Last night, at dinner, a woman told me I was a colourful character. She meant it as a compliment (I assume), but if there's one thing I don't wish to be it's a character.
People who have character, don't need to be characters; in the same way that people who have a certain vital intensity don't need to be seen to be larger than life. Characters, and individuals who are larger than life, are invariably just dullards behaving in a loud and boorish manner; the sort of people I try to avoid.
As for being colourful, even that's something I find troublesome. These days, I aim for a certain achromatic neutrality or greyness and to be a man without qualities, like the mathematician Ulrich, in Robert Musil's (appropriately unfinished) novel; ambivalent, indifferent, lacking any essential self and viewing the world in all its vulgar excess of colour and violent enthusiasm with cool analytical passivity.
Those of a philosophical disposition have always appreciated that grey is the most beautiful - for most noble - of colours. During the Renaissance, it played an important role in fashion and art; Rembrandt, for example, had a palette made up almost entirely of complex shades of grey.
Those who associate grey with boredom and conformity and perceive only an absence of colour, lack sophistication and subtlety. Let them wear their blues and browns in order to display their character; men in the know and men of style still favour a grey suit (light in summer, dark in winter) and understand like Roland Barthes that it is the Neutral alone which escapes and deconstructs the black-and-white binaries that structure meaning and produce the arrogance of certainty in Western thought and discourse.
