Fragile certainties: Fluid identities, masculinity and reclaiming time

I love the essay-writing genre because, unlike the novel or the academic treatise, it is an imperfectly anarchic thought experiment—one that reflects a mood.

As British novelist and essayist Zadie Smith notes:

“Writing exists at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”

But the success of the essay lies in its ability to spark a myriad of conversations as the text is consumed by its readers. For the reader, a good essay is like an encounter—like meeting a stranger in a coffee shop and listening to what they have to say. For me, a good essay needs to be informed but also entertaining and deeply personal.

Kurt Borg’s Sens ta’ Ħarifa, a collection of eight philosophical reflections on themes such as masculinity, fluid identities, bodies, and how we relate to strangers, represents the best of this tradition. It is informed without sounding pedantic, it rambles without being annoying, and it invites readers to talk back—both to the author and to themselves.

This particular collection, mostly written during the pandemic, felt like an invitation to reconnect with parts of myself that had briefly surfaced during that period—submerged aspects of being that tend to go unnoticed in the speed of daily life.

Five years on, the pandemic is becoming a distant memory—a brief interlude in which we were forced to withdraw and reflect before being thrown back into a world unravelling at a speed that continues to shatter many of our certainties.

One of my greatest curiosities during that time was observing strangers in parks or while walking, wondering: what is happening in their private mental universe? With a few, during my walks, I even established a rapport—just by smiling and saying nothing else. With a couple of these strangers, the connection endures to this day.

Perhaps, as Borg suggests, our lives would be richer if we opened ourselves up to strangers and their stories—even casually, and without a particular reason—and worried less about the perceived dangers of breaking the social taboos regulating proper behaviour and personal space. Moreover, Borg invites us to reclaim time and to experience encounters. He invites us to consider how our life would change if we listened to other people’s stories.

Borg’s reflections include only brief references to the pandemic during which they were written, though I suspect his own gaze on the world at the time was shaped by a sense of being cocooned in introspection. The book also reminded me of a recurring sensation I had during the pandemic: the melancholic feeling one experiences in late September, just before school resumes and routine sets in—a mixture of anxiety and hope.

For this reason, it took me longer to read Borg’s essays than I expected. They opened too many internal corridors.

Despite the clarity and unpretentious style with which Borg writes, I felt compelled to underline passages and scribble notes, actively negotiating with the text. Imagine my surprise when Borg started elaborating on his own relationship with books, including his habit of keeping them in a carton box within his other bag to shield them from the elements—while also scribbling in the margins and underlining key phrases according to a standardised system he devised over time. As Borg says, if you really love a book, you have to use it—and even write on it.

As someone who often thinks while walking, I was particularly struck by his practical reflections on ethical walking—like his suggestion to walk at the side of the pavement rather than through the middle, as many still do nonchalantly.

In the end, the book became a deeply personal exchange—primarily with the many selves and words that inhabit me, but also with an imaginary Kurt Borg, whom I’ve only rarely met (or rather seen) in person, mostly at some Graffitti protest or at some rock concert.

Of course, I could not help feeling a sense of affinity. Despite the age difference, we both belong to a generation who had a poster of Che Guevara in their room, who listened to punk and alternative music, and who identified with progressive causes.

His honest deconstruction of masculinity—including his own—is essential reading in an era where simply being who you are, let alone being respectful or civil, is often mocked as ‘woke’. Yet Borg’s empathy ensures his reflections do not shut readers out. Borg is radical in his critique of masculinity, but his essays reach out to those who live in a different universe.

“In the same society,” Borg writes, “you find people who have barely started recognising homosexuals as human... and people who refer to others as ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’. For some, these are obvious matters; for others, they haven’t even entered this discursive universe…”

He reminds us that, for some, questions of identity are little more than irritating issues of wording—while for others, they are about liberation from an oppressive cage. Gender fluidity may seem absurd to those who dwell in binary universes, but some simply cannot define themselves within those fixed categories. It is the latter, not the former, who are at risk of being cancelled. For in the absence of new words to define them, they will simply not exist. So, while understanding everybody’s starting point, Borg clearly stands on the side of the oppressed and marginalised.

I personally doubt whether a conversation on these themes is even possible between those who celebrate a masculine identity that excludes and those who question the very assumption of a fixed identity. Often, it feels like a conversation between people from different historical epochs. But Borg’s appeal to empathy may be the best shot at a conversation.

His reflections on the theme are coupled with a heartfelt plea to be less rigid in our certainties, definitions, and categories:

“Not everything stands on a solid platform… Don’t repress, don’t build walls, columns, and forts… We are all full of holes and damaged in some way.”

This recognition—that we are all imperfect and damaged—pervades the book, yet it reads as a celebration of our shared humanity. And what disturbs Borg’s conscience most is how the oppressor can strip the ‘others’ of their humanity, as the Nazis did in Auschwitz.

Of course, Borg never ceases to be a philosopher—one who dazzles with encyclopaedic knowledge and the perspectives of great thinkers ranging from Saint Augustine to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. But he does so without condescension. He is not trying to impress. At times, it feels he is more interested in understanding himself than in convincing anyone, and his point of departure is always self-doubt.

My advice? Take this book in small doses. Think. Jot notes. Write your own essays. And, above all, try to speak to strangers. Open yourself to their stories. Sens ta’ Ħarifa is a courageous act—Borg lays bare his doubts and vulnerabilities in a world increasingly dominated by authoritarian strongmen who exude certainty. In this scenario, the recognition that we are so fragile is fast becoming the most radical act.