Or the question may be considered still at least open -Īn unused drawer, a pair of waiting workboots.Ĭomplement with Sylvia Plath on the pillars of personhood and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jane Hirshfield’s wonderful poems “Optimism,” “The Weighing,” and “For What Binds Us,” and her uncommonly insightful prose meditation on how poetry transforms us. To be a person may be possible then, after all. To play, when it is needed, one-handed piano. Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty. To create, too often, mostly grief and pain. Yet seem always to be trying to look back. To be a person is an untenable proposition. “Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves,” philosopher Amélie Rorty wrote as she examined what makes a person - a self-conception shaped by our astonishing evolutionary inheritance, which took us from bacteria to the Benedictus in a mere minute on the clock-face of the cosmos a self-conception distorted by an ego that habitually confuses who we wish we were for who we are, redeemed only by the courage to know ourselves.Ī generation after Maya Angelou captured these flickering contradictions in her poem “A Brave and Starling Truth,” which sailed into space to remind us that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Jane Hirshfield cracks open this eternal question of what it means to be a person in a lovely poem from her collection The Asking: New and Selected Poems ( public library). “Inward secret creatures,” Iris Murdoch called us in reckoning with the blind spots of our self-knowledge. A human being is a living constellation of contradictions, mostly opaque to itself.
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