I want to be measured in units of myself.

Not my accomplishments or what other people think of me or what I am to you.

I want my life’s main gestalt to be toward more-and-more-myself.

I want my death to be a tragic arrest of possibility – an abrupt conclusion to something just beginning – however old I am.

I want to leave room for adjectives and their opposites. I am generous and mean and thoughtful, and careless.

I wrote nine years ago in “Problems in Philosophy” that I was “a puzzle unfinished” – worried I would never be solved – and now I know I want to keep adding pieces as I go, so they never all fit. (I want to never all fit.)

I will use you to serve my ends. I will use every shred of experience, eventually, to weave my own soul.

I’ll do it by risk, and love, and you won’t be able to prevent it.

It will be knotted but beautiful.