ABSTRACT
“I lack nothing,” wrote Franz Kafka, “except myself.” From time without measure man has been desperately trying to fill that lack. It was the search for himself that compelled Thoreau to build his cabin in the woods at Walden Pond, for he was afraid, he said, that when he came to die, he might discover that he had not lived. What Thoreau meant, of course, was that his real self needed to live—the self, for example, that Socrates identified with his soul: that which made him a self and a man.
