"While growth realizes, it narrows," Miller writes. "Plural possibilities simmer down." This is painful, but it's an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven't become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what's never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

• If we spend a little more time reflecting on our "unreal selves," what can they tell us about our real one?
• Just the fact that we're thinking about it is new. Higher stakes if there isn't a belief in the afterlife— this is the only shot!
• Capitalism, specialisation → more unlived lives: focus on individualisation, more choices
• 18th century, more intensity of subjectivity (we see ourselves as deep & feeling) and objectivity (interchangeable with everyone else)
• Thinking about alternative lives doesn't mean wishing we were living them.
• Jean Paul Sartre: "A man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh. . . . But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations, and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations." (quote page)
• Would we still "burn with the same light" if we were in another life?
• Lines of poetry heard by a character in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be Are full of trees and changing leaves.

We all dwell in the here and now; we all have actual selves, actual lives. But what are they? Selves and lives have penumbras and possibilities—that's what's unique about them. They are always changing, and so are always new; they refuse to stand still. We live in anticipation of their meaning, which will inevitably exceed what can be known or said. Much must be left unsaid, unseen, unlived.