Richard Quinney

Who Are We?

Who Are We?

by Richard Quinney

 

How we have lived, and continue to live, with a consciousness of who we are is my daily concern at this time in my life. In recent years I have thought about this self of mine, wondering about its creation and manifestation over the years. Lately I have entertained the notion that what I know as the self is not the single and stable entity as once conceived. In fact, we have several different selves in our life course, and we have several different selves at any one time in our lives. This line in Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself struck me with consequential force only recently: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Just when I was about to make a statement about who I am, Whitman’s epiphany caused me to revise my conception of who I am, and who I have been, and who I am becoming.