Author Archives: EAllen

In the “Induction,” — the opening section of The Taming of the Shrew — Christophero Sly, a drunken beggar, is asleep in the gutter when a Lord decides to play a trick on him and make him believe that his whole life has been no more than a delusion, a long hallucination. The Lord and his servants conspire to convince Sly that he is a great Lord himself, with a beautiful wife, a rich household, and many servants.

At first, Sly wonders whether he has gone mad, but then he begins to accept what the people around him are telling him. He is rather quickly persuaded that the life he thought he had led was a delusion, and that he is in fact the great man that those around him now claim to perceive when they look at him.

In “From Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches” (February 1, 2012),  New York Times reporters Nick Bilton and Evelyn M. Rusli describe the case of David Choe, a graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s first corporate headquarters and was paid for his services in stock rather than cash. After Facebook goes public later this year, Choe’s stock is expected to be worth more than $200 million. What effect will this have on Choe’s life? Will he, like Christophero Sly, begin to feel that the world of financial constraint he lived in prior to acquiring that fortune was a dream, a long delusion from which the money awoke him? Will his circumstances be so different, and will those around him treat him so differently, that he begins to wonder who he is, and whether he is losing his grip on himself?

Here’s his personal website: http://davidchoe.com  What do you think?

The larger question brought up by both of these stories is: are we the person we feel ourselves to be within ourselves, regardless of our external circumstances? Or is it our external circumstances and how other people see us that dictate who we are?