“[W]e very often differ from ourselves.”
I know I’m not the man I
was when I woke up this morning. I was foggy, befuddled and briefly
memory-less, my customary pre-caffeinated state. Slowly the world leaked in. Consciousness
grows like mushrooms after a spring rain and as quickly disappears in sleep,
intoxication or death. We fancy ourselves solid and at least semi-permanent.
Experience teaches otherwise. We are not nothing, a fiction, but a loosely
aligned colony of mutating selves, not an empire.
In The Adventurer
#107, published on this date, Nov. 13, in 1753, Dr. Johnson continues: “How
often we alter our minds, we do not always remark; because the change is
sometimes made imperceptibly and gradually, and the last conviction effaces all
memory of the former: yet every man, accustomed from time to time to take a
survey of his own notions, will by a slight retrospection be able to discover,
that his mind has suffered many revolutions . . .”
Imagine holding,
unchanged, the opinions, convictions, values and beliefs you did at seventeen,
twenty or thirty-three. My first reaction to such a thought experiment is
embarrassment. I was an idiot then, while fancying myself quite worldly and
sophisticated. Young people, who have little experience and less judgment, are
likeliest to fall for grandiose theories and violent convictions.
A reader upbraids me for having
not stated my preference in the presidential election. She asks if I’m a “coward
. . . afraid to come right out and say
who you voted for.” No, it’s just not an interesting subject. Besides, I didn’t
vote. I don’t expect others to agree with me. My opinions on any subject are the
least pertinent things you can know about me. Don’t reduce me to my opinions or
lack of them.
“We have less reason to be
surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we
very often differ from ourselves. . . . Such is the uncertainty in which we are
always likely to remain with regard to questions wherein we have most interest,
and which every day affords us fresh opportunity to examine: we may examine,
indeed, but we never can decide, because our faculties are unequal to the
subject; we see a little, and form an opinion; we see more, and change it.”
3 comments:
An alarming number of minds are altering into a state of intolerant political zealotry. The familiar Chinese curse ("May you live in interesting times") failed to note that "interesting times" are tense with aggressively uninteresting people.
Identifying oneself as a non-voter will bring the Virtucrats out of the woodwork. I started voting in the 1970s as a reaction against being ineligible to vote until age 21, yet being eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Following politics nowadays can be a full-time, unpaid job.
My views are radical in the morning, liberal in the afternoon, and conservative by evening. Sometimes, it's the other way around.
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