I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself—not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence, which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart. (Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, by Mary Wollstonecraft).

This is a very long sentence, but philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft has a lot of thinking to do. It is a dawn morning in the summer of 1795 and Mary finds herself in the Swedish city of Gothenburg where has travelled on business for the sake of her notoriously inconstant lover, Gilbert Imlay. I say alone, but in fact she is with her baby daughter and her nursemaid, Marguerite, who sleeps calmly while she muses on the nature of her aloneness. Her thinking is tangled, bruised and thorny. Mary considers herself quite alone, as a particle broken off and floating free of community or kinship. If we jump over this long, unravelling passage and rush towards the next sentence — unhappiness in another is hard to face, and which of us isn’t keen to have it over with — we might think the enemy is futurity, the mean, withholding, pusillanimous future: ‘Futurity, what hast thou not to give to those who know that there is such a thing as happiness!’ This is a harsh retort to the ‘sympathetic emotion’ that would move things along towards something more hopeful.

Yet Mary is quick to identify with this binding, adhesive emotion, because it arrives despite her melancholic and misanthropic mood, bringing with it a sense of a ‘mighty whole’ that pushes her through the currents of her heart. Mary’s central figure is simple: this whole is a thread which keeps us altogether; a thread she is able to identify, trace and follow across the natural world, to the rocks outside her lodgings, ‘which looked as if they partook of the general repose.’

The whole world sleeps except Mary. Somehow, despite her urgent need for rest, Mary has been drawn unexpectedly back into the stream of life. She has been touched by that adhesive force, a quickening of her heart that moves her mind to stir and climb the dark rocks jutting through the sky. It is impossible to make short, sharp work of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thoughts, or indeed her sentences, because she writes in the style of someone in active conversation with herself — a restless woman roaming across the territories of her mind. She delivers her thoughts as a form of public address to herself, but also to nature. This sentence is a kind of ode to those dark rocks, ‘the rude materials of creation’ that look down upon her from across the restless sea, beckoning with an implacable force. Mary is wary of this dragging, alert, active thread: it is her own mind, but it is also the force of nature; it is the renewing force of hope. And one must be wary of that sometimes false friend who would carry us back towards a heart unready to receive our needs: the cruel proportions of an inconstant reality that sometimes says yes, and sometimes NO!

For John