“We have no idea our personal souls, not to mention the souls of others… There’s a virgin forest in every.”
By Maria Popova
It’s each a terror and a mercy that we all know ourselves solely incompletely and one another hardly in any respect — as a result of, someplace in that lacuna of thriller, in that opaque area past absolute data and absolute empathy (which assumes data of one other’s expertise), among the most magical issues in life come abloom. These are the locations we develop, and develop into — the openings which can be our portals to the doable.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) shines a sidewise gleam on these locations in a passage tucked into her very good century-old meditation on illness as a portal to self-understanding.
Difficult the damaging attract of being completely understood and held in excellent sympathy — by others, or by ourselves — she writes:
That phantasm of a world so formed that it echoes each groan, of human beings so tied collectively by frequent wants and fears {that a} twitch at one wrist jerks one other, the place nevertheless unusual your expertise different individuals have had it too, the place nevertheless far you journey in your personal thoughts somebody has been there earlier than you — is all an phantasm.
In a sentiment the poet Could Sarton — who was half in love with Woolf — would echo in her abiding insistence on solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery, Woolf provides:
We have no idea our personal souls, not to mention the souls of others. Human beings don’t go hand in hand the entire stretch of the best way. There’s a virgin forest in every; a snowfield the place even the print of birds’ toes is unknown. Right here we go alone, and prefer it higher so. All the time to have sympathy, at all times to be accompanied, at all times to be understood can be insupportable.
Complement with James Baldwin on love, freedom, and the illusion of choice, then revisit Woolf on 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.
