To Be a Person: Jane Hirshfield’s Playful and Poignant Poem About Bearing Our Human Condition

“To be a person may be possible then, after all.”

A human being is a living constellation of contradictions, mostly opaque to itself. “Inward secret creatures,” Iris Murdoch called us in reckoning with the blind spots of our self-knowledge. “Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves,” philosopher Amélie Rorty wrote as she examined what makes a person — a self-conception shaped by our astonishing evolutionary inheritance, ...