Walt Whitman slipped this line into Song of Myself in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a book he paid to print himself because no publisher would touch it. The section begins with a kind of confession: do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. The line about multitudes follows, offered almost as a shrug. He is not apologizing. He is correcting the premise of the question.

Consistency is usually treated as a virtue. Whitman is suggesting it is more often a trick of editing. A real person is a weather system of competing impulses, most of which do not reconcile. The self we present in any given hour is a slice of something much larger and messier, and pretending otherwise is a kind of deflation. The honest move is not to resolve the contradictions but to admit the room they take up.

A cream-colored longhair mid-yawn, mid-stretch, with eyes closed and mouth open and back arched and one paw already pointing at the next activity, is four different cats in one frame. None of them contradicts the others. The cat does not feel the need to settle on a single gesture. We, on the other hand, spend considerable energy deciding which version of ourselves to post. Whitman's answer, still radical for being so old, is that all of them are in there. The yawn is as true as the pounce.