Gaylene - do you a really believe that "Hell is other people?" I don't think even Sartre believed that. I thought it was more to Shiny's point, or what I thought her point was about image vs authenticity, how people see us is the illusion. If we accept Sartre's construct that we exist only in the image that other people have of us that would be a hell of our owm making. But that place is illusory, it is Blake's mind forged manacles. But it's not real, any more than one of those awful instant photos is an active representation of us. Static, distorted, a fragment; that is image. The sacred "I" is not fixed, it is self determined, and it exists only in action, not in the fixed moment. We are not how other people see us, we "are" in how our actions effect them;whether we are a force of good in the universe, whether we are light bearers or agents of darkness. It is self determined. It is choice. It is action. It is only when we step outside Shiny's box, when we choose not to accept Sartre's premise that we exist only in the illusory image reflected in their eyes, in others perceptions of us, when we actively say "no," no one defines us but ourselves, that we realize, as Sartre intended, that there never was a prison other than what we have created for ourselves. The power of choice, of self determination, to act and through those actions to define ourselves - we find the room without exit is an illusion, and like the moment in "Divergent" when Tris shatters the glass box, we realize that we are without constraints other than the ones we put on ourselves. Etre, I am, is a verb.
