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At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of consciousness folded unto itself, our becoming the most private, most significant work we have.
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) made public art of this private work, his poetry so eternal and universal precisely because it came from a place so personal. Animated at once by a profound existential loneliness and a deep feeling of connection to every atom, every person, and every blade of grass, he spent his life writing and rewriting Leaves of Grass — the record of his becoming — always addressing the person in the reader, always owning the person in himself.
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While on the other side of the Atlantic Nietzsche was admonishing that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Whitman was reckoning with the rapids of responsibility for your life. He writes in one of the poems:
No one can acquire for another — not one,
Not one can grow for another — not one.
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him — it cannot fail.
Echoing Hermann Hesse’s insistence that “no prophet or teacher can relieve you of the need to look within,” Whitman urges us to heed the singular call of our own becoming bellowing beneath the din of the world:
Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself.
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He distills this first and final truth of life in the closing stanzas of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — one of the greatest poems ever written, and one of the most perspectival takes on time. Insisting that you must abide “no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself,” he observes that at the end of life, we all invariably face…
…the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
A generation later, another of the world’s most original poets would come to compose the best manifesto I know for the courage to be yourself.
Complement with Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul and Marion Milner’s superb field guide to self-possession inspired by Woolf, then revisit Whitman on what makes a great person and how to keep criticism from sinking your soul.
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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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