Tove Jansson
April 21st, 2024
I still have a lot to learn. I might think I already know this or that, but then the realization comes that makes me aware that I really don't. And I love it. I love seeing my ignorance and then patching it up with more knowledge that comes my way or I stumble on by accident or stems from some research. Every single event like that makes me glad for my constant thirst for knowledge and my ability (which I gather is not that common) to adjust and even completely change (if there is a need) my thinking and my knowledge and my convictions and beliefs.
I knew Tove Janssen only from her Moomins books series which, since my childhood — and up to this day — has been my constant companion and my most reread books. I knew her from those books as a gentle, calm, quiet, and extremely compassionate writer, and I projected that on her personality and that was my held view of her. Until last week, that is, when I went on a binge of reading her works for adults — “Art in Nature”, “The Summer Book”, and “A Winter Book”. In those books, she is still gentle and compassionate and acutely observant, but she is also rude and loud and obnoxiously weird in that particular insular Scandinavian way, and she even swears — a lot. That was shocking for me, but in a way, it now completes her personality in my view — she is fully human with all the good and bad that can be our lot. She is no longer a studiously imagined perfection, but a real person with all the foibles that make our personality.
Still, finding out that she was not the image of perfect gentleness was shocking and akin to finding out that my mom is not all-knowing and all-powerful and can have bad days and breakdowns and may need my support. And that makes sense now, since Moomins were instrumental in developing my personality as a child, maybe even more so than parental guidance. And I feel better knowing that now, no matter how late I was finding that out.
