Clearly, they would rather be two or more people than just one person.
It would seem that human beings find, accept, and retain a single, permanent identity only with the greatest reluctance. And the chances are that long before that, by barking, mewing, or roaring, the ordinary child has endeavored to be a dog, a cat, or a lion instead of himself. It is only a pathologically unimaginative child who doesn’t try to palm himself off as an Indian or a cowboy as soon as he is big enough to make a horse out of a stick and ride it. Children as young as three years of age, or even two, enjoy not being themselves. Many people-and creative people in particular-admittedly spend the better part of their lives trying to find themselves the inference is that the self they are making do with in the meantime is not their own but somebody else’s. The urge to be somebody other than oneself is so universal and so deep-seated that it may well be an elemental instinct of the human species. Few people are entirely satisfied with being themselves. In any case, it is an edict that is infrequently carried out. At other times, an individual issues this command to the soul that exists at his very center. Sometimes it is addressed to a friend, a lover, a husband, a wife, or somebody else who the person uttering it has cause to think is not being himself or herself. It was his destiny most of the time not to be funny to himself but to make other people look funny to still other people. Weyman, however, was not a conscious comedian, and it is doubtful if he possessed a trace of a sense of humor until the declining years of his long and changeable life. Although Weyman was unaware of it, he bore a rather remarkable resemblance to the comic character with the wispy mustache and the shuffling gait created by Charles Chaplin on the silent motion-picture screen. No matter what imposture Weyman was engaged in, he never altered his face-not even by so much as shaving off a thin, spruce mustache, which, along with expressive, bright brown eyes, an aquiline nose, a strong, solemn mouth, a shapely head, and a tall, trim figure, gave him an air of distinction that he carried with disarmingly modest grace. And more than once he actually tasted glory. Then he would find a fresh role to play and would perform another piece of impeccable imposture. Only when it had been fulfilled did he put that particular dream of glory aside, as a painter puts aside a finished painting. For him, it was not enough simply to have a dream of glory and then put it aside and go about his business. The men he became were never obscure, and in time he himself ceased to be obscure. He was a man who, unwilling or unable to remain an obscure citizen of Brooklyn, became many men in the course of a long career of being people other than himself. For the sake of simplicity in a chronicle that cannot be other than compound, and in deference to the man himself, he will generally be called here by the name he seemed to like best-Stanley Clifford Weyman. From then on, he used only that name, but under it he continued to carry out impostures of great artistic merit. In middle age, he settled firmly on Stanley Clifford Weyman. Clifford Weinberg and Ethan Allen Weinberg for second and third tries.
Sterling Weinberg, and he went back to S.
Wyman, Stanley Clifford Weyman, Allen Stanley Weyman, and C. Clifford Weinberg, Ethan Allen Weinberg, Rodney S. Otherwise, he was, more or less successively, S. Cyr only when he wished to drum home to himself and other people the notion that he was a lieutenant in the French Navy, which he wasn’t. Cyr, he stayed fairly close to the essentials of the name he had started out with. Except for swift, recurrent periods during which he was Royal St. Soon after he reached the age of twenty-one, he started tinkering with his name and being people other than himself. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with his name or with himself. Seventy-eight years ago, on November 25, 1890, in one of a long row of red brick two-story houses in Brooklyn that had five gray stone steps leading up to the front doors, coal stoves for heat, and toilets in the back yards-each house exactly like the other houses in the row, and also exactly like the ones on the opposite side of the street-a boy was born who was named by his parents Stephen Jacob Weinberg.