“To be nobody-but-you – in a world where you're doing your best, day and night, to be everybody else – means fighting the hardest battle anyone can fight,” EE Cummings wrote in his timeless summons to dare to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be you when your identity is an ever-changing body of emotions and cells, a model of repair to dampen the fluid that carries us along the river of life, to soften the harsh reality that we will never fully know who we are because we have never been one thing long enough. “Man, the environment we live in, is a place of deception,” Iris Murdoch emphasized in her beautiful case of indifference, and yet we live our whole lives in it – the self is our filter of truth, the sensory organ through which we find love and politics and the color blue. How to live in it authentically but without attachment can be the greatest task of life.
A great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) answers these deep and profound questions A Letter of Sorrow (public library) – his posthumously published collection of meditations and revelations between autobiography and aphorism, deeply personal but universally brilliant.
Considering himself “the type of person who is always on the edge of his own things, not only seeing the crowd he is part of but also the open spaces around us,” with a soul “impatient in itself,” Pessoa writes:
Inch by inch I conquered the inner space I was born with. Little by little I took back the swamp I was frustrated in. I gave birth to my eternal self, but I had to pull it out of myself with tongs.
[…]
Maybe it's time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the middle of a big desert. I tell what I was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.
[…]
I retreat to myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in the distant night untainted by work and the world, untainted by mystery and the future.
A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost himself and found himself in an epic dilemma in a library, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to see the magnitude of the self:
Everything I have done, what I think or what I am is a series of presentations, either to a false person that I thought was mine because I presented myself with it on the outside, or to the weight of circumstances that I thought was the air that I breathed. In this moment of realization, I suddenly find myself alone, an exile where I always thought I was a citizen. In the heart of my thoughts I was not.
I am haunted by the sarcastic horror of life, a depression that transcends the boundaries of my life. I realize that I was wrong and deviating, that I did not live, that I only existed when I filled the time of awareness and thought… This sudden awareness of my true personality, this personality that keeps wandering between what you hear and what you see, weighs on me like an innumerable sentence that I have to serve.
It is very difficult to describe what I feel when I really feel myself and my soul is a real thing that I don't know what human words can describe. I do not know whether I have a fever, as I feel it, or whether I have ceased to have a sleeping fever in life. Yes, I repeat, I am like a traveler who suddenly finds himself in an unknown city, not knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time it is not them but someone else. I was someone else for a long time – from birth to awakening – and suddenly I woke up in the middle of a bridge, leaning on a river and knowing that I was stronger than the person I had been until now.
However, like Virginia Woolf's garden epiphany about the creative spirit and Margaret Fuller's hilltop non-self-contained “All,” such moments of revelation when the soul comes into contact with reality are merely glimpses of an underlying truth that we cannot bear to look at further without melting into it. Pessoa shows:
Not knowing anything about yourself is life. Bad self-awareness is thinking. To be aware of oneself in an instant, as I am doing in this moment, is to have a fleeting vision of the immediate monad, the magical name of the soul. But that light suddenly burns everything, destroys everything. It even strips us of ourselves.
Coach Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood the “same” person despite life and mental and lifelong changes, then revisit Jack Kerouac on self-deception and the “Golden Eternity” behind it.
