'The Breezy Wight Who Cannot See'

I often think about the continuity of personality. Not in the abstract sense, as an academic exercise in human psychology. Rather, as an aspect of your life and mine. Are we the same people we were at age twelve or twenty? Is that a metaphysical question? Is it trivial?At the trivial level of DNA, of course. Our genetic inheritance is always with us. But why is it, when I look back at my younger self, I am puzzled and sometimes ashamed? Why the hell did I do that? What did I hope to accomplish? How could I be so thoughtless? At the time, I would have congratulated myself on making enlightened decisions. I read Freud and Proust. I knew something about people and their behavior. That twenty-year-old kid seems foreign to me, and yet I recognize him. I hurt people and congratulated myself on my precious moral principles. In 1914, the year he turned seventy-four, Thomas Hardy published Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces. Among the poems collected in the…