In Costume

As Halloween approaches, people are working tirelessly to construct the perfect trick-or-treating outfit, desperately trying to figure out who to be on that night of universal dress-up. In a more metaphysical sense, though, people are trying to figure out what character to embody, what persona to assume for a single night.

In a column several weeks ago, I talked about how college decisions often border on the existential. This is not simply because we feel as though our entire futures depend on the decisions we make right now. It’s also partially because of the nature of decisions themselves. Many people consider decisions to be a choice of what to do, but they’re also a choice of who to be—whose existence to take on at any given time. We associate the choice of whether to go to law school, for example, not just with monetary questions or choices about whether to take the LSAT—we question whether we are people who want to pursue law.

Borges’ “Everything and Nothing” tells the story of a man who takes up acting to conceal his own lack of an identity, predestined to go into a profession where one “on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.” With that in mind, it’s hard to ignore the theatricality of these college decisions. We assume various roles. We take on various parts. Actors on a stage willfully assume personae, and this is the essence of decision-making in every aspect of life. We do not just choose between paths—we choose between being different people taking on different roles. To quote the famous “All the world’s a stage” monologue from As You Like It might be too clichéd, but the point is clear—we are all actors following our entrances and exits according to the paths we choose for ourselves.

Like many of Borges’ stories, though, “Everything and Nothing” doesn’t end quite so simply. The actor loses track of who he is, gripped in the end by an ontological insecurity marked by having played so many different roles without a single identity. After 20 years of acting, he considers the “tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire.” The fear of being no one overtakes him as he realizes he no longer knows who exactly his self is. Underneath the characters, he assumes, there is nothing—when he tries to remove all of his guises, he finds that there is nothing underneath.

The more decisions we have to make, the more roles we have to assume, the more times we have to choose who we want to be—the more we run the risk of losing ourselves. People often talk about how college is the time for “finding yourself,” for discovering who you are. Few of us don’t change during our time here, and few of us don’t have altered identities by the time we leave. We present ourselves differently. We think about ourselves differently. This is the nature of college. But there is a point at which we can become so caught up in trying to figure out who we are, when we’re so engrossed in making decisions about our present and future, that we have trouble holding on to a single personality. We are so intent on presenting ourselves differently that we begin to think of ourselves differently, running the risk of not being able to figure out who we really are when we’re alone without an audience.

Trying to maintain a true self is no easy task, though. “The labor of hanging on to one’s identity!” exclaims the character of Ed in David Ives’ Degas, C’est Moi. And he’s spot-on. Hanging on to one’s identity is a laborious task, one that requires an individual to actively remember who he is even while playing many different parts. Even Ed realizes this, experiencing the same sort of Borgesian horror discussed above: “Just for a picosecond there, I forget who I am! Just for a moment—I seem to be nobody.”

Whether we define ourselves entirely by our actions, I’m not sure. But certainly, the person we claim to be must at least be partially reflected in the decisions we make on a daily basis. This is why the decisions we have to make right now seem so consequential. They define who we currently are, or at least who we’re pretending to be. Perhaps all the world’s a stage after all, with each of us trying to figure out what our next line is. But the more apt Shakespearean reference comes from Hamlet, as Polonius makes sure his son Laertes is aware of which piece of his abundant advice is the most important: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” Polonius doesn’t remind him, of course, that figuring out who his own self is can be a task within itself.

My point is this: choose your masks carefully this Halloween. And when you’re all alone in your room and you take off that plastic face you bought at Ricky’s—be sure you know who will be underneath.

Dan Blank is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. That Is the Question runs alternate Wednesdays.
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