Can we learn to be sociable again?

A few days ago, a delivery person assembled some large household items in my home. The entire process took several hours and, during that time, a conversation naturally developed as they worked. They ended up telling me about life challenges they had overcome, and about the current aspirations they had. I listened and offered encouragement. 

After the person left, to my surprise I felt exhausted. It had been so long since I engaged with a complete stranger for such an extended period of time, and in my own home. It left me feeling depleted, as though someone had scrambled over the protective wall that I had erected in the past 16 months. I wasn’t sure I felt ready for that to happen again any time soon. But it did get me thinking about the idea of hospitality, about showing care and attention to others and welcoming people back into our lives. 

As the world opens up, I’m trying to wean myself back into being social again. Always more of an introverted, private person, I found the requirements of lockdown — social distancing, staying at home, limited numbers for gatherings — a welcome reprieve at times, despite the circumstances. With less social interaction outside the home, the days bled into one another and the world got quieter. At times, I confess, I cherished that. 

Now, with vaccinations available, restaurants opening, galleries catching up with new or delayed exhibitions, and travel increasing, I’m trying to break out of the now-normalised seclusion. In some ways, the world has gone from a place we knew, to a stranger with whom we have to reacquaint ourselves afresh. We have to trust the world to be a hospitable place again. We have to learn how to be hospitable to one another.

In his painting “Jupiter and Mercury in the House of Philemon and Baucis” (c1620-25), the Flemish Old Master Peter Paul Rubens depicts a famous story of hospitality told by the Roman poet Ovid. As the story goes, a poor, elderly peasant couple are the only ones in a village to offer hospitality to two travelling men who (unbeknown to everyone) are actually Roman gods on a quest to see who will practise hospitality. The story is rooted in the ancient Greek practice of xenia, the belief that part of living well included practising a code of hospitality that recognised a guest-host relationship in which both parties had responsibilities. It was linked to the idea that gods mingled among humanity, so one should treat strangers as if they might be a deity, capable of blessing or cursing you.

The host was obliged to welcome and care for the stranger, protecting them if necessary, and thereby converting them into a guest. The stranger/guest had their own obligations, chief of which was appropriate behaviour and boundaries and an assumption of returning the hospitality to the host if that were ever needed. 

Being a good guest or good host may be an invitation to trust in a new way, to step out again in faith

In the painting, despite the house’s sparse interior, there is a choice basket of fruit on the table, probably the couple’s best, and the clean, fresh white tablecloth isn’t even fully covering the old table, as though thrown on in haste for the benefit of the guests. The old man dressed in a rough brown tunic is engaged in conversation with the god Mercury, whom we recognise by his symbolic cap. The woman reaches out her strong bare forearms — testament to a life of hard work — trying to catch a goose for dinner as Jupiter, shirtless and chiselled like any king of the gods worth his salt, looks on. 

I’m stuck on this painting because I’m imagining what it could be like to take on a new code of hospitality as we continue to re-emerge from lockdown. The hosts in this painting were open to having their lives interrupted, and to welcoming people with new stories into their space. They were ready to offer what was in their possession in order to serve their guests.

As we try to find our footing back into some semblance of regular public and communal existence, to play a host to others would mean considering similar actions towards those we encounter. Making space for new conversations, as Philemon does with Mercury. Or like Baucis, offering what we have because we trust that when we offer our lives generously, the gift is multiplied and perhaps even returned at some point.

I look at the guests in this painting. They have chosen to abide by unspoken rules of conduct that honour the environment and the lives of their hosts. Perhaps to be a good guest in this next season of life is tied to holding back from our usual tendencies to try to control or determine what exactly should happen next and when. Maybe it’s an invitation to trust in a new way, to step out again in faith and let life show you what choice offerings it can bring.

Another way I’ve been considering hospitality is about how we are coming to terms with any emerging parts of ourselves that seem unfamiliar to us. I imagine many of us have discovered that there are ways we have changed over the pandemic that we have yet to reckon with. Some of us have discovered that we can no longer remain in relationships — romantic or platonic — because something has shifted too much. Some of us might be questioning the priorities we held, and what we valued before being forced into lockdown.

In her 2011 work, “Guy Reading The Stranger”, New York-based artist Nicole Eisenman fills a 6ft by 5ft canvas with the broad, flattened forehead and hunched shoulders of a man holding Albert Camus’s existentialist novel The Stranger (L’Étranger). His large left hand rests on the side of his jaw, while the other clutches the novel. Yet his eyes appear to gaze above and beyond the pages. Behind him, we see part of a bookshelf with more existential and metaphysical works such as philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Lines are etched vertically, horizontally and diagonally and in loops on his face like the primitive beginnings of a map, for now going nowhere, uncharted territory still to be plotted.

Who knows what questions of ontological existence are racing through his mind? Who knows if he’s just taking himself too seriously or is actually in the midst of a crisis of identity? Whatever the case, the painting suggests a moment of renewed questions and searching, trying to make sense of the world and one’s place in it. The painting is reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture the “Thinker”: humanity rendered still yet restless and introspective. Perhaps, as we offer our homes and selves to others, we also need to be hospitable to the different people we ourselves have become over these troubling 16 months.

Enuma Okoro is a New York-based columnist for FT Life & Arts

Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first