The therapists say we come to devise and learn our own private set of instructions of what to do when we feel cornered. We never write them down; we would be embarrassed to do that consciously. But the instructions are there, worn smooth from use, and sometimes even inherited — handed to us by the rooms we grew up in. Most of the time we don't notice we're following them. We go quiet, or we leave, or we say the clever thing that ends the conversation, and we call it personality.

A young man named Stephen Dedalus wrote his instructions down, and they were quite beautiful, if troubled. At the end of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen explains to a friend how he intends to survive a world that keeps trying to claim him. He will not serve it — not his country, not his church, not the people who made him. These are the nets, in his governing image, flung at a soul to hold it back from flight, and he means to fly past every one. For his defense he will use, he says, "the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning." Joyce immortalized himself with turns of phrase like these.

But Joyce was not entirely on Stephen's side. The book is a portrait, and like all good portraits it shows the sitter whole — the brilliance and the chill in the same frame. Stephen does win his freedom. He also ends the novel alone, magnificent and untouched, having flown so far past the nets that no one is left close enough to catch him if he falls. The three weapons work exactly as advertised, and this is exactly the problem.

On any given Tuesday, most of us are not engaged in the work of keeping at bay our existential threats. Rather, we’re well within our daily routines. We are folding laundry. But the same three arms are within easy reach in nearly every life, and we take them up more often than we would admit — not across the whole battlefield, only in a few defended corners where being open once cost us something we never wanted to pay again.

Silence comes first, because it is the quietest. Not the dramatic vow of a monk, but the small daily withholding. The opinion you keep to yourself at dinner because it isn't worth the friction. The hurt you decide not to mention, since naming it would only make it bigger. The "I'm fine," which is among the hardest-working phrases in the whole of Ireland, asked to carry everything from I am fine to I have not been fine since roughly 2014. We learn that some words, once out, cannot be called back, and we draw from this the reasonable-sounding conclusion that the safest words are the ones we never let out at all. You and someone you love have a subject you no longer discuss. You both know what it is. The silence around it has become a piece of furniture in the house, and you have each learned to cross the room in the dark without bumping into it.

Exile is second, and the most socially acceptable, because we have given it a respectable name: busy. The grand version is a one-way ticket. The ordinary version is staying late on a night you could have come home, or discovering that the spice cabinet urgently needs reorganizing at the exact moment a hard conversation begins. It is the phone, a small country you can emigrate to without leaving your chair, passport always in your pocket. Most exile is not departure but drift — the friendship that ends in no argument at all, only a text you keep meaning to return, until enough time passes that returning it would require an apology, so you don't, and a person who once knew you becomes a person you used to know. We are especially gifted at exiling ourselves into competence, burying the hours in work we have mastered so we never have to stand in a room where we might look like a beginner.

Cunning is third, and the one we are proudest of, because it doesn't feel like fear. It feels like skill. Cunning is the management of how we appear. It is offering the answer that closes a conversation instead of the one that is true, replying to the question we wish we'd been asked, releasing the update that has been safety-tested like a product cleared for market. It is the deflecting joke — and here writers should be careful, since we are virtuosos of this one, having learned that a well-aimed bit of wit can keep a person laughing at a comfortable distance for years. Cunning lets us manage the people we love rather than be known by them, and it runs so smoothly that we can mistake a long performance for a relationship.

Here is what the three have in common, and why the young man in the novel ends up alone. Each is a form of managed absence. You are still at the table, still in the marriage, still on the group thread — but you have quietly pulled back the one part of yourself that could be wounded. The difficulty is that this is the same part that could be known. Safety and solitude, it turns out, are bought with a single coin. The wall you raise to keep the weather out keeps the light out at the same rate, and there is no setting that lets through one and not the other.

The cruelest detail is that most of these defenses have outlived the danger they were built for. The silence was a sensible policy at a dinner table decades ago, where speaking up got punished; it is still running now against a husband or wife who would never. The cunning that once protected a frightened child is still reporting for duty, guarding a grown person no one is trying to harm. We might go on manning the walls around ground no enemy has approached in years, paying the full cost of the garrison out of habit, never sending anyone out to check whether the war is still on.

So the task is not to tear it all down and stand exposed in the open — that kind of nakedness is just another way of getting hurt. The real task is smaller and harder. It is to walk the perimeter of your own life and find the one or two places where you've gone defended for a reason that no longer holds — and they exist: the conversation you keep routing around, the friend you've let drift, the joke you reach for the instant someone gets close — and to ask, without much drama, what you are still protecting, and from whom.

Silence, exile, and cunning are how we survive the people who hurt us. They are also how we lose the people who never would. It is nothing but bravery to speak, to pull down the wall, to leave the gate open in one small place, and stay nearby, seeing who walks in.

John

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John Conrad