Vanity Feature

Vanity Feature

I'm in a mountain village. To get here I crossed areas affected by a recent earthquake. I've seen houses torn apart; sections of villages razed to the ground. The earth is immense and powerful. One tremor from it and we are crushed, our lives changed, our homes crumbled.

Then I went for a walk. There's nothing like a starry sky to remind us of our infinite smallness. Even the huge planet we inhabit is a tiny particle.

To have a vanity feature is to forget the insignificant place we occupy in the universe. We are nothing, yet we think we are everything. A pair of shoes, a hairdo, a real or presumed talent, however small (I can dry glasses like nobody else), is enough to occupy our thinking for an entire day.

Vanity teaches us to evaluate other people according to the traits we believe we possess. If we are beautiful, or imagine that we are, our judgments are based on beauty; if strong, then strength; if smart, then intelligence. Our talent is bigger than anyone else's. Like every feature, vanity deforms reality and bends it to our subjective needs.

Many of our buffers are organized around a desperate attempt to save face in our own eyes, to maintain our imaginary picture: positive, dignified, kind, ethical.

Although we believe that we are at the center of the world—and therefore consider only ourselves, our own problems, our own opinions, our own prestige, our superiority over others—we are dependent on the approval of others, on flattery and applause. If someone speaks well of us, even in a clearly hypocritical way, we are psychologically imprisoned.

Vanity is visible. We almost always know whether a person is saying something because it is useful or because she is expressing her vanity (for that person only is it invisible). Vanity can transform any essence interest or passion into something for personality to exhibit to others.

Like all features, vanity is incompatible with presence. It's an extreme form of subjectivity. If we happen to wake up during a moment when we’re expressing vanity, we seem to see a stranger saying and doing absurd things, not ourselves.

My teacher said that if vanity is not one's chief feature, it is almost certainly the second feature. No one is immune to it. If someone seems immune, he probably just has an unusual form of vanity. Someone told me a few days ago that I don't have this feature. I smiled, because I think it's my chief feature, only in a passive form. That is, rather than wanting to be praised for my talents, I'm always sure I'll be caught and shown to be wrong or inadequate.

Self-deprecation is the flip side of the vanity coin. To think of oneself as ugly, stupid, bad is nothing more than an expression of the same feature.

One way to work on vanity is not to buffer when other people praise you. Don't make jokes out of false humility, don't minimize. Just say thank you. Or—interesting experiment—let the praise flow sincerely and freely into yourself.

"What a lovely tie you have!"

"Isn't it? In fact, it's my favorite. Look how finely woven it is."

And meanwhile observe yourself. You can learn something.

From A Question of Presence by our friend Sergio Antonio

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Pavo cristatus (Peacock), J. Smit after Joseph Wolf