The Story of Spurina

Spurina was said to be so beautiful that the sight of him disturbed people — men and women alike — to a degree that caused confusion and disorder wherever he appeared. His beauty was not, by his account, a gift. It was a distraction, for others first and then, through his awareness of its effect on others, for himself. He could not enter a room without becoming a kind of event. He could not conduct a conversation without knowing that the conversation was only partly about its stated subject. The rest of it was about him — about his face, which he had not chosen and could not set aside.

His solution was drastic. He disfigured his face. He destroyed what was causing the disturbance at its source. And by doing so, he obtained the freedom to be thought about for other reasons — to be taken seriously for what he said and did rather than for what he looked like. It is one of the more remarkable acts of self-governance in the records I have read, because it required him to sacrifice a thing the world would have called an advantage in order to secure a deeper advantage that the world did not know he was seeking.

“There is no tyranny more subtle than the tyranny of our own gifts — they bind us to a certain character, a certain role, a certain expectation, and the liberation from them is more costly, and more complete, than any other freedom.”

Beauty, when it is strong enough to precede a man into every room, becomes a kind of fate. It determines how others see him before he has spoken a word, and no subsequent conduct quite escapes the framework it establishes. The beautiful man who tries to be taken seriously must work twice as hard for the same result as the plain man who opens his mouth and is heard only for what comes out of it. Spurina understood this and made his choice.

I do not say his method is recommended. I say his understanding of the problem was clear, and his willingness to pay the price of clarity is admirable. Most of us cling to our gifts even when they diminish us, because the clinging feels like preservation of the self. Spurina knew that sometimes what we are most proud of is precisely what most imprisons us.