There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warning. This is the price of consciousness, which makes living both difficult and urgent. “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,” Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) writes in her almost unbearably wonderful 1972 masterpiece The Summer Book (public library), written in the wake of her mother’s death.

Jansson’s observation here is literal: Her protagonist — a little girl named Sophia, who is living on a small Nordic island with her elderly grandmother after her mother’s death — finds herself thinking about what it’s like to be a worm, fabled to go on living two new lives when split in half.

Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener.

Worms — those humblest of creatures, which Darwin regarded with absolute amazement and celebrated as the unsung sculptors of the biosphere, having tilled and fertilized the Earth as we know it — dwell in the popular imagination as a living metaphor for regeneration, for turning trauma into redoubled life. (Here, poetic truth and scientific fact diverge — in reality, most earthworms, of which there are more than 1,800 species, have a distinct head and tail; if cut in the middle, some species can regrow a new tail from the head half and go on living, but the tail half dies. Perhaps the planarium flatworm — a tiny invertebrate belonging to the phylum Platyhelminthes, separate from earthworms — is the more scientifically accurate metaphor, for it can regrow its entire body from the smallest cut fragment.)

Still, the poetic image of the cleaved worm that goes on living is a fertile thought experiment for how we may think about those most sundering experiences.

Wondering about what it may be like for the worm to be cut in half, Sophia discovers one of life’s elemental truths — that the price of all growth is pain, but the pain passes and the growth remains:

The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts. And we don’t know, either, if the worm is afraid it’s going to hurt. But anyway, it does have a feeling that something sharp is getting closer and closer all the time. This is instinct. And I can tell you this much, it’s not fair to say it’s too little, or it only has a digestive canal, and so that’s why it doesn’t hurt. I am sure it does hurt, but maybe only for a second.

It always hurts to grow twice as alive. And the question is always what are you going to do with your new uncharted life. Jansson imagines this is the ultimate challenge of the worm halves as they come to live as reborn wholes:

They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Couple with some enduring wisdom on control, surrender, and the paradox of self-transcendence from another of Jansson’s vintage children’s books, then revisit her breathtaking love letters to the love of her life.

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art and morality. There could be no such realization without imagination, which is our only instrument for fathoming what it is like to be somebody else — that most difficult triumph of unselfing. It is only through the imagination that we are capable of empathy — in fact, the modern sense of the word empathy came into use just over a century ago as a way of describing the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art.

We are living in a strange time, a time tyrannized by a moral fashion forbidding that vital act of imagining lives radically different from our own, narrowing the permissible locus of creativity and conversation to tighter and tighter self-similarity — censure that defeats the very project of fathoming otherness in order to, in Audre Lorde’s lovely words, “use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future.”

Three decades ago, at the dawn of this tyrannical regime that continually mistakes self-righteousness for morality and enslaves the soul in servitude to identity, the poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) issued a sonorous wakeup call it is not too late to hear.

Grace Paley

Addressing other members of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative she had co-founded in the 1960s, Paley — who believed that “it is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power” and “to learn the truth from the powerless” — offers a sentiment of astonishing relevance to our own cultural moment:

We need our imaginations to understand what is happening to other people around us, to try to understand the lives of others. I know there’s a certain political view that you musn’t write about anyone except yourself, your own exact people. Of course it’s very hard for anyone to know who their exact people are, anyway. But that’s limiting. The idea of writing from the head or from the view or the experience of other people, of another people, of another life, or even of just the people across the street or next door, is probably one of the most important acts of the imagination that you can try and that can be useful to the world.

Born just after women became citizens, having lived through and taken part in the early Civil Rights movement, having just traveled to Vietnam in her seventies to meet with and learn from Vietnamese writers, she observes:

We’re living in a time when the different peoples in this country are being heard from, for the first time. I’m happy to have lived into this period when we hear the voices of Native Americans — twenty or twenty-five years ago you didn’t even know they were writing, apart from token publication. That was the general condition of American literature at that time. The voices of African-American men and women, the voices of women of all colors, Asian women, Asian men, all these people — this is our country — and we’re living at a time when we can hear the voices of all these people.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society.)

With an eye to the complaints of “people without imagination” who look to these tectonic shifts and “say with that denigrating tone, multiculturalism or diversity or political correctness,” she adds:

They use those words to try to shut all of us up. This is what the imagination means to me: to know that this multiplicity of voices is a wonderful fact and that we’re lucky, especially the young people, to be living here at this time. My imagination tells me that if we let this present political climate defeat us, my children and my grandchildren will be in terrible trouble.

Complement with James Baldwin on how Shakespeare found poetry in other lives, then revisit Grace Paley on the art of getting older — one of the loveliest things I have ever read.

Some of the most difficult moments in life are moments of having to choose between two paths leading in opposite directions — to tell or not to tell, to leap or not to leap, to leave or not to leave — each rife with losses (even if they are necessary losses) the pain of which you will feel acutely and with gains which you are constitutionally unable to imagine.

You could do it rationally, applying Benjamin Franklin’s framework of weighing the pros and cons. You could do it emotionally, turning to people you trust to decide for you, abdicating responsibility for doing the right thing. You could concede the futility of free will and flip a coin. Still, that bifurcation of the soul remains because life, in all its irreducible complexity, is not something you can optimize the way you optimize a route for minimal traffic or maximal scenery. What makes those moments so difficult is the knowledge that there will never be a way of testing where the other path would have led — you only have the one life, lived.

But perhaps there is a third way — one based not on renunciation, which is at the heart of all binary choices, but on integration, which is the pulse-beat of possibility. A way to stop trudging the ground of forking paths and lift off into the sky of the possible.

Art by Marc Martin from We Are Starlings

That is what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explores in his 1843 masterwork Either/Or (public library). Long before Alan Watts admonished against the trap of thinking in terms of gain and loss, before George Saunders offered his lovely lens for living an unregretting life, Kierkegaard writes:

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This… is the sum of all practical wisdom.

[…]

Many people think [they are in the mode of eternity] when, having done the one or the other, they combine or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it.

Kierkegaard considers the frame of mind necessary for living beyond either/or:

Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.

In no region of life is the tyranny of binaries more punitive and the passion for possibility more vital than in our closest relationships, which at their strongest and most nourishing must transcend the confines of binary categories, for any relationship on the level of the soul has elements of lover, parent, child, and friend, and suffers when subjected to either/or. And yet there are times in life when such relationships collide with the confines of practical reality, the reality in which binary choices must be made, and must shape-shift in order to survive.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

A century before Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote so beautifully about embracing the mutability of intimate relationships, Kierkegaard considers what it takes to let a relationship change organically in order to feed the soul in a new way:

The same relationship can acquire significance again in another way… The experienced farmer now and then lets his land lie fallow; the theory of social prudence recommends the same. All things, no doubt, will return, but in another way; what has once been taken into rotation remains there but is varied through the mode of cultivation.

What a way to remember that everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.

THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK