I'm finding it more and more difficult to persuade myself that I have anything to say here that's sufficiently different from what a gazillion other blogs are saying to make it worth anyone's time to read this one. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals and to believe our thoughts, feelings and experiences in general are very different from everyone else's, but when you live in a nation of 300-plus million people, even if only 1/10th of 1 percent of your fellow citizens have the same thought, that's still 300,000 of you with the same idea.
Moreover, how many choices do we really have? Religion, for example: There's a sort of menu of options ranging from highly traditional, fundamentalist sectarianism to outright materialistic atheism. The same sort of thing is true with politics. Sports: Pick a game, then choose a team to support. So identity-formation becomes like a meal in a Chinese restaurant: Pick one item from column A, one from column B, etc. And one person is a Baptist Republican Redskins fan who drives a Ford and likes Toby Keith, another is a Unitarian Democrat Yankees fan who drives a Toyota and listens to Tori Amos. I don't know how many such combinations are possible, but the number probably isn't very large, and some of the differences are pretty insignificant.
Worse still, we live in a world in which not just physical products are mass-produced, so are ideas, attitudes, styles, dreams. The products are marketed as a way of expressing who we are, and we buy them, and we also buy the premise that what we own, what we wear, what we drive expresses who we are. And maybe it does, and maybe it's not completely absurd to go to the mall to buy some individuality, but it certainly seems likely that we're limiting our possibilities that way.
If you've ever watched an older relative in the twilight of life, you've seen them seemingly fade away as they lose their grip on the attitudes, opinions, obsessions, addictions, preferences and finally the memories by which they defined themselves. What's left then, if that kind of self-definition is all they have? But who or what is it that made those choices in the first place?
Oh sure, I know, no two of us have the same fingerprints, except monozygotic twins. So yes, we're all unique in that sense - which means we're all the same, doesn't it?
Sunday, November 9, 2008
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2 comments:
Your point about older people fading away got my attention. While I have seen the process you describe, I've also seen something quite different.
A friend who was also a famous poet died recently at the age of 87 following a series of strokes. Rather than losing his personality or identity, he actually maintained his life themes and thoughts to the very end. In his last days, an imaginary council was convened in his hospital room attended by every person and animal that had been important in his life.
I know that poets are not "typical" but it seemed to me that my friend's final days were a testament to his solid foundation and sense of who he was and his rich inner life. It seemed to me his unique "identity" carried him through his life all the way to the end.
That's how it should be, of course. My point - expressed a bit critically, I'm afraid - was that our fixation on externalities leads us away from the true source of our identity. As you said, your friend had a rich inner life; that's the Way, according to all the best authorities.
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