Welcome to a new week on Things Unseen.

When someone is asked, and who are you, there's more than one way to answer, isn't there?

You could ask that question and be completely satisfied with the answer, I'm the plumber.

Actually, in the United Kingdom, plumbers seem to be very difficult to get, so perhaps if

someone says that to you, you're ecstatic. But in a different situation, you might not be satisfied

with that kind of reply. You might say, no, I mean, who are you? What's your name? And even then, you're not

satisfied just with a name. What you really want to know is the person himself or herself.

The question you're really asking is, what's your character? What are you like? If I get to know

you, what am I going to discover? Should

I trust you? Will I like you? Will I want you as my friend? And of course, what a person

does, what his or her name is, what their character is like, all of that is involved

in answering the question, who are you? And then the answer tends to determine

the kind of relationship we have with them.

And in turn, how we answer someone else's question,

do you know so and so?

People often ask me that question, do you know so-and-so?

I don't mean to be awkward and irritating when I sometimes reply,

well, it depends on what you mean by no.

And even when the answer is, yes, I know them,

I don't know someone as well as his closest friends or his wife and so on do.

And we recognize that even in the case of the person we know best, we still don't fully

understand who and what they are.

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