The Shapers of Ourselves

Last evening, I was listening to Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, whose music is a delight to hear. Most recently, he composed the soundtrack to the film The Theory of Everything, but I have known and listened to his alternately haunting and moving music for years before that. His powers are on full display in his Fordlandia album, music inspired by the failed experiment of Henry Ford, such as this extended piece below.

It made me wonder just what it is about the character of Iceland that has crafted artists like Johannsson, like Sigur Ros or Olafur Arnalds. For that matter, what was it about Russia that crafted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Not too many years ago, some doyens of English literary criticism insisted that the work of an author was to be analyzed without the context of the author's life, which would also exclude considering the larger culture at the time. This was a paltry view, to my mind, for we are products of our culture and do not exist independently of it. We may not often be aware of how what we think, what we value, and even how we say what we say, is shaped by the culture in which we live, flowing around us often unseen. If you could have taken Dostoevsky and put him in England instead of Russia, he would not have become the Dostoevsky we know. He may still have been a writer, but growing up in England might have meant that he ended up sounding more like Dickens or Conrad.

This is to my mind one of the problems with the idea that we alone are the shapers of our own destiny. We exist only in context of that which is around us, the I that we know ourselves as shaped by countless factors we do not even consider. We are shaped not only by the culture in which we live, but by our biology, by the long history of evolution on this planet. We are shaped by the environment around us, by the parents we have, by the school we go to and the friends we make. All of these factors and more come together to create who we are in this moment. 

Oftentimes in an age where more of us are living alone, where we continue to separate out, cocooned in our own lives and wrapped around our own devices even in a room full of other people, it is easy to feel a tinge of loneliness. We may be alone at the moment, but we do not exist alone. Science no longer supports the idea of a Great Chain of Being, but has revealed something infinitely more complex and beautiful. We exist as part of a great, ever-branching tree of life, related to every other living thing in the world, and all the extinct ones too. The DNA that shapes who we are is part of an unbroken thread that goes back to the very first spark of life on the planet, the elements that make up our bodies going back to the death of the very oldest stars in the universe. 

We are, in a very real sense, a part of this world, and the atoms that have come together to make up our bodies will go on in other forms long after we ourselves do not exist, the energy that propels us recycled back into the environment that created us. While we are here, we play a part, however small, in shaping the world as we've found it, and that world, that culture, shapes those who come after. Not immortality in the sense that so many have longed for and sought, but it is an oddly hopeful thought nonetheless.