2026-08-26 12:10:06
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.
An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.
We call this suffering.
Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.
We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.
In his exquisite reckoning with what makes life worth living, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captures this in a diary entry from the late spring of 1942. Under the headline “very necessary qualifications for a good Persian storyteller,” he copies out a passage from an unidentified book he is reading:
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
A generation before Canetti, the philosopher-poet Rainer Maria Rilke articulated the same essential condition for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but speaking to what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance, anything drawn from one life to touch another:
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
Couple with Carl Jung on the relationship between suffering and creativity, then revisit Annie Dillard on creativity and what it takes to be a great writer and Oliver Sacks, writing thirty years before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-08-26 07:41:36
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.
We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.
Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.
In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.
Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-08-26 06:08:30
“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy,” Hermann Hesse wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century in trying to course-correct the budding consumerist conscience toward the small triumphs of attentive presence that make life worth living, adding: “My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.” Delights, we may call them. And that is what poet Ross Gay does call them as he picks up, a century and a civilizational failure later, where Hesse left off with The Book of Delights (public library) — his yearlong experiment in learning to notice, amid a world that so readily gives us reasons to despair, the daily wellsprings of delight, or what Wendell Berry, in his gorgeous case for delight as a countercultural force of resistance, called the elemental pleasures “to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all.”
Each day, beginning on his forty-second birthday and ending on his forty-third, Gay composed one miniature essay — “essayettes,” he calls them, in that lovely poet’s way of leavening meaning with makeshift language — about a particular delight encountered that day, swirled around his consciousness to extract its maximum sweetness. (Delight, he tells us, means “out from light,” sharing etymological roots with delicious and delectable.) What emerges is not a ledger of delights passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an instrument of wonder-stricken presence — the living-gladness counterpart to Tolstoy’s kindred-spirited but wholly cerebral Calendar of Wisdom.
Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded — almost with the shock of having forgotten — that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold.
He writes:
Patterns and themes and concerns show up… My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.
In a passage evocative of those delicious lines from Mary Oliver’s serenade to life — “there is so much to admire, to weep over / and to write music or poems about” — he adds:
It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study… I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it.
And so we learn, as passengers on Gay’s delightcraft, that it is not just a matter of paying attention, but of taking attention, of deliberately shifting it, of diverting the glycogen that pumps our despair muscle and clenches the fist scanning for danger, for that selfsame glycogen is needed to pump our delight muscle and open the palm to hold joy.
He writes:
When I began this gathering of essays, which, yes, comes from the French essai, meaning to try, or to attempt, I planned on writing one of these things — these attempts — every day for a year. When I decided this I was walking back to my lodging in a castle (delight) from two very strong espressos at a café in Umbertide (delight), having just accidentally pilfered a handful of loquats from what I thought was a public tree (but upon just a touch more scrutiny was obviously not — delight!), and sucking on the ripe little fruit, turning the smooth gems of their seeds around in my mouth as wild fennel fronds wisped in the breeze on the roadside, a field of sunflowers stretched to the horizon, casting their seedy grins to the sun above, the honeybees in the linden trees thick enough for me not only to hear but to feel in my body, the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.
To be sure, this capacity for drinking in the glorious everythingness of the world is rooted in recognizing the immense and improbable elemental delight of one’s own existence — the consequence of what Gay calls “the many thousand — million! — accidents — no, impossibilities! — leading to our births,” that miracle of chance he had contemplated a decade earlier in a wondrous poem. He marvels at the improbable origin of his own delight:
For god’s sake, my white mother had never even met a black guy! My father failed out of Central State (too busy looking good and having fun, so they say), got drafted, and was counseled by his old man to enlist in the navy that day so as not to go where the black and brown and poor kids go in the wars of America. And they both ended up, I kid you not, in Guam. Black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination. Comes some babies, one of them me.
One of the readiest sources of daily delight comes — predictably, given the well documented physiological and psychological consolations of nature — from his beloved community garden. (Gay is as much a poet as he is a devoted gardener, though perhaps as Emily Dickinson well knew, the two are but a single occupation.) In an early-August essayette titled “Inefficiency,” he writes:
I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden (spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness — staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb—and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions — did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.
Perhaps the most charming category of delights Gay encounters throughout the year are what he terms “unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers.” One September day, wandering through a small town in Indiana where he had just given a poetry reading at the local college and where “Make America Great Again” signs glare from an auto-shop selling foreign cars, he records this:
While I was working, headphones on, swaying to the new De La Soul record (delight, which deserves its own entry), I noticed a white girl — she looked fifteen, but could’ve been, I suppose, a college student — standing next to me with her hand raised. I looked up, confused, pulled my headphones back, and she said, like a coach or something, “Working on your paper?! Good job to you! High five!” And you better believe I high-fived that child in her preripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens. For I love, I delight in, unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. What constitutes pleasant, it’s no secret, is informed by my large-ish, male, and cisgender body, a body that is also large-ish, male, cisgender, and not white. In other words, the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal. We all should understand this by now.
A few months ago, walking down the street in Umbertide, in Italy, a trash truck pulled up beside me and the guy in the passenger’s seat yelled something I didn’t understand. I said, “Como,” the Spanish word for “come again,” which is a ridiculous thing to say because even if he had come again I wouldn’t have understood him. He knew this, and hopping out of the truck to dump in a couple cans, he flexed his muscles, pointed at me, and smacked my biceps hard. Twice! I loved him! Or when a waitress puts her hand on my shoulder. (Forget it if she calls me honey. Baby even better.) Or someone scooting by puts their hand on my back. The handshake. The hug. I love them both.
And then there are his parenthetical meta-delights — parentheses applied, in proper Lewis Thomas fashion, as containers of delight, wherein the container itself is delightful. For instance, this:
(A delight that we can heal our loved ones, even the dead ones.) Oh broken. Oh beautiful.
Or this, nestled into his Indiana-small-town experience:
(A feature of the small-town Midwest: a city-hallish building in the center, always with some sad statue trumpeting one war or another. This one had a guy in one of those not-very-protective-looking hats they called a helmet during WWI. He’s carrying, naturally, a gun. Jena Osman’s book Public Figures alerted me to the ubiquity of the gun, the weapon, in the hands of our statues. A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one’s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas — we could go on like this for a while. But never again — never ever — guns. I decree it, and also decree the removal of the already extant guns. Let the emptiness our war heroes carry be the metaphor for a while.)
This transmutation of terror into transcendence haunts the book as a guiding spirit. In an early-autumn essayette, drawing on Zadie Smith’s elegant reflections on joy, and on Rilke, and on Edmund Burke and the Romantics, Gay offers the daring theory that joy is “not a feeling or an accomplishment: it’s an entering and a joining with the terrible.” He then tests it in the only laboratory we have for our life-theories — our own being-in-the-world:
I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.
[…]
Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute.
[…]
It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?
Complement the infinitely delightful Book of Delights with poet Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s lovely picture-book about happiness as a daily practice of noticing and Michael McCarthy’s meditation on nature and the serious work of joy, then revisit Bill T. Jones’s spellbinding Universe in Verse performance of one of Ross Gay’s poems.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-08-25 10:34:58
Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it spills outside what language can hold. And yet we live in language — narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of personhood and emotions are how the brain interprets bodily sensations, an interpretation achieved largely by naming. We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture’s parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel.
It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.
That is what cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith offers in The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust (public library) — a linguistic ledger of feeling exploring the cultural histories and psychosocial nuances behind the words we use to name our most confounding, complex, yet common experiences, partway between The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (that lovely lexicon of invented words for real things we feel but cannot name based on real etymologies from around the world) and David Whyte’s Consolations (that passionate unfastening of everyday words to reveal the deeper strata of their emotional nuances).
Punctuating the entries in English, from anger to loneliness to delight, are some wonderfully untranslatable words from around the world for very specific affective states and emotional reactions with no equivalent in English — partly because our culture holds no space for them, partly because our model of human nature factors out the reality and dignity of those experiences, partly simply because the English language is not pliant enough to mold itself around such irregularly shaped objects of feeling.
Here are ten of my favorites:
ABHIMAN
SanskritThe literal meaning of abhi-man is “self-pride.” Abhiman evokes the pain and anger caused when someone we love, or expect kind treatment from, hurts us. Sorrow and shock are at its root, but it quickly flourishes into a fierce, bruised pride. To recognize abhiman as an inevitable part of our emotional life is to know that breaking the unspoken contracts of love and respect between families and allies is an extremely serious betrayal.
ACEDIA
GreekA distracting, creeping feeling. Like the tickle of a gnat crawling up your arm. A short-lived but disastrous emotional crisis, usually striking between 11AM and 4PM. Its first signs are listlessness and irritability, but it doesn’t take long to turn into desolation and despair.
AMAE
JapaneseThe sensation of temporary surrender in perfect safety when you crumple into the arms of a loved one to be coddled and comforted. In Japan, amae is commonly acknowledged as part of all kinds of relationships, felt not only between family members, but with friends and in the workplace too. According to the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi, amae is “an emotion that takes the other person’s love for granted,” there when we depend on another’s help with no obligation to be grateful in return. You can even be encouraged to show amae to yourself. For Doi, surrendering to amae is important because it represents a return to the indulgences and unconditional nurturing of infancy. It’s the glue which allows stable relationships to flourish, an emblem of the deepest trust… this combination of vulnerability and belonging.
BASOREXIA
20th-century English derivative of Latin and GreekThe sudden urge to kiss someone.
GRENG JAI
ThaiThe feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer to help because of the bother it would cause them.
KAUKOKAIPUU
FinnishFeeling homesick for a place you’ve never been to. From kauko — faraway, and kaipuu — a yearning.
MALU
IndonesianThe sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward around people of higher status.
SAUDADE
PortugueseA melancholic yearning for someone, or something, which is far away or lost. It’s always there, pulsing between the surface with its hopefulness tinged with grief. There is a vague yearning, yet it is interlaid with resignation and the pleasure of remembering past joys.
VIRAHA
SanskritViraha is usually translated as longing or the particular kind of love felt during separation or abandonment. An aspect of sringara rasa (erotic and romantic love), one of the nine rasas or themes that shape human experience, viraha is a feeling of incompleteness without a loved one, and a fixation on the ecstasy of the longed-for reunion. Viraha recalls the formulations of romantic infatuation, not only the erotic — the poetry of the Occitan troubadours, or the inconsolable longing expressed in Portuguese fado music. The difference is that viraha is also a religious feeling — the soul’s quest to find it’s spiritual home. [See John Donne’s “Batter My Heart”.]
ŻAL
PolishŻal (pronounced jal) is melancholy felt at an irretrievable loss. This is not straightforward dejection. Żal is fickle, and shifts its shape, one moment resigned, the next rebellious. It combines the disappointment, regret and even violent fury which comes when some part of our lives has been taken away for good. It is most of all a kind of anger at recognizing the end of things.
Couple with Pablo Neruda’s love letter to language, then revisit artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated ode to words and the meanings between them.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-08-25 09:32:13
“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” And yet we are increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves out in various social contexts, lacerating the parchment of our identity in the process. As Courtney Martin observed in her insightful On Being conversation with Parker Palmer and Krista Tippett, “It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places.” Today, as Whitman’s multitudes no longer compose an inner wholeness but are being wrested out of us fragment by fragment, what does it really mean to be a person? And how many types of personhood do we each contain?
In the variedly stimulating 1976 volume The Identities of Persons (public library), philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) considers the seven layers of personhood, rooted in literature but extensible to life. She writes:
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Rorty offers a brief taxonomy of those conceptions before exploring each in turn:
Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable. Presences are descendants of souls; they are evoked rather than presented, to be found in novels by Dostoyevsky, not those by Jane Austen.
Depending on which of these we adopt, Rorty argues, we become radically different entities, with different powers and proprieties, different notions of success and failure, different freedoms and liabilities, different expectations of and relations to one another, and most of all a different orientation toward ourselves in the emotional, intellectual, and social spaces we inhabit.
And yet we ought to be able to interpolate between these various modalities of being:
Worldliness consists of [the] ability to enact, with grace and aplomb, a great variety of roles.
Rorty begins with the character, tracing its origin to Ancient Greek drama:
Since the elements out of which characters are composed are repeatable and their configurations can be reproduced, a society of characters is in principle a society of repeatable and indeed replaceable individuals.
Characters, Rorty points out, don’t have identity crises because they aren’t expected to have a core unity beneath their assemblage of traits. What defines them is which of these traits become manifested, and this warrants the question of social context:
To know what sort of character a person is, is to know what sort of life is best suited to bring out his potentialities and functions… Not all characters are suited to the same sorts of lives: there is no ideal type for them all… If one tries to force the life of a bargainer on the character of a philosopher, one is likely to encounter trouble, sorrow, and the sort of evil that comes from mismatching life and temperament. Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic… Two individuals of the same character will fare differently in different polities, not because their characters will change through their experiences (though different aspects will become dominant or recessive) but simply because a good fit of character and society can conduce to well-being and happiness, while a bad fit produces misery and rejection.
Rorty’s central point about character takes it out of the realm of the literary and the philosophical, and into the realm of our everyday lives, where the perennial dramas of who we are play out:
“To be a character” is to maintain a few qualities, nourish them to excess until they dominate and dictate all others. A character is delineated and thus generally delimited. To “have character” is to have reliable qualities, to hold tightly to them through the temptations to swerve and change. A person of character is neither bribed nor corrupted; he stands fast, is steadfast.
[…]
Because characters are public persons, even their private lives can have universal form, general significance. The dramatic character, writ large, can represent for everyman what only later came to be thought of as the inner life of some; it can portray the myth, the conflicts, reversals and discoveries of each person, each polis.
After characters come figures, which Rorty describes as “characters writ large,” “defined by their place in an unfolding drama.” Figures are allegorical archetypes — rather their being defined by their vocations or social roles, their traits originate in ancient stories. Rorty writes:
A figure is neither formed by nor owns experiences: his figurative identity shapes the significances of the events in his life.
[…]
Individuals who regard themselves as figures watch the unfolding of their lives following the patterns of their archetypes… They form the narratives of their lives and make their choices according to the pattern…
In contrast with the wholly external perspective on characters, the concept of a figure introduces the germ of what will become a distinction between the inner and the outer person. An individual’s perspective on his model, his idealized real figure, is originally externally presented, but it becomes internalized, becomes the internal model of self-representation.
This shift from self-discovery to active choice, to locus of agency, brings us to the person. Rorty writes:
A person’s roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system related to others. The person thus comes to stand behind his roles, to select them and to be judged by his choices and his capacities to act out his personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama.
The idea of a person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of person come together.
Central to the concept of the person — unlike the character and the figure — is the idea of free will, which springs from our capacity for making choices and implies the responsibility for those choices. Rorty explains:
If judgment summarizes a life … then that life must have a unified location. Since they choose from their natures or are chosen by their stories, neither characters nor figures need be equipped with a will, not to mention a free will… The actions of characters and figures do no emerge from the exercise of a single faculty of power: there is no need for a single source of responsibility… Persons are required to unify the capacity for choice with the capacities for action.
This very capacity, Rorty argues, is what defines personhood. But unlike the powers of characters, which exist on a spectrum, personhood is a binary notion — because it arises from responsibility, and in any given instance we are either liable or not, there are no degrees in personhood. The more obvious dark side to this binary conception is the sociopolitical one: Throughout its evolving understanding of what it means to be human, our civilization has systematically treated various classes of people — women, children, people of color — as less-than-persons by denying them basic human rights of choice. But there is also a private psychological downside to our capacity for choice, one that plays out from the inside out rather than the outside in. Rorty writes:
It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person. Here the stage is set for identity crises, for wondering who one really is, behind the multifold variety of actions and roles. And the search for that core person is not a matter of curiosity; it is a search for the principles by which choices are to be made.
One of these principles is the notion of property, which determines the rights and agency of persons, thus transforming them into selves and conferring upon them the status of souls and minds. Rorty writes:
The two strands that were fused in the concept of person diverge again: When we focus on persons as sources of decisions, the ultimate locus of responsibility, the unity of thought and action, we must come to think of them as souls and minds. When we think of them as possessors of rights and powers, we come to think of them as selves. It is not until each of these has been transformed into the concept of individuality that the two strands are woven together again.
[…]
When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self… The quality of an individual self is determined by his qualities: they are his capital, to invest well or foolishly.
In a sentiment that calls to mind young Sylvia Plath’s meditation on free will and what makes us who we are, Rorty considers the identity level of soul and mind:
Because persons are primary agents of principle, their integrity requires freedom; because they are judged liable, their powers must be autonomous. But when this criterion for personhood is carried to its logical extreme, the scope of agency moves inward, away from social dramas, to the choices of the soul, or to the operations of the mind.
[…]
From character as structured dispositions, we come to soul as pure agency, unfathomable, inexpressible.
Echoing philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on the relationship between property-ownership, agency, and victimhood, Rorty considers the role of property in the conception of the self and its identity-crises in the face of alienation:
Judgments of persons are moral; judgments of souls are theological; judgments of selves are economic and political. Societies of persons are constructed to assure the rights of choice and action; they emerge from a contract of agents; societies of selves are also formed to protect and guarantee the rights of their members. But when the members of a society achieve their rights by virtue of their possessions, the protection of rights requires the protection of property, even though in principle everyone is equally entitled to the fruits of his labors and protection under law.
[…]
The concerns of selves are their interests; their obligations are the duties with which they are taxed or charged. The grammar and the semantics of selfhood reveal the possessive forms. Whatever will come to be regarded as crucial property, or the means to it, will be regarded as the focus of rights; the alienation of property becomes an attack on the integrity if not actually the preservation of the self.
Alongside property, the other essential component of the self is the faculty of memory, which, as Oliver Sacks has memorably demonstrated, is the seedbed of what makes us who we are to ourselves. Rorty writes:
The conscious possession of experiences [is] the final criterion of identity. The continuity of the self is established by memory; disputes about the validity of memory reports will hang on whether the claimant had as hers the original experience. Puzzles about identity will be described as puzzles about whether it is possible to transfer, or to alienate memory (that is, the retention of one’s own experience) without destroying the self.
Today, two generations later, this puzzle is all the more puzzling, for it illuminates the central paradox of the singularity movement and its escapist fantasy of somehow decentralizing, downloading, and transferring the self across different corporeal and temporal hosts. Rorty speaks to this indirectly but brilliantly:
There is difficulty in describing the core possessor, the owner of experiences who is not herself any set of them. One can speak of characters as sets of traits without looking for a center; but it is more difficult to think of bundles of properties without an owner, especially when the older idea of the person as an agent and decision-maker is still implicit. It is presumed that the self as an owner is also endowed with capabilities to choose and to act.
Out of this necessity to reconcile the ownership of experience with the capacity for choice arises the level of the individual. Rorty writes:
From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves — the divergence of practice from ideological commitments — comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.
Unlike characters and figures, individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Individuals are indivisible entities… Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. Although in its inception, individuality revives the idea of person, the rights of persons are formulated in society, while the rights of individuals are demanded of society. The contrast between the inner and outer person becomes the contrast between the individual and the social mask, between nature and culture.
A society of individuals is quite different from one composed of selves. Individuals contract to assure the basic rights to the development of moral and intellectual gifts, as well as legal protection of self and property. Because a society of individuals is composed of indivisible autonomous units, from whose natures — their minds and conscience — come the principles of justice, their rights are not property; they cannot be exchanged, bartered. Their rights and their qualities are their very essence, inalienable.
Therein lies Rorty’s most important point — the integrity of our identity requires a locus of agency that is honored by the collective but cultivated in solitude. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s immortal defense of that integrity, Rorty writes:
Being an individual requires having a room of one’s own, not because it is one’s possession, but because only there, in solitude, away from the pressure of others, can one develop the features and styles that differentiate one’s own being from others. Integrity comes to be associated with difference; this idea, always implicit in individuality, of preserving one’s right against the encroachment of others within one’s own society, emerges as dominant… Conscientious consciousness is then the transparent eye that illuminates the substance of social life.
And yet there is a level of personhood that exists even above the individual — one that represents our highest mode of being, beyond the ego’s ambitions and preoccupations — the level of presence:
Presences [are] the return of the unchartable soul… They are a mode of attending, being present to [one’s] experiences, without dominating or controlling them.
[…]
Understanding other conceptions of persons puts one on the way of being them; but understanding presences — if indeed there is understanding of them to be had — does not put one any closer to being one. It cannot be achieved by imitation, willing, practice, or a good education. It is a mode of identity invented precisely to go beyond of achievement and willfulness.
Complement The Identities of Persons — the remaining essays in which examine various facets of the perplexity of personhood and come from such celebrated thinkers as Daniel Dennett, John Perry, and Ronald de Sousa — with Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of change, Hannah Arendt on being vs. appearing, Andre Gidé on what it really means to be yourself, and Parker Palmer on the six pillars of the integrated life.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-08-25 04:36:51
Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) is among the most imaginative, important, and influential children’s book creators of all time, an artist and writer of unparalleled creative vision and great sensitivity to life’s ineffable nuances. A recipient of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award, she had the courage to turn down Walt Disney and build her own creative empire. From her beloved Moomins characters to her spectacular vintage illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit, her stories exude the metaphorical magic of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh tales, the fanciful whimsy of Baum’s Oz world, the contemplative introspection of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and the enchanting symbolism of Carroll’s Wonderland. Philip Pullman has aptly called her “a genius of a very subtle kind” and Neil Gaiman considers her work “a surrealist masterpiece.”
Jansson’s singular sensibility springs from her own unusual life. Born to an artistic and rather eccentric family from Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, young Tove was raised by wildly creative parents — her father was one of Finland’s greatest sculptors and her mother designed books and postage stamps, illustrated book jackets, and created punchy political cartoons. Jansson completed her formal training in art and graphic design in various institutions across Sweden, Finland, and France, but the origin of her iconic Moomin characters was rooted in an affectionate family joke rather than in her formal training — while studying in Stockholm in her late teens and living with relatives there, Jansson would regularly sneak into the kitchen for treats; her uncle would tease her that a “Moomintroll” lived in the kitchen pantry, ready to breathe cold air down stealthy snackers’ necks.
Moominvalley’s main protagonist, Moomintroll, is thus a self-portrait of sorts, but perhaps Jansson’s most interesting character is also the one based on the most intimate part of her life. Too-ticky, the sage of Moominvalley who solves even the most existential of problems with equal parts practicality and wisdom, was inspired by the love of Jansson’s life — the great Finnish sculptor and graphic arts pioneer Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, the love of Tove Jansson’s life. The two women met at the Helsinki Artist League’s holiday party in the 1950s and remained together until Jansson’s death decades later, collaborating on a lifetime of creative projects — all at a time when queer couples were straddling the impossible line between anguishing invisibility and dangerous visibility.
Although Too-ticky, clad in her signature red-and-white sweater, appears in a number of the Moomin books, her spirit blossoms most vibrantly in the 1957 gem Moominland Midwinter (public library), where “her common sense often restores order in the valley.” More than mere common sense, however, Too-ticky’s laconic sagacity and aphoristic reflections are full of invaluable wisdom on life.
The book tells the story of Moomintroll who, unlike his family that hibernated from November to April every year, wakes up early and decides to stay up through the harsh Scandinavian winter. He grows angry at the sun’s absence, angry at the raging blizzards, angry at those who seem able to enjoy rather than resent the season of snow and ice. It is a tale of learning to live with the vital discomfort of uncertainty, to get lost in order to find oneself, to surrender to the rhythms of life rather than agonizing in resistance.
Lost in the forest, Moomintroll comes upon a warm light emanating from a cozy hole someone had dug for shelter — “someone who lay looking up at the serene winter sky and whistling very softly to herself.” It is, of course, Too-ticky. When Moomintroll inquires about the song she is whistling, she replies, Whitman-like, with a wonderfully metaphorical answer:
It’s a song of myself… The refrain is about the things one can’t understand. I’m thinking about the aurora borealis. You can’t tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.
This theme of uncertainty and of finding joy in questioning reality is a recurring one for Too-ticky. Echoing the first of Bertrand Russell’s ten famous commandments of teaching, learning, and life — “Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.” — she offers comforting solidarity in Moomintroll’s lament that he doesn’t understand the snow:
I don’t either… You believe it’s cold, but if you build yourself a snowhouse it’s warm. You think it’s white, but at times it looks pink, and another time it’s blue. It can be softer than anything, and then again harder than stone. Nothing is certain.
In many ways, Too-ticky’s wisdom seems almost Zen Buddhist in nature. In addition to championing the ability to be at peace with uncertainty, she also advocates a minimalist approach to material possessions — when Moomintroll discovers, distraught and indignant, that someone is secretly smuggling things out of his sleeping family’s house, Too-ticky responds:
That’s nice, isn’t it? You’ve got too many things about you. As well as things you remember, and things you’re dreaming about.
Too-ticky is also a sage of the “slow churn” and wise champion of the idea that “anything worthwhile takes a long time.” (Janssen would certainly know — she wrote her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, in 1939 and published it in 1945, but it was not a success; her first critical acclaim arrived in 1946, nearly a decade after she had created the Moomins, with the publication of Comet in Moominland.) When Moomintroll grows angry and impatient with the sun’s refusal to rise, Too-ticky reminds him that hurrying is a toxic way of trying to resist the present:
Don’t be in such a hurry… Soon now. Sit down and wait.
When the sun does appear, it flits across the horizon for a fleeting moment, only to set back down. Moomintroll is even more frustrated, but Too-ticky assures him that the sun, like the myth of the overnight success, follows an incremental rise to brilliance:
He’ll return tomorrow… And then he’ll be a tiny bit bigger, about like a piece of cheese rind. Take it easy.
The story is also a gentle primer on evolution. When Moomintroll, against Too-ticky’s instruction, opens her secret cabinet and finds a strange creature living there, he tells her it was “only a sort of old rat,” but she corrects him:
That was no rat. It was a troll. A troll of the kind you were yourself before you became a Moomin. That was how you looked a thousand years ago.
Moomintroll is so unsettled by the notion that he is related to a mere rat — an elegant allegory for why some people are drawn to such defensive fancies as Young Earth creationism — he storms into the attic to look for an old family album. Janssen writes:
Page after page of dignified Moomins, most often reproduced standing in front of porcelain stoves, or on fret-worked verandahs. Not a single one of them resembled the cupboard troll. “Must be a mistake,” Moomintroll thought. “He can’t be any relation of mine.”
Slowly, Moomintroll makes peace with Too-ticky’s knowledge:
He went down and looked at his sleeping Pappa. Only the nose bore some resemblance to the troll’s. But possibly, a thousand years ago.
There is almost a cosmology element to this undercurrent — a reminder that, however discomfiting this too may be to most humans, we are indeed a cosmic accident. Janssen traces the evolution of Moomintroll’s understanding:
Suddenly he felt very proud of having an ancestor. And it cheered him no little to think that Little My [Moomintroll’s sister] had no pedigree at all, but rather had come into the world by chance.
But perhaps her most profound wisdom deals with our quintessential struggle to make peace with death, which stems from an inability to recognize the comforting interconnectedness of life. When the Lady of the Cold — the beautiful but formidable priestess of the Great Cold, capable of turning into an icicle any fool so bewitched as to look straight into her eyes — freezes the cheerful little squirrel Moomintroll had befriended, Too-ticky sighs:
It’s very hard to tell if people take any pleasure in their tails when they’re dead.
Death, too, is part of nature’s necessary cycles of growth and decay. When Moomintroll and Little My remonstrate the very mention of death, Too-ticky responds:
When one’s dead, then one’s dead. This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And later on still there’ll grow trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that’s so very sad?
Too-ticky’s greatest gift, it appears, is a certain quality of presence — the kind she cultivated in “her own private winter world that had followed its own strange rules year after year” — that allows her to feel one with the world. It is from that standpoint that, when spring finally arrives, she responds to Moomintroll’s accusation that she hadn’t comforted him during the long winter by offering assurance that spring will come, but instead focused on what the world had to offer right there and then. Too-ticky’s answer, emanating a kind of Emerson-like ideal of self-reliance, rings with extraordinary, if uncomfortable, poignancy:
One has to discover everything for oneself. And get over it all alone.
Moomintroll imbibes Too-ticky’s existential lesson. Soon, when his friend the Snork Maiden comes across “the first brave nose-tip of a crocus” shyly trying to push through snow, she suggests they put a glass over it to protect it from the frost at night. But Moomintroll objects:
No, don’t do that. Let it fight it out. I believe it’s going to do still better if things aren’t so easy.
Decades before the groundbreaking research on why cultivating grit is the greatest key to success, Jansson made the same point with great subtlety and wisdom.
Moominland Midwinter is an immeasurably wonderful read in its entirety, as are all of Jansson’s Moomin books. For another taste, see my favorite one.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.