I'll describe myself, thank you very much.

I was looking through some old books of mine, when I found Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. I haven't read philosophy in a while, so it was refreshing to read a few chapters from that book. Here's a passage I liked, and found particularly moving:

The drama of an individual life, or of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in which a preexistent goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not reached. Neither a constant external reality nor an unfailing interior source of inspiration forms a background for such dramas. Instead, to see one’s life, or the life of one’s community, as a dramatic narrative is to see it as a process of Nietzschean self-overcoming. The paradigm of such a narrative is the life of the genius who can say of the relevant portion of the past, “Thus I willed it,” because she has found a way to describe the past which the past never knew, and thereby found a self to be which her precursors never knew was possible.*

In this Nietzschean view, the impulse to think, to inquire, to reweave oneself ever more thoroughly, is not wonder but terror. It is, once again, Bloom’s “horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or replica.” The wonder in which Aristotle believed philosophy to begin was wonder at finding oneself in a world larger, stronger, nobler than oneself. The fear in which Bloom’s poets begin is the fear that one might end one’s days in such a world, a world one never made, an inherited world. The hope of such a poet is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which blindly impressed all her own behaving, bear her impress. Success in that enterprise – the enterprise of saying “Thus I willed it” to the past – is success in what Bloom calls “giving birth to oneself.”

*When he writes “because she has found a way to describe the past which the past never knew was possible”, he refers to the individual’s creation of a new language, a new set of metaphors, to describe, or re-describe, the past. Freedom and autonomy find their elbow room with that task.