It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to the quantum foam.

The best shorthand we have for it is soul.

“One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) lamented in her diary. But writing directly about the soul, and with tremendous insight, is precisely what she does in a wonderful essay about the essays of Montaigne — his epochal “attempt to communicate a soul,” a “miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul” — included in her classic Common Reader (public library).

Virginia Woolf

Contemplating the soul — that most private part of us — as “so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public,” she writes:

Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he decreed to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it. Woolf writes:

The man* who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)

Observing that the souls we most wish to resemble “are always the supplest” — for “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living” — Woolf arrives at what it takes to be fully oneself:

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says.

Complement with E.E. Cummings on the courage to be yourself, Tracy K. Smith’s short, splendid poem “The Everlasting Self,” and the poetic science of how we went from cells to souls, then revisit Woolf on self-knowledge, the remedy for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the consolations of growing older, and her epiphany about the meaning of creativity.

After “Spell Against Indifference,” an offering of another poem — this one inspired by a lovely piece of science news that touched me with its sonorous existential echoes.

THE HALF-LIFE OF HOPE
by Maria Popova

Walking beneath the concrete canopy
     of Manhattan
I find myself thinking about
Charles B. Kaufmann
     who
just after the end
of the Second World War
invented bird spikes
     who
thought it a fine idea
to fang the roofs
of hospitals and banks,
to weaponize the libraries
to keep the thing with feathers
from perching on our homes
to keep the angels
     from alighting.

Twenty bird generations later
atop a maple tree
outside a hospital in Belgium
a magpie has heisted
a thousand metal spikes
to make of them
     a nest
to sing from it
the requiem
     of the saved.

There is a model of reality in which every action you take, from falling in love with a particular person to reading this essay right now, is dictated by a Rube Goldberg machine of events set into motion by the Big Bang — a classical universe of clockwork determinism, in which there is no room for choice. There is also a model in which every event is the product of randomness and probability fluctuations — a quantum universe, in which chance is God’s other name.

Hovering between these two versions, haunted by the paradox of free will, is our experience of what we call serendipity — the gladsome coincidence of two events, rendered meaningful by the emotional weight of each and the infinitesimal cosmic odds of their co-occurrence.

But these highly improbable gifts of chance are also rendered meaningful by the focus of our attention, by choosing to attend to those particular elements of reality amid the myriad others swarming us at the same time — for how we choose to pay attention renders the world what it is. The Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska captured this enchanting interplay of mind and reality in her wonderful poem “Love at First Sight.” The Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and his unlikely friend Carl Jung named it synchronicity and placed it at the nexus of physics and psyche.

Art by mathematician Anatolii Fomenko

Whatever their cause, in such moments of dazzling coincidence we feel that beyond the seeming reality of this world lies another, sending us signs, hinting at the possibility of the impossible.

That is what Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929–July 11, 2023) explores throughout his 1984 classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library).

Kundera places chance at the center of the love story unfolding between two people who believe they have chosen each other. Teresa — a romantic full of existential longing and Anna Karenina — is working as a waitress in a restaurant. One evening, a man looks up from his book to order a cognac. At that very moment, Beethoven comes on the radio. Long ago a string quartet had come to play in Tereza’s small town and had rendered Beethoven “her image of the world on the other side, the world she yearned for.” She takes it as a sign — Tomas must be the answer to her yearning. She goes on seeking other signs — when he charges the cognac to his room, she realizes his room number is the same as the street number of the house she grew up in. “Tomas appeared to Tereza in the hotel restaurant as chance in the absolute,” Kundera writes as he considers the psychological machinery of how we imbue such coincidences with meaning:

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed the radio was playing Beethoven… But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)

In serendipity, we find an organizing principle for meaning amid the randomness that governs the universe of which our own lives are but an echo. It is the music amid the noise of being. Kundera writes:

Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his* sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life… Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.

It is important, Kundera argues, to be awake to serendipity — for letting coincidences go unnoticed deprives our lives of “a dimension of beauty.” But his very metaphor undermines the case for pure chance as the conductor of our lives: Music, after all, is not the product of chance but of the composer’s deliberate choice in sequencing the notes and silences. Our experience of beauty is the product of the quality of attention we choose to pay an object. Simone de Beauvoir, writing in the same era as Kundera, came closer to the composite truth when she contemplated how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Still, Kundera captures an elemental fact: We may choose to love whom we love, but it is chance that first intersects our fates. Coincidences remind us that chance may not be the sole conductor of our lives, but it is what gives life the capacity for surprise, for sudden deviation from the predicted path — those quickenings of the soul that elevate life above mere existence and envelop it in an aura of magic that makes it worth living. He writes:

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.

[…]

Necessity knows no magic formula — they are all left to chance.

Complement with Iris Murdoch on love and chance and a Borges-lensed meditation on chance, the universe, and what makes us who we are, then revisit Kundera on the central ambivalences of life and love and the key to great storytelling.

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy