Selfhood

“Who could have understood Abraham? He is discontinuous with himself. The girl who hated Joni and the woman who loves her seem to me similarly divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body. It’s the feeling we get sometimes when we find a diary we wrote, as teen-agers, or sit at dinner listening to an old friend tell some story about us of which we have no memory. It’s an everyday sensation for most of us, yet it proves a tricky sort of problem for those people who hope to make art. For though we know and recognize discontinuity in our own lives, when it comes to art we are deeply committed to the idea of continuity. I find myself to be radically discontinuous with myself—but how does one re-create this principle in fiction? What is a character if not a continuous, consistent personality? If you put Abraham in a novel, a lot of people would throw that novel across the room. What’s his motivation? How can he love his son and yet be prepared to kill him? Abraham is offensive to us. It is by reading and watching consistent people on the page, stage, and screen that we are reassured of our own consistency.” ZADIE SMITH

I love this because, personality is discontinuous despite our efforts to reconcile it into plain coherence. It can never be accurately distilled into logical terms, it is meant for us to pursue continuously, perpetually, without end.