{"id":4645,"date":"2023-10-21T04:22:05","date_gmt":"2023-10-21T08:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/jane-hirshfields-playful-and-poignant-poem-about-bearing-our-human-condition-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-10-21T04:22:05","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T08:22:05","slug":"jane-hirshfields-playful-and-poignant-poem-about-bearing-our-human-condition-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/jane-hirshfields-playful-and-poignant-poem-about-bearing-our-human-condition-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane Hirshfield\u2019s Playful and Poignant Poem About Bearing Our Human Condition \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

A human being is a living constellation of contradictions, mostly opaque to itself. \u201cInward secret creatures,\u201d Iris Murdoch called us in reckoning with the blind spots of our self-knowledge<\/a>. \u201cHumans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves,\u201d philosopher Am\u00e9lie Rorty wrote as she examined what makes a person<\/a> \u2014 a self-conception shaped by our astonishing evolutionary inheritance, which took us from bacteria to the Benedictus<\/em> in a mere minute on the clock-face of the cosmos; a self-conception distorted by an ego that habitually confuses who we wish we were for who we are, redeemed only by the courage to know ourselves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A generation after Maya Angelou captured these flickering contradictions in her poem \u201cA Brave and Starling Truth,\u201d<\/a> which sailed into space to remind us that \u201cwe are neither devils nor divines,\u201d Jane Hirshfield<\/a> cracks open this eternal question of what it means to be a person in a lovely poem from her collection The Asking: New and Selected Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n