From the Editor's Desk

You Are a Wonder, You Are a Nobody, You Are an Ever-Drifting Ship: Melville on the Mystery of What Makes Us Who We Are

“The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth,” the poet Robert Penn Warren wrote in his impassioned and insightful challenge to the notion of “finding yourself” — something the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert captured half a century later in his memorable quip about our blind spots of becoming: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Two millennia after Plutarch probed what makes you you in his enduring thought experiment, two decades before Nietzsche admonished that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” and a century before James Baldwin turned to the sea for existential evidence that nothing in this world is fixed, including us, Melville considers the myriad twists and turns, the forward leaps and backward steps, the detours and digressions by which the story of life tells itself through us. At the heart of his meditation is a warning: We must set ourselves free from the illusion that there is a steady vector of personal growth, along which we glide unperturbed toward some final completeness, where we at last become our fully realized selves and where life is at last permanently becalmed. He writes:

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