Self

Use in the book

The difficulty of leaving the country is phrased as parting from oneself, balanced against leaving friends in Paris. This self-relation can sustain inward life. The social-disunion fragment instead makes ambition and love of well-being attach each person to themselves at others’ expense. The early warning that pain at another’s better treatment is not always jealousy further prevents a single moral diagnosis of every self-concern. The same reflexive direction can therefore appear as presence, hurt or enclosure.

Places to read

1. I, p. 34, entry 1, ¶1Unequal treatment can hurt without necessarily being jealousy.
2. I, p. 403, entry 2, ¶2Country life is described as companionship with oneself.
3. II, p. 911, entry 2, ¶2Self-attachment can accompany disunion from others.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains the friends/myself parallel and the repeated self-reference in the disunion passage. It does not replace the pronouns with an invented technical ego. The early “not always” should survive any summary of the jealousy maxim.

Use in the book

The self is not best known by inventorying private possessions or identifying the boundary of the body. Traherne asks the reader to consider the soul’s reach: its understanding can attend to distant places and ages, its affections can embrace persons it has never physically encountered, and its delight can increase through their happiness. To live by this power is to become one’s true self. The expansion does not simply add more objects to an unchanged owner. It changes the character of the person who enjoys them.

This is why the language of self-possession can coexist with an injunction to go out of oneself. Inward knowledge discloses capacities whose exercise is outward and communicative. The self impoverishes itself when it shuts those capacities within a merely private interest. Conversely, to acknowledge oneself as a receiver of gifts is a necessary beginning, because a person incapable of caring about his own good could not be moved by benefits or gratitude.

Traherne’s fullest statement identifies the true self with love in act rather than merely in power. Love here is not a passing feeling appended to a stable inner substance. It is the person’s powers realized in fitting relation to God, creatures, and other persons. Its range includes the past and the future because the objects of understanding and affection are not limited to the living company immediately present. The historical persons of Scripture can consequently become genuine objects of concern.

The claim is not that the individual is absorbed into an impersonal whole. Souls remain distinct sources of response, and another person’s happiness enriches mine precisely because it is another’s. Divine likeness increases the capacity for communion without making a creature identical with its creator. The considerable self-regard of these meditations therefore needs to be read through their social demand: the reader is to be treasured, but must also become a treasure to others.

Finally, the present self is corrigible. Its capacity may be obscured by false custom, its desire misdirected, and its love confined. The invitation to greatness is inseparable from the work of re-education. “True” does not mean whatever the speaker happens to feel most strongly; it means the person whose understanding, value, and love have come into accord with their proper objects.

Places to read

1. II.92The reader becomes the true self by living through the soul’s comprehensive greatness.
2. II.100The self is included among the real objects of felicity, without inward self-sufficiency being made its whole.
3. IV.55Self-love is a necessary basis that becomes dishonourable when isolated.
4. IV.67The true self is identified with love realized in act.
5. IV.85The soul’s distinct acts of love establish its reality as a fountain.

In this edition

Self and soul overlap here but are not mechanical substitutes. “Your true self” in II.92 and IV.67 is an evaluative claim about fulfilled personhood; it should not be modernized into a slogan about spontaneous authenticity.

Use in the book

In Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII, love is a need to leave oneself. The worshipping animal sacrifices and prostitutes itself, so dispersion includes devotion as well as appetite. Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII then makes God an inexhaustible common source of love. A simple rule that all outgoing feeling degrades the self cannot accommodate this divine availability.

Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII says the man of genius wants to be one, whereas ordinary love seeks escape in another body. Fame nevertheless demands a special prostitution that leaves the artist one. The self must reach others without surrendering its organizing singularity. Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII sharpens the contrary extreme: the artist never leaves himself. This is a deliberately absolute claim in a fragment that also opposes art to sexual potency, not a complete account of artistic sympathy.

The late instruction to enjoy memories ‘à deux’ in Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI challenges the privilege of solitary experience. It imagines sharing as a task still to be learned. Taken together, these notes make the problem ethical as well as aesthetic: how can a person preserve form while becoming capable of attachment?

Places to read

1. Mon cœur mis à nu XXIIIDe la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. — The initial pair makes dispersion and concentration mutually intelligible.
2. Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIILe besoin de sortir de soi. — Love is defined by an outward movement.
3. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIILa gloire, c’est rester un — Fame poses the problem of public circulation without dissolution.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu CXVIil faut en jouir à deux. — The final regimen asks for shared memory.

Translation in this edition

The 2026 English retains ‘vaporization and centralization of the Self’, preserving the physical and organizational metaphors and the capital on Self. ‘Concentration’ is a useful related concept but should not silently replace centralisation. Elsewhere ‘get outside oneself’ and ‘leaves himself’ keep the spatial language visible, allowing readers to recognize its changes of value.