422 becoming more human by becoming more godlikemode of being with the characteristics of surfeit, fecundity, and sponta-
neity. It works to dissolve the contrast between character and life, and
to reinvent in the grown man or woman the charms and the intensity
of the child.
For the character, the attribute of surfeit implies availability to the
inspirations and possibilities of experience outside the range of the fa-
miliar. Th e adjacent possible must live in the mind as no less real than
the examples and models provided by the past of the self. Th e funnel of
the accessible in the course of life must widen rather than narrow, de-
spite the approach of death, with the result that, like the child that he
was, the grown man is transfi xed, with joy or terror, by the world
around him. His arousal from the slumber of a diminished life, given
over to routine and repetition, is now sustained by his sense of feasible
next steps. He is available as well as attentive because he has awakened
more fully to life.
Spontaneity in the character means that the hold of the past over the
present, in the development of the self, weakens. What we did before
serves less to predict what we shall do next. Path de pen den cy there
always is; when we diminish it, however, we become more alive. It is not
that existence falls apart into a series of momentary selves, as some of
the metaphysical conceptions associated with Buddhism proposed. It is
rather that the burden of a formulaic continuity, inscribed in the tro-
pisms of a character, on the continuity of the self, lightens.
Surfeit and spontaneity make possible renewed surprise and fecun-
dity, the perpetual creation of the new— above all, new experience, new
connections, new engagements. Th e signifi cance of the creation of the
new is to show and develop our power to exceed all the determinate
circumstances of society, thought, and character and, by so doing, to
become more lifelike.
A second mark of such a way of living is the refusal to identify the self
with any par tic u lar role and therefore, as well, the refusal to accept, with-
out re sis tance and qualifi cation, the rules and expectations associated
with the role. What stands behind the system of roles is the marriage of a
social regime with a cultural vision. Th e regime embeds cooperation in
hierarchy. Th e vision translates the abstract idea of society into a series
of models of human association: prescriptive views of how people can