“Is this what you are, Jacob?” I asked him one day, pretending I had had too much to drink, but in fact extremely alert to how he would respond. He seemed embarrassed. But then I thought that one would be a fool to expect people to remain as they once were, and that it is a kind of o’erpridefulness in us to treat ourselves as constant wholes, as if we were always the same person, for we are not.
