An Essay on Kindred Spirits

You either get it or you don't? A bad solipsistic essay.

I. Not lovers, I don’t think.

You could define a kindred spirit as the platonic version of true love.

But between you and I, this will not quite do. (I like to address you candidly, and, reader, I am in a good mood with you today.) To define it thus would be an oversimplification. The term is less specific than that. For a relationship to be able to be termed true love (or to fall short of the epithet, contrariwise) suggests, by necessity, supremacy and apotheosis. Singularity—like the idea of there being one true God. It suggests that you can have just one kindred spirit: they are yours and you are theirs.

Whereas with the case of two kindred spirits, you might not be soulmates. An association of kindred spirits is not about necessarily perfectly complementing each other as life partners. You share a similar delight in the world and you abide by similar principles and philosophies: in a word, you have an overlapping weltanschauung.

The term refers, plurally, to that magical demographic of people who you will meet throughout your life and in potentially unexpected locations, who understand you without trying; who experience the world through a similar gamut of emotions, felt in similar titrations of intensity.

A kindred spirit is someone who you find yourself habitually saying more than you had intended to say about yourself around. You almost couldn’t help yourself. And when you finally recollect yourself and promptly shut up, you do not feel nakedly exposed by the blunder. Instead you are feeling somewhat relieved. For your patient listener did not merely move through the niceties of sympathy, or level a few throwaway comments your way—rather you felt that they understood what you were getting at. They recognised your motivations behind certain decisions that perhaps even your family had drawn a blank at. You do not feel you are justifying yourself to a kindred spirit—nor would you feel obliged to do so either.

Now, will you forgive me if I leave off semantics for now—is this homemade definition enough for you to be getting by with? Just this little while.

I daresay that that elderly lady waiting beside you at the bus stop might prove to be a kindred spirit of yours. She, that unlikely suspect—she with the bunioned hands heavy and clinking with valueless rings, with her coarse hair always permed (she loves talking to the young hairstylists; it makes her feel less isolated) and her stain of red lipstick determinedly applied each morning—despite her wrists wracked with arthritis and the discouragement of the tremors. Yes, she with the wicked though whipsmart tongue and the roaring laugh—yes, she is a good match for you and the needs of your soul just as much as the girl of the same age and tax bracket, who lives a block away from you, who became your best friend.

You might, if you are lucky, marry a kindred spirit. One can make no guarantees in this kind of transaction. The foolhardy young investor knows in theory that ‘capital is at risk’ when he speculates and ventures his money. But he is delighted with himself and his daring-do. He’s going to make so much money, this is the next big thing, yeah?And so, buoyed along by manospheric djinn, he sinks his money in a start-up which has the quippiest copy and which mentions all the right corporate buzzwords when pitching itself, but yields no good returns. Avarice smited. May we all hope to have good discernment visited unto us in matters of money and love. Unfortunately, you may mistake your soulmate for a virtuosic chimera—the best of its graduating class, the valedictorian. You marry that changeling asp with a forked tongue and a warp in their soul and thereafter proceed to repent of the mésalliance bitterly.

However, it may be predestined for you that you discover a kindred spirit later in life. Shell of a man though you are—we find you with your arms folded on a bar and your head laid atop them in desolation, a puddle of spilt beer wet beneath your elbow. The very picture of pity. But there was hope for you anyhow. Just like the machines at the Wimbledon tennis matches which spit pelting torpedoes of tennis balls, life and God had more souls waiting in the wings to launch at you. Cup your hands out to catch them.

But enough of marriage and those lesser-spotted twin flames, for kindred spirits usually take that overlooked form of a friend. They may even only ever be an acquaintance—nevertheless someone you share a moment of clear-sighted understanding with. You might encounter one by happenstance, serving you at the pharmacist’s or the supermarket. And if it is so written for you both, together you might enter into a thoroughly fulfilling friendship with them.

Mistake me not—it would be sensible to befriend a kindred spirit should you be so fortunate as to have one presented before you, but you can also simply enjoy a fleeting connection for what it is. Letting it go without putting up a fight after the meeting is over and the moment has dissipated. Retracting your claws from where you’d held on; maturely surrendering stolen possessions in an amnesty.

Sometimes a kindred spirit really is just someone you cross paths with once. A brief encounter on a train station platform with another person. You both realise that your train has been delayed, but suddenly the inconvenience transforms into a half-hour of scintillating conversation when you are placed in the proximity of a kindred spirit. Coaxing the hapless bureaucracy behind train management into something altogether more beautiful and humane. That’s the point: a virtual stranger can—if you bother to look—and if you lift a scalpel and gingerly slice at their surface with surgical dexterity—reveal themselves to be someone so similar to yourself. The piqued curiosity of an old physician gratified. (Naturally an acolyte of Vesalius; a white-whiskered visage of ardent learning; proprietor of many well-thumbed books—all read and digested and pored over in the half-light of his study in sixteenth-century Venice.) (Forget the old man though, and summon up the image of a lieutenant; moustachioed and wearing a very starched shirt, with clear grey eyes and a terse affectionless voice. Newly promoted and therefore especially unforgiving towards mistakes or lackadaisical behaviour as he tries valiantly to distance himself from the lower ranks. He is going to issue you an order and you would do well to heed it.)

Pedal backwards through time. Set life in retrograde back to your childhood. Think of all the little children you befriended once upon a time and then never saw again. You may not even remember their names any longer. Nevertheless, you spent a summer’s afternoon together at the beach or the playground, arm looped in arm, secrets confessed and tittered at, games invented and acted out, stories prattled, tiny bleating hearts opened to one another. Between children there is no needless small talk, no awkward niceties appendaged to conversation, no hang-ups and no hesitation. Young children become friends so quickly and so uncomplicatedly.

But then, alas, a parent swoops in and severs those purest bonds.

The death-knell chimes: ‘It’s time to go home.’ Whisked away and dolefully herded back into their cars: little defiant bodies strapped into their car-seats. The more expressive children cry: bottom lips threaten a snivelling mutiny. But the more tranquil children bear their tragedy more resolutely. And their sweet little friendship, tender in its infancy, has exhausted itself in one brief show of over-exertion. Like the mayfly in his shiny copper overcoat who is born to live and love and die all in the space of twenty four hours.

Here we breach some dubious metaphysics. We begin to ignite debate on theories (ruses?) like love at first sight. Ludicrous thought. This would have been a tricksy juncture to begin with (metaphysics always are) but the whole affair is made more hazardous by a pyromaniac’s streak of fearless mischief, by our willingness to grapple with it. Believing in love at first sight, or the idea that some relationships were meant to be—I reckon this is probably healthy in small doses. It keeps us from overmuch embitterment.

And obviously it’s very nice to believe in these things, but then again I don’t know how far we get by operating on schemata of niceness. It might make us too gullible, too ingenuous. (There’s a whole sermon to be written on whether man ought to believe something purely because it is pleasing to do so…) Therewith I promptly crumple up this particular lecture, and toss it without attachment into the wastepaper basket.

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II. Passionate writers.

One of the last relics of childhood that I cling to is my belief in happy ever afters. Unfortunately, I do believe in true love and I do believe in kindred spirits. A credo of the fairy-tale and a ministry of wishful thinking. Fantasist’s chicanery.

And I surrender and laugh at myself for this foible amusedly—it is full-grown naïveté on my part and this I know well. Aping the innocence of childhood doesn’t always feel particularly practical in modern society. I sometimes think my values have been too much fashioned by the diet of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books I was read as a girl. Unwittingly I have been catechised into thoughts at odds with much of the world I move in, a world which emphasises an abundance mindset. Always keep striving, keep looking for better places and better people. Always be transitory and detached—just pass through—don’t get too close to anyone—social dilettantism.

Meanwhile I am so… I’m so easily contented. It’s pathetic. I have no muscle in me to strive forward nor upward with. No gumption. Look, if I were a choice piece of fish, pan-fried and christened with a gleaming lick of butter, and were to be then plated and placed before a lithe French waiter, he would not be able to find a spine to relieve me of. No deboning necessary. I am served to the poor sod who ordered me pallid and glistening, a morsel to be forgotten as soon as the is Pinot Grigio is quaffed.

Not much is needed to make me happy. As I shall explain later, this is both a good and bad thing.

Give me a pen and paper and I am quite taken care of—I have always been that way. Growing up behind the counter of my mother’s little shop, sitting cross-legged in my gingham school summer dresses, I would cover acreages’ worth of land in A4 paper, snaffled from the printer, marauder’s plunder.

In one of the first parenting books, Practical Education (1798), married couple Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth discuss how best to structure a child’s play time. What toys should you give them—or strictly not give them?

Ideally, children will not be given toys like doll-houses (‘baby-houses’). No. Spare the rod and spoil the child—correspondingly, if you err and let said child play with toys, you shall ruin their ‘natural vivacity and ingenuity’ forevermore. Children instead ‘require to have things which exercise their senses or their imagination, their imitative, and inventive powers.’ If a child is read to with books containing printed illustrations—likenesses of the objects which fill the world they inhabit and are daily beginning to understand more and more—then eventually ‘children will probably wish to try their own powers of imitation. At this moment no toy, which we could invent for them, would give them half so much pleasure as a pencil.’¹

Sometimes customers in my mother’s shop would bring children with them. I was always quite an exhibit to these children, a creature of great fascination. A shop-girl. Look, she’s allowed behind the counter! Great mystery!

On occasion, I also used to sit in the shop windows, where my mum carefully displayed finely-dressed mannequins among other wares. I used to clamber in to sit and think. Once, an elderly lady thought I was a doll and almost bought me. (That’s another story and one I had almost forgotten until now.)

Many of these children would talk to me and I’d play with them. My mum was a very good mother, and she always used to ensure I had plenty to do—bounteous hoards of pens, paper, and storybooks. She set up a collapsible table for me (and somewhat liable it was to collapse too, sending pens rolling) in one of the two changing-rooms for customers to try on her clothes. So sometimes children, bored with waiting for their mothers to finish their shopping, would come and pester me instead. Great sport for them. Many of them showed suggestions of being kindred spirits, I don’t doubt.

Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime. So the adage goes. And I do believe that if you give a child a pencil, in turn you shall rear a thinking being which is able to entertain itself with scant supplies. Unfortunately you also run the risk of raising a quiet-spirited daughter without any entrepreneurial drive, who asks only to be allowed to write and read as much as she pleases.

As a woman I will be easy to tame. If rescued from the dog kennel, a simple sign above my cage: ‘MONGREL. DOES NOT BITE. BIT SCARED OF OTHER DOGS BUT OTHERWISE FINE. FREE OF CHARGE.’ A breeze to domesticate. I’ve said before that beyond my love for writing, I find it hard to be ambitious.

Other people seem to have roaring appetites for success. Ghrelin diffuse in their blood—whilst I don’t know how to crave corporate victory; I don’t hunger after it in the slightest. I like writing and that’s about it. That much is probably hideously apparent. I’m not a good writer but you can tell I delight in it by the fact that I am incapable of phrasing something simply. Not when I can clothe it with finery. Oh, but if we added a tassel here? a line of sequins here?—now wouldn’t that look nice?

The writer and philosopher William Godwin—yes, he who married Mary Wollstonecraft and sired Mary Shelley—in his author’s note to his Jacobin novel Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are (1794)—writes this:

I then sat down to write my story from the beginning. I wrote for the most part but a short portion in any single day. I wrote only when the afflatus was upon me. I held it for a maxim that any portion that was written when I was not fully in the vein told for considerably worse than nothing.

In essence: if you’re not writing whilst you’re absolutely red-hot with passion for it—just don’t bother.

This is a tenet of my own writing discipline (or lack thereof). But as for my writing as an actual product—we must admit, with the best will in the world, that it is all a bit pantomimed. Sometimes, but only sometimes, beneath florid words lies the real kernel of my argument, like a drowsy Thumbelina tucked up asleep inside her walnut shell. Mostly, violating the walnut with the nutcracker yields you nothing with my essays. There are no kernels whatsoever. The ravening squirrel still feels his stomach keenly.

With writing, I get carried away with the passion of it all. It’s so strange that something as quiet and hermetic as writing, whether done hunched over tip-tapping at a computer or scrawling in a notebook, can be the arena of such passion. Nevermore do I feel so alive, though? Or very seldom. And I have known many emotions in fullness. Writing, like a defibrillator, shocks past emotion back into life and re-awakens it.

In saying that, a perfect evening with my friends, whether it was bacchic or teetotal, can and will set me happy-crying. I used to look at them late at night, the way they all seemed to glow with youth and beauty and brilliance and be quite overcome with feeling. There is a certain magical, will-o’-the-wisp look young people have, especially after twilight. Whether it’s a gleam of sweat from dancing or their hair rumpled from the exertion—or their puppy-like, inexhaustible energy—or the messy overflow of tactility and affection that a good night out inspire—I don’t know what it is but it is so beautiful. Have you ever been accosted from behind and cocooned in a hug by someone who can think of nothing in that moment but how much they care for you?

If you look at a young person late on some summer night, there is nothing to be done but to admire them, even with their misapplied makeup smudged, even as they grin and yell something cheerful but positively unintelligible your way. All discord, yet all exactly as it had ought to be.

(Actually thinking about these dear friends of mine right now is making me tear up.)

When you look at your precious circle of friends—or family—those the world and Providence have thrust forth into your lap for your safe-keeping—isn’t it the warmest feeling? Some people understand these feelings and their intensity. And some don’t—or not satisfactorily.

Contrastingly, have you ever looked at someone and wished very deeply that they saw things the way you did? You are not so feral as to grip them by the shoulders and shake them, but you wonder whether you mightn’t be able to change their mind..?

But, with a sinking heart, you acknowledge that nothing will ever win them over to your point of view. Nothing will bring their mind into concord with your own. You are worlds away. If you were two kingdoms, then your monarch would never condescend to ally with yours. You observe frosty civilities at best. When movements are made towards a parley it is done with but a slivered hemisphere of a heart; a gratuitous gesture towards reconciliation and a wholesale mockery of diplomacy. You are asymptotes. You will never, never, never meet.

It’s not really just a matter of differing opinions, either. There are some people who will simply never understand you, you in toto. Again I come to writing as an example. There will be some people who love your writing and who understand it as your life-blood. You do not need to explain yourself to these people. Whether they are destined to be close to you or not, you make sense to them.

Some souls, meanwhile, cozen together so naturally; perfect fraternity. When hand touches hand it is though an electric current has been earthed. The current can trickle from body to body uninterrupted. In short; there is perfect congruence and confluence. All accords well.

I am subject to passion but rarely action. Patently not a heroine—although I might be alright at documenting the life of one. I watch, I admire, I love, I write.

Being so emotional must make me seem a caricature of myself, contorted lineaments flaunted in a horrible satire—the illustrations of Cruikshank or Gillray—somewhat unbecomingly larger-than-life—even vulgar.

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“I think he’s lovely,” said Anne reproachfully. “He is so very sympathetic. He didn’t mind how much I talked—he seemed to like it. I felt that he was a kindred spirit as soon as ever I saw him.”

“You’re both queer enough, if that’s what you mean by kindred spirits,” said Marilla with a sniff.

This is from early on in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and a better children’s book you would be hard-pressed to find. Anne is about eleven years of age here, and is describing Matthew, a septuagenarian who becomes her adoptive father. Other kindred spirits for Anne include several of her school-teachers, her best friend Diana, and the man she goes on to fall in love with, Gilbert Blythe. Kindred spirits, as aforementioned, come in many guises, donning many costumes. And, thrillingly, they are often found unexpectedly.

“Miss Barry was a kindred spirit, after all,” Anne confided to Marilla. “You wouldn’t think so to look at her, but she is. You don’t find it right out at first, as in Matthew’s case, but after a while you come to see it. Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”

Growing up I was blessed beyond what is commonplace with a liberality of good books. We double, nay triple, stacked our bookshelves; space coming at a premium in our attic of a flat. As I said, these particular books schooled me in a type of love which is fast becoming outmoded and old-fashioned. The conservationists repine—it is gravely endangered. But, although the love I believe in is a love which is persecuted, chased around and never allowed to rest, I believe it lingers bravely still in some precious corners of our world.

For now though, half-wild with fear, this love runs about like a tortured pilgrim seeks sanctuary in a church. Gnarled wooden doors are shut fast against the brewing squalls outside, bolted and fastened; the air a pheromonal mixture of fright and musky incense, pluming from the altar. Light slants through the stained-glass windows and skims over the wing-span of a metal crucifix raised aloft. An antsy-looking curate with a Neanderthal brow and bloodless skin with the texture of orange peel is sweeping the stone floors, always vigilant. (For all this, he is a good man and I in my description show myself to be an unkind writer.) And a stray pigeon squawks in the church’s rafters, but its throaty caws deaden at length into a melancholy hush.

Similarly, the Brontë siblings knew a thing or two about kindred spirits. Let’s briefly examine (although through a process much more playful than that gloomy word promises) Jane Eyre (1847). (You are a little flock of schoolchildren to me now, gazing up blankly with very big eyes, taking in my dull lecturette. You are in fact very like inhabitants of one of Charlotte Brontë’s forsaken orphanage settings. But I shall see to it that you are given your fair helpings of seed-cake and cheese at teatime and that your tippets are always nicely laundered and I shall not be strict if you recite your poems amiss.)

We’ll be sensible and do some housekeeping to quickly set the scene first. There is a brindled cat curled up tightly on a beaten wooden chair, crowned puritanically with the simplicity of a hand-sewn cotton coverlet. Four sedulous siblings are scribbling away at the dining-table. The scritch-scratch of pen nibs, the daubing of blotting paper at chance ink spills. Occasional drawn breaths and emphatic sighs—since it is a trying thing when a writer feels their words are not behaving, not doing the right things. If you were to peer through the window, you would see moors quilted with frost and heather and a sulking grey sky. The cottage walls are white-washed. Cleanliness and drudgery are things made requisite; it is a great undertaking to keep the gangrene of damp and mould away. And on the stove is a lidded pot of gruel, and beside it a half-loaf of heavy oaten bread, wrapped dormant in hessian.

If you would consent to it, I could read the whole of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to you (and, frankly, of less pain and more pleasure the affair would be!), and inform you that that is a book—the book—of kindred spirits. It is also, next to the Bible, and besides anything which my striving hand could hope to write, my own testimony of and to love.

“You say you love me, Janet: yes - I will not forget that; and you cannot deny it. Those words did not die inarticulate on your lips. I heard them clear and soft; a thought too solemn, perhaps, but sweet as music - “I think it is a glorious thing to have the hope of living with you, Edward, because I love you.” Do you love me, Jane? - repeat it.”

“I do, sir - I do, with my whole heart.”

“Well,” he said, after some minutes’ silence. “it is strange; but that sentence has penetrated my breast painfully. Why? I think because you said it with such an earnest, religious energy, and because your upward gaze at me now is the very sublime of faith, truth, and devotion: it is too much as if some spirit were near me. Look wicked, Jane: as you know well how to look: coin one of your wild, shy, provoking smiles; tell me you hate me - tease me, vex me; do anything but move me: I would rather be incensed than saddened.” (Chapter 25)

Any line from this book, though—after Jane and Edward Rochester reveal their love to one another—could have been excerpted. The choice was almost arbitrary—though I picked this passage because bound up in it there was love, faith, and a dash of playfulness—the pairing are the perfect kindred spirits. No notes.

The critic Q. D. Leavis writes very unflatteringly of Jane Eyre when she accuses it of inconsistencies and discrepancies after being unable to properly date when the book was meant to take place. But Leavis laughs off the inconsistencies in the end because, really, ‘…[they don’t] matter so long as we realize that at this point we are reading a fairy-tale and not a realistic novel.’

Because of the gorgeous symmetry of Jane and Rochester’s souls and the apparent superhuman strength of their love to have withstood forcible separation and, later, disability, Leavis imputes the novel of unbecoming fairy-tale sensibilities.

And there was me reading along, absolutely sure that the kind of love being represented was very much real, and very much something possible to believe in—not merely the domain of fanatics and the deluded. Clearly I have read the book wrongly—or more worryingly, I have read the world at large wrongly.

What I realise I have done throughout this essay is correct myself of a mistaken assertion I made at the outset. I don’t think we need the poetic idea of a kindred spirit at all—nor do we need the idea of true love—nor soulmates—nor we do need, with as much gusto as we sometimes do—separate the romantic from the platonic—make so many distinctions in our conception of the beloved. It’s all love. I will wrap this up quickly because I can see this essay quickly becoming disgustingly cloying and that will not do.

Here materialises a steadfast shoulder to lean upon. There’s that haunting Bible verse 1 Corinthians 13… ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.’ If he has ‘not love, I am nothing.’

The same speaker adduces gravely: ‘Love never fails.’ Yes—that’s more like it. That’s a belief suited to me. And this speaker is to be taken as a rational man: ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

And our dependably rational man—he prudently shelved his childish things, but he did not impoverish himself of his belief in love. The thought did not seem, thankfully, even to have occurred to him.

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Thank you for reading this horrible mess of an essay! I hope you have a lovely rest of your day.

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Psyche Before the Throne of Venus by Henrietta Rae (1894)

1. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth: Practical Education (1798) via. Edgeworth, M., & Edgeworth, R. (2012). Practical Education (Cambridge Library Collection - Education). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139207638 (p. 13)