The New Science of Siblings

摘要

There are a lot of ways to study a painting, and one of the best is to get to know the painter. The splash or splatter of color makes a lot more sense when you understand the rage or whimsy or heart behind it. The songwriter, similarly, can lay bare the song, the poet the poem, the builder the building. So what explains the complex bit of artistry that is the human personality? We may not be born as tabulae rasae. Any parent can tell you that each child comes from the womb with an individual temperament that seems preloaded at the factory. But from the moment of birth, a lot of things set to work on that temperament—moderating it, challenging it, annealing it, wounding it. What we're left with after 10 or 20 or 50 years is quite different from what we started out with.