I have observed, through what the moderns might call a miraculous transmission across the centuries, a conversation that took place in a park between two souls and a teacher. What moved me most deeply about the encounter was not the solutions offered but the anguish displayed—the anguish of two individuals beginning to grasp their own freedom and responsibility. For anguish is the mark of the authentic. It is what we feel when we realize that we must choose a life without the comfort of external authority, rational certainty, or systematic guidance.
The Consistent Man's confusion about what to be consistent toward is the beginning of wisdom. He must realize that he had the strength to choose without certainty once, when he became consistent, and must gain the strength to choose yet again and again.
The Woman of Mirrors' question about who does the choosing is equally profound. For when she realizes that she becomes herself precisely in choosing—that the chooser is not prior to the choice but is constituted by it—she will be ready to step into the uncertainty that authentic selfhood requires.
This is the paradox of becoming: one must choose to become oneself before one knows who oneself is. The Consistent Man chose to become consistent, and thus came to know himself, before he first knew himself. The self is not a given that one discovers through introspection or rational analysis. The self is a task—perhaps the only task that matters—and it can be completed only by those willing to work without a blueprint.
The choice to exist—to truly exist as a self rather than merely persist as a biological organism—is not a choice made once and then executed systematically. It is the choice that must be made again and again, in fear and trembling, without the comfort of rational certainty.