There are several stories; there is one story

Leibniz imagines people as mechanical toys, energizer bunnies with internal and private principles of development and movement -- marvelously adjusted to each other to make it appear that they interact. There's more truth to that than teachers -- or most other people -- want to admit. The influence of one person on another, of a place on people, of events on lives, is mysterious and subtle. People say Leibniz imagines people as mechanical toys, energizer bunnies with internal and private principles of development and movement -- marvelously adjusted to each other to make it appear that they interact. There's more truth to that than teachers -- or most other people -- want to admit. The influence of one person on another, of a place on people, of events on lives, is mysterious and subtle. People say that other people change their lives, that events redirect their lives, but from the outside, the external influence sometimes looks more like "yet another occasion to do the same old thing" -- a theme on which one can play one's accustomed variations.

This blogging field gives this course a chance to study the dynamics of change and persistence carefully. Each blog establishes who the author is. The total of the blogs gives some idea of what they are all confronting, what elephant they have hold of. And the progress of the blogs should say something about when and how people are moved by what they encounter and when and how they assimilate what they encounter into a basically unchanged self -- or what the continuum is between those two phenomena.