When I go into company where everybody is spontaneous and free, easily
uttering what the occasion calls for, I can utter only what I call for
and not at all what the occasion asks. Between the two demands there
is always an awkward jar. When tortured by such experiences it does
not soothe to have others carelessly remark, "Oh, just be natural!"
That is precisely what we should like to be, but how? That little
point is continually left unexplained. Yet obviously self-
consciousness involves something like a deadlock. For how can one
consciously exert himself to be unconscious and try not to try? We
cannot arrange our lives so as to have no arrangement in them, and
when shaking hands with a friend, for example, be on our guard against
noticing. Once locked up in this vicious circle, we seem destined to
be prisoners forever. That is what constitutes the anguish of the
situation. The most tyrannical of jailers--one's self--is over us, and
from his bondage we are powerless to escape. The trouble is by no
means peculiar to our time, though probably commoner forty years ago
than at any other period of the world's history. But it had already
attracted the attention of Shakespeare, who bases on it one of his
greatest plays. When Hamlet would act, self-consciousness stands in
his way.
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