ON WATCHING FACES
By Kenneth Barnes
Sunday Assembly November 20th, 1949.
This afternoon, while I was listening to a broadcast concert with a number of girls and boys (one boy, to be exact), I started playing a game – a game that perhaps some of you have played. I looked at the faces of the others who were listening, trying to imagine what was passing behind their faces, what their thoughts were like. I often enjoy looking at faces – though it is sometimes a little difficult. You cannot look at a face very long without the other person becoming conscious of what you are doing. Even if you are not in their line of vision they become, by some mysterious telepathic impulse, aware of what you are doing. They look up and catch your eyes – and you both look quickly away in opposite directions, slightly embarrassed.
The more you like people the more interesting is this game. In a school like this, where there is a good deal of opportunity for people to appreciate and like each other, there should therefore be plenty of interest to find in it. Being a man I naturally enjoy looking at girls. I’m amused at the thoughts that pass through my mind. I find myself wondering what sort of wives they would make. My mind goes wandering over the country, imagining the men or boys scattered here and there through our vast population, who are destined to marry them – and I wonder what delights or headaches they will experience as a result. I hope, and I believe, more delights than headaches.
Sometimes my gaze strays to the feet of the people around me, and I think of how expressive of their personality’s people’s feet are – how even the bulges of their shoes express something in their characters. I wonder whether you could recognise many people from a group if you stood them all in line and screened off their bodies so that you saw only their feet and ankles.
Sometimes, if you try hard, you can stop thinking of people as human beings and look at their faces as you do at the faces of animals. You get some very quaint ideas then and curious likenesses. You perhaps see someone who has the wary and soft look of a rabbit, another with the ready-for-anything look of a terrier. You can see Cheshire cats and pekinese among your friends, perhaps even a camel or a poodle. But you can’t do this for long. You’re bound to come quickly back to thinking of your friends as human and personal, and you become aware of what a world lays behing (sic) the face, of what a lot is implied in its shape and its little movements – or even lack of movement. People listen to music with such different expressions. Some listen with unchanging gravity – with hardly a movement except the slight movement of breathing. Yet you are aware that they are very much alive – that a great deal of feeling is going on behind – indeed is implied in their gravity. In other faces there is constant slight movement of muscles; the variations in the intensity or the thought of the music is paralleled by the change in their position or expression. Whichever sort of face I am watching I become aware of the whole world that exists within the head – the head that takes up, relatively, so little space. We think the material world round us is tremendous in its extent, and less in its possibilities of exploration. But so also is the world inside the minds of the people who sit beside us, every bit as mysterious and fascinating as the mysterious universe of the planets, the stars and the nebulae. The world inside me – my thoughts, perceptions, imaginings – and all the experience stored up in my memory – as well as the pattern I make of it all in reflection – can never be the same as that of any other person. Each of us sits at the centre of our own private world – yes, a very private world.
Isn’t it strange that we should all be so keenly aware of each other, and yet so very unable to enter each other’s world? So unable to think each other’s thoughts? You perhaps do not know that people who have, so to speak, grown into each other in a long and happy marriage will sometimes turn to each other and say; “Isn’t it strange that we feel so much one, and yet we cannot think each other’s thoughts?” In our thoughts we remain forever distinct and separate – wholly ‘other’.
A famous writer once wrote a story in which he supposed the invention of a thought-reading machine – a machine which when pointed at a person enabled you to read his thoughts in detail. Can you imagine the result? At first a good deal of astonishment and anxiety. Respectable and good people were found to have quite a current of nasty thoughts passing over the surface of their minds. People were made anxious by the apparent intention of other people to swindle them. It was all very disturbing. But the thought machine soon fell into disuse – became little more than a curiosity that people no longer cared to use. It was boring after a while to listen to the casual flow of another person’s thought, and an unnecessary disturbance to learn of wicked intentions that would never be put into practice.
Yes, it is better that we should remain a mystery to each other - and a mystery we do indeed remain. Occasionally when you looking at people they will look up, catch your eye and after a direct look or fleeing smile turn away. It is as though a tiny window was for a moment opened, through which you took a peep into the inner life of the other – a glance that lasted long enough only for you to be aware of how unfathomable and mysterious is human life and consciousness, this extraordinary capacity of human beings to create a world within a world and yet extending beyond it.
There are some people – people whom in a way I envy – who can see quickly and deeply into the minds of others. They need but a little lifting of the window to know much of what lies within – and thus knowing more they find more to care for. The two stories I read you from the life of Jesus showed how quick and deep his perceptions were and how moved he was by what he saw, whether it was in the eager mind of a young man unhappily caught in the snare of riches – or in the mind of a degraded, despised woman and her hypocritical accusers. People who have this acute perception and with it the gift of loving count for so much in the world. But we can’t reach this state by merely willing it. Such people are not the hearty back-slapping type, always cheerful and whistling like a boy scout. They are more often quiet, unpretentious, humble – but intensely alive.
As people grow older their experiences and the personality that grows with them – become graven on the face. The contours and lines become steadily more marked. They lose their youthful smoothness and glow. The peach and ivory pass – but they are replaced by something more individual and personal and their faced become more definitely and unmistakably theirs – their own and no one else’s. Sometimes fear and defeat, brutality, cunning, greed or lust for power are stamped thereon. Or it may be that as time goes on the capacity for understanding love grows and becomes more and more clearly expressed in the many lines that creep over the ageing skin. Do some of you remember Charles Ford of Bentham – who was so good to us in our old home – how lined his face was? It was lined with a good deal of anxious thought and furrowed with responsibility, but you could see at the same time how the spirit in time had grown to match the demands that life made of it.
Often people cultivate a false face – a mask: something they show to the world but behind which the real self hides. Psychologists call it a “persona”. Take an example at its crudest – the stylish waiter with the perfect manner who flourishes his way with all the grace of a superior gentleman between the tables, tray perched on hand, coat tails flying out behind. Very impressive – but perhaps behind the kitchen door, or in his own house, an unhappy figure desperately aware of his own insignificance and inadequacy. Sometimes the mask is put on or taken off at will. It is like a uniform that you put on for a particular job. I wonder whether I put on a headmaster’s persona when I’m interviewing parents. Perhaps that sort of persona is sometimes useful and justified – but even so it is bound to have its dangers for in all jobs we must be prepared to be personal when the need arises. The really dangerous mask, however, is the one that becomes stuck – the mask that we come to like so much that we think it is our true face and not a false one. This is tragedy – for we are lost in falsehood and our true life dwindles. Our eyes become the dark window of an almost empty house.
What am I asking you to do – to wear your feelings and thoughts on your faces? No – you can’t consciously set about to do this. You can become less afraid that others shall know you – and then your face perhaps will become more expressive of yourself – and people will discover you to be more interesting after all than either your or they ever thought. But whatever we do it is right that there should be in our minds a private room to which we can withdraw and close the door for a while. What happens in that room nobody need know – but it is very important. Although it is private there is always another person there. That person is – yourself. There are always at least two of you – the one that acts and the one that watches him. In the inner room of the mind they meet, and it is very important that they should come to terms with each other.
Archive reference PP KCB 3/7/2 document06