There's a part of us that watches our doings and overhears our thoughts--a neutral observer that monitors our experiences as if from the outside, witnessing what the Danish philosopher SÃ ¶ren Kierkegaard aptly called the "stages on life's way." This faculty stands apart from the rush of worldly life and simply takes note of what happens. The elderly will tell you that although their bodies and minds have changed, this "witness" hasn't aged at all. Even in old age, it's the same youthful, candid observer that it was when they first became aware of it as a child. At ninety, my father told me he felt the "one" looking out at the world through the "two holes in the fence" was the same one that had done so when he was a boy of five.
As the literary critic Harold Bloom points out, Shakespeare drew attention to the witness by creating characters such as Hamlet and Falstaff who, in soliloquy, overhear themselves. It is this inner process that enables us to take stock of where we are and then steer a different course if we're unsatisfied with what we find.
When the spectacle of life becomes intense, the witness often recedes into the background, but continues observing no matter how turbulent things become. This unobtrusive monitoring faculty is detached and nonjudgmental. The critical voice we sometimes hear in our head is not that of the witness. Blaming ourselves is rather the result of internalizing the rankist agenda of others who would put us down. In contrast, our witness is a "secret sharer" that does not condemn us no matter what we do or what others think of us. It plays an indispensable part in the creation and re-creation of our personas by chronicling with a disinterested eye everything that goes on in our home for identities.
The witness looks both inward and outward. There is no part of ourselves to which we feel closer. It's a model builder's closest ally. Some regard it as the soul.
Questing
Isidore I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate in physics, remarked: "Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: "So? Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. "Izzy,' she would say, "did you ask a good question today?'"
Learning to catch a good question on the fly, no matter how sophomoric it may seem, is a model builder's lifeblood. Questions indicate the path to a new personal identity by suggesting ways in which we might contribute something of ourselves.
Most of our ancestors were fully occupied with just the feeding of their families. So long as we're struggling to fulfill our basic needs, we can't afford to pay attention to the questions within us. Suppressed, they lie dormant and are passed along from generation to generation.We make do with traditional doctrine and dogma until our survival is assured.
But once there is leisure, submerged questions surface into consciousness. They usually arise out of contradictions between ourselves and other people. The young unearth the questions their parents avoided and soon embark on their own search for answers.
The late writer Wallace Stegner said, "The guts of any significant fiction--or autobiography--is an anguished question." Our inquiries generate our individuality. Even when we're unaware of them, they shape our every move.
As a teenager, Einstein wondered what time the clock in the steeple of his hometown Ulm, Germany, would show if the trolley he was on were to race away from it at the speed of light. It seemed to him that if the trolley left at noon and moved in sync with the light that showed the hands of the clock straight up, he would just keep on seeing noon forever. But wouldn't that mean that time had stopped? Thus was a question born, the pursuit of which would unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the universe.
In the places where we're most alive we are questions, not answers. One has to listen carefully, again and again, to detect new ones, which often make their presence known in a whisper.
Every person is an original, each of us unprecedented. Even if our genes were cloned, our social environments would be distinct. This double uniqueness is further differentiated by the questions we generate, which are the source of our passions.
Taking our questions seriously,whether or not we are able to answer them, defines a personal quest that places our current identity on the line, exposing it to transformation. In a dignitarian society we would be able to do this without fear of humiliation or persecution.
In the film My Name Is Nobody, a young gunslinger who calls himself "Nobody" faces down a legendary old hand who has a reputation for being the "fastest gun in the West." In their climactic showdown, Nobody ostensibly kills Jack Beauregard, played by Henry Fonda. Written on his gravestone we see,"Nobody was faster than Jack Beauregard." While expressing the literal truth, this epitaph, via its twofold meaning, preserves the dignity of Beauregard, who, as it turns out, has actually faked his death and begun a new life on the Mississippi in partnership with the young man named Nobody.
In this same sense, nobody is holier than thou.
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