In a short poem from 1957, the English poet Stevie Smith homed in on the split between public smiles and private pain that we and all the people around us go through every day. She imagines a man drowning off a beach. Onlookers see his frantic signals but imagine he is just larking around. Smith gives us the dead swimmer's haunting summation of his existence:
And not waving but drowning.'
It's so true of life, isn't it? A lot of people pretend that they are very jolly and ordinary sort of chaps but really they do not feel at home in the world or make friends easily, so they joke a lot and laugh and people think they're quite all right and jolly nice too but sometimes the brave pretence breaks down and then, like the poor man in this poem, they are lost.
We are, all of us, much more distressed than the people around us realise. And other people are much more distressed than we allow ourselves to discover. We don't pick up on the quiet references to 'difficulties', we assume things must be fine, because it's just so much more convenient that they be so.
We are all, in some corner of our souls, a little bit like the swimmer: not waving but drowning.
