The New Yorker:

Our yearning to be fully known is inevitable—and, perhaps, misleading.

By Joshua Rothman

At the end of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the less famous of the novel’s two main protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving family. Unlike Anna, he has a happy marriage. His wife, Kitty, and son, Mitya, bring him great joy, and he feels that his existence “has the unquestionable meaning of the good.” Still, he’s noticed that there is a “wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife.” There are limits to the intimacy that helps give his life meaning, and they vex him.

Does anybody really know you? It’s a question that arises at odd moments—sometimes, perversely, when we’re surrounded by people who know us well. Suddenly, we become conscious of an inner sanctum they’ve never breached. Like Levin, we might feel subtly private. More dramatically, we might perceive ourselves as lost, abandoned, as though we’re passing through the world unnoticed. Perhaps we’re wearing a mask that others are too inattentive to peer behind; or maybe we’re just too deep to know. There are many variations on a central theme: others sail to our shores, they even disembark, but they never quite venture into our unexplored interiors. This can be a source of sorrow, or a relief.

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