***
Knowing Our Selves
And his final remarks:I went for my first counseling session today. I did not know what to expect. All I knew was I had a burning desire to talk, to communicate what I felt to someone who might understand, someone who might provide an answer to what was plaguing me, or someone who could just shake me out of my rut. My appointment was for four in the afternoon. 4:02 pm. Counselors streamed out intermittently from a door, picking up their respective patients with hearty handshakes and toothy grins. 4:08 pm. A frumpy woman emerged from the door with a searching look. We made eye contact, and immediately I knew she was my counselor. She had an expectant yet wary gaze, as if she was getting ready to critically evaluate her new patient. If I could intuit who she was by her expression, she probably knew my identity by empirical observation. What are the odds that the sole Asian in the room is named Hejin Chua? I didn't get so much as a handshake - all I got was a hesitant greeting as she stayed an arm's length away from me. I wondered if she was a naturally less effusive person, or if she was being sympathetic to my unfamiliarity with American customs, or if she just couldn't care less. Naturally, she didn't endear herself to me. She struck me as someone who would not be sympathetic, someone who regarded her job purely professionally. I did a bit of sleuthing and looked up her credentials prior to the appointment. My nosy curiosity coupled with the convenience of the Internet yielded the information that she had a MPH and a LMSW: clearly a woman who knows what she is doing. One of the first things she said to me was that the first few counseling sessions are for information-gathering, i.e. it would be spent collecting as much information as possible to lay the groundwork for our subsequent sessions. Immediately I had some misgivings: is it even realistically possible for her to gain a full understanding of my life? I could certainly provide relevant parts – parts that I think are relevant. However, what I think is relevant might not even be relevant. I might withhold information because it serves my ego to not divulge it. Granting that I manage to choose what is relevant, what is to say that I am even able to convey my thoughts in a way that do justice to them?
In order to understand another, Jim W. Corder would agree that “each of us, alone, must speak and write and go on speaking and writing” (142) in the hopes of finding an essence through the cacophony of voices. However, through this disorganized rabble it is even easier to feel like our thoughts are lost among the avalanche of “views and words” that “we have to save” (143). We are all fighting to be heard, but this is a fight that no one emerges victor. According to Corder, “Our characters do not emerge in our discourses” (141) – character has to be experienced and lived through, in order to be truly understood. I told the counselor as much as I could in the paltry forty-five minutes that we had, yet I didn’t feel the release that I was expecting. I didn’t feel like she had understood: I felt even more alone, if anything at all. It was in my yearning to be understood that led me to realize the futility of even trying. Even if the forty-five minutes could do justice to the tumultuous events that occurred over the past two months, how effective would all that detail be in helping her to truly empathize with me? “The observation and rendition of particulars will not necessarily yield universal truth” (142): much less will a mere summary of particular particulars. (then my teacher gives me a big-ass tick here)
Yet a small part of me wonders if my feeling of never being fully understood is a self-imposed “voluntary exile” (140). I could be erecting my own walls, closing off people from me - yet I claw on the inside, desperate for help. Maybe I need to feel misunderstood; I need to be perceived as enigmatic because it helps me assert my individuality. There is always a struggle between wanting to be an independent individual, and a more basal need to feel connected to others, to feel rooted in a “collective” where “we can save one another, keep one another, hold one another, rather than lose one another”. (143)
We could “tell our stories carefully to one another” (142), but what if we don’t know our stories well enough to relate them? Certainly we have to have a reasonable amount of self-awareness before we can even begin to try to be understood. Corder takes the detachment further by suggesting that his own thoughts and memories are elusive to himself, that he cannot even fully understand his own memories and ideas because a memory once past is gone. “Scraps are what there is,” (140) he depressingly states. Joan Didion affirms this when she rereads her own notebook by saying that “sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.” (4) Sometimes we even alter our memories to our liking, just to indulge in a form of self-delusion. If our thoughts are opaque even to us, what can we possibly learn from “the people we used to be”, the ones we are “well-advised to keep on nodding terms with”? (5) Self-reflection seems to lose its value, and this has greater implications in that if we face a barrier from our own experiences, we will express even greater difficulty in trying to express our own thoughts and feelings to another because these relations will be twice-removed from reality.
However, Didion would assert that introspection is purposeful, that keeping a private diary helps us to keep track of our emotional responses to events, or even serves as a kind of mood chart where the things she chooses to write down in her notebook helps her keep track of her mental state, it helps her to “remember what it was to be me” (3) and “keep in touch” (5) with ourselves. All these reasons “are getting closer to the truth about a notebook” (2). Writing is not purely for a factual record of things. For Didion, writing also serves as an outlet for discussing things that are too intimate and seemingly trivial to be expressed in a social situation. No one else but Didion would be similarly captivated by the psychological portrait that she forms of the girl in the plaid silk dress. In her private notebook, Didion can write “transparently” and “shamelessly”. There is no hesitation involved, no need to consider what is suitable for “public consumption” – thoughts are raw, unadulterated and explicit. She doesn’t have to worry if she is young enough to be excused for not knowing any better or too old enough to have sufficient wisdom to “dwell upon” (3) ourselves publicly.
While we are less restricted by social hierarchies within a counseling session, the concept of counseling is still a strange amalgamation of the public and private. We are expected to reveal our most private and sacred thoughts in an environment that is at once artificially private yet not wholly public. While it is probably more useful for patients to spill all uninhibitedly, there still remains a reflexive desire to sanction the things being said. Our deepest thoughts and feelings are, after all, “indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker”. (Didion, 3) Having to reveal our darkest secrets to our counselors not only forces us to expose our vulnerabilities to another, but also forces us to admit to ourselves in a concrete, tangible form the thoughts that have been harassing us.
While it is possible to see why we might be reluctant to share ourselves with another transparently, we are still not entirely exempt from self-censorship when we write things even for private gratification. We write in our notebooks to give grandiloquence to our memories, to give substance to our character, to prove to ourselves that we are sensitive, articulate intellectuals attuned to the nuances of life. Didion views “keepers of private notebooks” as “a different breed altogether”. (1) She romanticizes them as troubled, agonized souls who are afflicted with “some presentiment of loss”, and are fated to be solitary “anxious malcontents”. (1) Writing might help us to understand ourselves better, but in this self-indulgent introspection we might even exclude ourselves further from the collective, as we come to regard our thoughts and memories as highly personal to us. Already, empathy proves to be a logically troubling phenomenon. We need to have a firm grasp on our stories before we can relate them. Yet in fully immersing ourselves in our stories, we lose touch with the collective, getting caught up in our self-absorption.
The only way a collective can function effectively is if there is a “minimal degree of trust in communication”. (585) Not only do we need to be honest to ourselves; we also need to be honest to others. Sissela Bok rightly states that if “the veneer of social trust” is destroyed, “societies falter and collapse.”(589) Discovering that one has been lied to before can cause us to lapse into a mistrusting, doubting position where everything that people say or do is merely a farce. However, there are varying degrees of deception that might seem excusable in some instances but all skirt around the truth in some way. I could have insisted on wanting to know why my counselor didn’t shake my hand upon meeting, but she would have only gotten defensive, or at best dumbfounded. Interrogating her motives for such an insignificant event is rude and possibly pointless, even in an artificially open forum like a counseling session. If she had initially had nothing against me, she now would have: she would come to realize that I am scrutinizing her every move and that knowledge of being watched is enough to put one on high alert. Bok would applaud me for remaining discreet, as “everyone depends on deception… to avoid hurting the feelings of others.” Counselors are people too; people who might have a better grasp of healthy coping mechanisms but still not immune to having their feelings hurt and their motives questioned. I kept my suspicions to myself because I knew that revealing everything I felt would only jeopardize her objectivity and professionalism when dealing with me. At the same time, the counseling session might not be very fruitful if I was still bounded by the social mores that had left me frustrated and in need for a candid, open discussion.
Both withholding and disguising the truth, despite being typically governed by good intentions, are still forms of deception. The pretense, the whitewashing of the truth – they are all varying forms of hypocrisy, some governed by better intents than others but still deceitful nonetheless. If I cannot even maintain a sense of personal integrity, what else can I possibly hold on to? If I cannot trust myself to be honest to others, how much can I possibly trust others to be honest to me, too? Lying will only cause me to “look at those” I have lied to “with a new caution” (Bok, 588), and that stifling feeling of wariness is something I want to avoid at all costs. I cope by being a frank, sometimes brutal talker, in the hopes that others will be truthful to me too. Yet not everyone adopts the golden rule with the same rigor as I do. While people continue engaging in the social rituals that they feel compelled to perform, I choose to extract myself out of it. By not abiding by the rules of the game, I have effectively ostracized myself. Even though social interaction is built on a foundation of rituals, humans are still creatures that thrive on social interaction. If we don’t engage in social activity because of a philosophical stand against formalities and decorum, we deprive ourselves of something that also contributes to our personal growth. Having independence of mind can not only affect the people around us but also prove to be detrimental to our sense of self. It seems like there is no easy way to maintain personal integrity yet seamlessly integrate with society.
Even if we disregard the barrier that introspection poses to communicating to another, both Corder and Didion share a seemingly doubtful stance on the true functionality of expressing our thoughts. Corder expresses his thoughts and opinions about the powers and limitations of the written word, yet asserts that the written word is limited in what it can express. However, he continues by saying that “if we tell our stories carefully to one another” (142), it might actually be possible to “attend to that word-gathering soul” (143). This apparent self-reflexive contradiction would instill doubt in us as readers. If we read his essay and doubt the veracity of what he says, it must mean that what he was trying to convey about the limitations of communication has gotten through to us. Corder’s essay ends self-deprecatingly, stating that he “should have known better” (144). This bout of insecurity is almost uncalled for, as it causes the reader to wonder if he considers his own essay the very opposite of “well-crafted,” “finished,” and “definitive.” (144)
Didion too ends her essay on an esoteric note. She recreated the sauerkraut recipe that reminded her of good times, but the recreation “did not make her feel any safer”. If writing in her private diary was meant to help her remember certain emotions she felt, why was it that recreating the experience did not produce the same emotional reaction? Corder would foresee this coming, as he is astute enough to know that “words” are “never anything but traces.” (140) If we sieve through the stories of our lives, we will come to realize that each interesting event that our minds choose to categorize as memorable is very closely tied to our state of mind at that point in time. “Nostalgics” (140) ache not for the incident or the words that we use to describe it, but for the feelings associated with each specific incident. However, innocence once lost cannot be regained; feelings that were once new and thrilling to us become stale and dry as we discover that the same themes reoccur in our lives over and over again merely in slightly different variations.
Humans connect on themes that are on the lowest common denominator: fear, love, rage, joy, etc. These are the things that writers wax lyrical about and movie-makers make films about. Yet these basic human emotions have been shrink-wrapped and repackaged into bite-sized, palatable chunks in the form of commercial blockbusters and paperbacks – is it any wonder that being force-fed these exploited emotions have caused us to develop a distaste for them? Movies are essentially “rhetorics” that are an attempt “to reconstruct ourselves jackleg style.” (Corder, 141) We watch a carefully scripted romance movie; the cockles of our hearts are warmed by proxy; we think back and mutter to ourselves, “That was so cheesy.” Emotions are “a difficult point to admit” (Didion, 3) as we have been taught to avoid excessive self-reflection and instead see ourselves as individuals within a larger collective. We end up divorcing ourselves from the emotions that we have every right to feel, dismissing the importance of those emotions and cynically trying to rationalize them away. We have just rid ourselves of yet another perfectly acceptable way to connect and empathize as a collective.
What does it mean to feel empathy? Is it just a culturally-conditioned response that we have been taught to produce? Since our behavior is the only way to directly convey our thoughts, perhaps we have learned to position our faces into looks of furrowed concern, or developed habits of giving tokens of appreciation as a gesture of goodwill. Empathy could merely be a farce built on social rituals. Or is what we call empathy really an introspective exploration where we project our emotions unto others? Logically, true empathy might not be possible, but human relations are not governed by the rules of logic – figuring people out would be much easier if they were.
I met up with my counselor once more. This time, instead of waiting for her to smile, I smiled first. Instead of waiting for her to wish me happy birthday (I knew she knew, because I mentioned it the previous session), I told her that it was my birthday and she congratulated me accordingly. I didn’t wonder if she only wished me happy birthday because it was polite to – I thanked her. I did what I was supposed to without thinking about our motives – I simply rode the waves of social etiquette without wondering where it might take me too. Paralysis from analysis wasn’t a good feeling. Over-thinking things had only left me lost – why not just let my knee-jerk responses to social stimuli lead my actions? Just as I was struggling to see sense within the haze in my mind, she articulated with precision what I was trying so hard to put meaning to. In her own way, she understood, and it was in her understanding that I felt startlingly enlightened – a feeling that might have indicated an inherent skepticism in her ability to understand. Never mind that I didn’t know myself; never mind that I was struggling to relate to her; never mind that she’s a separate entity who has never lived my life, and whose life I will never know of. But we still clicked. Empathy transcends our self-absorbed misgivings and stifling social rituals - if anything, empathy that clicks into place despite these contrived barriers is as satisfying as it gets.
Works cited
1. Corder, Jim W. “Aching for a Self”. Ed. Robert DiYanni, Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008.
2. Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook”. (1966), Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, London: Andre Deutch.
3. Bok, Sissela, “On Lying”. Ed. Robert DiYanni, Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008.
***
In order to understand another, Jim W. Corder would agree that “each of us, alone, must speak and write and go on speaking and writing” (142) in the hopes of finding an essence through the cacophony of voices. However, through this disorganized rabble it is even easier to feel like our thoughts are lost among the avalanche of “views and words” that “we have to save” (143). We are all fighting to be heard, but this is a fight that no one emerges victor. According to Corder, “Our characters do not emerge in our discourses” (141) – character has to be experienced and lived through, in order to be truly understood. I told the counselor as much as I could in the paltry forty-five minutes that we had, yet I didn’t feel the release that I was expecting. I didn’t feel like she had understood: I felt even more alone, if anything at all. It was in my yearning to be understood that led me to realize the futility of even trying. Even if the forty-five minutes could do justice to the tumultuous events that occurred over the past two months, how effective would all that detail be in helping her to truly empathize with me? “The observation and rendition of particulars will not necessarily yield universal truth” (142): much less will a mere summary of particular particulars. (then my teacher gives me a big-ass tick here)
Yet a small part of me wonders if my feeling of never being fully understood is a self-imposed “voluntary exile” (140). I could be erecting my own walls, closing off people from me - yet I claw on the inside, desperate for help. Maybe I need to feel misunderstood; I need to be perceived as enigmatic because it helps me assert my individuality. There is always a struggle between wanting to be an independent individual, and a more basal need to feel connected to others, to feel rooted in a “collective” where “we can save one another, keep one another, hold one another, rather than lose one another”. (143)
We could “tell our stories carefully to one another” (142), but what if we don’t know our stories well enough to relate them? Certainly we have to have a reasonable amount of self-awareness before we can even begin to try to be understood. Corder takes the detachment further by suggesting that his own thoughts and memories are elusive to himself, that he cannot even fully understand his own memories and ideas because a memory once past is gone. “Scraps are what there is,” (140) he depressingly states. Joan Didion affirms this when she rereads her own notebook by saying that “sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.” (4) Sometimes we even alter our memories to our liking, just to indulge in a form of self-delusion. If our thoughts are opaque even to us, what can we possibly learn from “the people we used to be”, the ones we are “well-advised to keep on nodding terms with”? (5) Self-reflection seems to lose its value, and this has greater implications in that if we face a barrier from our own experiences, we will express even greater difficulty in trying to express our own thoughts and feelings to another because these relations will be twice-removed from reality.
However, Didion would assert that introspection is purposeful, that keeping a private diary helps us to keep track of our emotional responses to events, or even serves as a kind of mood chart where the things she chooses to write down in her notebook helps her keep track of her mental state, it helps her to “remember what it was to be me” (3) and “keep in touch” (5) with ourselves. All these reasons “are getting closer to the truth about a notebook” (2). Writing is not purely for a factual record of things. For Didion, writing also serves as an outlet for discussing things that are too intimate and seemingly trivial to be expressed in a social situation. No one else but Didion would be similarly captivated by the psychological portrait that she forms of the girl in the plaid silk dress. In her private notebook, Didion can write “transparently” and “shamelessly”. There is no hesitation involved, no need to consider what is suitable for “public consumption” – thoughts are raw, unadulterated and explicit. She doesn’t have to worry if she is young enough to be excused for not knowing any better or too old enough to have sufficient wisdom to “dwell upon” (3) ourselves publicly.
While we are less restricted by social hierarchies within a counseling session, the concept of counseling is still a strange amalgamation of the public and private. We are expected to reveal our most private and sacred thoughts in an environment that is at once artificially private yet not wholly public. While it is probably more useful for patients to spill all uninhibitedly, there still remains a reflexive desire to sanction the things being said. Our deepest thoughts and feelings are, after all, “indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker”. (Didion, 3) Having to reveal our darkest secrets to our counselors not only forces us to expose our vulnerabilities to another, but also forces us to admit to ourselves in a concrete, tangible form the thoughts that have been harassing us.
While it is possible to see why we might be reluctant to share ourselves with another transparently, we are still not entirely exempt from self-censorship when we write things even for private gratification. We write in our notebooks to give grandiloquence to our memories, to give substance to our character, to prove to ourselves that we are sensitive, articulate intellectuals attuned to the nuances of life. Didion views “keepers of private notebooks” as “a different breed altogether”. (1) She romanticizes them as troubled, agonized souls who are afflicted with “some presentiment of loss”, and are fated to be solitary “anxious malcontents”. (1) Writing might help us to understand ourselves better, but in this self-indulgent introspection we might even exclude ourselves further from the collective, as we come to regard our thoughts and memories as highly personal to us. Already, empathy proves to be a logically troubling phenomenon. We need to have a firm grasp on our stories before we can relate them. Yet in fully immersing ourselves in our stories, we lose touch with the collective, getting caught up in our self-absorption.
The only way a collective can function effectively is if there is a “minimal degree of trust in communication”. (585) Not only do we need to be honest to ourselves; we also need to be honest to others. Sissela Bok rightly states that if “the veneer of social trust” is destroyed, “societies falter and collapse.”(589) Discovering that one has been lied to before can cause us to lapse into a mistrusting, doubting position where everything that people say or do is merely a farce. However, there are varying degrees of deception that might seem excusable in some instances but all skirt around the truth in some way. I could have insisted on wanting to know why my counselor didn’t shake my hand upon meeting, but she would have only gotten defensive, or at best dumbfounded. Interrogating her motives for such an insignificant event is rude and possibly pointless, even in an artificially open forum like a counseling session. If she had initially had nothing against me, she now would have: she would come to realize that I am scrutinizing her every move and that knowledge of being watched is enough to put one on high alert. Bok would applaud me for remaining discreet, as “everyone depends on deception… to avoid hurting the feelings of others.” Counselors are people too; people who might have a better grasp of healthy coping mechanisms but still not immune to having their feelings hurt and their motives questioned. I kept my suspicions to myself because I knew that revealing everything I felt would only jeopardize her objectivity and professionalism when dealing with me. At the same time, the counseling session might not be very fruitful if I was still bounded by the social mores that had left me frustrated and in need for a candid, open discussion.
Both withholding and disguising the truth, despite being typically governed by good intentions, are still forms of deception. The pretense, the whitewashing of the truth – they are all varying forms of hypocrisy, some governed by better intents than others but still deceitful nonetheless. If I cannot even maintain a sense of personal integrity, what else can I possibly hold on to? If I cannot trust myself to be honest to others, how much can I possibly trust others to be honest to me, too? Lying will only cause me to “look at those” I have lied to “with a new caution” (Bok, 588), and that stifling feeling of wariness is something I want to avoid at all costs. I cope by being a frank, sometimes brutal talker, in the hopes that others will be truthful to me too. Yet not everyone adopts the golden rule with the same rigor as I do. While people continue engaging in the social rituals that they feel compelled to perform, I choose to extract myself out of it. By not abiding by the rules of the game, I have effectively ostracized myself. Even though social interaction is built on a foundation of rituals, humans are still creatures that thrive on social interaction. If we don’t engage in social activity because of a philosophical stand against formalities and decorum, we deprive ourselves of something that also contributes to our personal growth. Having independence of mind can not only affect the people around us but also prove to be detrimental to our sense of self. It seems like there is no easy way to maintain personal integrity yet seamlessly integrate with society.
Even if we disregard the barrier that introspection poses to communicating to another, both Corder and Didion share a seemingly doubtful stance on the true functionality of expressing our thoughts. Corder expresses his thoughts and opinions about the powers and limitations of the written word, yet asserts that the written word is limited in what it can express. However, he continues by saying that “if we tell our stories carefully to one another” (142), it might actually be possible to “attend to that word-gathering soul” (143). This apparent self-reflexive contradiction would instill doubt in us as readers. If we read his essay and doubt the veracity of what he says, it must mean that what he was trying to convey about the limitations of communication has gotten through to us. Corder’s essay ends self-deprecatingly, stating that he “should have known better” (144). This bout of insecurity is almost uncalled for, as it causes the reader to wonder if he considers his own essay the very opposite of “well-crafted,” “finished,” and “definitive.” (144)
Didion too ends her essay on an esoteric note. She recreated the sauerkraut recipe that reminded her of good times, but the recreation “did not make her feel any safer”. If writing in her private diary was meant to help her remember certain emotions she felt, why was it that recreating the experience did not produce the same emotional reaction? Corder would foresee this coming, as he is astute enough to know that “words” are “never anything but traces.” (140) If we sieve through the stories of our lives, we will come to realize that each interesting event that our minds choose to categorize as memorable is very closely tied to our state of mind at that point in time. “Nostalgics” (140) ache not for the incident or the words that we use to describe it, but for the feelings associated with each specific incident. However, innocence once lost cannot be regained; feelings that were once new and thrilling to us become stale and dry as we discover that the same themes reoccur in our lives over and over again merely in slightly different variations.
Humans connect on themes that are on the lowest common denominator: fear, love, rage, joy, etc. These are the things that writers wax lyrical about and movie-makers make films about. Yet these basic human emotions have been shrink-wrapped and repackaged into bite-sized, palatable chunks in the form of commercial blockbusters and paperbacks – is it any wonder that being force-fed these exploited emotions have caused us to develop a distaste for them? Movies are essentially “rhetorics” that are an attempt “to reconstruct ourselves jackleg style.” (Corder, 141) We watch a carefully scripted romance movie; the cockles of our hearts are warmed by proxy; we think back and mutter to ourselves, “That was so cheesy.” Emotions are “a difficult point to admit” (Didion, 3) as we have been taught to avoid excessive self-reflection and instead see ourselves as individuals within a larger collective. We end up divorcing ourselves from the emotions that we have every right to feel, dismissing the importance of those emotions and cynically trying to rationalize them away. We have just rid ourselves of yet another perfectly acceptable way to connect and empathize as a collective.
What does it mean to feel empathy? Is it just a culturally-conditioned response that we have been taught to produce? Since our behavior is the only way to directly convey our thoughts, perhaps we have learned to position our faces into looks of furrowed concern, or developed habits of giving tokens of appreciation as a gesture of goodwill. Empathy could merely be a farce built on social rituals. Or is what we call empathy really an introspective exploration where we project our emotions unto others? Logically, true empathy might not be possible, but human relations are not governed by the rules of logic – figuring people out would be much easier if they were.
I met up with my counselor once more. This time, instead of waiting for her to smile, I smiled first. Instead of waiting for her to wish me happy birthday (I knew she knew, because I mentioned it the previous session), I told her that it was my birthday and she congratulated me accordingly. I didn’t wonder if she only wished me happy birthday because it was polite to – I thanked her. I did what I was supposed to without thinking about our motives – I simply rode the waves of social etiquette without wondering where it might take me too. Paralysis from analysis wasn’t a good feeling. Over-thinking things had only left me lost – why not just let my knee-jerk responses to social stimuli lead my actions? Just as I was struggling to see sense within the haze in my mind, she articulated with precision what I was trying so hard to put meaning to. In her own way, she understood, and it was in her understanding that I felt startlingly enlightened – a feeling that might have indicated an inherent skepticism in her ability to understand. Never mind that I didn’t know myself; never mind that I was struggling to relate to her; never mind that she’s a separate entity who has never lived my life, and whose life I will never know of. But we still clicked. Empathy transcends our self-absorbed misgivings and stifling social rituals - if anything, empathy that clicks into place despite these contrived barriers is as satisfying as it gets.
Works cited
1. Corder, Jim W. “Aching for a Self”. Ed. Robert DiYanni, Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008.
2. Didion, Joan. “On Keeping a Notebook”. (1966), Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, London: Andre Deutch.
3. Bok, Sissela, “On Lying”. Ed. Robert DiYanni, Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008.
***
There is a lot of great reflection in here. You really take authority over the essays. It's really nicely done.
***
Also, random funny thought: at the dining hall, a server complimented this guy wearing a baby blue sweater; "Your shirt matches your eyes." No one has ever and will ever tell me that my clothes match my eyes. :(
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