This chapter explores Pablo Neruda’s militant trajectory, asserting that his political commitment was not merely circumstantial but permeated his entire poetic oeuvre. Divided into two sections, the first section scrutinizes the political implications of his work, discernible from Residencia en la tierra onward, where societal issues arising from the crisis of capitalist modernity culminate in a robust Marxist commitment. The second part employs the Foucauldian concept of “parrhesia” to analyze Neruda’s actions and work, emphasizing his explicit commitment in Chile. There, he supported Allende’s socialist government and confronted the challenges of Pinochet’s subsequent neoliberal dictatorship. This analysis underscores the integral connection between Neruda’s political engagement and his lyrical creations, contributing to the recognition of the inseparable political dimension within his poetic work.

This chapter looks at Neruda’s memoirs as an attempt to find a whole in different parts of his self. He embraces his own contradictions, without falling into self-aggrandizement. Instead, the chapter argues, he presents a complex self, at times heroic, other times not at all. In Confieso que he vivido (I Confess I Have Lived), he admits that, as a human being, he is many Pablo Nerudas, and some of these have faults. He felt the need to clarify and correct the way in which the world saw him in human terms. In part, this reveals, of course, the profundity of his debt to the American poet Walt Whitman, who asked his readers to accept him with all his “contradictions.”

Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf became friends in the 1930s, when the two were widely considered the pre-eminent women modernist novelists in the British Isles. Younger writers at the time, like literary critics later, compared the two women; yet in their private writings, both of them dwelt on their divergent personal characteristics. This underlines the importance of the notion of character to both Woolf’s and Bowen’s fictional projects. In her pivotal experimental essays and fictions of the early 1920s, Woolf returned to the idea of two people sitting opposite in a railway carriage to explore the ways in which the variety and intricacy of subjectivity could never be fully plumbed by another. Bowen, who admitted to being influenced by Woolf, used the same railway-carriage thought experiment in her own essays on the writer’s craft. Although Bowen understood character largely in terms of Woolfian notions of the vast complexity of subjectivity, she demonstrates in her own novels, particularly The House in Paris and To the North, that character needed to be delimited by more notions from previous eras that depend on the broader strokes of caricature to ascertain another’s personality.

This final chapter summarizes key arguments about how the neglect of decentralized property rights and markets as central elements of US environmental legislation can inform overall institutional formation. Although transaction cost efficiencies motivate private institutional change, they have not been major drivers in government policy. Rent-seeking dominates, with implications for institutional formation and human welfare.

The final chapter ends the book with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society.