By Jonathan Goldstein

It inspires me. It crushes me.


Man is two. He is holy, but he is also a scumbag. He is a sentimentalist, but he is also a murderer. He is one, but he is also many. Perhaps he is not just two. He is more than two. Perhaps thirty or so. The great tragedy of life is that we only have one; one life to be this or that. Yet within us we hold many selves, all of whom want to live equally.

If only we could subdivide like an amoeba and have one half go into work while the other half wanders the streets writing poetry on park benches. One self to absent-mindedly play with a letter opener during an endless PowerPoint presentation while another self dances on the windowsill. One self that nods politely at a stranger's story on the bus about the best chicken sandwich he's ever eaten while the other self kisses the bus driver on the lips.

We are walking, talking piñatas; plump with unnourished desires and every desire is an unborn self. Pardon my saying so, but this is a kind of personal weight that you cannot rid yourself of in a gymnasium with the rigorous passing of a medicine ball.

And so we read books and go to movies and live vicariously through the people on the screen, who shine twenty feet tall in the darkness. It's why we dream at night. In dreams we are basketball stars with the power of flight. In dreams the soul paints impossible pictures of endless possible worlds. The idea of reincarnation is reassuring, this idea of unending potential selves launching into perpetuity, for while we live this life, we are doomed to forever be one lonely self.

When we were children we knew that there were many people who lived inside of us. We donned masks and put on strange clothing. We allowed these other selves to speak through us in high-pitched voices. Everything around us was more than what it seemed. The hole in the laundry room wall was a portal to a dimension full of Keebler elves and the red Smarties were pills that cured bullying. The family cat wasn't merely a cat -- we dressed it up in bonnets to bring out its inner milkmaid. And we ourselves were the seeds that would one day sprout into large, multi-petaled things.

As adults we imagine what we could have been, what we might have been, if only we had been loved a little more, breast-fed a little longer. There is, in each of us, a feeling of untapped hidden possibility; potential selves that, given the chance, could've loved more boldly, spoken the truth more plainly, and perhaps even chewed less loudly.

We hunger for new forces to enter our lives, to take hold of our hands and stop us dead in our tracks with words that recognize and explain not only who we could have been but who we still can be, as though all of our possible worlds were as plainly obvious and present as the voice on the other end of the telephone line.