The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa used 137 aliases, or heteronyms, as he called them, to manifest his many writerly personae. About this multifarious crowd, contributor Nolan Kelly observes “all they have in common, across various forms and styles, is a shared belief in the unknowability of the self and the porousness of all identities.”

Philosophers have long posited self-knowledge as a foundational necessity for a moral life. But what if that goal is not merely illusive but impossible? The very notion of a self may be a comforting fiction, a tale we tell to mitigate our fear of mutation, even dissolution. “We are merely ashes,” Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet, “endowed with a soul, lacking any shape, not even that of water, which takes the shape of the glass containing it.” 

Perhaps, though, there is solace, even pleasure to be found in this shapelessness. A sense of inexhaustible possibility. Today we aren’t bound by who and what we were the day before. This, too, may be a fiction. Yet it’s one that tilts against certainty, in particular moral certainty. An understanding of the self such as Pessoa’s might prove a useful corrective in this moment of dire convictions.