The Interior Landscape

The Describing Self   18

Describe your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and your faith in some kind of beauty—describe it all with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and use it to express yourself, the things that surround you, the images of your dreams, and the objects of your memory.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

In his master work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman draws a distinction between a person’s “experiencing self” and “remembering self”: the perceptual gap between measurable qualities of an experience and how people remember the experience. The difference in perception between reality and memory raises this interesting question: Which is more important, the qualities of a real experience (which we may not ...