Value for Wednesday of Week 43 in the season of Assessing

Being Authentic

Giorgione, Young Man (The Impassioned Singer) (1508-10)

To be our best selves, we must be who we are – we must be authentic.

What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, the most precious he has. . . . he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness — of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him . . . [Erich Fromm]
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. [William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act I, Scene 3: Lord Polonius to his son Laertes.]
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. [Rumi]
The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self. [Fred Rogers.]

“Authenticity is defined as being true to yourself . . .” “A number of philosophical and psychological theories suggest the true self is an important contributor to well-being.”

There is, of course, a difference between authenticity and stubbornness but no one can express herself fully or make his full contribution to the world except by being authentic. Each of us thinks we see a variety of truths. We may be right or wrong but unless we live according to our vision, we will never know. If we try to act in a way that does not seem right to us, we are not likely to be effective. We may make mistakes but through those mistakes, we can learn.

The same process drives science forward. As theories are tested and their flaws identified, the store of knowledge grows.

Real

True Narratives

Creative people do not necessarily live peaceful or contended lives. Here are some stories of people who walked energetically, if often tumultuously, along their own path.

Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, 2010), about how the rock star Patti Smith and her love Robert Mapplethorpe set their independent paths, together.

Other narratives on authenticity:

Jill Soloway, She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy (Crown Archetype, 2018): “ . . . it’s Soloway’s deeply considered and honestly depicted quest for an authentic self that gives this memoir its depth.”
Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2017): “At its simplest, it’s a memoir about being fat — Gay’s preferred term — in a hostile, fat-phobic world. At its most symphonic, it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways in which trauma, stories, desire, language and metaphor shape our experiences and construct our reality.”
Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021): “. . . a coming-of-age story that explores Black manhood and queerness in the Rust Belt”.
Caster Semenya, The Race to be Myself: A Memoir (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023): “. . . the Olympic runner tells the full story of her gender-based discrimination and dehumanization by the global athletics world.”
Lucy Sante, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition (Penguin Press, 2024): “The book presents a life in layered stages. We shift back and forth between present and past. The present has greater impact. We are with Sante as she tries on wigs, joins support groups, finds an endocrinologist and begins to take subcutaneous injections of estrogen. She practices sitting like a woman, to shake off what she thinks of as her lifelong imitation of masculinity.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex: A Novel (Picador, 2002): born a female, Calliope undergoes a sex-change operation and becomes Cal at age fourteen, after discovering a genetic abnormality that resulted in his sexual ambiguity.
Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol (New York Review Books, 2012): “Laughter in Czernopol had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity . . .”
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Bloomsbury, 1991): reflecting the author’s strict Pentecostal upbringing, the novel tells of a young woman who finds and pursues her own path.
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), a lesbian author’s musings about a lesbian woman’s search for self in Napoleon’s time.
Sheila Heti, Pure Color: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “. . . holds within it a taste of something that defies classification. As Heti writes: ‘There is something exciting about a first draft — anarchic, scrappy, full of life, flawed. A first draft has something that a second one has not.’ That something doesn’t always survive into the final product, but it is the artist’s purest self, unadulterated.”
Jane Pek, The Verifiers: A Novel (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022): “Are we surrendering to algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves? Are we trading our freedom of choice, thought, even desire, for convenience and fantasy? Are we becoming unable to tell, or even care, what’s real?”
Jennifer Egan, The Candy House: A Novel (Scribner, 2022), “takes its title from a repeated metaphor for temptation: the lures of amusement and nostalgia that Hansel-and-Gretel us into a spun-sugar edifice upon which we are invited to gorge and in which we — our desires, our memories — are also on the menu.”
Kristen Arnett, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2025): “Throughout the novel, clowns are framed as a way to explore queer identity and gender expression. Bunko is after all a cowboy and is referred to with male pronouns, though Cherry is a woman and referred to with female pronouns. But the way that clowns are reviled by the public at large is also explicitly compared with the queer experience . . .”

From the dark side:

T.J. Alexander, A Gentleman’s Gentleman: A Novel (Vintage, 2025): “Christopher Winterthrope, the orphaned Earl of Eden, must marry before his 25th birthday or lose his lands and title. Marriage is a complicated prospect, since Christopher is trans.”

Poetry

From the dark side:

Edgar Lee Masters, “Amos Sibley”
Edgar Lee Masters, “George Trimble”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

In music, adherence to the composer’s intent is a form of authenticity. In addition, a grounding in the music’s idiom also makes performance seem authentic. Adrian Boult was a British conductor whose output was authentic in both ways. Here is a link to his playlists.

Joaquín Rodrigo, Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) (approx. 24-28’) (list of recorded performances): “Its music seems to bring to life the essence of an eighteenth-century court, where aristocratic distinction blends with popular culture. In its melody the perfume of magnolias lingers, the singing of birds and the gushing of fountains.” “In summer, the Aranjuez gardens are beautiful, indeed. But such is the lure of Joaquín Rodrigo’s music that nowadays one cannot walk through its leafy avenues without thinking of the Aranjuez. The composer has mesmerized the world with his wonderful inspiration, and made Aranjuez his very own.” “'It should sound like the hidden breeze that stirs the treetops in the parks, as strong as a butterfly, as dainty as a verónica [a classic pass in bullfighting],' is how the composer described his concerto.” Top recorded performances are by de la Maza (Argenta) in 1948; Yepes (Alonso) in 1969; Bream (Gardiner) in 1974; de Lucia (Colomer) in 1991 ; Pepe Romero (Marriner) in 1992 ***; Kraft (Ward) in 1992; Barreuco (Domingo) in 1995; Ogden (Fujioka) in 1997; and Gallén (Valdés) in 2001.