Identity
Libra exists on the edge of many realities. Was Lee brilliant, or an idiot? Was Lee a crack shot, or extremely lucky? Did Lee hang at the center of a web of conspiracy, buzzing like a stuck fly, or was he the spider itself? All these dualities emerge as a function of the inescapable problems with digging in the past to reconstruct a person's life. Even with all the possible evidence that is left behind, what conclusions can we draw from them? If we had Lee's army shooting records, or testimony that he beat his wife, or his pubic hair, we haven't learned much about the man himself. What were Lee's motives? What type of person was he to be around? We can't tell those things from the information that we have. I don't think that the lack of ability to reconstruct identities is limited to Lee. We face similar problems when trying to reconstruct the identities of any other person in history. Who was Rosalind Franklin? Many books can, and have, been written on Fra...