Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.

On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

[…]

Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.

Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.

A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.

In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:

There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids, — as lime and iron, — any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion, — fluid humanity.

This, of course, is what makes identity such a tedious concept — a fixity of past experience and predictive narrative that crystallizes a person’s natural fluidity, makes them impermeable to possibility, and is therefore inherently uncreative. True creativity, Burroughs observes, is rooted in this dynamism, this fluidity, this irrepressible and ever-shifting aliveness:

All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property… flaming up with electric and defiant power, — power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.

It can only be so because we a fractal of nature, the supreme creative agent, whose processes are a ceaseless flow of change and self-revision. Burroughs writes:

The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.

Burroughs sees this as “the essential difference between prose and poetry,” between “the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject.” A great life, he intimates, is more like a great poem than like a great teaching:

The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transit. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.

And yet because these interior movements are fundamentally untranslatable between one consciousness and another, belonging to that region of absolute aloneness that accompanies the singularity of being oneself, there is always an element of the ineffable in all great creative work and all great persons:

There must always be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality… As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he or she says or knows or shows, or even how they behave, but in the silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or any other expression of art.

Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Burroughs on the measure of a visionary, the art of noticing, and how to live with the uncertainties of life.

“I think we moderns lack love,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war.

The paradox is that when we lack something long enough, we forget what it looks like, what it means, how to recognize it when it comes along. And so we love without knowing how to love, wounding ourselves and each other.

Over and over, in her novels and her essays, in her letters and her journals, Woolf tried to locate love, to anneal it, to define it in order to reinstate it at the center of life.

“To love makes one solitary,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway a generation before Sylvia Plath contemplated the loneliness of love — because “nothing is so strange when one is in love… as the complete indifference of other people.”

Two years later, she set out to “throw light upon the question of love” in To the Lighthouse, to illuminate its “thousand shapes.”

Nothing, she wrote, could be “more serious… more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death.”

Against “the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its scrupulosity,” she pitted the kind of love “that never attempted to clutch its object but, like the love that mathematicians bear their symbols or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.” She found it “helpful” and “exalting” to know that people could love like that.

At its best, at its truest, the experience of falling in love partakes of that exaltation, that transcendent participancy in the order of things. She captures the phase transition as her characters flood with “being in love”:

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting [was] how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Above all, perhaps, love is a function of time and chance, time and choice — an equivalence that Woolf conjures up on the pages of Orlando, drawing on her relationship with Vita Sackville-West to compose what Vita’s son would later call “the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Virginia] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.” Here, to love someone is to choose them again and again day after day, century after century, as they change and morph and fluctuate across the spectrum of being, to continue to see and cherish the kernel of the person beneath the costume of personality, the soul beneath the self. In this sense, love is a revelation of the essence — “something central,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, that permeates the fabric of a person, “something warm” that breaks up the surface and ripples the “cold contact” between people:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation… an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.

The great tragedy of human life is that we ask of love everything and gives us an almost; the great triumph is that we know this, know the price of the illumination, and we choose to love anyway.

The Minimalists speak with Kapil Gupta about letting go of nonsense, the many ways humans waste their lives, what happens when you minimize ambition, and much more.

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Minimal Maxims

Joshua, Ryan, and T.K.’s pithy, shareable, less-than-140-character responses. Find more quotes from The Minimalists at MinimalMaxims.com.

• There’s nowhere in the world that the world is not.
• If the poor man is happy, he certainly isn’t happy because he is poor.
• Consumerism is the ideology that acquiring more will make you a better person.

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