Again: do we really “notice” these things the first time we read the story? I sure didn’t, back when I read it for the first time. But we notice them now, as we analyze the story. These structures are undeniably present. And I’d say we noticed them, on rst read, “in our bodies” or “in that deep-reading portion of our minds.” The patterning of the story works like a form of Pavlovian conditioning. We react without knowing why. And it’s these reactions that make us feel melded to the author, as if we are playing a very important, intimate game of some kind with him.

FIVE: What is a Person?

“And this traumatic vignette highlights a central truth about what human beings are: A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears,

desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.64)

“People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

The next question I ask myself when hearing stories is: How reliable is this narrator? I guess all of our stories are false and self-flattering to some degree. The seventeenth- century French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld issued the crucial warning here: “We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.” Some people, however, take fabulation to the extreme.

Early philosophers argued that we cannot perceive ourselves directly, rather ourselves must be “caught in the act” of perceiving something that exists in the real world. Self-knowledge, therefore, comes from our reactions to things that happen to us and around us. Just as we learn about other people by observing their behavior and making inferences from it, we learn about ourselves by examining what we do when events force our hand—yet another reason why solitary introspection is insufficient and why experimenting provides more useful information than reflecting on past experience.

One of the primary ways in which unfreezing events mark a cut with the past and herald the start of a transition period, according to psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries, is by serving as an organizing scheme for everything that occurs afterwards: “From this point on, every new disturbance is recognized as part of the same pattern of dissatisfaction,” he writes.