Q: Who am I?
A: Why do you ask?
Introspection is a human peculiarity. Dogs don’t, Henry assures me. Dogs react but do not reflect. Same, he assumes, with other species, though he has no way of knowing and doesn’t care. What is is, why rattle teacups with what ifs? Why regret? Why compare?
He pities me my pain. He has a big heart. He licks me as I writhe (with or without an h). I’d be gladder, he’s convinced, if I followed his lead, but he’d never coach. What is is, no use yelping.
Friends mistake Henry for Carll in disguise. Who else could he be? – dogs don’t write. That is not my experience. I don’t play Henry, I transcribe him. The extent and complexity our acquaintance surprises me. Change an essential element in yourself and you become someone new, for each of our values shapes the others. A person four feet tall and a person seven must differ in all respects, not just height. So with awareness of time. Deprive me of yesterday and tomorrow – and of the never-never lands of nostalgia and longing – and I’m no longer I. This is not a mind game or what’s labeled philosophy, rather ontology as a life skill. How can you envision where you’re going if you don’t know where you are? I live in time – today, yesterday, tomorrow, would and yet might be. The constant collision of those realms confounds. Sparks from those collisions include art, beauty, God, goodness, love, history, grief, the words on this page. Remove awareness of time and all else alters. Differ here and willy-nilly Henry and I must differ in all.
He becomes, more daily, my professor.
How can he teach, some might ask, what he does not know? This is to misunderstand education. We learn by experience only. Information does not adhere to consciousness until it becomes experience. We must feel that two plus two equals four. We have all felt such a-hahs and they are magical, quite unlike intellection. Reason may help us toward realization, but discovery feels like revelation. Two plus two has to equal four, we can hardly say why. No more can I explain why the Goldberg Variations consoles like no other music or why I love Jane.
We learn by study. Our word study hails from the Latin studium, evoking “earnest application, enthusiasm, eagerness, object of interest, aim, concern, activity, pursuit, devotion…,” in the OED’s effusive account. All of these are feelings which pulse in a compelling present. Henry studies, in this sense. So I, blessed by retirement with time, study Henry. The more I explore the more I feel our differences and similarities. I love Henry, but he cannot love me, not in the same aching way, for love is a child of time.
Is introspection worth the pain? No more can we question the value of bipedalism or our opposable thumb, they’re part of who we are. Change those, change all. Awareness of time is what makes us us, curious to compare, doomed to evolve. “The sunshine of an eternal present,” Henry’s constant weather, we humans experience, if we’re lucky, only in rare ecstatic glimpses.
Comparing Henry and myself is not a meme or trope, a convenient conversational trick, but my fascination and concentration, a mystery beyond solution, a microcosm of all mysteries. Who I am means who by comparison – to all other creatures that are, were, or might be. I ask “Who am I?” because God has favored me with wonder, His most precious gift.