A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, then we had better know it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “to act responsibly.” And yet we don’t. We encounter each other at points, as points, and promise each other timelines, denying our temporality, denying that time is the measure of change. In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy. To embrace it in each other is one of the kindest, most loving things we can do.
In between laying out her resolutions for a life worth living and contemplating how two souls can interact with one another in friendship and love, she observes that “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:
A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.
With an eye to “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures” that would bedevil every love if we didn’t counter them with “a lot of tenderness and pity,” she considers the tenderness for change — in oneself and in the other — essential to love yet unaccounted for in the fundamental premise of marriage:
The horror of the definitive choice is that we engage not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Thus, we must try to determine which one repeats our changing self the most often. One must create a sort of abstract self and say to oneself: this is the state in which I find myself the most often; this is what I want the most often; thus, this is what suits me.
Already familiar with the singular suffering of regret — that punishing wish that the past self had made choices better suited to the values and needs of the present — she resolves:
No, no pity for my vanished past. Live in the present. It is beautiful enough if I know how to make it so.
It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.
With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
In his wonderful contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, Yo-Yo Ma tells children about how books helped him survive his own childhood, listing King Arthur among his three great heroes; as a young boy born in France to Chinese parents, trying to find his mooring as an immigrant in America, he reaped great consolation and inspiration from the tales of the legendary medieval leader — stories of “adventure, heroism, human frailty and accidental destiny” that emboldened him to believe in the power of the quest for holy grails and improbable dreams — dreams as improbable as a small boy with no homeland growing up to be the world’s greatest cellist.
And, indeed, buried inside the adventure-thrill of these Arthurian tales are treasure troves of wisdom on fortitude, courage, and the art of honorable living, nowhere richer than in the novels by T.H. White (May 29, 1906–January 17, 1964), one particular passage in which offers a meta-testament to the potency of reading in the character-formation of King Arthur himself.
In White’s 1958 Arthurian classic The Once and Future King (public library) — one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s lifelong favorite books — the mystic-magician Merlyn, aware of the young not-yet-king Arthur’s destiny, endeavors to sculpt the boy’s moral fiber and to teach him what it means to be a strong, kindly leader through a series of lessons from the animal kingdom, transforming him by turns into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose, and a badger. One day, the young Arthur comes to Merlyn in his ordinary human incarnation, sulking with an ordinary human disappointment — that small, merciless mallet for our fragility. Merlyn offers his advice on the mightiest antidote to disappointment and sorrow:
The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.
“The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” Carl Jung wrote as he contemplated life and death. And the most astonishing part of it all is just how resourceful we can be in kindling that flame even amid the most oxygen-deprived and suffocating of circumstances — a kind of spiritual survival instinct the vitalizing beauty of which only the oppressed, the marginalized, and the otherwise banished from mainstream society have the painful privilege of knowing.
This painful privilege is what the great German writer and political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in Men in Dark Times (public library) — a 1968 collection of essays that have grown all the more timely and radiant in the half-century since. (The book’s title, it bears pointing with a mixture of lamentation and delight, comes from an era when a great woman was a “he” — a paradox of which Arendt herself, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and the first woman to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures, was the epitome.)
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth… Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.
From our vantage point as Arendt’s posterity, one thing is certain — her own ideas about freedom and justice and human nature are more blazing than ever. Half a century before Rebecca Solnit’s lucid and luminous case for hope in the dark, Arendt writes:
The world lies between people, and this in-between … is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe.
Arendt argues that in dark times — times of injustice, when certain groups are oppressed by certain other groups and personal liberty is imperiled — something magical happens to this in-between space, “a special kind of humanity develops,” a fierce fellowship between and among the oppressed. More than a century after Kierkegaard contemplated the power of the minority, she writes:
Humanity manifests itself in such brotherhood most frequently in “dark times.” This kind of humanity actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world. Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peoples and enslaved groups… This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah peoples; it is the advantage that the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have over others.
Arendt herself, in addition to being a female intellectual in a almost entirely male realm, belongs to one such pariah population — the group of Jews expelled from Germany by Hitler at an early age — and it is from this meeting point of the personal and the political that she adds:
The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it — starting with the common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others and going on to the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world — that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness.
But out of this worldless in-betweenness, Arendt observes, something else is born — a new sort of kindred humanism, which can’t be replicated or manufactured under any other circumstances:
It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world (and which of course existed between them before the persecution, keeping them at a distance from one another) has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as an almost physical phenomenon… In its full development it can breed a kindliness and sheer goodness of which human beings are otherwise scarcely capable. Frequently it is also the source of a vitality, a joy in the simple fact of being alive, rather suggesting that life comes fully into its own only among those who are, in worldly terms, the insulted and injured.
[…]
But … this kind of humanitarianism, whose purest form is a privilege of the pariah, is not transmissible and cannot be easily acquired by those who do not belong among the pariahs. Neither compassion nor actual sharing of suffering is enough.
There is something larger and more expansive at the heart of the matter, Arendt argues — “the question of selflessness, or rather the question of openness to others, which in fact is the precondition for ‘humanity’ in every sense of that word” — and this openness, in its highest form, is an openness to each other’s joy rather than only each other’s suffering:
It seems evident that sharing joy is absolutely superior in this respect to sharing suffering. Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say. What stands in the way of this gladness is envy, which in the sphere of humanity is the worst vice…
This sharing of gladness, Arendt notes with an eye to Aristotle’s ideas about friendship, is the glue for the most powerful of human bonds:
The ancients thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living. In holding this view they gave little consideration to the idea that we need the help of friends in misfortune; on the contrary, they rather thought that there can be no happiness or good fortune for anyone unless a friend shares in the joy of it. Of course there is something to the maxim that only in misfortune do we find out who our true friends are; but those whom we regard as our true friends without such proof are usually those to whom we unhesitatingly reveal happiness and whom we count on to share our rejoicing.
[…]
Humanity is exemplified not in fraternity but in friendship.
Therein lies Arendt’s most salient, most beautiful point — it is in this act of connecting that we create the world:
The world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows… We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.
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