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happens to him through them; and tries to live his life as if he were recounting them.”
tone of voice.
By our late twenties or early thirties, most of us have what McAdams calls an imago, an archetype or idealized image of oneself that captures the role that person hopes to play in society.
We live our childhoods at least twice. First, we live through them with eyes of wonderment, and then later in life we have to revisit them to understand what it all meant. As adults, artists often return to their childhood homes as a source of spiritual nourishment and in search of explanations for why they are as they are.
Edmund Burke once wrote that “people will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors.” Each person’s consciousness is formed by all the choices of her ancestors, going back centuries: who they married, where they settled, whether they joined this church or that one.
In other words, a person is part of a long movement, a transmission from one generation to another, and can only be seen rightly as part of that movement.
Black/white, gay/straight, Republican/Democrat. It’s a first-class way to dehumanize others and not see individuals.
And you have to manage both these things at a level of high complexity. One of the great fallacies of life is to think culture is everything; another great fallacy is to think culture is nothing.
What is culture? It’s a shared symbolic landscape that we use to construct our reality.
