osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2016-12-24 08:01 am
osprey_archer) wrote2016-12-24 08:01 am
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Book Review: Shrinking Violets
After a string of subpar books, I was beginning to lose faith in Netgalley - is a title and a couple of short descriptive paragraphs truly enough information to make an informed reading decision? - but Joe Moran’s Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness restored it. The book is a melange of anecdotes from the lives of famous shy people (lots of authors, artists, singers), various theories both ancient and modern about the nature of shyness, and a light sprinkling of philosophizing on Moran’s part.
He promises at the outset that this book is not going to turn into a sideways biography of his own history of shyness, which I appreciated, and I think the fact that he doesn’t discuss his own shyness directly allows him to dig deeper into the nature of shyness as a whole. He’s interested in the amorphous nature of shyness, the way that it waxes and wanes in a life, and affects some people almost totally and other people only in small parts of their lives; the fact that it can coexist with other personality traits that might seem quite antithetical to it. “It is so dirt-common that no especially disagreeable or virtuous human attributes can be extrapolated from it,” he notes. “It cohabits with egotism and self-pity as readily as with modesty and thoughtfulness.”
He notes also that people are often paradoxically proud of their shyness, that we tend to believe that it makes us unique and perhaps deeper than other people - the irony being that many people consider themselves shy, that perhaps most people suffer at least occasionally from the feeling that they don’t belong, that there are few things in the world less unique than suffering from embarrassment and anxiety.
This quote struck me, although unfortunately it’s too long to stick on an inspirational post-it note somewhere:
Eventually most of us come to see that our feelings of unbelonging are unexpectional and that the truly heroic act is to carry on trying to connect with others, even if it can be dispiriting to keep doing something you are not very good at.
Also it’s not exactly inspirational. But it struck a chord with me.
He promises at the outset that this book is not going to turn into a sideways biography of his own history of shyness, which I appreciated, and I think the fact that he doesn’t discuss his own shyness directly allows him to dig deeper into the nature of shyness as a whole. He’s interested in the amorphous nature of shyness, the way that it waxes and wanes in a life, and affects some people almost totally and other people only in small parts of their lives; the fact that it can coexist with other personality traits that might seem quite antithetical to it. “It is so dirt-common that no especially disagreeable or virtuous human attributes can be extrapolated from it,” he notes. “It cohabits with egotism and self-pity as readily as with modesty and thoughtfulness.”
He notes also that people are often paradoxically proud of their shyness, that we tend to believe that it makes us unique and perhaps deeper than other people - the irony being that many people consider themselves shy, that perhaps most people suffer at least occasionally from the feeling that they don’t belong, that there are few things in the world less unique than suffering from embarrassment and anxiety.
This quote struck me, although unfortunately it’s too long to stick on an inspirational post-it note somewhere:
Eventually most of us come to see that our feelings of unbelonging are unexpectional and that the truly heroic act is to carry on trying to connect with others, even if it can be dispiriting to keep doing something you are not very good at.
Also it’s not exactly inspirational. But it struck a chord with me.
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