The wonder of tracking a self is its variations, which keep you surprised by who you are.

                  For some, self’s no mystery. They know who they are. Now or then they may be jolted out of their complacencies – falling in love or absorbing a death – but shocks only temporarily disturb their equanimity. Their story’s as dependable as the lub-dub of the heart. 

                  For others, the self is a horror-show they flee. They keep too busy to muse and when the self erupts angrily at its neglect seek professionals for repair. They may accomplish much, racing from the demons within, or wilt depleted by their internal contest.

                  I bumped into my self when I was sixteen. My father died and suddenly there was rage within. I’d been happy, compliant, loping through my expected life, and now I found myself at a crossroads with neither a map nor inkling what I sought from this assignment of time. My father, dying young and grim, discredited his example. Now I could not be him. So who? What? How to know?

                  My tools for discovery became words. I liked to write before and now I had to. For my first fifty years I held few earnest conversations except with myself. Conversations with others were performances, to be gauged by their effect. Had I pleased my interlocutor, satisfied expectations, made the sale? Only alone, into my journals, could I hiss, “What the fuck are you doing, fella, with your time?” Thoreau draped his fragrant arm over my shoulder: “It’s OK, my friend, to ask. 

                  My little book, Glimpses of a Self, this month’s offering in Carll’s Book of the Month Club, is what it says it is: glimpses, no conclusion: a few moments from my myriad when sense shone through. The attraction of the book, if any, is companionship. The solace and society Thoreau offered me I extend to you. Turns out, despite our differences, we are much alike. The joy of being is sharing.

                  I excavated the book from a mountain of private and published verbiage. Only by writing lots, I’ve found, am I lucky enough to sometimes write well. Most of my moaning or cavorting moments merit their deep obscurity. But now and then, an instant’s urgency met language somehow adequate.

                  Extracting those nuggets, I smelted them into a shape, which suggests, I hope, a narrative of a consciousness. This is not a box of bits, but a stroll with a friend that naturally unfolds.

                  I’m hoping you’ll read this book and those to follow, because they are the best of me, and I long to deepen the relationship which today’s words commence. Reading and writing for me are adventures in intimacy. The authors I love I love with a heat almost palpable. And love, by my lights, is the real right reason to be.

                  If this story has a moral it is this: “Look – with your own eyes. Explore – with your own mind. Feel – with your own heart. And behold!” Having encountered my self in crisis, we grew friends over time, in our later years reliving with a smile our old debates.

                  A glimpse is only a glimpse, but these words suggest a little of what I’ve learned.

                  I have trekked a long way to insignificance. Soon enough none of us will matter, not even Shakespeare – or Jesus. Any calling is a noise in our head like tinnitus, a shrill of molecules, no revelation. And what a gift this inconsequence, what a giddying release from the despotism of pride. We need not become, we can just be, as dog-pal Henry just is. Now is enough.