On Being

On Being is a lyric-philosophical essay that reads the word individual against its own history. In Latin, individuus meant the indivisible — Cicero's rendering of the atomists' átomon, the term at which Porphyry's tree of being stops dividing, and, in its oldest English use, a name for the undivided unity of the Trinity. Only in the seventeenth century did the indivisible whole become the separate part: the unity became the unit, and we now say individual and hear alone. Through the quantum lens, the essay keeps both readings in superposition rather than collapsing one; it then hears, in In-divi-dual, an I that does not end at itself but carries dual — an indivisible duality. By way of Jung's individuation, Whitman's multitudes, and Boethius's eternity as a whole life possessed at once, it proposes that to be oneself is not to stand apart as an uncut stone but to be aligned in time: one continuous being, the I and the trace the I leaves through the years.