themarginalian.org · 15 hours ago

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel – the Marginalian

In a short piece written for a Michigan newspaper in 1952, E.E. Cummings offered what may be the most honest account of what it costs to live as oneself - not as a romantic ideal, but as a daily, lifelong act of resistance. At the center of his advice is a distinction that cuts quietly to the bone: thinking, believing, and knowing are things we do as "a lot of other people," but feeling belongs to nobody but yourself, and it is feeling, Cummings insists, that is the whole of the matter. "To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." Maria Popova's reflection on Cummings situates his words within a lineage of thinkers who understood that conformity is not a modern invention, only a modern refinement - and that the courage to remain oneself has always required something closer to endurance than inspiration. What stays with the reader is not the difficulty Cummings describes, but the tenderness with which he calls it "the most wonderful life on earth."