For legal purposes, I am that older self, and if a question of my identity were to arise I could do nothing but point to my attributes of yesterday.  I have not tried to bring myself up to date, either from indifference or from fear. Very little about the Joseph of a year ago pleases me.  I cannot help laughing at him, at some of his traits and saying.

Joseph, aged twenty-seven, an employee of the Inter-American Travel Bureau, a tall, already slightly flabby but, nevertheless, handsome young man, a graduate  of the University of Wisconsin—major, History—married five years, amiable, generally takes himself to be well-liked. But on close examination he proves to be somewhat peculiar.  Peculiar ? In what way? Well, to begin with, there is something about his appearance, something wrong … he takes a sad or negative satisfaction in wearing something that he calls “the uniform of the times.”

In things of this sort his friends sometimes find him ridiculous. And, yes, he says, he admits he is on the “funny side” in many ways. But that can’t he helped.  The appearance and behavior of reflective men is seldom comparable to that of the less reflective, who unhesitatingly entrust all they stand for to their looks and gestures.

From “Dangling Man,” by Saul Bellow

With his elegant prose, Saul Bellow can tread the human mind’s puzzles and unveil facts that we have all known but somehow missed altogether.   As he points out, we change as we get older.  Most of us had opinions or behaved in the past in ways that we would now consider wrong. I also love the conclusion of this literary snippet: “The appearance and behavior of reflective men is seldom comparable to that of the less reflective, who unhesitatingly entrust all they stand for to their looks and gestures.” This statement still holds true.