27 january

At what price should one discover who he is? Should one not endeavor to this at any cost: does one's life not diverge into definite periods of "before" and "after"? And is not every action played out in the darkness of "Before" become inconsequencial? Does not one lust after, hunger for a greater self-knowledge after one has begun to discover, begun to know?

To have unravelled oneself into thin exhaustive fragments, and to say, look! These are the things which have shook and ground and chiseled me into the great translucent watershed of I. What more satisfying thing is there than to know oneself? He who controls the past controls the future. To suture one's past into air-tight compartments of understanding, to know thoroughly the self with which one must live, inescapable-- this is to refine, to resolve, to redefine. To stick one's hand in the grinding mill and grab fistfuls of mutable future.

We are, after all, irrevocable, but, ultimately, shapeable.

I am beginning to think that we are not refined by wad after wet added wad of new clay: perhaps the reconstruction consists not of addition, but subtraction: of chiselling off those wads of clay, of finding the nucleus buried underneath.