Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves — those rare moments when the urn of the self cracks and out pours something more fully alive: truer than any narrative, more authentic than any performative personhood, unfettered from identity and expectation and all the other scripts we live by. It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so reminded that we know ourselves only incompletely and the future not at all; that inside us dwell parts so unexplored as to be capable of surprising the conscious totality — parts drawing on some subterranean river of lore to make instantaneous decisions we never could have planned and did not anticipate. Lurking in it all is the haunting intimation of the illusion of choice, gnawing at the fundament of the self: Who exactly is doing the deciding that surprises the decided-for? And yet out of such confusion, such delight. We call these delightful and disorienting deviations from the script improvisation. Nowhere are they more impressive, or more illustrative …