It is only in the life of a human being that the question about the meaning of being human can be asked. This is not to say that each of us asks this question. Rather, it is more likely that we dwell in the midst of the answer that others have given to this question without much imagining that there will ever come a time when we shall have to ask for ourselves what it means to be human in order to go on living, or to bring our lives to a close. Of course, in a daily way we provide for our lives to be sufficient. We trust to family, to community and religion or to our own selfishness, prejudices and ideologies in order to defend ourselves from the ultimate question underlying the gift of this life, its brief trust and certain loss.

What we are, we are for others and yet the question of who we are remains for ourselves. We cannot borrow ourselves from others; or not entirely. Nor can we keep ourselves to ourselves without what others bring to us of ourselves. This is the riddle of our public and private lives. It never ceased to occupy Montaigne. We cannot come to the end of ourselves and we cannot keep that distance upon ourselves that others likewise observe towards us. We must, however, observe their standpoint in order to make ourselves known to those around us. At the same time we must withhold that source within us from which we launch our life, its dreams and its freedom. We never possess ourselves, yet we need to call ourselves our own. Despite the abiding difference between who we are and what we are, we must nevertheless seek self-knowledge and place ourselves in the trust of others. For we cannot suspend our living in the mystery that a man we are to ourself and that others are to us.

We might seek who we are in that infinite difference between ourselves and God, of which the lack in ourselves is the merest though most positive, reverberation.