INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

“In a line-up that included one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever worked with in the music world, Bo Diddley was an unassuming breath-of-fresh-air. He was the only one who came alone, without even a family member or a manager. He was kind, polite and quiet—quiet until he hit the stage. His was probably one of the biggest transformations between on and off-stage personas that I’ve ever seen.”*

“When I first became famous, it really freaked me out. You see, I’m a very different person onstage—very different. I have a job to do and I ain’t got time to be throwing the bull. I decided right from the beginning of my career I’d give it all I got, put on the most outrageous show I could. I’m two people, really. Up there, I’m Bo Diddley. At home, I’m Ellas McDaniel, the same plain, straight dude all the time.” —Bo Diddley

“I joke that I knew James before he was sensitive,” Danny Kortchmar chuckles affectionately, “but the truth is that James is the archetypal singer-songwriter. He’s the mould, as a solo artist backed by a consistent touring band, writing confessional songs before almost anybody—songs that remained personal even as they became universal. Dylan achieved the universal aspect, but not the personal vulnerability.

“Working and touring with James for decades, I used to want him to rock out more—until I realized that what he wanted to do was actually calm people in a unique, quirky way. His songs sound like the blues, like Christmas carols, and like a church choir too, yet it all essentially comes only from him.”

“Fundamentally,” Ike Taylor told this writer in 1981, “James is a retiring person who wants and is able to be in meaningful contact with other people. At the one-on-one level, his shyness interferes. Paradoxically, that shyness disappears on-stage. I see family allusions in much of his work and a core confidence in the rightness of exposing his inner self. ‘Fire And Rain,’ for instance, was a great expression of his sensitivity but also of his will.”

[…]

“My son ministers through his music,” says Trudy Taylor. “He picks up the themes of what’s good in the past, and he gives them a unified clarity in the present.”

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“For me, I don’t have much direction or control over it. I don’t write or read music. But, generally speaking, I am visited by songs. They usually happen to me either while I’m sitting and playing guitar or sometimes when I’m driving the car. ‘Sweet Baby James’ happened while I was driving down south. You have to be ready to catch those things when they come, you know, ‘cause they’ll just fall right through and you’ll forget them. I write lots of songs that I guess you could call remedial, that are sort of therapeutic. Sometimes, I feel uncomfortable with that, as though they are too sticky and sentimental; but that’s what I do, that’s the kind of song I write.” —James Taylor

There are those who, on hearing that the tintype photographer John A. Coffer lives without car, phone or plumbing, might call him a Luddite. This, he insists, is not true — for one thing, he has a computer. He even has a computer room. The walls are bales of hay, the roof is tin, and the power source is a 75-watt solar panel outside in the pasture. Mr. Coffer, who lives on a 48-acre farm in the Finger Lakes, built his computer room in March. It’s lasted nicely through heavy rains and if it falls apart, Mr. Coffer says, no matter: He’s invested all of $15 in it.

The big question: why does Mr. Coffer choose to live like this? “Modern living was always too fast for me,” he said. “I was not good at 20th-century living.”

“I used to do all that, go to singles bars,” Mr. Coffer said. “It was cheap. It just wasn’t fulfilling. I don’t want to live up to other people’s expectations. I own this land, 50 acres free and clear. I’ve got a lot of money in the bank. I’ve been in galleries in New York. And yet girls go, ‘He doesn’t have a phone.’ ” Mr. Coffer rarely curses, but speaking about women, he does. They’ll chase down a guy 10 feet in debt over his head, working at some dead-end job, who’s got a phone and a car, he said angrily.

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“For INFPs, the dominant quality in their lives is a deep-felt caring and idealism about people. They experience this intense caring most often in their relationships with others but they may also experience it around ideas, projects, or any involvement they see as important. INFPs are often skilled communicators and are naturally drawn to ideas that embody a concern for human potential. INFPs live in the inner world of values and ideals, but what people often first encounter with the INFP in the outer world is their adaptability and concern for possibilities.”*

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.” —John Lennon

Related: Famous INFPs

“For INTPs the driving force in their lives is to understand whatever phenomenon is the focus of their attention. They want to make sense of the world —as a concept—and they often enjoy opportunities to be creative. INTPs are logical, analytical, and detached in their approach to the world; they naturally question and critique ideas and events as they strive for understanding. INTPs usually have little need to control the outer world, or to bring order to it, and they often appear very flexible and adaptable in their lifestyle.”*

My religion professor in college, Dr. Bernard Boyd, was one of the most colorful people I have ever known. The wonderful stories he told brought his teachings to life in a way his students would have never believed possible. One of his best was about Albert Einstein.

While young Boyd was a seminary student at Princeton, Dr. Einstein was a professor there, well-known for his absent-minded ways. On more than one occasion, Boyd saw the famous theoretician and scientist wandering aimlessly in the middle of the street licking an ice cream cone, totally oblivious to traffic and the potential threat to his life.

One day, late for a class, Boyd was rushing down the library steps and accidentally bumped into Dr. Einstein, almost knocking the two of them down. Stunned, he realized who it was and hurriedly apologized. Einstein was polite and said not to worry about it. What happened next was a complete surprise. The almost-speechless Boyd suddenly blathered, “Why don’t you come to my room tonight around 8 and meet some of my friends.” Einstein said that sounded like fun, and promised he’d be there.

Boyd spent the rest of the day telling all his friends to come by his room that evening because “Big Al” was going to be there. When they asked, “Who’s Big Al?” he responded vaguely, “It’ll be fun. Just come.” So they did. A small crowd gathered in anticipation of meeting Big Al, who, as almost always, was late.

Around 8:20 a few people were starting to leave, when suddenly Albert Einstein appeared and asked for Bernard Boyd. At first some of the friends thought the man was an impostor, even a hired prankster, but they soon realized it really was Albert Einstein in the flesh.

Dr. Boyd related that Albert Einstein was colorful, lively, and very friendly, answered lots of questions and participated in a “bull session” so typical of anyone’s college days.

A few years later, Einstein passed away and gave humanity and science one last great lesson. Einstein had always been widely regarded as one of the greatest minds on the planet, if not the greatest of all time. Scientists had a special curiosity to study his brain after his death, so he granted their wish—under one condition. He handed the scientists a sealed envelope with specific instructions that the contents be read only after the scientists finished their research, which took place at Cornell University.

After weeks of intensive study of his brain and much debate among the scientists, they called a press conference to present their findings. They had indeed uncovered a major difference between Einstein’s brain and everyone else’s, but it was not the difference anyone had expected. Einstein’s brain was about three-fourths the size of a normal human adult’s. Other than that, there was absolutely no discernible distinction.

Following that incredible press announcement, the sealed envelope was opened to reveal a single sentence. It read, “I do not consider myself to be especially smarter than any other human, but I do have a particularly vivid imagination.”

“Our only limits are in our imagination.” —Albert Einstein

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“For INFJs the dominant quality in their lives is their attention to the inner world of possibilities, ideas, and symbols. Knowing by way of insight is paramount for INFJs, and they often manifest a deep concern for people and relationships as well. INFJs often have deep interests in creative expression as well as issues of spirituality and human development. While the energy and attention of INFJs are naturally drawn to the inner world of ideas and insights, what people often first encounter with INFJs is their drive for closure and for the application of their ideas to people’s concerns.”*

“I have such a rich spiritual life. Most people take drugs to experience that. I’ve only smoked two joints in my life—once at the Grosvenor House in London and it made me so hungry I nearly ate the furniture—and the other time at a party near here. I stared at a TV test pattern for 14 hours. I don’t need drugs to have imaginative fantasies.” She points to a doormat on the balcony—Welcome UFOs and aliens—and says she doesn’t take herself too seriously. “How can I? I’m used to people thinking I’m wacky but what I’ve said for 30 years is now mainstream. I don’t feel I told you so. I’m prepared to be misunderstood. It’s taken me a long time and a lot of soul searching, but I’ve finally come to know who I am.” —Shirley MacLaine

“People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note.” —H. Ledger

“I’m shy. People get confused. They think, as an actor you can get up and be confident on the screen. Why aren’t you like this in normal life? Why can’t you act in your social life? Because I can’t!” —H. Ledger

“There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.” —Greta Garbo

Her penchant for privacy broke all of Hollywood’s rules. Except at the start of her career, she granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres, answered no fan mail. In a rare statement to reporters she acknowledged, ‘’I feel able to express myself only through my roles, not in words, and that is why I try to avoid talking to the press.'’

Every day, the woman in black walked through New York’s Central Park to feed the squirrels. Wearing huge sunglasses, she was careful not to look at anyone as she moved slowly along the paths. She rarely spoke. To locals, she was just another New York oddball, but this fragile and isolated figure had once been the most famous and admired actress in the world, feted for her beauty and poise. This was screen legend Greta Garbo.

Little is known about her later life because she protected her privacy so fiercely, famously declaring, “I want to be left alone.”

Garbo hadn’t always shunned the spotlight. In fact, as a young girl growing up in Sweden, Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, dreamt of fame as a way to escape from the brutality and poverty of her life. Hers is the classic rags-to-riches tale.

Born on September 18, 1905, to Karl Alfred and Anna Lovisa, she was the youngest of three children. With her parents, sister Alva and brother Sven, she lived in one of Stockholm’s poorest districts in a tiny apartment with no hot water.

Karl was an alcoholic and the family often went without food so he could buy whiskey. His youngest daughter withdrew from the pain, creating a fantasy world as a respite from reality.

“I have always been moody. When I was just a little child, as early as I can remember, I have wanted to be alone. I detest crowds, don’t like many people. I used to crawl into a corner and sit and think, think things over. When just a baby, I was always figuring, wondering what it was all about—just why we were living.

“Children should be allowed to think when they please; should not been pestered. ’Go and play now,’ their mothers and fathers tell them. They shouldn’t do that, thinking means so much to even small children.

“When I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t wondering what it was all about, this living; I was dreaming. Dreaming how I could become a player (actress).

“No one of my people were on the stage. It was just born in me, I guess. Why, when I was just a little thing, I had some water colors. Just as other children have water colors. Only I drew pictures on myself. Rather than on paper, I used to paint my lips, my cheeks, paint pictures on me. I thought that was the way actresses painted.”

She told Karl that she loved pretending to be characters in stories “because I hate life around us.”

[…]

Garbo developed an enigmatic screen persona that captivated fans but at the height of her career in 1941, at the age of thirty-six, she left Hollywood, never to make another film.

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“Through the years, I have encountered people and been involved in events that have had huge impacts, knocked off rough corners, lifted me to the heights of joy, plunged me into the depth of sorrow and anguish, taught me to laugh, especially at myself—in other words, my life experiences and the people with whom I shared them have been my teachers.

“At times, I have felt like a helpless bit of flotsam, at one moment stranded in a placid backwater that knew not, cared not, that I was there, then swept out to be hurled about in an unfeeling sea. At other times, I felt I was being sucked under by strong, unknowing currents toward annihilation. Yet somehow, looking back through my life, with its downs and its ups, its despairs and its joys, I believe that I was following some overall plan—though to be sure there were many times when I strayed from the course. Yet I was never truly lost. It seems to me now that the flotsam speck was being gently nudged or fiercely blown along a very specific route by an unseen, intangible wind. The flotsam speck that was—that is—me.

[…]

“The genes that were handed down to me by my parents were created long, long ago. And my inherited traits were molded by the people and the events surrounding my early years.

[…]

“My mother, Vanne, now aged ninety-four, has always loved to tell stories about my early fascination with animals and concern for their welfare. One of her favorites is of the time when, around the age of eighteen months, I collected a whole handful of earthworms from the London garden and took them to bed with me.

“‘Jane,’ she said, staring at the wriggling collection, ‘if you keep them here they’ll die. They need the earth.’

“So I hurriedly collected up all the worms and toddled back with them into the garden.

“Soon after this, we went to stay with some friends who had a house near a wild rocky beach in Cornwall. When we went down to the sea, I was enthralled by the tide pools and their teeming life. No one realized that the seashells I carried back to the house in my bucket were all alive. When Vanne came up to my room, she found little bright yellow sea snails crawling everywhere—the bedroom floor, up the walls, behind the wardrobe. When she explained that the snails would die when taken from the sea, I became hysterical. The entire household, she says, had instantly to drop what it was doing and help me collect the snails so that they could be rushed back to the sea.”

—Jane Goodall (The Jane Goodall Institute)

“Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.” —Thomas Disch

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” —Jonathan Swift

“The souls of people, on their way to earth-life, pass through a room full of lights. Each takes a taper—often only a spark—to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer—and have time to grab a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity—its poets, seers, and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers and, without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark.” —Plato

David Foster Wallace: Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally-retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally-retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world.

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies C.P.R. to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary United States that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now.

I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.

We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!”

But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?

The magic of fiction is that it addresses and antagonizes the loneliness that dominates people.

I wanted to know what invisible thing compelled a person to read a certain book and turn away from another. Well, he said, he was a 49-year-old executive who’d grown up in a privileged family in New England, and my novel is about a 14-year-old girl who grows up in an underprivileged family on a peach farm in the South. “There couldn’t be two more different worlds,” he said.

Did it come down to this—the discomfort of differences? Do we shy away from books that threaten to tamper with our perceptions and prejudices? Do we unwittingly gravitate to works that we suspect will affirm our own points of view? Are books meant to be places of refuge or remonstration? I’ve noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others. Did the tendency spill into our reading?

“Was reading my novel painful?” I teased.

“Actually, it was,” he said, “but painful in a good way.” He went on to tell me about the surprising connection he’d made with adolescent Lily and the African American women in the book, these people with whom he supposedly shared 600 degrees of separation. “The characters got under my skin,” he confessed. “What can I say? I feel disposed now to the South, to black women and to white girls who need their mothers.”

With these words, he revealed to me a reason to write fiction: because it creates empathy.

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The Writing Life
How to summon forth the Secret Author Person within you.
By Laura Zigman
Book World, Washington Post

The first thing you should do when you decide you want to be a writer is to stop yourself from telling anyone you want to be a writer (stick a sock in your mouth if you have to). As a rule, most parents and guidance counselors (dream-killers) will try to dissuade you from following this career path (to nowhere). The root of their lack of support (extreme negativity) is that it’s a painfully unwise (foolish) ambition to have since very few writers earn a living from writing. You will be told:

- to be practical (”Why not try technical writing or corporate communications writing or computer software manual-writing?”)

- to get your head out of the clouds (”And how exactly will poetry pay the bills? The last time I checked, iambic pentameter was not an accepted currency.”)

- to realize that your notion of wanting a career you love can be disproved linguistically (”If work was supposed to be fun it would be called ‘fun,’ not ‘work.’ “)

Since you are young enough to still believe in yourself (instead of only in people who try to talk you out of believing in yourself), you will bring the subject up again (repeatedly, in an oddly masochistic “Groundhog Day” kind of way). You will then be lectured on:

- the value of a dollar (”You can’t just write more money.”)

- what it was like to be in the army (even if that army never actually went anywhere or did anything)

- what it was like growing up during the Depression (depressing).

To top it all off, you will be labeled a dreamer (and the only thing worse than being a dreamer is being a dreamer who is foolish enough to actually pursue a dream).

If you are like most people (me), before you know it, you will agree wholeheartedly with your naysayers. “What was I thinking?” you will say to yourself every time the urge to write surfaces like an unruly weed, which you and everyone else keep trying to beat to death. “What could I possibly have to say that hasn’t already been said by people a thousand times smarter than I will ever be?” Psychologists refer to this as the Stockholm Syndrome — when captives begin to share the views of their captors. You will so fully internalize their message and adopt it as your own that you will eventually forget it wasn’t your opinion to begin with.

You will now enter a long (seemingly placid but emotionally turbulent) period of denial that can sometimes last years (or decades). You will lie. “Who me? Be a writer? And put up with all that rejection? Are you kidding?” You will obfuscate. “Who would want to be a writer? Can you imagine being someone who wanted to be a writer?” When pressed, you will even philosophize: “If a writer writes something that never gets published and is thus never read, is a writer still a writer?”

In order to convince yourself and others that you have “moved on” (accepted defeat without even trying), you will learn to hide in plain sight: You will get a normal job, one with an actual office and an actual desk (engaging in “freelance work” from your apartment or working “odd jobs” with “odd hours” are dead giveaways of your true intentions and unconscious desires). In exchange for your 40 (or 50 or 60) hours a week of work (indentured servitude), you’ll receive a respectable paycheck (let’s be frank: not much more than you made waitressing in high school at the International House of Pancakes or working the drive-thru at Burger King) and medical benefits (to pay for psychotherapy, twice a week, to deal with the stress of all your repression). Most important, your job will provide you with some financial security and emotional stability (not to mention the perfect opportunity for people watching, eavesdropping, Internet research and working on something — Fiction? Nonfiction? Comedy? Tragedy? — even if you don’t yet know what that something is).

In addition to the macro-lie (yourself as Career Drone), you’ll see that you need to make up lots of little lies to protect your true identity (Secret Writer Person). You’ll have to appear ambitious and deserving of promotions (show up before noon); pretend to embrace any and all career-enhancing business trips and client interactions (even though you see any time away from your true calling as a soul-deadening, blood-sucking diversion); and continue to dress the part (never complaining about how dumb it is that you have to spend all your money on work clothes when you could be home writing your novel in your pajamas).

And then one day, out of the blue, just when you think you’re finally lost in the jungle, you will see it. You will look at all the papers and files and meaningless detritus on your desk, you will watch all your wonderfully idiosyncratic co-workers racing busily around the office, talking of Michelangelo, and you will stop whatever it is you are doing. The world you’ve tried so hard to join will suddenly cease to exist, and you will finally see that life without your dream is a wasteland; that you must at least try to do the thing you really want to do even if, in the end, you do not succeed at it. You will be tempted to put the better-to-have-loved-and-lost rule in parentheses, like everything else in your life that you’ve sidelined and tried to ignore up until now, but you will resist and settle for multiple hyphens instead. It is a step. You are about to head into the great unknown, and you will be tempted to throw away the map to your lost world in triumph, but don’t — you will need something to write on.

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides; and, when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being ‘in love’—which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

“Love, itself, is what is left over when being ‘in love’ has burned away and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground—and, when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we found that we were one tree and not two. But, sometimes, the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.”

—Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin