Till we have faces covered Part 3
The human face communicates; it conveys an anthropological type of knowledge. When, for instance, Lady Capulet tries to convince young Juliet that Paris is a worthy match, she enjoins her daughter to behold the good things written in his face: "Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face, / And find delight writ there with beauty's pen." In Coriolanus, Menenius tells the envious tribunes, "You know neither me, yourselves nor any thing," which he indicates is linked to their duplicity: "you make faces like mummers." The insult is that they are mere actors of virtue.
Alternatively, in Henry IV, Part I, had Harry Hotspur only worn a face mask, he could perhaps have concealed his consternation from his wife. But the face is its own world, and just as one reads the storm in oncoming clouds, Lady Percy sees in the microcosm of Harry's countenance "portents" that "strange motions have appear'd, / Such as we see when men restrain their breath / On some great sudden hest." And in Much Ado About Nothing, when Hero is falsely accused of infidelity, Friar Francis needs only to examine her appearance to discover "A thousand blushing apparitions / To start into her face," and that "a thousand innocent shames / In angel whiteness beat away those blushes." It is in looking into her face that the Friar finds her blush to be the symbol of her innocent "fire," which eventually burns "the errors that these princes hold against her maiden truth."
What Shakespeare shows, Solomon plainly tells: "As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man" (Prov. 27:19). The principle is simple, yet so foundational for the virtue of friendship. Because the face is by its nature linguistic, it thus conveys a knowledge not only of the other but also of the self.
How is this so? In How to Be a Conservative, Roger Scruton explains, "The other's face is a mirror in which they see their own. Precisely because attention is fixed on the other, there is an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-discovery" (148). This is how friendship is built. "In the once normal conditions of human contact, people became friends by being in each other's presence." It wasn't simply the "information" of verbal signals that was communicated. "Attention," writes Scruton, "was fixed on the other's face, words and gestures. And his or her nature as an embodied person was the focus of the friendly feelings that he or she inspired."
What this ultimately means is that human relations are altered without face-to-face encounters. When we do encounter each other in, say, the tête-à-tête, one of the bases of Western civilization is preserved. Scruton continues, "The object of friendly feelings looks back at you, and freely responds to your free activity, amplifying both your awareness and his own. In short, friendship, as traditionally conceived, was a route to self-knowledge" (148).
- The Heavy Cost of Covering