“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering — their own and the world’s — then make of it a found of hope and fulcrum of strength for others. Heroes are transmutation agents — people who alchemize suffering and restlessness and rage into love, who compost disappointment into fertilizer for growth, who break down cynicism to its building blocks of helplessness and hubris, then metabolize the toxin out of the system we call society.
There are myriad kinds of heroes capable of myriad heroisms — the epochal heroisms of speaking truth to power that mobilize the consciousness of a civilization and the small daily heroisms of the invisible labor that makes the world cohere, the heroism of planting a tree and the heroism of abolishing a plantation, the heroism of keeping faith in a friend through a hard time and the heroism of leaving a false love.
It helps to remember this diversity of heroisms, because it saves us from imprisoning our heroes in the expectation that everyone contribute to the shared cause — the great project of human flourishing — in the same way. The protest marcher and the poet are very different kinds of heroes, and it is an act of oppression against the gift of each to measure them on the register of the other. Only when we cease doing that can we begin to recognize the heroes who across the history of every civilization have kept the lighthouse blazing through the dark times — the heroes we call artists.
These are the heroes John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) celebrates in one of the essays in his 1991 collection Keeping a Rendezvous (public library) — the heroes we need in times “when the just cause is defeated… when our past is dishonoured and its promises and sacrifices shrugged off with ignorant and evil smiles, when whole families come to suspect that those who wield power are deaf to reason and every plea, and that there is no appeal anywhere, when gradually you realize… that They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home and, wherever possible, your bones too.” Of such times, Berger writes:
The avenging heroes are now being dreamt up and awaited. They are already feared by the pitiless and blessed by me and maybe by you.
I would shield any such hero to my fullest capacity. Yet if, during the time I was sheltering him, he told me he liked drawing, or… she told me she’d always wanted to paint, and had never had the chance or the time to do so, if this happened, then I think I’d say: Look, if you want to, it’s possible you may achieve what you are setting out to do in another way, a way less likely to fall out on your comrades and less open to confusion.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.
Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic notion of anam cara. We bring this knowledge, this mutual understanding, to every interaction with a true friend — that is what makes friendship satisfying, steadying, safe; it is what makes it, in Kahlil Gibran’s immortal words, a “field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.” And yet, if we are alive enough, each time we meet we are meeting for the first time, getting to know each other afresh, for only the self that goes on changing goes on living. A true friend blesses both the abiding and the possible in us.
Another paradox: It is often the loneliest people, those most riven by self-doubt and most unsure of where they belong, that make the most steadfast and salutary friends once they break through the barriers of insecurity and fear to allow connection. Because for them the gift of being understood is especially hard-earned, they give it back redoubled with gratitude.
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) was one such person.
Franz Kafka
“Am I broken?” he asks on the pages of Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal in which he grappled so desperately with self-doubt — and answers himself: “Almost nothing but hope speaks against it.” When his hope dwindled, he declared himself “unfit for friendship,” doubted whether friendship is “even possible” for someone as strange and solitary as himself, and yet he yearned for it: “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person.”
In a particularly dispirited diary entry from the last year of his thirties, which was also one of the last years of his life, he declares himself “forsaken” and writes:
[I am] incapable of striking up a friendship with anyone, incapable of tolerating a friendship, at bottom full of endless astonishment when I see a group of people cheerfully assembled together.
It takes just one unwavering friend — a friend to the soul beneath the self that does the doubting — to quietly and consistently revise these punishing stories we tell ourselves. All along, through all the years of all this punishing self-talk, Kafka’s childhood friend Max Brod had been the greatest champion of his talent, never losing faith in his friend or in the friendship. Though Kafka frequently withdrew into his self-elected isolation, Max never withdrew his love.
Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird — a tender illustrated story about loyalty and the gift of friendship
With time, Kafka came to understand that in every friendship, life happens and interrupts the continuity of connection, making it difficult to reconnect — difficult but infinitely important, for in moving through the difficulty of discontinuity, in the repair of the rupture, the deeper substratum of trust and durability is laid down and reaffirmed again and again.
In another diary entry, he writes:
Since a friendship without interruption of one’s daily life is unthinkable, a great many of its manifestations are blown away time and again, even if its core remains undamaged. From the undamaged core they are formed anew, but as every such formation requires time, and not everything that is expected succeeds, one can never, even aside from the change in one’s personal moods, pick up again where one left off last time. Out of this, in friendships that have a deep foundation, an uneasiness must arise before every fresh meeting which need not be so great that it is felt as such, but which can disturb one’s conversation and behaviour to such a degree that one is consciously astonished, especially as one is not aware of, or cannot believe, the reason for it.
Like all deep and complex people, Kafka was not fully aware of the reasons for his frequent withdrawals. But some part of him hoped, trusted that true friendship withstands the elasticity of presence. When he finally realized that the tuberculosis he had been living with for years was going to take his life, he left all his papers and manuscripts to Max, instructing him to destroy everything. In an act of love — refusing to enable a friend’s damaging self-doubt is always an act of love — Max disobeyed, instead preserving Kafka’s writing for posterity, publishing a tender biography of his friend, and immortalizing their friendship in his 1928 novel The Kingdom of Love.
“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood — it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.
Crisis, of course, is important — it is, as Alain de Botton writes in his deeply assuring meditation on the importance of breakdowns, “an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” There come times when the tedium and turmoil of being yourself become too much to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you wish to be someone else, send you searching for a different organizing principle. (It takes some living to reach that point, which is why midlife can be such a time of tumult and transformation.)
We live and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in those first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, those first experiments in self-acceptance. They are deep and difficult questions, but Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston bring great playfulness and delight to them in their second collaboration, The Dictionary Story (public library) — a charming fable about the yearning for inner congruence and the existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language carried by Oliver’s joyful paintings, his singular hand-lettering, and Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.
The story begins on the bookshelf, where “most of the time, all the books knew what they were about” — except one book. Because she contains “all the words that had ever been read, which meant she could say all the things that could ever be said,” Dictionary is perpetually unsure of herself, her organizing principle not coherence but alphabetic order, the words in her not a story but a list.
It is often the most unexpected and improbable things that save us from ourselves: An Alligator suddenly leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not wanting to be eaten, darts across the alphabet.
A chaos of delight ensues as other words come alive as other characters — a Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Tornado, the Moon — each trying to understand their part in the confusing story writing itself through their animacy.
Dictionary’s thrill at finally having a story unfold on her pages turns into terror as things get out of hand. Suddenly, her natural order starts to look a whole lot more desirable than this unbridled disarray of characters with incompatible desires. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing overwhelm of trying to make too many changes to the story of life all at once, to harmonize the discord of conflicting desires, only to end up in even deeper incoherence.)
In the end, Dictionary calls on her friend Alphabet to restore her to herself — a lovely reminder that the greatest gift a friend can give is to sing back to you the song of yourself when you forget it.
Couple The Dictionary Story with Oliver and Sam’s previous collaboration, A Child of Books, then revisit The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s uncommonly wonderful invented words (based on real etymologies from around the world) for what we feel but cannot name, words like maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”) and apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person”).
What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what we are actually feeling.
There are two ways of keeping that tension from breaking the heart — a surrender to the truth, or a falsification of feeling. When we don’t feel strong enough or safe enough to face our emotional reality, we manipulate it. It may be an outward act, masking for others what we fear would be unwelcome or judged, or it may be an inner one, lying to ourselves about what we are actually feeling to dull the discomfort and ambivalence of feeling it. The stab of loneliness at the party, the relief at the funeral, the love that requires nothing less than changing your life — whether internally sundering or socially inappropriate, we render these emotions impermissible and suppress them. That falsification, whether conscious or not, maps the fault line between the person and the personality — that costume the soul wears to perform and protect itself.
But there is a high psychological cost to putting on the performance, the costume, the mask — a cost sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild terms emotional labor.
In her revelatory 1983 book The Managed Heart (public library), she draws on a wealth of case studies and interviews to explore emotional labor as “a distinctly patterned yet invisible emotional system” governing our private and public exchanges through individual acts of “emotion work” and social “feeling rules” that shape what we allow ourselves to show and what we allow ourselves to feel. Much of our emotional labor is invisible even to us, but we become aware of it when we experience what Hochschild calls “the pinch” between a real but unwelcome feeling and a preferred, idealized one.
René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)
Emotion functions as a messenger from the self, an agent that gives us an instant report on the connection between what we are seeing and what we had expected to see, and tells us what we feel ready to do about it… Emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence.
[…]
Emotional labor… requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others… This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality.
There is emotional labor involved each time we put someone else’s needs before our own, each time we force a binary conclusion to resolve our ambivalence about a nuanced matter of the heart. This “subterranean work of placing an acceptable inner face on ambivalence” is painfully exhausting because it makes us less ourselves. Hochschild draws an analogy:
Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self — either the body or the margins of the soul — that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation, what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own?
Owning what we feel — which involves both allowing it and expressing it — is fundamentally a way of claiming ourselves. But because permission and expression are so intricately entwined, the very act of suppressing what we express changes what we feel, alters the very self. Hochschild writes:
If we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes.
This matters because attention is the lens that renders reality and attention is a function of feeling — by changing our feelings, we change our lens, ultimately changing what we experience as reality:
Feeling… filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize… Every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.” It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective.
In this sense, feeling is an orienteering tool, a clue about where we stand in relation to something or someone. And yet it is prey to one great complication: the interpretation of the clue. Often unconscious, our interpretation of feeling is regularly garbled by what was and by what we think should be — the ghosts of the past and the fantasies of the future haunting the present, warping the present, warping reality itself, effecting what George Eliot called a “double consciousness.” Because to know what is real is the measure of self-trust, confusion and ambivalence about our feelings erode our self-trust.
Unable to bear the internal dissonance, or entirely unaware of it, we cope by feigning to feel something other than what we are actually feeling. Whether performed for others or for the audience of our own confused conscience, this is acting work. Hochschild, who grew up as the child of diplomats, classifies two key varieties — surface acting and deep acting. She writes:
Feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically in either deep acting or surface acting. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene — either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one.
[…]
In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary.
We make it unnecessary by replacing our actual feeling with the feeling we wish to project, wish to feel, so that in a sense we no longer need to feign it — we have induced ourselves to feel it. Hochschild, whose study of emotional labor began with hundreds of flight attendants in training, offers an illustrative example:
Can a flight attendant suppress her anger at a passenger who insults her?… She may have lost for awhile the sense of what she would have felt had she not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, she alters herself.
Art by Guridi from The Day I Became a Bird — an illustrated allegory about falling in love and learning to unmask the true self
This alteration of the real self requires tremendous emotional labor, which comes at a great psychological cost — we lose sense of who we are and where we stand. (Those of us who have had to take care of a parent’s emotional needs and feelings from a young age at the expense of feeling our own, at the expense of knowing our own, are particularly vulnerable to such self-abandonment in adult life.)
This notion of deep acting originates in Russian theater pioneer Konstantin Stanislavski’s influential century-old system for training actors in what he called “the art of experiencing” — a practice of tapping into the actor’s conscious thought, will, and memory in order to trigger the unconscious into experiencing, rather than just representing, the emotion the actor must perform in their part.
In one of the many case studies substantiating the book, Hochschild gives the example of a man trying to stop feeling deep love for a woman with whom he is no longer able to have a reciprocal relationship. Applying Stanislavski’s method, the man would draw on his emotional memory to make a list of all the times the woman disappointed him or hurt him, prompting himself to feel the pain and disappointment as an antidote to his love. “He would not, then, fall naturally out of love,” she writes. “He would actively conduct himself out of love through deep acting.”
We are conducting ourselves into and out of feeling all the time as we play the parts of the lives we think we ought to live. Most of the time, we are not even aware we are doing this. We do it especially deftly in love. “I was afraid of being hurt, so I attempted to change my feelings,” an exceptionally self-aware woman tells Hochschild in one of the interviews, naming plainly the commonest contortion of the heart we perform in the pit of fear — after all, falling in love is always and invariably a surrender to the fear of loss. In love, Hochschild observes, one always “wavers between belief and doubt” — and it is precisely when afflicted with ambivalence, when unable to tolereate doubt and reconcile conflicting feelings, that we exert the most toilsome emotional labor.
One of Hochschild’s interview subjects is a woman riven by a common ambivalence — a marriage she has outgrown, yet one in which she continues to stay out of a misplaced feeling of responsibility for her child’s future, forgetting somehow that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to model the courage of living one’s truth. She tells Hochschild:
I am desperately trying to change my feelings of being trapped [in marriage] into feelings of wanting to remain with my husband voluntarily. Sometimes I think I’m succeeding — sometimes I know I haven’t. It means I have to lie to myself and know I am lying. It means I don’t like myself very much. It also makes me wonder whether or not I’m a bit of a masochist.
Lying to ourselves, Hochschild admonishes, erodes our trust in knowing what is real, what is true. In acting, the actor is aware of the illusion; in life, deluding ourselves is a form of bad faith and self-betrayal, the price of which — paid upon the reluctant but inevitable admission of our inner truth — is a loss of self-respect. She writes:
It is far more unsettling to discover that we have fooled ourselves than to discover that we have been fooling others… When in private life we recognize an illusion we have held, we form a different relation to what we have thought of as our self. We come to distrust our sense of what is true, as we know it through feeling. And if our feelings have lied to us, they cannot be part of our good, trustworthy, “true” self… We may recognize that we distort reality, that we deny or suppress truths, but we rely on an observing ego to comment on these unconscious processes in us and to try to find out what is going on despite them.
Hochschild offers a single, merciless antidote to this all too human tendency toward self-delusion: “constant attention, continual questioning and testing” of what we believe about ourselves, what we trust in ourselves. Then and only then can we begin to treat our hearts not as something to be managed but as something to be met, discovering in that meeting the truth of who we are.
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