At What Point In Your Life Did Your Personality Get "Set" (If Indeed, It Ever Did)

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Stumbled over this thread doing a Search that was so remotely tangential to it that the connection was pure accident. There's a lot of fascinating discussion up thread, so I am reviving it.

As for me, I have a hard time grasping just what my personality consists of. My turn of mind is often quite literal-minded and simplistic, and so it is generally tethered very directly to whatever is under my nose.

Intellectually speaking, I instinctively submit to the wisdom of the Fool in King Lear, who said "Nothing comes of nothing, nuncle." Whatever my self is at this moment, it connects to what it was a few moments ago, and so on and on, following that thread down into the increasing dimness of the remote past. It all connects, right back to some unknown beginning. But what that amounts to in terms of my 'personality', it baffles me to say.

Taking another tack toward an answer to this conundrum, I once wrote a book. I was the only character in this book. When I wrote it, I had a good grip on what I was doing, but as other people read this book and I had a chance to talk to them about it, I discovered each reader had a different idea of what the book amounted to, which parts stood out, and which caught their interest. Their version was as valid as mine was. I suspect whatever my 'personality' is, it is much the same as what my book is - a complex thing that has no definitive version.

Aimless, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 04:54 (twelve years ago) link

13

Virtual Bart (EDB), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 10:44 (twelve years ago) link

have you lost your tiller?

dell (del), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 13:43 (twelve years ago) link


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