comes from the ancient Greek prefix ἀπο- (apo) meaning "away from" and καλύπτω (kalúptō) meaning "I cover." An apocalypse is an uncovering, and it makes impermanent the veneers of everyday life—floorboards, dental cosmetics, the brick façade of a building—as much as the autumn and looming winter do to the ginkgos in Manhattan and Tokyo.

In his work À la recherche du temps perdu (anglicized as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past), the French author Marcel Proust employs the idea of the veneer in the form of rehearsal. Young Marcel, the narrator, rehearses things which are yet to happen so as to make them real despite not having happened. The idea of a date with a girl he adores, the death of his grandmother, the performance of an actor he hasn't yet seen. The book he will soon write. Young Marcel spins the veneer around himself so tightly that he never acts on his desires. It isn't until much later, at the end of the book, that the chrysalis begins to rustle.

In the same way, so much of how we travel persists at the level of the veneer. Proust, in the first volume of his novel, has a line:

…les pays que nous désirons tiennent à chaque moment beaucoup plus de place dans notre vie véritable, que le pays où nous nous trouvons effectivement, …

or roughly

…the countries we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our reality than the country in which we happen to be, …

In other words: we prefer the idea of what we want to see instead of the reality in our visual field. We pay for sanitized hotels or Airbnbs that cater to [American] tastes; we purchase tours that show selective, "approved" areas of the city; we don't study the language or the history of a place before we visit and so leave with a superficial understanding of the land.

We collect countries like trading cards, spend a day or two in each capital city and depart before it has begun to enact any chance upon us; we travel the world without ever really seeing it. We claim we've been to many countries and cities and yet we don't know a soul there. Such is the veneer of the well-traveled.

This is all, of course, nobody's fault: it's how the brain is wired. In their book Thinking Fast and Slow, behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky posit two "systems" for how the brain works: System I is intuitive, lazy, assumption-making, and fast. System II is slow, resource-hungry, lumbering at its work, and grumpy. For the simple limitation of energy, we process most of life via System I.

We default to the veneer.

We do, at times, lay a hand on the curtain to find there might be something behind it. I think about death and departures: recently, my brother and I were helping our nonagenarian grandmother into a car that would take her to the airport, and he turned to me and said: "that's always the hardest goodbye. I never know when it might be the last." We know her death is near, but we don't know how: a few weeks? Several years? How close to 100 do you get to live before some random chance whisks you away?

The veneer is here to protect us: Ah, better not to think about it. We'll deal with it when it comes.

I might enact Proustian rehearsal for myself, pulling back the curtain, of paying some attention to that which might be there like a blind person opening Schrödinger's Box and being unable to distinguish whether the cat is alive or dead: I imagine the aftermath of her death, of me being somewhere far like Buenos Aires or Taipei or Stockholm and taking the next flight to D.C. to see her in the hospital.

I imagine the funeral, at times, everyone in their grief, even negotiating the experience with this future, unrealized self of mine. We can rehearse a loved one's death to lessen the pain of it; we use the veneer to prepare for when it is pulled away.

But it, too, is an artifice: we face an imagined reality, subject to the whims of the veneer. We are less pulling back the curtain than burying our eyes in the folds.

Withdrawing the veneer

Poetry and stories remind us, too. The Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Edith Södergran has a poem called Höstens sista blomma that ends as such: 

jag skall stänga dödens portar.
Jag är höstens sista blomma.

translated as:

I shall close the doorways to death.
I am the last flower of autumn.

Poetry forces us to look at that which we would rather not. What is the last flower of autumn? In my mind, it is a rose, like Beauty and the Beast, losing a petal as a time in a beautiful glass showcase. Although I know this not to hold any factual veracity. I want it to be beautiful, to have the mono no aware one experiences when the yozakura wafts into a palm, and not the brutal reality of a wilted, browning leaf that was left behind.

But rather, I think of art and writing as a way in which we negotiate with the unknown, with which might be behind the curtain. Clarice Lispector, the great Brazilian writer of the 20th century, writes in a solitary line in her book Água Viva:

Te escrevo porque não me entendo.

translated as:

I write to you because I don't understand myself.

Lispector wrote Água Viva in a chaotic manner, less writing and more detritus-making, scribbling on scraps of paper and leaving them around the house for her partner to assemble and turn into a coherent manuscript. We do not know when she wrote this line, whether it was at the beginning of the end, but it is situated near the front of the book in my edition, as if she is doing the work of pulling back the veneer she has built around herself and encouraging us to do the same.

Piercing the veil between ideal and reality is something that even artists need to work on. It is work, but work worth doing.

Our responsibility

I've recently begun patronizing an Italian coffee shop in my neighborhood. I was making small talk with the baristas and learned that one of them would be experiencing their first anniversary in New York City in a few weeks.

I said nothing of it again until the day of, when I gave her a card I'd spent a few minutes looking for at the Strand. I'd never seen someone so happy. She hadn't even thought to commemorate such an anniversary, and she hadn't thought that someone who was, essentially, a total stranger in a city famous for being full of cold strangers, would think of her beyond their perfunctory, scripted interactions.

I wrote a card to the barista who is new to New York because I don't understand what I'm doing in New York. I'd moved here with a purpose, but perhaps it is lost—or forgotten. I pull back the veneer in search of someone else who has pulled back theirs, grasping for something that they may or may not have a glimpse of.

The other barista told me something similar had happened to him the other day. They'd ordered delivery of some product via a TaskRabbit-like service; the runner showed up; as a tip, this barista, with Google Translate assistance, offered to make the runner a latte. This man broke down crying—he'd fled the war in Ukraine and was hardly making ends meet. Emotion is the sound of a shattered veneer.

The lie of the veneer is this: the things that seem normal to you and me, like going out for a latte, may often be out of reach to the people in the background of our lives. The veneer we construct around ourselves is also the veneer we use to shroud others—to avoid looking at them.

Much as there is a blind spot in our vision, there must too be one in our representation of the world, in our basic assumptions about one another. The veneer covers up the flaws.

The Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli reminds us that, in particle physics, molecules are not "aware" of each other unless they're touching: all reality is interaction. It is the same with people. We do not see people—not really—unless we pull back the curtain and pay attention to whomever it conceals.

We must learn to control the veneer, to pull it back at will. The lies we tell to cocoon—protect—ourselves like Young Marcel, tangling our feet so much we cannot reach for our own desires. The heuristics we use to ignore, discriminate, or filter against other people—the barista is just a person in their job. Soon to be automated away.

We pull back the curtain and say yes to the life behind it.