We have said above that a person is given at birth not ‘abilities’ for something definite, but undivided forces, a certain irrational restlessness. Their manifestation we call a ‘gift’. In order for the ‘gift’ to take place, this restlessness must meet with an external form. Not only talent, however, but also the soul itself needs a form. Education (in the broad sense of culture) brings it out of the state of undivided unity that precedes thought, feeling and word.

A human being is not a ‘blank slate’ on which everything that the educator wants to write can be written. The soul does not come into the world empty. It is not a form waiting for its content, but content in search of its form.  Initially its content has no means of expression and is known only to itself. Not everyone remembers their early childhood. Freud speaks altogether of the ‘forgetting of childhood’ as a general rule. This memory error allows the child’s personality to be seen as an empty box waiting to be filled. In fact, the child already has all the content of the complexly dissected ‘adult’ inner life — in an undivided, merged form, more as a question than as an answer.

If ‘cognition is remembering’, then development is the gradual recognition of the self, not in one image, but in a multitude of disparate reflections. These reflections are given by culture. The soul approaches culture as a mirror, finding in it an ennobled and complicated image of itself. The union of soul and culture is personality.

With all this said, form is not self-sufficient. Personality is a child of form, but in any case is nourished by the forces of the soul. ‘Form’ does not abolish ‘soul’, but directs its forces in narrow ways.

Sense and thought are primarily nurtured by books. Among our educators there are more absentees than present ones. (I did not, by the way, mention ‘feeling’ for nothing. Feeling, too, must be learnt. Behind every feeling is the experience of its meaning. A developed personality is distinguished by attention to meaning in everything, and in its feelings as well.)

One of the joys of reading is to learn about oneself, one’s thoughts and motivations in a side branch of thought, in a small remark. The most ‘nourishing’ authors for the mind are those who have many such side thoughts. Fiction is not philosophy; but all significant works are not without wisdom (if we understand by wisdom the truths about man and life). Nabokov’s prose, almost devoid of thoughts (‘tasty but insubstantial’, as Protopresbyter Schmemann puts it), is rather an exception in Russian literature.

For all the overwhelmingly important, exclusive influence of culture, it must be emphasised that form is not coercive; it does not subjugate, but makes the soul fall in love with itself, and this falling in love is due to an inner affinity. In cultural forms we find ourselves, only in a purified, clarified, complexly divided form.

Our inner city is built by external culture. But what is left of my inner world if we take away the memories, the influences, the forms? What remains is what lies beneath its surface, to which art and beauty appeal, from which inspiration springs. The initial childish perception of things; the sensations of a fearless and curious lump of light, facing a warm, not threatening, but mysteriously peaceful darkness; the core of the personality, living even before the separation of word and feeling; in a word, the soul.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Twilight Time.

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