Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Limits of Empathy – The Marginalian

It is both a fear and a pity that we know ourselves imperfectly and know each other at all – because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that dim place beyond perfect knowledge and perfect compassion (which assumes the knowledge of the other's experience), some of the magical things in life blossom. Those are the places where we grow, and have grown – the holes that are our portals to possibility.

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) shines a marginal light on those places in the passage included in his remarkable meditations of a century of illness as a portal to self-understanding.

Challenging the dangerous allure of being completely understood and empathized – by others, or by ourselves – he writes:

That illusion of a world structured in such a way that it conforms to every whimper, of people bound together by common needs and fears so that the movement of one wrist explodes the other, how strange your experiences and other people's experiences are, where no matter how far you go in your mind someone has been there before you – it's all an illusion.

In a sense the poet May Sarton – Woolf's lover – echoed in her insistence on solitude as a source of self-discovery, Woolf adds:

We do not know our own souls, let alone those of others. People don't agree with every method. There is each virgin forest; a place of snow where even the footprints of birds are unknown. Here we go alone, and we love you better. To be always sympathized, always accompanied, always understood would be unbearable.

Five years later, he would develop this sad feeling The waves:

Our friends – how far away, how quiet, how little visited and little known. I, too, am dim to my friends and do not know; a phantom, sometimes visible, often invisible.

Hitting the bottom of Woolf's reckoning is an invitation to give up the dream of being understood – that destructive expectation beneath so much of our relationship suffering. In the end, “you'll never know someone completely the way you want to. But that's okay, love is better.”

Fill up on James Baldwin's love, freedom, and the illusion of choice, then revisit Woolf about the cure for doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the comfort of growing up, and his epiphany about the meaning of creativity.