I don’t know how I stumbled upon Any Person Is Only The Self, a book of essays by Elisa Gabbert. Most likely I was looking for an audiobook to listen to on my way to work and this one was highly rated, I guess, so my library algorithm propelled it to my face. The cover image informed me that the author (or editor, or whoever makes the final decision about cover images) had good taste, the same taste as me that is.
Two essays in (about 18 minutes into my 30-minute commute) and I know that Gabbert might be my soulmate. Sorry to my real soulmate, Adam. Books hit Gabbert in the same way they hit me. I wonder what these essays read like to someone who doesn’t like to read. It might be like me reading essays on the personally transformative power of math equations. Or like those videos of how English sounds to non-English speakers. When I was a kid I thought of this often: when I speak, like “Hi there, Becky,” I sound like the churning of broken machinery to someone else. Meaningless.
In one of her essays, Gabbert talks about reading Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as part of her “Stupid Classics Book Club” and uncovers that it’s not stupid, though it has been rendered cartoonish by over a century of interpretation. Jekyll describes himself as “radically both”–both the Good and the Bad, not eclipsed by one. It’s not like he slipped on Hyde temporarily, he was Hyde. And he was Jekyll. So much depends on this truth. The world may spin around it. But it’s only two words in a novella written in 1886.
I can chew on this for days now. It’s like getting a complicated Lego set for my children. They’ll be occupied and focused, noiseless. Like them, I will be occupied and noiseless as I think on these words: “Radically Both.” I will ponder them until they become a shiny, hard string woven into everything I write and think from here on out.
Because I am radically both, radically all. I am the reader and the writer, the meaningful and meaningless, the bark and the leaves, all tangled. The mother and the baby. These words are so silly in their separateness because they only have meaning next to each other. I only have meaning next to my meaninglessness. I only have a future because of my past. This is so obvious it goes without mentioning but if everyone who thought that kept their mouths shut then we’d have nothing out there to read and chew on.
