Photograph of a Comtesse

Abstract

A poem published when Parfit was nineteen, during his internship at The New Yorker. The poem meditates on a photograph of a young girl who has since become an elderly, dying woman, drawing its poignancy from the assumption that the girl in the photograph and the woman at the end of her life are one and the same person. The theme anticipates, and stands in ironic tension with, Parfit’s later philosophical work questioning the importance of personal identity over time.