I’m not generally a tardy person, but it did take me an embarrassingly long time to update my address after my fifteenth (or so) move since starting college a decade ago. Consequently, I have a prodigious stack of New Yorkers to skim through that my husband mailed me last week. Beginning with the October 10, 2022, issue, I did a double take upon reading “are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four?” (Rothman, 2022) flicking my eyes up to the author line. But no, the piece wasn’t written by the philosophy professor I had last year, who posed the same question to us in assigning the most challenging paper of my college career. I pulled something together for that paper, but I never really answered—couldn’t really answer—the question.

I ended up defending the standby of laypersons, even though philosophy often regards it as a quaint oddity harkening to an earlier time: the soul. Dementia and brain injury and paralysis and simple inevitable fading of old memories and iterative introduction of new ones aside it seems there still is—has to be—a continuity of self through it all. I am not the same as I was at four years old, but I am the same person. Right?

“My son, who is happy and voluble, is so much fun to be around that I sometimes mourn, on his behalf, his future inability to remember himself,” Rothman writes. I can relate—what I wouldn’t give to remember my own phenomenal childhood. It was the most fun I’ve ever had, and yet the vast majority of it is lost—as far as I’m consciously aware—to my memory.

“I have always been who I am” Anna Delvey/Sorokin proclaims in the Netflix series Inventing Anna. It shouldn’t have sounded so foreign to me, given my defense of the soul in that (also mostly forgotten) philosophy paper, but somehow it did. Here’s a character with an alleged photographic memory, who speaks an alleged seven languages. If all that knowledge and linguistic facility doesn’t mold one’s identity into something almost unrecognizable, what could?

“Will we remember this life, in heaven?” someone asked in our weekly Bible study. Of course, I thought—but didn’t say. This life is the proving ground—what would have been the point if the memory of becoming oneself is wiped out at the end of this life? But here’s the thing… I don’t remember the vast majority of my life, even in the midst of it, and even its very best moments in my charmed childhood haven’t stuck nearly as well or as frequently as I would like. And surely even the best of those is only the palest, narrowest shard of the brilliance that awaits—so maybe my initial thought could use some tweaking.

Whatever the case may be about memory, I suspect (as I almost always do) that Lewis had it right when he discussed what comprises the self: “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature” (Lewis, 1952, p. 92). What was that line of Dumbledore’s? Oh yeah—“it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” (Rowling, 2000). These two authors, Lewis and Rowling, stand out most vividly in my memory—probably because I’ve read them both many, many times. As it happens, Lewis had something to say about that too: “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once” (1932).

 

Lewis, C. S. (1932, February). Letter to Arthur Greeves. In They stand together: The letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), p. 439.

Lewis, C. S. (1952). Mere Christianity. HarperCollins.

Rothman, J. (2022, October 10). Becoming you: Are you the same person you were when you were a child? The New Yorker. 

Rowling, J. K. (2000). Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Scholastic.

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