Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

Have you ever noticed how your thoughts and opinions change when you tell them to people, or even when you think with the intention to speak aloud, or to write? One’s private opinions, intended only for the cavernous solitude of one’s own reflection, are one thing, while thoughts intended for public view or public defense are quite another. In the privacy and safety of my personal mental universe, my thoughts can form at the deepest, most honest, most holistic level, but when I allow the light of social intercourse to interact with my reflections, they squirm and shift against my will, taking on a kind of acceptability that I can’t avoid. Apparently, I am neither honest nor strong enough to “put myself out there” unreservedly – and I can feel the very shape of my mind moving against my will.

Of course, I am not famous. I can only imagine how much worse this pressure is in the light of a truly public exposure. One can easily imagine being essentially insane under those circumstances, having transformed into a kind of vessel of acceptable views, a conduit for an established pattern of thought, an ideology.

I often wonder why politicians and public figures are so boring, so hopelessly wooden, so unable to respond and think spontaneously. It is remarkable that almost nothing that is done in public is honest, and when the stakes are high – big issues, big publicity – the level of stupidity, of phoniness, of caricature is so outrageous as to be comical, except that it actually affects our lives.