What is the easiest game in the world–and I’ve played it–is mistaking an inability or unwillingness to assume adult responsibility for depth. Simply because you read books we are told are deep does not mean you are.
In the end, what we call superficial necessarily includes a conception of what is deep, which is to say what “life” “really” “is”.
Plays like “Streetcar named Desire” are called deep because they deal with complex human conflicts.
Is conflict the necessary nature of human existence, or is it the result of emotional superficiality and incompetence? I would argue the latter. Does the “deep” not then consist in what shows us how to TRANSCEND the easy emotions of anger, resentment, lust, greed, jealousy, hate and the like?
I get the sense sometimes that writers in the latter part of the 19th, through roughly the mid 20th Century thought they discovered how nasty people can be. How is this profound? I doubt anyone who lived then had not seen it. They didn’t talk about it, and they sure as hell wanted escape from it in their entertainment, because they lived it, but they were not the naive fools culturally disconnected fools seem to have thought they were.
That is my view, at any rate.
What is deep, in my own world, is expanding emotions and my sense of self to Space itself, to where I can make direct contact experientially with the energies which surround us in infinite varieties and ways, and which all come from one infinite source. Violence and conflict are of no more intrinsic importance than human imbecility and physical deformity. They are unfortunate, and it is appropriate both to care for and to not to pity them, but it is the height of idiocy to see them as profound in and of themselves.
It was Helen Keller’s triumphant expansion of self and joy which marks her as special, not the ways in which her physical senses were broken. This should be obvious, but it seemingly is not.