Self

Human nature needs both fellowship and freedom, but usually we must choose. The more we encircle ourselves with others, the more we handcuff our will. Ask for help on a project at work, and it will not be done exactly how you want. Marry, and your holidays will be spent at in-laws'. Have children, and you will listen to their music in the car instead of yours. But worship your freedom, and you will be an empty temple. A bachelor's life resembles a widower's. Write, sing, or paint the way you please, disregarding the market's demands, and you will be your own and only audience. Travel wherever you want, whenever you want, and you will go alone.

Fellowship imprisons us, freedom exiles us.

When having my hair cut, I am always startled to see my hair in the trash can. The pile of hair looks familiarly like my head, yet now I am mixed among food scraps and snotty tissues. A part of me which, until today, I washed and combed daily and based my self-esteem on will soon line a rat's nest in a landfill.

Similarly, since seventy-five percent of indoor dust is dead skin cells, cleaning my house is a chore of throwing myself away. When I wipe my desk, I am wiping up my face that fell off. If I breathe too much, I irritate my own lungs and sneeze myself back out.

Whatever dies of us is promptly discarded. Death will be our full and final relegation to rubbish. Alive, we were endowed with sacred, inalienable rights—by our Creator, our courts, our moral codes—but no sooner will we die than the living will stuff us in wooden trash bins and bury us in landfills of human bodies, where they can remember us without the horror of seeing or smelling us. Death transforms the body from earth's most precious to its most repulsive substance.

When I need to think, I think out loud. Silent reflection is a lonely interior affair, whereas saying one's thoughts audibly splits the self into speaker and listener and turns monologue into dialogue. Nor is any dialogue quite so enjoyable as a dialogue with oneself. This is not a matter of vanity but compatibility. Who else besides me always and unfailingly desires to discuss exactly the same subjects I do? We start from shared premises, hold equivalent interests with equivalent passion, get bored at just the same moment and, without the awkwardness of hinting, simultaneously move on to another topic.

Each of us is our own perfect match.

Every day, strangers look at our face—our brows, cheeks, lips, and lashes—but all we have ever seen of ourselves, while closing one eye, is the blurry lump of our nose. Were it not for mirrors and photographs, we could not tell if we had Cleopatra's looks or Socrates'. Oddly, we know others better than ourselves, for we observe their reality, but only copies of ourselves.

Faces are like assumptions: we see with them, we do not see them.