{"id":12506,"date":"2026-03-01T21:12:03","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T01:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/tove-jansson-on-the-worm-and-the-art-of-self-renewal-the-marginalian-2\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T21:12:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T01:12:03","slug":"tove-jansson-on-the-worm-and-the-art-of-self-renewal-the-marginalian-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/tove-jansson-on-the-worm-and-the-art-of-self-renewal-the-marginalian-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Tove Jansson on the Worm and the Art of Self-Renewal \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Trauma,<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature \u2014 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. \u201cNothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,\u201d Tove Jansson<\/a> (August 9, 1914\u2013June 27, 2001) writes in her almost unbearably wonderful 1972 masterpiece The Summer Book<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), written in the wake of her mother\u2019s death. <\/p>\n

Jansson\u2019s observation here is literal: Her protagonist \u2014 a little girl named Sophia, who is living on a small Nordic island with her elderly grandmother after her mother\u2019s death \u2014 finds herself thinking about what it\u2019s like to be a worm, fabled to go on living two new lives when split in half. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Worms \u2014 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 \u2014 dwell in the popular imagination as a living metaphor for regeneration, for turning trauma into redoubled life. (Here, poetic truth and scientific fact diverge \u2014 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 \u2014 a tiny invertebrate belonging to the phylum Platyhelminthes<\/em>, separate from earthworms \u2014 is the more scientifically accurate metaphor, for it can regrow its entire body<\/a> from the smallest cut fragment.)<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Wondering about what it may be like for the worm to be cut in half, Sophia discovers one of life\u2019s elemental truths \u2014 that the price of all growth is pain, but the pain passes and the growth remains:<\/p>\n

\n

The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don\u2019t know how much it hurts. And we don\u2019t know, either, if the worm is afraid it\u2019s 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\u2019s not fair to say it\u2019s too little, or it only has a digestive canal, and so that\u2019s why it doesn\u2019t hurt. I am sure it does hurt, but maybe only for a second.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\n

They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn\u2019t know how, that is, in what way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting the Audubon Society.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Couple with some enduring wisdom on control, surrender, and the paradox of self-transcendence<\/a> from another of Jansson\u2019s vintage children\u2019s books, then revisit her breathtaking love letters<\/a> to the love of her life.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}