Sublime

Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. Social convention encourages the fixity of the idea because the very usefulness of symbols depends up

As a boy, he began narrating a story about himself to himself, a story of pluck and success, and he acted on that premise until it came true. He understood that, whether we sail to a new continent or simply travel from one day to the next, we are always headed into the unknown. Charlie had learned to treat the unknown as a friend, until life convin

in many countries changes in collective memory are legally induced. In

'a unified Christian drama with no scope for or interest in differences between past and present' (Lowenthal

You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story.

conventions' and therefore as 'a fundamental ingredient of each of us'

After twenty years of such wondering, I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars—always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.

I once read a great phrase in a book by the British writer Will Storr that captures the dual nature of our defenses. He proposed that most great fictional characters—and, by implication, most great people—have a “sacred flaw.” His point was that each of us goes around with certain models in our head that shape how we see the world. You build these

Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile.