The ancients, who had no telephones and were therefore insufferably wise, carved "Know thyself" over the temple door at Delphi. It was not a suggestion for the gift shop. It was the price of admission. And knowing oneself, is not a single grand revelation on a mountaintop but a small, daily, almost domestic labor, like winding a clock or feeding a temperamental cat. One must sit with oneself long enough to hear what one really wants, beneath the din of what one is told to want. One must consult the inner compass, that small, trembling, rather aristocratic needle that points, without explanation and with infinite stubbornness, toward one's own north.
Now, a compass is a sensitive instrument. Bring a magnet near it and it will spin with the breathless enthusiasm of a debutante, pointing at whatever is loudest, nearest, and most insistently metallic. And every unsolicited check-in, every gentle "so what are you up to," every small administrative inquiry into the state of one's soul, is a magnet, waved cheerfully across the glass by someone who means no harm whatsoever, and who would be genuinely hurt to learn that he has just sent me several degrees off course, toward his agenda, his anxieties, his long and fascinating saga about a refrigerator under warranty.
One may live an entire life this way, I suspect: a thousand tiny deflections, none of them cruel, all of them affectionate, until one arrives at seventy in a harbor one never chose, surrounded by people who all agree it is a lovely harbor, and that one was very wise to come.
I should be fair to the magnets. There is one kind of interruption I accept without a murmur, and that is the paid kind. If a gentleman sells his Tuesday to a firm, a client, a producer, a tenant, for an agreed sum and under agreed terms, then his Tuesday is no longer his to mourn. He has signed the deed. He has, so to speak, rented out the east wing of the estate, and if the tenants hang hideous curtains, well, that is in the lease. There is a certain dignity in it, the dignity of a mercenary who knows precisely what he is fighting for, which is, as it happens, the rent. He has chosen. The compass still points north; he has merely agreed, for a fee, to walk south for a few hours, and he knows the way back.
