To Peel or Not to Peel

Quoting Mr. Harris, again:

The personality of a man is not an apple to be polished, but a banana to be peeled. And the reason we remain so far from one another, the reason we neither communicate nor interact in any real way, is that most of us spend our lives in polishing rather than peeling.

Man's lifelong task is simply one, but it is not simple: to remove the discrepancy between his outer self and his inner self, to get rid of the "persona" that divides his authentic self from the world. This persona is like the peeling on a banana: it is something built up to protect from bruises and injury. It is not the real person, but sometimes (if the fear of injury remains too great) it becomes a lifelong substitute for the person.

The "authentic personality" knows that he is like a banana, and knows that only as he peels himself down to his individuated self can he reach out and make contact with his fellows by what Father Goldbrunner calls "the sheer maturity of his humanity." Only when he himself is detached from his defensive armoring can he then awaken a true response in his dialog with others.

Most of us, however, think in terms of the apple, not the banana. We spend our lives in shining the surface, in making it rosy and gleaming, in perfecting the "image." But the image is not the apple, which may be wormy and rotten to the taste.

Almost everything in modern life is devoted to the polishing process, and little to the peeling process. It is the surface personality that we work on -- the appearance, the clothes, the manners, the geniality. In short, the salesmanship: we are selling the package, not the product.

There is a vast disparity between our outer and inner selves; in many of us, the real person never comes to life at all, never reveals itself, never knows itself. It lives through its functions, it lives as a type, a response to an environment, and dies without ever having found it's true existence. This, and not unhappiness, is the tragedy of life; this, and not "selfishness," is what causes human misery.

So long as we live behind the peeling, we can have no genuine encounter with the world. So long as we go on polishing, we sacrifice the substance for the image -- until, at last, there is no substance left. What is all the good of our "individualism," if it means merely the freedom to be like everybody else, the liberty to remain secure within the peeling?

~ End Quote