On Self, and Other Selves. How many people does one pass by on a given day? How many eyes are met and smiles exchanged? How many words of greeting? How many of thanks? How many hands does a person shake?

I suppose the answer to any one of these questions depends on where a person happens to be. Among friends? or among strangers? When among friends, exchanging some form of greeting is almost a requirement. When among strangers, out of courtesy one walks with one's eyes straight ahead staring off into the vast beyond or at ground as if to trace a crack in the sidewalk. Yet friends do not always want your attention and strangers just might crave it. I do not offer the former observation as an example of strife or the later as an example of inordinate desire. It just is the case that friends sometimes desire space while strangers do not.

But the interior of a person remains forever just beyond view of the eyes, just out of reach of the ears, forever beyond the touch of the finger tips, and certainly beyond the sense of smell and taste. What a person is thinking, contemplating, imagining, or feeling may bubble up to the bodily surface, but rarely does it do so with any discernible content. One says to a person, 'I can tell you are worried by the look on your face,' but the precise reason why the same person is worried is not written out in bold letters on their forehead. One says to a person, 'I see someone is happy today,' but which wellspring of joy they are drinking from at that moment isn't exactly marked out for all to see.

This is not to say that you might not have an idea of what might be passing through my head at any given moment, or that I might not have idea of what might be passing through yours. The longer one person knows another, the bigger the repertoire of shared memories one has to draw on to make an inference. Memories are of external impressions, to be sure, but it is memories on which familiarity between persons is built up. To understate the obvious, I suspect this is why husbands and wives are instructed to communicate with each other, and why, when communication breaks down, the marriage is said to be on the rocks. Conversation need not always plumb the depths of a of passionate togetherness; the simplest of subjects will do. Regardless, the closer in proximity one is to another person, the more necessary communication becomes.

Still, even between the closest of friends and the most intimate of lovers full disclosure of self to self is never achieved. All the words in the world could never lay the mind of one person bare to another. One might wonder why, of course, that this should be the case. Or one might not wonder at all, but simply accept this as part and parcel of the way things are. But someone, like myself for example, might wonder why it is that my thought, when it passes through the lips to the ears of another as a vocal sound, is incapable of conveying the whole content of my mind. (Or why it is so difficult to blog about.) Why is it that I struggle to find words to express myself to another when what I am thinking seems, most of the time at least, perfectly intelligible.

When thought becomes the vocal word a boundary is crossed from the interior to the exterior of a person. The exterior world I share with others, but in the interior, I find myself mostly alone. Memories of other people in other times and places are to be found ready at hand in the mind; so in a limited sense I am not alone in my innermost thoughts. But memories are only records, and as such have not the capacity to respond on their own accord like an actual person with whom I share the external world would be able to.

Let me dip in my bag of analogies and draw out that of glass. Neither are persons perfectly transparent nor completely opaque to each other, but persons exist in varying degrees of translucence. The analogy can be extended: like the sheen of light on glass, persons reflect each other with varying degrees of clarity. One finds oneself in another. Not wholly or completely, of course, but necessarily nonetheless. A child depends on their parents for affirmation. Friends come together to celebrate each other's differences, in and through which they find themselves. The same goes for lovers, only to a much greater, deeper, more pervasive, extent. To communicate the contents of one's own mind to another is a way to receive the same back, albeit from the reflected vantage of the other.

Still on the graph of familiarity, on which familiarity is directly related to the amount of time spent together, the function of disclosure is asymptotic, always approaching, but never reaching, one hundred percent. We might wonder why. The only answer that can be given is that the boundary between body and soul, between what is internal and what is external to a person, is always to some degree translucent, and never completely transparent.

At one and the same time, this translucency of self is the dignity and misery of humankind. It is misery because it is the cause of so much hurt. One honestly didn't know that is the way the other person would react. Or maybe one didn't care to know that would be the way the other person would react. Either way, to act towards another person while one lacks a complete knowledge of them is to take a risk, which bears the potential for being causing extreme pain. It is dignity because there will be something that escapes human comprehension of other persons, which is the way it should be. Knowledge of a person is power over a person, which can be used for good or for ill. With persons, however, something escapes the knowing of other persons, which entails that the power one exercises over person ought to be curtailed. A parent raises a child with the intention of enabling the child to take care of themselves. A friendship would quickly end if the only thing that defined the relation was a struggle for supremacy. Marriage would quickly fall to pieces if the other spouse is neither affirmed nor deferred to at the appropriate times.

We read in Genesis 1, 'So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.' A curious paradox arises, however, if this passage is compared to the Decalogue, where it says, 'You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.' The Creator of heaven and earth, who created humanity in his image, is not Himself imageable. Humanity bears the image of an imageless God, from which we gather that the inscrutability of God is shared somehow by human beings. The basic principle of being created in the image of the Imageless is comprehensive in its scope: it means the human being does not belong to him or herself, nor in a final sense to another other human being, but to their Creator alone. Thus it will follow that the human body, which is plainly visible and easily comprehendable by other persons, is a leasehold. Because it is a human body, it must be accorded respect and dignity by other persons.

Created in the image of the Imageless, the inner person, which is in a final sense beyond the comprehension of other persons, however, lies completely exposed to its Lord and Maker.


1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?

--Psalm 139