Besides Your Birth Name, Do You Know Who You Actually Are?
What Stephen Fry can teach us about defining modern “identity”
Come, come! Please, sit. Step into the weird house of mirrors that I call my mind. Today, I’d like to throw a curveball at you — the question who you actually are, or rather, how much of you is defined by those folks you call “family.”
I recently watched one of the older live performances of Stephen Fry, which is based on his memoir. In it, he makes an interesting point:
I don’t think even the Prince of Wales could name his eight great-grandparents. And if he couldn’t — and he comes from the most famous family in the world — then which of us can? And that’s only three generations back.
Later on, Fry connects this argument to our identity, to the fact that he’s called “Fry” just like his father, and his father before him, and compares that oddity to the tale of the inventor of chess who — when asked about his reward — “just” requested grains of rice to be doubled in every field of his newly invented board. One in A1, two grains in A2, four in A3, you get the gist…
