There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warning. This is the price of consciousness, which makes living both difficult and urgent. "Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment," Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) writes in her almost unbearably wonderful 1972 masterpiece The Summer Book (public library), written in the wake of her mother's death.
Jansson's observation here is literal: Her protagonist — a little girl named Sophia, who is living on a small Nordic island with her elderly grandmother after her mother's death — finds herself thinking about what it's like to be a worm, fabled to go on living two new lives when split in half.
Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener.
Worms — those humblest of creatures, which Darwin regarded with absolute amazement and celebrated as the unsung sculptors of the biosphere, having tilled and fertilized the Earth as we know it — dwell in the popular imagination as a living metaphor for regeneration, for turning trauma into redoubled life. (Here, poetic truth and scientific fact diverge — in reality, most earthworms, of which there are more than 1,800 species, have a distinct head and tail; if cut in the middle, some species can regrow a new tail from the head half and go on living, but the tail half dies. Perhaps the planarium flatworm — a tiny invertebrate belonging to the phylum Platyhelminthes, separate from earthworms — is the more scientifically accurate metaphor, for it can regrow its entire body from the smallest cut fragment.)
Still, the poetic image of the cleaved worm that goes on living is a fertile thought experiment for how we may think about those most sundering experiences.
Wondering about what it may be like for the worm to be cut in half, Sophia discovers one of life's elemental truths — that the price of all growth is pain, but the pain passes and the growth remains:
The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don't know how much it hurts. And we don't know, either, if the worm is afraid it's going to hurt. But anyway, it does have a feeling that something sharp is getting closer and closer all the time. This is instinct. And I can tell you this much, it's not fair to say it's too little, or it only has a digestive canal, and so that's why it doesn't hurt. I am sure it does hurt, but maybe only for a second.
It always hurts to grow twice as alive. And the question is always what are you going to do with your new uncharted life. Jansson imagines this is the ultimate challenge of the worm halves as they come to live as reborn wholes:
They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn't know how, that is, in what way.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
Couple with some enduring wisdom on control, surrender, and the paradox of self-transcendence from another of Jansson's vintage children's books, then revisit her breathtaking love letters to the love of her life.
The Coziest Place on the Moon
An illustrated fable about how to live with loneliness and what it means to love
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