“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened, but no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Do you consider yourself truly free?” asks a smallish, librarianish, sixty-ish woman who looks like she might be taking all this spiritual stuff a little too seriously; more in the everlasting-soul sense than in the hour-upon-the-stage sense. Her smallish, baldish husband is with her, pinching his nose and rubbing his eyes. It starts out as just a casual conversation between them and me, but a crowd gathers as we talk.
“I might think of myself as not unfree if I thought about it at all,” I say, “but I wouldn’t say I feel specifically free. I’m in this body on this planet and that comes with certain restrictions, but I don’t have any sense of being unfree so it’s not really an issue.”
She just stares at me.
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