The Gutsy Girl: A Modern Manifesto for Bravery, Perseverance, and Breaking the Tyranny of Perfection

In 1885, a young woman sent the editor of her hometown newspaper a brilliant response to a letter by a patronizing chauvinist, which the paper had published under the title “What Girls Are Good For.” The woman, known today as Nellie Bly, so impressed the editor that she was hired at the paper and went on to become a trailblazing journalist, circumnavigating the globe in 75 days with only a duffle bag and risking her life to write a seminal exposé of asylum abuse, which forever changed legal protections for the mentally ill. But Bly’s courage says as much about her triumphant character as it does about the tragedies of her culture — she is celebrated as a hero in large part because she defied and transcended the limiting gender norms of the Victorian era, which reserved courageous and adventurous feats for men, while raising women to be diffident, perfect, and perfectly pretty instead.

Writer Caroline Paul, one of the first women on San Francisco’s firefighting force and an experimental plane pilot, believes that not much has changed in the century since — that beneath the surface progress, our culture still nurses girls on “the insidious language of fear” and boys on that of bravery and resilience. She offers an intelligent and imaginative antidote in The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure (public library) — part memoir, part manifesto, part aspirational workbook, aimed at tween girls but speaking to the ageless, ungendered spirit of adventure in all of us, exploring what it means to be brave, to persevere, to break the tyranny of perfection, and to laugh at oneself while setting out to do the seemingly impossible.

Illustrated by Paul’s partner (and my frequent collaborator), artist and graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton, the book features sidebar celebrations of diverse “girl heroes” of nearly every imaginable background, ranging from famous pioneers like Nellie Bly and astronaut Mae Jemison to little-known adventurers like canopy-climbing botanist Marie Antoine, prodigy rock-climber Ashima Shiraishi, and barnstorming pilot and parachutist Bessie “Queen Bess” Coleman.

A masterful memoirist who has previously written about what a lost cat taught her about finding human love and what it’s like to be a twin, Paul structures each chapter as a thrilling micro-memoir of a particular adventure from her own life — building a milk carton pirate ship as a teenager and sinking it triumphantly into the rapids, mastering a challenging type of paragliding as a young woman, climbing and nearly dying on the formidable mount Denali as an adult.

Let me make one thing clear: Throughout the book, Paul does a remarkably thoughtful job of pointing out the line between adventurousness and recklessness. Her brushes with disaster, rather than lionizing heedlessness, are the book’s greatest gift precisely because they decondition the notion that an adventure is the same thing as an achievement — that one must be perfect and error-proof in every way in order to live a daring and courageous life. Instead, by chronicling her many missteps along the running starts of her leaps, she assures the young reader over and over that owning up to mistakes isn’t an attrition of one’s courage but an essential building block of it. After all, the fear of humiliation is perhaps what undergirds all fear, and in our culture of stubborn self-righteousness, there are few things we resist more staunchly, to the detriment of our own growth, than looking foolish for being wrong. The courageous, Paul reminds us, trip and fall, often in public, but get right back up and leap again.

Indeed, the book is a lived and living testament to psychologist Carol Dweck’s seminal work on the “fixed” vs. “growth” mindsets — life-tested evidence that courage is the fruit not of perfection but of doggedness in the face of fallibility, fertilized by the choice (and it is a choice, Paul reminds us over and over) to get up and dust yourself off each time.

But Paul wasn’t always an adventurer. She reflects:

I had been a shy and fearful kid. Many things had scared me. Bigger kids. Second grade. The elderly woman across the street. Being called on in class. The book Where the Wild Things Are. Woods at dusk. The way the bones in my hand crisscrossed.

Being scared was a terrible feeling, like sinking in quicksand. My stomach would drop, my feet would feel heavy, my head would prickle. Fear was an all-body experience. For a shy kid like me it was overwhelming.

Let me pause here to note that Caroline Paul is one of the most extraordinary human beings I know — a modern-day Amazon, Shackleton, Amelia Earhart, and Hedy Lamarr rolled into one — and since she is also a brilliant writer, the self-deprecating humor permeating the book serves a deliberate purpose: to assure us that no one is born a modern-day Amazon, Shackleton, Amelia Earhart, and Hedy Lamarr rolled into one, but the determined can become it by taking on challenges, conceding the possibility of imperfection and embarrassment, and seeing those outcomes as part of the adventure rather than as failure at achievement.

That’s exactly what Paul does in the adventures she chronicles. It’s time, after all, to replace that woeful Victorian map of woman’s heart with a modern map of the gutsy girl spirit.

There is even a nod to Harvard social scientist Amy Cuddy’s pioneering work on power poses:

As a lover of clouds and their classification, I delighted in Paul’s foray into thermal flying — a particularly challenging yet poetic type of paragliding, in which paragliders do what birds do and ride the column-like streams of hot air, known as thermals, learning which clouds are allies and which mortal threat.

Cumulus clouds — those cotton-like fluff formations you see on sunny days — are formed when the hot air of the thermal cools and stops rising. They are thus helpful indicators that there is a thermal below. But the rub is that because the hot air cools as it rises, the paraglider must stop before reaching a bottom of the cloud — otherwise disaster might strike.

For Paul, a practiced paraglider but a novice at thermal flying, disaster did strike as she found herself so enraptured by soaring like the birds amid the misty air that she forgot this basic rule:

I realized what was happening, just as the cloud completely enveloped me.

It was called Cloud Suck. It happened when you thought you were flying below a cumulus cloud, but you were really below a building cumulonimbus. The difference between those two clouds doesn’t sound like a big deal. Cumulus means “heap” in Latin. But in Latin the word “nimbus” means “dark cloud.” In other words a cumulus cloud was just a heap of clouds, but a cumulonimbus cloud was one of those black, towering, anvil-shaped monsters that you associate with an incoming storm.

I was in a thundercloud.

I’d heard all the stories. Visibility goes from white to black. You’re rained on, hailed on, and lightning flashes on all sides. At some point you lose consciousness. Your wing begins to freeze. You are finally spat out and you’re probably dead. If you’re not, your wing has been ripped to shreds and you soon will be. One paraglider pilot, a European champion, had been cloud-sucked to thirty-two thousand feet — that’s where jetliners fly. This was recorded on her variometer, which froze there. She survived only because she gained consciousness on her descent, her paraglider miraculously intact, and guided herself to the ground.

Rapidly, Paul is sucked into the thunderous darkness, leaving her only seconds to decide — react, really — what to do. In a testament to legendary chemist Louis Pasteur’s famous proclamation that “chance favors the prepared mind,” she saves herself by calling on her mental library of practiced maneuvers and instinctively combining two tricks she had performed individually before. She writes:

I rocketed out of the bottom of that storm cloud, spinning and dropping like a downed war plane. Luck was with me, and my wing held. Skill was with me, too, as I gently transitioned out of the two maneuvers and leveled off. EEEeeeeeee went my exhaled breath. Ba BOOM, Ba BOOM went my heart. I glided for a while, calming down. I was both ashamed of my mistake, and exhilarated to be alive. Was there a lesson here? I had tried to learn something new, but I had almost killed myself doing it. Still, I hadn’t killed myself.

Suddenly it was clear to me: The best outdoor athletes are adventurous, but they aren’t reckless! They know their skill level, and their goals.

She recounts an exchange with her paragliding partners:

When we regrouped at the landing zone, Lars and Mike wanted to know how my flight had been. They’d lost sight of me, Lars said, after their own launches. “Oh, I’m getting the hang of it,” I said, shrugging with feigned nonchalance.

Lars looked happy. “Pretty great, right?!” he cried. Then his eyes widened, and his voice lowered. “Well, I don’t want to freak you out.” He leaned in closer. “But I saw this dude get cloud sucked. Cumulonimbus! He escaped, though.” Lars shook his head. “I don’t know who it was but man, that guy was brave, and jeez, was he stupid!”

It’s hard not to appreciate the tragicomedy of the exchange — Lars speaks for our culture at large, in which it is assumed that the adventurous feat, even if bordering on recklessness, is reserved for the dudes.

But Paul’s most instructive adventure, for it is the one most laced with larger psychological dimensions and philosophical lessons, took place in Denali — Alaska’s formidable mountain summit, where she and her friend Trish traveled to visit their friend Eric, working there as a park ranger. With humor foreboding peril, she paints the backdrop against which the drama was to unfold:

One day soon after we arrived, the forecast for the mountain said something unexpected: It was going to be clear and balmy for the next week. Where were the terrible blizzards? Where were the high winds? Where were the blood-stopping temperatures? Gone. Suddenly Denali, with none of its fierce weather, seemed tame.

It was as if a large tiger had abruptly sighed and said, forget this, I’m going to be a kitten for a while. And what do you do with a cute cuddly kitten? You tickle its tummy and play with its nose. So suddenly we were not sticking to our plan of remaining at base camp. We were pondering a two-day expedition to the next camp at fourteen thousand feet. We asked each other: What could possibly go wrong? We asked as if it was a question, but it wasn’t a question. It was a statement. The weather was fine, is what we meant, so nothing could possibly go wrong.

Everything went wrong.

The balmy weather had come with a dark side — melting snow, unveiling a mine field of cracks in the ice. After a few hours of easy skiing, the trio tied together with a hefty climbing rope (which Paul affectionately calls “the Hoister, the Puller-Upper, or the Thankyouthankyouthankyou”) so that if one of them fell the other two would hold the weight, Eric is suddenly inhaled by a crevasse — a cleave in the glacier, opening up a bottomless grotto below the ice.

Paul recounts the freeze-frame terror of the moment:

There was silence.

Silence, except for the sound that adrenaline must make as it floods the body. Silence, except for the clicking and clacking as my brain began to assess this new succession of facts. Eric, in crevasse. Trish and me, prone on snow. Ice axe, our savior.

Trish and I called to each other. Okay? Okay! Then we called for Eric.

No response.

Was he dead? Was he unconscious? We didn’t know. But this was no time to lie about, even if we were lying about because gravity and more than three hundred pounds of swinging, possibly dead, weight was pulling on us. If the hundred-pound sled that had followed Eric down hadn’t killed him, hypothermia would. Once the heat began to leach from Eric’s body, he would have only a little time. So we had work to do, and I was the one who had to do it. It was time to set up the Thankyouthankyouthankyou, so I scrabbled for the stakes I was carrying on my back, and I drove one into the snow with the ferocity of someone aiming for a vampire’s heart.

That single stake is to serve as the anchor, holding the entire weight of Eric and his sled. But, to Paul’s horror, the skate doesn’t hold in the melting snow. With the heavy humility that comes with recognizing one’s hubris only after the fact, she writes:

The very weather that had made us feel so safe was now conspiring against us. The warmth that had lulled us into believing everything was going to be fine had opened up crevasses and turned the snow soft and mushy. Denali had been a friendly kitten for a while. But it remained a wild tiger at heart, and we had made the mistake of forgetting that.

Scrambling for a new anchor, she grabs all four of her stakes and jabs them into the snow as deep as she can. Just then, she feels a teardrop on her face. There is, of course, no crying in the life of adventure — but there is always the weather. It has started to rain — one of the mountain’s famous summer blizzards, a deadly hazard threatening to melt the stakes loose. Paul, with the ice melting under her rapidly, frantically unburies the stakes and carves an even deeper hole for the anchor. The leverage system is at last in place and can begin hauling Eric up — as soon as Trish unclips herself from the rope.

This being a Rube Goldberg machine of disaster, Trish can’t unclip — pulled asunder in opposite directions by the rope stretched between the anchor and Eric, her carabiner is strained by too much pressure to release. The rain is now not only melting the snow, but soaking Eric — if alive at all, this puts him at severe risk of hypothermia. Paul decides to throw a knife to Trish so that she can cut the harness and release herself. Once again, tragedy and comedy conspire:

Trish was on the national champion Frisbee team. She knew how to throw. And she knew that I did not, because she had, on a few occasions at least, attempted to teach me to throw a Frisbee. The attempts had been a disaster. The Frisbee had careered off to one side repeatedly. Or it had dropped sadly to the ground in front of me. On one or two occasions it had even disappeared behind me.

But a knife is not a Frisbee. And I had seen enough movies to know that when a knife is tossed by the hero to someone in need, it lands exactly where it should. So I picked up the knife, and I centered myself. “Be the hero,” I whispered.

I inhaled a deep breath. I brought my arm back. Exhaling, I tossed the knife.

It landed fifteen feet wide, disappearing into the snow. “AAARRRGGHH,” I yelled in disbelief.

“AAAARRRGGHH,” Trish yelled, with the same vigor.

This was not a movie, it turned out. This was real life and in real life I remained a nincompoop who couldn’t throw a Frisbee or a knife.

Somehow, Trish manages to release herself. But just as she begins climbing toward Paul, she is swallowed by the snow — another crevasse. By a superhuman exertion, she manages to swing her legs up, pulls herself onto the edge, and rolls over to the side, trying to keep as still as possible on the feeble snow, with the crevasse gaping beneath her. There is still Eric to save. Paul recounts:

Both Trish and I were tied into the anchor I had set. But would the anchor hold with the falling weight of all three of us? I doubted it. But that scenario was unthinkable, so I did what all people do when they need to concentrate on the task at hand with a clear mind and steady hand. I un-thinked it.

Trish and I began to pull on the Thankyouthankyouthankyou. It was slow going. The rope bit into the soft and mushy snow, hampering our progress immensely. We pulled and pulled, the rope sank and sank, and little by little by little Eric and his sled began to rise. But it was too slow, and we knew it.

Then tiny dots appeared on the horizon. The dots snaked quickly toward us, enlarging into people. It was a team of climbers, descending the mountain!

Both relieved and mortified, Paul faces her saviors:

We were staring at two female mountaineers, genuine kick-ass gals, shining examples of superhero skill, and at that moment very disgusted with us. They threw us a withering look: You got yourself in this situation and you can’t get yourself out? With a yawn, and a slow, stern shake of her superhero head, one of the women guides unspooled a rope from her back. She commanded her ten clients to grip that rope with their hands. Then she clipped in.

Now this seemed a little unfair. No anchor in the soft mushy snow? No Thankyouthankyouthankyou? Just the twenty hands of ten eager climbers. But I swallowed my pride and watched as the kick-ass woman guide rappelled (a technique climbers use to descend a rope) into the crevasse, while her clients held fast. We waited. Five minutes later she jugged (a technique climbers use to ascend a rope) her way back up.

“He’s alive,” she said in the same tone of voice you might use to say Pass the Butter, or Two Plus Two Equals Four. And why not? As a kick-ass superhero mountaineer she had seen many things, it was clear, and being alive was the most normal of them. Then she added, “But there’s blood all down the walls. Let’s do this fast.” In the same Pass the Butter voice she commanded her clients to pull on the rope, now attached to Eric… The woman guides called their team to attention, then tilted their square chins at us and, in the tradition of superheroes everywhere, skied away with hardly a word.

Paul tampers the story with the necessary nuances of real life, where outcomes aren’t allotted to the binary model of tragic deaths and happy endings — Eric had sustained a concussion, a fractured vertebrae, and a head gash that would require eighty stitches, and his recovery was slow. But the experience had taught her invaluable lessons that transcend the realm of mountain-climbing and apply to everything from entrepreneurship to love — about the line between courage and cockiness, about how we lacerate ourselves on our own misguided expectations, about the price of pride and the cost of overconfidence.

In the remainder of The Gutsy Girl, Paul goes on to chronicle the thrills and takeaways of adventures ranging from kayaking the rough Adriatic Sea to her days as a working firefighter. Complement it with her very differently wonderful memoir for grownups, Lost Cat, then revisit psychologist Carol Dweck on the two basic mindsets that shape our lives.

Illustrations courtesy of Wendy MacNaughton / Bloomsbury

Gardening and the Secret of Happiness

“This is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life — and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist — while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden.

Nearly a century later, botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has written beautifully about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales, examines the revelations of the garden in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (public library) — an unusual and richly rewarding book blending botany, Native American mythology, natural history, and philosophy.

In a particularly enchanting passage, Kimmerer, who fuses her scientific training with her Native American storytelling heritage, considers happiness as a sort of reciprocity between the Earth and the human spirit — a gladdening mutuality of affections and animacy:

It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.

I was hunting among the spiraling vines that envelop my teepees of pole beans, lifting the dark-green leaves to find handfuls of pods, long and green, firm and furred with tender fuzz. I snapped them off where they hung in slender twosomes, bit into one, and tasted nothing but August, distilled into pure, crisp beaniness… By the time I finished searching through just one trellis, my basket was full. To go and empty it in the kitchen, I stepped between heavy squash vines and around tomato plants fallen under the weight of their fruit. They sprawled at the feet of the sunflowers, whose heads bowed with the weight of maturing seeds.

Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener

Mid-stride in the garden, Kimmerer notices the potato patch her daughters had left off harvesting that morning. She twines this communion with the land and the commitment of good parenthood in a beautiful meditation on what it means to care for, to be a steward of, to love — be it a child or Mother Earth:

They complain about garden chores, as kids are supposed to do, but once they start they get caught up in the softness of the dirt and the smell of the day and it is hours later when they come back into the house. Seeds for this basket of beans were poked into the ground by their fingers back in May. Seeing them plant and harvest makes me feel like a good mother, teaching them how to provide for themselves.

[…]

How do I show my girls I love them on a morning in June? I pick them wild strawberries. On a February afternoon we build snowmen and then sit by the fire. In March we make maple syrup. We pick violets in May and go swimming in July. On an August night we lay out blankets and watch meteor showers. In November, that great teacher the woodpile comes into our lives. That’s just the beginning. How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.

Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.

I was reminded of this passage from the altogether bewitching Braiding Sweetgrass by a mention in Kimmerer’s terrific On Being conversation with Krista Tippett — listen and revel below:

[The] kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim — because attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants. That means they’re not paying attention.

Complement with Mary Oliver — another patron saint of listening and of the Earth — on what it really means to pay attention, then revisit Kimmerer’s exquisite writings about the magic of moss and how naming confers dignity upon existence.

Finding Winnie: The Improbable and Touching Real-Life Story of the Baby Bear Who Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh

On August 24, 1914, a kindly Canadian veterinarian named Harry Colebourn bought a baby bear from a trapper at a train station, where he had taken respite on his way to heal horses injured in World War I. He named her Winnie, after his hometown of Winnipeg, and took her to the front, where she became his most beloved friend. When his unit was eventually summoned to go to battle, he did the hardest thing he ever had to do — he parted with Winnie to save her life, taking her to the London Zoo. There, a little boy named Christopher Robin befriended Winnie and named his teddy bear after her.

So began the unlikely true story that inspired one of the most beloved children’s books of all time, Winnie-the-Pooh, which A.A. Milne wrote for his young son, Christopher Robin — a story Captain Colebourn’s great-granddaughter, Lindsay Mattick, tells in the impossibly wonderful Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear (public library). And since I clearly live in a bear-cave where the world often passes me by, may the record reflect that this is most emphatically a superb, if belated, addition to the best children’s books of 2015.

Tenderly illustrated by the inimitable Sophie Blackall, this story-within-a-story begins with Mattick herself recounting the adventures of Harry and his bear to her own son, Cole, named after Captain Colebourn. We are then plunged into the century-old tale.

We meet the gentle and handsome young Harry and follow him as he leaves for war.

After the first overnight leg of the journey, Harry decides to stretch his legs at a station called White River, where he encounters an old man on a bench with a leashed baby bear.

Surmising that the man must be a trapper, which hardly casts him as a proper guardian for the sweet young creature, Harry tussles with the decision but eventually offers the trapper $20 — a fortune, and nearly everything he has — for the bear, then takes her back on the train with him.

“Captain Colebourn!” said the Colonel on the train, as the little Bear sniffed at his knees. “We are on a journey of thousands of miles, heading into the thick of battle, and you propose to bring this Most Dangerous Creature?”

Bear stood straight up on her hind legs as if to salute the Colonel. The Colonel stopped speaking at once — and then, in quite a different voice, he said, “Oh, hallo.”

Harry names the bear Winnie, to remind the men of their hometown, and she becomes the baby of the group, lovingly nursed by the soldiers.

Eventually, they arrive at an enormous camp set up in the fields of Valcartier, where Harry is to work at the horse hospital.

Winnie becomes the camp mascot and continually impresses the soldiers with her remarkable skills as a navigator, capable of finding anything hidden anywhere. But the time comes for them to travel across the ocean and join the actual war in Europe. Harry is conflicted, but can’t bear the thought of abandoning Winnie, so he takes her along.

Mattick — whose writing neither dumbs down the historical facts nor suffers from the common strain of forced facetiousness but instead emanates a kind of effortless delight — writes:

Nobody had ever tried to float so many people and animals across the Atlantic Ocean before. Thirty ships sailed together, carrying about 36,000 men, and about 7,500 horses … and about one bear named Winnie.

In England, although Winnie is happy amid the ceaseless rain, it becomes clear that the war is real and inevitable. After the soldiers take a photo with their beloved mascot to send home, Harry makes the difficult decision to do what is best for Winnie, even if it breaks his heart. (One is reminded of Charlie Brown in the 1965 gem Love Is Walking Hand in Hand, lamenting: “Love is being happy knowing that she’s happy… but that isn’t so easy.”)

Harry puts in Winnie in a car reminiscent of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s famous Lady Godiva, and together they drive to London, where Harry wistfully entrusts his beloved friend with the London Zoo — the safest place for her — before returning to his wartime duty.

Here, the philosophical dimension of the book pokes through — when Cole interrupts his mother to protest that he doesn’t want the story to be over, Mattick responds:

“Sometimes,” I said, “you have to let one story end so the next one can begin.”

“How do you know when that will happen?”

“You don’t,” I said. “Which is why you should always carry on.”

And carry on the new story does — we meet young Christopher Robin Milne and his stuffed bear, which he has trouble naming. No name seems to fit.

One day, the boy’s father takes him to the London Zoo and, lo and behold, there is Winnie. Christopher Robin falls instantly in love and the two become true friends — so loving is their bond that the boy is allowed to go inside Winnie’s enclosure and play with her. We see his father — a young A.A. Milne — observe affectionately in the background, smoking his famous pipe.

The rest is the sweetest kind of history — Christopher Robin, of course, names his nameless teddy bear Winnie and it becomes the protagonist of his father’s classic book series, which remains one of those tremendously rewarding and philosophically rich stories attesting to J.R.R. Tolkien’s assertion that there is no such thing as writing “for children.” One suddenly wonders whether it is because so much real, complex emotion went into Harry’s relationship with Winnie that the simple words of Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood animal inhabitants are rife with such immense insight into the complexities of the human heart.

The end of the book, like the marvelous Blackall-illustrated The Mighty Lalouche, includes an album of wonderful vintage photographs of Captain Colebourn, Winnie, Christopher Robin, and even Harry’s diary, where under Monday, August 24, 1914, “bought bear $20” appears in his handwriting.

Harry Colebourn

Winnie and Harry at the Valcartier camp. This photograph inspired statues now gracing Winnipeg and London.

Christopher Robin with Winnie

Complement the irrepressibly heartwarming Finding Winnie with this rare 1929 recording of Milne reading from Winnie-the-Pooh, then revisit Sophie Blackall’s lovely illustrations for Aldous Huxley’s only children’s book and meet the real-life little girl who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

What Makes a Person: The Seven Layers of Identity in Literature and Life

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” And yet we are increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves out in various social contexts, lacerating the parchment of our identity in the process. As Courtney Martin observed in her insightful On Being conversation with Parker Palmer and Krista Tippett, “It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places.” Today, as Whitman’s multitudes no longer compose an inner wholeness but are being wrested out of us fragment by fragment, what does it really mean to be a person? And how many types of personhood do we each contain?

In the variedly stimulating 1976 volume The Identities of Persons (public library), philosopher Amelie Rorty considers the seven layers of personhood, rooted in literature but extensible to life. She writes:

Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Rorty offers a brief taxonomy of those conceptions before exploring each in turn:

Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable. Presences are descendants of souls; they are evoked rather than presented, to be found in novels by Dostoyevsky, not those by Jane Austen.

Depending on which of these we adopt, Rorty argues, we become radically different entities, with different powers and proprieties, different notions of success and failure, different freedoms and liabilities, different expectations of and relations to one another, and most of all a different orientation toward ourselves in the emotional, intellectual, and social spaces we inhabit.

And yet we ought to be able to interpolate between these various modalities of being:

Worldliness consists of [the] ability to enact, with grace and aplomb, a great variety of roles.

Rorty begins with the character, tracing its origin to Ancient Greek drama:

Since the elements out of which characters are composed are repeatable and their configurations can be reproduced, a society of characters is in principle a society of repeatable and indeed replaceable individuals.

Characters, Rorty points out, don’t have identity crises because they aren’t expected to have a core unity beneath their assemblage of traits. What defines them is which of these traits become manifested, and this warrants the question of social context:

To know what sort of character a person is, is to know what sort of life is best suited to bring out his potentialities and functions… Not all characters are suited to the same sorts of lives: there is no ideal type for them all… If one tries to force the life of a bargainer on the character of a philosopher, one is likely to encounter trouble, sorrow, and the sort of evil that comes from mismatching life and temperament. Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic… Two individuals of the same character will fare differently in different polities, not because their characters will change through their experiences (though different aspects will become dominant or recessive) but simply because a good fit of character and society can conduce to well-being and happiness, while a bad fit produces misery and rejection.

Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice in Wonderland

Rorty’s central point about character takes it out of the realm of the literary and the philosophical, and into the realm of our everyday lives, where the perennial dramas of who we are play out:

“To be a character” is to maintain a few qualities, nourish them to excess until they dominate and dictate all others. A character is delineated and thus generally delimited. To “have character” is to have reliable qualities, to hold tightly to them through the temptations to swerve and change. A person of character is neither bribed nor corrupted; he stands fast, is steadfast.

[…]

Because characters are public persons, even their private lives can have universal form, general significance. The dramatic character, writ large, can represent for everyman what only later came to be thought of as the inner life of some; it can portray the myth, the conflicts, reversals and discoveries of each person, each polis.

After characters come figures, which Rorty describes as “characters writ large,” “defined by their place in an unfolding drama.” Figures are allegorical archetypes — rather their being defined by their vocations or social roles, their traits originate in ancient stories. Rorty writes:

A figure is neither formed by nor owns experiences: his figurative identity shapes the significances of the events in his life.

[…]

Individuals who regard themselves as figures watch the unfolding of their lives following the patterns of their archetypes… They form the narratives of their lives and make their choices according to the pattern…

In contrast with the wholly external perspective on characters, the concept of a figure introduces the germ of what will become a distinction between the inner and the outer person. An individual’s perspective on his model, his idealized real figure, is originally externally presented, but it becomes internalized, becomes the internal model of self-representation.

This shift from self-discovery to active choice, to locus of agency, brings us to the person. Rorty writes:

A person’s roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system related to others. The person thus comes to stand behind his roles, to select them and to be judged by his choices and his capacities to act out his personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama.

The idea of a person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of person come together.

Central to the concept of the person — unlike the character and the figure — is the idea of free will, which springs from our capacity for making choices and implies the responsibility for those choices. Rorty explains:

If judgment summarizes a life … then that life must have a unified location. Since they choose from their natures or are chosen by their stories, neither characters nor figures need be equipped with a will, not to mention a free will… The actions of characters and figures do no emerge from the exercise of a single faculty of power: there is no need for a single source of responsibility… Persons are required to unify the capacity for choice with the capacities for action.

This very capacity, Rorty argues, is what defines personhood. But unlike the powers of characters, which exist on a spectrum, personhood is a binary notion — because it arises from responsibility, and in any given instance we are either liable or not, there are no degrees in personhood. The more obvious dark side to this binary conception is the sociopolitical one: Throughout its evolving understanding of what it means to be human, our civilization has systematically treated various classes of people — women, children, people of color — as less-than-persons by denying them basic human rights of choice. But there is also a private psychological downside to our capacity for choice, one that plays out from the inside out rather than the outside in. Rorty writes:

It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person. Here the stage is set for identity crises, for wondering who one really is, behind the multifold variety of actions and roles. And the search for that core person is not a matter of curiosity; it is a search for the principles by which choices are to be made.

Art by Oliver Jeffers from This Moose Belongs to Me, an illustrated parable of the paradox of ownership

One of these principles is the notion of property, which determines the rights and agency of persons, thus transforming them into selves and conferring upon them the status of souls and minds. Rorty writes:

The two strands that were fused in the concept of person diverge again: When we focus on persons as sources of decisions, the ultimate locus of responsibility, the unity of thought and action, we must come to think of them as souls and minds. When we think of them as possessors of rights and powers, we come to think of them as selves. It is not until each of these has been transformed into the concept of individuality that the two strands are woven together again.

[…]

When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self… The quality of an individual self is determined by his qualities: they are his capital, to invest well or foolishly.

In a sentiment that calls to mind young Sylvia Plath’s meditation on free will and what makes us who we are, Rorty considers the identity level of soul and mind:

Because persons are primary agents of principle, their integrity requires freedom; because they are judged liable, their powers must be autonomous. But when this criterion for personhood is carried to its logical extreme, the scope of agency moves inward, away from social dramas, to the choices of the soul, or to the operations of the mind.

[…]

From character as structured dispositions, we come to soul as pure agency, unfathomable, inexpressible.

Echoing philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on the relationship between property-ownership, agency, and victimhood, Rorty considers the role of property in the conception of the self and its identity-crises in the face of alienation:

Judgments of persons are moral; judgments of souls are theological; judgments of selves are economic and political. Societies of persons are constructed to assure the rights of choice and action; they emerge from a contract of agents; societies of selves are also formed to protect and guarantee the rights of their members. But when the members of a society achieve their rights by virtue of their possessions, the protection of rights requires the protection of property, even though in principle everyone is equally entitled to the fruits of his labors and protection under law.

[…]

The concerns of selves are their interests; their obligations are the duties with which they are taxed or charged. The grammar and the semantics of selfhood reveal the possessive forms. Whatever will come to be regarded as crucial property, or the means to it, will be regarded as the focus of rights; the alienation of property becomes an attack on the integrity if not actually the preservation of the self.

Art by Oliver Jeffers from Once Upon an Alphabet

Alongside property, the other essential component of the self is the faculty of memory, which, as Oliver Sacks has memorably demonstrated, is the seedbed of what makes us who we are to ourselves. Rorty writes:

The conscious possession of experiences [is] the final criterion of identity. The continuity of the self is established by memory; disputes about the validity of memory reports will hang on whether the claimant had as hers the original experience. Puzzles about identity will be described as puzzles about whether it is possible to transfer, or to alienate memory (that is, the retention of one’s own experience) without destroying the self.

Today, two generations later, this puzzle is all the more puzzling, for it illuminates the central paradox of the singularity movement and its escapist fantasy of somehow decentralizing, downloading, and transferring the self across different corporeal and temporal hosts. Rorty speaks to this indirectly but brilliantly:

There is difficulty in describing the core possessor, the owner of experiences who is not herself any set of them. One can speak of characters as sets of traits without looking for a center; but it is more difficult to think of bundles of properties without an owner, especially when the older idea of the person as an agent and decision-maker is still implicit. It is presumed that the self as an owner is also endowed with capabilities to choose and to act.

Out of this necessity to reconcile the ownership of experience with the capacity for choice arises the level of the individual. Rorty writes:

From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves — the divergence of practice from ideological commitments — comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.

Unlike characters and figures, individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Individuals are indivisible entities… Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. Although in its inception, individuality revives the idea of person, the rights of persons are formulated in society, while the rights of individuals are demanded of society. The contrast between the inner and outer person becomes the contrast between the individual and the social mask, between nature and culture.

A society of individuals is quite different from one composed of selves. Individuals contract to assure the basic rights to the development of moral and intellectual gifts, as well as legal protection of self and property. Because a society of individuals is composed of indivisible autonomous units, from whose natures — their minds and conscience — come the principles of justice, their rights are not property; they cannot be exchanged, bartered. Their rights and their qualities are their very essence, inalienable.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Louis I, King of the Sheep, an illustrated parable of power

Therein lies Rorty’s most important point — the integrity of our identity requires a locus of agency that is honored by the collective but cultivated in solitude. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s immortal defense of that integrity, Rorty writes:

Being an individual requires having a room of one’s own, not because it is one’s possession, but because only there, in solitude, away from the pressure of others, can one develop the features and styles that differentiate one’s own being from others. Integrity comes to be associated with difference; this idea, always implicit in individuality, of preserving one’s right against the encroachment of others within one’s own society, emerges as dominant… Conscientious consciousness is then the transparent eye that illuminates the substance of social life.

And yet there is a level of personhood that exists even above the individual — one that represents our highest mode of being, beyond the ego’s ambitions and preoccupations — the level of presence:

Presences [are] the return of the unchartable soul… They are a mode of attending, being present to [one’s] experiences, without dominating or controlling them.

[…]

Understanding other conceptions of persons puts one on the way of being them; but understanding presences — if indeed there is understanding of them to be had — does not put one any closer to being one. It cannot be achieved by imitation, willing, practice, or a good education. It is a mode of identity invented precisely to go beyond of achievement and willfulness.

Complement The Identities of Persons — the remaining essays in which examine various facets of the perplexity of personhood and come from such celebrated thinkers as Daniel Dennett, John Perry, and Ronald de Sousa — with Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of change, Hannah Arendt on being vs. appearing, Andre Gidé on what it really means to be yourself, and Parker Palmer on the six pillars of the integrated life.