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I feel like "figuring out who you are" is a frivolous modern activity that constitutes the hole of our collective emptiness. Notions of self reach deep within us, trying to find a meaning or history that is not really there. The idea that one can "figure out" who one is promotes a conception that one can find a stable, fixed self and thus halt the process of evolution once and for all, using that chosen/ discovered identity as a mediator indefinitely. However, just like evolution, the concept of self continually develops and never stops - not only is there no end point, but there is nothing latent within us waiting to be uncovered and inhabited. We simply have a telescoping of consciousness ad nauseam until we die. There is no atomistic, singular, cohesive whole that constitutes a self; perhaps we moderns feel so empty because we operate under such an assumption instead of acknowledging the dynamic relationality that continually shapes both our consciousness and everything in the world around us. Like philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, the world is like a "knot in motion."

Therefore it is no surprise that a novel like Hustvedt's, focusing on static notions of finding a stable 'self' and discovering one's personal mythic past, is less-than-compelling for some of us to read, because as Ann noted the action primarily consists in "the journey into the landscape of the self." We live so much inside our heads and dote on this quest that moderns are completely isolated from one another physically, psychologically, spiritually. The p. 301 revelation that "there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely" made completely sense to me because there is no self that we seek at our core, just a Buddhist nothingness or sunyata, and, concordantly, separation of one human being from anything else in the universe is an illusion. "The illness that besets the intellectual" is precisely trying to analyze one thing in isolation from any number of other things, of trying to solve problems such as one's own identity in a vacuum.

As Paul noted Thursday, the novel is less interesting to him because what new things are possible through evolution is more interesting than analyzing the way things came to be the way they presently are. This moment in history is one way that things have happened, but it could have been infinitely otherwise, and will become infinitely otherwise.