themarginalian.org · 3 hours ago

The Moomin Strategy for Living with Uncertainty – the Marginalian

Tove Jansson built her beloved Moomin world from the inside out - rooting its wisest character, Too-ticky, in the person she loved most, the Finnish sculptor Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner for life during an era when that love had to be lived quietly or not at all. What Jansson encoded in Too-ticky's laconic philosophy is something harder to come by than cleverness: a genuine ease with not knowing, a willingness to sit with the world as it is rather than rage against what it withholds. "All things are so very uncertain," Too-ticky says, "and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured." Maria Popova's close reading of *Moominland Midwinter* reveals how Jansson used a children's story to hold the full weight of adult reckoning - with death, with evolution, with the slow, unglamorous work of becoming - trusting that young readers could bear it and that older ones needed it. There is something quietly radical in the idea that the most loving thing one can offer another person is not shelter from difficulty but the honest reminder that "one has to discover everything for oneself."