This is KCSU, Stanford.

Welcome to Entitled Opinions. My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus. I don't know exactly what a self is, yet I know that it's adhesive.

It clings to its tastes, it clings to its obsessions, it clings to its fanities, it clings to its

loves and hates and idiosyncrasies and much else besides.

The self is mostly glue, and it takes a mighty solvent to break it down.

Am I the same self I was 30 years ago?

There's a lot more yes to that answer than no.

In his poem, Cold Spring Morning,

W.S. Merwin writes, the self has no age. Yet what is it in the self that stays the same through time,

even as the body undergoes a transformative aging process? And what is it in the self that gets deceived in moments of self-deception?

The self is mostly glue, yet it's also a battleground, an arena of tension and conflict,

and in many cases a source of suffering.

I quote the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal,

author of the dictum Le Moi etaiseable, the self is hateful. The self wants to be great and sees itself small.

It wants to be happy and sees itself wretched. It wants to be great and sees itself small. It wants to be happy and sees itself wretched. It wants to be

perfect and sees itself full of imperfection. It wants to be the object of men's love and esteem,

and it sees that its defects deserve only their dislike and contempt. This embarrassment in which it finds itself produces the most

unrighteous and criminal passions imaginable, for it conceives a mortal hatred against truth,

admonishing it, and convincing it of its faults. It wants to annihilate this truth,

but, unable to destroy it in its essence, it destroys

it as far as possible in its own knowledge and in that of others. It takes a lot of self-honesty

to be that miserable, and maybe for most people in our day and age, things are not as bad as Pascal describes.

...