It's an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your friendship the same person. Throughout life's physical and mental changes, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “a continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, withdrawn from everything else, calm, like the stars, shining forever.” Complexity theory traces it to a quantum bubble.
It's the best shorthand we have for it the soul.
“One cannot write directly about the soul. If you look, it disappears,” lamented Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) in her diary. But writing directly about the soul, and with great understanding, is exactly what he did in Montaigne's wonderful story – his epochal attempt to “communicate with the soul,” “the miraculous correction of all these stray parts that make up the human soul” – included in his classic book. Common Reader (public library).
Thinking of the soul – that private part of us – as “very complex, infinite, corresponding very little to the version that does its work in society,” he writes:
Beyond the difficulty of communication, there is the great difficulty of being yourself. This soul, or the life within us, does not agree at all with life outside of us. If someone dares to ask him what he thinks, he always says the opposite of what other people say.
That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he said “discard anything that insults your soul, and your very flesh will be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the voice of system and expectation it should – do we become fully and joyfully ourselves. Our self-awareness is hearing that voice. Contentment in ourselves is obedience. Woolf writes:
A self-aware person is independent; and he is not bored, and life is too short, and he is full of deep but balanced happiness. He alone is alive, while other people, slaves to the festival, let life pass them by in a kind of dream. Once you agree, do what other people do because they do, and fatigue steals all the emotions and energy of the soul. He becomes all outward show and inward vanity; dull, dull, and indifferent.
Realizing that the souls we most desire to be like “are always the best of all” – because “the man who keeps changing is the man who keeps living” – Woolf arrives at what it takes to be alone:
Let's go over our innumerable pot, our fascinating confusion, our hotch-potch of ideas, our eternal wonder – for the soul throws up miracles every second. Movement and change are at the core of our being; hardness is death; conformity is death: let's say what comes to our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, spout absurd nonsense, and follow our wildest dreams regardless of what the world does or thinks or says.
Complete with EE Cummings on the courage to be yourself, Tracy K. Smith's short, brilliant poem “The Everlasting Self,” and the poetic science of how we go from cells to souls, then revisit Woolf on self-awareness, the cure for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and the ultimate meaning, pipha, comfort about the growth of love. of creativity.
