The Most Unsettling Inscription I've Ever Found on the Inside Cover of a Used Book, Bar None

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul from a secondhand bookstore. If you don’t remember this book in particular (it was a bestseller in 1992), you might be familiar with similar titles that were also part of the pop-archetypal psychology, post-James Hillman boom of the 80s and 90s: Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With The Wolves, Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men¹, Marion Woodman’s The Pregnant Virgin, etc.

It’s the sort of book with sentences like “The act of entering into the mysteries of the soul, without sentimentality or pessimism, encourages life to blossom forth according to its own designs and with its own unpredictable beauty,” any appreciation of which will depend entirely on your taste for that sort of thing. “That sort of thing” being pretty difficult to pull off, I ought to add, because a lot of profound spiritual truths can sound pretty trite. I don’t mean to knock Moore for it.

But the annotations inside the front and back covers are what sold me, rather than the contents of the book itself, and I would gladly have paid three times as much to possess them. Whoever owned this book before me did not write a single word in the margins of the text, did not underline a single sentence, did not dog-ear a single page. They wrote only before and after.

Here’s the text on the inside front cover:

I can do hard things

There is always more to learn

mistakes help me learn

is this my best work?

I can learn!

I will take a break and try again

I am smart

I will be present in every moment

I am kind

I am brave

I am beautiful

Today is a great day

I choose my choices

I am stronger than I know

I am confident in my skills and gifts.

Working towards my goals consistently is easy for me

I see my goals clearly

I am grateful for each moment of this life that I am blessed with.

The past has no power over me anymore

Peaceful sleep awaits me in dreamland

---

As it happens, I have a lot more patience for this kind of self-motivating journaling than I do for Jungian semi-secular “spiritual” writing. I find it entirely poignant, entirely human, perfectly self-aware and tongue-in-cheek. One writes it without entirely believing it, of course, but there is something satisfying about the very image of “Peaceful sleep awaits me,” that almost serves as well as a night of peaceful sleep itself.

My wife Grace has very little patience for this kind of thing, and told me she found it more upsetting than the inscription on the back; I do agree there’s something monstrous about writing “I will be present in every moment” and “The past has no power over me anymore” — but it’s a kind of monster I don’t mind, and think can be nevertheless useful to a right-thinking person, if handled skillfully.

After this section, as I said, the rest of the text is entirely free from mark-ups. Whatever sections might have inspired this reader were not recorded. Then, on the back cover, there is this:

A nightmare

Hell

Show me hell

and give me

a nightmare

today and

tomorrow and

honestly show and give it to me forever

I don’t know whether reading Care of the Soul caused this reader to give up all faith in self-help, or whether writing something relentlessly positive in the front and something relentlessly despairing in the back was a purposeful exercise. Possibly it wasn’t the book that caused this mental shift, but something off the page, and in their personal life, occurred just as they were finishing it.

Possibly they were paraphrasing St. Silouan the Athonite, whose “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not” also served as an epigraph to Gillian Rose’ Love’s Work, which is certainly in conversation with the post-Hillman archetype crowd, although better by miles.²

At any rate, if you’re looking for a shorter version of how to care for the soul, you could do worse than to meditate on “I can do hard things, There is always more to learn, mistakes help me learn, is this my best work? I can learn! I will take a break and try again” in the morning, and on “A nightmare, Hell, Show me hell, and give me a nightmare” in the evening. It should protect you from toppling into preciousness on the side of either melancholy or positivism, and that’s no small gift.

1. I’m still looking for sources the claim that the two had a “friendly correspondence,” incidentally, if you’ve got any light to shed on the subject.

2. My problem with Gillian Rose is that I like that sort of thing, but half the time I don’t understand it. My other problem with Gillian Rose is that she should have been allowed to transition as a child.