Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The Self

No one is ever himself, Galip whispered, as if divulging a secret. None of us can ever be ourselves. Don't you wonder if other people see you as someone other than the person you really are? Are you so very sure you are your own person? If you are, are you sure that the person you are sure you are is really you?

Thus Galip, the central character (if a character is what he is) in one of the later chapters of The Black Book. (Just finished, by the way. It started well and just got better.)

And what if the self is no more than a thin stretched tissue binding together the various autonomous bits and pieces that make us up, creating a fiction of some kind of togetherness, before it all falls apart, even as it falls apart, to convince us, console us, it was once all together? If I'm not mistaken (and I might be, I might be) that's the story told by Michael Gazzaniga in Human. My intuition tells me that might well be the way it is when I look inside, though I must admit, other humans look all of a piece to me.

It's odd to think of us all being so selfish if there were no real self to be selfish for.

2 comments:

Trebuchet said...

I guess my oh-so-penetrating insight here is that whatever humans are, we're a whole order of complexity greater than all other living things on this planet. Why do I say that?

We accrete so much more junk, in terms of quantity and complexity. I mean, think of all the stuff in your house and in your workplace compared to all the stuff in any animal's house or workplace.

*grin*

Brian Connor said...

Homo junkians.

I hoard therefore I am.