Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
11 - At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
So i ask again: where amidst all these roles lies the true self, that core of authenticity, that real me behind the masks and veils, that authentic Bill Miller, not the guy who signs this book William Ian Miller? How I got the Ian long before that name became pretentiously fashionable is a story in itself, an innocent one of my dad doing honor to the Scotsman Ian McPhearson, who commanded the ship on which my dad served in the war. I was named after William Isidore Miller, my father's dead father, really Velvel or Villkela Yitzhak Miller in the Yiddish that was my namesake's native tongue. When you are Bill Miller there is always a good chance you will be sitting next to another one on the airplane; you get the mail of several others on your campus, and most recently you lost five years of accumulated frequent flyer miles because some other William Miller in Ann Arbor took a trip around the world on them. So you posture as William Ian Miller purely as a practical matter. But had my middle name been Seymour, I see you thinking, you would not be signing your books William Seymour Miller, would you? Spelling out that Ian, latching on to it as a veil of sorts, shows I know very well who and what I am at the core.
A Bowdlerized Jewish Joke
Maybe the core naked me lies in certain identities, ineradicable identities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Faking It , pp. 132 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003