personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked
every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's
own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't
know what that is."

On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be
So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be
able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to
be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand
that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his
knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend."
It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be
someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their
normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to
persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For
myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained
unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then
nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a
furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as
one of our ascetics has put it.[7]

To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should
become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be
himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a
change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its
continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself
with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at
the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a