“I am frightened of getting too close and frightened of not getting close enough.”

Clarice Lispector,
Near to the Wild Heart

Porcupines are creatures of contradiction. They live long lives for rodents—often up to twenty years—and are equipped with some of the most ingenious defenses in the animal kingdom. Covered in thousands of keratin quills, they can raise their spines in an instant, deterring even the hungriest predators to a different direction. To approach a porcupine is to accept pain.

The Paradox of Closeness

And yet, porcupines approach each other with soft, cold and small hearts. In the bitter winters of their northern habitats, their bodies desperately crave the comfort of closeness. This is where their paradox begins: how do you get close without spilling blood when your very heart is surrounded by spines? What protects porcupines in the wild is exactly what makes intimacy so painful. And in the wild, animals remember pain the best and run from it the most: “This is spiny, this tastes bad, and this almost killed me.”

Close Enough

Arthur Schopenhauer was captivated by this dilemma. He described how porcupines would attempt to huddle for warmth on a freezing day, only to stab one another with their quills. They would then run from each other, shivering, before running back into one another again. After many rounds of painful approaches and retreats, they discovered a delicate equilibrium: close enough to share heat, far enough to avoid harm. Schopenhauer saw in their “comings and goings” a perfect metaphor for human intimacy.

Cold, Cold, Cold

It is not cruelty that makes us—porcupines and humans—prickly, but fear. Fear that the closeness we desire will one day stab us right in the heart, fear that the heat we hunger for will set us on fire, fear that to lower our spines is to invite the old pains back into our skin. Yet without lowering them, even slightly, we remain in the cold.

We, too, are spined. Our “quills” are not visible, but they are no less sharp, no less painful to remove once under the skin. Like porcupines, we crave connection—the heat, the safety in numbers—yet by the time we draw near, our spines have already grown tall. Bristling and on fire.