to each we turn a different face...

Lawrence Durrell wrote in his Alexandria Quartet, "To each we turn a different face of the prism." The idea is that, while we are - as a self - a unified whole, we are multifaceted and dimensional, and we show our different "faces" to others in different ways. Depending on our mood, our perceived audience, the environment, and so on, we play different roles. We are the serious-minded and conscientious person at work, friendly but guarded person with clients, the intellectual person when speaking in front of academic audiences, the comic and jovial girl when with friends, the caring and compassionate one with our beloved, quiet and introspective when alone, or any other number of faceted-selves.

It was my father who passed this quote on to me when I was 13. I think he was trying to reassure me that I wasn't being disingenuine with others if I acted or spoke in one way at one time, and in an opposite way another time. I could be both persons, and one person at once! Maybe this was good advice for a person who, as a teen and even still, is preoccupied with authenticity while yearning for the acceptance and approval of others. I guess probably most teens are like that. But is this a good quote to live by? If you knew my father, certainly this was a quote that spoke to him -- and likely confirmed if not excused many of his own actions and attitudes. And it has been a formational quotation for me, as well. But as I face one episode of depression after another, continually struggling with questions of self, of who I am and who I want to be, and who I may be doomed to be, I have begun to question the soundness of Durrell's words.

About six months ago, a close friend of mine sent me a book called "Lovingkindness," a book about compassion from a Buddhist perspective. I am longtime advocate of western philosophy; a dissertation shy of a PhD in philosophy (ironically my diss was on self-deception). Particularly in the past, I dogmatically avoided anything that wasn't supported by strong, analytical argumentation and/or falsifiable, scientific data. Eastern philosophical works were, for me, on a par with literature: not false but not true, perspectival in nature, and therefore imperfect in capturing anything essential or real. Even during my Nietzsche phase (a short 5 months), I managed to remain attached to the dogma that reason/rationality is the key to any kind of understanding. When I came upon Kierkegaard, I was shamefully drawn to his idea that reason can only get you so far in understanding anything, that ultimately any argument based in reason is doomed to fail and will not secure that which it so tirelessly aims to answer: questions that humans have been asking since humans have been asking questions. What is it? Who am I? Why is it? and so on. Later I discovered Heidegger, who talks phemonenally and about grasping -- the closest, I see now, that western phil comes to Buddhism -- and I quit philosophy. Literally. I left grad school, and moved to Denver, and set out to live. I quit philosophy.

Of course, philosophy did not quit me. And now, four years after I left graduate study, I still find myself fairly firmly planted in the soil of Aristotle, Descartes,of transcendental realists like Kant, even of the metaphysical shape-shifters and language-benders of the past century. It's funny who heavy you can feel without a body. Particularly during my darkest days, when I sleeping as often as I could manage to find an excuse to, I was bogged down in cycles of thought, arguments of impeccable validity about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the self. While these arguments are complicated and compelling and fascinating to me even now, their undecidability can at times fill me with a sense of despair and futility.

Those reactions are extreme, and are (as my dad would say,) "the depression talking." But I don't think I am alone out here in this non-substantive sea of uncertainty. The more I talk to others and read about my generation and the next (and maybe the ones before and after), the more I come to see that we are all grasping at illusions to some extent or other. We are all, at last, seeking to be happy. At last, to be happy.

What I am saying is nothing new, it is my own personal and continual (re) discovery. And the words that we are "grasping at illusions" can't come close to describing or explaining the phenomenon. Many others, far smarter and more sage than I, have done far better than I could hope to express this. It is not that the ideas of happiness, truth, knowledge, love, and self are illusive. Maybe they are, maybe not. More likely, they are true-for-what-they-are: ideas as ideas. The issue that I am more interested in these days is the way that we attach to these concepts as being anything more than concepts. Our definition of happiness creates in us a life-plan to which we feel errant when we deviate. Our sense of self feels violated if we do something out of the ordinary, or someone doesn't validate us in the way we expect. This is the source of our malaise.

If there is anything holds its own weight, it is that nothing is permanent. Nothing -- no thing, no love, no self -- lasts forever. Everything and every thing changes.

A view that knowledge of the world is necessarily shaped by the categories of space and time, or that consciousness is a feature or property of brain (or that it is not) may provide provisional answers, but it is important, too, acknowledge that this is only one part of the picture. It is only one, albeit good, story. Yes, I said it. It is a story.

A view that we are in love, or not in love, is doomed to cause us pain at some point. We fear that the love might end, or that we might screw it up, or that we might never find love, or that love is not what we hoped it would be. But "thislove" -- in this moment -- or "thislonliness" -- in this moment -- will end. Love, or loneliness, is entirely new in every single moment. You can't hold on to any one moment, or hasten any one moment, or kill one moment. It is, and then it is not. And as soon as it is not, there is another moment, and then another, and then another.

And then, any curiosities or concerns about "who I am" is also futile. There is no enduring self. Are you hearing this? There. is. no. self. 'You' do not exist as a permanent thing, even in this life on this earth. I am coming to believe that struggles for authenticity-through-time cannot yield any fruit because there is no one unified way to be. The only semblance of authenticity we can hope to have is simply to continually remind ourselves that we are not definable.

"To each we turn a different face of the prism" traps us in the illusion that we are a prism at all. There is no prism -- no one block of crystal with chipped edges that a single-consciousness strategically turns. We may, at times, feel as though this is the case. But the concept of self as 'prism' is just that: a concept. And, as a concept, the more seriously we take it, the more it acts to confine us to an idea of who we are.

Ultimately, idea of self as prism acts as a prison, even as it attempts to legitimize and free us.