To Live, Read Them
The Plural Life
There is a quiet violence in trying to be one thing only.
The world asks for it: pick a lane, pick a mood, pick a life story.
But if you listen carefully—if you press your ear against the cracked stone of literature—you hear something older and more frightening, and far more beautiful:
you were never meant to be one thing at all.
Inside you, there is a breath large enough for Whitman, a fever secret enough for Nin, a silence electric enough for Lispector, a structure stern enough for Beauvoir, a dread honest enough for Kierkegaard, and a clarity cool enough for Russell.
Inside you, there is space for contradiction, for expansion, for fire and form and fracture and becoming.
These writers are not ornaments for your bookshelf.
They are catalysts.
They will not flatter you.
They will enter your bloodstream and alter your chemistry.
They will shatter rooms inside you that you have spent your whole life pretending were whole.
To read them is not to admire them.
It is to walk into a cathedral half-lit by stars and half-lit by fires you yourself must tend.
If you dare to live all your facets—if you dare to be wide, and wrong, and wide again—then step forward.
These are the six who will help you build the world inside your ribs.
Walt Whitman — The Breath of the Self
You come first to the man who taught the world to breathe itself open.
Walt Whitman does not knock politely at the edges of your consciousness; he breaks them apart with a voice so large, so leafy, so shamelessly alive, that for a moment you wonder if you have been living at all.
He does not ask you to shrink your ambitions or temper your sensualities; he demands that you expand—your hunger, your mercy, your terror, your belonging.
Leaves of Grass is not a book, not really.
It is a lung pressed between pages, and if you read it properly, you must read it as he intended—not line by line, but breath by breath, like a body moving, gasping, shuddering into newness.
Whitman speaks from the place before self-consciousness was invented, where the soul is still enormous and permeable and full of morning light.
He does not see contradiction as a flaw.
He is vast enough to hold opposites inside himself without apology, and he invites you, too, to stop explaining yourself, to stop whittling yourself down into something palatable for smaller minds.
You are allowed to be too much.
You are allowed to be multitudes.
❝ Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) ❞
In Whitman’s world, existence itself is a prayer: a celebration of skin, of grass, of death, of touch, of time, of forgetting, of breathing.
And to read him is to remember that your life is not a career, or a costume, or a mistake—it is a hymn of being, unfolding, unstitching, expanding even now.
Essential Book: Leaves of Grass (particularly the "Song of Myself" sections)
Where to Begin: Read outdoors if you can.
Let the wind touch your skin while his words touch your lungs.
Anaïs Nin — The Erotic Mirror
You step now into a different air.
The light is dimmer here, the furniture velveted, the air stitched with scent.
Anaïs Nin does not greet you as Whitman does, arms flung wide in the sun.
She beckons you closer, until you are standing inside your own breath, until you realize it is not her reflection you are looking at—it is your own.
To read Nin is to feel language curling around sensation: thick as silk stockings, sharp as the click of a lighter, warm as a secret kept too long under the tongue.
She does not offer you morality.
She offers you experience—unfiltered, unmapped, dangerous, decadent.
In A Spy in the House of Love, and even more in the labyrinths of her diaries, she teaches a lesson most never dare to learn:
❝You are not singular.
You are a chorus of selves.
And every one of them must be given voice if you are to survive yourself.❞
Desire, for Nin, is not shameful or performative.
It is existential.
To want is to know.
To betray is to recognize.
To abandon is to affirm the multiplicity burning under the fiction of a single name.
There is something almost unbearable about the intimacy she demands.
You cannot read her and remain a spectator.
She requires that you move inward with her, into the gardens and basements and fevered rooms of memory and myth and unmet longing.
❝ I must be a mermaid... I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. ❞
Anaïs Nin will not let you live shallowly.
She will lower you into your own floodwaters, your half-truths, your scented masks, and then, softly, she will dare you to swim deeper still.
Essential Book: A Spy in the House of Love (for the fevered fiction) + The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I (for the raw, molten truth)
Where to Begin: Read at night. Preferably alone. Preferably somewhere a mirror can catch you forgetting who you are.
Clarice Lispector — The Unknowable Center
There is no easing into Clarice Lispector.
You fall, or you are seized.
The moment you open her pages, you feel the language folding, disintegrating, recoiling from its own weight.
Clarice does not write to narrate.
She writes as if language itself were a wound she is trying to enter with bare hands.
She is not here to charm you, or to guide you gently through plotlines.
She is here to crack the bone of perception, to open the hollow spaces inside the self where names fail, where gestures collapse, where the unformed cries louder than the finished.
In The Hour of the Star, you meet poverty, insignificance, awkwardness—not grand suffering, but the banal, humiliating hunger of being alive without vocabulary.
In The Passion According to G.H., you meet a cockroach and a woman and a collapse of all certainties.
Clarice’s sentences feel like walking into a church just after lightning has struck it.
The walls are still standing, but everything inside is burning, and you are asked to kneel anyway.
❝ Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. ❞
There is no safe way to read her.
There is only the surrender.
There is only the strange, electric sensation of seeing yourself—not as hero, not as victim—but as an unfinished thing, a trembling sentence not yet concluded.
Clarice Lispector teaches you that knowing yourself is not the end of the journey.
It is the beginning of collapse.
And it is holy.
Essential Book: The Hour of the Star (short but devastating) + The Passion According to G.H. (for those willing to lose footing entirely)
Where to Begin: Read somewhere sterile—an empty room, a white wall. No background noise. Let the words leave their own weather inside you.
Simone de Beauvoir — The Reckoning and the Naming
If Lispector strips you raw, Simone de Beauvoir stands you upright again, wipes the salt from your face, and hands you a pen.
There is nothing accidental about Beauvoir.
Her words move not like rivers, but like bridges—each one calculated, weighted, tested for tension, designed to carry you forward into spaces you did not know how to reach alone.
To read her is not to float.
It is to be forced to think where you would rather feel.
It is to encounter yourself not in metaphor, not in atmosphere, but in choice, in freedom, in responsibility.
In The Second Sex, she does not merely describe womanhood—she dissects its mythologies, pulling apart the fictions society whispers into bone, and demanding that you see your complicity, your inheritance, your refusal.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she offers the skeleton key to adulthood itself:
that freedom is not a gift, but a wager.
That to choose is to create value.
That to defer choice is to let the world harden around you without your consent.
❝ One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ❞
Every sentence she offers is a tool.
A hammer, a scalpel, a scaffolding pole.
There is tenderness in her work, yes, but it is the tenderness of someone who loves you enough to demand your birth into sovereign adulthood.
She will not shield you from the knowledge that freedom is frightening.
She will not save you from the realization that choosing means risking, failing, losing.
But if you stand where she points—if you bear the weight of the world she reveals—you will leave stronger than you ever imagined.
Not armored, but awake.
Essential Book: The Second Sex (start with the introduction and Part II if you feel daunted) + The Ethics of Ambiguity(for those seeking a philosophy of real, lived freedom)
Where to Begin: Read in a place where you can take notes. Beauvoir does not flow past you; she demands your active construction of meaning.
Søren Kierkegaard — The Dread of Freedom
You feel it before you even open his pages:
the tightening of the air, the slight tilt of the ground underfoot, the hush that falls over thought when you realize there are no longer any guardrails.
Søren Kierkegaard is not interested in comforting you.
He does not offer self-improvement or triumph.
He offers the confrontation: the slow, annihilating realization that to exist freely is to exist tremblingly.
In The Sickness Unto Death, he unearths despair not as a moment of sadness, but as the natural condition of a self aware of itself and horrified by its own infinite possibility.
To be conscious is to be capable of becoming anything—and to be capable is to know that becoming requires the annihilation of all false certainties.
Freedom, in Kierkegaard’s world, is not a prize.
It is a weight that can crack the ribs of the unprepared.
❝ Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. ❞
Yet he is not nihilistic.
Beneath the dread, there is a tender, burning faith: that if you can bear the vertigo, if you can step fully into the yawning freedom that terrifies you, you might find—
not comfort,
not security,
but a living relationship with the mystery itself.
He demands that you take the leap:
not a leap of evidence, not a leap of reason,
but a leap of existential fidelity—the willingness to act as if your life matters even when no proof is forthcoming.
To read Kierkegaard is to stand barefoot on the threshold between despair and devotion.
It is to understand that becoming whole is not about erasing fear.
It is about moving with it, eyes wide open, into the unnamed light.
Essential Book: Either/Or (for the battle between living beautifully and living rightly) + Repetition (for the impossibility and holiness of renewal) + Philosophical Crumbs (for the sharpest distillation of existential faith)
Where to Begin: Read when you are already a little unsettled. Read when you are strong enough not to demand answers, but brave enough to ask sharper questions.
Bertrand Russell — The Light at the End of Thought
There is a sharpness to Bertrand Russell, but it is not the sharpness of cruelty.
It is the sharpness of a mind that has burned away ornament, until only the essentials remain: truth, clarity, mercy.
If Kierkegaard is the vertigo of standing at the edge of freedom,
Russell is the cold, clean breath you take when you realize you can build bridges across that abyss—not with superstition, not with wishful thinking, but with the luminous precision of reason.
His writing never sneers.
It invites.
Even when he dismantles false comforts, he does it with the gentleness of someone who knows that confusion is not a failing, but a condition of being human.
In The Conquest of Happiness, Russell speaks with a humility few philosophers ever manage:
he does not pretend that life can be solved,
only that it can be better inhabited—through affection, curiosity, and work.
In The Problems of Philosophy, he does not hand you conclusions wrapped in marble,
but instead teaches you to live more elegantly with uncertainty—
to understand that knowledge is not a fortress, but a field in which light falls unevenly,
and that wisdom lies in learning to walk gracefully through that shifting glow.
❝ To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. ❞
Russell’s faith was not in systems.
It was in clear seeing.
In the belief that a mind stripped of vanity, paranoia, and prejudice could touch something clean and universal:
the joy of knowing,
the duty of honesty,
the slow, stubborn, radiant building of a life worth inhabiting.
To read Russell is to feel your breath even out.
To feel your posture straighten,
your gaze sharpen,
your small desperate clutches at certainty loosen.
It is to understand that to think clearly is not to think coldly.
It is, at its highest, an act of love.
Essential Book: The Conquest of Happiness (for the architecture of emotional sanity) + The Problems of Philosophy (for the foundation of reasoned wonder)
Where to Begin: Read in clear daylight, near a window, with something growing nearby—a plant, a tree, even a piece of sky. Let the clarity around you mirror the clarity unfolding within.
You were never meant to live as a single note, never meant to choose one mood, one shape, one narrow song and call it a life; you were built for multitudes, for contradictions, for the terrifying and beautiful task of holding breath and fever and dread and lucidity inside the same ribcage without flinching, to live as Whitman lived in wild open air, to burn as Anaïs burned behind the glass of memory, to fracture as Clarice fractured in the white-hot spaces where language gives way, to reckon as Simone reckoned with the harsh dignity of naming yourself, to tremble as Kierkegaard trembled on the edge of unbearable freedom, to clear yourself as Russell cleared himself until thought itself was a mercy and a mirror; you were never asked to be pure, you were only ever asked to become vast, and if you dare to read them, truly read them, you will not become them, you will become more completely, impossibly, beautifully yourself.
with love,
LUNABALM
There is a quiet violence in trying to be one thing only. The world asks for it: pick a lane, pick a mood, pick a life story. But if you listen carefully—if you press your ear against the cracked stone of literature—you hear something older and more frightening, and far more beautiful: you were never meant to be one thing at all.