In one of the most haunting moments in all literature, King Lear, recognizing that he is beginning to lose the identity he thought was his and understanding, dimly but with intuitive foreboding, that he himself is somehow in part responsible for the horror and evil that have been loosed upon his universe, cries out in anguish as he goes forth onto the barren, storm-torn heath of the world, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" It is the question men have asked of themselves since the first faint dawn of recorded thought: it is the question of Gilgamesh and of Job, of Confucius and of Homer. Its resonant poignancy lies in the fact that each one of us is, as Socrates insisted, obliged by our fate to ask it, and to endeavor to answer it, for ourselves. We search for the answer in our experience and our beliefs, by means of our self-questioning intelligence and the knowledge we acquire from our senses; but in most of us, our powers being poor, those means are rarely adequate. Hence, as King Lear's question itself suggests, we turn to others wiser than ourselves, asking them to share with us what they have discovered in pondering the same question. Among those we turn to first are the great artists who have struggled with this question; and this is the ultimate function and justification of all art, that it assists us in our ontological quest to comprehend our own being.