Nolan Park

“What does it mean to truly be yourself? Around this time, in the mid-1900s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor began thinking about how people throughout history had dealt with this question of individual identity. In the past, there was no such thing. You were born into a well-defined position, locked along a hierarchy, and you accepted that this was the natural order of things. With the dissolution of feudal, old-world bonds, new possibilities of economic and social mobility emerged, and this transience infected the soul. People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of self discovery, self creation, and revision. For some, this manifested as a kind of endless drifting and searching; others found the possibility of claiming one's own identity empowering. But we were all in search of the same thing, that quality that made you yourself.

Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It's a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone's clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic -- this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor's telling, everyone becomes a kind of artist, creatively wrestling with the parameters of our own being. He described the outlook as one where 'being true to myself is being true to my own originality, and that is something that only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am defining it'. Even though all this sounds very navel-gazing, being true to yourself cannot happen in a vacuum. Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others. Authenticity, Taylor explained, presumes dialogue, and it is born out of engaging with those around us. We seek recognition, even if what you want to hear from a close friend is that you're a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they'll never truly understand.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“What I learned from Naoko's death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem