Sonder: "More or Less Like a Man" by Michael Powers

John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows tells us that "sonder" is "the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as our own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it."

One thing I know for certain about that definition is that for most people, it's quite different from learning a word like "zugzwang," where to learn the word is also to learn about a thing you didn't know existed before you heard the word. That feeling sonder describes is something almost all people experience, sometimes deeply, before getting too far into our teen years. We know the feeling, we just didn't know there was a word for it.

Michael Powers' "More or Less Like a Man" gets much of its considerable appeal from playing with the notion of sonder. The protagonist, whose name we do not know, is on a flight. It's not an international flight, but it's more than long enough at nearly six hours, going from New York to San Francisco. While on this flight, our narrator does what he says "all normal people do," which is to "go to great lengths to avoid striking up conversations with strangers on airplanes." He looks intently at a book, he listens to music on his headphones. He fears any kind of contact with the people adjacent to him on a plane, because "who knows where that might lead?"

The narrator fears being dragged into a conversation, but even more, he fears starting a conversation and then not being able to continue it. At that point, once the two of you realize you have nothing to say to each other, "You are two human beings who have been forced to admit, without even being able to say so aloud, that you have no interests in common." This is a corollary of sonder: sometimes, you are a bit player in someone else's life, someone not interesting enough to play a key role. While you're observing others, they're observing you.

Sonder can make us feel linked to others when we realize the world isn't one big solipsistic computer simulation meant for our consumption. But it can also be uncanny when we realize how different those other people might be. If "they" are people like us, that means they are also people with agency to be people not like us. It can make us feel in communion with others or terribly lonely.

Our narrator seems to be a person who struggles with isolation. His cousin has invited him out to San Francisco to join a landscaping business, not because the two were close, but because "I think he knew I didn't have much else going on at the time." But he is protecting on his flight his isolation by trying so hard not to have a moment when he will have to recognize that he is surrounded by real people living real lives.

The setting for this story is perfect. An airport is a pretty normal place to feel sonder. You look around, and you wonder why all these people are going the same place you're going. You wonder what their stories are. Not, I emphasize, that most of us actually want to hear the story of our seat neighbors, but we do wonder.

Sonder is sort of the reverse of what happens in The Truman Show: instead of realizing everything around you is fake, suddenly you are overcome by how real everything, and more importantly everyone, is. 

The narrator's isolation is broken by a seat neighbor who insists on breaching norms among strangers on planes. Without being invited, she blurts out to the narrator that she is "fleeing." There is then a somewhat pedantic exchange in which this neighbor notes the etymological relationship between "fleeing" and "flying." I found this dialogue so unnatural, I almost lost interest, but the story, like the plane in which the narrator was flying, righted itself after a little turbulence and kept going.

The woman both wants and does not want to share. This is one of the many ambiguities in this story. Besides the title, "more or less" like a man, we get, in the very first sentence, that the woman looked up from the "book she'd been reading, or pretending to read." She has an accent that is vaguely central European but which the narrator can't place. The narrator, describing her, sees her ponytail as "guileless," but that does not help him to decode any of the external clues he sees in her:

"She might have been married or not, might have had children or not. It might have been her husband or her children she was fleeing.
The outfit she wore looked almost American but not. I don't know what it was exactly. Her boot-cut jeans maybe, a little too artificially distressed at the the hips and the backs of the knees.
She was fleeing New Jersey, and she wanted to talk about it but did not want to talk about it."

The airplane experiences turbulence, diving down a pocket of air and then righting itself. This is, if you think about it, a rather terrifying and incredible thing to happen--hundreds of people are stuffed into a metal tube flying above the Earth that dips and then goes back up. But nobody even blinks. "All of this was routine. No one that I could see looked even slightly alarmed."

Isn't this external phenomenon a mirror of what goes on internally every time strangers ride a plane together? There are hundreds of people, each with a fully developed interior life, each with hopes and dreams and terrible secrets and huge successes. We are in the presence of all these HUMANS--in action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a God! And travel is often a key component to some of the strongest demonstrations of their agency: they are moving, taking a new job, visiting a loved one, seeing something they always wanted to see. It's too much.

But the narrator soon realizes that this woman might also be the worst kind of human. He just read about how some Bosnian immigrants who snuck in with refugees during the humanitarian crisis in the 90s were actually the torturers everyone else was running from. He calculates that this woman is the right age to have been one of those who forced Bosnian Muslims to drink gasoline before shooting them. Because he has just read this article, and because the woman sitting next to him is vaguely central European, he cannot resist linking the coincidences. He thinks that this is because we all want to believe that "the world outside ourselves corresponds with whatever is going on in our minds."

He is trying to prevent feeling the fundamental terror that comes with sonder. It destroys our solipsistic selves. It intrudes upon our carefully created internal realities with the brutal and undeniable reality from outside. There is a person here. Is it more terrifying if she really is a pyschopathic killer, or if she isn't, because if she isn't, then that means she has her own reality, one the narrator did not create and over which he is powerless. She might have been victim as much as perpetrator.

He finally learns her story, which she gives up in one gulp after seemingly both wanting and not wanting to tell it for so long. She came to live with her sister and sister's husband from Slovenia. The sister was a successful geologist, which meant she was gone often. While studying English with her brother-in-law (which at last justifies those pedantic observations at the beginning about "fly" and "flee,) the two fall in love and have an affair. When it is discovered by the sister, she drinks Drano and nearly kills herself. The woman in the seat next to the narrator has decided to remove herself from the man she loves and her sister by going to San Francisco to "sit beside an ocean she had never seen before, and to be far from those she loved."

The coda

The story is nearly done at this point, and yet in the last thousand words, it suddenly transforms into something totally new. We get a glimpse of the narrator's life in San Francisco. He has returned to the safety of treating anonymous people without differentiation, summing up the whole city with, "It's crawling with assholes."

But he's now seeking some kind of connection. He's on Tinder, or something like it. "My phone shows me the faces of women who are physically near me, and I decide whether I like these faces. The owners of the faces decide whether they like my face. If we like each other's faces, we type messages to each other." How terrible this is for him, now that he is keenly aware of the reality lurking behind each profile. He wants to disassociate the face from the person, but he can't now. Each day of swiping left and right is a deluge of faces he knows signify a fully realized person who is doing the same things he is doing, seeking the same connections as him. He is a blip on their screen, as they are on his.

The narrator is trying to think of something to say the potential dates haven't heard before. He tells them about the time he met the "Jersey Devil," which is apparently some folkloric Bigfoot-like thing from which the hockey team gets its name. The story ends with this unforgettable passage:

I tell them that I grew up in New Jersey, that I've seen the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens. It was late at night, and I was eating a hamburger with a friend at a diner, on this long stretch of empty road where there was nothing else around but the dark woods growing out of the sandy soil. I looked up from my hamburger and saw him through the window, but he was pretty far away. He was naked, covered in short, stiff hair like the hair of a dog, but shaped otherwise more or less like a man. He was standing at the edge of a beam of light from a streetlamp, at the border between the woods and the parking lot, just staring in at us. I could tell by the way he held his tail in his hands that he'd been alone a long time.

It's possible to see this as the narrator projecting himself into the figure of a half-man, half-dog (his own best friend, as one Spaceballs character might have said), his loneliness central to this image. But it's also possible this Jersey Devil is his way of imagining himself outside of the feeling of sonder, his attempt to return to the stabilizing ability to treat others as something truly different, which allows us to treat them with indifference. The devil, the ultimate "other," is the narrator's attempt to hold onto a belief in something that is unlike him, something isolated and not fully human, meaning he can also remain both happily and yet unhappily isolated himself.