the human race is a great coauthorship

"The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly, or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to effect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning or dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity. Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in With a Daughter's Eye, 'it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error.'" -Wendell Berry, "Men and Women in Search of Common Ground" p.115 in Home Economics.