Skinner’s end-of-life observation in 1990 that ‘a person is simply a place where something happens’ seems to be confirmed by social media. That a person might not be a place at all, but a carrier of history, a second chance at the future, a being capable of love, a moment that is not capturable, an interior force, a private act with public consequences, but not ultimately public – in the way a park or a shopping mall is public – is what? Romantic? Foolish? Wrong? Or a view of the self that is worth sustaining?
