Louis Roney: Who are you?

Who are you? Do you really know?

Are you just like all the other “yous” one ever meets? Is there anything really new and distinguished about you?

You may look different, but inside you may be the same as everyone else. True individuality is almost impossible to establish these days. The best way for a store to sell an item is to be sure that “everyone wants one.” Only the truly courageous buy the things that no one else already has.

Who am I? Well, I know my own personal history and the name I answer to, but when you start delving into what ancestors are traceable, the road is soon a dead-end street.

While living in Virginia for several years to improve my genealogy, I heard a great deal about “families,” about background, and in general, about “who we are.”

Like every other person on the street, I know who I am, where I was born, and even knew a great-grandfather for a short period of time. People who are steeped too deeply in the long-gone pasts of their families must finally come to the place where the past melds into the unknown of long ago. They may be able to trace their forebears back several, even many generations on paper, but eventually they can go no further.

Living in the today where we have the ability to think, to plan and to act, is our only chance to make our lives count.

Those people, who lean inordinately upon their ancestry, must be reminded that the best part of them is underground.

I dig who you are primarily from what you have done. I know Lindbergh only as the first guy to fly solo across the Atlantic, and Admiral Byrd only as the first guy to winter at the South Pole!

May I suggest that the person about whom you honestly know the least, may be you, yourself? You may know your hat size, but do you know what’s going on inside your head? Somewhere along the line they may have told you what your I.Q. is — but do you keep trying in vain to acquire “smarts” that are out of reach?

Though you are perfectly satisfied with your life, are you really satisfied with yourself? Why are you looking in the mirror all the time? Why doesn’t using the mirror while shaving or putting on make-up satisfy you? Do you really think that Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” can better your life on earth? (We should have sent a copy to Adolf Hitler and Admiral Tojo.) Maybe Dale helped us send the socially nicer boys onto the battlefield, but did he teach them to shoot straight?

Shrinks help us to look inside ourselves to get acquainted with “who we really are.”

History books tell us who our ancestors were and who they managed to kill before they got killed.

I, myself, became an opera singer and sang all kinds of different characters on the stage in different countries and languages.

Cavaradossi in “Tosca” is a very nice noble gentleman, whereas the Duke in “Rigoletto” is just a first class jerk.

I often wondered what would have happened if after the curtain fell, I had wandered out of the theater and walked up the street still dressed as Otello or Romeo, or some other larger than life operatic personality. Would I have been locked up? Surely I would at least have been asked a few unanswerable questions!

But, after the curtain fell I always went back to my dressing room, took off my costumes and put on street clothes, and became my same old self. What a dull ending for an operatic tenor!

About Roney: Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF 2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts Award (assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)