How not to begin a story. Like this. Ab ovo—from the egg, from the beginning. In his Ars Poetica, the first-century BCE poet Horace emphasizes the importance of starting a story in medias res—in the middle of things—by giving the example of what not to do: don’t start the story of the Trojan War ab ovo, from the egg from which Helen hatched. No egg, no Helen; no Helen, no abduction by Paris; no abduction by Paris, no Trojan war. Horace seems not even to consider that someone inquisitive like me, someone more interested in excavating beginnings than weaving an action-packed plot, might even want to venture ante ovem, before the egg, to ask why Leda’s children were born out of eggs in the first place. Before the egg, Zeus seduced/raped Leda in the form of a swan, so, appropriately, her children were born from eggs.

Helen hatching from an egg. A phylax image circa 4th century BCE.

I’m surely not alone in finding value in all this egg and pre-egg business, in believing that examining origins leads to worthwhile insights about motivations, people, as well as the ways people use religion to explain the inexplicable. And yet, for hundreds and hundreds of years after Horace, writers mostly took his advice. The great epics, the weak epics—the poets followed the rules, as though they had a little checklist next to them: start in medias res—check; invoke Muse—check; divine intervention—check. Eventually, the epic gave way to the novel as the literary home for long stories, but generally novelists followed the old Horatian dictum to start at a moment of action instead of from the egg of the plot.

In what sort of alternate literary universe would starting at the beginning be prized, and what values would it express? For one thing, an interest in character development over plot and narrative thrust, introspection over event. (I think I hear Achilles yawning just thinking about it.) It didn’t take a new world, but a new genre, which Michel de Montaigne kindly invented for us at the very moment that some historians have dated as the genesis of the private self. The essai—an attempt, an effort at understanding that uses a different kind of thinking than plot-driven narratives, is well-suited to the practice of going back to the egg to try to understand oneself. The desire to understand differs fundamentally from the desire to entertain or teach, and whereas one can achieve the latter without reference to origins, understanding depends on knowing not only the present but the past as well. We can chase causation backwards, backwards, backwards, looking for a place beyond which there is only faith or chaos. There we find the egg of the story.

Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the esssay.

Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago for an explanation of why my family is so religiously diverse—my father adheres to a sect of Hinduism, my mother is a Unitarian Universalist, my sister is a Baha’i, and I am a former Methodist, former atheist, former agnostic, former Catholic, former dabbler in Buddhism who now identifies as “universalist/religious tourist” on my Facebook page.

“Well,” I said. “I suppose it’s because my father set the example of choosing one’s own religion. He was raised Southern Baptist and rebelled against it by exploring Hinduism and Transcendental Meditation.”

But this answer seemed partial and made me ask and answer another question: “Why did he rebel against the Southern Baptist faith? Well, I suppose it’s because my grandparents’ way of being religious, and their way of infusing religion into family life, seemed oppressive, excessive.” But this only led to another question: Why did my grandparents have such a heavy religion? Only now do we arrive at an answer that leads to an unanswerable question: My father had an older brother, Bob, who died before my father was born. My grandparents had moved their family to a new farm in Iowa, and while the adults were busy with moving and unpacking, the two boys ran off to explore. Six-year-old Bob fell into an uncovered well and drowned. Shortly thereafter, my grandparents, first my grandmother and some time later my grandfather, got “saved” and began a new life in religion.

Horace in conversation with poets. By Raphael, from the Stanza della Segnatura

So where is the egg, the earliest point in time after which cause and effect applies? Before the egg is something unexplainable, something that can be understood only with reference to god (“Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan; that’s where these eggs came from”) or to chaos (“Children die terrifying and apparently meaningless deaths because mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”). In my grandmother’s case, what looked like chaos could be borne only by means of religion.

I can thus trace back something of my own ideas about religion to a summer day in 1939 and a chain of events set in motion by the death of a boy my father never met. How far back can I go to find the ovular moment of my tendency toward introspection? In the summer of 2007, during the separation that preceded the beginning of my divorce process, I pored over my diaries from 1994 through 1996, trying to understand, looking for the egg of that story. One day in midsummer, an envelope slipped out of the pages of one of the fat five-subject notebooks I favor for my journals. It was eerie to open the envelope and find a letter to my future self, written in 1995, a year before my wedding. It was written for future-Rachel, who 1995-Rachel knew would one day want out of the marriage, to explain to her why she should ignore that wish. The letter, by its existence, serves as proof of my own belief in 1995 in the potential discontinuity of my own identity. So far, the meaning of the letter has differed at three points in time, three distinct Rachel-readers of the letter. In 1995, the letter contained truths that a future self might forget. To my self in 2007, defensive about the terrible, terrible responsibility of ending a marriage, the letter was proof that something had been off all along. To my self in 2009, less committed to ideas of absolute truth, less defensive about the way my life has turned out, it was a sad snapshot that gave me a heart-breaking sympathy for all the multiple versions of me, all the multiple versions of him, but especially those two in 1996, poised on the brink of a story to which I know the ending, but they don’t.

Thirty years of diaries: November 27, 1979--August 17, 2009.

But that wasn’t the first letter from myself to a future self. In 1984, when I was in seventh grade, I wrote a letter to future-Rachel, trying to explain myself, to gain sympathy. I was ashamed, embarrassed about being who I was: shy, nerdy, depressed, lonely. I felt so hopeless, such an ugly duckling in every way—I still remember how much I longed for invisibility the day the boy I adored spoke to me, and I was wearing a lavender shirt that was, in my mind, hideous, horrible. I never wore it again. These indignities were bearable; what was unacceptably painful was the thought of some Rachel of the future, one who would have figured out how to negotiate the intricacies of the adolescent social web and how to attain the desideratum of a boyfriend, one who would look back at my seventh-grade sad-sack self and cringe or laugh. I don’t remember a lot of the details, just that it was a plea for understanding: the writer of the letter believed in and feared the possibility that the reader of the letter, her own future self, might have forgotten her misery, or might blame her for it.

These two letters to future-Rachels were written alongside volume after volume after volume of diaries, going back to when I was eight years old. But that’s still not early enough to be the egg. To find the egg of my introspection, my sometimes obsessive attempts to communicate, I have to go back to the dream my mother had three days after my conception, when I was barely more than an egg myself. In the dream, I looked like newborn-Rachel: a baby with a patch of black hair on the side of her head. The baby said to my mother, “My name is Rachel Elizabeth” . . . and so it was. Hearing that story over and over again as a child—because I loved it and wanted to hear about it often—shaped my sense of self. Who knows why my mother had that dream—perhaps its origin was supernatural (the Zeus explanation) or perhaps she had a bad burrito (mere anarchy). At any rate, I locate in that dream the egg of my fascination with the idea of communication among all these discrete selves who are me and not-me, all at once.

Only by writing and reading and writing and reading my selves through these journals across, so far, thirty years of my life, could I have experienced for myself how illusory is the idea of a stable self. My desire to find or create causal linkages that can take me back ad ovem—so that I can turn around and trace a straight line ab ovo to the present, to my present self—leads me instead to find a series of discrete selves. Two of these selves in particular felt so acutely the fallacy of continuity that they called attention to it and to themselves as, perhaps, moments of my identity that would be subsumed, erased in future-Rachel’s attempts to create a seamless narrative, a story of identity as an unbroken line stretching from egg to chick to hen.