This is the experiment

I have often observed, to my wonder and delight, that my handwriting changes in very subtle ways depending on the kind of pen I am using: Whether it is an inkpen or a ball point, or again whether it is a gel pen or a pencil even. Even within a certain class, say gel pens, my handwriting takes to some kinds and not so much to others. The r's and s's and f's get their own flair and pointed intentions with the right kind of pen.
So too with us. What we are is intricately bound up with whom we are around, where we are, what we give and what we receive. There, some style of ours is taken up and immortalized by someone, here an intention that we made is covered over and reinvoked at a different time, thereby lending this intention a new, hitherto unanticipated meaning, and some times a proposal of ours is rejected initally but sharpened into a more disciplined, self-conscious command by the other, and at other times what we offer is completely overlooked or rejected by the world. What we end up inscribing on the tablet of life seems to depend entirely on the surface of the tablet itself! This dark uncertainty that belongs inescapably to our lot seems to be a sort of weakness. Nietzsche implies so much when he writes of the German that he "cannot be judged by his actions and [that] as an individual he is still completely hidden even after he has acted." Our actions do not reveal who we are for these actions only manage us to recast us into a new light, which we ourselves were not privy to before. Like a fallen leaf we get whisked away, trampled over, flown across lands at the mercy of uncertain forces and winds, or we remain in some corner withering away and forgotten.
But this injustice that we suffer at the hands of life is also our path to glory and redemption. To be sure, one must limit oneself and possess oneself in a self-contained way. But this self-enclosure is only possible by an occasional will to stupidity, as Nietzsche might say. In the end, by wrapping ourselves with our own skin we deny ourselves the possibility of a new meaning, a re-birth, a future, however dangerous a game one is now playing in choosing to remain in this open uncertainty. It is in this future that our greatness and glory lie. Life's theatre of cruelty is not revealed in that one is fluttering at the mercy of natural forces one cannot gain control over, but in the challenge to repeatedly submit oneself to this flight and fluttering all the while preserving oneself in the act without losing balance. To speak through Nietzsche again: "How much truth can one endure? how much truth can one dare? This is the real measure of value. This is the test. This is the experiment."