Brain Pickings: Recent Episodes
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“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.”
We are each born with a wilderness of possibility within us. Who we become depends on how we tend to our inner garden — what qualities of character and spirit we cultivate to come abloom, what follies we weed out, how much courage we grow to turn away from the root-rot of cynicism and toward the sunshine of life in all its forms: wonder, kindness, openhearted vulnerability.
Answering a young person’s plea for guidance in finding direction and meaning amid a “bizarre and temporary world” that seems so often at odds with the highest human values, the sage and sensitive Nick Cave offers his lens on the two most important qualities of spirit to cultivate in order to have a meaningful life.
Nick CaveA generation after James Baldwin observed in his superb essay on Shakespeare how “it is said that his time was easier than ours, but… no time can be easy if one is living through it,” Nick prefaces his advice with a calibration:
The world… is indeed a strange and deeply mysterious place, forever changing and remaking itself anew. But this is not a novel condition, our world hasn’t only recently become bizarre and temporary, it has been so ever since its inception, and it will continue to be such until its end — mystifying and forever in a state of flux.
He then offers his two pillars of a fulfilling life — orientations of the soul that “have a softening effect on our sometimes inflexible and isolating value systems”:
The first is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.
The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.
Couple with Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on what makes a fulfilling life and revisit Nick Cave’s humble wisdom on the importance of trusting yourself, the art of growing older, and the antidote to our existential helplessness, then savor his lush On Being conversation with Krista Tippett about loss, yearning, transcendence, and “the audacity of the world to continue to be beautiful and continue to be good in times of deep suffering.”
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve… to live in the world with the absence of someone… ingrained in your understanding of the world… For the brain, [they are] simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time.”
“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief,” Emily Dickinson wrote as she calibrated love and loss. But she did not mean that it is good to ruminate and wallow — Dickinson so deftly played with the surface of meaning, so delighted in startling us into a flinch or furrow before plunging us into the deeper truths she fathomed. She meant, I think, that a love lost is grieved forever, whatever the nature of the loss — this she knew, and turned the ongoingness of it into a lifetime of art — but by looking back, we are reminded over and over that the sharp edge of grief does smooth over time, that today’s blunt ache is worlds apart from the first stabs, until grief becomes, as Abraham Lincoln wrote in his stirring letter of consolation to a bereaved young woman, “a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.”
Art by Sophie Blackall for “Dirge Without Music” from The Universe in Verse.And besides, what does it mean to lose a love anyway? We never lose people, not really. I don’t mean this in some mystical sense — let there be no confusion about what actually happens when we die. I don’t even mean it in the poetic sense. I am speaking strictly from the point of view of the mind emerging from the dazzling materiality of the brain — that majestic cathedral of cortex and synapse shaping every thought we have and every feeling we tremble with.
I am speaking of the paradox inside the brain:
On the one hand, we lose people all the time — to death, to distance, to differences; from the brain’s point of view, these varieties of loss differ not by kind but only by degree, triggering the same neural circuitry, producing sorrow along a spectrum of intensity shaped by the level of closeness and the finality of the loss.
On the other hand, no person we have loved is ever fully gone. When they die or vanish, they are physically no longer present, but their personhood permeates our synapses with memories and habits of mind, saturates an all-pervading atmosphere of feeling we don’t just carry with us all the time but live and breathe inside. Or the opposite happens, which is its own devastation — the physical body remains present, but the person we have known and loved, that safehouse of shared memories and trust, is gone — lost to mental illness, to addiction, to neurodegenerative disease.
Art by Sophie Blackall for “Dirge Without Music” from The Universe in Verse.In both cases, the brain is tasked with the slow, painful work of reconstituting its map of the world, so that the world makes sense again without the beloved person in it. Mapping, in fact, is not a mere metaphor but what is actually going on in the brain, since our orientation in spacetime and our autonoeic consciousness — the capacity for mental self-representation — share a cortical region.
Where the missed and missing person goes on the map, how the remapping actually unfolds, and what it takes to redraw the map in such a way that the world feels whole again are the questions coursing through The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (public library) by neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor — a pioneer in fMRI research since the technology first became available, who has devoted a quarter century to studying the particular neurophysiology of grief. She writes:
The brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one.
[…]
Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.
Making an important distinction between grief (“the intense emotion that crashes over you like a wave, completely overwhelming, unable to be ignored”) and grieving (an ongoing process punctuated by recurring moments of grief but stringing the moments into a larger trajectory), O’Connor adds:
Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.
[…]
Grief never ends, and it is a natural response to loss. You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even years after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience. But… even if the feeling of grief is the same, your relationship to the feeling changes. Feeling grief years after your loss may make you doubt whether you have really adapted. If you think of the emotion and the process of adaptation as two different things, however, then it isn’t a problem that you experience grief even when you have been grieving for a long time.
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)Although volumes have been written about the psychology, philosophy, and poetics of grief — none more piercing than the Joan Didion classic, none more practical than Seneca’s advice to his bereaved mother — there is something singularly revealing about exploring grief from the point of view of the brain beneath the mind, which must begin at the developmental beginning. Childhood — the brain’s most fertile growth period, when most of its major infrastructure is laid out — is also our training ground for loss. Every time we are separated from our primary caregivers, we experience scale-models of loss; every time they return, we learn that the loss of their presence is not a loss of their person, of their love. (A pause worth taking: every abandonment is a miniature of grief.)
In those formative attachments, we also learn the role we ourselves play in the relationship. Because, in building its relational world-map, the brain is constantly computing our loved ones’ position in three dimensions — time, space, and closeness, also known as psychological distance — we learn the causal link between our behavior and a caregiver’s position in the closeness dimension, just like we learn the causal link between our bodily movements and our position in space. When there is secure attachment, the child learns that throughout various surface disruptions, situational factors, and passing emotional weather patterns, there is a steadfast underlying closeness. O’Connor writes:
Closeness is partially under our control, and we learn how to maintain and nurture this closeness, but we also trust those who love us to maintain that closeness as well.
The obvious — and heartbreaking — corollary is that children who grow up without secure attachment experience the pangs of miniature grief much more readily throughout life, with each departure of a loved one, however temporary, because trusting a continuity of closeness does not come naturally to us. But no matter the formative experience of closeness, human beings are universally undone by the death of someone close — the final abandonment, at once the most abstract and the most absolute absence, in which our brains simply cannot compute the total removal of a person so proximate and important from the fabric of psychological spacetime.
Vanish by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)Citing the disoriented devastation of a woman ghosted by a lover, O’Connor notes that “ghosting” is the neurologically appropriate word-choice for such abandonments — studied under fMRI, the brain of a person who has lost a loved one to “ghosting” behaves much the same way as the brain of a person who has lost a loved one to death, the mental map suddenly crumbled and torn to pieces. O’Connor describes the strange yet strangely sensical way in which the brain copes with this incomprehensible disruption of reality:
If your brain cannot comprehend that something as abstract as death has happened, it cannot understand where the deceased is in space and time, or why they are not here, now, and close. From your brain’s perspective, ghosting is exactly what happens when a loved one dies. As far as the brain is concerned, they have not died. The loved one has, with no explanation, stopped returning our calls — stopped communicating with us altogether. How could someone who loves us do that? They have become distant, or unbelievably mean, and that is infuriating. Your brain doesn’t understand why; it doesn’t understand that dimensions can simply disappear. If they don’t feel close, then they just feel distant, and you want to fix it rather than believe they are permanently gone. This (mis)belief leads to an intense upwelling of emotions.
[…]
If a person we love is missing, then our brain assumes they are far away and will be found later. The idea that the person is simply no longer in this dimensional world, that there are no here, now, and close dimensions, is not logical.
Drawing on brain imaging studies, she adds:
The ephemeral sense of closeness with our loved ones exists in the physical, tangible hardware of our brain.
The particular bit of hardware is the brain’s posterior cingulate cortex — our built-in GPS of love. Scanning the environment and processing innumerable bits of sensory information, the PCC is constantly calibrating and recalibrating the psychological distance between us and the people we love, tightening the bond the closer we feel and loosening it when we sense distancing. Death turns the GPS into a crude compass trying to orient to an all-pervading, ever-shifting magnetic field suddenly bereft of its true north. O’Connor writes:
After the death of a loved one, the incoming messages seem scrambled for a while. At times, closeness with our deceased loved one feels incredibly visceral, as though they are present in the room, here and now. At other times, the string seems to have fallen off the board — not shorter or longer than it was before, but simply stolen from us entirely.
Liminal Worlds by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)This confusion is so fundamental and so primal, so beyond the reach of reason, that it befalls minds indiscriminately along the spectrum of intelligence and self-awareness — a reality most clearly and devastatingly evinced in the extraordinary love letter Richard Feynman wrote to his wife 488 days after her death and 6,994 days before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
But O’Connor notes that while Western physicians long believed such continuing bonds across the life-death divide to be a symptom of poor coping with grief that makes for poorer bonds with the living, recent research drawing on various grief rituals and customs from cultures around the world has demonstrated that such ongoing inner dialogue with the dead might actually enrich our relationships with the living and allow us to show up for them in a fuller, more openhearted way. She writes:
Our understanding of ourselves changes as we gain wisdom through experience. Our relationships with our living loved ones can grow more compassionate and resonant with gratitude as we age. We can also allow our interactions with our beloved ones who are gone to grow and change, even if only in our minds. This transformation of our relationship with them can affect our capacity to live fully in the present, and to create aspirations for a meaningful future. It can also help us to feel more connected to them, to the best parts of them… Their absence from our physical world does not make our relationship to them any less valuable.
[…]
Instead of imagining an alternate what if reality, we must learn to be connected to them with our feet planted firmly in the present moment. This transformed relationship is dynamic, ever-changing, in the way that any loving relationship is ever-changing across months and years. Our relationship with our deceased loved one must reflect who we are now, with the experience, and perhaps even the wisdom, we have gained through grieving. We must learn to restore a meaningful life.
The greatest challenge, of course, is the perennial challenge of the human mind — how to integrate seemingly contradictory needs or ideas in such a way that they coexist harmoniously, perhaps even magnify each other, rather than cancel each other out. Without such integration, any new relationship can feel like a threat to this ongoing inner bond with the dead, undamming a flood of grief at the notion of emotional erasure: grief for the grief itself, for that outstretched hand holding on to the gone and to ourselves at the same time, to the map as it used to be. This is a fear so understandable as to cusp on the universal. It is also — and this might be the most assuring part of O’Connor’s research — a neurophysiologically misplaced fear. Within the brain, every person we love leaves a tangible, structural imprint, encoded in synapses that can never be vanquished or replaced by new and different love. Because that bond — like every bond, like every idea, like the universe itself — was “only ever conjured up in the mind,” it is there too that it always lives, unassailable by other minds and other events.
Art by Sophie Blackall for “Dirge Without Music” from The Universe in Verse.O’Connor writes:
Gaining a new relationship is simply not going to fill the hole that exists. Here is the key — the point of new roles and new relationships is not to fill the hole. Expecting that they will can only lead to disappointment.
The point is that if we are living in the present, we need to have someone who loves us and cares for us, and we need someone to love and care for as well. The only way to enjoy a fulfilling relationship in the future, however, is to start one in the present. If we can imagine a future in which we are loved, then we must start a relationship that eventually will become important to us in a way that is different from our previous relationship, but rewarding and sustaining.
Understood this way, then, the ongoing relationship with the gone is a lavishment to other loves, for it has made us exactly who we are — the person doing the loving, the person being loved, the mapmaker of present and possible worlds. O’Connor offers neural affirmation for this poetic aspiration:
After a loved one dies, they are clearly no longer with us in the physical world, which each day proves to us. On the other hand, they are not gone, because they are with us in our brain and in our mind. The physical makeup of our brain — the structure of our neurons — has been changed by them. In this sense, you could say that a piece of them physically lives on. That piece is the neural connections protected within our skull, and these neural connections survive in physical form even after a loved one’s death. So, they are not entirely “out there,” and they are not entirely “in here,” either. You are not one, not two. That is because the love between two people, that unmistakable but usually indescribable property, occurs between two people. Once we have known love, we can bring it into our awareness, we can feel it emerge and emanate from us. This experience reaches beyond the love for the flesh and bones of the person we once knew on this earthly plane. Now loving is an attribute of us, regardless of who we share it with, regardless of what is given to us in return. This is a transcendent experience, a felt sense of being loving without needing anything in return. In the very best moments together, we learned to love and to be loved. Because of our bonded experience, that loved one and that loving are a part of us now, to call up and act on as we see fit in the present and the future.
Complement The Grieving Brain with a mathematician’s geometric model for living with grief and this soulful animated film of “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay — the most beautiful homily on the emotional paradox of loss I know — then revisit Nick Cave’s life-honed wisdom on grief as a portal to greater aliveness.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
The third volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries has been on heavy rotation in recent weeks, yielding Nin’s thoughtful and timeless meditations on life, mass movements, Paris vs. New York, what makes a great city, and the joy of handicraft.
The subsequent installment, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) is an equally rich treasure trove of wisdom on everything from life to love to the art of writing. In fact, Nin’s gift shines most powerfully when she addresses all of these subjects and more in just a few ripe sentences.
Such is the case with the following exquisite letter of advice she sent to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W., whom she had taken under her wing as creative mentor. Nin writes:
I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.
[…]
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4 is brimming with such poetic yet practical sagacity on the creative life and is a beautiful addition to other famous advice on writing like Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-nonsense tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.
On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:
Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
[…]
Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.
It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.
Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:
To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.
Only such raw receptivity to the reality of the universe without saves us from losing sight of the universe within. Consciousness may be the instrument the universe invented to look inside itself, but it is a flawed instrument that keeps inverting the lens — the price of consciousness is self-consciousness. Like the tragic flaw that haunts the Greek hero, our greatest strength is also the source of our greatest suffering. With an eye to this tragic flaw of the human animal, Pessoa observes:
To stop trying to understand, to stop analyzing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field — that is true wisdom.
Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The art of tempering your fury with an infuriating existential truth.
The vast majority of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. As we dust ourselves off amid the rubble, bruised and indignant, we further pain ourselves with the exertion of staggering emotional energy on outrage at how reality dared defy what we demanded of it.
The remedy, of course, is not to bend the reality of an impartial universe to our will. The remedy is to calibrate our expectations — a remedy that might feel far too pragmatic to be within reach in the heat of the collision-moment, but also one with profound poetic undertones once put into practice.
Walt Whitman understood this when, felled by a paralytic stroke, he considered what makes life worth living and instructed himself: “Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.” He spared himself the additional self-inflicted suffering of outrage at how his body failed him — perhaps because, having proclaimed himself the poet of the Body and the poet of the Soul, he understood the two to be one. He squandered no emotional energy on the expectation that his suddenly disabled body perform a counterpossible feat against reality to let him enjoy his beloved tree workouts and daily excursions to the river. He simply edited his expectations to accord with his new reality and sought to find his joy there, within these new parameters of being.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)What is true of the poetics of our own body-soul is as true of the poetics of relationship, that beautiful and terrifying interchange between separate body-souls. Little syphons the joy of life more surely than the wasted energy of indignation at how others have failed to behave in accordance with what we expected of them.
Two millennia before the outrage culture of the Internet, the lovesick queer teenager turned Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) addressed this curious self-mauling tendency of the human mind with his characteristic precision of insight and unsentimental problem-solving in the notebooks that became his Meditations (public library) — a timeless book, newly translated and annotated by the British classics scholar Robin Waterfield, which Marcus Aurelius wrote largely for and to himself, like Tolstoy wrote his Calendar of Wisdom and Bruce Lee calibrated his core values, yet a book that went on to stake the pillars of the philosophical system of Stoicism, equipping countless generations with tools for navigating the elemental existential challenges of being human and inspiring others to fill the gaps of its unaddressed questions with exquisite answers of their own.
Marcus AureliusEpochs before the birth of probability theory, Marcus Aurelius begins with a probabilistic-statistical consolation:
Whenever a person’s lack of shame offends you, you should immediately ask yourself, “So is it possible for there to be no shameless people in the world?” It isn’t, and you should therefore stop demanding the impossible. He’s just one of those shameless people who must necessarily exist in the world. You should keep the same thought readily available for when you’re faced with devious and untrustworthy people, and people who are flawed in any way. As soon as you remind yourself that it’s impossible for such people not to exist, you’ll be kinder to each and every one of them. It’s also helpful immediately to consider what virtue nature has granted us human beings to deal with any given offense — gentleness, for instance, to counter discourteous people…
Millennia before William James lit the dawn of modern psychology with the radical assertion that our experience is what we “agree to attend to,” millennia before neuroscience came to locate the seat of consciousness in the qualia of subjective experience, Marcus Aurelius serves that classic Stoic cocktail of simply worded obvious truths that are difficult truths to live up to, earned by a thousand complexities of conduct to be practiced daily:
The things of the world cannot affect the soul; they lie inert outside it, and only internal beliefs disturb it.
Light distribution on soap bubble from a 19th-century French science textbook. (Available as a print.)From this follows a curious, infuriating fundament of our humanity: that no matter what another person does — to us or at us or near the self-membraned bubble of our being — our inner response to it lives in the realm of feeling, that sovereign source of light over which we alone have agency and dominion. Even more infuriatingly, Marcus Aurelius reminds us, our outrage at some entirely predictable misbehavior by a person known to misbehave is a failure not of the other but of our own powers of reason:
You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there’s nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you… After all, you even had the resources, in the form of your ability to think rationally, to appreciate that he was likely to commit that fault, yet you forgot it and are now surprised that he did exactly that.
Observing that to explode with rage at the offender would make no positive difference to their conduct and would only further perturb your own soul, he instead offers a two-step process for dealing with the situation, telescoping into the broad existential perspective and then microscoping into your own innermost values:
First, don’t be upset. Nothing happens that isn’t in accord with universal nature, and before long you won’t exist at all, just like [your heroes]… Second, fix your gaze on the matter at hand and see it for what it is, and then, keeping in your mind your obligation to be a good man and the demands of your humanity, go right ahead and do it, in the way that seems to you to be most just. But do it with kindness and modesty, and without dissembling.
This is but one manifestation of the central preoccupation of the Meditations — the lifelong project of learning to see clearly as the greatest self-defense against mental anguish. So much of our disappointment and rage, after all, stem from the clash between our misperceptions of things and the reality of things — they are the pain of disillusionment, inflamed in those moments when the veil of illusion is lifted or violently pierced to let us, finally, see reality.
Reaching across space and time, across cultures and civilizations, Marcus Aurelius prescribes the antidote:
Always define or describe to yourself every impression that occurs to your mind, so that you can clearly see what the thing is like in its entirety, stripped to its essence, and tell yourself its proper name and the names of the elements of which it consists and into which it will be resolved. Nothing is more conducive to objectivity than the ability methodically and honestly to test everything that you come across in life, and always to look at things in such a way that you consider what kind of part each of them plays in what kind of universe, and what value it has for the universe as a whole.
Total solar eclipse by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1878. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)Clarity of vision, he reminds us, is the basis of rightful action, and while our own rightful action may not be a guarantee of our contentment — or what the Romans shorthanded as “the good life” — it is our only assurance toward it:
If you carry out every present task by following right reason assiduously, resolutely, and with kindness; if rather than getting distracted by irrelevancies, you keep your guardian spirit unspoiled and steady, as though you had to surrender it at any moment; if you engage with the task not with expectations or evasions, but satisfied if your current performance is in accord with nature and if what you say and express is spoken with true Roman honesty, you’ll be living the good life. And there’s no one who can stop you doing so!
Complement with Seneca, another apostle of Stoicism, on the antidote to anxiety and Marcus Aurelius himself, in a different translation of his Meditations, on the key to living with presence, the most potent motivation for work, and how to begin each day, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent more-than-translation of another ancient classic from the wisdom tradition of a different civilization, the Tao Te Ching. (One thing that has always troubled me about modern translations of ancient classics is that they present an opportunity to calibrate the inclusiveness of these teachings to our present hard-earned sphere of dignity without changing their message — an opportunity very few translators take, for it requires a formidably delicate balance between the rigors of scholarship and the responsibilities of a social conscience. Count on Le Guin, whose meditation on being “a man” remains the finest thing I have ever read on the history of gender in language, to leap at that opportunity and make something soaring.)
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly paradoxical about such an appeal to reason in the notion that we can exercise prudence in matters of love — to have loved is to have known the straitjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.
How to heed Augustine’s caution, not by subjugating but by better understanding our experience of love, is what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in her least known but in many ways most beautiful work, Love and Saint Augustine (public library) — Arendt’s first book-length manuscript and the last to be published in English, posthumously salvaged from her papers by political scientist Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosopher Judith Chelius Stark.
Hannah Arendt (photograph by Fred Stein, 1944); Saint Augustine (painting by Gerard Seghers, circa 1600-1650.)For half a century after she wrote it as her doctoral thesis in 1929 — a time when this apostle of reason, who would become one of the twentieth century’s keenest and most coolly analytical minds, was composing her fiery love letters to Martin Heidegger — Arendt obsessively revised and annotated the manuscript. Against Augustine’s whetstone, she came to hone her core philosophical ideas — chiefly the troublesome disconnect she saw between philosophy and politics as evidenced by the rise of ideologies like totalitarianism, the origins of which she so memorably and incisively examined. It was from Augustine that she borrowed the phrase amor mundi — “love of the world” — which would become a defining feature of her philosophy. Occupied by questions of why we succumb to and normalize evil, Arendt identified as the root of tyranny the act of making other human beings irrelevant. Again and again, she returned to Augustine for the antidote: love.
But while this ancient notion of neighborly love, which would come to inspire Martin Luther King, Jr., was central to Arendt’s philosophical concern and her interest in Augustine, its political significance is inseparable from the deepest wellspring of love: the personal. For all of the political and philosophical wisdom she draws from it, Augustine’s Confessions is animated by his experience of personal love — that eternal force that governs the Sun and the Moon and the stars of our interior lives, reflected and codified in our cultural and social structures.
Illustration from An ABZ of Love, Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexualityWith an eye to Augustine’s conception of love as “a kind of craving” — the Latin appetitus, from which the word appetite is derived — and his assertion that “to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” Arendt considers this directional desire propelling love:
Every craving is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves. For, as Augustine writes, love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” What determines the motion of desire is always previously given. Our craving aims at a world we know; it does not discover anything new. The thing we know and desire is a “good,” otherwise we would not seek it for its own sake. All the goods we desire in our questing love are independent objects, unrelated to other objects. Each of them represents nothing but its isolated goodness. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing. As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of “aiming at” and “referring back to.” It refers back to the individual who knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires. Craving, or love, is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy, that is, of gaining possession of what is most his own.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.That is why a generous and unpossessive love — a love undiminished by the failure to attain the good for which it craves — can seem like a feat nothing short of superhuman. (“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me,” Arendt’s good friend and great admirer W.H. Auden wrote in his sublime ode to that superhuman triumph of the heart.) But a love predicated on possession, Arendt cautions, inevitably turns into fear — the fear of losing what was gained. Two millennia after Epictetus offered his cure for heartbreak in the acceptance that all things are perishable and therefore even love ought to be held with the loose fingers of nonattachment, Arendt — who notes Augustine’s debt to the Stoics — writes:
So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.
Half a century after Tolstoy admonished that “future love does not exist [for] love is a present activity only,” Arendt adds:
The present is not determined by the future as such… but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future, and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good, and even more in being sure of not losing it. Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss. However, for Augustine the happiness of having is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing. The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.
Death, of course, is the ultimate loss — of love as well as life — and therefore the ultimate object of our future-oriented dread. And yet this escape from presence via the portal of anxiety — perhaps the commonest malady to which human beings are susceptible — is itself a living death. Arendt writes:
In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains.
Art by Catherine Lepange from Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried MindAgainst this background of negative space, Arendt casts the shape of love’s ultimate object according to Augustine:
Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear.
In a sentiment that illuminates the central mechanism by which frustration fuels (temporary) satisfaction in romantic love, she adds:
A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.
If presence — the removal of expectancy — is a prerequisite for a true experience of love, then time is the elemental infrastructure of love. Nearly half a century later, in becoming the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures in the 85-year history of the series, Arendt would make this notion of time as the locus of our thinking ego a centerpiece of her landmark lecture, The Life of the Mind. Now, quoting from Augustine’s writings, she considers the paradox of love beyond time for creatures as temporal as we are:
Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?
Time exists only insofar as it can be measured, and the yardstick by which we measure it is space.
Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandFor Augustine, she notes, memory is the space in which time is measured and cached:
Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
One of the major themes I explore in Figuring is this question of the temporality of even our lushest experiences. “The union of two natures for a time is so great,” Margaret Fuller — one of my key figures — wrote. Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity. Fuller’s exclamation upon seeing the paintings of Correggio for the first time, overcome with beauty she had not known before, radiates a larger truth about the human heart: “Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.”
Jupiter and Io, Correggio, circa 1530Arendt locates this fundamental fact of the heart in Augustine’s writings. A century after Kierkegaard asserted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” she observes:
The Now is what measures time backwards and forwards, because the Now, strictly speaking, is not time but outside time. In the Now, past and future meet. For a fleeting moment they are simultaneous so that they can be stored up by memory, which remembers things past and holds the expectation of things to come. For a fleeting moment (the temporal Now) it is as though time stands still, and it is this Now that becomes Augustine’s model of eternity.
Augustine himself captures this transcendent temporality:
Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable… but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.
Arendt hones in on the heart of the paradox:
What prevents man from “living” in the timeless present is life itself, which never “stands still.” The good for which love craves lies beyond all mere desires. If it were merely a question of desiring, all desires would end in fear. And since whatever confronts life from the outside as the object of its craving is sought for life’s sake (a life we are going to lose), the ultimate object of all desires is life itself. Life is the good we ought to seek, namely true life.
She returns to desire, which simultaneously takes us out of life and plunges us into it:
Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it… Since man is not self-sufficient and therefore always desires something outside himself, the question of who he is can only be resolved by the object of his desire and not, as the Stoics thought, by the suppression of the impulse of desire itself: “Such is each as is his love” [Augustine wrote]. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody.
[…]
Man as such, his essence, cannot be defined because he always desires to belong to something outside himself and changes accordingly… If he could be said to have an essential nature at all, it would be lack of self-sufficiency. Hence, he is driven to break out of his isolation by means of love… for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging. Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being.
It is stunning to trace the line of these ideas across the life of Arendt’s mind. Decades after her doctoral days, she would compose her influential treatise on how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression — totalitarianism, in other words, is not only the denial of love but an assault on the essence of human beings.
In the remainder of Love and Saint Augustine, Arendt goes on to examine Augustine’s hierarchy of love, the psychological structure of craving, the perils of anticipation, and the building blocks of that “love of the world” so vital to a harmonious life and a harmonious society. Couple it with Elizabeth Barrett Browning on happiness as a moral obligation, then revisit Arendt on action and the pursuit of happiness, lying in politics, the power of being an outsider, and the difference between how art and science illuminate the human condition.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely simultaneity of absolute presence and absolute peace. I didn’t yet know the word for transcendence.
Not long after that, I began swimming competitively in a chlorinated Olympic pool, investing long hours in perfecting my stroke and bettering my lap times. Those four years became a hard initiation into a culture that prizes productivity above presence. At eleven, I was beginning to see how the moment we incline action toward achievement, we drain the activity of joy; how anything we approach transactionally will never yield transcendence. I stopped swimming abruptly, disaffected and worn out. It would take me a quarter century to return to the water — it was only when I was drowning in the 800-page manuscript of my first book that I began swimming daily in the open ocean to think through the edits, to feel myself in the womb of the world while trying to birth something bigger than myself.
This spiritual dimension of swimming in wild nature comes vividly alive in Roger Deakin’s delicious book Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (public library).
Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)“Such indelible swims are like dreams, and have the same profound effect on the mind and spirit,” he writes of the transcendences he discovered when, suffused with sadness at the end of a long love, he began swimming in rivers, scribbling in his notebook:
All water, river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think.
Our profound response to water appears to be our evolutionary inheritance — we came out of the ocean, of course, but never fully. Drawing on marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s aquatic theory of human evolution, later deepened by evolutionary historian Elaine Morgan in her classic The Descent of Woman, Deakin writes:
We spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. We went through a sea change to become what we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent, short-lived affair. Apart from the proboscis monkey of Borneo, we are the only primate that regularly takes to the water for the sheer joy of it. We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water.
Hardy had arrived as his theory by way of a single, startling insight — that the vestigial hairs on our bodies are arranged in a pattern completely unique among apes; that when a human swims through a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines representing the trajectory of water flow map exactly onto the lines drawn by the pattern of body hairs. In consonance with Rachel Carson’s recognition that because “our origins are of the earth… there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Swimming appears to be our most direct way of contacting our creaturely belonging with the world. Deakin writes:
When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is — water — and it begins to move with the water around it… The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born. So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim… You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.
Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River?That bewildering sense of aliveness comes aglow in the book’s final pages as Deakin reflects on how absurd the lengths he goes to for a transcendent swim may seem from the outside, yet how to him it is “always an entirely serious enterprise, if at times surrealist,” and one that always leaves him “enriched.”
I turned off down a timeless sandy avenue of oaks, potholed by rabbits, to a distant farmhouse on a promontory jutting into the wide Blyth marshes… I cycled by the woods where George Orwell made love to Eleanor Jaques, his neighbour when he lived at Southwold, and into the village past the ruined church where he used to sit and read. I passed the house of Freddy the fisherman (“The Sole Plaice for Some Fin Special”). It was a quarter past six, and the sun, which already shared the sky with the blushing new moon, was beginning to go down. I hurried out over the little wooden bridge where they hold the annual crabbing contest in summer, and printed faint tyre-tracks across the last two hundred yards of cracked saltpan desert mud on Walberswick marsh. Scaling the sand-dunes, I ran down the deserted beach, flung off my clothes and waded into the surf. I felt the sweetness of tired limbs and fell headlong into the waves, striking towards the horizon that appeared intermittently beyond the breakers. I had left my rucksack and clothes beside a beautiful pebble starfish on the beach, another echo of the Scilly Maze. Perhaps I had at last swum my way through it. When I reached the relative calm of unbroken swell, I looked back towards the shore. A crimson mist lay over the sea as a red-hot sun dropped over the pantiled roofs behind the sand-dunes. The sea-fret shaded to a deep purple along the curve of the bay where Dunwich should have been, and obscured the giant puffball of Sizewell B. One of the beauties of this flat land of Suffolk is that when you’re swimming off the shore and the waves come up, it subsides from view and you could be miles out in the North Sea. An orange sickle of new moon hung above the chimneys in a deep mauve sky. Autumn bonfires glowed in the mist and floated white smoke-rings above it. The beach shone in the gathering dusk as the tide fell and the sea grew less perturbed. I turned and swam on into the quiet waves.
Such homilies on presence are also an act of resistance, of reclamation, of revolutionary rapture against the tyrannies of our present:
Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially “interpreted.” There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild… by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things… [to access] that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery.
Complement Waterlog with Bill Hayes on swimming as the poetry of the body and artist Lisa Congdon’s illustrated celebration of the joy of swimming, then revisit Robert Macfarlane’s superb reckoning with the aliveness of rivers.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily tasks punctuating the unbidden wonder of our lives. But it is good, every once in a while, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to cast upon ourselves a spell against indifference by moving through the world with an inner bow at every littlest thing that prevailed over the odds of otherwise in order to exist.
Artist couple Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller, who work together under the pen name Icinori, offer a vibrant invitation to this countercultural way of seeing in Thank You, Everything (public library) — a meditative yet exuberant journey through the world within and the world without, inspired by the Japanese notion of tsuumogami: the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to acquire after being of service in the world for a hundred years.
Out of what begins as an impressionistic portrait of gladness — “thank you, blue”; “thank you, morning”; “thank you, glass” — emerges a story syncopating the abstract and the concrete.
Day breaks with gratitude, breaks into a mysterious adventure, each step of which is a bow — we see the protagonist move through cities and landscapes, thanking every large and little thing along the way: bicycle and bus and airplane, sky and clouds and streams, night and fog, binoculars and birds, caterpillar and leaf, spring and silence.
The destination, rather than a place, is a state of being — the recompense of paying everything in our path the gratitude and reverence it is due for merely existing. For we forget, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — is not something we can ever have for ourselves unless we accord it to everything and everyone else.
Couple Thank You, Everything with Oliver Sacks on gratitude and the measure of living at the horizon of death, then revisit poet Marissa Davis’s love letter to everything alive.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is… on each person… creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.”
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”
Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.
That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.
Viktor FranklA mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning.
As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame — these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered — as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past — they are now published in English for the first time as Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library).
Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes:
We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this.
Liminal Worlds by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision:
Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.
Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims:
Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!
How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity.
Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:
What remained was the individual person, the human being — and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.
Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds:
Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.
Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless — the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:
Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.
He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked — and behold,
duty was joy.
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation — an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity — Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point:
So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.
In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself:
At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?
Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.
Another of Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for the 1913 English edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance — triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization:
The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.
We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?
What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms — terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:
One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.
Art from Margaret C. Cook’s 1913 English edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death — a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:
The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.
In the remainder of the slender and splendid Yes to Life, Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.
Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.
And so, a poem:
HARROWING
by Maggie SmithThis world is harrowing, harrowing,
all harrow, as if harrow were what
the world is made of, what we are
made of, as if harrow were strings
to be strummed, tendons and veins
to be strummed, as if harrow
could be snapped between the teeth,
the word one letter from the white meal
inside our bones, the meal we could make
of ourselves, harrow, two letters
from the bird who might strum
with its beak what the body is made of,
what the world is made of, and in that
strumming become the song.
“Harrowing” comes from Maggie Smith’s benediction of a book Good Bones (public library). Couple it with Nick Cave on how to use your harrowing, then revisit Marcus Aurelius on turning your suffering into strength.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.”
There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads is yet unwritten. Such moments come most readily at the beginning of something new.
To begin anything — a new practice, a new project, a new love — is to cast upon yourself a spell against stagnation. Beginnings are notation for the symphony of the possible in us. They ask us to break the pattern of our lives and reconfigure it afresh — something that can only be done with great courage and great tenderness, for no territory of life exposes both our power and our vulnerability more brightly than a beginning.
One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)How to leap into the thrilling and terrifying unknowns of the possible is what the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) explores in a chapter of his parting gift to the world, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (public library), which also gave us his luminous meditation on kindling the light between us and within us.
He begins by telescoping into deep time, reminding us that we are but a small and new part of something ancient and immense — a vast totality that holds us in our incompleteness, in our existential loneliness, in the vulnerability of our self-creation:
There are days when Conamara is wreathed in blue Tuscan light. The mountains seem to waver as though they were huge dark ships on a distant voyage. I love to climb up into the silence of these vast autonomous structures. What seems like a pinnacled summit from beneath becomes a level plateau when you arrive there. Born in a red explosion of ascending fire, the granite lies cold, barely marked by the millions of years of rain and wind. On this primeval ground I feel I have entered into a pristine permanence, a continuity here that knew the wind hundreds of millions of years before a human face ever felt it.
When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.
[…]
Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) by Caspar David Friedrich, circa 1817. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Just as our lives are shaped by those necessary endings — by what we choose to let go — they are shaped by what we choose to begin, however precarious the precipice of the new.
A century after Van Gogh exulted in risk as the crucible of the creative life and a decade after David Bowie urged young artists to “always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in,” O’Donohue adds:
Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)And yet we are homeostasis machines, our very organism oriented toward maintaining the status quo of comfort and predictability, which every beginning inevitably disrupts with its fulcrum of change and its brunt of uncertainty. O’Donohue considers what it takes to override our creaturely reflex for habituation:
Sometimes the greatest challenge is to actually begin; there is something deep in us that conspires with what wants to remain within safe boundaries and stay the same… Sometimes a period of preparation is necessary, where the idea of the beginning can gestate and refine itself; yet quite often we unnecessarily postpone and equivocate when we should simply take the risk and leap into a new beginning.
He renders the vulnerability and redemption of that leap in a poem — a kind of self-blessing to consecrate the courage of beginning:
FOR A NEW BEGINNING
by John O’DonohueIn out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to — an illustrated celebration of living with presence in uncertain times.Sometimes — in fact, often — beginnings are tucked into endings. In consonance with his philosopher-poet friend David Whyte’s poignant reflection on ending love and beginning love, O’Donohue writes:
Often when something is ending we discover within it the spore of new beginning, and a whole new train of possibility is in motion before we even realize it. When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. Surrounding the intention and the act of beginning, there are always exciting possibilities.
Paying attention to those portals of possibility is both an act of self-respect and a reverence of life:
Part of the art of living wisely is to learn to recognize and attend to such profound openings in one’s life.
Complement with poet Pattiann Rogers’s stunning ode to our ongoing self-creation and the poetic psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on how people change, the revisit John O’Donohue on why we fall in love, the essence of friendship, and how we bless each other.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic notion of anam cara. We bring this knowledge, this mutual understanding, to every interaction with a true friend — that is what makes friendship satisfying, steadying, safe; it is what makes it, in Kahlil Gibran’s immortal words, a “field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.” And yet, if we are alive enough, each time we meet we are meeting for the first time, getting to know each other afresh, for only the self that goes on changing goes on living.
A true friend blesses both the abiding and the possible in us.
Another paradox: It is often the loneliest people, those most riven by self-doubt and most unsure of where they belong, that make the most steadfast and salutary friends once they break through the barriers of insecurity and fear to allow connection. Because for them the gift of being understood is especially hard-earned, they give it back redoubled with gratitude.
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) was one such person.
Franz Kafka“Am I broken?” he asks on the pages of Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal in which he grappled so desperately with self-doubt — and answers himself: “Almost nothing but hope speaks against it.” When his hope dwindled, he declared himself “unfit for friendship,” doubted whether friendship is “even possible” for someone as strange and solitary as himself, and yet he yearned for it: “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life, the demands of my own person.”
In a particularly dispirited diary entry from the last year of his thirties, which was also one of the last years of his life, he declares himself “forsaken” and writes:
[I am] incapable of striking up a friendship with anyone, incapable of tolerating a friendship, at bottom full of endless astonishment when I see a group of people cheerfully assembled together.
It takes just one unwavering friend — a friend to the soul beneath the self that does the doubting — to quietly and consistently revise these punishing stories we tell ourselves. All along, through all the years of all this punishing self-talk, Kafka’s childhood friend Max Brod had been the greatest champion of his talent, never losing faith in his friend or in the friendship. Though Kafka frequently withdrew into his self-elected isolation, Max never withdrew his love.
Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird — a tender illustrated story about loyalty and the gift of friendshipWith time, Kafka came to understand that in every friendship, life happens and interrupts the continuity of connection, making it difficult to reconnect — difficult but infinitely important, for in moving through the difficulty of discontinuity, in the repair of the rupture, the deeper substratum of trust and durability is laid down and reaffirmed again and again.
In another diary entry, he writes:
Since a friendship without interruption of one’s daily life is unthinkable, a great many of its manifestations are blown away time and again, even if its core remains undamaged. From the undamaged core they are formed anew, but as every such formation requires time, and not everything that is expected succeeds, one can never, even aside from the change in one’s personal moods, pick up again where one left off last time. Out of this, in friendships that have a deep foundation, an uneasiness must arise before every fresh meeting which need not be so great that it is felt as such, but which can disturb one’s conversation and behaviour to such a degree that one is consciously astonished, especially as one is not aware of, or cannot believe, the reason for it.
Like all deep and complex people, Kafka was not fully aware of the reasons for his frequent withdrawals. But some part of him hoped, trusted that true friendship withstands the elasticity of presence. When he finally realized that the tuberculosis he had been living with for years was going to take his life, he left all his papers and manuscripts to Max, instructing him to destroy everything. In an act of love — refusing to enable a friend’s damaging self-doubt is always an act of love — Max disobeyed, instead preserving Kafka’s writing for posterity, publishing a tender biography of his friend, and immortalizing their friendship in his 1928 novel The Kingdom of Love.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May UdryComplement with Comet & Star — a cosmic fable about the rhythms and consolations of friendship — and an introvert’s guide to friendship from Thoreau, another strange and solitary person riven by self-doubt, then revisit Kafka on the nature of reality, the power of patience, and the four psychological hindrances that keep the talented from manifesting their talent.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood — it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.
Crisis, of course, is important — it is, as Alain de Botton writes in his deeply assuring meditation on the importance of breakdowns, “an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” There come times when the tedium and turmoil of being yourself become too much to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you wish to be someone else, send you searching for a different organizing principle. (It takes some living to reach that point, which is why midlife can be such a time of tumult and transformation.)
We live and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in those first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, those first experiments in self-acceptance. They are deep and difficult questions, but Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston bring great playfulness and delight to them in their second collaboration, The Dictionary Story (public library) — a charming fable about the yearning for inner congruence and the existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language carried by Oliver’s joyful paintings, his singular hand-lettering, and Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.
The story begins on the bookshelf, where “most of the time, all the books knew what they were about” — except one book. Because she contains “all the words that had ever been read, which meant she could say all the things that could ever be said,” Dictionary is perpetually unsure of herself, her organizing principle not coherence but alphabetic order, the words in her not a story but a list.
It is often the most unexpected and improbable things that save us from ourselves: An Alligator suddenly leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not wanting to be eaten, darts across the alphabet.
A chaos of delight ensues as other words come alive as other characters — a Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Tornado, the Moon — each trying to understand their part in the confusing story writing itself through their animacy.
Dictionary’s thrill at finally having a story unfold on her pages turns into terror as things get out of hand. Suddenly, her natural order starts to look a whole lot more desirable than this unbridled disarray of characters with incompatible desires. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing overwhelm of trying to make too many changes to the story of life all at once, to harmonize the discord of conflicting desires, only to end up in even deeper incoherence.)
In the end, Dictionary calls on her friend Alphabet to restore her to herself — a lovely reminder that the greatest gift a friend can give is to sing back to you the song of yourself when you forget it.
Couple The Dictionary Story with Oliver and Sam’s previous collaboration, A Child of Books, then revisit The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s uncommonly wonderful invented words (based on real etymologies from around the world) for what we feel but cannot name, words like maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”) and apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person”).
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what we are actually feeling.
There are two ways of keeping that tension from breaking the heart — a surrender to the truth, or a falsification of feeling. When we don’t feel strong enough or safe enough to face our emotional reality, we manipulate it. It may be an outward act, masking for others what we fear would be unwelcome or judged, or it may be an inner one, lying to ourselves about what we are actually feeling to dull the discomfort and ambivalence of feeling it. The stab of loneliness at the party, the relief at the funeral, the love that requires nothing less than changing your life — whether internally sundering or socially inappropriate, we render these emotions impermissible and suppress them. That falsification, whether conscious or not, maps the fault line between the person and the personality — that costume the soul wears to perform and protect itself.
But there is a high psychological cost to putting on the performance, the costume, the mask — a cost sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild terms emotional labor.
In her revelatory 1983 book The Managed Heart (public library), she draws on a wealth of case studies and interviews to explore emotional labor as “a distinctly patterned yet invisible emotional system” governing our private and public exchanges through individual acts of “emotion work” and social “feeling rules” that shape what we allow ourselves to show and what we allow ourselves to feel. Much of our emotional labor is invisible even to us, but we become aware of it when we experience what Hochschild calls “the pinch” between a real but unwelcome feeling and a preferred, idealized one.
René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)Two decades ahead of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s case for the intelligence of our emotions and half a century ahead of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s case for feeling as the crucible of consciousness, Hochschild writes:
Emotion functions as a messenger from the self, an agent that gives us an instant report on the connection between what we are seeing and what we had expected to see, and tells us what we feel ready to do about it… Emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence.
[…]
Emotional labor… requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others… This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality.
There is emotional labor involved each time we put someone else’s needs before our own, each time we force a binary conclusion to resolve our ambivalence about a nuanced matter of the heart. This “subterranean work of placing an acceptable inner face on ambivalence” is painfully exhausting because it makes us less ourselves. Hochschild draws an analogy:
Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self — either the body or the margins of the soul — that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation, what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own?
Owning what we feel — which involves both allowing it and expressing it — is fundamentally a way of claiming ourselves. But because permission and expression are so intricately entwined, the very act of suppressing what we express changes what we feel, alters the very self. Hochschild writes:
If we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes.
Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little WolfThis matters because attention is the lens that renders reality and attention is a function of feeling — by changing our feelings, we change our lens, ultimately changing what we experience as reality:
Feeling… filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize… Every emotion does signal the “me” I put into seeing “you.” It signals the often unconscious perspective we apply when we go about seeing. Feeling signals that inner perspective.
In this sense, feeling is an orienteering tool, a clue about where we stand in relation to something or someone. And yet it is prey to one great complication: the interpretation of the clue. Often unconscious, our interpretation of feeling is regularly garbled by what was and by what we think should be — the ghosts of the past and the fantasies of the future haunting the present, warping the present, warping reality itself, effecting what George Eliot called a “double consciousness.” Because to know what is real is the measure of self-trust, confusion and ambivalence about our feelings erode our self-trust.
Unable to bear the internal dissonance, or entirely unaware of it, we cope by feigning to feel something other than what we are actually feeling. Whether performed for others or for the audience of our own confused conscience, this is acting work. Hochschild, who grew up as the child of diplomats, classifies two key varieties — surface acting and deep acting. She writes:
Feelings do not erupt spontaneously or automatically in either deep acting or surface acting. In both cases the actor has learned to intervene — either in creating the inner shape of a feeling or in shaping the outward appearance of one.
[…]
In surface acting we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. Diplomats and actors do this best, and very small children do it worst (it is part of their charm). In deep acting we make feigning easy by making it unnecessary.
We make it unnecessary by replacing our actual feeling with the feeling we wish to project, wish to feel, so that in a sense we no longer need to feign it — we have induced ourselves to feel it. Hochschild, whose study of emotional labor began with hundreds of flight attendants in training, offers an illustrative example:
Can a flight attendant suppress her anger at a passenger who insults her?… She may have lost for awhile the sense of what she would have felt had she not been trying so hard to feel something else. By taking over the levers of feeling production, by pretending deeply, she alters herself.
Art by Guridi from The Day I Became a Bird — an illustrated allegory about falling in love and learning to unmask the true selfThis alteration of the real self requires tremendous emotional labor, which comes at a great psychological cost — we lose sense of who we are and where we stand. (Those of us who have had to take care of a parent’s emotional needs and feelings from a young age at the expense of feeling our own, at the expense of knowing our own, are particularly vulnerable to such self-abandonment in adult life.)
This notion of deep acting originates in Russian theater pioneer Konstantin Stanislavski’s influential century-old system for training actors in what he called “the art of experiencing” — a practice of tapping into the actor’s conscious thought, will, and memory in order to trigger the unconscious into experiencing, rather than just representing, the emotion the actor must perform in their part.
In one of the many case studies substantiating the book, Hochschild gives the example of a man trying to stop feeling deep love for a woman with whom he is no longer able to have a reciprocal relationship. Applying Stanislavski’s method, the man would draw on his emotional memory to make a list of all the times the woman disappointed him or hurt him, prompting himself to feel the pain and disappointment as an antidote to his love. “He would not, then, fall naturally out of love,” she writes. “He would actively conduct himself out of love through deep acting.”
We are conducting ourselves into and out of feeling all the time as we play the parts of the lives we think we ought to live. Most of the time, we are not even aware we are doing this. We do it especially deftly in love. “I was afraid of being hurt, so I attempted to change my feelings,” an exceptionally self-aware woman tells Hochschild in one of the interviews, naming plainly the commonest contortion of the heart we perform in the pit of fear — after all, falling in love is always and invariably a surrender to the fear of loss. In love, Hochschild observes, one always “wavers between belief and doubt” — and it is precisely when afflicted with ambivalence, when unable to tolereate doubt and reconcile conflicting feelings, that we exert the most toilsome emotional labor.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)One of Hochschild’s interview subjects is a woman riven by a common ambivalence — a marriage she has outgrown, yet one in which she continues to stay out of a misplaced feeling of responsibility for her child’s future, forgetting somehow that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to model the courage of living one’s truth. She tells Hochschild:
I am desperately trying to change my feelings of being trapped [in marriage] into feelings of wanting to remain with my husband voluntarily. Sometimes I think I’m succeeding — sometimes I know I haven’t. It means I have to lie to myself and know I am lying. It means I don’t like myself very much. It also makes me wonder whether or not I’m a bit of a masochist.
Lying to ourselves, Hochschild admonishes, erodes our trust in knowing what is real, what is true. In acting, the actor is aware of the illusion; in life, deluding ourselves is a form of bad faith and self-betrayal, the price of which — paid upon the reluctant but inevitable admission of our inner truth — is a loss of self-respect. She writes:
It is far more unsettling to discover that we have fooled ourselves than to discover that we have been fooling others… When in private life we recognize an illusion we have held, we form a different relation to what we have thought of as our self. We come to distrust our sense of what is true, as we know it through feeling. And if our feelings have lied to us, they cannot be part of our good, trustworthy, “true” self… We may recognize that we distort reality, that we deny or suppress truths, but we rely on an observing ego to comment on these unconscious processes in us and to try to find out what is going on despite them.
Hochschild offers a single, merciless antidote to this all too human tendency toward self-delusion: “constant attention, continual questioning and testing” of what we believe about ourselves, what we trust in ourselves. Then and only then can we begin to treat our hearts not as something to be managed but as something to be met, discovering in that meeting the truth of who we are.
Couple The Managed Heart with Javier Marías on the courage to heed your intuitions, then revisit the fascinating science of how emotions are made.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.”
The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all the terror and tenderness of knowing ourselves in order to know the world, of loving ourselves in order to love the world.
That is what Native American novelist, poet, and children’s book author Louise Erdrich offers in “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance,” originally published in a special edition of Orion Magazine — a poem evocative of Derek Walcott’s classic “Love After Love,” of Leonard Cohen’s lyric reckoning with resistance, and yet entirely original for the simple reason of drawing from the freshest spring of the universal: the most deeply personal.
ADVICE TO MYSELF #2: RESISTANCE
by Louise ErdrichResist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.
Couple with e.e. cummings on the courage to be yourself — the ultimate act of resistance “in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else” — then revisit Grace Paley on the art of growing older, predicated on how you hold your face.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together.
This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the spirit — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul above the self, unselfing us into seeing each other, into remembering, as James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their epochal conversation, that “we are still each other’s only hope.”
Born in Iran months after the end of the First World War and raised by farming parents in present-day Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was still a girl when she sensed something deeply wrong with the unquestioned colonial system of her world, with the oppression that was the axis of that world. By the time she was a young woman — a time when our urge to rebel against the broken system is fiery but we don’t yet have the tools to rebel intelligently, don’t yet know the right questions to ask in order to tell whether the answer we are holding up as an alternative is any better or worse — she rebelled by embracing Communism as “an interesting manifestation of popular will.” Working by that point as a telephone operator in England, she joined the Communist Party. “It was a conversion, apparently sudden, and total (though short-lived),” she would later recall. “Communism was in fact a germ or virus that had already been at work in me for a long time… because of my rejection of the repressive and unjust society of old white-dominated Africa.” It didn’t take her long to see the cracks in Communism. She left the party, discovered Sufism, grew fascinated with the nascent field of of behavioral psychology and its revelatory, often disquieting findings about the inner workings of the mind, of its formidable powers to act and its immense vulnerabilities to being acted upon. But she found no ready-made answer to the problem of social harmony.
And so, in that way artists have of complaining by creating, she devoted her life — almost a century of life, a century of world wars and violent uprisings, of changes unimaginable to her parents — to asking the difficult, clarifying questions that help us better understand what makes us human, how we allow ourselves to dehumanize others, and what it takes to cohere, as individuals and as societies. At 87, she became the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for writing that “with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”
In 1985, months after I was born under Bulgaria’s Communist dictatorship, Doris Lessing delivered Canada’s esteemed annual Massey Lectures, later adapted into a series of short essays under the haunting title Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (public library) — a searching look at how it is that “we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives,” lensed through a lucid faith that we have all the power, urgency, and dignity we need to choose otherwise, to use what we have learned about the worst of our nature to nurture and magnify the best of our nature, to figure out “how we behave so that we control the society and the society does not control us.”
One of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince. (Morgan Library & Museum)In a sentiment Rebecca Solnit would echo three decades later in her modern classic Hope in the Dark, Lessing writes:
This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that — a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice — or if we notice, belittle — equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.
To be realistic about our own nature, Lessing argues, requires attentiveness to both of these strands — the destructive and the creative. This is the cosmic mirror Maya Angelou held up to humanity in her stunning space-bound poem, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” An epoch before her, Bertrand Russell — also a Nobel laureate in Literature, though trained as a scientist — reckoned with our twin capacities to define them in elemental terms — “We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when we diminish the potential energy.” — and in existential terms: “Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”
Our sanity, Lessing observes, lies in “our capacity to be detached and unflattering about ourselves” — and in the understanding that our selves are not islanded in time but lineages of beliefs and tendencies with roots much longer than our lifetimes, not sovereign but contiguous with all the other selves that occupy the particular patch of spacetime we have been born into. It is vital, she insists, that we examine ourselves — our selves, and the constellation of selves that is our given society — from various elsewheres.
Art by Felicita Sala from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.This is why we need writers — those professional observers, in Susan Sontag’s splendid definition, whose job it is to “pay attention to the world” and shine the light of that attention on every side of the kaleidoscope that is a given culture at a given time. A decade after Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb reckoning with the role of literature in democracy that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Lessing writes:
In totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this reason… Writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function that has been evolved by society… Literature is one of the most useful ways we have of achieving this “other eye,” this detached manner of seeing ourselves; history is another.
Because we are the future of our own past, the posterity of our ancestors, looking back on history from our present vantage point offers fertile training ground for looking forward, for shaping the world of tomorrow. Lessing writes:
Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next. There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves.
[…]
There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the right, because within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new development — at the best, something that has been changed, all passion spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.
Doris Lessing, 1950s. (National Portrait Gallery, London)In consonance with Carl Sagan’s admonition against “the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth” and with Joan Didion’s admonition against mistaking self-righteousness for morality, Lessing offers:
This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong; our cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense, if not as downright evil… Well, in our sober moments, our human moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate us, we all of us suspect that this “I am right, you are wrong” is, quite simply, nonsense. All history, development goes on through interaction and mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life, as one strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development — the main current of social evolution — cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general stream.
Looking back on the colonialist Zimbabwe of her childhood, on the “prejudiced, ugly, ignorant” attitudes of the ruling whites, she reflects:
These attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though the merest glance at history would have told them (and many of them were educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their certitudes were temporary.
At the center of Lessing’s inquiry is the paradox of how seemingly sound-minded, kind-hearted people get enlisted in ideologies of oppression. Kierkegaard had written in the Golden Age of European revolutions — those idealistic but imperfect attempts to unify fractured feudal duchies into free nations, attempts that modeled the possibility of a United States of America — that “the evolution of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the individual apart from the crowd,” that “truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because… the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” An epoch and a world order later, Lessing considers how regimes of terror take hold:
Nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically. But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.
Art by Jeska Verstegen from Bear Is Never Alone by Marc VeerkampThe mess we have made, she intimates, may be the most effective teaching tool we have — a living admonition against doing the same, a clarion call to rebel by doing otherwise:
Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest, wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”
As for us, here in the roiling mess, our sole salvation lies in learning to “live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.” Lessing writes:
While all these boilings and upheavals go on, at the same time, parallel, continues this other revolution: the quiet revolution, based on sober and accurate observation of ourselves, our behaviour, our capacities… If we decided to use it, [we may] transform the world we live in. But it means making that deliberate step into objectivity and away from wild emotionalism, deliberately choosing to see ourselves as, perhaps, a visitor from another planet might see us.
Art by Diana Ejaita from Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way by poet Aracelis GirmayThis, in fact, was the conditional clause in Baldwin’s words to Mead — in order to be “each other’s only hope,” he said, we ought to be “as clear-headed about human beings as possible.” This, too, was Maya Angelou’s conditional optimism for humanity: “That is when, and only when, we come to it” — to that “Brave and Startling Truth,” balanced on the fulcrum of our conflicted capacities, “that we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”
Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.
The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life’s meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters (public library).
Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead’s concept in an anthology of their own, even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)” — offers his own perspective:
I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.”
[…]
I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe.
It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:
I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.
I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”
Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take issue with the idea that there are two “magisteria” — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing:
Talk of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “another,” as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a “higher” domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).
Art by Ariana Fields from What Love Knows by poet Aracelis GirmayA century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:
When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.
I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toAs if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love, he adds:
I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).
Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s wide and wonderful Letters with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth, and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on what makes life worth living, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.
Light distribution on soap bubble from the 19th-century French physics textbook Le monde physique. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.
We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure.
A century of upheavals ago, suspended between two World Wars, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the strange power and possibility of such societal phase transitions in his novel Steppenwolf (public library). He writes:
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.
We too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.
Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. A century before Toni Morrison, living through another upheaval, insisted that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work,” Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”
The Dove No. 1 by Hilma af Klint, painted during World War I. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Often, they do the nourishing at great personal cost. He considers what it means, and what it takes, to be an artist:
You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.
Most people, Hesse laments while watching his contemporaries, are instead “robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings” by the newspapers they read daily — the social media of his time — through which the world’s power-mongers manipulate our imagination of the possible. “The end and aim of it all,” he prophecies, “is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last.”
That is what happened. The next war did come, the world’s grimmest yet — a phase transition that nearly destroyed every particle of humanity. And yet something was left standing, stirring — that same creative force that made of the chaos a new era of possibility never previously imagined: civil rights and women’s liberation, solar panels and antibiotics, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nina Simone.
On the other side of that war’s ruins, another thinker of uncommon depth and sensitivity considered the role of the artist and of art in the collapse and reconfiguring of civilizations. In a 1949 address before the American Academy of Arts and Letters, later included in his lifeline of a collection Two Cheers for Democracy (public library), the English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) celebrates the stabilizing power of art in times of incoherence and discord:
A work of art… is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a mess — but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess — but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess — but there was Macbeth. Louis XIV — but there was Phèdre. Art… is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.
Art by Nina Cosford from the illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf, who wrote To the Lighthouse in a transitional time.Because art is the antipode to the destructive forces sundering society, the artist — endowed with the personal and political power of the sensitive — will invariably tend to be an outsider to the society in which they are born. A decade before Auden observed that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,” before Iris Murdoch observed that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Forster writes:
If our present society should disintegrate — and who dare prophesy that it won’t? — [the figure of the artist] will become clearer: the Bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat — one of those figures which have at present no function either in a warring or a peaceful world. It may not be dignified to be a rat, but many of the ships are sinking, which is not dignified either — the officials did not build them properly. Myself, I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship — at all events I can look around me for a little longer — and I remember how one of us, a rat with particularly bright eyes called Shelley, squeaked out, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” before he vanished into the waters of the Mediterranean… The legislation of the artist is never formulated at the time, though it is sometimes discerned by future generations.
This, he assures us, is not a pessimistic view — it is a kind of faith in the future, made of our creative devotion to the present. (I am reminded here of his contemporary Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” and of C.S. Lewis, who reckoned with our task in troubled times from the middle of a World War to remind us that “the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”) Forster writes:
Society can only represent a fragment of the human spirit, and that another fragment can only get expressed through art… Looking back into the past, it seems to me that that is all there has ever been: vantage-grounds for discussion and creation, little vantage-grounds in the changing chaos, where bubbles have been blown and webs spun, and the desire to create order has found temporary gratification, and the sentinels have managed to utter their challenges, and the huntsmen, though lost individually, have heard each other’s calls through the impenetrable wood, and the lighthouses have never ceased sweeping the thankless seas.
Art by Caldecott-winning children’s book author and artist Sophie Blackall
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter, what makes life alive? A generation later, the Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman answered with a deeply original proposition: that life is best defined as freedom, that freedom is the boundary between inanimate matter and animacy.
To me, freedom is the boundary condition where matter reaches for meaning — life, after all, is the only component of the universe free to comprehend the rest. And yet all of our technologies of thought have so far failed to discern what life actually is, how it emerged from non-life, and what to look for when we are looking for it in our laboratories and in the great unfolding experiment that is the universe itself. We have sequenced the human genome and discovered the “God particle,” yet genetics and particle physics have found no common language for communicating and harmonizing their respective discoveries to address the complex question the single answer to which is life.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrote. Watching her mathematician brother — the number theory pioneer André Weil — try to reduce the problem of reality to his own science, watching the founding fathers of quantum mechanics do the same, she lamented: “The state of science at a given moment is nothing else but… the average opinion of the village of scientists [who] affirm what they believe they ought to affirm.”
An epoch later, the villages have drifted so far apart as to grow foreign to each other. Gravitational waves, radioactivity, and DNA belong to the same reality — the reality that made life possible — and yet cosmology, chemistry, and biology are too mute to each other to make sense of the deeper meaning behind their respective discoveries. We are still left wondering how reality happens unto life and how life becomes reality.
Art by Komako Sakai for a modern Japanese interpretation of The Velveteen RabbitAstrobiologist Sara Imari Walker takes up these complex and abiding questions in Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (public library).
Trained as a theoretical physicist and disenchanted with her discipline’s insistence that life is a conceptually banal scientific problem subservient to the fundamentals of space, time, energy, and matter, she holds modern physics accountable for providing “a fundamental description of a universe devoid of life” — that is, a description of the universe that negates the very existence of its describers, we who are very much alive. She writes:
We cannot see ourselves clearly because we have not built a theory of physics yet that treats observers as inside the universe they are describing.
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)In this quest to understand ourselves and the universe that made us, she argues, the vitalists of the eighteenth century — who believed that a concrete non-physical element, a “vital spark,” grants life its aliveness — were no more misguided than the modern materialists who believe that life — that poetry, that whale song, that love — is just a property of physical matter. Reckoning with a colleague’s startling remark that “life does not exist,” she considers the deeper logic beneath this koan-like formulation of the great scientific blind spot of our time:
What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter… There is no magic transition point where a molecule or collection of molecules is suddenly “living.” Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience — that we are living — is nonexistent when you look at our parts. If life is not a property of matter, and material things are what exist, then life does not exist.
(And of course, none of it had to exist at all. Life seems to be the imperative of the unnecessary. Long before modern physics, Darwin marveled at how, on this planet shaped by unfeeling forces and moved by fixed laws, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Here was a biologist trained as a geologist shining a sidewise gleam on a cosmological question — a rare vagabond between the villages of science, from a time before they had become separate continents of thought.)
At the heart of the book is the rigorous, passionate insistence that we need a softer and more elastic explanatory membrane between the three hard problems of reality: the hard problem of consciousness (rooted in the mystery of qualia, that inarticulable essence of what it feels like to be oneself, the felt interiority of being alive in a particular embodiment and enmindment), the hard problem of matter (the fact that everything observable arises from the interaction of particles and forces), and the hard problem of life (sculpted of information and an observer of information). Sara writes:
Cast in this way, all three hard problems become one more fundamental problem we cannot seem to avoid any more than we can seem to answer it: Why do some things exist (or experience existence) and not others? It is perhaps the most perplexing question of our existence that anything should exist at all. And if something exists, then why not everything?
By contracting the pinhole of our scrutiny to the question of life, she intimates, we might be able to begin extrapolating an answer to this largest of questions — something that calls not only for new principles but for a new theory of physics and a dismantling of disciplinary boundaries. A century after Weil, Sara points to the same paradox standing between the life of science and the science of life in our own time:
We don’t yet have a general understanding of the category of things that we should group together and call “life.” Therefore either our categorization is wrong or life is not something to be categorized.
[…]
We cannot always see this clearly because of the arbitrary boundaries we set between the current classification of disciplines we think are needed to solve the problem, which are based on paradigms not suited for solving what life is.
Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Observing that “the boundary between the phenomena we want to think of as life and not life is fuzzy at best and may not exist at all,” she considers the present state of our disciplinary parochialism:
Biologists approach the problem by defining life in terms of observed features of life on Earth, which is not especially useful when you’re looking for life’s origins or for life elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiologists need guiding principles to inform how they conduct their search, but they, too, end up being overly anthropocentric in their reasoning: their search is most often directed at signs of life that would indicate biology exactly as we observe it here on Earth. Chemists either think life does not exist or that it is all chemistry (probably these are equivalent views). Computer scientists tend to focus too much on the software — the information processing and replicative abilities of life — and not enough on the hardware, i.e., the fact that life is a physical system that emerges from chemistry, and that the properties of chemistry literally matter. Physicists tend to focus too much on the physical — life is about thermodynamics and flows of energy and matter — and miss the informational and evolutionary aspects that seem to be the most distinctive features of the things we want to call life. Philosophers focus too much on the need for a definition or the flaws of providing one, and not enough on how we can move as a community beyond the definitional phase into a new paradigm.
Nature does not share these boundaries between disciplines. They are artifacts of our human conception of nature, our need to classify things, and historical contingencies in how our understanding of the reality around us has evolved over the last few centuries. That is, they are the product of paradigms established in the past. We are in part pre-paradigmatic in understanding life as a general phenomenon in the universe because there is no defined discipline that can fully accommodate the intellectual discussion that needs to be had about what life is.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)The solution to the unsolved problem of life, she argues, may not be one of new evidence but one of new explanation, just as we watched the planets move for eons before we discerned the laws of their motion to concede a heliocentric universe. Without a clear explanatory model for life here on Earth, she argues, we might never be able to detect life on other worlds — the central task of her own science. With an eye to how the new science of plant intelligence deepens the mystery of what a mind is, Sara considers what kindred blind spots may be afflicting astrobiology:
Plants are just one example that makes clear how the boundary of our imagination does not even intersect with what it is to be among the other multicellular life that surrounds us on this planet.
If we cannot even shift our reference frame enough to understand what it is like to be other inhabitants of our own planet, how could we possibly imagine the truly alien? “Truly alien” here should be understood as other life that does not share any ancestry with our own: that is, that has an entirely unique history with an independent origin. There are no aliens on Earth because as far as we know, all the life we have encountered shares a common history. Even artificial intelligences — sometimes described as alien, are not alien; they are trained on human data, which is itself the product of nearly four billion years of evolution on Earth. AI is as much a part of life on Earth as any of the biological organisms that have evolved here.
Art by Pepita Sandwich from The Art of CryingA century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the emergence of a new “mechanical kingdom” extending the kingdoms of biological life into our machines, Sara argues that our mechanical and algorithmic creations may not only alter the definition of life but help illuminate its origins:
The emergence of a technosphere may be precisely what is required for a biosphere to solve its own origins and therefore to discover others like it. To make this transition and make first contact, it may be critical to where we sit now in time that we recognize how thinking technologies are the next major transition in the planetary evolution of life on Earth. It is what we might expect as societies scale up and become more complex, just as life simpler than us has done in the past. The functional capabilities of a society have their deepest roots in ancient life, a lineage of information that propagates through physical materials. Just as a cell might evolve along a specific lineage into a multicellular structure (something that’s not inevitable but has happened independently on Earth at least twenty-five times), the emergence of artificial intelligences and planetary-scale data and computation can be seen as an evolutionary progression — a biosphere becoming a technosphere.
“Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in one of her finest, least known poems. A proper understanding of life, Sara argues, must account for that fact — for the tenacity with which life not only continues to exist despite the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence (which anchored Richard Dawkins’s wonderful counterintuitive insistence on the luckiness of death) but continues to exist in its particularity despite the infinitely many other possible configurations. She writes:
If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to — and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.
Out of this arises a crucial distinction between life and being alive (highlighted in the biological fact that most of you is dead). Nearly a century after cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener made the then-radical assertion that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” Sara adds:
DNA cannot exist unless there is a physical system (e.g., a cell) with memory of the steps to assemble it. All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute “life.” Life is the high-dimensional combinatorial space of what is possible for our universe to build that can be selected to exist as finite, distinguishable physical objects. Being “alive,” by contrast, is the trajectories traced through that possibility space. The objects that life is made of and that it constructs exist along causal chains extended in time; these lineages of information propagating through matter are what it is to be “alive.” Lineages can assemble individual objects, like a computer, a cup, a cellular membrane, or you in this very instant, but it is the temporally extended structure that is alive. Even over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself — what persists is the informational pattern over time, not the matter.
[…]
The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time. The branching pattern at the tips of this structure is what is alive now, and it is what is constructing the future on this planet.
One of computing pioneer Alan Turing’s little-known diagrams of morphogenesisIn the remainder of Life as No One Knows It, Sara goes on to explore assembly theory — a new framework for understanding the complexity of living organisms by discerning the minimal number of steps required to assemble them from the most fundamental building blocks — as a possible solution to the abiding problem of what we are. Complement it with pioneering biologist Ernest Everett Just — one of the first scientists to consider this question holistically — on what makes life alive, then revisit Meghan O’Gieblyn on our search for meaning in the age of AI and Alan Turing’s favorite boyhood book about the strange science of how alive you really are.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called “the art of living.”
That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sandwich explores in The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears (public library) — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence.
She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body’s cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those “custodians of the heart,” as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal).
Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can’t produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs.
The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way.
She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were “the humors of the heart,” to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin’s studies of emotional expressions, which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation.
We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world’s largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle.
This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only came into popular use in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.)
This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes:
It doesn’t matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human.
It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris’s death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories.
Because every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita’s interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the beach, crying “with pure love at the grocery store line.”
She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships.
Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions (which makes a cameo in The Art of Crying as one of many celebrations of other artists’ art), then savor the fascinating evolutionary history of dreaming — our other complex language for reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony.”
For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment to those unbidden days in it when summer seems to make a brief and bright return — as if to assure us that time is not linear but planar, that life will always recompense loss, that in the liminal we find the immanent and in the ephemeral the eternal.
No one has captured that enchantment more vividly than Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) in a rhapsodic entry from his journal penned one late and luminous October day in his thirties.
Emerson writes:
On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes.
He would later draw on this journal entry for the opening passage of his landmark book-length essay Nature (public library), considered the founding document of Transcendentalism (a term his visionary friend Elizabeth Peabody coined). Following a short poem, the essay begins:
There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.
The phrase “Indian summer” entered the lexicon in Emerson’s lifetime, peaked a century and a half later, and has since been falling out of use in the slow repair work of culture. But we have failed to replace it with a new term for those golden echoes of summer that harmonize the hymn of letting go that is fall. Perhaps “the halcyons” can do.
Complement with ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn, in nature and in life, as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Emerson on how to trust yourself, how to live with presence, how we become our most authentic selves.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet.”
“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her exquisite statement of belief, having lived through two World Wars and stood with the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War and used her own art as an instrument of cohesion and translation between selves. In times of political crisis, we seem to forget that societies are made of selves, are made at all — that they are collaborative acts of the imagination, works of the creative spirit emanating from the collective conscience of this relational constellation of individuals. As such, they require of us a deep and imaginative sensitivity to other selves, to what it is like to be someone else — that hallmark of our humanity we call empathy.
The English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) takes up these questions in an essay titled “What I Believe,” originally written just before the outbreak of WWII and later included in the out-of-print treasure Two Cheers for Democracy (public library) — his 1951 collection of essays based on and building upon his wartime anti-Nazi broadcasts.
E.M. Forster, queer and contemplativeA decade after D.H. Lawrence extolled the strength of sensitivity and a decade before James Baldwin observed in his timeless essay on the creative process that “society must accept some things as real; but [the creative person] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen,” Forster writes:
The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research (or they may be what is called “ordinary people,” who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbors.) All these people need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.
Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.But more than thriving in democracy, creative people — who are people of deep sensitivity to the world outside and the world within and the worlds others carry — make democracy thrive. Half a century before the word “empath” entered popular use, Forster upholds just that kind of person as the pillar of a harmonious society that serves and is served by the highest human potential of its citizens. In a passage of staggering pertinence to our own time, to this world once again teetering on the event horizon of totalitarianism in countless countries, he writes:
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke… Their temple… is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.
With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure.
Detail from the art in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina, created between 7,300 BC and 700 AD.Because democracy starts “from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization,” the relationships between individuals — that living reliquary of the Heart’s affections — are the golden threads that give the whole tapestry its shape and vibrancy. (This is why, as Hannah Arendt so incisively observed, dictators prey on loneliness.) With so little left to believe in when the world falls apart, Forster argues that what we can still and always have faith in is one another. With an eye to our personal relationships as “something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty” despite how opaque we remain to ourselves and each other, he writes:
Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a ‘Person,’ and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we cannot. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not unchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toRedoubling his insistence on the power of personal loyalties — which, in their contrast to political loyalties, embody Bertrand Russell’s poignant distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge” — Forster adds:
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
A country — a civilization — is only possible if we don’t betray each other. In consonance with his visionary contemporary Donald Winnicott, who listed reliability among the key qualities of a healthy mind, Forster writes:
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract… It is a matter of the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is natural warmth… One can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.
Complement with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy and Jenn Shapland on the power of a thin skin, then consider the radical act of choosing to love anyway.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see; thinking life impossible below 300 fathoms, because that was as far as we could reach — only to discover, as we wield our minds to develop prosthetic extensions of our senses, scales of complexity infinitely wider and vaster than we had imagined, full of wonders we could not conceive with our self-referential imagination.
“I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration,” Galileo reported after converting his telescope into a compound microscope to reveal a cosmos inside the world, an exponent of life never before imagined.
“I examined water in which I had steeped the pepper,” the artist turned scientist Robert Hooke wrote a generation later in his pioneering 1665 book Micrographia, “and as if I had been looking upon a Sea, I saw infinite of small living Creatures swimming and playing up and down in it, a thing indeed very wonderful to behold.”
Within two centuries, Darwin had drawn a link of kinship between us and these tiny wonders. “Each living creature,” he wrote, “must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”
Today, we know that there are more bacteria in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way, more in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people living in Europe. In the body of the Earth itself, there are microbes that breathe rock rather than oxygen and live for millions of years — a mysterious intraterrestrial universe that may have sculpted the continents we live on. Microbes touch every aspect of our planet’s history and health, from climate change to the origin of life. They are the golden threads in the tapestry connecting everything alive.
Centuries after it enchanted the early microscopists, their strange and subtle wonder comes aglow magnified by our modern tools and thinking on the pages of
Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse (public library) by synthetic biologist Tal Danino.
Multiple colonies of E. coli cultivated in a petri dishAgainst the backdrop of bacteria’s billions of years of evolutionary history, here is a young art (photography, born in 1839) drawing on a young science (bacteriology, established in the 1860s) and using an even younger canvas (the petri dish, devised in 1887) to capture the primordial, eternal beauty of Earth’s first life-forms.
Samples of Proteus mirabilis and Paenibacillus dendritiformis isolated from soil and printed on handmade washi paperPart artist and part futurist, Danino runs a lab working on microbial programming that aims to turn these ancient organisms into futuristic aids for human life, ranging from living environmental sensors to bespoke probiotics that target specific diseases.
Two of 100 samples of bacteria collected from different womenCenturies after the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used saffron to stain the cells he was observing in order to reveal their intricate structure, Danino’s dazzling array of samples — bacteria from the sands of Venice Beach in California and the rocks of Breakneck Ridge in New York; bacteria from a man’s foot, a woman’s bellybutton, and a baby’s hand; bacteria from the soil of South Korea and of New York City — are stained with vibrant dyes that render their enchantment partway between expressionist painting and psychedelic vision.
A strain of bacteria isolated from a cracked probiotic capsuleMultiple bacterial colonies in two different communal samples, stained, dried, and embedded in resinComplement Beautiful Bacteria with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions, neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s stunning drawings of brain cells under a microscope, and the mesmerizing microscopy of tree tissues, then revisit the haunting science of mental health, free will, and your microbiome.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.
This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal — not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read — so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)
On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s — the most challenging and most transformative of my life.
18. How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.
17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.
15. Outgrow yourself.
14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.
12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
And here, drawn from the archive, are 18 pieces consonant with these learnings — readings and writings that have fomented these reckonings with how to live.
- Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss2. An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days3. How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older4. Love Anyway5. The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence6. What Happens When We Die7. Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”8. A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings9. The Missing Piece Meets the Big O: Shel Silverstein’s Sweet Allegory for the Simple Secret of Love and the Key to Nurturing Relationships10. The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular11. The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life12. What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep13. The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand14. A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want15. An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection16. The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written17. How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other18. The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter to Life
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting our wildness, insisting on the “primal allegiance” the human spirit has to the wild.
A decade after artist Rockwell Kent headed to a remote Alaskan island “to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness,” a young German woman headed to an even smaller island on the opposite side of the globe to face a wilderness even more fierce and fathomless, living out her primal allegiance to the undomesticated soul, searching for the fruition of her spiritual ideals.
Having grown up with the haunting sense that she was “somehow not like other children,” feeling a “special intimacy” with wild nature not usually seen in those born and raised in cities, Dore Strauch (1900–1943) was eighteen and training to be a teacher when she fell under the spell of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and felt the calling to some higher purpose, though she could not discern what it might be.
Watching the world come aflame with its first global war, moved by “the frightful distress” of the working classes, she grew convinced that the higher development of humanity “can never come from the outside” — that no prophet can promise it and no demagogue can deliver it; that it is the inner work of each individual. She was determined to do her part, “whatever the cost.”
Dore StrauchDore decided to become a doctor and enrolled in night school to prepare for the university entrance exam. She might have withstood the seventeen-hour workdays had she not decided to live on fruit alone after reading Schopenhauer and finding herself moved by his “discountenancing the destruction of life for human nourishment,” eventually reducing her diet to figs only. After a year and a half of this morally cloaked eating disorder, her body started giving way.
Just as Dore was trying to decide what to do next, she met a “cheerless bachelor” twice her age and married him, determined “to thaw him out with sunshine,” only to learn one of the hardest lessons in life — that unless we love who a person is and not whom we wish them to be or hope to make them, it is not love but projection destined for heartbreak. At twenty-three, she found herself “the wife of an elderly schoolmaster” who repulsed her with his conjugal demands and his desire to make of her an accessory to appear on his arm at social functions high-heeled and gowned — the perfect housewife, “her horizon bounded by the four walls of a few stuffy rooms, her mind stunted to the scope of her husband’s paltry opinions.” She would later reflect:
With all the strength and obstinacy in me, I defended myself against being turned into something I had always passionately despised… The emptiness and frustration of such an existence poisons the spirit, however one may strive to counterbalance it.
The poison hit deep. Dore fell gravely and mysteriously ill. After a seventeen-month hospitalization, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and told her illness was incurable. “This was a blow,” she later wrote, “but it shocked me less than the realization that my marriage was a failure, and beyond repair.”
People come into our lives when we need a way out of them, out of self-erected prisons and back to ourselves. Dore found herself falling in love with her attending physician, Dr. Frederick Ritter — with his love of Nietzsche, with “his astonishing blond mane, his youthful bearing, and his steel- blue eyes that looked out from under his furrowed forehead so compellingly,” with the little black notebook he showed her, in which he had logged some of the world’s remotest islands as possible destinations for realizing “his great ideal of solitude.”
They were in love — a Rilkean love in which the highest task of each is to “stand guard over the solitude of the other” — and they set out to find those ideal solitudes together as far from the bourgeois traps of their culture as they could get on this planet.
It was pioneering oceanographer William Beebe’s landmark volume on the Galapagos that persuaded them to seek their idyll on the islands where Darwin had first conceived the evolutionary cohesion of nature, originally known as the Enchanted Islands — a land so alien that it had never been inhabited by native tribes. “I believe that these islands are in truth one of those places of the earth where humans are not tolerated,” Dore would later write, having lived the proof.
Five species of Galapagos ground finches from William Beebe’s Galapagos: World’s End, 1924. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)The lovers buried themselves in the stacks of the Berlin Public Library, reading everything they could get their hands on about the Galapagos in order to choose a particular island.
They settled on Floreana — a volcanic burp smaller than Brooklyn, favored by the whalers of the previous century for its flat terrain and ample supply of freshwater.
In a living antidote to the dangerous myth that contemplation is a luxury of the privileged — here was a woman of humble means, ailing with multiple sclerosis, having survived a World War and a suffocating marriage — Dore reflects in her striking memoir Satan Came to Eden: A Survivor’s Account of the “Galapagos Affair” (public library):
How few, if any, of the millions struggling along the world’s ways, have ever had or sought the opportunity to find themselves. The leisure after the day’s work is not devoted to this higher learning. Time that the wise would spend in meditating on these things is spent at movies, cafes and theaters, created as if by malicious design to hinder contemplation.
Frederick and I rejected all these things and were determined to fight our way to inner freedom in spite of all the hindrances of civilized life.
They were not trying to be modern Crusoes. This was not be a mere experiment in “Puritan self-denial, of repudiation of the flesh in a search for higher spiritual values.” They were going to Floreana not to escape life but to contact the substratum of its deepest meaning, “to try and found an Eden not of ignorance but of knowledge.”
And so, in the first week of summer in 1929, with Dore disguised as a man to avoid identification, they headed for Ecuador. Packed in alongside mosquito netting and matches were Dore’s Greek and Latin textbooks, a small volume of animal fables, and what she considered her “greatest treasure”: her heavily underlined, marginalia-laden copy of Zarathustra. She didn’t tell her mother that she intended never to come back. She didn’t formally divorce her husband. She made no will.
Dore reflects in her memoir:
I felt, in spite of all my deep affection for those dear to me, that in leaving them forever I was not uprooting my real self but only an outward part of me that did not count.
Dore and Frederick on the way to the GalapagosIn consonance with Wendell Berry’s insistence that “in the wild places… one’s inner voices become audible,” Dore could feel even before she set foot on Floreana how the part of her that counts the most, the wild and true voice of the soul, was about to come alive in a way it never could have in so-called civilization:
I shall never forget the first view of Ecuador as we sailed slowly into the deep bay of Guayaquil. The coast is fringed with dense thickets of mangrove interrupted by settlements where groves of cocoanut palms waved over the heads of the other trees, amidst which cows, donkeys and goats seemed to find plentiful pasture.
[…]
A brilliant early morning sun shone down on our departure from the haunts of men, as we set out upon the final stage of our long journey to the solitudes of our desire. We thought and hoped that we should never recross the broad six-hundred miles of ocean that lay between our island and the mainland. As we moved out of the little harbor and watched it receding slowly from our sight, we felt a oneness with each other which we had never felt before, and if we thought about the past at all, then it was with an utter absence of regret, and with a feeling of deep happiness and gratitude to the fate which had permitted us to approach our goal at last.
Upon arrival, they discovered that an oil leak in the ship’s hull had ruined all their books and writing paper, all the bedding, and a box of clothes. But the captain — a questionable character who had been a German spy in WWI and who frequently docked on Floreana — dropped them off with the remains of their belongings and went on his way.
Alone on the desolate beach, with the dark silhouette of an extinct volcano rising above them, they took comfort in the half-demolished stone wall, rusty water tanks, and remnants of a chicken coop left behind by the Norwegian settlers who had tried living there long ago, then given up. Dore writes:
An atmosphere of extreme desolation enfolded this scene, and was increased by the almost completely dried-up, lifeless vegetation round about it. It was impossible not to think, with a qualm of fear, of all the disappointed hopes of our predecessors on this island, who probably had come there with confidence no less than ours that they would be able to make their lives according to their hearts’ desire.
Common Galapagos fish from William Beebe’s Galapagos: World’s End, 1924. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)She paints the alien world that was suddenly their home, beautiful and menacing:
The landscape spread out at its feet had the gray-blue shimmer of all the Galapagos vegetation. What looked like dense thickets at the crater’s edge was much greener and fresher than the growth below. Thin streamers of clouds floated low down among the smaller craters towards the interior of the island, and at the water’s edge more volcanoes stood up straight out of the sea, steeply, though to no great height. Their rocky flanks were full of deep clefts which caught the incoming surf, so that the island was encircled by a tossing white girdle of the breaking sea. As the waves receded they revealed huge boulders of pitch-black lava.
[…]
The red rays of the setting sun gilded the ocean at our feet. The sharp black fins of sharks cut through the water; a thousand wild voices of unseen creatures mingled with the soft roar of the surf. With the terrifying suddenness to which I, the Northerner, never grew accustomed, the equatorial night rushed down upon us and the moon came up.
Filled as she was with “golden anticipation” at the prospect of building Eden on Earth, almost immediately Dore collapsed with an attack of her multiple sclerosis. Dr. Ritter, despite his medical training, held some dangerously antiscientific views: He believed that willpower alone could prevail over any physical condition, including her illness, and with “sheer intensity of consciousness” one could erect a wall of defense against any danger or pathogen. He had therefore refused to bring even basic medication — a decision for which Dore would later pay bitterly: teeth extracted without anesthesia, severe lacerations from the sharp lava rocks, a fire burn almost to the bone, a crippling blood infection by Floreana’s vampiric sand fleas carried by the wild swine.
Galapagos eels from William Beebe’s Galapagos: World’s End, 1924. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Over and over, Floreana surprised them and challenged them beyond anything they had imagined:
Our aim was to lead a life of contemplation, but we soon learned that this was something we should have to earn at the expense of arduous and protracted manual toil.
They surprised themselves and each other, this nation of two, thousands of miles from the nearest human being, having crossed the globe to discover that all true companionship is made of two parallel solitudes. Dore writes:
There could be no such thing as loneliness, for each must be complete within himself, and companionship is only perfect when it is not dependent.
Collage from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days, using text from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Elizabeth Gould’s illustration of his Galapagos specimens. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)The story goes on to take a strange and ominous turn when a newspaper gets a hold of their letters home and makes of them the era’s equivalent of clickbait, sending the world’s wealthy voyeurs on their trail. An American yachting party arrives, then a polyamorous Austrian Baroness (the Satan in the title of Dore’s memoir) declares herself Empress of the Galapagos. Dore’s life is suddenly enfolded in a human drama that far exceeds the ills and artifices of civilization she had fled, culminating with a murder mystery and Frederick’s death.
Having gone to Floreana to find the purest light of being amid the wildest nature, Dore left having seen the darkest recesses of human nature. And yet there is no wasted experience — looking back on her idealistic experiment, she reflects on its deepest lesson:
Life in the wilderness is rich in lessons most of us never have a chance to learn. It was a source of continual amazement to me to realize how civilization falsifies the lives of men and women, making it forever impossible, even for those who know each other best, to see each other as they really are.
Couple with A Life of One’s Own — a very different and very poignant answer to the enduring question of how we attain inner freedom by Dore’s contemporary Joanna Field — then revisit 200 years of great writers, artists, and scientists on the spiritual rewards of solitude.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
This is why I love diaries, with their rare glimpse of the inner worlds that lavish our own with beauty and truth, with nourishment of substance and sweetness that endures for epochs after the lives that made it are no more.
Of all the writers and artists who have kept a journal as a means of creative catalysis and a salve for self-doubt, no one has confronted the internal saboteur of creativity — those psychic hindrances that stand between the talented and the fruition of their talent — more pointedly than Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924).
Franz Kafka“I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can,” he vows at the outset of his Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal that became part creative sandbox, part metronome of discipline, part exorcism for self-doubt as Kafka was trying to live into his creative calling while working as an insurance salesman. “I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead,” he declares, and yet over and over he indicts himself for falling short of his desire, for thwarting his talent with insecurity and lack of discipline. “Wrote nothing,” he laments in entry after entry. “Have written nothing for three days,” he sulks as his creative block consumes him. “Bad,” he declares a perfect spring day for having produced no writing. By early summer, he is in despair:
Nothing written for so long. Begin tomorrow. Otherwise I shall again get into a prolonged, irresistible dissatisfaction; I am really in it already. The nervous states are beginning. But if I can do something, then I can do it without superstitious precautions.
The reasons for Kafka’s creative block are various: By turns he finds himself drowning in loneliness, enraged by distraction, physically fatigued and pained by the tuberculosis that would soon take his life, tortured by his era’s version of an overflowing inbox: heaps of unanswered letters. He feels his powers being wasted, feels himself “wretched, wretched, and yet with good intentions,” feels the “absolute despair” of trying and failing to write. The diary itself becomes his watering hole through the dry spells:
Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
On its pages, universal patterns emerge: In his private and particular turmoils, Kafka touches again and again on what I consider the four great perils standing between us and our gifts — those psychic hindrances of which we may not always be consciously aware, but we which experience palpably and painfully as creative block.
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)4. TIME-ANXIETYSavaged by shame at his writing, Kafka regularly winces at his sentences, then reasons:
I explain it to myself by saying that I have too little time and quiet to draw out of me all the possibilities of my talent.
Baldwin would have had something to say about that excuse, which Kafka himself sees crumble: During a rare respite from his ordinary time-lament — that his day job at the insurance company is taking too much energy away from writing — he finds himself not using the windfall gain to write:
This month, which, because of the absence of the boss, could have been put to exceptionally good use, I have wasted and slept away without much excuse… Even this afternoon I stretched out on the bed for three hours with dreamy.
Such is the bi-polar nature of time-anxiety in creative work: Alongside the feeling of not having enough time is also the time-dilating experience of procrastination — the paradoxical paralysis many gifted people feel at the prospect of living up to and into their gifts. Kafka writes:
Idled away the morning with sleeping and reading newspapers. Afraid to finish a review for the Prager Tagblatt. Such fear of writing always expresses itself by my occasionally making up, away from my desk, initial sentences for what I am to write, which immediately prove unusable, dry, broken off long before their end, and pointing with their towering fragments to a sad future.
“Wasted day,” he groans in another entry. And yet he has the wisdom to recognize that procrastination — “the shameful lowlands of writing” — has a purpose:
Stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, ‘I’ve been writing until now.’ The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in… I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.
Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace3. WORLD-ANXIETYTo be an artist is to feel life deeply, to tremble with the terrors of everything that trembles. As the first global war is painting the world around him black, Kafka sinks into an inner darkness, his anxiety rising to untenable heights:
The thoughts provoked in me by the war… devour me from every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it.
The writing stalls again as he sorrows with the world’s sorrow:
Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn’t it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing.
Kafka would die of tuberculosis while the war is still raging.
One of Harry Clarke’s haunting 1925 illustrations for Goethe’s Faust2. SELF-COMPARISONFew things maim an artist’s confidence more savagely than self-comparison, which breeds the two most pernicious species of despair in creative work: insecurity and envy, always entwined in a singularly damaging form of learned helplessness. While working on what would become his first published short story, Kafka acquires a volume of Goethe’s conversations and finds himself completely blocked:
So passes my rainy, quiet Sunday, I sit in my bedroom and am at peace, but instead of making up my mind to do some writing, into which I could have poured my whole being the day before yesterday, I have been staring at my fingers for quite a while. This week I think I have been completely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influence and have therefore become useless.
Nearly a month later, he is still immersed in and paralyzed by Goethe. After yet another “wrote nothing,” he records:
The zeal, permeating every part of me, with which I read about Goethe (Goethe’s conversations, student days, hours with Goethe, a visit of Goethe’s to Frankfort) and which keeps me from all writing.
Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat1. SELF-DOUBT“I cannot believe that I shall really write something good tomorrow,” Kafka forebodes in one entry. In another, he declares himself “an almost complete failure in writing.” He is torn between determination and despair:
I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing? At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been compelled — without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion — to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.
With his characteristic drama for metaphor, he writes in the winter of his twenty-eighth year:
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones. Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other… My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odour of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader’s face.
Toupet tit / Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Like Audubon did with his bird paintings, Kafka regularly destroyed writing that dissatisfied him. With an eye to all he disavowed one particular year — a great deal more writing than he kept — he is suddenly seized by anxious self-doubt:
That hinders me a great deal in writing. It is indeed a mountain, it is five times as much as I have in general ever written, and by its mass alone it draws everything that I write away from under my pen to itself.
Preparing to visit his siblings and parents, and heavy with shame for having written nothing, he consoles himself grimly:
I shall, since I have written nothing that I could enjoy, not appear stranger, more despicable, more useless to them than I do to myself.
When his best friend does a reading of one of Kafka’s stories at a salon, Kafka finds himself feeling bitterly “isolated from everyone,” chin down in shame at the “disordered sentences” of his “story with holes into which one could stick both hands.” He agonizes:
If I were ever able to write something large and whole, well shaped from beginning to end, then in the end the story would never be able to detach itself from me and it would be possible for me calmly and with open eyes, as a blood relation of a healthy story, to hear it read, but as it is every little piece of the story runs around homeless and drives me away from it in the opposite direction.
He feels unable to write, and the little he does write feels “wrong.” In yet another dramatic metaphor — “metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing,” he would later rue — he reflects:
My feeling when I write something that is wrong might be depicted as follows: In front of two holes in the ground a man is waiting for something to appear that can rise up only out of the hole on his right. But while this hole remains covered over by a dimly visible lid, one thing after another rises up out of the hole on his left, keeps trying to attract his attention, and in the end succeeds in doing this without any difficulty because of its swelling size, which, much as the man may try to prevent it, finally covers up even the right hole. But the man — he does not want to leave this place, and indeed refuses to at any price — has nothing but these appearances, and although — fleeting as they are, their strength is used up by their merely appearing — they cannot satisfy him, he still strives, whenever out of weakness they are arrested in their rising up, to drive them up and scatter them into the air if only he can thus bring up others; for the permanent sight of one is unbearable, and moreover he continues to hope that after the false appearances have been exhausted, the true will finally appear.
And then, swift as a whip, his self-doubt meta-flagellates the metaphor itself:
How weak this picture is. An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between the actual feeling and the metaphor of the description.
He doubts not only his talent but his motivation to manifest it:
I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me.
Within months, he had published The Metamorphosis. And this indeed is the great consolation of his diaries: Over and over, Kafka discovers — as every artist eventually must — that the remedy for writer’s block is writing. A generation before Steinbeck observed in his own diary of self-doubt that “just a stint every day does it,” Kafka writes with an eye to the 1911 comet visible in the night sky above him:
Every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets… Then I should appear before that sentence once, lured by that sentence.
Over and over, he discovers that he writes to save himself:
I feel helpless and an outsider. The firmness, however, which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful.
He discovers that writing, for him, is not a matter of art but of survival:
I have now… a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely. This is no artistic yearning.
At its best, it is not merely survival, not salvation, but self-transcendence:
Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours considering what I overcame this afternoon while writing.
[…]
I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.
He relishes “the strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing… a seeing of what is really taking place.” What buoys him through all the doubt and despair is the deeper knowledge — a kind of profound self-trust — that writing is his calling, the great spiritual reward for which he would give up — and did give up — every earthly pleasure:
When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even half-way serve the purpose of my writing. Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely. In any case I shouldn’t complain that I can’t put up with a sweetheart, that I understand almost exactly as much of love as I do of music.
[…]
My development is now complete and, so far as I can see, there is nothing left to sacrifice; I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life in which, with the progress of my work, my face will finally be able to age in a natural way.
Complement with Bob Dylan on sacrifice, neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the six “diseases of the will” that keep the talented from reaching greatness, and the story of how Steinbeck used his diary as a tool of discipline and a hedge against self-doubt (that eventually won him the Pulitzer and paved the way for his Nobel), then revisit Kafka on the nature of reality, the power of patience, and his remarkable letter to his narcissistic father.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life.
“What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother from the bathtub while Whitman’s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a New Jersey cemetery.
In his lifetime of nearly a century, John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008) would go on revolutionize physics by posing this question to reality itself, emerging as a bridge figure between the world of relativity and the quantum world. The student of one Nobel laureate (Niels Bohr) and the teacher of another (Kip Thorne), he walked with Albert Einstein, shaped Stephen Hawking’s ideas about the singularity, and coined the term black hole. Four centuries after Leibniz launched the information age by developing binary arithmetic — the underlying logic of 1s and 0s, of yeses and nos, that constitutes all information — Wheeler posited that, at the fundamental level, reality is made of two things only: binary choices and a chooser. “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe,” he wrote in his brilliant and brilliantly titled It from Bit theory. “Observer-participancy gives rise to information.” That he never received a Nobel Prize is a testament to Wheeler’s animating spirit — he was interested not in the answers for which it is awarded but in the questions that quicken the mind with participancy in the universe. Questions like what happens at the end — of space and time, of mass and energy, of life.
John Archibald Wheeler across lifeThe year he turned seventy, Wheeler became one of the artists and scientists whom Viennese psychologist Lisl M. Goodman, then in her early thirties, interviewed for her fascinating out-of-print book Death and the Creative Life (public library) — vibrant and overt affirmation of the elemental fact that all creative work, be it a theorem or a poem, is our best instrument for wresting meaning from our transient lives, the best way we have of bearing our mortality.
Wheeler addresses this directly when asked why he does what he does:
To understand why we are here. The universe without any consciousness would not be the universe. We haven’t found the meaning, but there must be one. These questions, about life and about death, are the most important to me.
In consonance with Whitman’s proclamation that “what invigorates life invigorates death,” Wheeler adds:
Life without death is meaningless. It’s like a picture without a frame. Death gives value to life. More than that, without death there is no life.
Half a century after Rilke insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” Wheeler considers the irrepressible vitality of the living here-and-now, the throbbing atom of eternity that is each passing moment, which would go pulseless if it were to become permanent:
Life is more important than the ones who do the living… All the preciousness and meaning of life would be drained away if one could go on living forever.
Citing his love of Emily Dickinson — who wrote beautifully about “the drift called the infinite,” and who died at the peak of her powers — he auguries:
By understanding death better we will understand life better.
Perhaps death so fascinated Wheeler because it is the starkest subset of his greatest scientific obsession: time. Death is life having run out of time, the event horizon past which all happening ceases for the living observer. But in Wheeler’s physics, nothing happens at all — everything has already happened and is always happening, and past and present are not a function of time but of the observer’s vantage. “No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,” Wheeler wrote three years earlier with an eye to the famous double-slit experiments demonstrating how profoundly the quantum world violates our basic intuitions about reality:
It is not a paradox that we choose what shall have happened after it has already happened [because] it has not really happened, it is not a phenomenon, until it is an observed phenomenon.
At the peak of his ninety-seventh spring, death observed Wheeler and everything continued to happen, not happening at all.
“Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death.” Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)Couple with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on what happens when we die, then revisit the mathematical prodigy William James Sidis, writing when Wheeler was still a boy, on how the quantum undoing of time and thermodynamics changes life and death.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they change us all the same.
The great consolation of the cosmic order is the constancy of its laws, indiscriminate across the immensity of space, unchanged since the beginning of time. That we can predict an eclipse centuries into the future with precision down to the second but not the outcome of an election, that we can foretell the return of a comet but not the return of a friend, is a strange oasis of sanity amid the chaotic uncertainty of life. It is also a mirror — we see ourselves reflected in universe, covet its organizing principles for the chaos of our own lives.
In this respect, comets — the most erratic of cosmic denizens, with their irregular orbits, fickle periodicity, and mysterious origins in the outermost reaches of space — offer a singular lens on human relationships, that most unpredictable phenomenon in the universe.
Korean musician Lee Juck and artist Lee Jinhee take up these deep and often heavy questions with great levity and loveliness in Comet & Star (public library) — the story of a little star whose cosmic loneliness is interrupted by a visit from humanity’s most beloved comet: Halley’s comet, which has inspired poems and auguries. (“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835,” a grown man wrote in his 1909 autobiography. “It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And so he did — Halley’s comet, which blazes across Earth’s skies once every 76 years, was visible on November 30, 1835, when Samuel Clemens was born, and again on April 21, 1910, when he died as Mark Twain.)
As the comet passes, the little star calls out timorously, “Will you… be my friend?” But the comet blazes past.
Loneliness descends again, grey and dim — 76 years of it (which is but a blink in the life of a star, but it is also eternity to wait even a day for a loved one who has left).
And then, to the star’s great and glad surprise, the comet returns, this time ready to connect.
In the fleeting encounter, a beautiful friendship comes aglow. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe memorably wrote — but there is also, if you are lucky enough and openhearted enough, that rare miracle of knowing another only a short time yet seeing their naked soul, seeing yourself seen and deeply cherished in their eyes.
And so, when the comet leaves again to complete its next orbit, the star is no longer lonely — there is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any true bond, which nothing but indifference can break. (“Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good,” Simone Weil wrote to a faraway friend. “Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.”)
The star and the comet
each glowed with joy
because they knew
they would meet again.
And they both shone
brighter than ever
in our vast universe.
Complement Comet & Star with the story of the comet behind Earth’s most transcendent celestial spectacle (which might one day destroy us) and these wonder-smiting medieval paintings of comets, then revisit Big Wolf & Little Wolf — another tender illustrated parable about loneliness and how friendship transforms us, which remains one of my favorite books of all time.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth.”
Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles into golf courses.
I watched waves taller than factory chimneys break into cliffs black as spacetime, making mansions look like a maquette of life.
I beheld the ancient indifferent faces of turtles older than the light bulb hatching their young under the NO TRESPASSING sign on a billionaire’s private beach.
I looked into the open mouth of the volcano taunting the sky in the language of time.
I kept thinking about how those fault lines between the elemental and the ephemera of human life most readily expose our gravest civilizational foible: regarding nature as something to conquer, to neuter, to tame, “forgetting that we are nature too,” forgetting that we are taming our own wildness, neutering our very souls.
Jay Griffiths offers a mighty antidote in her 2006 masterpiece Wild: An Elemental Journey (public library) — the product of “many years’ yearning” pulling her “toward unfetteredness, toward the sheer and vivid world,” learning to think with the mind of a mountain and feel with the heart of a forest, searching for “something shy, naked and elemental — the soul.” What emerges is both an act of revolt (against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable and staggering as love.)
Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)A century and a half after Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately” (omitting from his famed chronicle of spartan solitude the fresh-baked doughnuts and pies his mother and sister brought him every Sunday), Griffiths spent seven years slaking her soul on the world’s wildness, from the Amazon to the Arctic, trying “to touch life with the quick of the spirit,” impelled by “the same ancient telluric vigor that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky.” She writes:
I was looking for the will of the wild… The only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self.
I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else.
[…]
The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.
It all began by getting lost in “the wasteland of the mind, in a long and dark depression” that left her unable to walk or write, “pathless, bleak and bewildered, not knowing which way to turn.” (A decade later, Griffiths would write an entire book about that discomposing yearlong episode of manic depression.) Searching for “the octaves of possibilities,” reckoning with “the maybes of the mind,” yearning for release from the supermarket aisles of the psyche, she set out to find the savage antipode to “this chloroform world where human nature is well schooled, tamed from childhood on, where the radiators are permanently on mild and the windows are permanently closed.” She writes:
I felt an urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my eyes yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)She lived for months with a hill tribe in the forests of the Burmese border, lost all her toenails climbing Kilimanjaro, met “cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelized them,” felt “what it is like to whimper with sheer loneliness on a Christmas Day in a jungle on the other side of the world,” learned to live in the seasons and the elements, “right within nature because there is nothing that is not nature.”
She reflects:
To me, humanity is not a strain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon… We are — every one of us — a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.
Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Pulsating beneath the passionate poetics is an indictment and a beckoning. A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:
There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.
Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature:
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness… sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who willfully goes their own way.
Complement Wild — a vivifying read in its entirety — with Wendell Berry’s timeless poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and artist Rockwell Kent, writing a century earlier, on wilderness and creativity, then revisit Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s magnificent rewilding of the human spirit.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living metaphor for the necessary losses that shape our human lives: What falls away reveals the imperative beneath the superfluous, making what remains all the more precious — the fleeting colors, the fading light, the embering warmth. It is a teacher in the art of letting go — what has ceased to nourish, what has lost its vital spark, what no longer serves.
Hardly anyone has captured the singular, unphotographable magic of autumn more vividly than Richard Adams (May 10, 1920–December 24, 2016) in this passage from his 1973 classic Watership Down (public library), painting “a fine, clear evening in mid-October”:
Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man’s beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.
Complement with the poetic ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn of life as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Richard Adams on moonlight and the magic of the unnecessary and the penguin as a teacher in patience and faith.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,” Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words remain a haunting reminder that our rights are founded upon our responsibilities: “To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” There are few terrors greater than the knowledge that we are free to change the world with our choices.
Two years earlier, Butler fleshed out this reckoning with our personal responsibility to the political in a 1996 interview for the magazine Science Fiction Studies included in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (public library).
The OracleConsidering her Earthseed series “fundamentally about social power,” she reflects on the disquieting forces tearing American society apart:
Some people insist that all civilizations have to rise and fall — like the British before us — but we have brought this on ourselves. What you see today has happened before: a few powerful people take over with the approval of a class below them who has nothing to gain and even much to lose as a result. It’s like the Civil War: most of the men who fought to preserve slavery were actually being hurt by it. As farmers they could not compete with the plantations, and they could not even hire themselves out as labor in competition with the slaves who could be hired out more cheaply by their owners. But they supported the slave system anyway.
A century and a half after Walt Whitman insisted that you must “always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote” and admonished that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,” Butler reflects on the self-destructive psychological underpinnings beneath divisive politics and adds:
Many people just need someone to feel superior to to make themselves feel better. You see Americans doing it now, unfortunately, while voting
against their own interests. It is that kind of shortsighted behavior that is destroying us.
While this perilous inner rupture seems only magnified in the America of our day, Whitman, far-seeing and unafraid to challenge the will of the world, warned about it an epoch earlier, at a time when most of us were not rightful citizens and were denied the power to shape fate with our vote. In his enduring reckoning with democracy predicated on a truly feminist society, he wrote:
Of all dangers to a nation… there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.
Couple with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy, then revisit Butler on the spirituality of symbiosis and how we become who we are.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind some of humanity’s most triumphant achievements — the great discoveries, the great symphonies, the great paradigm shifts. This is not to say that suffering is a prerequisite for greatness — I don’t subscribe to the dangerous myth of the tortured genius. But because the engine of all creative energy is connection, suffering can serve as a mighty instrument of unselfing, of contacting that place where the spirit meets the bone of being, that common core of human experience. “It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical,” a gifted young poet who wouldn’t live past 30 wrote to Emily Dickinson, “that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.” People of uncommon creative vision have often touched the soul of humanity not because of their suffering but through it. Perhaps the supreme mark of greatness is leaving something of substance and sweetness in the mouth of the world despite the bitter disappointments and heartbreaks you suffer. (I wrote Figuring largely as an ode to seven such people.)
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) was eighteen when he arrived alone in America with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon’s army. Born Jean-Jacques Rabin, he was the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and a Creole mother who had died in a slave rebellion when he was a small boy. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a lonely childhood became the guiding passion of his new life. Despite having only rudimentary portraiture training, he taught himself to draw nature and set out “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person.” He winced at his first attempts — “My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples.” — but her persisted. Every year, he would burn entire batches of bird drawings that didn’t satisfy him and start all over, often spending fourteen continuous hours on a single bird.
All the while, struggling to support his family, he tried his hand at various businesses — indigo, a saw mill, a steamer — all ending catastrophically, costing him more than he had put in. Accepting that he had no gift for business, Audubon leaned on his creative gifts: He gave dance lessons, drew portraits in black chalk for $5 each, wrote to President Monroe in the hope of getting an appointment as artist and naturalist on a government expedition. (He never heard back.)
The hardships kept coming. While traveling down the Mississippi, a bottle of gunpowder exploded in his chest, damaging 200 of his bird drawings. He had left another 200 in storage with a friend, only to discover upon his return that “a pair of Norway rats had taken possession of the whole, and reared a young family among gnawed bits of paper, which but a month previous, represented nearly one thousand inhabitants of the air!”
19th-century Japanese woodblock depicting Audubon’s discovery of the rat-savaged drawings.Despite the biochemical blessing of a bright disposition, Audubon felt at times that his spirit would break from the weight of disappointment, and yet his passion for the work buoyed him, saved him. From the fortunate platform of his old age, he would look back on one especially dispiriting period early in the project:
The world was with me as a blank, and my heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark ways I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all.
Throughout the struggle, Audubon kept at his vision. He worked tirelessly, with fiery passion bordering on possession. In the journal later edited by his grand-daughter Maria, he writes during on particularly flaming stretch in the autumn of 1829:
I wish I had eight pairs of hands… still I am delighted at what I have accumulated in drawings this season. Forty-two drawings in four months, eleven large, eleven middle size, and twenty-two small, comprising ninety-five birds, from Eagles downwards, with plants, nests, flowers, and sixty different kinds of eggs. I live alone, see scarcely any one, besides those belonging to the house where I lodge. I rise long before day and work till nightfall, when I take a walk, and to bed.
When he pitched his book of birds to publishers, he got only rejections. And so, like Whitman would a quarter century later, Audubon decided to self-publish his magnum opus, relying on subscribers, asking for a pledge of $1,000 for the full body of work. It took him four years to complete the first volume, by which point he had lost more than a third of his subscribers.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)America, too unrefined in its art and too young in its science, did not seem ready for him. So Audubon headed to Europe in search of subscribers, painting the ship’s cabins to pay his passage, drawing portraits of a shoemaker and his wife to acquire proper shoes. The trip was his wife’s idea. While his friends thought him a madman to keep laboring at something doomed to failure, Lucy’s encouragement sustained him. “My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant,” he would later reflect.
An American born in England, Lucy had helped Jean-Jacques become John James not only on paper but in his mastery of the new language that eventually made him one of the most lyrical nature writers humanity has produced, writing about birds the way he felt about them: with reverence, tenderness, and poetic ardor.
To assist with the publication of her husband’s work, Lucy began teaching — tirelessly, taking on more and more students, until she was earning a staggering $3,000 per year: more than $100,000 today. An epoch before Arthur Rackham revolutionized the business of book art with his Alice in Wonderland illustrations, printing books with text and color images was an expensive and laborious process. By the time Audubon completed his Birds of America, the final work — an immense four-volume “Double Elephant Folio” — had cost him $115,640 to print: more than $2,000,000 today. It had taken him fourteen years. “Few enterprises, involving such labour and expense, have ever been carried through against such odds,” the great naturalist John Burroughs exulted in his short and splendid biography of Audubon.
John James Audubon by John Syme (White House Historical Association)Adding his voice to the chorus of beloved writers who salved their suffering with nature and those who found solace in solitude, Audubon looks back on what saved him in those challenging years:
One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush’s melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.
This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.
In the end, every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for the soul-aches of living, and what we make of our creative potential is largely a matter of how we bear our suffering, of learning to save ourselves by finding and feeding those things that most reliably nourish our strength and our sanity — friendships and forests, song and sea, and above all the tug of wonder.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that wonderful capacity for self-surprise as tears came streaming down my face in a windowless government office. I had taken the naturalization ceremony to be just the final checklist item on a long and tedious bureaucratic process. But standing there between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, born just after women became citizens of mankind, I found myself profoundly moved, a shaky voice in the chorus reciting the Oath of Allegiance — all these beautiful people from every corner of the world, who had left behind everything they knew of home to partake of this imaginative experiment in freedom, flourishing, and dignity for all.
Detail from the art in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina, created between 7,300 BC and 700 AD.In preparing for my first election — an election so historic it may be the litmus test for the experiment’s success or failure — I was reminded of an uncommonly insightful investigation of democracy not as a political but as a psychological phenomenon by the reliably revelatory pediatrician turned psychiatrist Donald Winnicott (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971).
In a 1958 essay found in his posthumous essay collection Home Is Where We Start from (public library), Winnicott examines the meaning of democracy in a way that may “give unconscious emotional factors their full import.” He writes:
An important latent meaning [is] that a democratic society is “mature,” that is to say, that it has a quality that is allied to the quality of individual maturity which characterizes its healthy members.
[…]
In psychiatric terms, the normal or healthy individual can be said to be one who is mature; according to his or her chronological age and social setting there is an appropriate degree of emotional development… Psychiatric health is therefore a term without fixed meaning. In the same way the term “democratic” need not have a fixed meaning… In this way one would expect the frozen meaning of the word to be different in Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, and yet to find that the term retains value because of its implying the recognition of maturity as health.
The full realization of democracy, Winnicott argues, requires the study of society’s emotional development beneath the political machinery of democratic election, which is itself rooted in a fundament of our psychological experience as persons:
The essence of democratic machinery is the free vote (secret ballot). The point of this is that it ensures the freedom of the people to express deep feelings, apart from conscious thoughts. In the exercise of the secret vote, the whole responsibility for action is taken by the individual, if he is healthy enough to take it. The vote expresses the outcome of the struggle within himself, the external scene having been internalized and so brought into association with the interplay of forces in his own personal inner world. That is to say, the decision as to which way to vote is the expression of a solution of a struggle within himself. The process seems to be somewhat as follows. The external scene, with its many social and political aspects, is made personal for him in the sense that he gradually identifies himself with all the parties to the struggle. This means that he perceives the external scene in terms of his own internal struggle, and he temporarily allows his internal struggle to be waged in terms of the external political scene. This to-and-fro process involves work and takes time, and it is part of democratic machinery to arrange for a period of preparation. A sudden election would produce an acute sense of frustration in the electorate. Each voter’s inner world has to be turned into a political arena over a limited period.
In a sentiment evocative of Toni Morrison’s magnificent 2004 commencement address, in which she celebrates true maturity an achievement that is “a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory,” Winnicott offers a perspectival definition:
A democracy is an achievement, at a point of time, of a limited society, i.e. of a society that has some natural boundary. Of a true democracy (as the term is used today) one can say: In this society at this time there is sufficient maturity in the emotional development of a sufficient proportion of the individuals that comprise it for there to exist an innate tendency towards the creation and re-creation and maintenance of the democratic machinery.
Out of this insight can arise a kind of formula for predicting the fate of a society:
It would be important to know what proportion of mature individuals is necessary if there is to be an innate democratic tendency. In another way of expressing this, what proportion of antisocial individuals can a society contain without submergence of innate democratic tendency?
The danger of that proportion is what Whitman contoured a century before Winnicott in his own reckoning with democracy, admonishing that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.”
Artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustration for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)The antisocial, Winnicott observes, come in three main psychological varieties: the overt kind, who “show their lack of sense of society by developing an antisocial tendency”; those “reacting to inner insecurity by the alternative tendency — identification with authority,” whom he calls “hidden antisocials”; and “indeterminates who would be drawn by weakness or fear into association with [the antisocials].” Of these, he highlights the hidden antisocials as the most dangerous, for their motives are most unconscious. (In every region of life, down to our most intimate relationships, the most unsafe people are those most lacking in self-awareness, most governed by unconscious complexes.)
He considers the psychological peril of the hidden antisocials:
This is unhealthy, immature, because it is not an identification with authority that arises out of self-discovery. It is a sense of frame without sense of picture, a sense of form without retention of spontaneity… Hidden antisocials are not “whole persons” any more than are manifest antisocials, since each needs to find and to control the conflicting force in the external world outside the self. By contrast, the healthy person, who is capable of becoming depressed, is able to find the whole conflict within the self as well as being able to see the whole conflict outside the self, in external (shared) reality. When healthy persons come together, they each contribute a whole world, because each brings a whole person.
In an insight of staggering pertinence to our present political climate, not just in America but throughout the so-called democratic world courting totalitarianism under the guise of individualism, he adds:
Hidden antisocials provide material for a type of leadership which is sociologically immature. Moreover, this element in a society greatly strengthens the danger that derives from its frank antisocial elements, especially since ordinary people so easily let those with an urge to lead get into key positions. Once in such positions, these immature leaders immediately gather to themselves the obvious antisocials, who welcome them (the immature anti-individual leaders) as their natural masters.
In the remainder of the essay, Winnicott goes on to explore the creation of that necessary “innate democratic factor,” which begins with “the ordinary man and woman, and the ordinary, common-place home” — the work of parenting. (The morning after the 2016 presidential election, fearing my new home might come to resemble the dictatorship I was born into, I reached out to the wisest elder I knew — a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor — for perspective and consolation. Reminding me that the grimmest crime against humanity began with a legal election, she insisted that abating the unconscionable cannot be done purely on the level of politics — it must begin, she said, deeper and earlier: by laying the moral foundation of the young.)
Sign in an Italian mountain village. (Available as a print.)In a passage of astonishing prescience, Winnicott considers the staggering gender disparity in political leadership over history and its root in our developmental psychology:
In psychoanalytical and allied work it is found that all individuals (men and women) have in reserve a certain fear of WOMAN. Some individuals have this fear to a greater extent than others, but it can be said to be universal. This is quite different from saying that an individual fears a particular woman. This fear of WOMAN is a powerful agent in society structure, and it is responsible for the fact that in very few societies does a woman hold the political reins. It is also responsible for the immense amount of cruelty to women, which can be found in customs that are accepted by almost all civilizations.
The root of this fear of WOMAN is known. It is related to the fact that in the early history of every individual who develops well, and who is sane, and who has been able to find himself, there is a debt to a woman — the woman who was devoted to that individual as an infant, and whose devotion was absolutely essential for that individual’s healthy development. The original dependence is not remembered, and therefore the debt is not acknowledged, except in so far as the fear of WOMAN represents the first stage of this acknowledgement.
Art by Alessandro Sanna from Crescendo.With haunting foresight into both the fault lines and the opportunities of our time, he adds:
As an offshoot of this consideration, one can consider the psychology of the dictator, who is at the opposite pole to anything that the word “democracy” can mean. One of the roots of the need to be a dictator can be a compulsion to deal with this fear of woman by encompassing her and acting for her. The dictator’s curious habit of demanding not only absolute obedience and absolute dependence but also “love” can be derived from this source.
Complement these fragments of Winnicott’s prophetic essay with Octavia Butler on how (not) to choose our leaders, Hannah Arendt on how dictators prey on loneliness, and Winnicott’s contemporary Erich Fromm on self-love as the root of a sane society, then revisit Winnicott on the qualities of a healthy mind.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.”
Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when we judge, we cannot understand. True curiosity is therefore a form of love, because, as the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh so plainly and poignantly put it, “understanding is love’s other name.”
There have been few more curious and loving observes of this world than Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862). “Life! who knows what it is, what it does?” he exclaimed on the pages of his journal — perhaps the book in my library most populous with highlights and marginalia — a tender record of Thoreau’s yearning to understand the nature and workings of life in all its physical and psychic manifestations, not as a scientist but as a poet. “Every poet has trembled on the verge of science,” he conceded as he read books of ornithology to deepen his reverence for the birds he observed, and yet it was with a poet’s eyes that he observed them, animated by the belief that “the poet’s relation to his theme is the relation of lovers.”
Because curiosity is a supreme act of unselfing, it is at its most difficult and most rewarding when aimed at what is most unlike ourselves — as Thoreau’s is in his journal account of a singular encounter from the autumn of 1855.
One “raw and windy” October afternoon, paddling down a stream under the overcast skies, Thoreau sees a small screech-owl perched on the lee side of a three-foot hemlock stump, looking at him with its “great solemn eyes” and raised horns. An epoch before science began illuminating the mysteries of what it’s like to be an owl, he marvels at this creature so profoundly other:
It sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off. When it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris. You see two whitish triangular lines above the eyes meeting at the bill, with a sharp reddish-brown triangle between and a narrow curved line of black under each eye…. You would say that this was a bird without a neck. Its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, excepting the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back.
Art by JooHee Yoon from Beastly VerseAfter observing the bird for ten minutes, transfixed by its strangeness, Thoreau decides he must study the creature closely to better understand its umwelt. He lands the boat and carefully makes his way to the hemlock from the windward side, surprised to find the owl unperturbed by his approach. Unlike the ornithologists of his day, who killed in order to know and reduced living species to “specimens” — even Audubon, for all his tenderheartedness, shot every bird he drew and described — Thoreau sets out to capture the living bird. (“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others,” he writes in another journal entry.) Sneaking up behind the hemlock, he springs out his arm to gently grasp the little owl, which is so surprised that it offers no resistance but only glares at him “in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers.” He swaddles it in his handkerchief, rests it at the bottom of the boat, and paddles home, where he builds a small cage for observation. He marvels at the seemingly neckless owl puffing out its feathers and stretching out its neck, slowly rotating its head in that singular owl way. He tries to imitate its hiss “by a guttural whinnering.” He offers his hand, to which the bird clings so tightly that it draws blood from his fingers. He regards its “squat figure” and “catlike” face, the fine white down covering its legs all the way down to the sharp talons.
When dusk falls, he sits down to record his observations and becomes the object of observation himself, the owl looking out at him with its immense eyes, intent and perfectly still. Thoreau writes:
It would lower its head, stretch out its neck, and, bending it from side to side, peer at you with laughable circumspection; from side to side, as if to catch or absorb into its eyes every ray of light, strain at you with complacent yet earnest scrutiny. Raising and lowering its head and moving it from side to side in a slow and regular manner, at the same time snapping its bill smartly perhaps, and faintly hissing, and puffing itself up more and more, — cat-like, turtle-like, both in hissing and swelling. The slowness and gravity, not to say solemnity, of this motion are striking.
[…]
He sat, not really moping but trying to sleep, in a corner of his box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. I never once caught him with his eyes shut.
When morning comes, Thoreau sets out to return the bird to its home, rowing back to the hill with the hemlock. But to his surprise, the owl refuses to leave the box and has to be gently shaken out of it. With raw reverence for this creature, this mind so incomprehensibly other yet so strangely kindred, he records their farewell:
There he stood on the grass, at first bewildered, with his horns pricked up and looking toward me. In this strong light the pupils of his eyes suddenly contracted and the iris expanded till they were two great brazen orbs with a centre spot merely. His attitude expressed astonishment more than anything. I was obliged to toss him up a little that he might feel his wings, and then he flapped away low and heavily to a hickory on the hillside twenty rods off.
There is something poignant in this account — a disquieting reminder of how accustomed we too grow to the false comforts of our traps, how unwilling to leave them for the terror of freedom, how we too may need a gentle push to feel our own wings. Our habitual way of seeing is also a comfort and a trap. In another entry, Thoreau wonders what it might be like to “witness with owls’ eyes” the life of the forest, then concludes that what we perceive of the world is what we receive in the world and each person “receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally.”
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost SpellsComplement with the strange and wondrous science of how owls hear with sound, then revisit Thoreau on living through loss, the Milky Way and the meaning of life, and his introvert’s field guide to friendship.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum.”
We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God — the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common center to form the first star: an immense ball of gas, at the core of which was a hydrogen sphere that eventually reached pressures of millions of atmospheres and heated up to millions of degrees. These extreme conditions triggered a new phenomenon in the cosmos — the first nuclear fusion reactions: When two hydrogen atoms collide with immense force, neutrons are transferred from one nucleus to the other, making some atoms larger. After a series of such collisions, a nucleus with two protons forms and the second element — helium — is born. As the star ignites, illuminating the austere darkness of pure spacetime surrounding it, it keeps burning its hydrogen to make more helium. The fusion accelerates, forging carbon, then neon, then oxygen, and so forth across the periodic table, turning the star into a kind of onion with layers of fusion reactions.
Most of the first twenty-six elements in the periodic table — the elements composing almost everything we can touch and see — were created by nuclear fusion in individual stars. If you could tag any individual atom in your body and follow it backward in time, across all the other matter it composed before it became yours — your mother’s body, the food your mother ate, the soil in which that food grew, the geologic strata ground down by the oceans to make that soil — you could trace it all the way back to the core of a particular star that lived and died billions of years ago: an actual atom that is now in you, having prevailed over the infinite probabilities by which it could have ended up in someone else.
To this Rube Goldberg machine of chance you owe all of your particularity — alter any part of that cosmic genealogy, and you would have ended up as someone else.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)The victory march of our particularity against probability comes alive in a short, dazzling poem by Ruth Stone (June 8, 1915–November 19, 2011).
Stone was six and enchanted by her grandmother’s dictionary when she began writing poetry. She was eight-four and the grandmother of seven when she received major recognition as a poet. By the time she died, having lived nearly a century and survived her husband’s suicide, she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award with her singular poems bridging the domestic and the cosmic, lensing the world of love and loss, of rapture and regret, through the world of galaxies and particles — poems shimmering with the spirit of The Universe in Verse (which is now a book).
This poem, found in What Love Comes To (public library) — Stone’s final poetry collection, published just before her death at age 96 — was read at the seventh annual Universe in Verse by David Byrne.
STRINGS
by Ruth StoneWe pop into life the way
particles pop in and out
of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larvae
and the evil of stars
are a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
like the moon, spit out like
a broken tooth.
“Oh,” groans the world.
The outer planets,
the fizzing sun, here we come
with our luggage.
Look at the clever things
we have made out of
a few building blocks —
O fabulous continuum.
Follow the continuum forward into the science of what happens when we die, then revisit David Byrne’s animated reading of Pattiann Rogers’s magnificent poem “Achieving Perspective,” with art by Maira Kalman, and Nick Cave’s animated reading of “But We Had Music.”
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here suspended between the time of insects and the time of stars, our transient lives bookended by not yet and never again. Time baffles us with its elasticity, the way it slows down when we’re afraid and speeds up as we age. It harrows us with its stagnancy, the way waiting twists the psyche. It haunts us with its demand for meaning. Time is the breath in the lungs of life, the marrow in the skeleton of space, the substance we are made of: “Time is a river which sweeps me along,” Borges bellows down the hallway of eternity, “but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
But while we have no control over time itself, we do have a choice in how we orient to it, how we inhabit the moment, how we own the past and open to the future — a choice that shapes our entire experience of life, that ossuary of time. And just as it bears remembering that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it bears remembering that there are infinitely many ways of being in time.
In her altogether wonderful book Weathering (public library), geologist turned psychotherapist Ruth Allen explores some of them as different ways of anchoring into our own existence.
Art by Harvey Weiss from Time Is When by Beth Youman GleickA generation after Paul Goodman taxonomized the nine kinds of silence, Allen taxonomizes the kinds of time in a celebration of what she calls chronodiversity:
Time is so diverse, and experienced so differently between subjects in the present, that any prolonged effort to constrain what time is falls apart. There is the time of insects who live no more than a day, and the time of tortoises that outstrip our own. There is the time that for me is saved, but for you wasted. There is the time that can never be equal in an unequal world, where you can relax and I have to work or vice versa. There is the time we experience in chronological order (or chronos) but there is also the qualitative experience of “everything in its own time” time in the moment (or kairos). There is time as it is experienced at altitude, which is different from time at sea level, and there is the time that shifts and bends with longitude. There is the slow time of youth when ideas and experiences are rushing clear and fast like spring water, creating an endless and expansive present, and Christmases that never come, and the fast time of elderhood when a lack of novelty speeds life up, racing forward like an arrow to a target without hesitation or deviation. There is the time of our psychological experience, the relative time of Einstein, and now also an entropic time rooted in what physicist Carlo Rovelli calls our “quantum ignorance.” “When we have found all the aspects of time that can be spoken of, then we have found time,” Rovelli declares. For now, then, we do not know time.
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)Drawing on the work of Marcia Bjornerud — another uncommonly insightful geologist — and her concept of timefulness, Allen considers how living into and between these different kinds of time can help us be more fully alive and more meaningfully connected (which is, in the end, the only thing that redeems our mortality). She adds:
Time is not a resource we have for cashing in. True timefulness… is to live in awareness of the dynamic and unpredictable array of times that co-exist within one life, as well as the intersubjective nature of time between all individuals. To live it well, we may need to break the temporal norms altogether and finally come to terms with time as entirely relational and contingent upon each other in specific and localised ways. In this way, time becomes unique among individuals who co-create its meanings and who give it vibrancy and liveness through their interaction with each other.
Dive deeper — into the subject and into the body of time itself — with 200 years of reflections on time from some of humanity’s greatest minds, from Kierkegaard to Nina Simone, then savor the lovely vintage children’s book Time Is When.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be granted the basic rights of citizenship in any country, into a mind that will never be allowed to expand in any institution of higher learning.
Dorothea Maria Graff (May 13, 1678–May 5, 1743) was born into such a world.
Red-crowned crane by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Through one of those wondrous rabbit holes that any passionate curiosity opens into the terra firma of culture, I discovered Graff’s strange and beautiful creatures in the course of my bird divinations project. Partway between encyclopedia and fairy tale, they rendered her one of the first fine artists to bring their brush to the young science of ornithology, more than a century ahead of Audubon and Elizabeth Gould.
At a time when natural history illustration depicted specimens in isolation, Graff painted living organisms in relationship with other living organisms — she painted ecosystems, doing for birds and reptiles what Marianne North would do for plants a generation later.
Parrot by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Alligator and snake by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Portrait of a South African ecosystem by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Frog by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Reptiles by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Despite their singular style, Graff’s paintings, now preserved by the magnificent cathedral of culture that is the British Museum, were long attributed to her mother — the trailblazing etymological artist Maria Sibylla Merian, whose classic visual study of the insects of Suriname her daughter helped illustrate. (In this regard, Maria and Dorothea affirm in the history of art what Marie Curie and her Nobel-winning daughter Irene affirm in the history of science — that what a parent models and nourishes for and in a child is an infinitely more powerful portal of possibility than any formal system of education and cultural permission.)
Egret by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Scarlet ibis by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Bearded dragon and beetle by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)Iguana by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)After her mother’s death in 1717, Graff went on to teach at the Russian Academy of Sciences and to work as a curator at Russia’s founding art museum — one of the first people in the world with a dual formal appointment in both art and science, animated by the stubborn recognition that these seemingly disparate lenses on reality, when combined, only magnify our understanding of it, that in the very act of combining them we come to know the world more intimately and therefore to love it more deeply.
Blue bird and monkey by Dorothea Graff, early 1700s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)For more visionary women who followed in Graff’s footsteps across space and time, leap forward a century with English artist Sarah Stone’s stunning natural history paintings of exotic and endangered animals, then another century into the daring life and art of pioneering American plant ecologist Edith Clements.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for knowledge — a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not yourself and a lively interest in its interiority. Bertrand Russell captured this in his essential distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge,” for it is only by means of love that we get to know anything deeply — a landscape, a person, the world — and it is love that beckons forth our own secret knowledge of what makes life worth living.
That is what poet Aracelis Girmay and her artist sister Ariana Fields explore in What Do You Know? (public library), inspired by the closing lines of Sharon Olds’s tender poem “Looking at Them Asleep.” (“When love comes to me and says / What do you know? I say This girl, this boy.”)
Page by page, love comes to the farmer and the seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and the stars, asking each what they know, and their answers come simple and profound like a child’s question.
When love comes to the well and asks,
What do you know,
it says,
I know thirst, I know abundance.
I know depth, I know darkness.When love comes to the ash and asks,
What do you know,
the ash says, I know the secrets between the volcano and the sky.It says, I know wandering,
and I know the language of fire.When love comes to courage and asks,
What do you know,
courage says,
I know speaking, even though I am afraid,
and I know the daily work of keeping on.
The constellations know “the story of distance and the language of light,” the rocks know “that change is possible, even if it takes a million years,” the land knows “the laughter of children who run below the birds” and “the joy of going on and on and on.”
What emerges is a glowing sense that love is not something we do but something we are, something the world is, something vaster than space and older than time.
Aracelis and Ariana as childrenCouple What Do You Know? with Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way, also by Girmay, then revisit Mary’s Room — a brilliant thought experiment about the limits of knowledge.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowing uncertainty and longing for resolution, I have found in the long stillness of the hunting bird, waiting for the right moment to do the next right thing, a living divination — a great blue reminder that patience respects the possible.
It is naïve, of course, to believe that this immense and impartial universe is sending us, transient specks of stardust, personalized signs about how to live the cosmic accident of our lives. Still, it is as foolish to ask the meaning of a bird as it is to see it as a random assemblage of feather and bone. Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it. That is the difference between signs and omens. Signs disrespect the nature of reality, while omens betoken our search for meaning, reverent of the majesty and mystery of the universe — they are a conversation between consciousness and reality in the poetic language of belief.
A bird is never a sign, but it can become an omen if our attention and intention entwine about it in that golden thread of personal significance and purpose that gives life meaning.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Jarod Anderson also turns to the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning in Something in the Woods Loves You (public library) — his poignant meditation on surviving the darkest recesses of human nature, the strange fusion of shame and sadness that gives depression its devastating power, by turning to the luminous and numinous in nature. Emerging from the pages is a lyrical love letter to how “imaginative empathy” heals and harmonizes our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the wonder of being alive.
Reflecting on the difficulty of interpreting his own life and on the myriad symbologies of the great blue heron — among them an ancient myth in which the bird dusts the surface of the water with golden starlight to attract bluegill — Anderson writes:
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.
You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
[…]
The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices… The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes.
Whenever we think in absolutes, we ossify. Our freedom always lies in our flexibility, and because concepts like meaning and identity are not fixed, because, as Anderson observes, they “require our intentional participation,” they are “mercifully flexible.” They take the shape of our beliefs about who we are and what we deserve, they abide by the messages we send ourselves through the omens we make of reality.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Watching the herons walking his local shoreline, feeling like they are sending him “an overt message” about the power of “quiet contemplation and self-determination,” Anderson writes:
The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn’t diminish the heron’s power. It simply highlights my own.
There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment — these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.
For those of us who find consolation in the natural world, the sense of meaning has to do with contacting the numinous quality of sea and sky and songbird, of everything that makes this planet a world. You may call that contact wonder. You may call it magic. “If you don’t think herons are magic,” Anderson writes, “you need to broaden your definition of that word.”
My local heron, the mystic. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Looking back on the bleak period when depression swept away the herons from the sky of his mind and voided the world of wonder, he reflects:
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
In the remainder of Something in the Woods Loves You, Anderson goes on to lens the search for meaning through a kaleidoscope of living wonders, from the sugar maple to the red-tailed hawk to the morel mushroom. Couple it with Loren Eiseley on warblers as a lens on the wonder of being, then revisit some of humanity’s greatest writers on nature as an antidote to depression and Terry Tempest Williams on the bird in the heart.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love.
Half a century after Whitman’s atomic theory of belonging and half a century before Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the meaning of solidarity in his visionary 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (public library) — the culmination of his pioneering studies of the cooperation networks of social insects and his outrage at the destructive power structures and power struggles of human society, for which he was eventually imprisoned. After a dramatic escape, Kropotkin spent four decades in exile across Western Europe and went on to influence generations of thinkers with this radical insistence on cooperation and solidarity, not the struggle for power, as the true engine of survival and flourishing.
Peter Kropotkin by Félix Nadar.Having fallen under Darwin’s spell as a teenager, Kropotkin came to see in evolutionary science an optimistic model for the elevation of human conscience — in the history of life on Earth, across which organisms have continually improved their biological adaptation for survival, he found assurance for a better future forged by our continual moral improvement.
Unable to obtain the scientific education he yearned for, the young Kropotkin took a post as an officer in Siberia (where Dostoyevsky was serving in a labor camp), then used his military credentials to join geological expeditions studying glaciation, all the while witnessing staggering corruption and abuses of power in local government while the peasants governed themselves through deep bonds of mutual trust that seemed purer, more primal, and closer to nature than any political power structure.
Challenging the anthropocentric view of other animals, Kropotkin considers the deepest driving force beneath the harmony and coherence of nature:
To reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and humans in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and humans alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.
Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)An epoch before Lewis Thomas speculated in his poetic case for why we are wired for friendship that “maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute,” Kropotkin adds:
Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each person from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.
Complement with Albert Camus on what solidarity means and Lewis Thomas’s forgotten masterpiece of perspective on how to live with our human nature, then revisit Kropotkin on how to reboot a complacent society and the art of putting your gift in the service of the world.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.”
Looking back on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of dark matter, astronomer Vera Rubin reflected: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”
Far from a mere diversion of the senses, beauty may just be the dialogue between nature and human nature — our most expressive language for loving the universe, for loving ourselves as fractals of the universe, for living wonder-smitten by reality. To find something beautiful is to find it interesting and meaningful in some way, often a way we can’t articulate — to render it significant and worthy of attention, to render it a wonder. In all of its forms — the beauty of a willow at night, the beauty of a noble act, the beauty of the imperfect face you love — beauty is what we find and what we create as we move through the world at our most fully human.
In 1955, the English marine biologist and poetic science writer N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) worked out the ideas that would later bloom into his perspectival masterpiece You and the Universe on the pages of another book. Despite a title very much a product of its time — a time before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliant unsexed the universal pronoun — Man’s Emerging Mind (public library) remains a singular and enduring reckoning with what makes us human, lensed through the majesty and mystery of beauty in all its forms, which pulsates beneath those qualities of mind we associate with terms like soul and spirit.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in VerseAware of himself as an individual unique in the history of a universe he doesn’t fully understand yet living with questions common to “all of us who move and think and feel and whom time consumes,” Berrill writes in the twenty-first chapter, wonderfully titled “The Shape of Wonder”:
I know beauty but I do not know what it means. Keats said that beauty is truth and so did the Greeks, although the one was concerned with loveliness and the others mainly with intellect. I do know that whatever beauty is, whether it is the kind that is woven within the mind itself or is perceived without, on this earth only the human mind can sense it… And inasmuch as we ourselves, in body, brain or mind, are as integral a part of the universe as any star, it makes little difference whether we say beauty lies only in the mind of the beholder or otherwise. We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.
With an eye to the creative impulse that is part of our humanity, part of the true nature of the universe that we refract, he echoes poet Robinson Jeffers’s moving meditation on moral beauty and adds:
Somehow, as our brains have grown beyond a certain complexity and size, beauty emerged both as perception and as creation. We know it when we meet it and we create it when we can. And we know it in many forms and not only in sublimated senses — we know it when love becomes selfless and solicitude becomes compassion. We see it in moral stature and in hope and courage. We see it whenever the transcending quality of growth is clear and unmistakable, knowing that only in such growth do we find our own individual happiness.
Berrill considers one thing beauty shares with love (which both share with the first of William James’s four features of transcendent experiences):
We can express them with words but cannot define them — we can only say that this and this are included but that is not, and wordlessly we all recognise the truth of it. Speech is limited, no matter what the language…. For in our hearts we understand more than we can possibly talk about.
A century after Walt Whitman called himself a “kosmos” and insisted that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Berrill intimates that this ineffable knowledge is a way of knowing ourselves, of anchoring ourselves to time and meaning as we evolve over the course of a lifetime and face our finitude. In consonance with Annie Dillard’s piercing insistence that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” he writes:
Your day’s activity, mental and physical, is a part of you and by extension you are all that you have ever been — like an unfinished symphony.
[…]
I believe… that during the closing notes of an individual life the question, if any, should be not do I have an immortal soul and what comes next, but how much of a soul have I grown? Whether individual consciousness persists at all… all that lives, all that has lived, retains its value and its meaning… I believe the past lives, that the present is eternal, and the future immanent; that we take it as an indivisible whole and that our obsession with the sweep and drama of history, our probing with fossils and other symbols of time, and our efforts to constructs theories of evolution of life and matter, are all in keeping with the craving to recreate in the human mind the unity of the universe in all its dimensions. The fact that we are so concerned and make such attempts to do this is much more significant than the results we may obtain. Space and time unite in the mind, in the organism, and in the universe as one all-inclusive whole.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in VerseIt is with this awareness that the Nobel-winning quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made his koan-like deathbed insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” Beauty, Berrill suggests, is how we rise out of our transient individual lives to contact this transcendent wholeness, to trust it and thus to trust ourselves. As such, it is a form of faith — the faith we most need to fully inhabit our lives, entwined as they are in that “inescapable network of mutuality.”
Berrill writes:
We need faith, a faith in ourselves as human beings and not as members of this or that race or religion or state or class of society. We need no faith in supernatural forces. We need only to recognise that our knowledge of the universe through our senses and our knowledge of the universe through our own inward nature show that it is orderly, moral and beautiful, that it is akin to intelligence, that love and hope belong in it as fully as light itself, and that the power and will of the human mind is but a symptom of reality; that we, when we are most human, most rational, most aware of love and beauty, reflect and represent the spirit of the universe. That should be enough.
And isn’t the sense of enough the triumph of life?
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” Kahlil Gibran observed in one of his prophetic poems. This paradox remains one of the 17 most important things I have learned about life.
Nick Cave, who has lived through some unimaginable loss, brought the paradox of joy to the 300th edition of his wonderful journal The Red Hand Files — an oasis of largehearted anticynicism in our world, and my favorite email by orders of magnitude. He writes:
I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practised method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost — at least, it can seem that way.
This paradox comes alive in Nick’s song “Joy” from his altogether soul-slaking record Wild God. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” goes a lyric spoken by the ghost of his dead son.
Some time ago, amid a season of suffering, Nick introduced me to the soulful work of poet Christian Wiman and sent me his lifeline of an anthology Joy: 100 Poems (public library) — a kaleidoscopic lens on, as Wiman writes in the introduction, “why a moment of joy can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached, or why this lift into pure bliss might also entail a steep drop of concomitant loss.”
Among the hundred poems, as various as Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, is the plainly and pointedly titled “Joy” by one of my favorite poets: Lisel Mueller, who lived nearly a century and wrote with such ravishing poignancy about the consolations of mortality and the dazzling complexities that make life worth living.
JOY
by Lisel Mueller“Don’t cry, it’s only music,”
someone’s voice is saying.
“No one you love is dying.”It’s only music. And it was only spring,
the world’s unreasoning body
run amok, like a saint’s, with glory,
that overwhelmed a young girl
into unreasoning sadness.
“Crazy,” she told herself,
“I should be dancing with happiness.”But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love —
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.
Couple with Nick’s beautiful of reading of “But We Had Music,” then revisit poet Ross Gay on delight as a force of resistance.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the gap between knowledge and mystery that we discover wonder. Every act of making space is in some sense a creative act and an act of faith. And yet in its open-endedness and indeterminacy, in its courtship of uncertainty, it challenges our most basic instincts about how to govern our lives, unsettling the foundation of our illusion of control (which is always the opposite of faith).
Italian writer Paola Quintavalle and artist Miguel Tanco offer a lovely antidote to our unease about this essential creative and contemplative act in Making Space (public library) — a charming illustrated taxonomy of the many forms of this existential exhale, the many ways we can deepen and magnify life by giving things beyond our control the time and space they take.
There is making space “to plant a seed and watch it grow,” space “for taking a chance” and “for another try,” space “for a hand to hold and when it’s time, for letting go.”
Children hold vigil over a dead bird, making space “for those who are no longer here.” A boy with a party hat and a mouthful of cake encircled by angry peers in party hats becomes an emblem of “the truth stuck inside your mouth.” A constellation of little cosmonauts make space “to wonder why.”
Page by page, there emerges a growing awareness that making space is really about our relationship to time and the unknown — that it is intimately related to learning how to wait better, that it is a laboratory for the paradoxes and possibilities of change, that it is where we come to terms with our necessary losses. (“Longing is like the Seed,” Emily Dickinson wrote, beholden to “the Hour, and the Zone, / Each Circumstance unknown.”)
Couple Making Space with Pablo Neruda’s beautiful poem “Keeping Quiet,” then revisit 200 years of beloved writers, artists, and scientists on the rewards of solitude, that supreme act of making space.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston observed of other animals two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery reflected on her encounters with thirteen different animals to insist that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.”
An epoch before Beston and Montgomery — before we had the science to fathom how owls see with sound, how dolphins and whales communicate in supersonic hieroglyphics, how hummingbirds defy the physics of gravity, and what birds dream about — John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) observed with astonishment and awe the myriad ways in which birds respond to the world with qualities of mind his contemporaries considered singularly human: tenderness and anger, memory and foresight, prudence and percipience about tides and tornadoes and the forces of nature far beyond mere instinct, far beyond human understanding.
Art from Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)While working on the brown pelican divination for my Almanac of Birds, I was struck by a strikingly sensitive and scientifically prescient passage in Audubon’s essay on the species, suspended like all of his writing partway between ornithological description and lyrical memoir of personal encounters. Lamenting the population decline of the brown pelican in his lifetime, he marvels at the mysterious intelligence of these strange and ancient seabirds:
The Brown Pelicans are as well aware of the time of each return of the tide, as the most watchful pilots. Though but a short time before they have been sound asleep, yet without bell or other warning, they suddenly open their eyelids, and all leave their roosts, the instant when the waters, which have themselves reposed for awhile, resume their motion. The Pelicans possess a knowledge beyond this, and in a degree much surpassing that of man with reference to the same subject: they can judge with certainty of the changes of weather. Should you see them fishing all together, in retired bays, be assured, that a storm will burst forth that day; but if they pursue their finny prey far out at sea, the weather will be fine, and you also may launch your bark and go to the fishing.
In consonance with Beston’s insistence that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Audubon adds:
I ponder on the faculties which Nature has bestowed on animals which we merely consider as possessed of instinct. How little do we yet know of the operations of the Divine Power!
Audubon often contemplated the intelligence of birds in his journal, nowhere more so than in an 1833 entry about the species to which he would soon devote the greatest number of pages — twenty — in his voluminous Birds of America (and which yielded one of the most direct and sobering bird divinations). Writing on the summer solstice, he jabs at our human hubris:
The Wild Goose is an excellent diver, and when with its young uses many beautiful stratagems to save its brood, and elude the hunter. They will dive and lead their young under the surface of the water, and always in a contrary direction to the one expected; thus if you row a boat after one it will dive under it, and now and then remain under it several minutes, when the hunter with outstretched neck, is looking, all in vain, in the distance for the stupid Goose! Every time I read or hear of a stupid animal in a wild state, I cannot help wishing that the stupid animal who speaks thus, was half as wise as the brute he despises, so that he might be able to thank his Maker for what knowledge he may possess.
Art from Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Complement with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on how to be more animal and artist James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, then revisit the story of the seamstress who laid the foundation for the study of octopus intelligence the year Audubon contemplated the brilliance of the goose in his journal.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities.”
Aristotle believed that everyone’s true calling lies at the crossing point of their natural talent and the world’s need. But this simple, seductive equivalence breaks down as soon as we account for the myriad factors that go into the cultivation of natural talent and the myriad doors of opportunity that may open or close between the gifted and the world. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” Stephen Jay Gould sniped at our crude conception of genius as pure natural endowment rather than a constellation of biological, psychosocial, and cultural conditions.
Every once in a while, a particular life renders vivid the roulette of what-ifs that determine whether a person of genius will leave a mark on the world with their gift or perish unrealized in a cage of circumstance.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) — who was still a teenager when his mother died of tuberculosis and who grew up to believe that “in a person’s life here are many, many sorrows, much woe, and many joys” — was twenty-seven when he was arrested and sentenced to death for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. His sentence was repealed at the last moment, prompting him to send his brother an ecstatic letter about the meaning of life. But he was not set free — instead, he served four years in a hard labor camp in Siberia.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871When he was finally released, Dostoyevsky remained in Siberia, conscripted into compulsory military service as the lowest-ranking officer. He worked hard but anguished with the knowledge that this work was not his calling. At thirty-four, no longer able to bear the disconnect, he breached all permissible military conduct and broke rank to write directly to the head of his military unit, with whose brother he had once shared an apartment.
Appealing not to the general’s authority but to his humanity, Dostoyevsky recounts his plight in Siberia:
Four years of grievous, horrible time. I lived with thieves, with people lacking human feelings, with perverted principles; I did not see and could not see for all of these four years anything cheerful, besides the blackest, most hideous reality. I had not a single being at my side with whom I could exchange even a single sincere word; I experienced hunger, cold, illnesses, work that was beyond my strength and the hate of my thieving comrades… But… there was no suffering for me greater than when I realized… that I was cut off from society, an exile, and could not be useful to the extent of my energy, desire and capabilities.
Feeling deeply what artist Agnes Martin would observe a century and a half later — “Doing what you were born to do [is] the way to be happy.” — Dostoyevsky adds:
Military service is not my field… My one dream is to be released from military service and enter the civil service… But I do not consider the service to be the main goal of my life… I have always considered the calling of the writer to be a most noble, useful calling. I am convinced that only on that path could I truly be useful, perhaps, I would attract at least some attention too, I would acquire a good name for myself again, and at least somewhat provide for my existence, because I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities.
Etching by William Blake, 1793. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)An epoch later and a culture apart, Gabriel García Márquez would observe with an eye to his own improbable literary path: “If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones… After all, there are better ways to starve to death.” At the heart of Dostoyevsky’s impassioned plea to his general is the recognition that his very soul would starve to death if he did not follow his path as a writer.
And then, in a defiance of military rank both bold and touching in its intimacy, he adds:
I will not conceal from you that in addition to a sincere desire to exchange my lot for another, one more suitable to my energies, a certain circumstance, upon which, perhaps, depends that entire happiness of my life (a purely personal circumstance), has induced me to be so bold…
That circumstance was that Dostoyevsky was in love — and love, at its truest, wings the soul to live into its highest potential.
He ends by acknowledging overtly just how daring his plea is, what a violation of code, what an act of hope:
I know that by writing this letter I have committed a new crime against the service. A simple soldier writing to an adjutant-general! But you are magnanimous and I entrust myself to your magnanimity.
His trust was not misplaced. The general was moved by his case and on Valentine’s Day 1854, Dostoyevsky was released to begin his life as a writer. And yet, had he not endured those difficult years, he may never have written the kind of literature he did, literature that has moved the world. No experience is ever wasted and all of our suffering is but raw material for art, for creation, for greater fulness of being. An AI could never write Crime and Punishment because an AI could never suffer a labor camp or a heartbreak.
Couple with Dostoyevsky’s account of the day he discovered the meaning of life in a dream, then revisit the story of how Van Gogh found his purpose.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“But we will have to find a way to live, as people do.”
We are lucky accidents of chemistry and chance, children of choices made for us by the impartial forces that set the first atoms into motion and by the human partialities that have shaped this latest blink of cosmic time we call history. The astonishing thing is that not one human being who ever lived has chosen the body, brain, place, or time to be born into, and yet in the narrow band of freedom between these chance parameters, we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness. Chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.
Poet Aracelis Girmay and artist Diana Ejaita take up these immense, intimate questions with uncommon soulfulness in Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way (public library) — a magical-realist story, lyrical and consummately illustrated, about a little boy and his grandmother who wake up one morning to find themselves on the Moon, pressed to make a home amid its inhospitable strangeness. What emerges is an ode to the stubborn courage of choosing to make a lush life out of even the most arid circumstances, to the defiant will of prevailing over the odds with fearless grace.
The Moon has always been our nearest notion of another world and other worlds have always been one of our most imaginative ways of thinking about our own, about otherness itself. Five millennia after Johannes Kepler pioneered science fiction by challenging humanity’s unexamined assumptions with an allegory about life on the Moon, here is an allegory that touches with great tenderness the global consequence of one of humanity’s most inhumane choices. But although the book celebrates the African diaspora — an undeniably singular experience — it has universal resonance for the broader experience of finding oneself transplanted, by choice or by circumstance, to a world so profoundly other that it appears alien, that one feels alien in it. (That is what America felt like when I arrived alone from Bulgaria in my late teens — incidentally, having been raised there largely by a grandmother named Zizi.)
ZuZu, discomposed at first by how different the lunar landscape feels from their home village, sets out to grow the most vital nourishments for body and soul. “Hello there, Sister,” she says to the ground as she presses a kernel of corn into it, then a clothespin from her apron, then a photograph of her mother, then a square of cloth tucked inside her favorite book.
In time, all kinds of things begin to grow. (“Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her poignant tribute to anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.)
From the kernel grew moon corn, but also moon beans
From the clothespin grew trees — mango, cashew, and willow.
And from the square of cloth, a wide and silent kite. And also a flock of birds and a very small meadow of flowers.
The tears ZuZu cries missing her family — the psychology of missing being one of the hardest and most defining aspects of human experience — stream down her face and into the ground to become a deep well of drinking water.
And so the boy grows, and learns to plant, and learns to sing, watching his grandmother dance. (“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his timeless memoir of surviving the Holocaust.)
Meanwhile on Earth — in that beloved “Back Home” place — ZuZu and Kamau’s family search for them near and far “for days, then weeks, then years.”
And then one day, by the same unexplained miracle that had landed the boy on that alien world, a letter appears in his father’s pocket to let him know that Kamau is safe with ZuZu on the Moon.
Word spreads across the village, exuberant with relief: “They’re all right! They have sent word!”
But then comes the question of how to write back.
Everyone shrugs, stumped, until Kamau’s sister comes up with an idea partway between science and magic — she heads to the ocean on her bicycle to harness the eternal relationship between the Moon and the tides (which Kepler uncovered), writing her letter in the sand for the water to carry it to her little brother.
And soon, the whole village is sending oceanic letters to the Moon. (“Each that we lose takes part of us,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “A crescent still abides, / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides.”)
So begins the correspondence between Back Home and the Moon. “These letters did not make the distance any less great,” Girmay writes, “but they had found a way to know each other.”
ZuZu finds a way to help Kamau know the Back Home world, too.
They would often sit and look out into the big, bright blue of Back Home, and he would ask his questions, and she would tell him everything she could. The noises, the fruits, the camels, the sea.
At the heart of the story is a reckoning with the meaning of resilience, of strength, of that bright stubbornness by which we make our lives emblems of the possible amid the improbable.
Looking at their new home on the Moon “outside the realm of what anyone thought could be,” knowing it is not what she would have chosen for her grandson, ZuZu captures the essence of the human spirit:
But we will have to find a way to live, as people do.
Something about the way she said “live” always filled Kamau’s blood up with sun.
Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way, which comes from the always inspired and inspiring Enchanted Lion, is lifeblood for the soul from cover to cover. Couple it with I Touched the Sun — a tender illustrated fable about how to find and bear your inner light, also from Enchanted Lion — then savor a very different existential meditation lensed through our closest cosmic companion in Dorianne Laux’s stunning poem “Facts about the Moon.”
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Photographs by Maria Popova.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On “the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs.”
With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening human experiences, and one of the great arts of living. To wait for something is to value it, to want it, to yearn for it, but to face its absence, its attainment forestalled by time and circumstance. All true waiting — which is different from abstinence, delayed gratification, and other forms of self-discipline — has an element of helplessness to it and is therefore training ground for mastering the vital, incredibly difficult balance of control and surrender that gives shape to our entire lives.
Because, as Tom Waits so unforgettably observed, the way we do anything is the way we do everything, our style of waiting is a miniature of our style of living: There is impatient and petulant waiting; there is waiting with the humility that while we may be worthy of the object of our hope, we are not entitled to it or to the mercies of time; there is waiting with an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, for the wait itself may reveal something we did not yet know about ourselves that might change our desire for the awaited outcome. (“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,” T.S. Eliot wrote knowing this, “for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”)
At its core, waiting is a frustrated relationship between desire and time — a surplus of desire with no temporal agency over its fulfillment. In that sense, it is the opposite of boredom — another singularly maddening experience, marked by total temporal agency hollowed of desire.
This is how I think of it:
But like boredom, waiting is also one of our earliest and most primal experiences — infancy and childhood are punctuated by the parent’s absences and it is in missing the parent, in awaiting their return, that we get our first taste of longing, of frustration, of rage. In missing the mother, the infant is training for all the people they will ever love and miss in the course of life. Every absence is therefore a fractal of that great primal absence, and while hardly anyone can wait with a penguin’s patience and faith, those with insecure attachment — most often the product of a childhood marked by a parent’s irremediable absences, physical or emotional — find waiting especially tortuous.
In On Getting Better (public library) — one of his many small, tremendous books about the paradoxes composing our lives — the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that we can get better at waiting, better at putting absences in the service of our emotional and spiritual development.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)To get better at waiting and at withstanding absences, Phillips argues, is “to get better at, to begin with, missing the mother, and then missing all the people one loves and needs.” Drawing on the influential work of Donald Winnicott, he writes:
The child experiences the mother’s absence as a withholding of something that could be given. The mother forbears to come into presence, and the child can’t help but react, respond, mobilize something in or of himself to manage the withdrawal in the first instance, often rage. Everything depends in this developmental story on how mother and child deal with the absences. It is in one sense a matter of time, of how long the wait is before the mother reappears. “It is a matter,” Winnicott writes in Playing and Reality, “of days, or hours, or minutes. Before the limit is reached the mother is still alive; after this limit has been overstepped the mother is dead.” That is to say it feels to the child that the mother he has in his mind has died; and/or he has killed her in his mind out of rage at her absence. In this story it is all about what happens in the absence — what Winnicott calls the “gap” — and, more pragmatically, what can be done in, or with, the gap.
It is in that gap that we cultivate the most essential skill for enduring absence and the tyranny of waiting — “the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs.” Phillips writes:
When you are waiting for someone you are looking forward to seeing, can you do anything other than wait? And can you enjoy them when they finally arrive? How you wait is who you are, and everything depends on your sense of an ending.
At its healthiest, Phillips intimates, that sense ought to be one of open-endedness — Winnicott himself considered the mark of a healthy person the ability to have, as Phillips puts it, “a certain kind of mutual relationship with another person, but to no obviously discernible, or predictable, end.” And indeed the sense that we are unfinished — as individuals and as a species, in our personal development and our interpersonal relations and our evolutionary trajectory — may be the single most hopeful thing about being alive, the truest grounds for faith.
Complement this fragment of On Getting Better — a superb read in its entirety, and a mighty antidote to the fashionable cult of self-improvement — with Phillips on knowing what you want and the courage to change your mind, then revisit Winnicott on the qualities of a healthy mind and a healthy relationship.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The universe is as we find it and as we discover it within ourselves.”
In her stunning space-bound ode to the human condition inspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “traveling through casual space past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns” — and yet these selfsame stars made us; out all this indifference arose all our capacity for feeling, our poems and our postulates. That every single atom in your body, if tagged and traced back in time, would lead to the core of a particular star in the early universe is a truth pulsating with transcendence, a truth Nick Cave channels beautifully in one of my favorite songs, singing of the stars as “bright, triumphant metaphors of love.”
An epoch ago, before we set foot on the Moon and sent rovers to Mars, before we built supercolliders to search for the “God particle” and heard the sound of spacetime in a gravitational wave, the cosmically curious English marine biologist N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) took up the eternal question of how to harmonize our cosmic smallness with the immensity of our creaturely experience in his slender, splendid 1958 book You and the Universe (public library).
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Berrill — a writer partway between Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan in both subject and poetic sensibility — begins with the basic question of being alive:
Just what are we doing here, spinning on a tilted planet swinging round a star? … Where do we stand, with our few pounds of flesh and bones and our fleeting lives?… Only a short while ago we were all God’s children, holding most of His attention, and the world was exclusively ours for better or for worse. The sun shone to give us warmth and light, the moon to bewitch us, the stars were there to be born under, and the volcanic depths to serve as hell. Now paradise is lost and we find ourselves in limbo, inhabiting one of the minor planets of a middle-class star drifting in the outer arm of a spiral galaxy no different from a hundred million more that are visible through our telescopes. Space and time and stellar systems are overwhelming and to face the twinkling sky of night with any sense of what you see requires either courage or a great amount of faith. Stars are no longer baleful or beneficial, an have no concern with us, but they leave a lonely terror striking at the heart. So here we stand, looking wistfully into the void and nostalgically back into time, for knowledge has put us outside our house.
And yet, in consonance with Richard Feynman’s poetic meditation on the relationship between knowledge and mystery, Berrill insists that greater intimacy with the raw reality of the universe, rather than further evicting, would reopen the door to our sense of belonging:
Perhaps in the end we can rediscover the reality of our home with a greater sense of wonder and a more mature appreciation.
He places at the heart of this possibility “the need to join outward observation with inner intuition.” In a passage that calls to mind the French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s elegant case for bridging the scientific and the sacred, Berrill writes:
It is the aim of science to coordinate all observable phenomena within a single natural order and it is its faith that such is possible. Hence the basic objection to acceptance of the supernatural. If the scientific stand is justified, then everything, whether of matter, energy, mind or spirit, belongs to one vast scheme — it is all one and every part has meaning in relation to the whole. This is as much a tenet of faith as any other belief, but it forms the working hypothesis of all real scientific endeavor.
Rather than being in conflict with the miraculousness of life, our material nature is the miracle itself:
Put together in the proper way and we all turn out to be a rather weak watery solution of salts and carbon compounds, more or less jellified. You and I, with all that we eat and the various bacteria, fungi and viruses that live so happily within us, are a mingling of the wind and water and dust that constitute the surface of the earth. The miracle is that such stuff as we are made of should walk and talk and know such things as song and sadness.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)In consonance with Loren Eiseley’s poetic insistence that life itself is “is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness” — a miracle each of us repeats in our particular constitution of indifferent atoms forged in long-dead stars — Berrill writes:
Life… is not something set in motion long ago to get along as best it can ever since, whether by some sort of divine intervention or a peculiar concatenation of circumstances: it must be maintained and incessantly driven along its path of freedom, hour by hour and year by year throughout the ages, coerced into being from moment to moment and forced willy-nilly into the channels of time.
For us humans, he observes, “life is a dance of hydrogen and electrons along the atomic pathways of the body” — but life abounds and insists on itself, in every living form:
In every second of time the visible beings, large and not so large, vegetable and animal, are growing out of the invisible with a force so subtle yet so irresistible they can break a rock or split an atom. Out of almost nothing came the leviathans of trees and beasts, inexorably expanding to a destined size. Out of a almost nothing, almost but not quite — for there is the fact we tend to overlook or take for granted: the capacity of the smallest unit of living matter to grow into stupendous and bewilderingly complicated wholes. It goes on around us all the time; it is the world we live in, and it is ourselves, you and I. We are the event itself, or at least a very significant part of it — giant examples of expansion, marvelously elaborated, and of exceptionally long duration.
Alluding to the strangely spiritual science of what happens when we die, Berrill adds:
Duration is hard to achieve, not that which belongs to crystals and rock but duration of the transcendent form and sparkle that belong to life. Hence the need for continual renewal, of birth from death, of the corn king who dies and the spring queen who brings forth life again. Life is forever being resurrected, not from nothing but from that speck of continuity that breaks off as a bud or seed or egg, leaving the old blown-up construction of the body lagging behind in time to stumble and die. Each fragment that begins anew, no matter what we call it, has time built into it.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse bookA century after Whitman wrote that “the whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly at a single individual, namely, you,” and a generation after quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made the koan-like quantum-infused observation that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,”, Berrill writes:
Nature, in the intimate and in the vast, is not designed. It is designing. Our own nature confirms it.
[…]
The merging qualities of hope, courage, love, intellectual quest and the sense of beauty, as represented to some degree in every human being, are emergent qualities of all that the universe is made of… Whether you wish to call this the path to God or to use some other term is not important, for the meaning if far older than any language and is both supernal and transcendent. At this level the spiritual and scientific ventures become one, and any experience derived from either source must be scrutinized in the light of the other. Above all we need not be afraid, either of the universe at large in all its oneness and multiplicity, or of our own nature which has itself been created by a star.
In soulful defiance of the materialist reductionism with which some apprehend the elemental nature of the universe, Berrill anticipates physicists Alan Lightman and Sean Carroll’s respective notions of “spiritual materialism” and “poetic naturalism,” and adds:
If mind and spirit grow out of matter they are nonetheless what they have been thought to be. It is our conception of matter that needs revision. All that is included in thought, perception and spiritual harmony belong as naturally in the universe as visible energy and tangible matter, and it is our peculiarly human task at the moment to see them all as facets of a whole.
[…]
The universe is as we find it and as we discover it within ourselves.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse book
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“At almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Rupture precedes revolution.”
It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know our depths and our limits, to know where we end and the rest of the world begins. And it is often at the edges, those boundary regions between one state of being and another, that we fathom ourselves, that we grow most alive — after all, life itself began in Earth’s tide pools, that fertile boundary between the depths of the ocean and the limits of the land.
The vital interplay between boundaries and growth, the catalytic function of limits, the way we hone our lives on the edges of the possible, is what geologist turned psychotherapist Ruth Allen explores in her uncommonly wonderful book Weathering (public library).
Looking back to her unusual pivot of purpose, Allen finds in the realities of the physical world a poignant metaphor for the life of the psyche:
Mountains can only be maintained because they are also places of vast removal. Through a process called isostacy, uplands and mountains accumulate material, making them heavier, and then weather and erode to become lighter again, causing crust to rebound as the earth maintains its balance, which it must do. Upland areas that are still uplifting, such as the Peak District, are doing so precisely because of the erosion that is constantly unburdening the land of their material. In short, stuff must be lost for everything to keep rising. This tells me two fundamental truths: one, that in order to evolve and grow, we must be prepared to face the erosive aspects of life. Two, it’s the weathering that creates the finest landscape of our lives, shaping us and defining us over time.
[…]
Instead of understanding the erosion rates of rock, I became more enthralled by what weathers a person, and what if anything can be done about that. What happens when the earth is shaken under our feet, undermining the foundations of everything we have known? How do we live with (or even close) the fault lines that open through trauma? How do we negotiate erosive and accumulative periods over time? What would it really mean to weather well?
Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print.)It is often at the fault lines where we rupture that we repair ourselves into a new and stronger way of being. In a sentiment that touches on the fundamental paradox of personal change, Allen writes:
At almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Rupture precedes revolution.
Rupture redefines our limits, remaps the boundaries of our self-knowledge, redraws the edge of the possible. And yet we recoil at the very notion of it, wired as we are for the safety of stasis. Allen considers our cognitive dissonance about these transformative regions of being:
As humans, we have a confused relationship with edges, boundaries and limitations, which can be seen as one and the same thing, unified paradoxically by their dividing potential… We seek them even when, as a psychological or relational construct, we recoil from their necessity, and will often find ourselves drawn to and entranced by the water’s edge: the shifting line between sand and sea, the horror of the cliff’s edge. Our pull towards edges is magnetic, our playfulness around them notable. We are compelled to edges, boundaries and limits, like an intrusive thought that we don’t want but can’t resist going towards… Edges are, in some ways, an embodiment of the core dilemma about how to live, and how to live under the spectre of death. Boundaries say here is OK, but beyond is the insistent abyss, and I am curious about that. Limits give us a place to challenge ourselves and triumph over. They provide an opportunity for growth, where going beyond a limit can test our courage, expand our hitherto unknown ability, and consolidate our resilience for yet another new horizon that appears as we pass through what’s now behind us. In short, edges are frontiers where we find ourselves.
They are also often where we find each other — the most transformative relationships create a Venn diagram of boundaries, take place at the edge between who we thought we were and who we can be, shifting that edge. Sam Shepard knew this when he reflected on love: “There can be a real meeting between two people at the point where they always felt marooned. Right at the edge.” Allen agrees:
In the overlap between people’s boundaries there is potential for interesting meetings and the potential for collapses.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse bookThat dual potential has to do with the nature of boundaries as the edge between the known and the unknown, between safety and risk. Defining a boundary as “a change point — a moment in space and time when what was no longer is, and a new state is emerging,” Allen writes:
Being alive in any meaningful sense is a balance of feeling and staying safe, and taking and overcoming risks. In safety, we have a vital place to rest, be comfortable and build the foundations of a life, and through risk we are expanded and grown… It is through taking risks that we expand our safety – widening the boundaries and limitations of our existence into ever-broadening and rich terrains… In therapy… pushing our psychological and emotional limits in creative ways. Real and effective trauma work is about carefully restoring the inner grounds of self-trust and trust-in-world, increasing our capacity for risk, not striving to make the world safe.
And yet at the heart of self-trust is knowing and honoring our limits — those safety valves between self and world. (This is why some of the most unsafe people to be in relationship with are people not aware of their own limits.) Allen writes:
Limits may slow us down long enough to breathe in what we already have, but they do not reduce meaning. In some cases, they may generate more. We’re not designed to be at capacity all the time, endlessly stimulated by activities, saturated in tasks to tick off… To remind ourselves of our limits is a kindness.
The great payoff of knowing the boundaries of our being is the wise discrimination of knowing when and whether to push them in order to grow. In another poignant geological analogy, Allen writes:
Reaching our boundaries is not the same as limiting our growth. Sometimes we find our edges and an amazing thing happens; capacity is rebuilt, old wounds are healed and we grow further and more beautifully than before. The process is analogous to mineral growth in rock. Without a surface and a set of containing edges, minerals that we prize for their beauty, function and even healing properties do not have the right conditions to develop. Crystals do not grow in the open, where space is boundless. Where crystals become their most vivid and multi-faceted is where there is containment that gives shape and definition to what is alchemically coming together on the inside.
We all need a container to hold and ferment the rich potential of our energy and talents — this is the crucible of newness from which all creativity and life flows.
In the remainder of the altogether magnificent Weathering, Allen goes on to explore geology as a lens on grief (“the most raw and frantic way of experiencing the words I love“), ecosomatics (“an emergent nature-based discipline at the intersection between ecology, the environment, and the lived experience of the body”), and other facets of what it means to live in a physical world as a physical being limited by time and flesh, set free by the unlimited potential of the psyche.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.”
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”
It is a powerful sentiment and a dangerous one, because if mutual salvation is not the byproduct of a healthy relationship but an expectation upon entering into one, it can bleed into destructive codependence. And yet we know from the neurobiology of limbic revision that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
Whether a relationship ends up rewiring or deepening unhealthy attachment patterns encoded early in life depends largely on the expectations we bring to it, and can change from one to the other as the expectations change. When we approach one another with curiosity and care without the expectation of curing each other, something paradoxical and miraculous may happen — the care may become the cure. The Latin of the word “cure” — cūra — means anxiety, which is also the root of “care” (to have cares, to be anxious), “curiosity” (an anxious inquisitiveness), and “secure” (without anxiety and care).
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toThe pioneering pediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971) understood uniquely the interplay of the two in the making of secure and healthy relationships. Trained as a physician — a profession predicated on cures — Winnicott came to psychoanalsis skeptical of applying the disease model of medicine to the health of the psyche. For him, proper therapy offered not just a cure of symptoms but “a more widely based personality richer in feeling and more tolerant of others because more sure of [oneself]” — a radically countercultural notion amid a therapy culture predicated on curing pathologies.
Winnicott placed at the center of a healthy and secure relationship — between a therapist and a patient, as much as between two private human beings — what he termed care-cure. In the final months of his life, he developed this notion in a talk delivered to doctors and nurses in St. Luke’s Church, later included in the altogether fantastic posthumous collection Home Is Where We Start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (public library).
With an eye to what is at the heart of this care-cure concept, Winnicott observes:
We are talking about love, but… the meaning of the word must be spelt out.
One of artist Margaret C. Cook’s rare 1913 illustrations for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)In spelling out the primary qualities of a true care-cure relationship — it must be non-moralistic, truthful, and reliable — Winnicott places especial emphasis on reliability as a way of protecting the other from unpredictability, since the root of suffering for many is that “they have been subjected as part of the pattern of their lives to the unpredictable.” (All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.)
Winnicott considers the cost of unpredictability:
Behind unpredictability lies mental confusion, and behind that there can be found chaos in terms of somatic functioning, i.e. unthinkable anxiety that is physical.
To be capable of a care-cure relationship, with all its requisite predictability, one must therefore be free of mental confusion and balanced enough to show up in a reliable way. Winnicott offers a definition of a healthy mind that doubles as a fundamental definition of healthy love:
A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.
Art from Birds by Brian WildsmithThis imaginative interpenetration of experience is necessary for the greatest challenge of consciousness — understanding what it is like to be another. Without it, there can be no love, for we cannot love whom we do not understand — then we are pseudo-loving a projection. A sign of healthy love, therefore, is the ability to be reliable and responsible with — which is different from being resposible for — the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of the other.
Complement with Alain de Botton, writing a generation after Winnicott, on the qualities of a healthy mind and Adrienen Rich, writing in Winnicott’s day, on the mark of an honorable human relationship, then revisit Winnicott on motherhood, that fundament of our hardest-wired attachment patterns.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and separation. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in silence, by choice or by circumstance — is a singularly discomposing experience. It takes a tremendous effort of the psyche to keep oneself from feeling abandoned, and we know from fMRI studies that every abandonment is experienced as a miniature death because the brain registers a loved one’s death — the ultimate abandonment — as simply a sudden and inexplicable separation.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)We may call that tremendous effort faith.
The wives of whalers had it when their husbands left on perilous voyages of months or years — faith that time and chance would smile upon that particular precious life adrift on the turbulent waters. Parents have it when their child takes those first steps, runs that first errand, goes to college — faith that across the developmental stages of individuation and separation, some unbroken bond of love will remain. Friends and lovers have it each time they embrace goodbye — faith that it will not be the last embrace.
But no one in the history of the world has had more faith in the face of separation and uncertainty than the penguin.
Penguins mate for life and lay one egg per year, which the parents take turns incubating and nursing for long stretches as each ventures into the sea hunting for food. The separation can last for months, during which the starving parent protecting the egg must retain unfaltering faith in the mate’s return — for if they too leave the nursery and go in search of food, the egg will perish.
The extraordinary extent of that faith and the heroic patience it requires of the penguin come alive on the pages of Voyage Through the Antarctic (public library) — a collaboration between ornithologist and conservationist Ronald Lockley and novelist Richard Adams, who traveled together through the polar regions a decade after Adams wrote the repeatedly rejected manuscript turned modern classic Watership Down.
The King Penguin by Thomas Waterman Wood, 1871. (Available as a print.)Celebrating the emperor penguin as “a miracle of antarctic evolution” — its six-month courtship, its immense single-file march to remembered nursery sites far from the sea, its devoted co-parenting — Adams writes:
On the frozen breeding-grounds no food is accessible. The sea steadily retreats — perhaps for as much as 125 miles — as the winter ice extends outwards from Antarctica.
When at last, in May, the female lays the single large (about 0.5 kg) egg, there is much excitement and mutual “talk.” The male awaits its appearance intently, and with his curved beak at once rolls it over his feet and up into a kind of pouch between his legs, where it is protected by a large flap of feathered belly skin and warmed by contact with the naked, hidden brood patch. If he did not do this, the egg would freeze within one minute. Exhausted by her efforts, and starving, having lost much weight during the long fast of mating and egg-building, the female now waddles seaward, tobogganing down slopes and now and then sleeping for short periods among the ice-hills.
It takes her days, even weeks to reach open water, where she sets about restoring her body fat — a long recovery of vitality before she can return to the nursery at the end of the two-month incubation period. During that time, the males survive by crowding together in a solid shield known as testudo, which allows them to maximize body heat and keep from being blown away by the ferocious polar gales. It is only when the female returns to take over parenting duties that the male, weak and famished, can set out to sea to restore himself, having persevered through his mate’s long absence with total trust in her return.
Adams marvels at this unparalleled act of faith:
The male’s stoic, heroic devotion to his duty as incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving that almost incredibly long fast under conditions of exposure to intense frost that would kill most other living creatures. It is at last rewarded, while the rookery is still sunless in July, by the return of his mate, fat an full-bellied from her long sojourn amid the krill and small fishes. She has had an even longer walk back to the rookery, since water ice is still forming far at sea. She usually arrives a few days after the chick is born at the time when, getting hungry, it begins to poke its head into the air and whine for food. The male, by an unusual provision of nature, manufactures sufficient nourishing fluid from bile and stomach secretions to keep the infant alive until the female arrives.
In a testament to voice as the fingerprint of the soul, Adams adds:
When the female returns, she calls to and recognizes her mate by voice. This is a kind of ceremony, which may take some time, since after two months of testudo and other movement the mate is not likely to be where she left him nursing the precious egg. Once the ceremony of vocal recognition is over, the female persuades her mate to yield the chick to her. Within seconds it is transferred to her pouch. The male, in his turn, is now free to set out on the long walk to the ocean feeding-grounds… And here we rind another remarkable and unusual natural provision: the mother is able not only to live off her body fat but also to conserve the contents of her stomach to dole out enough daily food to keep the chick going until the male returns.
That penguins have survived by an act of faith since they first diverged from albatrosses 71 million years ago is not only a miracle of evolution — there alongside such improbable and astonishing things as the eye of the scallop, the periodicity of the cicada, and REM — but a living testament to patience as the guardian of love and the engine of the possible, a model for refusing to experience absence as abandonment, that miniature of death. For only love — the tenacity of it, the faith in it — makes life more stubborn than death.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Sometimes it feels as if all of life is made up of longing.”
My first great culture shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between busy streets all bore plaques that called them “parks.” Where I came from, a park was a place of birdsong and rustling leaves, a place to ramble, to get lost in, to dream in; a patch of wonder in the middle of the city; a pocket wilderness. It was in a park that I took my first steps, had my first kiss, wondered for the first time why we are alive.
The park — the proper park — as a place of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with great soulfulness in We Go to the Park (public library) — the product of an unusual collaboration between Swedish author and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna.
At the dawn of the pandemic, amid the maddening captivity of lockdown and the tempest of uncertainty, Alemagna entered a kind of trance of painting — an outpouring of color and feeling channeling her hopes and fears, dreams and remembrances. (Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism — we make what we make to save ourselves, to stay sane, to find the slender cord of grace between us and the world.)
When Stridsberg received a selection of these impressionistic unstoried images, she was moved to respond with her own art. Her spare, lyrical words gave the pictures coherence, making of them something uncommonly lovely: part story, part poem, part prayer.
Some say we come from the stars,
that we’re made of stardust,
that we once swirled into the world
from nowhere.We don’t know.
So we go to the park.
Though spoken by children playing in the park, the collective pronoun seems to expand in widening circles as the vignettes unfurl until it becomes the voice of humanity, making the park — this “land beyond” — a miniature of our restless search for meaning, an antidote to the ordinary world where “everything is so big there’s no room for it inside of us.”
There amid the thousand-year-old trees that “stretch their branches toward the sky like old hands,” we encounter minute creatures and enormous flowers as big as heads, “birdlike old ladies on benches” and a girl “in a yellow raincoat with wild hair, who smells like lightning and isn’t scared of anything”; we encounter ourselves in all our yearning, all our incompleteness.
Sometimes it feels as if all of life
is made up of longing.A dizzying lack of someone
to swing and swoosh beside.
When Stridsberg writes that “there are no rules in the universe” — a universe we know to be governed by immutable laws precise as clockwork — she seems to be intimating that there are no rules for how to be human, for how to make meaning. (There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.) There are only invitations — to be present with the wind that feels like “the breath of a dragon,” with the tiny ants, with the exquisite fragility of life and the size of time.
In just a second,
everything we love might be gone.
We Go to the Park is part of independent children’s book powerhouse Enchanted Lion’s inspired Unruly imprint of picture-books for grownups — or, rather, wonderfully category-defying books emanating Maurice Sendak’s insistence that an authentic life is a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”
For other Enchanted Lion treasures that feed the child self without shying away from the deepest dimensions of maturity, savor Before I Grew Up, Big Wolf & Little Wolf, and this illustrated reimagining of Neruda’s Book of Questions.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Photographs by Maria Popova.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is always to see the divine in each other, because all love is a yearning for the sacred, within us and between us. And yet the moment we cast the other as our savior, our redeemer, the arbiter of our significance, we have ceased loving — for we have ceased seeing the living human being.
The Heart of the Rose by Elihu Vedder, 1891. (Available as a print.)The tragic part, the touching part, the strangely assuring part is that we have been doing this since consciousness — that synaptic hammock of yearning — first crowned the human animal. We have suffered in the same way across cultures and civilizations, and have transmuted that singular, commonplace suffering into some of our most enduring works of art. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin observed in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)
Centuries ago, John Donne (1572–1631) channeled the complex interplay between eros and the divine, the confusion of it and the transcendence of it, in the most eternal of his Holy Sonnets. Composed in his late thirties and published shortly after his death, it is read here by nineteen-year-old artist and poetry-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Complement with Derek Walcott’s lifeline of a poem “Love After Love,” then revisit Aldous Huxley on reclaiming the divine within.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.”
Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for the paradox of art) to the mystery.
It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.
The paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977) channels this idea with uncommon loveliness and lucidity in one of the essays found in his superb 1969 collection The Unexpected Universe (public library).
Writing at the dawn of the space age, when the human animal with its “restless inner eye” first reached for the stars, Eiseley observes:
The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Picking up Dante’s thread, Eiseley offers a sweeping meditation on what ennobles our small stardusted lives, beginning with the story of a seemingly mundane accident that thrusts him, as sudden shocks to the system can often do, toward transcendence.
Walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself facedown on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling. And then, with that wonderful capacity we humans have, he surprises himself:
Confusedly, painfully, indifferent to running feet and the anxious cries of witnesses about me, I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.”
The words were not addressed to the crowd gathering about me. They were inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems.
I was made up of millions of these tiny creatures, their toil, their sacrifices, as they hurried to seal and repair the rent fabric of this vast being whom they had unknowingly, but in love, compounded. And I, for the first time in my mortal existence, did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands. It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos.
Art by Luisa Uribe from The Vast Wonder of the World — a picture-book biography of cellular biology pioneer Ernest Everett JustIt is often like this, in some small sudden experience, that we awaken to reality in all its immensity and complexity. Eiseley’s blood-lensed realization is elemental and profound: We are not the sum total of the tiny constituent parts that compose us — we are only ever-shifting and regenerating parts operating under the illusion of a sum we call a self. Any such awareness — whether we attain it through science or art or another spiritual practice — is an act of unselfing, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s perfect term. And every act of unselfing is an act of love — it is how we contact, how we channel, “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” It is the self — the prison of it, the illusion of it — that keeps us trapped in lives of less-than-love. But a self is a story, which means we can always change the story to change, to dismantle, to be set free from the self — and it might not even require a bloody face.
Observing that while other animals live out their lives by obeying their nature, the human animal has the freedom to define and redefine its own humanity, Eiseley considers both the gift and the danger of our malleable and impressionable self-definition. A decade before James Baldwin admonished in his superb conversation with Margaret Mead that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and half a century before Maya Angelou wrote in her staggering poem to the cosmos that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Eiseley reminds us of something fundamental that we so easily forget, so easily abdicate, in these times of social imaging and performative selfing:
To the degree that we let others project upon us erroneous or unbalanced conceptions of our natures, we may unconsciously reshape our own image to less pleasing forms. It is one thing to be “realistic,” as many are fond of saying, about human nature. It is another thing entirely to let that consideration set limits to our spiritual aspirations or to precipitate us into cynicism and despair. We are protean in many things, and stand between extremes. There is still great room for the observation of John Donne, made over three centuries ago, however, that “no man doth refine and exalt Nature to the heighth it would beare.”
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets. (A particularly countercultural point, given he is writing in the middle of the Cold War — an ideology of hate, like all war, under which humans on both sides are taught that those on the other are devils, that power and not peace is the pinnacle of our humanity.) Drawing on his singular access to deep time as a scientist who studies fossils long predating Homo sapiens, he considers what made us human — what keeps us human:
A great wealth of intellectual diversity, and consequent selective mating, based upon mutual attraction, would emerge from the dark storehouse of nature. The cruel and the gentle would sit at the same fireside, dreaming already in the Stone Age the different dreams they dream today.
[…]
Some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved — they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices of women. On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form. Here — not with the ax, not with the bow — man* fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds — the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s century-old illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)Millions of years later, Eiseley finds himself one of the lovers as he befriends a large old seagull, grey as himself. Day after day, he sits on an old whiskey crate half-buried in the sand at the edge of the ocean — that crucible of life, that ultimate lens on its meaning — and watches the gull. “I came to look for this bird,” he recounts, “as though we shared some sane, enormously simple secret amidst a little shingle of hard stones and broken beach.” And then, one day, the gull is gone.
With an eye to what remains — which is what always remains when something or someone we love leaves — Eiseley writes:
Here, I thought, is where I shall abide my ending, in the mind at least. Here where the sea grinds coral and bone alike to pebbles, and the crabs come in the night for the recent dead. Here where everything is transmuted and transmutes, but all is living or about to live.
It was here that I came to know the final phase of love in the mind of man — the phase beyond the evolutionists’ meager concentration upon survival. Here I no longer cared about survival — I merely loved. And the love was meaningless, as the harsh Victorian Darwinists would have understood it or even, equally, those harsh modern materialists… I felt, sitting in that desolate spot upon my whiskey crate, a love without issue, tenuous, almost disembodied. It was a love for an old gull, for wild dogs playing in the surf, for a hermit crab in an abandoned shell. It was a love that had been growing through the unthinking demands of childhood, through the pains and rapture of adult desire. Now it was breaking free, at last, of my worn body, still containing but passing beyond those other loves.
Here, in this scientist’s farewell to life, we find an echo of Dante and of Larkin’s timeless insistence that “what will survive of us is love,” we find the first truth of life, which is also its final truth. (This too is why we, fallible and vulnerable to the bone, ought to love anyway.)
Complement with Eiseley’s contemporary and kindred spirit Lewis Thomas on how to live with our human nature and Iris Murdoch on how to love more purely, then revisit Eiseley’s muskrat-lensed meditation on the meaning of life and his warbler-lensed meditation on the miraculous.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with silence. To me, voice is an unequaled portal to the soul and the supreme pheromone. When I miss someone, it is their voice I miss the most.
For eons, we could capture the likeness of a person far in space or time, but not their voice: all the portraits of kings and queens staring down from palace walls, all the marble thinkers and the nudes descending staircases, all the photographs of lovers and children, all the mute millennia of them. Voice was life incarnate, impossible to immortalize. Then we harnessed electricity, dreamt up the phonograph and the telephone, began translating these ephemeral oscillations through the air into electrical waveforms to be transmitted and recorded. You could suddenly hear the nightingale across the globe, you could hear the voice of the dead.
And then voice became something you could see.
Margaret Watts Hughes. (Portrait by S. Harris courtesy of Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Trust)Margaret Watts Hughes (February 12, 1842–October 29, 1907) was already one of the most beloved singers of her time before she became an inventor. Jenny Lind — the most celebrated vocalist of the 19th century, who inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Nightingale” by breaking his heart — considered her one of her only two spiritual sisters in music, alongside Clara Schumann.
On the cusp of forty, Margaret invented a device to test and train her vocal powers — a membrane stretched over the mouth of a receiver attached to a megaphone-shaped tube, into which she would sing. To render her voice visible, she would place various powders atop the rubber diaphragm and watch the vibrations scatter the particles, much like cosmic rays scatter subatomic particles in a cloud chamber. She experimented with different designs: various tube shapes, fine silk and soft rubber for the membrane, sand, lycopodium powder, and flower seeds for the medium.
She called her device eidophone, from the Greek eidō (“to see”) and phōnḗ (“voice, sound”), and became the first woman to present a scientific instrument of her own invention at the Royal Society.
Margaret Watts Hughes and her eidophone. (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1908.)But the eidophone gave her a far greater reward — a glimpse into another dimension of reality.
One day in 1885, Margaret noticed something astonishing — as she sang into the eidophone modulating her pitch, the seeds she had placed atop the membrane “resolved themselves into a perfect geometrical figure.” Experimenting with her voice, she discovered that particular tones produced particular geometries — shapes that “alter in pattern or in position with each change of pitch… and increase in complexity of pattern as the pitch rises.”
She sang entire songs into the eidophone, capturing the imprint of each note.
A new visual language for sound came abloom — forms partway between Feynman diagrams and Haeckel’s radiolaria.
And then she began to wonder what would happen if she placed a small heap of wet color paste instead of powder at the center of the diaphragm and covered it with a glass plate, singing different sustained notes into the eidophone.
She held her long steady pitch, then watched wonder-smitten as modulations of intensity pushed the pigment outward into petals and pulled it back concentrically toward the center, each sound forming a different shape. She sang daisies and roses, she sang ferns and trees, she sang strange serpents of otherworldly beauty. The same tone formations produced the same flowers each time — daisies and primroses were easy to sing, pansies difficult — revealing the secret garden inside the voice.
She called these forms Voice-Figures and came to think of them as echoes of the voice of God, hoping they would serve in some small way “the revelation of yet another link in the great chain of the organised universe.”
Long considered lost, they have been rediscovered and now endure in the collection of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery in Wales.
In the final years of her life, looking back on her experiments, Margaret reflected:
Passing from one stage to another of these inquiries, question after question has presented itself to me, until I have continually felt myself standing before mystery, in great part hidden, although some glimpses seemed revealed.
Born to working-class parents, the daughter of a cemetery supervisor, Margaret began giving music lessons to homeless children in the basement of her house. Overcome with tenderness for them, she felt she had to do more and used the income from her music career to found several orphanages in North London. Upon her death, the Times eulogized “the penetrating sweetness of her voice, both in speech and in song, her glowing faith, and her great magnetic power [that] had an extraordinary effect on the roughest and most unpromising children.”
When the novelist Emilie Barrington visited one of the orphanages, she was moved to see that instead of curtains or blinds, the windows were shaded with Margaret’s bright voice-figures, which appeared as something out of a dream, out of Alice in Wonderland — “strange, beautiful things,” she marveled, “suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature.”
While elsewhere in London Florence Nightingale was writing about the healing power of beauty, Margaret Watts Hughes seems to have understood that the colorful voice-figures were more than decoration in the lives of these abandoned children, that inside each person, even the loneliest, dwells a secret garden of delight waiting to bloom under the warm rays of tenderness, that perhaps voice only exists to give tenderness a vessel.
Couple with these visualizations of consciousness by Margaret Watts Hughes’s contemporary Benjamin Betts (one of which became the cover of Figuring) and pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott’s visualizations of scientific phenomena, then revisit Hannah Fries’s poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song” — a tender love letter to the voice.
HT Public Domain Review via Sophie Blackall
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than not, when someone breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell. But in any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society.)Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores this central perplexity of human life with her characteristic intellectual agility and emotional virtuosity in one of the essays found in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books, which also gave us Murdoch on what love really means, the myth of closure, and the key to great storytelling. She writes:
People are so very secretive. Sometimes it is said, “Those characters and that novel are purely fantastic — nobody in real life is like that.” But people in real life are very, very odd, as soon as one gets to know them at all well, and they conceal this fact because they are frightened of appearing eccentric or shocking… What are other people really like? What goes on inside their minds? What goes on inside their houses?
It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else — this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.
Iris MurdochParadoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination — of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots. Murdoch writes:
Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, is the ability to see the other thing, what one might call, to use those old-fashioned words, nature, reality, the world… Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth.
In another essay from the book, Murdoch considers the existential jolt of discovering how poorly we know ourselves, for we are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. Defining it as the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control,” Murdoch locates Angst in any experience where we feel the discrepancy between our ideals and our personality. She writes:
Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that personality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will.
In a sense, Angst — which often manifests as anxiety, to use a presently fashionable term — is the loss of faith in the omnipotence of the rational will, the discovery that much of our conduct is governed by unconscious tendrils of our personality impervious to our conscious ideals. This makes the project of change far more complex and durational than we would like it to be.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Murdoch writes:
The place of choice is certainly a different one if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the “decision” lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be “cultivated.” If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at… Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.
This is so because pure attention reveals the fundamental necessity of our lives, and where there is necessity there is no need for choice — there is only what Murdoch calls “obedience to reality,” which is always “an exercise of love.” Such attention — “patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation” — shapes what we believe to be possible and, when coupled with the conscious will, shapes our lives. It is only through obedience to reality that we can ever see clearly enough — ourselves or another — to be in loving relationship, by discovering, in Murdoch’s lovely words, “the real which is the proper object of love.”
Couple this fragment of the altogether superb Existentialists and Mystics with Adam Phillips on the paradoxes of changing, then revisit Iris Murdoch on how attention unmasks the universe and how to see more clearly.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”
There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warning. This is the price of consciousness, which makes living both difficult and urgent. “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,” Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) writes in her almost unbearably wonderful 1972 masterpiece The Summer Book (public library), written in the wake of her mother’s death.
Jansson’s observation here is literal: Her protagonist — a little girl named Sophia, who is living on a small Nordic island with her elderly grandmother after her mother’s death — finds herself thinking about what it’s like to be a worm, fabled to go on living two new lives when split in half.
Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener.Worms — those humblest of creatures, which Darwin regarded with absolute amazement and celebrated as the unsung sculptors of the biosphere, having tilled and fertilized the Earth as we know it — dwell in the popular imagination as a living metaphor for regeneration, for turning trauma into redoubled life. (Here, poetic truth and scientific fact diverge — in reality, most earthworms, of which there are more than 1,800 species, have a distinct head and tail; if cut in the middle, some species can regrow a new tail from the head half and go on living, but the tail half dies. Perhaps the planarium flatworm — a tiny invertebrate belonging to the phylum Platyhelminthes, separate from earthworms — is the more scientifically accurate metaphor, for it can regrow its entire body from the smallest cut fragment.)
Still, the poetic image of the cleaved worm that goes on living is a fertile thought experiment for how we may think about those most sundering experiences.
Wondering about what it may be like for the worm to be cut in half, Sophia discovers one of life’s elemental truths — that the price of all growth is pain, but the pain passes and the growth remains:
The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts. And we don’t know, either, if the worm is afraid it’s going to hurt. But anyway, it does have a feeling that something sharp is getting closer and closer all the time. This is instinct. And I can tell you this much, it’s not fair to say it’s too little, or it only has a digestive canal, and so that’s why it doesn’t hurt. I am sure it does hurt, but maybe only for a second.
It always hurts to grow twice as alive. And the question is always what are you going to do with your new uncharted life. Jansson imagines this is the ultimate challenge of the worm halves as they come to live as reborn wholes:
They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Couple with some enduring wisdom on control, surrender, and the paradox of self-transcendence from another of Jansson’s vintage children’s books, then revisit her breathtaking love letters to the love of her life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art and morality. There could be no such realization without imagination, which is our only instrument for fathoming what it is like to be somebody else — that most difficult triumph of unselfing. It is only through the imagination that we are capable of empathy — in fact, the modern sense of the word empathy came into use just over a century ago as a way of describing the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art.
We are living in a strange time, a time tyrannized by a moral fashion forbidding that vital act of imagining lives radically different from our own, narrowing the permissible locus of creativity and conversation to tighter and tighter self-similarity — censure that defeats the very project of fathoming otherness in order to, in Audre Lorde’s lovely words, “use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future.”
Three decades ago, at the dawn of this tyrannical regime that continually mistakes self-righteousness for morality and enslaves the soul in servitude to identity, the poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) issued a sonorous wakeup call it is not too late to hear.
Grace PaleyAddressing other members of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative she had co-founded in the 1960s, Paley — who believed that “it is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power” and “to learn the truth from the powerless” — offers a sentiment of astonishing relevance to our own cultural moment:
We need our imaginations to understand what is happening to other people around us, to try to understand the lives of others. I know there’s a certain political view that you musn’t write about anyone except yourself, your own exact people. Of course it’s very hard for anyone to know who their exact people are, anyway. But that’s limiting. The idea of writing from the head or from the view or the experience of other people, of another people, of another life, or even of just the people across the street or next door, is probably one of the most important acts of the imagination that you can try and that can be useful to the world.
Born just after women became citizens, having lived through and taken part in the early Civil Rights movement, having just traveled to Vietnam in her seventies to meet with and learn from Vietnamese writers, she observes:
We’re living in a time when the different peoples in this country are being heard from, for the first time. I’m happy to have lived into this period when we hear the voices of Native Americans — twenty or twenty-five years ago you didn’t even know they were writing, apart from token publication. That was the general condition of American literature at that time. The voices of African-American men and women, the voices of women of all colors, Asian women, Asian men, all these people — this is our country — and we’re living at a time when we can hear the voices of all these people.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society.)With an eye to the complaints of “people without imagination” who look to these tectonic shifts and “say with that denigrating tone, multiculturalism or diversity or political correctness,” she adds:
They use those words to try to shut all of us up. This is what the imagination means to me: to know that this multiplicity of voices is a wonderful fact and that we’re lucky, especially the young people, to be living here at this time. My imagination tells me that if we let this present political climate defeat us, my children and my grandchildren will be in terrible trouble.
Complement with James Baldwin on how Shakespeare found poetry in other lives, then revisit Grace Paley on the art of getting older — one of the loveliest things I have ever read.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones:
What is life?
Where does it begin and end?
What makes it alive?
But in the epochs since, having discovered muons and mitochondria, having discerned the elementary building blocks of matter and the synaptic infrastructure of the mind, we — “atoms with consciousness,” in physicist Richard Feynman’s poetic words — seem to be haunted all the more urgently by the question of what makes life sacred and worthy of living.
The Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman (November 29, 1905–September 14, 1964), who had spent a thousand days as a correspondent on the frontlines of humanity’s unholiest war and composed some of the earliest eyewitness accounts of Nazi extermination camps, takes up these urgent and eternal questions in his 1959 novel Life and Fate (public library) — the story of a visionary physicist named Viktor and his search for meaning amid the radical mathematics of reality.
A generation after the mathematical prodigy William James Sidis bent Einstein’s equations into a provocative model of what distinguishes inanimate matter from life, Viktor’s colleague taunts him with a daring definition of life:
There is a boundary limiting the infinity of the universe — life itself. This boundary’s nothing to do with Einstein’s curvature of space; it lies in the opposition between life and inanimate matter… Life can be defined as freedom. Life is freedom. Freedom is the fundamental principle of life. That is the boundary — between freedom and slavery, between inanimate matter and life.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Viktor shudders at the notion. (So did James Baldwin, who wrestled with the illusion of choice and concluded “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”) When the other physicist prophecies that in the coming century — the century in which we are living out our lives — “the abyss of time and space will be overcome” as science unravels the mystery of energy and matter to solve “the creation of life itself” and thus liberates humanity from its mortal destiny, Viktor pushes back against this escapist fantasy with the full force of the human struggle:
On this very day the Germans are slaughtering Jewish children and old women… And we ourselves have endured 1937 and the horrors of collectivization — famine, cannibalism and the deportation of millions of unfortunate peasants… You say life is freedom. Is that what people in the camps think? What if the life expanding through the universe should use its power to create a slavery still more terrible than your slavery of inanimate matter? Do you think this man of the future will surpass Christ in his goodness? That’s the real question. How will the power of this omnipresent and omniscient being benefit the world if he is still endowed with our own fatuous self-assurance and animal egotism? Our class egotism, our race egotism, our State egotism and our personal egotism? What if he transforms the whole world into a galactic concentration camp? What I want to know is — do you believe in the evolution of kindness, morality, mercy?
In the end, Grossman intimates, these are the elementary particles of life — the building blocks of its significance and sanctity. Given the miracle of how a cold cosmos kindled consciousness, given the everlasting wonder of what happens when we die, given the luckiness of death, it seems that each life is a reliquary of itself — that we exist only to discover that what makes the interlude between inanimacy and death alive with meaning is love, no matter the names we give it: kindness, friendship, forgiveness.
Available as a printGrossman writes:
When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes — respiration, the metabolism, the circulation — continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
This, of course, is also the fundamental constitution of love — it is the singularity of a person, the dear particularity unexampled in all of space and time, that we love. That is why the loss of love feels like a death — when the universe between two people who have loved each other ceases to exist, a part of each soul also dies, a part of each consciousness ceases to reflect the universe and is extinguished.
But there, amid the desolate haunts of eternity, we discover that the only shelter is the naked now — the only place where we have any freedom at all, including freedom from fear. Hannah Arendt knew this when she observed in her timeless reckoning with love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss that “fearlessness is what love seeks” and “such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” which makes “the only valid tense” of love the present — the only place where life is truly alive, and holy.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.”
Some of the most difficult moments in life are moments of having to choose between two paths leading in opposite directions — to tell or not to tell, to leap or not to leap, to leave of not to leave — each rife with losses (even if they are necessary losses) the pain of which you will feel acutely and with gains which you are constitutionally unable to imagine.
You could do it rationally, applying Benjamin Franklin’s framework of weighing the pros and cons. You could do it emotionally, polling the people you trust, despite the fact you alone know what is best for you since you alone know what it’s like to be you. You could concede the futility of free will and flip a coin. Still, that bifurcation of the soul remains because life, in all its irreducible complexity, is not something you can optimize the way you optimize a route for minimal traffic or maximal scenery. What makes those moments so difficult is the knowledge that there will never be a way of testing where the other path would have led — you only have the one life, lived.
But perhaps there is a third way — one based not on renunciation, which is at the heart of all binary choices, but of integration, which is the pulse-beat of possibility. A way to stop trudging the ground of forking paths and lift off into the sky of the possible.
Art by Marc Martin from We Are StarlingsThat is what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explores in his 1843 masterwork Either/Or (public library). Long before Alan Watts admonished against the trap of thinking in terms of gain and loss, before George Saunders offered his lovely lens for living an unregretting life, Kierkegaard writes:
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This… is the sum of all practical wisdom.
[…]
Many people think [they are in the mode of eternity] when, having done the one or the other, they combine or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it.
Kierkegaard considers the frame of mind necessary for living beyond either/or:
Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.
In no region of life is this passion for possibility more vital than in our closest relationships, which at their strongest and most nourishing must transcend the either/or confines of labels and categories, but must retain deep friendship at the core. There are times in life when an important relationship collides with the confines of practical reality and must shape-shift in order to survive — a collision that can be incredibly painful yet incredibly fertile in the change it precipitates within both persons involved and in the third person that is the dynamic between them.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May UdryA century before Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote so beautifully about embracing the mutability of intimate relationships, Kierkegaard considers what it takes to let a relationship change organically in order to feed the soul in a new way:
The same relationship can acquire significance again in another way… The experienced farmer now and then lets his land lie fallow; the theory of social prudence recommends the same. All things, no doubt, will return, but in another way; what has once been taken into rotation remains there but is varied through the mode of cultivation.
What a way to remember that everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We question our own sanity, assuming the outside world coherent and our response a form of madness; or we assume ourselves sane and accuse the external — the other person, the situation, the world — of madness. Both are stories we tell ourselves about what is true, how things are, and how things should be. Like all storytelling, both are works of the imagination.
It always takes imagination to understand what is real, for in the human sphere reality is a collaborative condition. It takes imagination to understand what it is like to be anybody else, what the other’s reality might be in the situation we share, and it takes imagination to consider what may live in our blind spots.
Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)G.K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936), who thought deeply and originally about the meaning of life, frames these two storytelling responses to reality and the problem of sanity as the fairy tale and the novel. In a fragment from his essay collection Tremendous Trifles (public library | free ebook), he writes:
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is — what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is — what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
But while it always takes imagination to understand what is real, it also takes imagination to see beyond the models of reality handed down to us by the world as we know it. (“Everything is in an attitude of mind,” Chesterton conceded.) Perhaps there is a third way beyond this dualism, one that recognizes consciousness as something beyond sanity and madness, one in which being a hero of one’s own life is not a battle between reality and sanity, between self and other, but a matter of peaceful accord with the cosmos, a cosmos capable of consciousness.
Perhaps that is the way of the poem. Perhaps the best way to face reality — especially when it betrays our hopes and expectations — is by being a living poem. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life, “and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” A poem is not a captive of narrative, has no need for resolution, is not a message but an opening. A poem makes its own meaning.
One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a stunning 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)Complement with Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.
We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.
Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.
Leonard Cohen (courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust)In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.
Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”
Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and spiritual rewards, its primal sanities.
Solitude by Maria Popova. Available as a print.RAINER MARIA RILKERainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) was in his late thirties when he began answering the eager letters of the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul. Shortly after Rilke’s death of leukemia, Kappus published the correspondence. Letters to a Young Poet came to stand as one of the finest books of the past century. In a wonderful new translation by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows, Rilke writes:
What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up by John MillerMAY SARTONA lifetime after she composed her stunning ode to solitude as a young poet, after she contemplated solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery upon entering her sixties, May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) moved to Maine to spend the last chapter of her life living alone in a house with a garden on the edge of the sea. Friends came to visit, as did strangers who admired her poetry and had found her address in the phone book — those were the days — but she cherished her solitude above even the most welcome company.
In a passage from her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea (public library) — which gave us her meditations on the relationship between gardening and writing, how to cultivate your talent, and the art of living alone — Sarton considers the tilting balance of her life. Reflecting on her approach to visitors, she writes:
I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson [Sarton’s prior home] focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)HENRY DAVID THOREAU“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his account of the months he spent at Walden Pond, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Although Thoreau’s solitude was not in actuality as total as he recounted it, it was deep and transformative. In a long meditation on solitude and the meaning of life, he writes in Walden (public library | public domain):
It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
[…]
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go [out among others] than when we stay in our chambers.
For Thoreau, who suffered bouts of debilitating depression and black grief, solitude was not a way of caving in on himself, as one does in loneliness, but a way of unselfing, of stepping beyond his small human turmoils and into the wider universe that holds:
The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth KraussSANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJALIn the last years of the nineteenth century, shortly after he originated an entire new field we now call neuroscience and a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neuron as the basic unit of the nervous system, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934) composed a short, passionate book titled Advice for a Young Investigator (public library), predating Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by three decades. In it, he outlined the six psychological flaws that keep the talented from reaching greatness and pointed to solitude as the supreme incubator of true originality. He writes:
Our major commitment … is to discover ourselves before discovering scientific truth, to mold ourselves before molding nature. To fashion a strong brain, an original mind that is ours alone — this is the preliminary work that is absolutely essential.
[…]
Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought! How satisfying and rewarding are the long winter evenings spent in the private laboratory, at the very time when educational centers are closed to their workers! Such evenings free us from poorly thought out improvisations, strengthen our patience, and refine our powers of observation.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew UpWENDELL BERRYIn his splendid poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” poet and farmer Wendell Berry located the remedy for despair in learning to “rest in the grace of the world,” which is most readily found amid wild solitude. He deepens the sentiment in one of the essays from his altogether wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection What Are People For? (public library). Reflecting on the antidote to the two great enemies of creativity, Berry writes:
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a CatROSE MACAULAYOften, it is only when something is taken away that we fully appreciate its value; in being famished for it, we remember how deeply it nourishes us. In a delightful reckoning with the pleasure of being left alone after entertaining visitors, found in her 1935 collection Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library), Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) writes:
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
[…]
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom… It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again.
Art by Dasha Tolstikova from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young ReaderSTEPHEN BATCHELORBuddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor echoes Berry’s sentiment in his thorough reckoning with solitude as contemplative practice, and writes:
By withdrawing from the world into solitude, you separate yourself from others. By isolating yourself, you can see more clearly what distinguishes you from other people. Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]). Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice.
[…]
Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back. Sustained aloneness brings you to a tipping point where the pendulum of life returns you to others.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in VerseMICHAEL LEUNIGA century after Virginia Woolf made her epochal case for the importance of having a room of one’s own in which to create — that womb of “fertile solitude
from which works of art are born — Australian cartoonist, poet, and philosopher Michael Leunig offers a singsong echo of Woolf’s timeless insistence:
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMSTerry Tempest Williams has devoted her life to giving voice to the dialogue between human nature and the rest of nature, whether we call it wilderness or landscape or environment. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (public library) — which also gave us Williams on change and denial — she writes:
Solitude… is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.
Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)HERMANN HESSEIn the wake of WWI, a quarter century before he won the Nobel Prize, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) composed an impassioned letter to the disaffected young. In it, an epoch before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed man as the universal pronoun, he writes:
Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.
Learning to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it, Hesse argues, is a prerequisite for taking charge of our destiny:
Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves… It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity.
[…]
Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.
Complement with Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness — that archnemesis of solitude — then revisit poet Elizabeth Bishop on why everyone ought to experience at least one long period of solitude in life and artist Rockwell Kent on the relationship between wilderness, solitude, and creativity.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought.
To me, a cloud will always be a spell against indifference — a little bloom of wonder to remind us that everything changes yet everything holds.
Two centuries after the amateur meteorologist Luke Howard classified the clouds with Goethe’s aid and two generations after Rachel Carson composed her lyrical serenade to the science of the sky, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of Cloud Appreciation Society (of which I am a pin-wearing member), and artist William Grill bring us Cloudspotting for Beginners (public library) — an illustrated field guide to the science and splendor of the sky, and an ode to the human longing for pattern, for order, for an organizing principle that gives coherence to the chaos of life.
CumulusCumulonimbusIt can be hard to give an artistic interpretation of something so naturally beguiling, so replete with raw wonder, but under Grill’s color pencil, clouds take on an even more whimsical quality, gentle as a child’s song, unhurried as a daydream.
CirrusAltostratusWith the plain-worded playfulness of a children’s book and the concise authority of an encyclopedia, the book covers the ten main cloud types — from the rough-hewn patchwork of Stratocumulus, commonest because it forms over the oceans that cover most of our planet’s surface, to Cirrocumulus, the rarest cloud of all and the most ephemeral.
CirrocumulusAltocumulusBeyond the main ten, there is the subgroup of special cloud types, from the aerial waves of Undulatus to the spaceship of Lenticularis.
Among them is a touching triumph of citizen science — Asperitas, a cloud species identified and named by members of the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2009 and, with Pretor-Pinney’s advocacy, officially affirmed by the World Meteorological Organization in 2017.
AsperitasFluctusRadiatusUndulatusLenticularisOpening beyond the cloud types is a cabinet of atmospheric curiosities — cloud iridescence, sundogs (which inspired Hilma af Klint), glories (which were central to the discovery of cosmic rays), clouds on other planets, thunder and lightning on our own, crepuscular rays.
Crepuscular raysPretor-Pinney details one of the great dramas of this world, which Coleridge saw as a singular portal to the soul:
Inside a storm cloud, the ice crystals bump into one another as they are blown around by violent air currents. Each time hail and ice crystals collide, the larger pieces of ice pick up negative electric charge from smaller ones, which instead become positively charged. This electric charge is like the one you feel when you rub a balloon.
The larger, heavier pieces of ice fall through the cloud’s rising air currents toward its base while the smaller, lighter ice crystals are wafted up toward the top. This is how separate parts of the Cumulonimbus become negatively and positively charged. Eventually, a massive current of electricity in the form of a lightning bolt can shoot through the sky to even out the charge again. Each bolt makes the air much hotter than the surface of the Sun, causing it to expand explosively, which we hear as the crash and boom of thunder.
Like all processes and phenomena of nature, clouds are rife with metaphors for human life. (Coleridge himself used to frequent London’s science lectures, including Luke Howard’s, hunting for metaphors to backbone his poems.) With an eye to the astonishing fact that the average Cumulus weighs as much as eighty elephants, Pretor-Pinney considers how a cloud, composed of myriad small particles known as cloudlets, stays afloat: “A cloud stays up because it’s not one big thing but a group of tiny, tiny things,” he writes, which strikes me as an apt metaphor for how diversity and multiplicity ensure the buoyancy of any society.
FibratusCouple Cloudspotting for Beginners with 19th-century Norwegian artist Kund Baade’s haunting cloudscapes, then revisit poet Mark Strand’s love letter to the clouds and the story of how they got their names.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.”
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.
The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Art in the Light of Conscience (public library) — the wonderful essay collection that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to ideas.
Marina TsvetaevaLiving in a political atmosphere that banished the divine from human life — the same state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria — Tsvetaeva writes with an eye to the prayerful poems of her beloved Rilke:
What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays (except Rilke’s… I know of none), it is not because we don’t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to — there is something and there is someone — but because we haven’t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we’ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.
A century later, in the atmosphere of Western consumer capitalism with its cult of the self, it is even more countercultural to speak about the soul — perhaps the last human holdout against commodification, too private and furtive to be turned into a marketable data point. And yet if art is what we make to save ourselves, to cotton the shock of living, then the soul is the only studio we have.
Altarpiece by Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Tsvetaeva, who considered art a physical manifestation of the spiritual and a spiritual manifestation of the physical, knew this and articulated it beautifully:
Poetry — which I never take my eyes off when I say “art,” the whole event of poetry, from the poet’s visitation to the reader’s reception — takes place entirely within the soul.
Complement with Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being, Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, and this soulful read on how poetry saves lives, then revisit Richard Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.”
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote as he charted the art of interbeing. Few things wound more deeply and syphon love more swiftly than the feeling of not being fully seen, of being exiled from your own totality by a simulacrum of love that showers adoration upon fragments deemed desirable, to the exclusion or grudging toleration of the rest of you. Any relationship worthy of the word “love” unfolds between two wholenesses and is resinous with respect — respect for the entirety of the person and everything that makes them themselves.
The humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) takes up the question of what respect really means and what it looks like in his 1947 book Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics.
Erich FrommFromm writes:
Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness… To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person’s individuality.
But mutual knowledge — “the mask slipped from the face,” in Tom Stoppard’s lovely phrase — takes time, takes constancy, takes a passionate curiosity undimmed by the fading of novelty. Respect, then, is a durational practice rooted in the commitment to know one another more deeply and accept more fully what is discovered in the depths.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toA decade later, Fromm deepened the inquiry into the nature of respect in his timelessly rewarding book The Art of Loving:
Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
Complement with Adrienne Rich on what makes an honorable human relationship, then revisit Fromm on the six rules of listening, spontaneity and our search for meaning, and what self-love really means.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.”
A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality, harmonious and symphonic with meaning.
And Pipe the Little Songs that Are Inside of Bubbles by Dugald Stewart Walker, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)And yet this musicality is more than a metaphor — it is part of our material nature, our creaturely inheritance. “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” wrote the poet Ronald Johnson. Music thrusts our neurobiology into transcendence. The poetic physicist Alan Lightman saw it as a language for the exhilaration of being alive. But it is also the language of mortality. “The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,” Richard Powers wrote.
Poet, French horn player, and choral singer Hannah Fries (who is also the visionary editor behind the Universe in Verse book) celebrates this enlivening relationship between music, meaning, and mortality in her stunning poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” inspired by Radiolab’s episode Memory and Forgetting and read here by Hannah herself to the sound of her young son improvising on the piano:
LET THE LAST THING BE SONG
by Hannah Friesi.
Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.
Behind locked doors
glow the unmarred pieces—
musical notes humming
in a jumble, only
waiting to be
arranged.ii.
What is left in one
who does not remember?
Love and music.Not a name but the fullness.
Not the sequence of events
but order of rhythm and pitch,a piece of time in which to exist.
iii.
A tone traveling through space has no referent,
and yet we infer, and yet it
finds its way between our cells
and shakes us.Aren’t we all still quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?iv.
When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, still
unspool its symphony?Sing to me — please —
and I will sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues past the final beat
of the stutter inside your chest.Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,
with the black hole’s
fathomless B-flat.
Couple with Marie Howe’s breathtaking “Hymn,” then revisit Nick Cave on music and transcendence in the age of AI and his reading of “But We Had Music.”
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real… It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.”
This essay originally appeared in The New York Times
I once dreamed a kiss that hadn’t yet happened. I dreamed the angle at which our heads tilted, the fit of my fingers behind her ear, the exact pressure exerted on the lips by this transfer of trust and tenderness.
Freud, who catalyzed the study of dreams with his foundational 1899 treatise, would have discounted this as a mere chimera of the wishful unconscious. But what we have since discovered about the mind — particularly about the dream-rich sleep state of rapid-eye movement, or REM, unknown in Freud’s day — suggests another possibility for the adaptive function of these parallel lives in the night.
Yellow-crowned night heron by John James Audubon, 1840. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society.)One cold morning not long after the kiss dream, I watched a young night heron sleep on a naked branch over the pond in Brooklyn Bridge Park, head folded into chest, and found myself wondering whether birds dream.
The recognition that nonhuman animals dream dates at least as far back as the days of Aristotle, who watched a sleeping dog bark and deemed it unambiguous evidence of mental life. But by the time Descartes catalyzed the Enlightenment in the 17th century, he had reduced other animals to mere automatons, tainting centuries of science with the assumption that anything unlike us is inherently inferior.
In the 19th century, when the German naturalist Ludwig Edinger performed the first anatomical studies of the bird brain and discovered the absence of a neocortex — the more evolutionarily nascent outer layer of the brain, responsible for complex cognition and creative problem-solving — he dismissed birds as little more than Cartesian puppets of reflex. This view was reinforced in the 20th century by the deviation, led by B.F. Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response.
Archaeopteryx specimen, Natural History Museum, Berlin. (Photograph: H. Raab)In 1861, just two years after Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, a fossil was discovered in Germany with the tail and jaws of a reptile and the wings and wishbone of a bird, sparking the revelation that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. We have since learned that, although birds and humans haven’t shared a common ancestor in more than 300 million years, a bird’s brain is much more similar to ours than to a reptile’s. The neuron density of its forebrain — the region engaged with planning, sensory processing, and emotional responses, and on which REM sleep is largely dependent — is comparable to that of primates. At the cellular level, a songbird’s brain has a structure, the dorsal ventricular ridge, similar to the mammalian neocortex in function if not shape. (In pigeons and barn owls, the DVR is structured like the human neocortex, with both horizontal and vertical neural circuitry.)
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost SpellsStill, avian brains are also profoundly other, capable of feats unimaginable to us, especially during sleep: Many birds sleep with one eye open, even during flight. Migrating species that traverse immense distances at night, like the bar-tailed godwit, which covers the 7,000 miles between Alaska and New Zealand in eight days of continuous flight, engage in unihemispheric sleep, blurring the line between our standard categories of sleep and wakefulness.
But while sleep is an outwardly observable physical behavior, dreaming is an invisible interior experience as mysterious as love — a mystery to which science has brought brain imaging technology to illuminate the inner landscape of the sleeping bird’s mind.
The first electroencephalogram of electrical activity in the human brain was recorded in 1924, but EEG was not applied to the study of avian sleep until the 21st century, aided by the even more nascent functional magnetic resonance imaging, developed in the 1990s. The two technologies complement each other. In recording the electrical activity of large populations of neurons near the cortical surface, EEG tracks what neurons do more directly. But fMRI. can pinpoint the location of brain activity more precisely through oxygen levels in the blood. Scientists have used these technologies together to study the firing patterns of cells during REM sleep in an effort to deduce the content of dreams.
Zebra finch by F. W. Frohawk, 1899. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society)A study of zebra finches — songbirds whose repertoire is learned, not hard-wired — mapped particular notes of melodies sung in the daytime to neurons firing in the forebrain. Then, during REM, the neurons fired in a similar order: The birds appeared to be rehearsing the songs in their dreams.
An fMRI study of pigeons found that brain regions tasked with visual processing and spatial navigation were active during REM, as were regions responsible for wing action, even though the birds were stilled with sleep: They appeared to be dreaming of flying. The amygdala — a cluster of nuclei responsible for emotional regulation — was also active during REM, hinting at dreams laced with feeling. My night heron was probably dreaming, too — the folded neck is a classic marker of atonia, the loss of muscle tone characteristic of the REM state.
But the most haunting intimation of the research on avian sleep is that without the dreams of birds, we too might be dreamless. No heron, no kiss.
The passenger pigeon by John James Audubon, 1842. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Audubon Society.)There are two primary groups of living birds: the flightless Palaeognathae, including the ostrich and the kiwi, which have retained certain ancestral reptilian traits, and Neognathae, comprising all other birds. EEG studies of sleeping ostriches have found REM-like activity in the brainstem — a more ancient part of the brain — while in modern birds, as in mammals, this REM-like activity takes place primarily in the more recently developed forebrain.
Several studies of sleeping monotremes — egg-laying mammals like the platypus and the echidna, the evolutionary link between us and birds — also reveal REM-like activity in the brainstem, suggesting that this was the ancestral crucible of REM before it slowly migrated toward the forebrain.
If so, the bird brain might be where evolution designed dreams — that secret chamber adjacent to our waking consciousness where we continue to work on the problems that occupy our days. Dmitri Mendeleev, after puzzling long and hard over the arrangement of atomic weights in his waking state, arrived at his periodic table in a dream. “All the elements fell into place as required,” he recounted in his diary. “Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” Cosmologist Stephon Alexander dreamed his way to a groundbreaking insight about the role of symmetry in cosmic inflation that earned him a national award from the American Physics Society. For Einstein, the central revelation of relativity took shape in a dream of cows simultaneously jumping up and moving in wavelike motion.
Art by Tom Seidmann-Freud — Sigmund Freud’s niece — for the philosophical 1922 children’s book David the DreamerAs with the mind, so with the body. Studies have shown that people learning new motor tasks “practice” them in sleep, then perform better while awake. This line of research has also shown how mental visualization helps athletes improve performance. Renata Adler touches on this in her novel Speedboat: “That was a dream,” she writes, “but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love — you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over. You’ve caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night.”
It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. It may be that the kiss in my dream was not nocturnal fantasy but, like the heron’s dreams of flying, the practice of possibility. It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another.”
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Walt Whitman wrote an epoch before the Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger examined the quantum conditions of existence to ask that urgent, discomposing question: “What justifies you in obstinately discovering… the difference between you and someone else… when objectively what is there is the same?”
It is not simply that we are here, made of the same matter, sharing the same improbable planet; it is that the sharing makes us what we are, each of us a fractal of this immense and indivisible ecosystem of relationship, a golden strand in a tapestry whose only meaning is in the interweaving of its threads.
That despite this elemental interdependence we remain riven by conflict and division is the great paradox and the great tragedy and great opportunity for redemption.
In his agrarian essay collection The Art of the Commonplace (public library), poet, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry dismantles the paradox to the building blocks of the tragedy and reconfigures them into a cathedral of redemption.
One of Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a stunning rare edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)In what is nothing less than an act of countercultural courage and resistance, Berry indicts the Western capitalist mythos of “self-fulfillment” as the root of this artificial and often violent erasure of our interconnectedness and considers its fundamental logical flaw:
The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly, or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.
To illustrate how erroneous this notion of an individual separate from relationships is, Berry recounts visiting the experimental plots at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and being pointed to a huge Maximilian sunflower growing alone and apart from other plants. The man who had planted it proudly held it up as an example of a plant that has “realized its full potential as an individual.” Berry counters:
Clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many long branches heavily laden with blossoms — and the branches had broken off, for they had grown too long and too heavy. The plant had indeed realized its full potential as an individual, but it had failed as a Maximilian sunflower. We could say that its full potential as an individual was this failure. It had failed because it had lived outside an important part of its definition, which consists of both its individuality and its community. A part of its properly realizable potential lay in its community, not in itself.
In a sentiment springing from the same defiant recognition that led Albert Camus to refuse the choice of right side and wrong side in conflict, Berry adds:
To make conflict — the so-called “jungle law” — the basis of social or economic doctrine is extremely dangerous. A part of our definition is our common ground, and a part of it is sharing and mutually enjoying our common ground. Undoubtedly, also, since we are humans, a part of our definition is a recurring contest over the common ground: Who shall describe its boundaries, occupy it, use it, or own it? But such contests obviously can be carried too far, so that they become destructive both of the commonality of the common ground and of the ground itself.
Echoing Schrödinger’s quantum-lensed koan-like insight that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” Berry writes:
The business of humanity is undoubtedly survival in this complex sense — a necessary, difficult, and entirely fascinating job of work. We have in us deeply planted instructions — personal, cultural, and natural — to survive, and we do not need much experience to inform us that we cannot survive alone. The smallest possible “survival unit,” indeed, appears to be the universe… Inside it, everything happens in concert; not a breath is drawn but by the grace of an inconceivable series of vital connections joining an inconceivable multiplicity of created things in an inconceivable unity. But of course it is preposterous for a mere individual human to espouse the universe — a possibility that is purely mental, and productive of nothing but talk. On the other hand, it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… They give the word “love” its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and a place. Only in such ways can love become flesh and do its worldly work.
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love?In consonance with the Nobel-winning poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore’s insistence that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world,” Berry adds:
It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known.
Couple with Rachel Carson on wonder — that ultimate gasp at the interrelations of things — as the antidote to our human folly, then revisit Berry on the key to mirth under hardship, the peace of wild things, and how to be a poet and a complete human being.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath.”
Time is the most private place, and the loneliest — an interior chamber entirely inaccessible to another consciousness, no matter how proximate in space. In time, we are always alone — for time is the substance we are made of, but each of us is a sealed vial.
Our first great encounter with the interiority of time is the childhood experience of boredom — an experience that never leaves us, though we come to mask it with our adult addiction to productivity, with the strobe light of pleasure.
Boredom is time laid bare, hollowed of meaning, blank as death. It is there, in this restlessness to do, in this urgency to live, that we first understand mortality. It is there we first begin to realize, in Annie Dillard’s immortal words, that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Boredom is the menacing sense that we are not spending our lives — our lives are spending us.
The other day I watched an immense queue at the airport security line, people of every kind and every age, uniformly anod at their smartphones. In this age of ready relief from practical boredom, it is easy to forget the existential boredom pulsating beneath our lives. But, paradoxically, it is that other, deeper boredom that fires us with the yearning for meaning, for filling our sliver of allotted time with aliveness — this is why some of humanity’s greatest minds have stood in defense of boredom.
In the summer of 1989, two years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two decades after he fled the Soviet dictatorship with the help of W.H. Auden, the great Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) addressed the graduating class of Dartmouth College with a magnificent speech later adapted into an essay and published in the posthumous collection On Grief and Reason: Essays (public library) under the title “In Praise of Boredom.”
Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a CatBoredom haunts the basic structure of human life: Although our habits and patterns, which hinge on repetition, give shape to our days, they can also become a prison as the vitalizing rhythm of repetition ossifies into monotonous repetitiveness. Brodsky observes:
Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom.
[…]
You’ll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways to escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets… you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate… You may lump all these together; and for a while, that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate… yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring in through your window. You’ll put on your loafers only to discover they’re lacking bootstraps to lift yourself out of what your recognize. Depending on your temperament or the age you are at, you will either panic or resign yourself to the familiarity of the sensation; or else you’ll go through the rigmarole of change once more.
Drawing on Robert Frost’s famous line “the best way out is always through,” Brodsky offers the only true remedy for boredom:
When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
This total surrender to boredom opens a portal of perspective. Out of its blankness surges a sudden fount of meaning. Brodsky writes:
Boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.
[…]
Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew UpIn consonance with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s insight that “a creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger” — for what is boredom if not the howl of need, the need for significance — Brodsky adds:
You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much. Because your boredom is the boredom of infinity.
[…]
So try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath… When you hurt, you know that at least you haven’t been deceived (by your body or by your psyche). By the same token, what’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception.
[…]
Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you’ll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don’t think you’ve goofed somewhere along the line, don’t try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, “Believe your pain.” This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won’t finally unclasp.
Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)With an eye to this inevitability of change, brutal and sanctifying, rife with ambivalence, he adds:
What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doesn’t stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck — not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past… receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck. So… look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past.
Complement with Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, Susan Sontag on the creative purpose of boredom, and Bertrand Russell on the vital role of “fruitful monotony” in a full life, then revisit Brodsky on the greatest antidote to evil and the six rules of a good life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in the 1933 Japanese classic In Praise of Shadows. As a physical phenomenon, shadows are one of the most beguiling phenomena of nature, emissaries of the entwined history of light and consciousness; as a metaphor, they are one of the most illuminating perspectives on human nature. The lower our level of conscious awareness, the longer the shadow our past casts on the present. But even under the noonday sun of our highest consciousness, we are still rooted in our shadows and must befriend them in order to fully inhabit our lives. “Learn to look when the sun of destiny plays with your shadows,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his passionate field guide to being yourself.
The world of shadows, physical and psychic, comes alive with uncommon tenderness in There Was a Shadow (public library) by writer Bruce Handy and artist Lisk Feng — the story, unfolding with a lovely rhythm partway between lullaby and villanelle, of a girl who ventures outside to discover that everything casts a shadow.
She encounters the “tall, wide shadow” of a hill and the “tiny, look-closely shadow” of a beetle, the shadows of her friends and the shadows of the birds, the soft blue shadow of moonlight and the warm yellow shadow of the kitchen lamp, the shadow of a feeling and the shadow of a dream.
Along the way, as the day’s shadows grow longer and melt into dusk to become the “delicate shadows, hard-to-see shadows” of the night, she also discovers that no shadow is fixed, that the loveliness of life is largely a matter of attending to the ever-changing light — the play of light on the water, the play of light on a face, the play of light in the mind.
There was a shadow.
It was a thinking shadow,
a shadow you could feel but not see,It was a worry.
But like a bird’s shadow,
the worry shadow darted,
flickered, and was gone.
Couple There Was a Shadow with The Shadow Elephant — a tender illustrated fable about what it takes to unblue our sorrows and lighten the load of our heaviest emotions — then revisit this lyrical illustrated invitation to find the light in the dark.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years earlier, he had become the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience” — problems like art as resistance, happiness as our moral obligation, and the measure of strength through difficult times.
During WWII, Camus stood passionately on the side of justice; during the Cold War, he sliced through the Iron Curtain with all the humanistic force of simple kindness. But as he watched the world burn its own future in the fiery pit of politics, he understood that time, which has no right side and no wring side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
Camus addresses this with poetic poignancy in an essay titled “The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” found in his altogether superb posthumous collection Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library).
Albert CamusIn a prescient admonition against our modern cult of productivity, which plunders our capacity for presence, Camus writes:
Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?
Echoing the young Dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed (“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart,” Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”), Camus adds:
What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.
These reflections led Camus to conclude that “there is no love of life without despair of life”; out of them he drew his three antidotes to the absurdity of life and the crucial question at its center.
Couple with George Saunders — who may be the closest we have to Camus in our time — on how to love the world more, then revisit Wendell Berry’s poetic antidote to despair.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not yet knowing I too was to become a writer, I found myself wandering the vast cool halls of the Penn Museum. There among the thousands of ancient artifacts was one to which I would owe my future life — an alabaster disk from Bronze Age Mesopotamia, inscribed in Cuneiform with the name of the world’s first known author: Enheduanna.
The disk of Enheduanna (Penn Museum)Born in present-day Iraq with a Semitic name lost to history, the daughter of the Sumerian king Sargon of Akkad named herself en (“high priestess”) hedu (“ornament”) an (the Sumerian sky god) na: high priestess of the ornament of the sky, our Moon. Her father — himself the son of a priestess single mother, who had borne him in secret, then cast the infant on the Euphrates river in a straw basket into a life as an orphan — had conquered the major Sumerian city of Ur in 2334 B.C.E. and set out to unify the tessellation of warring city-states that was then Mesopotamia, creating the world’s first multinational empire.
He did all the practical things that help people cohere into a people — fostered a common language, standardized weights and measures, introduced taxes to support soldiers and artists — but he came to see what all leaders eventually see: that nothing binds human beings more powerfully than ideas. His citizens had to believe in one thing to become one people.
Sargon hired the best man for the job: his daughter; she anchored her strategy in what Margaret Fuller called “that best fact, the Moon.”
Phases of the Moon by the self-taught 17th-century artist and astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart. (Available as a print.)Enheduanna, whose story is woven into Rebecca Boyle’s altogether fascinating book Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (public library), took it upon herself to unify the Akkadian and Sumerian religions, using the Moon as the unifying force and poetry partway between prayer and propaganda as the fulcrum.
Over the course of her forty-year reign, Enheduanna composed hundreds, perhaps thousands of poems, passionate and playful, unafraid of the sensuous that is the human in the divine and the divine in the human — poems through which, as Boyle writes, “humanity tried to make connections between heaven and Earth for the first time”; poems that, in bringing the gods down to Earth, made them equally interested in all human life, Akkadian or Sumerian. Her crowning achievement of unification were her forty-two verses about different holy places across the empire, known as the Sumerian Temple Hymns and inscribed with the world’s first byline:
The compiler of the tablets was Enheduanna. My King, something has been created here that no one has ever created before.
Enheduanna has been called the Shakespeare of the ancient Middle East. Like Shakespeare’s, her authorship is disputed. But, like Shakespeare, without counterproof she remains the greatest poet of her time and place — doubly so for turning even her pain and loneliness into sacred art: When Sargon’s grandson became king and a rebellion broke out, Enheduanna was exiled to the desert; there, as civil unrest was rupturing the empire, she wrote in verse about her suffering, which was the suffering of many. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s definition of a great poet: “The greatest poet in the English language,” he wrote of Shakespeare, “found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”
Complement with the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, which helped humanity bridge immortality and impermanence — those old concerns of religion — through a young science.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm.”
Central to our ambivalence about change is the fundamental difficulty of letting go. I am not sure what is more difficult — the heartache of enduring a change made against your will and without your consent, which is the foundation of all loss, or the inner turmoil of having to make a necessary change yourself, breaking the momentum of patterns propelled by a lifetime’s motive force, which in turn presupposes the loss of a familiar way of being, the letting go of a habitual self.
Often, we feel the tectonic tremors of change long before it erupts to alter the landscape of life; often, we tune them out or invent a thousand alternative explanations for them. But we know, we know, deep in the marrow of the soul, when something must change — and when it is about to.
Terry Tempest Williams speaks to this beautifully in a passage from her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (public library). Two decades before she came to reckon with the paradox of transformation, she writes:
It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm. We go about our business with the usual alacrity, while in the pit of our stomach there is a sense of something tenuous. These moments of peripheral perceptions are short, sharp flashes of insight we tend to discount like seeing the movement of an animal from the corner of our eye. We turn and there is nothing there. They are the strong and subtle impressions we allow to slip away.
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost SpellsWhat keeps us from heeding those intuitions is denial, that most precarious of the mind’s acrobatics, most prone to self-injury — denial that the change is necessary, denial that we are capable of it, denial that the world will hold us even if we fall apart in the process.
Williams writes:
Denial stops us from listening… But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs walls around us to keep us safe.
Couple with philosopher Amélie Rorty on the antidote to our self-defeating delusions, then revisit Williams on how to live with uncertainty.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Friendship is a lifeline twined of truth and tenderness. That we extend it to each other is benediction enough. To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.
Born in England in the final year of the nineteenth century, Hockley Clarke grew up loving nature. When he was sent to France with the British infantry during WWI, still a teenager, he looked for birds whenever he was out of the trenches or had a day’s rest, listening for them through the blaze of the machine guns, once hearing the song of the nightingale clear and bright over a heap of dead bodies. “Although I am not a religious man,” he would later write, “I have always regarded birds and all wild life as the manifestations of God.”
Having narrowly survived, he founded a bird magazine he went on to edit single-handedly for forty years, writing numerous books about birds along the way. He continued birding into his nineties.
Art by Thomas Jackson from Our Feathered Companions, 1870. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)In Blackie & Co. (public library), Clarke tells the story a blackbird family who took up residence in his wildly overgrown garden and his own family’s tender friendship with the birds. Emanating from it is a moving meditation on our capacity for connection with other creatures, kindred to the story of Beatrice Harrison and the nightingales.
In the savage winter of 1962 — the coldest weather to strike Europe in eighty years (which didn’t stop Dervla Murphy from mounting her bicycle in Ireland headed for India) — a blackbird began roosting in Clarke’s elderberry. He named him Blackie and began bringing him food first thing every morning and again in the evening as the snow and ice lasted for weeks and weeks.
Soon, Blackie was flying out of the tree at meal time, greeting Clarke with “a few glad chuckles.” Something began growing between man and bird, some unbroken thread of trust and tenderness. Clarke writes:
Blackie and I had an understanding on those cold mornings. I spoke to him; he knew my voice and I am sure that he answered in his own language, of which I thought I had some understanding. There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him. Perhaps birds understand more than we think.
Male and female blackbird by Elizabeth Gould from Birds of Great Britain by John Gould, 1837. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)Throughout the book, Clarke details the building blocks of that understanding over the course of the decade Blackie stayed in his garden — the small gestures of sympathy and sensitivity to another’s reality, affirming the Zen tenet that “understanding is the essence of love.” In the final chapter, titled “Valediction,” Clarke reflects on the challenge of comprehending another consciousness by applying to it the frames of reference shaped by our own — including our understanding of what an emotion is, so inseparable from our creaturely biology. He writes:
The relationship between ourselves and these birds threw up a finer feeling, something that cannot be described, and they responded to it without, possibly, being conscious of it at all. It would be rash to think birds are emotional. It would never do for them to be so, seeing the suffering and fatalities that take place, but they are capable of developing a finer feeling if they are allowed and encouraged to do so. This is made up of qualities such as confidence in the person with whom they come into close contact regularly, which motivates a feeling of trust in them and they respond. To put all their actions down to “cupboard love,” or self-interest, would be to rob the relationship of a glow and purpose.
Couple with J.A. Baker’s decade-long communion with a peregrine, then revisit naturalist Sy Montgomery on what befriending thirteen animals taught her about being more fully human.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient… Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach.”
“Without a body there’s no soul and without the latter there’s no way to speak about the sea,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote in her superb meditation on the sea and the soul. “No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry,” Rachel Carson insisted. Because the beach is where the body meets the sea, it is a place of encounter with the native poetry of the soul — a place to be “washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances,” as Anaïs Nin observed in contemplating the beach as training ground for presence. It was on the beach alone at night that Walt Whitman touched eternity.
One summer in the early 1950s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (June 22, 1906–February 7, 2001) left her husband and five children home in the suburbs of New York City and headed for beach in search of communion with her own soul. In Gift from the Sea (public library), in lovely prose winged with the poetic, she channels what she found through the patient work of surrender and shimmering receptivity.
Anne Morrow LindberghLindbergh writes:
The beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think… Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit… The books remain unread, the pencils break their points and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky. No reading, no writing, no thoughts even—at least, not at first.
At first, the tired body takes over completely… One is forced against one’s mind, against all tidy resolutions, back into the primeval rhythms of the seashore. Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)But this elemental surrender does not come easily, or quickly, to the captive of civilization and all its deadening compulsions of productivity — it takes time to surrender. For Lindbergh, in an era when airplanes were young and the Internet unborn, that time was two weeks. I wonder what the technology-induced inflation would be today.
She writes:
And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense — no — but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channelled whelk, a moon shell or even an argonaut.
Argonauta argo by Frederick Nodder, 1793. (Available as a print and as a bath mat, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)In a caveat central to every meditation practice and every true unbidden love, she adds:
But it must not be sought for or — heaven forbid! — dug for. No, no dredging of the sea bottom here. That would defeat one’s purpose. The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.
Complement with Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit Lindbergh on embracing change in relationships.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls… A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.”
There is a form of being together that feels as easy and spacious as being alone, when your experience is not crowded out or eclipsed by the presence of the other but deepened and magnified. Such companionship is extremely rare and extremely precious. All other company, no matter how dear, inevitably reaches a saturation point and begins to suffocate. If one is an introvert, that point comes sooner and more violently. A return to solitude then becomes nothing less than a rapture.
Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) channels this ecstatic relief with great charm and poetic passion in a piece from Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library) — her 1935 collection of reflections kindred to, and a century ahead of, poet Ross Gay’s wonderful Book of Delights.
Rose MacaulayDespite publishing twenty-two books in twenty years, alongside numerous essays, poems, and newspaper columns — prolificacy only possible through the deepest and most undistracted solitude, haunted by Susan Sontag’s lament that “one can never be alone enough to write” — Macaulay was no hermit. She gave talks, attended events, threw parties, and appeared frequently on public radio to offer incisive commentary on the state of the world. During WWI, she worked as a nurse and a civil servant. During WWII, like Marie Curie a war earlier, she became a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of sixty. She regularly wrote to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary — her favorite book — with suggestions, corrections, and improvements. (“To amend so great a work gives me pleasure,” she writes in one of these essays on life’s littlest and deepest joys.) When her flat was demolished in the Blitz, all her books destroyed, it was the dictionary volumes she most mourned. When she rebuilt her home, she continued hosting friends for salons and soirees.
But despite her surface sociality, Macaulay embodied the true test of an introvert — not whether one engages in social activity, but whether one is charged or drained by it. In an essay titled “Departure of Visitors,” she exults in the pleasure of being at last left alone:
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
[…]
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.
What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.
Art by Dasha Tolstikova from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young ReaderParadoxically, even Macaulay’s muse was a visitor from whom she eventually needed a break. In another essay, she offers a strikingly similar inner response to finishing a book — that moment when, upon setting down the last word on the last page, the mind becomes uncrowded again. She writes:
Leisure spreads before my dazzled eyes, a halcyon sea, too soon to be cumbered with the flotsam and jetsam of purposes long neglected, which will, I know it, drift quickly into view again once I am embarked upon that treacherous, enticing ocean. Leisure now is but a brief business, and past return are the days when it seemed to stretch, blue and unencumbered, between one occupation and the next. There are always arrears, always things undone, doubtless never to be done, putting up teasing, reproachful heads, so that, although I slug, I slug among the wretched souls whom care doth seek to kill. But now, just emerged as I am from the tangled and laborious thicket which has so long embosked me, I will contemplate a sweet and unencumbered slugging, a leisure and a liberty as of lotus eaters or gods.
Couple with May Sarton’s stunning ode to the art of being alone from the era of Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures, then revisit Olivia Laing on the modern art of being alone amid the crowd and Stephen Batchelor’s field guide to glad solitude.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Simply to look on anything… with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.”
There is no pure perception — of a flower, of a mountain, of a person. In everything we look at, we see partly a reflection of ourselves — a projection of an internal model seeking to approximate the actuality. If we are conscious enough and unafraid enough of being surprised, we will keep testing the model against reality, incrementally ceding the imagined to the actual. One measure of love — perhaps the deepest measure — is the willingness to remove the projection in order to perceive what is truly there. There is both sorrow and consolation in knowing that although we can only ever glimpse parts of the totality beyond us, we can keep trying to see more clearly in order to love more deeply.
I am reminded of a passage from The Living Mountain (public library) — that uncommon masterpiece of attention and affection by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd (February 11, 1893–February 23, 1981) — illustrating this paradox of perception.
Up in the Scottish Highlands, Shepherd discovers how the illusions of perception depend on one’s position, physical as much as psychic. She writes:
A scatter of white flowers in grass, looked at through half-closed eyes, blaze out with a sharp clarity as though they had actually risen up out of their background. Such illusions, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again.
This overwhelming infinity of possible perceptions is what attention evolved to protect us from — that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator,” selecting a handful of parts out of the totality in order to construct the projected image.
Without a conscious clearing of the lens, the eye sees what the mind has already imagined.
René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)As her vision encounters the myriad tessellated realities of the mountain, Shepherd considers what it takes to “look creatively” in order to see more clearly:
How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? — the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle — as beauty… A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.
Meanwhile on another landmass, Frida Kahlo was confronting the challenge of fully knowing another, writing to the complicated love of her life that “only one mountain can know the core of another mountain” — a poetic reminder that getting to know one another’s depths may be the supreme “continuous creative act,” the great triumph of perception over projection.
Complement with Oliver Sacks on the necessity of our illusions and Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality with attention as an instrument of love, then revisit the young Charles Darwin’s encounter with God in the mountains and the surrealist French poet and philosopher René Daumal on the mountain and the meaning of life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
To me, what makes the majestic migration of birds so moving is that it is a living spell against abandonment. No one is leaving and no one is being left in this unison of movement along a vector of common purpose. It is the only instance I know of a transition that is not a rupture but an affirmation of a bond — an immense family of beings magnetized together by unassailable belonging, governed by the elemental life-force pulsating beneath every longing for connection and communion.
And yet no spell against abandonment can ever protect us from the most terrifying and most certain of losses. This, in fact, is why the relationship rupture is so psychologically painful — every abandonment is a miniature of death.
Japanese artist and storyteller Keizaburō Tejima brings uncommon tenderness to this bittersweet inevitability of life in his 1988 book Swan Sky (public library) — a soulful addition to the best children’s books about making sense of loss, lensed through the migration of swans.
Partway in time and sensibility between Hasui Kawase and Nikki McClure, Tejima’s woodcuts rise from the page stark and sensitive as a child’s experience of change.
The story begins in a faraway lake, where the swans winter “until the wind is laced with the first warmth of spring.” Year after year, when that moment comes, they lift off as one immense V to soar together toward their summer home in the north, filling the sky with their ancient cries.
For as long as they can remember, this is what they have done.
But this particular spring, one of the young swans remains curled up on the water’s edge, unable to fly away with the rest.
Her family stays with her long after the other swans have left. But no matter how they coax the little swan, she simply tucks her head into her soft, warm wings.
As the snow melts and the miniature suns of petal and pistil cover the land in bloom, the young swan keeps lying still and quiet. One night, looking at the Moon, her father faces the impossible decision of doing what is best for the family.
By morning, the remaining swans have risen into the sky, calling out to the little one with their sad sonorous cries, only to hear her cry back that she cannot go.
And so they do. (There is no sorrow for a child like the sorrow of being left.)
The young swan watches them fly away over the still, still water.
Soon the swans disappear beyond the mountains. The young swan’s last goodbye echoes across the empty lake. She is alone.
But then, suddenly, a white constellation emerges from behind the crest of the mountain — her family has returned for her.
As they gather around her in the moonlight that night, the little swan buries her head into her feathers and falls asleep.
By morning, she has died.
At daybreak, heavy with grief, the swans who loved her lift off into the sky. (There is no sorrow for a parent like the sorrow of losing a child.)
When they arrive in the north, all the other swans have begun nesting. But to the bereaved family, “the land feels empty.”
Then, as the cold morning light breaks through with the promise of summer warmth, they feel a presence take shape in the clouds — the shape of memory, the shape of love, an echo of Hemingway’s insistence, in consoling his friends who had lost their young son, that “no one you love is ever dead.”
Complement Swan Sky with The Blue Songbird — a tender Japanese-inspired picture-book about finding your way home — and a penguin’s antidote to abandonment, then revisit Emily Dickinson on love and loss.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.”
When answering the Orion questionnaire, a question stopped me up short by contracting an incomprehensible expanse of complexity into a binary:
Are you the same person you were as a child?
It is fundamentally a question about change — its possibility and its paradoxes, our yearning for it and our ambivalence toward it. Here I am, living on a different landmass from the one I was born on, in a body composed of cells not one of which existed in its present form at my birth, but my sources of joy and suffering feel largely unchanged since I was a child. What, then, is change — and who is it doing the changing?
“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change,” the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis wrote in his 1973 field guide to how people change. But when we wish to recreate ourselves, to change for the better, how do we know what to want, what is truly and dependably better? “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her wonderful Field Guide to Getting Lost, shining a sidewise gleam on our staggering blind spot about transformation — we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.
Butterfly metamorphosis by Maria Sibylla Merian, 1705. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found. (Such changes tend to happen especially in midlife, when the accumulation of familiar suffering collides with our diminishing store of time to press us against the blade of urgency.)
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips takes up these restive questions with his characteristic rigor and sensitivity in On Wanting to Change (public library) — an insightful investigation of the paradoxes and possibilities of change, at the heart of which is our fundamental confusion about knowing what we really want, and what to want. He writes:
Wanting to change is as much about our wanting, and how we describe it, as it is about the changes we want. Getting better means working out what we want to get better at.
When we want to think of our lives as progress myths, in which we get better and better at realizing our so-called potential; or conversely as myths of degeneration — as about decay, mourning and loss (ageing as the loss of youth, and so on) — we are also plotting our lives. Giving them a known and knowable shape and purpose; providing ourselves with guidelines, if not blueprints, of what we can be and become. It is not that our lives are determined by our descriptions of them; but our descriptions do have an effect, however enigmatic or indiscernible it might be. And there is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.
Jacob’s Dream by William Blake, 1805. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Change is often a consequence of, and a coping mechanism for, the contradictions we live with — an attempt at greater cohesion. With an eye to the various divides that sunder our lives — nature and culture, appearance and reality, the private and the public, the conscious and the unconscious — Phillips considers this essential fulcrum of change:
The so-called self is what we have come to call, in William James’s phrase, “a divided self”; and after James and Winnicott, a true and false self, or a self in language, in fantasy, but perhaps, or really, no self at all. A self and its absence co-existing, in its most modern form and formulation. A self always, at least, having to manage conflicting and competing versions of itself; a self always having to get its representations of itself right, even while knowing, in the modern way, that they are only representations, pictures and descriptions of something that may only exist in its pictures and descriptions. A self riddled with conflict, having to straddle the contradictions; or, at its most minimal, do something with or about them.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Phillips observes, the need for resolving and reconciling these inner contradictions has culminated in the notion of conversion, which he defines as “the exchange that demands change, and claims to know the change that is needed,” often “prompted by something unbearable.” But the two most formative conversions in that tradition, Paul and Augustine, “simply expose the conflicts they were meant to resolve and clarify.” (“The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her incisive Augustine-lensed meditation on love and loss, and nowhere is our happiness more beset by fear than in our fear of change. “It’s frightening to step out of oneself, but everything new is frightening,” Clarice Lispector wrote in her novel The Hour of the Star, and what is change if not our supreme way of stepping out of ourselves.) Phillips writes:
This tells us something revealing, so to speak, about our modern scepticism about personal change at its most dramatic and significant. This profound modern ambivalence about conversion experiences — mostly but not always from the non-religious — leads to many questions not only about people’s relationship to God, but about their relationship to change, to transformation itself; questions about how it occurs, and what it might be for (what it might be in the service of).
At the center of these ambivalences, of course, is the problem of free will and the fact that myriad unchosen variables, from genetic and cultural inheritance to accidents and natural disasters, constrain our capacity for change. But beyond this question of whether and how we can choose our transformation is the question of what transformation to choose at all — a fundamental question of self-knowledge, riddled with all the ways in which we are fundamentally opaque to ourselves.
Phillips observes:
Change as an object of desire is a question of knowledge, of in some sense knowing what we want to be, or to become, or knowing that we don’t know what we want but that we want something.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toA great deal of change takes place in relationships. “What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?” Mary McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt. With an eye to Donald Winnicott’s pioneering work in developmental psychology, which illuminated how the mother-child relationship lays the foundation of future relationships, Phillips writes:
People are only ever converted to something they believe they can depend on… For Winnicott… the developmental question for everyone is: how can I depend on someone whose reliability can never be guaranteed? It is a straight line from this to the idea of faith; and the equation between believing in and depending on… Questions like this might help us to clarify the differences between conversion, addiction, entrapment and ownership; and whatever the alternatives could be in human relations. Conversion, addiction, entrapment and ownership, we should note, are all forms of consistency; and if and when consistency is equated with reliability, or dependability, or trust, these will be alluring, if malign, options. Winnicott proposes a capacity for surprise as an alternative to the need to be believed; an openness to surprise, a desire for it being integral, in his view, to a realistic and enlivening dependence on anything or anyone.
That capacity for surprise is another way of saying we must trust the uncertainty inherent in change if we are to reap the rewards of true transformation, undergo an inner conversion — one of “those momentous changes of belief that are changes of life.” And the refusal to ossify, the wish to change one’s life, shimmers with the deepest desire to live it. Virginia Woolf knew this: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
Complement On Wanting to Change with poet and philosopher John O’Donohue on the art of beginnings — that supreme springboard of change — then revisit Phillips on knowing what you want and the courage to change your mind.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Bruce Lee wrote to himself. All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they are worth, and what is possible for their life, and suffers in proportion to how conscious they are of the story, how much credence they give those inner voices over the raw input of reality. It is often when life blindsides us with a bright counternarrative to a limiting inner story that we suffer the most, because we are suddenly forced to revise our entire personal mythos, to relinquish our familiar ways of keeping ourselves small, to exceed our own expectations of the possible.
At fifty-three, while serving as Secretary of State as presiding over the commission for weights and measurements, fighting valiantly for the adoption of the meter after its hard-won invention, John Quincy Adams (July 11, 1767–February 23, 1848) received the unexpected news that he has been elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. None of his credentials, none of his merits so obvious to others, kept him from feeling unworthy of the post.
John Quincy Adams. Portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1796.In a diary entry from June of 1820, found in John Quincy Adams: Diaries 1779–1821 (public library), Adams writes:
I answered the Letter and accepted the Office; because I thought there would be an appearance of affectation in refusing it — The Arts and Sciences have been the objects of my admiration through life; I would it were in my power to say they had been objects of my successful cultivation.
But beneath his private affection for these disciplines lurks Adams’s aching lack of confidence in his own authority. (Confidence is simply a way of moving through the world with a correct view of your strengths and vulnerabilities, a correct measure of your depths and your limits, in order to face the possible with unstoried willingness.) In a touching testament to how prevalent and indiscriminate the existential epidemic of impostor syndrome is, Adams writes:
Honours like these produce in my mind humiliation as well as pride. In this particular instance, I am mortified at being raised to the head of a learned Society, with qualifications so inadequate to the Station — Mortified, that in a Society which ought to include all the distinguished men of Letters and of Science in the State, there was no man so notoriously and conspicuously superior to me, as to have prevented the thought of me from occurring at-all — As the time is fast approaching, when if my life continues, I shall be consigned to retirement from Public life, the idea presents itself to me, that I may still exist for some purpose useful to my Country, by devoting the leisure of my declining days to the duties of this Scientific Office. To promote the taste, the culture and the refinement of Art and Science in my Country — Should my exit from the public theatre be such as to leave me with a competency for the comfortable subsistence of my family, and therefore the choice of employment for my time, this will perhaps offer me the means of filling it with satisfaction and with honour.
One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of MontaigneFive years later, Adams was elected President not only of the nation’s cultural pantheon but of the nation itself — to this day America’s most science-literate, science-passionate leader. Having unsuccessfully advocated for the adoption of the metric system — the rejection of which was America’s first great act of international arrogance with consequences reaching across epochs and across worlds, confusing generations of global citizens and culminating in NASA’s tragicomical $125 million loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter after American engineers failed to correctly convert metric measurements — Adams understood uniquely the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and the proper aim of ambition.
Complement with how Nobel laureate John Steinbeck used the diary as a hedge against self-doubt and a classical guitarist’s account of overcoming impostor syndrome, then revisit Thoreau on defining your own success and Henry Miller on what makes a fulfilling life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since, we have come to see how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma; we have come to see consciousness itself as a full-body phenomenon.
Beyond the brain, no portion of the body shapes our mental and emotional landscape more profoundly than the tenth cranial nerve — the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system that unconsciously governs the inner workings of the body. Known as the vagus nerve — from the Latin for “wandering,” a root shared with vagabond and vague — it meanders from the brain to the gut, touching every organ along the way with its tendrils, controlling everything from our heart rate and digestion to our reflexes and moods.
One of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known drawings of the brain.In James’s lifetime, it was believed that synaptic communication within the brain was electrical. But when neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered a gap between neurons — a miniature abyss electricity could not cross — it became clear that something else must be transmitting the signals between neurons. In 1921, the German pharmacologist Otto Loewi confirmed the existence of these theorized chemical messengers by stimulating the vagus nerve of a frog and discovering in the secreted substance the first known neurotransmitter. Every thought, feeling, and mood that has ever swept across the sky of your mind was forecast by your neurotransmitters and executed by your vagus nerve.
A century after James, while working with premature babies, the psychiatrist Stephen Porges uncovered two distinct vagal pathways in the nervous system — the much older dorsal vagus, which evolved around 500 million years ago in a fish now extinct to regulate fear response and activate shutdown, and the ventral vagus, a uniquely mammalian development about 200 million old, controlling our capacity for connection and communication. This research became the foundation of polyvagal theory — the science of how the interplay of these two systems shapes our sense of safety and danger, shapes our attachment styles and relationship patterns, shapes our very ability to tolerate the risks of living necessary for being in love with life.
In the decades since, no one has championed polyvagal theory more ardently than the clinical psychologist Deb Dana. In her book The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (public library), written for therapists, she explores how trauma automates our adaptive responses in a survival story that puts the fear-based dorsal vagus in command to induce collapse and dissociation, and how we can rewire our neural pathways toward the emotional safety of the ventral vagal state, where our capacity for curiosity, connection, and change flourishes.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toDana writes:
Connectedness is a biological imperative, and at the top of the autonomic hierarchy is the ventral vagal pathway that supports feelings of safety and connection. The ventral vagus (sometimes called the “smart vagus” or “social vagus”) provides the neurobiological foundation for health, growth, and restoration. When the ventral vagus is active, our attention is toward connection. We seek opportunities for co-regulation. The ability to soothe and be soothed, to talk and listen, to offer and receive, to fluidly move in and out of connection is centered in this newest part of the autonomic nervous system. Reciprocity, the mutual ebb and flow that defines nourishing relationships, is a function of the ventral vagus. As a result of its myelinated pathways, the ventral vagus provides rapid and organized responses. In a ventral vagal state, we have access to a range of responses including calm, happy, meditative, engaged, attentive, active, interested, excited, passionate, alert, ready, relaxed, savoring, and joyful.
This biological need for co-regulation with others is not dissimilar to the concept of limbic revision — “the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love,” and to have our own emotional pathways remodeled by the people who love us. This is only possible in safe relationships, and it is the vagus system that governs our sense of safety.
Central to polyvagal theory is the distinction between conscious perception and what Porges termed neuroception — the conditioned way the autonomic nervous system responds from within the body, without our awareness, to cues of safety and danger in the outside world. Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships. Dana writes:
Co-regulation is at the heart of positive relationships… If we miss opportunities to co-regulate in childhood, we feel that loss in our adult relationships. Trauma, either in experiences of commission (acts of harm) or omission (absence of care), makes co-regulation dangerous and interrupts the development of our co-regulatory skills. Out of necessity, the autonomic nervous system is shaped to independently regulate. Clients will often say that they needed connection but there was no one in their life who was safe, so after a while they stopped looking. Through a polyvagal perspective, we know that although they stopped explicitly looking and found ways to navigate on their own, their autonomic nervous system never stopped needing, and longing for, co-regulation.
Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little WolfBecause we are physiologies first and psychologies second, but we are also storytelling and sensemaking creatures, our minds naturally create emotional narratives out of these unconscious vagal states — stories that, if we are not careful enough and conscious enough, may come to subsume reality. Dana observes:
The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.
Our early adaptive survival responses of trauma train the autonomic nervous system on a default neuroception of danger, replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection in a fear-based narrative. And yet these reflexes can be recalibrated by retraining our regulatory pathways.
Because the feeling of reciprocity is one of the most powerful regulators of the autonomic nervous system, a great deal of repair and rewiring can happen in relationships winged with true reciprocity. Dana writes:
Reciprocity is a connection between people that is created in the back-and-forth communication between two autonomic nervous systems. It is the experience of heartfelt listening and responding. We are nourished in experiences of reciprocity, feeling the ebb and flow, giving and receiving, attunement, and resonance.
Art from The Human Body, 1959.But the great paradox is that if our earliest template of connection is marked by rupture and deficient co-regulation, our very notion of reciprocity may be warped, leading us to tolerate immense asymmetries of affection and attention, to mistake deeply imbalanced relationships for reciprocal. The grounds for optimism lie in the very real possibility of changing the template through safe and nourishing relationships — ones we may not so much choose at first, for trauma can taint our choices with unhealthy patterns, as chance into and only then choose to nurture. The payoff is a gradual transition from the dorsal vagal state into the ventral vagal, a gradual willingness to release the patterns of protection in favor of connection, allowing the kinds of relationships Adrienne Rich celebrated as ones “in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love.'”
Complement with the science of how emotion are made and how love rewires the brain, then revisit Toni Morrison on reclaiming the body as an instrument of joy, sanity, and self-love.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
What was it like for Martha, the endling of her species, to die alone at the Cincinnati Zoo that late-summer day in 1914, all the other passenger pigeons gone from the face of the Earth, having once filled its skies with an immensity of beating wings, so many that John James Audubon likened their migration to an eclipse? And what made the difference between the people who killed them with glee — like the man in Austin who bragged about slaying 475 birds with a single stick — and those who reverenced their beauty, their majesty, their symphonic expression of life itself? A mere generation before Martha was born in captivity, Margaret Fuller had exulted:
Every afternoon [the pigeons] came sweeping across the lawn, positively in clouds, and with a swiftness and softness of winged motion, more beautiful than anything of the kind I ever knew. Had I been a musician, such as Mendelssohn, I felt that I could have improvised a music quite peculiar, from the sound they made, which should have indicated all the beauty over which their wings bore them.
Male and female passenger pigeons by John James Audubon, 1842. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)They were emissaries of the sublime, migrating by the millions, appearing like an immense blue wave rolling toward you, sounding like thunder — an experience we shall never know first-hand. One of the most vivid and poetic accounts of it, found in Joel Greenberg’s altogether fascinating and bittersweet book A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (public library), comes from the Potawatomi Chief Pokagon, who wrote with such touching tenderness in May 1850, as all over America the birds were being killed for food and for pleasure:
One morning on leaving my wigwam I was startled by hearing a gurgling, rumbling sound, as though an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me. As I listened more intently I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and yet the morning was clear, calm and beautiful. Nearer and nearer came the strange comingling sounds of sleigh bells, mixed with the rumbling of an approaching storm. While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving towards me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season. They passed like a cloud through the branches of the big trees, through the underbrush and over the ground… Statue-like I stood, half-concealed by cedar boughs. They fluttered all about me, lighting on my head and shoulders; gently I caught two in my hands and carefully concealed them under my blanket. I now began to realize they were mating, preparatory to nesting. It was an event which I had long hoped to witness; so I sat down and carefully watched their movements, amid the greatest tumult. I tried to understand their strange language, and why they all chatted in concert… The trees were still filled with them sitting in pairs in convenient crotches of the limbs, now and then gently fluttering their half-spread wings and uttering to their mates those strange, bell-like wooing notes which I had mistaken for the ringing of bells in the distance.
Within two generations, the bells had fallen silent.
Vocalization of male passenger pigeon recorded by Wallace Craig, 1911. (Library of Congress)Because the world is a kaleidoscope of qualia, because each creature has a singular sensorium not shared and never fully comprehended by creatures shaped by a different biology, with the loss of any species a particular way of seeing and a particular way of being is lost, a verse redacted from the epic poem of Life.
The fate of the passenger pigeon stands as a haunting monument to the deadliest defect of human nature — the hubris of seeing ourselves not as fractals of nature but as its overlords, the same hubris that gave us the atomic bomb. It is more than a cautionary tale to be heard in the mind — it is a mirror, harsh and clear, held up to the soul of humanity, a stark and sobering incantation to recover our reverence for life in all its myriad manifestations.
Passenger pigeon by Mark Catesby, 1731. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)The erasure of the passenger pigeon by the human hand comes alive with disquieting poignancy in this 1935 poem by Robinson Jeffers, part indictment and part invitation to revise our regard for the rest of nature:
PASSENGER PIGEONS
by Robinson JeffersSlowly the passenger pigeons increased, then suddenly their numbers
Became enormous, they would flatten ten miles of forest
When they flew down to roost, and the cloud of their rising
Eclipsed the dawns. They became too many, they are all dead
Not one remains.
And the American bison: their hordes
Would hide a prairie from horizon to horizon, great heads and storm-cloud shoulders, a torrent of life —
How many are left? For a time, for a few years, their bones
Turned the dark prairies white.
You, Death, you watch for these things.
These explosions of life: they are your food.
They make your feasts.
But turn your great rolling eyes
away from humanity
Those grossly craving black eyes. It is true we increase.
A man from Britain landing in Gaul when Rome
had fallen
He journeyed fourteen days inland through that beautiful
Rich land, the orchards and rivers and the looted villas: he reports he saw
No living man. But now we fill the gaps.
In spite of wars, famines and pestilences we are quite suddenly
Three billion people: our bones, ours too, would make
Wide prairies white, a beautiful snow of unburied bones:
Bones that have twitched and quivered in the nights of love,
Bones that have shaken with laughter and hung slack
in sorrow, coward bones
Worn out with trembling, strong bones broken on the rack,
bones broken in battle,
Broad bones gnarled with hard labor, and the little bones
of sweet young children, and the white empty skulls,
Little carved ivory wine-jugs that used to contain
Passion and thought and love and insane delirium, where now
Not even worms live.
Respect humanity, Death, these
shameless black eyes of yours,
It is not necessary to take all at once — besides that,
you cannot do it, we are too powerful,
We are men, not pigeons; you may take the old, the useless
and helpless, the cancer-bitten and the tender young,
But the human race has still history to make. For look — look now
At our achievements: we have bridled the cloud-leaper lightning,
a lion whipped by a man, to carry our messages
And work our will, we have snatched the thunderbolt
Out of God’s hands. Ha? That was little and last year —
for now we have taken
The primal powers, creation and annihilation; we make
new elements, such as God never saw,
We can explode atoms and annul the fragments, nothing left
but pure energy, we shall use it
In peace and war — “Very clever,” he answered in his thin piping voice,
Cruel and a eunuch.
Roll those idiot black eyes of yours
On the field-beats, not on intelligent man,
We are not in your order. You watched the dinosaurs
Grow into horror: they had been little elves in the ditches
and presently became enormous with leaping flanks
And tearing teeth, plated with armor, nothing could
stand against them, nothing but you,
Death, and they died. You watched the sabre-tooth tigers
Develop those huge fangs, unnecessary as our sciences,
and presently they died. You have their bones
In the oil-pits and layer rock, you will not have ours.
With pain and wonder and labor we have bought intelligence.
We have minds like the tusks of those forgotten tigers,
hypertrophied and terrible,
We have counted the stars and half-understood them,
we have watched the farther galaxies fleeing away
from us, wild herds
Of panic horses — or a trick of distance deceived by the prism —
;we outfly falcons and eagles and meteors,
Faster than sound, higher than the nourishing air;
we have enormous privilege, we do not fear you,
We have invented the jet-plane and the death-bomb
and the cross of Christ — “Oh,” he said, “surely
You’ll live forever” — grinning like a skull, covering his mouth
with his hand — “What could exterminate you?”
A decade later, the poetic conservationist Aldo Leopold memorialized the vanished bird in a moving speech delivered at the opening of a monument to the passenger pigeon erected at Wyalusing State Park by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology. Lamenting that “for one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” he writes:
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, nor clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather; they live forever by not living at all.
[…]
Man* is only a fellow-voyager with other creatures in the Odyssey of evolution… We should, in the century since Darwin, have achieved a sense of community with living things, and of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.
Reflecting on this “monument to a bird we have lost, and to a doubt we have gained,” he adds:
Our grandfathers, who did the actual killing, were our agents. They were our agents in the sense that they shared the conviction, which we have only now begun to doubt, that it is more important to multiply people and comforts than to cherish the beauty of the land in which they live. What we are doing here today is publicly to confess a doubt whether this is true.
[…]
Our grandfathers, who saw the glory of the fluttering hosts, were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered our lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange.
The Later Flights of the Passenger Pigeon by Frank Bond, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Couple with a poem inspired by the last Moho braccatus, which went extinct in our lifetime, then revisit Robinson Jeffers’s staggering poem about the interwoven mystery of mind and universe. For a bright counterpoint of what human nature is also capable of, savor the story of the woman who saved the hawks.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Emma Kunz (May 23, 1892–January 16, 1963) was forty-six and the world was aflame with war when she became an artist. She had worked at a knitting factory and as a housekeeper. She had written poetry, publishing a collection titled Life in the interlude between the two World Wars. Having lost two of her siblings to childhood illness, then both her surviving brother and her father to suicide when she was seventeen, she had coped with the physical fragility of life and the spiritual difficulty of bearing our mortality by becoming a healer. Her friends called her Penta, from the Pythagorean symbol for health — a pentagram drawn with a single line.
Inspired by the Swiss Renaissance alchemist, philosopher, and physician Paracelsus, who fused the divinations and prophecies with the building blocks of the scientific method in his experiments and observations in chemistry and biology that pioneered the field of toxicology, Penta came to see the physical and spiritual dimensions of reality as one.
Emma KunzLike Emily Dickinson, she was inspired by botany, saw in plants a model of the mind a century before the new science of plant intelligence, and filled her garden with medicinal plants to use in tonics and ointments. Like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin, she found in geometry a poetic form through which to explore metaphysical questions of truth and meaning.
As a schoolchild, she had delighted in using a pendulum to make drawings in her exercise books, but it was not until midlife that she found in this process a portal to a larger world of ideas. In 1938, using a silver pendulum with a jade end she believed was guided by energy fields — a technique she termed radiesthesia — she began making large-scale drawings in pencil and crayon on graph paper, hundreds of them, to divine diagnoses of physical and psychic ailments and heal people, often with results bordering on the miraculous. While working on a drawing, sometimes for two continuous days, she neither slept nor ate, subsisting on water and the spiritual energies she believed guided her.
There is something astral in the exquisite precision of her drawings, emanating the musicality of mathematics and the sacred symmetry of mandalas, emanating the animating force of her practice both as artist and as healer — a search for harmony and transformation, a reverence for the power of connection as an organizing principle of reality. She saw mystery as the key to revelation and sought it in the language of signs and symbols, in the essences and forms of plants and crystals, in the relationships between numbers.
Penta — who appears in Jennifer Higgie’s altogether wonderful The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World (public library) — considered herself not an artist but a researcher. At the peak of WWII, in the Roman quarry in Würenlos, she discovered a healing mineral she named AION A, after the Greek for “without limits,” still sold in Swiss pharmacies as a remedy for everything from inflammation to arthritis. The quarry is now known as Emma Kunz Grotto.
Penta believed she made her drawings for the twenty-first century. They were never exhibited in her lifetime.
I am haunted by the mirror-image consonance between a photograph of Emma Kunz in her studio and a photograph of Marie Curie in her laboratory — Emma in what could be a lab coat, Marie in a gown more suited to the drawing room, each bent over her worktable, each a woman in search of the elemental, making of herself an instrument of truth.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants.”
“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote a decade before Darwin gasped at how incomprehensible “the marvelous complexity” of organic beings is, insisting that “each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”
And yet this view does not come naturally to us humans, sensemaking creatures compelled to order the universe into comprehensible categories and value ranks, compelled to rank ourselves at the top. Even Darwin had to continually calibrate that impulse. “Never say higher or lower,” he exhorted himself in his marginalia on a book he was reading while working out his evolutionary theory. “Say more complicated.”
The crux of our difficulty is both profound and banal — to understand nature through degrees of complexity rather than levels of hierarchy scaffolded with self-reference is to find ourselves no longer the pinnacle of creation. We are only just beginning to comprehending non-human minds, only just beginning to concede that there are infinitely many other ways of seeing and other ways of being within the same reality; we would sooner grant consciousness to AI, modeled on our own minds arising from nervous systems crowned with brains, than consider different forms of intelligence as portals to a wider conception of consciousness.
Dragon arum (Arum dracunculus) from The Temple of Flora, 1812. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (public library), journalist Zoë Schlanger offers a mighty antidote to our tyranny of self-reference through the emerging science of organic beings we have long treated as stage decor for the drama of our earthly lives — a science rife with controversy and confusion, which is always the mark of a paradigm breaking down and breaking open, contouring a new way of thinking about questions of consciousness, communication, memory, gender, personality, interdependence, and agency. Rising from the pages is that rare achievement of meeting otherness on its own terms while broadening and deepening the terms on which we live our human lives. Schlanger draws from the world of plants “a masterclass in living to one’s fullest, weirdest, most resourceful potential,” and a counterpoint to the survival-of-the-fittest model of the natural world, intimating instead that the animating force of life may be not a combat for a kill but “an improvisation, or a collaboration, or something else entirely.”
A quarter millennium after Darwin’s grandfather popularized the young science of botany through poetry, and two centuries after Emily Dickinson wrote that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Schlanger writes:
A life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing, us included. Many are so ingenious that they seem nearly impossible for an order of life we’ve mostly relegated to the margins of our own lives, the decoration that frames the theatrics of being an animal. Yet there they are all the same, these unbelievable abilities of plants, defying our anemic expectations. Their way of life is so astonishing, I will soon learn, that no one yet really knows the limits of what a plant can do. In fact, it seemed that no one quite knows what a plant really is.
This perplexity, Schlanger observes, is one of the most exciting things to happen in our lifetime — “depending on how comfortable you feel with seismic shifts in what you once thought to be true.” Looking back on the past half-century of botany, she reflects on this generative discomfort:
Controversy in a scientific field tends to be a harbinger of something new, some new understanding of its subject… The more botanists uncovered the complexity of forms and behaviors of plants, the less the traditional assumptions about plant life seemed to apply.
Auriculas from The Temple of Flora, 1812. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)One of those assumptions stems from our basic taxonomic model of life on Earth, separated into six kingdoms — as though plants, animals, fungi, and all the rest are separate and sovereign territories of being, bound by borders and occasionally at war for resources. This tendency to mistake our models of reality for reality itself, universal to the human animal and manifested across all cultures in different ways, and this particular blind spot of Western science, unshared by indigenous and Eastern traditions, have left our view of plants on par with Descartes’s view of non-human animals. An epoch after the poetic naturalist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Schlanger writes:
For us to truly be part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants. They suffuse our atmosphere with the oxygen we breathe, and they quite literally build our bodies out of sugars they spin from sunlight. They made the ingredients that first allowed our lives to blink into existence at all. Yet they are not merely utilitarian supply machines. They have complex, dynamic lives of their own.
Out of those lives arose an organizing principle for life on Earth. In a passage that contours the central question of the entire field of plant intelligence — how something without a brain can respond to its conditions in coordinated, adaptive ways that optimize its future — Schlanger writes:
When plants climbed out of the ocean some five hundred million years ago, they arrived in a terrestrial barrens enveloped in an inhospitable fog of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Inhospitable, that is, to everything but plants. They had already learned to unlock oxygen from the carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean. They adapted the technology to their new world. In a way, they brought the ocean up with them. By incessantly breathing out, those legions of early land plants tipped the balance of gases toward oxygenation. They created the atmosphere we now enjoy. It’s not a stretch to say they birthed the habitable world.
We know this — we know that without the evolution of flowers, we wouldn’t exist; we know that chlorophyll is the crowning molecular miracle of nature, the only thing we know that can convert the inanimate elements of air and light into sugar, that lifeblood of the living world. With an eye to our own embodiment as cathedrals of glucose, Schlanger puts this alchemy in sobering perspective:
We are made of glucose, too. Without a constant supply of the plant sugar, our vital functions would quickly cease. Think about it: every animal organ was built with sugar from plants. The meat of our bones and indeed the bones themselves carry the signature of their molecules. Our bodies are fabricated with the threads of material plants first spun. Likewise, every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants.
Page from Emily Dickinson’s herbariumDrawing on her personal obsession with plants — a portal of wonder and optimism she discovered while suffering the psychic toll of working as a climate journalist — Schlanger seeks out the pioneers of this changing paradigm. She meets a rare-plant botanist on the brink of seventy who climbs down immense volcanic cliffs to save endangered species and self-medicates for the grief of extinction by writing poetry; she chronicles the research that led to the first clear evidence of mechanosensitive ion channels in plants — those rudiments of nervous systems, enabling organisms to experience touch at the cellular level — sparked by botanist Barbara Pickard’s groundbreaking work on plant electricity; she visits with scientists who study the most controversial frontlines of plant intelligence — research that unsteadies our grip on concepts we consider singularly human.
One botanist who studies how sagebrush send distress signals to each other has found that individual plants appear to have different risk tolerance — a metric of personality, the very notion of which in an organism without a brain-based mind challenges our central assumptions about consciousness. Other research on a family of flowering desert shrubs found that female plants heed signals from both male and female plants, but males only heed other males — intimations of preference and judgment, also features of personality and consciousness. Schlanger synthesizes some of the most provocative findings:
Plants could be said to have dialects, and are alert to their contexts enough to know when to deploy them. More than that, they have a clear sense of who is who; who is family, and who is not. They are in touch with their surroundings, and with the fluctuating status of their enemies. Their communication is not just rudimentary but complex and layered, alive with multiple meanings.
In fact, no aspect of this new botany is more paradigm-shifting than the study of plant communication. (Canadian forester Suzanne Simard’s epoch-making research into mycorrhizal tree communication was the fulcrum that began shifting the paradigm.) Schlanger considers how this very notion changes our understanding of nature:
Communication implies a recognition of self and what lies beyond it — the existence of other selves. Communication is the forming of threads between individuals. It’s a way to make one life useful to other lives, to make oneself important to other selves. It turns individuals into a community. If it is true that a whole forest or field is in communication, it changes the nature of that forest or field. It changes the notion of what a plant is.
It also changes the notion of what a mind is. We have taken it to be the product of a brain attached to a nervous system, but perhaps a mind is a complex, self-organizing system networked across the entire organism. Perhaps the whole plant is a mind.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in VerseEmerging from this particular field of science is a larger lens on the nature of knowledge. A century and a half after astronomer Maria Mitchell contemplated the fate of science, observing that “we reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us,” Schlanger writes:
The world is a prism, not a window. Wherever we look, we find new refractions.
Couple The Light Eaters with the poetic science of the ghost pipe — Earth’s most supernatural plant, which thrives mysteriously without eating light — then revisit this triptych meditation on flowers and the meaning of life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.”
Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child.
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriend Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one of their sons fell ill, but it was their other son, Baoth, who died after a savage struggle with meningitis.
Upon receiving the news, the thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part consolation for and part consecration of a loss for which there is no salve, found in Shaun Usher’s moving compilation Letters of Note: Grief (public library).
Ernest HemingwayOn March 19, 1935, Hemingway writes:
Dear Sara and Dear Gerald:
You know there is nothing we can ever say or write… Yesterday I tried to write you and I couldn’t.
It is not as bad for Baoth because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something now that we all must do. He has just gotten it over with…
About him having to die so young — Remember that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better. And he is spared from learning what sort of a place the world is.
It is your loss: more than it is his, so it is something that you can, legitimately, be brave about. But I can’t be brave about it and in all my heart I am sick for you both.
Absolutely truly and coldly in the head, though, I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one ever made a happier childhood than you made for your children, has won a great victory. We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do, while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact and the death only by accident.
Art by Charlotte Pardi from Cry, Heart, But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved — a soulful Danish illustrated meditation on love and lossIn a breathtaking sentiment evocative of Anaïs Nin’s admonition against the stupor of near-living, and of poet Meghan O’Rourke’s grief-honed conviction that “the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created,” Hemingway adds:
Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.
With this, echoing Auden’s insistence that “we must love one another or die,” he comes the closest he ever came to formulating the meaning of life. Like David Foster Wallace, who addressed the meaning of life with such exquisite lucidity shortly before he was slain by depression, Hemingway too would lose hold of that meaning in the throes of the agony that would take his life a quarter century later. Now, from the fortunate platform of the prime of life, he writes:
We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other. It seems as though we were all on a boat together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other. We are fortunate we have good people on the boat.
Complement with the young Dostoyevsky’s exultation about the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed, Emily Dickinson on love and loss, Thoreau on living through loss, and Nick Cave — who lived, twice, the unimaginable tragedy of the Murphys — on grief as a portal to aliveness, then revisit the fascinating neuroscience of your brain on grief and your heart on healing.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dreams. “I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures,” Willa Cather wrote to the love of her life while watching the transcendent spectacle of Jupiter and Venus rising in the summer sky. “If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things — because we can wonder.”
That we can wonder is what saves us. The price evolution had us pay for our exquisite consciousness is an awareness of our mortality — an awareness unbearable without the capacity for wonder at the miracle of existing at all, improbable as we each are against the staggering odds of never having been born, alive on an improbable world unlike any other known. Wonder is the religion nature invented long before we told our first myths of prophets and messiahs, the great benediction of our fate as borrowed stardust on short-term loan from an entropic universe.
A century before the pioneering neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington formulated his notion of “Natural Religion,” placing at its center our capacity for and responsibility to wonder, before Rachel Carson insisted that wonder is our greatest antidote to self-destruction and that “natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society,” the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) discovered that experiences of wonder — which he defined as “a chaos of delight” — are profoundly spiritual and come most readily in raw nature.
Charles Darwin in his twentiesIn early 1835, with the Beagle docked in Chile for repairs four years into its voyage, the twenty-six-year-old Darwin hired muleteers and set out to cross the Andes on foot and hoof, relishing the exposed face of Earth’s geologic history in the dramatic landscape. By mid-March, he reached the Piuquenes pass connecting Argentina and Chile and began the trying ascent. Breathing became “deep and laborious.” He felt the tightness in his chest. The mules panted and stopped every fifty feet. But when he stumbled upon some fossil shells on the ridge, he “entirely forgot” the altitude sickness in his delight.
And then, approaching the summit against wind “impetuous and extremely cold,” he encountered something belonging to the enchanting canon of the unphotographable.
Standing there amid the austere beauty of the mountain and the elements in their extreme, with petrified pieces of deep time in his pocket, Darwin touched God.
“View of Nature in Ascending Regions” by Levi Walter Yaggy from Geographical Portfolio, 1893. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)In an account later included in his memoir A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World (public library | free ebook), he writes:
When near the summit, the wind, as generally happens, was impetuous and extremely cold. On each side of the ridge we had to pass over broad bands of perpetual snow, which were now soon to be covered by a fresh layer. When we reached the crest and looked backwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere resplendently clear; the sky an intense blue; the profound valleys; the wild broken forms: the heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages; the bright-coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow, all these together produced a scene no one could have imagined. Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.
Complement with Coleridge’s transcendent experience of a thunderstorm and René Daumal on the mountain and the meaning of life, then revisit Darwin’s deathbed reflection on what makes life worth living and the bittersweet story of his beloved daughter.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings.”
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Nothing is more vital to the capacity for change than the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind — that stubborn refusal to ossify, the courageous willingness to outgrow your views, anneal your values, and keep clarifying your priorities. It is incredibly difficult to achieve because the very notion of the self hinges on our sense psychological continuity and internal consistency; because we live in a culture whose myths of heroism and martyrdom valorize completion at any cost, a culture that contractually binds the present self to the future self in mortgages and marital vows, presuming unchanging desires, forgetting that who we are is shaped by what we want and what we want goes on changing as we go on growing.
Changing — your mind, your life — is also painfully difficult because it is a form of renunciation, a special case of those necessary losses that sculpt our lives; it requires giving something up — a way of seeing, a way of being — in order for something new to come abloom along the vector of the “endless unfolding” that is a life fully lived, something that leaves your new emerging self more fully met.
One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers a salve for that perennial difficulty in On Giving Up (public library) — an exploration and celebration of giving up as “a prelude, a precondition for something else to happen, a form of anticipation, a kind of courage,” “an attempt to make a different future” that “get us the life we want, or don’t know that we want.”
He considers how countercultural such reframing is:
We tend to value, and even idealize, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves… Giving up, in other words, is usually thought of as a failure rather than a way of succeeding at something else. It is worth wondering to whom we believe we have to justify ourselves when we are giving up, or when we are determinedly not giving up.
At the heart of the book is the recognition that renunciation is the fulcrum of change. We give things up, Phillips observes, “when we believe we can no longer go on as we are.” (For many, this is the central crisis of midlife.) It is a kind of sacrifice in the service of a larger, better life — but this presumes knowledge of the life we want, and it is often experiences we didn’t know we wanted that end up magnifying our lives in the profoundest ways. (Nothing illustrates this better than The Vampire Problem.)
Phillips considers the paradox:
The whole notion of sacrifice depends upon our knowing what we want… Giving up, or giving up on, anything or anyone always exposes what it is we take it we want… To give something up is to seek one’s own assumed advantage, one’s apparently preferred pleasure, but in an economy that we mostly can’t comprehend, or, like all economies, predict… We calculate, in so far as we can, the effect of our sacrifice, the future we want from it… to get through to ourselves: to get through to the life we want.
Falling Star by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884. (Available as a print.)“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the psychiatrist and artist Marion Milner wrote a century ago in her clarifying field guide to knowing what you really want — which is, in the end, the hardest thing in life, for our self-knowledge is cratered with blind spots, clouded by conditioning, and perennially incomplete. Phillips — who draws on Milner’s magnificent book, as well as on Kafka and Judith Butler, Henry and William James, Hamlet and Paradise Lost — observes that, in this regard, giving up is a kind of “gift-giving.” He writes:
Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings.
And what would life be without continual acts of self-revision?
It is our ego-ideals — the stories we tell ourselves and the world about who we are and who we ought to be, fantasies of coherence and continuity mooring us to a static idealized self — that feed what Phillips calls the “tyranny of completion.” But human beings are rough drafts that continually mistake themselves for the final story, then gasp as the plot changes on the page of living. We do this largely because we are captives of comfort in our habits of thought and feeling, victims of certainty — that supreme narrowing of the mind — when it comes to our own desires. That we don’t fully know what we want because we are half-opaque to ourselves, that something we didn’t think we wanted may end up enlarging our lives in unimaginable ways, is a kind of uncertainty that unravels us. But if we can bear the frustration of the figuring, we may live into a larger and more authentic life.
Art by Francisco de Holanda, 1550s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Building upon his excellent earlier writing on why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in love, Phillips writes:
Our frustration is the key to our desire; to want something or someone is to feel their absence; so to register or recognize a lack would seem to be the precondition for any kind of pleasure or satisfaction. Indeed, in this account, frustration, a sense of lack, is the necessary precondition for any kind of satisfaction.
[…]
The traditional story about lack and desire describes a closed system; in this story I can never be surprised by what I want, because somewhere in myself I already know what is missing; my frustration is the form my recognition takes, it is a form of remembering.
Wanting is recovery, not discovery… There is a part of oneself that needs to know what it is doing, and a part of oneself that needs not to… a part of oneself that needs to know what one wants and a part of oneself that needs not to.
It is in the continual investigation of our desires, with all the frustration of our polyphonous parts, that we find the recovery and gift-giving which giving up can bring — a way of giving our lives back to ourselves and giving ourselves forward to our lives. Phillips distills the central predicament:
The question is always: what are we going to have to sacrifice in order to develop, in order to get to the next stage of our lives?
Couple On Giving Up with John O’Donohue on beginnings, Allen Wheelis on how people change, and Judith Viorst on the life-shaping art of letting go, then revisit Phillips on why we fall in love, breaking free from the tyranny of self-criticism, and the relationship between “fertile solitude” and self-esteem.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges.”
A person is not a potted plant of predetermined personality but a garden abloom with the consequences of chance and choice that have made them who they are, resting upon an immense seed vault of dormant potentialities. At any given moment, any seed can sprout — whether by conscious cultivation or the tectonic tilling of some great upheaval or the composting of old habits and patterns of behavior that fertilize a new way of being. Nothing saves us from the tragedy of ossifying more surely than a devotion to regularly turning over the soil of personhood so that new expressions of the soul can come abloom.
In the final years of his long life, former U.S. Secretary of Heath, Education, and Welfare John Gardner (October 8, 1912–February 16, 2002) expanded upon his masterwork on self-renewal in the posthumously published Living, Leading, and the American Dream (public library), examining the deepest questions and commitments of how we become — and go on becoming — ourselves as our lives unfold, transient and tender with longing for meaning.
Butterfly metamorphosis by Philip Henry Gosse from Entomologia terrae novae, 1833. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)With an eye to the mystery of why some people and not others manage to live with vitality until the end, and to the fact that life metes out its cruelties and its mercies with an uneven hand, Gardner writes:
One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. You’ve known such people — feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or perhaps they grew so comfortable that adventures no longer beckoned.
Recognizing that the challenges we face are both personal and structural, that we are products of our conditions and conditioning but also entirely responsible for ourselves, he adds:
We build our own prisons and serve as our own jailkeepers… but clearly our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self-images — that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past — the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions, the accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause. Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure — but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up by John MillerOf the lessons we learn along the vector of living — things difficult to grasp early in life — he considers the hardest yet most liberating:
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
But no learning is harder, or more countercultural amid this cult of achievement and actualization we live in, than the realization that there is no final and permanent triumph to life. A generation after the poet Robert Penn Warren admonished against the notion of finding yourself and a generation before the psychologist Daniel Gilbert observed that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” Gardner writes:
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. The purpose is to grow and develop in the dimensions that distinguish humankind at its best.
In a sentiment that mirrors the driving principle of nature itself, responsible for the evolution and survival of every living thing on Earth, he considers the key to that growth:
The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges — and the challenges keep coming, and they keep changing. Emergencies sometimes lead people to perform remarkable and heroic tasks that they wouldn’t have guessed they were capable of. Life pulls things out of you. At least occasionally, expose yourself to unaccustomed challenges.
The supreme reward of putting yourself in novel situations that draw out dormant potentialities is the exhilaration of feeling new to yourself, which transforms life from something tending toward an end into something cascading forward in a succession of beginnings — for, as the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue observed in his magnificent spell against stagnation, “our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.” This in turn transforms the notion of meaning — life’s ultimate aim — from a product to be acquired into a process to be honored.
One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little PrinceGardner recounts hearing from a man whose twenty-year-old daughter was killed in a car crash. In her wallet, the grief-stricken father had discovered a printed passage from a commencement address Gardner had delivered shortly before her death — a fragment evocative of Nietzsche’s insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.” It read:
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.
Complement with the pioneering education reformer and publisher Elizabeth Peabody on middle age and the art of self-renewal, the great nonagenarian cellist Pablo Casals on the secret to creative vitality throughout life, and this Jungian field guide to transformation in midlife, then revisit Nick Cave on blooming into the fulness of your potentialities and Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We make our lives by what we love.”
“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote. Silence is greater than music because it is its central organizing principle, the way the negative space around an object is what gives it a shape, the way you love someone for what they are not — the person who will not break a promise, the person who will not pass a collapsed bicycle without picking it up, the person who will not interrupt your reverie but will instead wait silently beside you until you open your eyes, is a particular kind of person, and it is each other’s particularity that we love. Just as a person is composed of their nos even more so than their yeses, sound becomes music through the silences between its notes — or else it would be noise.
Four days before his fortieth birthday, John Cage (September 5, 1912–August 12, 1992) instantly and permanently broadened the meaning of music by deepening our relationship to silence with the premiere of his now iconic composition 4’33”, inspired by his formative immersion in Zen Buddhism and “performed” by the virtuoso pianist David Tudor in a barn-like concert hall in Woodstock, New York — four minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure silence, suddenly rendering musical the ambient sounds of ordinary life.
Writer Nicholas Day and artist Chris Raschka bring the story of this quiet revolution to life in Nothing: John Cage and 4’33” (public library) — a spare, vibrant serenade to Cage’s masterpiece and its lasting existential echoes, challenging our most basic assumptions about what makes anything itself.
The story begins and ends with Tudor sitting at the piano that fateful summer evening in 1952, but in the smallness and stillness of that moment myriad questions about the nature of sound and the nature of attention come abloom, questions about how to listen and what to listen for, about who it is that does the listening, about the very nature of the self.
In the biographical afterword, Day writes:
What is music?
What is silence?
Can silence be music?
Can music be silence?[…]
Are there even answers to these questions?
For Cage, the questions were always the important part, because the questions were more interesting than the answers. The questions often led to more questions, instead of answers.
Like Beatrice Harrison, Cage was taken to a concert as a small child and stood in the aisle spellbound through the entire performance. He fell in love with sound long before he took his first music lesson. In a sentiment common to everyone who puts anything of beauty and substance into the world, Cage would later reflect:
We make our lives by what we love.
Complement Nothing with Kay Larson’s exquisite meditation on John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the inner life of artists — one of the finest books I have ever read — and Cage’s symphonic love letters to the love of his life, then revisit other wonderful picture-book biographies of cultural icons: Keith Haring, Maria Mitchell, Margaret Wise Brown, Emily Dickinson, John Lewis, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, E.E. Cummings, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, Frida Kahlo, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, Wangari Maathai, and Nellie Bly.
Illustrations © Chris Raschka courtesy of Neal Porter Books/Holiday House Publishing; photographs by Maria Popova
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light.”
We shall never know the sky, you and I — never know how to pierce a mountain with a pupil or sweep a meadow with a wing — and so we shall never know this world in its totality. It is our creaturely destiny to remain earthbound, trapped in frames of reference shaped by our senses, but it is our biological benediction to have a consciousness crowned with an imagination — that periscope of wonder capable of reaching beyond our sensorium, beyond the self, projecting us into other realities and other ways of being.
In the mid-1950s, a near-sighted English office worker set out to do for the sky what Rachel Carson had done for the sea thirty years earlier — invite our human imagination, grounded yet boundless, into the world of another creature dwelling in another sphere. J.A. Baker (August 6, 1926–December 26, 1987) spent a decade following earth’s fastest flying bird on bicycle and on foot, possessed by its “restless brilliance.” When he unloosed The Peregrine (public library) into the atmosphere of culture in 1967 — an atmosphere shaped by the new ecological conscience awakened by Carson’s Silent Spring five years earlier — it was a clarion call and a consecration, entirely original, yet emanating Thoreau’s meticulous observation, Whitman’s ecstatic language, and Carson’s soulful reverence for the realities of nature in all their brutal beauty. An epoch later, it remains an ode to wonder, a field guide to observation as devotional practice, a passionate and poetic reminder that by attending closely and tenderly to any one thing, we recover our natural reverence for everything, our love of the world in all its strangeness and splendor.
Baker writes:
You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light.
Peregrine at Auchencairn by Archibald Thorburn, 1923. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)On the hierarchy of explanation, elucidation, and enchantment to which all writing about the natural world and the science of reality belongs, Baker is a virtuosic enchanter. The writing is at times almost unbearably beautiful — about the bird (“He was a small speck now, like the pupil of a distant eye. Serenely he floated. Then, like music breaking, he began to descend.”), and about the world lensed through the bird (“The day hardened in the easterly gale, like a flawless crystal. Columns of sunlight floated on the land. The unrelenting clarity of the air was solid, resonant, cold and pure and remote as the face of the dead.”) Echoing Carson’s insistence that “it is not half so important to know as to feel” — the ethos that made her own writing so enchanting and unexampled — Baker captures the key to writing at the level of enchantment:
I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.
Like me, Baker was a latecomer to the love of birds, having long seen them “only as a tremor at the edge of vision.” And then something broke open, broke free. For ten years, he spent his winters “looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air,” learning along the way a new way of seeing — the peregrine’s way. (“To see takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “like to have a friend takes time.”) In consonance with the most eternal line from The Little Prince — “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Baker observes:
The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.
Peregrines from Coloured Illustrations of British Birds and Their Eggs by Henry Leonard Meyer, 1864. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)There is, of course, first the biological marvel of the peregrine’s sight, which renders visible not just to the soul but the eye itself layers of reality invisible to us:
The eyes of a falcon peregrine weigh approximately one ounce each; they are larger and heavier than human eyes. If our eyes were in the same proportion to our bodies as the peregrine’s are to his, a twelve-stone man would have eyes three inches across, weighing four pounds. The whole retina of a hawk’s eye records a resolution of distant objects that is twice as acute as that of the human retina. Where the lateral and binocular visions focus, there are deep-pitted foveal areas; their numerous cells record a resolution eight times as great as ours. This means that a hawk, endlessly scanning the landscape with small abrupt turns of his head, will pick up any point of movement; by focusing upon it he can immediately make it flare up into larger, clearer view.
The peregrine’s view of the land is like the yachtsman’s view of the shore as he sails into the long estuaries. A wake of water recedes behind him, the wake of the pierced horizon glides back on either side. Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries.
Gyr-falcon and peregrine falcon by Archibald Thorburn, 1915. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)From this astonishing physiology of seeing arises an astonishing way of being, alien to ours — a vivid reminder that this one planet, this common home to every creature that ever was and ever will be, is composed of billions upon billions of different worlds, each particular to the consciousness that inhabits it. In one of the book’s most exquisite passages, Baker slips into the consciousness of the peregrine, body and soul:
Slowly he drifted above the orchard skyline and circled down wind, curving upward and round in long steep glides. He passed from the cold white sky of the south, up to the warm blue zenith, ascending the wind-bent thermal with wonderful ease and skill. His long-winged, blunt-headed shape contracted, dwindled, and darkened to the flinty point of a diamond as he circled high and far over; hanging and drifting above; indolent, watchful, supreme. Looking down, the hawk saw the big orchard beneath him shrink into dark twiggy lines and green strips; saw the dark woods closing together and reaching out across the hills; saw the green and white fields turning to brown; saw the silver line of the brook, and the coiled river slowly uncoiling; saw the whole valley flattening and widening; saw the horizon staining with distant towns; saw the estuary lifting up its blue and silver mouth, tongued with green islands. And beyond, beyond all, he saw the straight-ruled shine of the sea floating like a rim of mercury on the surface of the brown and white land. The sea, rising as he rose, lifted its blazing storm of light, and thundered to freedom to the land-locked hawk… I watched him with longing, as though he were reflecting down to me his brilliant unregarded vision of the land beyond the hill… He sank forward into the wind, and passed slowly down across the sun. I had to let him go. When I looked back, through green and violet nebulae of whirling light, I could just see a tiny speck of dusk falling to earth from the sun, flashing and turning and falling through an immense silence that crashed open in a tumult of shrilling, wing-beating birds.
[…]
Standing in the fields near the north orchard, I shut my eyes and tried to crystallise my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk’s mind. Warm and firm-footed in long grass smelling of the sun, I sank into the skin and blood and bones of the hawk. The ground became a branch to my feet, the sun on my eyelids was heavy and warm. Like the hawk, I heard and hated the sound of man, that faceless horror of the stony places. I stifled in the same filthy sack of fear. I shared the same hunter’s longing for the wild home none can know, alone with the sight and smell of the quarry, under the indifferent sky. I felt the pull of the north, the mystery and fascination of the migrating gulls. I shared the same strange yearning to be gone. I sank down and slept into the feather-light sleep of the hawk.
Couple The Peregrine — one of Werner Herzog’s five requisite books for any filmmaker — with the fascinating science of what it’s like to be an owl, what it’s like to be a whale, and what it’s like to be a dog, then revisit Helen Macdonald’s exquisite recollection of what a hawk taught her about love and loss.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote.
From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her alabaster chest in the casket, she filled her poems with flowers and made of them a lexicon of feeling, part code language and part blueprint to the secret chambers of the heart.
The symbolic language of flowers peaked in Dickinson’s time, seeded by Erasmus Darwin’s radical romantic botany a century earlier and popularized by books like The Moral of Flowers, but humans have long heavied flowers with the responsibility of holding what we cannot hold, saying what we cannot say — the funeral wreath, the bridal bouquet, Georgia O’Keefe’s calla lilies channeling the divine feminine, the white hyacinth Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman made the emblem of their uncommon love. We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul’s cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.
Flowers for the loneliest person you knowArtist Tucker Nichols was in his late twenties when he found himself in a strange hospital room in a strange city with a strange diagnosis that confounded even his doctors. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody knew how to make it okay. As he fumbled his way to remission, he was saved again and again by the power of human connection, by the many languages of solidarity and sympathy when words fall short.
Half a lifetime later, as the pandemic swept the globe with its tidal force of terror and uncertainty, Nichols drew on that experience in a tender gesture of sympathy: He began sending small flower paintings to sick people on behalf of their loved ones. (I am thinking of Walt Whitman and his Civil War hospital visits, writing letters and poems on behalf of wounded and dying soldiers.) He painted for friends, for friends of friends, for strangers. His wife and daughter helped mail the paintings.
Flowers for the nurses who tell you what’s actually happeningFlowers for the neighbor who goes on the same early morning walks even though her dog is goneAs word spread of his project, these intimate and specific consolations began to feel unequal to the scale of suffering — we so easily forget that everyone is suffering in one way or another, often invisibly, always ultimately alone — and so he began painting flowers for entire categories of human experience ranging from the depths of despair to those quiet joys that make life livable.
The result is Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say (public library) — a floral counterpart to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, radiating the recognition that no matter how singular what we feel may seem, and how lonely in its singularity, it is just a garden variety feeling, felt by innumerable others since the dawn of feeling, being felt by someone somewhere right now. Out of that recognition unspool the golden threads of connection that bind us to each other and hammock the free-fall of our fear, our uncertainty, our loneliness.
Flowers for the kind of crying where tears stream straight down without a soundFlowers for anyone sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk again tonightFlowers for anyone who can see how good they have it and still find it nearly unbearableFlowers for the sound of my beloved chewing in the other roomFlowers for anyone in despairHis paintings, loose and bright, become analogues of how abstract yet vivid the most interior experiences are — amorphous shapes saturated with feeling, blurry arrangements of contrasting parts of the self.
Flowers for spectacular failuresFlowers for your terrible predicamentFlowers for the man in the back of the bus listening to music as the city rolls byFlowers for the inconsolableFlowers for old people falling in loveComplement Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say with the story of how the evolution of flowers gave Earth its language of love, then revisit The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Art © Tucker Nichols courtesy of Chronicle Books
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with a fleeting symphony of life before the final silence.
Each summer, cicadas arrive by the billions with their strange red eyes, their mysterious prime-shaped periodic cycles, and their haunting nocturnal emergence, sudden and synchronized. For years they have lived underground, soft milky-white nymphs nursed by endosymbiotic bacteria through their long helpless infancy. And then, in a flash, an obsidian exoskeleton encases their bodies to accompany them through the brief weeks of maturity as they rise from the underworld in singing search of a mate.
By early June, they have all emerged, more of them than all the humans who have ever lived; by late July, they have all died.
Transformation of the periodical Cicada Septemdecim. Illustration by Lillie Sullivan, 1898. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)While annual cicada species cover the globe, periodical cicadas — the seven known species of the genus Magicicada, which emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years in broods defined by geography and periodicity — are native only to North America. The English were staggered to encounter them when they first arrived. In 1633, the the governor of the young Plymouth Colony in New England marveled at the “numerous company of Flies which were like for bigness unto wasps or Bumble-Bees” that rose from the ground to feast on the trees and “made such a constant yelling noise as made the woods ring of them, and ready to deafen the hearers.”
Cicada by Edward Donovan, 1800. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Despite having no voice — no vocal chords, no lungs — cicadas are the loudest male chorus on Earth, their courtship serenades approaching the decibel level of a jet engine thanks to some of the most extraordinary acoustics in nature.
The body of a male cicada resembles a wood instrument. On each side of the hollow abdomen is a tymbal — a mesh of miniature ribs woven into a hard membrane, strummed whenever the singer flexes his synchronous flight muscles. Unlike locusts, which make sound by rubbing their legs against their wings and with which they were long conflated — it was only in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae that Linnaeus named the cicada as a different insect — cicadas sing the way humans do: with their whole body.
Art from A Monograph of Oriental Cicadidæ by William Lucas Distant, 1889. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Some find their music menacing, some mesmerizing. The Greeks considered it almost divine. When Pythagoras discovered the mathematics of harmony, a cicada sitting on a harp came to symbolize the science of music. Homer’s highest praise for orators was to compare them to cicadas. Anacreon, celebrated as the finest lyric poet of his civilization, reverenced them in verse:
Sweet prophet of summer, loved of the Muses,
Beloved of Phoebus who gave thee thy shrill song,
Old age does not wear upon thee;
Thou art earth-born, musical, impassive, without blood.
Thou art almost a god.
Epochs later, Lord Byron — poet laureate of the grandiose, otherwise blind to the grandeur of smallness — rhapsodized about these tiny “people of the pine” that “make their summer lives one ceaseless song.”
But no one has written more poetically about the biological reality of the cicada than the artist, naturalist, philosopher, entomologist, and educator Anna Botsford Comstock (September 1, 1854–August 24, 1930) — the forgotten pioneer who planted the seed for the youth climate action movement by introducing nature study to school curricula at the dawn of the twentieth century, making wonder a public good.
Anna Botsford Comstock circa 1900In 1903, Comstock wrote and illustrated Ways of the Six-Footed (public library | public domain) — a lyrical field guide to the world of insects, doing for entomology what Carl Sagan would do for astronomy two generations later. Celebrating the commonest male cicada of summer as the greatest of “the insect troubadours,” Comstock writes:
This musician… is an interesting-looking fellow, with a stout body and broad, transparent wings quite ornately veined… The cicada whose song is the most familiar to us is the “dog-day harvest-fly” or “Lyreman.” It resembles the seventeen-year species, except that it is larger and requires only two or three years in the immature state, below ground, instead of seventeen. The Lyreman when seen from above is black, with dull-green scroll ornamentation; below he is covered with white powder. He lives in trees; hidden beneath the leaves, this arboreal wooer sends forth a high trill, which seems to steep the senses of the listener in the essence of summer noons. If you chance to find a Lyreman fallen from his perch and take him in your hand, he will sing and you can feel his body vibrate with the sound. But it will remain a mystery where the musical instrument is situated, for it is nowhere visible to the uninitiated. However, if you place him on his back, you may see directly behind the base of each hind leg a circular plate, nearly a quarter of an inch in diameter; beneath each of these plates is a cavity across which is stretched a partition made up of three distinct kinds of membranes for the modulation of the tone; at the top of each cavity is a stiff, folded membrane which acts as a drumhead; but it is set In vibration by muscles instead of drumsticks, and these muscles move so rapidly that we cannot distinguish the separate vibrations. Thus, our Lyreman is provided with a very complicated pair of kettledrums, which he plays with so much skill that his music sounds more like that of a mandolin than of a drum.
[…]
Surely a new interest attaches to this summer-day song when we realize that it has pleased the human ear since the dim age of Homer. The cicada’s kettledrums are perhaps the only musical instruments now in use that have remained unchanged through a thousand centuries since they were first mentioned.
Cicada speciosa by Charles Dessalines d’Orbigny, 1861. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music as a property of the universe and this lovely vintage parable about another music-making insect, then revisit Anna Botsford Comstock’s beautiful meditation on winter trees as a portal to aliveness.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it.”
Seven years after the improbable idea of cross-pollinating poetry and science came abloom on a Brooklyn stage in a former warehouse built in Whitman’s lifetime, after it traveled to the redwoods of Santa Cruz and the sunlit skies of Austin, The Universe in Verse has become a book — fifteen portals to wonder, each comprising an essay about some enchanting facet of science (entropy and dark matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers), paired with a poem that shines a sidewise gleam on these concepts (Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath, Tracy K. Smith and Marie Howe).
It was a joy to write, and a joy to collaborate with two of the most thoughtful and talented people I know: The print book features original art by Ofra Amit (who painted my favorite piece in A Velocity of Being), and the audiobook features my favorite voice in the universe — the magnificent Lili Taylor.
For a sense of the spirit of it, here is my introduction as it appears in the book:
We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.
The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a festival of wonder: stories from the history of science — the history of our search for truth and our yearning to know nature — told live onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems — those emblems of our search for meaning and our yearning to know ourselves. Year after year, thousands of people gathered to listen, think, and feel together — a congregation of creatures concerned with the relationship between truth and beauty, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite.
Poetry may seem an improbable portal into the fundamental nature of reality — into dark matter and the singularity, evolution and entropy, Hubble’s law and pi — but it has a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity. Through it, other scales of time, space, and significance — scales that are the raw material of science — can enter more fully and more faithfully into our worldview, depositing us back into our ordinary lives broadened and magnified so that we can return to our daily tasks and our existential longings with renewed resilience and a passion for possibility.
Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it; a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.
The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry comes out October 1 and is now available for pre-order. A portion of my author’s proceeds goes toward a new Universe in Verse fund at The Academy of American Poets, supporting poets who steward science and celebrate the realities of nature in their work.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.”
A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its discomposing unlikeness to anything you have known before. Down, down you go into the depths of the unconscious, dark and fertile with the terror and longing that make for suffering, the surrender that makes for the redemption of suffering, not in resignation but in faith. It is then that the still, small voice of the soul begins to sing; it is then that the trapdoor becomes a portal into a life larger, truer, and more possible — a kind of rebirth.
Nobel laureate Louise Glück (April 22, 1943–October 13, 2023) captures the essence of such experiences, the way they sober us to being mortal and to being alive, with an image of piercing originality in the title poem of her 1992 collection The Wild Iris (public library).
THE WILD IRIS
by Louise GlückAt the end of my suffering
there was a door.Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Couple with Ursula K. Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain, then revisit Glück’s love poem to life at the horizon of death.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty. The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. And because every littlest thing is, as John Muir observed, “hitched to everything else in the universe,” when we pay generous and unalloyed attention to anything, we are learning to love everything; we are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.
That recognition and its ample rewards animate The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada (public library) — the soulful chronicle of thirteen summer days the poetic geologist Richard J. Nevle and the Buddhist poet Steven Nightingale spent walking across one of the world’s most majestic mountains with their wives and teenage daughters, recording and reflecting on those devotional acts of pure attention in diary entires, essays, and poems that interleave science and spirit, observation and metaphor, grandeur and smallness. What emerges is a love letter to “a tender whole that is so much sweeter than the sum of its lonely parts.”
One of Japanese artist Chiura Obata’s 1930s paintings of YosemiteNevle — who was first enchanted by the distant contour of the mountains when he was five but did not see them fully until he began his doctoral studies in geology eighteen years later — writes:
Many claim to have found God in the mountains. I don’t know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too. Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientific inquiry — its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking — can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation. For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark, to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction of a previously unencountered wildflower — to wonder and to seek answers to how these things might have come to be in the world — are themselves acts of devotion, ways of knowing, ways of longing for communion.
Nightingale harmonizes:
Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and everything we are.
It is no accident that Virginia Woolf arrived at her epiphany about the unity of being while looking at a flower, that Oliver Sacks grasped deep time while walking in a forest, that Mary Oliver contacted the interconnectedness of life while observing an owl: It is beauty that beckons our attention, and it is attention that lets us see the world whole. Nightingale considers the common root of these experiences, these revelations of wholeness:
In most cultures, in every century, beauty is bound up with unity. Beauty illuminates the affinity, the inner relation, the resemblance, the kinship, the concord and identity of things. We are all trained to tell things apart. In the experience of beauty, we learn to tell things alike; to move from the darkness of oneself to a sympathy, an open rapport; a longed — for, conscious union with the world. Beauty is a lucid and graceful assembly of forms that calls the mind close to life, our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another.
[…]
There is nothing more powerful than the movement toward beauty. As we walked, this thought sustained us. What we needed was to keep moving: one more day, and in each day, all day, one more step. It struck me as the simplest rule of life and of reflection: keep moving. Stay in readiness. Cultivate openness, clarity, affection, an easygoing revelry of the senses, a trust in our luck that we are here on earth at all, that we have this moment at all. Movement along a trail is movement within the mind. In the long run, the revelation of beauty is not a matter of chance: it is the centermost surety in life.
Beauty matters because it swings open the doors of perception, and it is by seeing — by taking in what is there, incorporating it into our inner world — that we can begin to comprehend and connect, out of which the sense of belonging arises. Nightingale reflects:
This is true for everyone, wherever we are: what we see is the preface to what we can see. Beyond that preface, with work and love, is what we can come to understand. If we can understand, then we can live. In the Sierra, we understood that we might, after all, belong here with tree and rock and time and light. We might, for a brief spell of years, have the luck to find a home here by following the beauty that beckons us.
One of Wilson Bentley’s “miracles of beauty”Observing the delicate fragility of a single ice crystal, and thinking about Wilson Bentley’s snowflakes, he adds:
The world around us is not what we see. It holds a life-giving, gift-giving, invisible order everywhere and always. It is an order of musical and exultant beauty. It has a mysterious and radiant splendor. Everywhere we look, if we would look, the natural world is making beauty, without fanfare, and the work is so plain, intelligent, playful, and devoted, that there is only one word for it: cosmic.
Throughout their journey, what kindles this sense of the cosmic are encounters with the earthly, in all its glorious smallness and specificity — a mountain chickadee hardly larger than a grape, singing in its “husky, harsh-sweet voice”; clouds “tangerine then crimson then lavender then gray”; a nutcracker harvesting ninety thousand whitebark seeds in a single year with its bill “black as obsidian”; a yellow-legged frog “as small as a baby’s hand, as still as a Buddha”; an aspen with its aria of color sung by chloroplasts that outnumber the stars in the Milky Way one hundredfold; a prairie falcon slicing through the clear blue with its speckled body, evoking a rush of astonishment that “such a wholly perfect thing could exist.” Nevle writes:
There is something numinous and joyful in these encounters, a way in which the boundary between the world we sense and the world that is beyond our senses becomes, for the briefest of moments, thin — almost transparent.
Punctuating the poems and essays are diary entries raw with aliveness. On the second day of the expedition, Nevle records:
Up too early again. Listening to the patter of rain dripping from the tree limbs onto the tent and the hush of the creek in the darkness. Breathing in the scent of earth and rain. I can’t believe we are here, surrounded by these old trees and mountains, with days ahead of us. I’m a little boy all over again, incredulous that this place actually exists, and I am here in it. I want to get up and wander down to the creek and feel its black, wet, cold aliveness on my skin.
Another of Chiura Obata’s Yosemite paintingsThat exhilaration emanates from a sudden and vivid sense of the interconnectedness of life in the mountain, the interbelonging of the wanderer and every wild creature, every rocky crevasse:
The great spine of rock holds diverse forests, dreamy meadows, skeins of streams, radiant lakes, and rare glaciers. Life ascends even to the highest reaches of the range, thousands of feet above tree line, where gardens of black, orange, and chartreuse lichen adorn the rock. Everywhere a tenacious living skin sheaths the ancient bones of the mountains.
[…]
The gray-crowned rosy-finch, the bighorn sheep, the pika, and the skypilot with its violet-cobalt blooms make their home among the enchanted stone that air and dust and time and life made possible.
Art by Matthew Forsythe from The Gold LeafMoving through the mountain, Nightingale embraces the poet’s task of wresting metaphor from observation. In a reflection that calls to mind poet Natalie Diaz’s magnificent meditation on brokenness as a portal to belonging, he writes:
The mountains are whole and beautiful for one principal reason: they have been broken so often… It is the very breaking and jointing, the cracking and carving and breakdown, the weathering and scouring, that all together give rise to the countless forms of beauty — iridescent, miraculous, gift-giving, exultant — throughout the whole of the range.
But it is often the geologist who best channels the poetic dimension of the living world. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson gasped in a poem that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Nevle writes:
What do we know of flowers? Of their wiliness and brilliance born of a ferocious will to live? Of their ability to extract what they need to survive over their fleeting lives, only so it can be given away? Consider the genus of flowering plants known as Castilleja, the paintbrushes. Species of Castilleja occur throughout the Sierra, from the oak savannas of the lowland foothills to the fragrant conifer forests of the mid-elevations to the sky gardens of the alpine fellfields — almost to the very crest of the range — blossoming in flames of vermillion and violet and cream and silvery mauve. Valley Tassels, Owl’s-Clover, Wooly Indian Paintbrush, Great Red Indian Paintbrush, Hairy Indian Paintbrush, Subalpine Paintbrush, Alpine Paint-brush, to name just a few of more than a dozen species of Castilleja whose blossoms return each year to the mountains. The sheer variety of Castilleja species you might encounter in a single summer day of wandering the Sierra might be enough to make you weep with gratitude for all the world offers us.
In the epilogue, Nightingale reflects on this countercultural endeavor to reunite dimensions of being that naturally belong together, that illuminate and magnify each other, despite how much our siloed and segregationist culture tries to keep them apart. (That, of course, is the animating spirit of The Universe in Verse.) He writes:
Science is thought by some to be dry, technical, and quantitative. It is not. Study is exaltation. Fact is miracle. Number is portal. Understanding is joy.
Poetry and spirituality are thought by some to be abstract, ethereal, private. They are not. Nature is language. Mind is sensual. Soul is earth.
Complement The Paradise Notebooks, an exultation of a read in its entirety, with The Living Mountain — poet Nan Shepherd’s timeless love letter to life lensed through the Scottish Highlands — and poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan’s poignant meditation on time and transcendence lensed through Mount Tamalpais, then revisit Emerson on nature and transcendence and Steinbeck (in his little-known nonfiction I find even more excellent than his novels) on wonder and the relational nature of the universe.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Loving is perennial vivification… a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it and positively affirming its being.”
It is a strange thing, desire — so fiery yet so forlorn, aimed at having and animated by lack. In its restlessness and its pointedness, so single of focus, it shares psychic territory with addiction. Its Latin root — dē + sidus, “away from one’s star” — bespeaks its disorientation, its rush of longing, which we so easily mistake for love. And yet, when unplugged from the engine of compulsion and possession, desire can be a powerful clarifying force for the hardest thing in life: knowing what we want and wanting it unambivalently, with wholehearted devotion and fully conscious commitment. In this aspect, desire is not a simulacrum of but scaffolding for love. It shares a strand of that same Latin root with consider, for it is only through consideration — of our own soul’s yearnings and the sovereign soul of the other — that we can truly love.
How to tell love from desire and how to make of desire a stronghold of love is what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) explores in On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (public library) — the posthumous collection of his superb newspaper essays challenging our standard narratives and touching self-delusions about who we are and what we want, anchored in the recognition that “people are the most complicated and elusive objects in the universe.”
Lee Miller and Friend by Man Ray. Paris, 1930.In a passage that calls to mind Auden’s haunting meditation on true and false enchantment, Ortega considers how our slippery grasp of reality shapes our experience of love:
It would be outlandish to conclude that, after being consistently wrong in our dealings with reality, we should hit the mark in love alone. The projection of imaginary qualities upon a real object is a constant phenomenon… To see things — moreover, to appreciate them! — always means to complete them… Strictly speaking, no one sees things in their naked reality. The day this happens will be the last day of the world, the day of the great revelation. In the meantime, let us consider our perception of reality which, in the midst of a fantastic fog, allows us at least to capture the skeleton of the world, its great tectonic lines, as adequate. Many, in fact the majority, do not even achieve this… They lead a somnambulant existence, scurrying along their delirium. What we call genius is only the magnificent power… of piercing a portion of that imaginative fog and discovering behind it a new authentic bit of reality, quivering in sheer nakedness.
Love, Ortega argues, can uniquely pierce the veil of delirium and reveal a greater truth, unlike “inactive sentiments” like joy and sadness, to which desire is akin:
[Joy and sadness] are a sort of coloration which tinges the human being. One “is” sad or he “is” happy, in complete passiveness. Joy, in itself, does not constitute any action, although it may lead to it. One the other hand, loving something is not simply “being,” but acting toward that which is loved… Love itself is, by nature, a transitive act in which we exert ourselves on behalf of what we love.
Illustration by Japanese artist Komako Sakai for a special edition of The Velveteen RabbitIn consonance with Iris Murdoch’s magnificent definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Ortega observes that the essence of love is an “intense affirmation of another being, irrespective of his attitude toward us.” With an eye to all the things we mistake for it — “desire, curiosity, persistence, madness, sincere sentimental fiction” — he admonishes against the culturally conditioned error of measuring the magnitude of love by the intensity of violent emotion it stirs in us, drawing a crucial distinction between falling in love, as a transient altered state of consciousness drunk on dopamine, and loving, as a continuous mode of being:
Love is a much broader and profound operation, one which is more seriously human, but less violent. All love passes through the frantic zone of “falling in love”; but, on the other hand, “falling in love” is not always followed by genuine love. Let us, therefore, not confuse the part with the whole.
[…]
The more violent a psychic act is, the lower it is in the hierarchy of the soul, the closer it is to blind physical mechanism, and the more removed from the mind. And, vice versa, as our sentiments become more tinged with spirituality, they lose violence and mechanical force. The sensation of hunger in the hungry man will always be more violent than the desire for justice in the just man.
We are always, of course, trapped by the limitations of language in communicating the limitless. Observing the difficulty of using a single term to encompass “the most varied fauna of emotions” — the love of science or art, the love of a lover or a child, the love of a country or a cause — and the fact that any term becomes unwieldy when tasked with conveying too many disparate things, Ortega considers what the defining feature of love might be:
Love, strictly speaking, is pure sentimental activity toward an object, which can be anything — person or thing. As a “sentimental” activity, it remains, on the one hand, separated from all intellectual functions — perception, consideration, thought, recall, imagination — and, on the other hand, from desire, with which it is often confused. A glass of water is desired, but is not loved, when one is thirsty. Undoubtedly, desires are born of love; but love itself is not desire. We desire good fortune for our country, and we desire to live in it because we love it. Our love exists prior to these desires, and the desires spring from love like the plant form the seed.
Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little WolfDesire is often so difficult to distinguish from love because it is rooted in longing, but longing exists only in absence and evaporates at the moment of attainment, while love grows more saturated the more presence and energy it is given. A generation before the poet J.D. McClatchy contemplated the contrast and complementarity of desire and love, Ortega writes:
Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something (“possession” meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction. Love, on the other hand, is enterally unsatisfied. Desire has a passive character; when I desire something, what I usually desire is that the object come to me. Being the center of gravity, I await things to fall down before me. Love… is the exact reverse of desire, for love is all activity. Instead of the object coming to me, it is I who go to the object and become a part of it. In the act of love, the person goes out of himself. Love is perhaps the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward something else. It does not gravitate toward me, but I toward it… Love is gravitation toward that which is loved.
[…]
In loving we abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves, and virtually migrate toward the object. And this constant state of migration is what it is to be in love.
And yet, he concedes, desire can bloom into love:
One may sometimes grow to love what he desires: we desire what we love, because we love it.
Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)The distinction between desire and love, Ortega observes, goes beyond that between the static and the active. Even more crucially, there is the distinction between possession and affirmation, between greed and generosity:
Desire enjoys that which is desired, derives satisfaction from it, but it offers nothing, it gives nothing, it has nothing to contribute… Love, on the other hand, reaches out to the object in a visual expansion and is involved in an invisible but divine task, the most active kind that there is: it is involved in the affirmation of its object.
[…]
Loving is perennial vivification, creation and intentional preservation of what is loved… a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it and positively affirming its being.
Couple with Ortega on how the people we love reveal us, then revisit French philosopher Alain Badiou on why we fall and how we stay in love, Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love, and Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the difficulty of discerning comfort from entrapment, freedom from peril. It is a paradox rooted in the early development of the psyche and most poignantly manifested in our intimate relationships as we confront over and over the boundary between where we end and the other begins, the challenge of balancing intimacy and independence.
Pulsating beneath the paradox are two opposing forces — one tugging us toward the comfort of the known, the safety of the terminal, the other beckoning us to fly into the open sky of the unknown, with all its sunlit freedoms and its storming dangers. In her 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (public library), Gail Sheehy (November 27, 1936–August 24, 2020) explores these “two sets of forces always at loggerheads inside us over the questions of how far and how fast we shall grow,” terming them the Merger Self and the Seeker Self.
Available as a print, benefitting The Nature ConservancyShe writes:
Our Merger Self… is the universal wish to be attached to another, to restore somehow the beatific closeness with mother, for in that fusion would lie perfect harmony, absolute safety, and endless time. The Merger Self is born of the frustration with our early discovery that we are indeed separate and distinct from our caregiver. It triggers a desire to totally incorporate the other, any “other” who becomes the source of love and pleasure… The Merger Self then, in its constant effort to restore closeness, desires always a safe, tight fit.
The Seeker Self is driven by the opposite wish: to be separate, independent, to explore our capacities and become master of our own destiny. This impulse is fueled in early childhood by our delight in awakening capabilities.
But for all its problematic clinginess, the Merger Self is also crucial for the “temporary fusions” upon which empathy is founded — the ability “to reach out and empathize with others, to feel as they might feel without letting our own reality intrude” — and upon which all love rests; for all its seeming strength and self-reliance, the Seeker Self can thrust us into selfishness and solipsism. Only by balancing the two can we achieve what Carl Jung called individuation, Abraham Maslow called self-actualization, and Sheehy calls simply authenticity — “the arrival at that felicitous state of inner expansion in which we know of all our potentialities and possess the ego strength to direct their full reach.” She considers the necessary calibration at the heart of the balance:
If the Merger Self is indulged too early, it can lead us into a no-risk, no-growth position. But once we are beyond the suspicion, or the fear, of letting our distinctiveness be lost in attachments to others, it is our merger side that enables us to love intimately, share unselfishly, express tenderness, and experience empathy.
If the Seeker Self is left unbridled, it will lead us to a self-centered existence in which genuine commitments can have no place, and in which efforts to achieve individual distinction are so strenuous that they leave us emotionally impoverished.
It is only by getting the two sides to work in concert that eventually one becomes capable of both individuality and mutuality.
Art from An ABZ of LoveIn the remainder of Passages (which I discovered through a sidewise mention in The Middle Passage), Sheehy goes on to explore how the balance of these two aspects of the psyche affects everything from romantic relationships to professional actualization across the various stages of life as we dismantle our projections and complexes, relinquish our compulsions and conditioning, and recover our authenticity. Observing that “the major task of midlife is to give up all our imagined safety providers and stand naked in the world, as the rehearsal for assuming full authority over ourselves,” she considers the ultimate payoff of this painful, redemptive process:
One of the great rewards of moving through the disassembling period to renewal is coming to approve of oneself ethically and morally and quite independent of other people’s standards and agenda. By giving up the wish that one’s parents were different and by navigating through various lifestyles to that point of dignity worth defending, one can achieve… arrival at that final stage of adult development, in which one can give a blessing to one’s own life.
Complement with Kahlil Gibran on the challenge of balancing intimacy and independence, the key to which Schopenhauer so poignantly captured in his parable of the porcupine dilemma, then revisit Rilke on the difficult art of giving space in love.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Hearing the rising tide,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, “there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before… of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.” There is indeed in the physics of the tides — that gravitational dialogue between our planet and its only satellite — something of the existential, something reminding us how transient all things are, how fluid the future, how slippery our grasp of anything we hold on to, how relational every loss.
The tides bridge the earthly and the cosmic, science and symbol: They cause drag that slows down our planet’s spin rate; because gravity binds the two, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us. The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this haunting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. It took another quarter millennium and a giant leap into the cosmos for his theory to be tested against reality in a living poem of geometry and light: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the surface of the Moon and laser beams were aimed at them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. The Moon, born of the body of the Earth billions of years ago, is drifting away at more than half the rate at which a child grows.
If even the Moon is leaving us — “that best fact, the Moon,” in Margaret Fuller’s exultant words — what is there to hold on to? How are we to bear our ordinary human losses, the worst facts of our lives?
Those questions, immense and intimate, come alive in the stunning title poem of Dorianne Laux’s’ collection Facts About the Moon (public library), stunningly performed by Debbie Millman at the seventh annual Universe in Verse on the eve of the 2024 total solar eclipse.
FACTS ABOUT THE MOON
by Dorianne LauxThe moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.
Complement with a poetic meditation on moonlight and the magic of the unnecessary, Japanese artist Hasui Kawase’s beguiling woodcut moonscapes, the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, and Patti Smith’s haunting reading of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” then revisit Dorianne Laux’s love letter to trees.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
There are certain experiences that shatter the eggshell of the self and spill the yolk of the unconscious, slippery and fertile, aglow with potential for growth. Shame is one of them — an experience private and powerful, rife with the most elemental questions of who we are and where we belong. At its core is a peculiar form of inner conflict, in which one part of the self gasps with revulsion at the choices of another, exposing the fundamental incoherence of our inner lives and the longing for what D.H. Lawrence called “living unison,” exposing the unsteady foundations of reality itself.
The pioneering sociologist and philosopher Helen Merrell Lynd (March 17, 1896–January 30, 1982) examines shame as a singular lens on the self, and on the human potential for integration and transformation, in her revelatory 1958 book On Shame and the Search for Identity (public library) — an investigation of the disconnect between the people we think ourselves to be and the people we act ourselves into being, inviting a proper understanding of shame as a pathway toward a more conscious and coherent self.
Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the BirdLynd writes:
Shame is an experience that affects and is affected by the whole self. This whole-self involvement is one of its distinguishing characteristics and one that makes it a clue to identity… In this moment of self-consciousness, the self stands revealed. Coming suddenly upon us, experiences of shame throw a flooding light on what and who we are and what the world we live in is.
Those experiences that involve the whole self are particularly vulnerable to our compulsion for categories and labels, born of an anxiety to contain the in the finite the infinities of the mind, to wrest order from the chaos of the heart. With an eye to the challenge of comprehending and communicating such complex experiences — experiences like love, wonder, longing, self-respect, and shame — Lynd cautions against the limiting nature of labels:
Reliance on accepted categories and methods may mean that certain phenomena essential for understanding identity escape attention. In the present climate of psychological thought any observed human characteristic speedily acquires a label, which encases it within one of the experimentalists’ or the clinicians’ categories. Extensive as these categories are, applied to some life situations they may be more constricting than informing.
Certain pervasive experiences, not easily labeled, may slip through the categories altogether or, if given a location and a name, may be circumscribed in such a way that their essential character is lost. Habituation to such usage may blind us still further to the necessity of searching more deeply into the nature of these experiences.
To look more closely at experiences “hard to isolate and confine,” she argues, is to look into the very nature of the self, into what William James called the “blooming buzzing confusion” of consciousness. Lynd writes:
It is no accident that experiences of shame are called self-consciousness. Such experiences are characteristically painful. They are usually taken as something to be hidden, dodged, covered up — even, or especially, from oneself. Shame interrupts any unquestioning, unaware sense of oneself. But it is possible that experiences of shame if confronted full in the face may throw an unexpected light on who one is and point the way toward who one may become. Fully faced, shame may become not primarily something to be covered, but a positive experience of revelation.
Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s UlyssesPart of what makes shame so misunderstood and underinvestigated is that it is often conflated with guilt. Although the two may complement and reinforce one another, guilt tends to arise from the feeling of wrongdoing, of having transgressed a boundary, while shame stems from the feeling of falling short, of failing to reach a hope or meet an expectation, which anchors it in a deeper stratum of the personality — for rules and boundaries are externally constructed, while our hopes, expectations, and ideals are the most intimate building blocks of personhood. This is why an apology accepted and pardon granted can vanquish guilt, but they do little to allay shame. Lynd writes:
Guilt can be expiated. Shame, short of a transformation of the self, is retained. This transformation means, in Plato’s words, a turning of the whole soul toward the light.
Drawing on a kaleidoscope of examples from literature — Shakespeare and Sartre, The Bible and Anna Karenina, Virginia Woolf’s diaries and Huckleberry Finn — she observes that shame is most often contrasted not with extrinsic measures like righteousness and approval by others but with the elemental, intrinsic values of truth and honor. It is a mirror held up to the self, brutal and sobering — a revelation of a profound breach between the ideal self, in which our self-image is rooted, and the real self. She writes:
Experiences of shame appear to embody the root meaning of the word — to uncover, to expose, to wound. They are experiences of exposure, exposure of peculiarly sensitive, intimate, vulnerable aspects of the self. The exposure may be to others but, whether others are or are not involved, it is always… exposure to one’s own eyes… Shame is the outcome not only of exposing oneself to another person but of the exposure to oneself of parts of the self that one has not recognized and whose existence one is reluctant to admit.
[…]
The feeling of unexpectedness marks one of the central contrasts between shame and guilt. This unexpectedness is more than suddenness in time; it is also an astonishment at seeing different parts of ourselves, conscious and unconscious, acknowledged and unacknowledged, suddenly coming together, and coming together with aspects of the world we have not recognized. Patterns of events (inner and outer) of which we are not conscious come unexpectedly into relation with those of which we are aware.
This feeling of internal incongruence is the most painful aspect of shame — a vivid reminder that we know ourselves only incompletely and have but marginal control over which parts of us take the reins of personhood at any given moment. (And yet this aspect of self-surprise is something shame shares with some of the most beautiful capacities of consciousness — wonder and delight, also marked by the gasp at another dimension of reality revealed. Homer linked Aidos — the Greek goddess of shame — to awe.) Lynd writes:
Being taken unawares is shameful when what is suddenly exposed is incongruous with, or glaringly inappropriate to, the situation, or to our previous image of ourselves in it… We have acted on the assumption of being one kind of person living in one kind of surroundings, and unexpectedly, violently, we discover that these assumptions are false. We had thought that we were able to see around certain situations and, instead, discover in a moment that it is we who are exposed; alien people in an alien situation can see around us.
What makes shame most unbearable is this feeling of sudden expatriation from reality, which leaves trust — in oneself, in the world — dangerously jeopardized. Paradoxically, it is often not the darkest but the brightest in us that is most vulnerable to shame. Lynd writes:
Part of the difficulty in admitting shame to oneself arises from reluctance to recognize that one has built on false assumptions about what the world one lives in is and about the way others will respond to oneself… Shame over a sudden uncovering of incongruity mounts when what is exposed is inappropriate positive expectation, happy and confident commitment to a world that proves to be alien or nonexistent… Even more than the uncovering of weakness or ineptness, exposure of misplaced confidence can be shameful — happiness, love, anticipation of a response that is not there, something personally momentous received as inconsequential. The greater the expectation, the more acute the shame.
Art from Cephalopod Atlas, the world’s first encyclopedia of deep-sea creatures. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Shame is so difficult to bear because it takes us back to the core vulnerabilities of childhood, that tender need for congruence between the world of our imagination and the real world, the longing for a single world that coheres. Lynd writes:
Basic trust in the personal and in the physical world that surrounds him is the air that the child must breathe if he is to have roots for his own sense of identity and for the related sense of his place in the world. As he gradually differentiates the world of in here from the world of out there he is constantly testing the coherence, continuity, and dependability of both… Expectation and having expectation met are crucial in developing a sense of coherence in the world and in oneself.
Because it is so rooted in our grasp of reality, the shame of having misjudged a situation, misplaced an expectation, miscalculated one’s own merits, is a profound unmooring of the psyche:
What we have thought we could count on in ourselves, and what we have thought to be the boundaries and contours of the world, turn out suddenly not to be the “real” outlines of ourselves or of the world, or those that others accept. We have become strangers in a world where we thought we were at home. We experience anxiety in becoming aware that we cannot trust our answers to the questions Who am I? Where do I belong?
[…]
Because personality is rooted in unconscious and unquestioned trust in one’s immediate world, experiences that shake trusted anticipations and give rise to doubt may be of lasting importance… Shattering of trust in the dependability of one’s immediate world means loss of trust in other persons, who are the transmitters and interpreters of that world. We have relied on the picture of the world they have given us and it has proved mistaken; we have turned for response in what we thought was a relation of mutuality and have found our expectation misinterpreted or distorted; we have opened ourselves in anticipation of a response that was not forthcoming. With every recurrent violation of trust we become again children unsure of ourselves in an alien world.
In the remainder of On Shame and the Search for Identity, Lynd goes on to explore examples of shame and its conciliation across the canon of Western literature, then examines the two natures of shame, what it offers in confronting the tragedy of life, and how to think from parts to wholes. Couple it with Lynd’s contemporary Karen Horney on the conciliation of our inner conflicts, then revisit Ellen Bass’s magnificent poem “How to Apologize.”
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her exquisite manifesto for the magic of real human conversation. Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the mycelial web of invisible connections undergirding our emotional lives — the way “sadness” shares a Latin root with “sated” and originally meant a fulness of experience, the way “holy” shares a Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things.
Because we know their power, we ask of words to hold what we cannot hold — the complexity of experience, the polyphony of voices inside us narrating that experience, the longing for clarity amid the confusion. There is, therefore, singular disorientation to those moments when they fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language turn out too small to contain emotions at once overwhelmingly expansive and acutely specific.
Art by Marc Martin from We Are StarlingsJohn Koenig offers a remedy for this lack in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (public library) — a soulful invitation to “get to work redefining the world around us, until our language more closely matches the reality we experience.”
The title, though beautiful, is misleading — the emotional states Koenig defines are not obscure but, despite their specificity, profoundly relatable and universal; they are not sorrows but emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capacity for affirming the joy of being alive: maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”), apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin”), the wends (“the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations”), anoscetia (“the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'”), dès vu (“the awareness that this moment will become a memory”).
Koenig composites his imaginative etymologies from a multitude of sources: names and places from folklore and pop culture, terms from chemistry and astronomy, the existing lexicon of languages living and dead, from Latin and Ancient Greek to Japanese and Māori. He writes:
In language, all things are possible. Which means that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is too obscure to define. We just have to do it.
[…]
Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.
Art by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the PeopleThere are various words addressing the maddening uncertainty of the two fundamental dimensions of human life: time and love.
ÉNOUEMENT
n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.French énouer, to pluck defective bits from a stretch of cloth + dénouement, the final part of a story, in which all the threads of the plot are drawn together and everything is explained. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”
QUERINOUS
adj. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; wishing there were some way to know ahead of time whether this is the person you’re going to wake up next to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of having to count them out one by one, quietly hoping your streak continues.Mandarin 确认 (quèrèn), confirmation. Twenty thousand days is roughly fifty-five years. Pronounced “kweh-ruh-nuhs.”
There are words that reckon with the challenges of self-knowledge.
AGNOSTHESIA
n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.Ancient Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos), not knowing + διάθεσις (diáthesis), condition, mood. Pronounced “ag-nos-thee-zhuh.”
ZIELSCHMERZ
n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.German Ziel, goal + Schmerz, pain. Pronounced “zeel-shmerts.”
Art by Paloma Valdivia for Pablo Neruda’s Book of QuestionsThere are words that anchor us in both the smallness and the grandeur of existence, its fierce fragility, its devastating beauty; words tasked with holding the hardest truth — that we are children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence, living with only marginal and mostly illusory control over the circumstances of our lives and other people’s choices, forever vulnerable to the accidents of a universe insentient to our hopes.
GALAGOG
n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.From galaxy, a gravitationally bound system of millions of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”
CRAXIS
n. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the process of turning theory into reality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”
SUERZA
n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.Spanish suerte, luck + fuerza, force. Pronounced “soo-wair-zuh.”
MAHPIOHANZIA
n. the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the burden of your own weight, which you’ve been carrying your entire life without a second thought.Lakota mahpiohanzi, “a shadow caused by a cloud.” Pronounced “mah-pee-oh-han-zee-uh.”
Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River?Emerging from the various entries is a reminder, both haunting and comforting, that despite how singular our experience feels, we are all grappling with just about the same core concerns; that our time is short and precious; that all of our confusions are a single question, the best answer to which is love.
Couple The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with Consolations — poet and philosopher David Whyte’s lovely meditations on the deeper meanings of everyday words — then revisit artist Ella Frances Sanders’s illustrated dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world and poet Mary Ruefle’s chromatic taxonomy of sadnesses.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy sighs in The Wizard of Oz. But home is not a place — it is a locus of longing, always haunted by our existential homelessness. “Welcome home!” a cheaply suited broker once exclaimed at me, swinging open the door to a tiny studio as my foot fell on the beige wall-to-wall carpet and my eyes on the two dead roaches embracing in the corner. Between the time I left my family home in Bulgaria in my late teens and the time I settled in Brooklyn in my late twenties, I moved in and out of housing across continents and oceans, cycling through dozens of dwellings. No matter how many books I shelved and how many plants I potted, none ever felt like a home. That took another decade — not because of anything in the house, but because I had finally begun feeling at home in myself.
Other animals don’t anguish with such existential troubles. “They are so placid and self-contain’d,” Whitman wrote. “They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins… Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” From the moment they are born until the moment they die, other animals are entirely at home in their being, for they don’t suffer the tyranny of a self, with all its restless need for expression and actualization. The homes they build — strange and various, baffling and beautiful in their singularity — reflect that purity of being. No ego and no self-image govern the design — only the exquisite genius of evolution, refining the blueprint over eons to make each home a perfect temple for consecrating each creature’s biological destiny.
The wonder, perfection, and diversity of animal dwellings come alive in artist Isabelle Simler’s book Home (public library) — a vibrant catalogue of nature’s creativity: the miraculous courtship cathedral of the satin bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), the “lace citadel” of the cross orbweaver spider (Araneus diadematus), the “silky apartment” of the comet moth (Argema mittrei), the “mossy miniature home” of the hummingbird (Trochilidae), the “cactus cabin” of the world’s smallest owl, the elf owl (Micrathene whitneyi), smaller than a sparrow.
There is emergence incarnate in the termite cathedral, built by millions of blind insects with no leader and no blueprint. There is an affirmation of poet and potter M.C. Potter’s credo that “the creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present” in the case-making caddisfly, housing its larvae in snug cases made of whatever is on hand: bits of wood, grains of sand, shells and pebbles and marine debris stitched together with silk. There is the sheer astonishment of the baya weaver’s nest, meticulously woven from fresh grasses that change color under the sun’s rays.
Nearly a century after Rachel Carson pioneered the then-radical approach of writing about the natural world from the living perspective of each creature, Simler channels each animals’s approach to its home in a short singsong first-person poem.
GRASSY LODGE
of the Eurasian harvest mouse
Micromys minutusMy tail knows each blade of grass
and tethers me safely
as I swing through the air,
a micro-acrobat
dressed in soft skin.
My tangled nest,
woven from grasses,
is shaped like a little ball.
Stem to stalk, stalk to stem,
a bounce or two,
and in between
I rest in my house.PAPIER-MÂCHÉ HOTEL
of the common wasp
Vespula vulgarisI nibble the dry bark,
and with my saliva I mush the wood fibers together.
That’s how I make the paper pulp
that I’ll use to build my palace.
The shades of color vary
depending on the tree
I’ve been chewing.
Inside, everything is well organized.
The hexagonal cells are
neatly spread out,
arranged in circular tiers
held by cardboard pillars.
The lightweight nest
is shrouded
in layers of paper,
and so it remains
at the ideal
temperature.HAUTE COUTURE BEDCHAMBER
of the common tailorbird
Orthotomus sutoriusWith three mango leaves
and the tip of my sharp beak,
I fashion my tailor-made house
at the edge of the forest.
Carrying a blade of grass or thread from a web,
I jab, I sew, I flit here and there.
Stitching straight lines or zigzags,
I hem, I make knots, I chirp and cheep.
Finally, I pad out my home with woolly red fibers,
animal hair, and another chirrup or two.
What emerges is a dazzling testament to naturalist Sy Montgomery’s poetic observation that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom — and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.”
Complement Home with The Blue Hour — Simler’s breathtaking celebration of nature’s rarest color — then revisit the sapiens counterpart to these creaturely dwellings in Carson Ellis’s tender illustrated catalogue of the many kinds of human homes.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”
The great paradox of personhood is that the sum is simpler than its parts. We move through the world as a totality, fragmentary but indivisible, clothed in a costume of personality beneath which roil parts perpetually fighting for power, perpetually yearning for harmony. The person making the choices, the person bearing their consequences, and the person taking responsibility for them are rarely the same person. There is no pain like the pain of watching oneself overtaken by one’s most shameful parts — the chaotic, the compulsive, the ungenerous, the needy, governed by fear and lack, splattering confusion and distress over anyone who comes near.
To live with consciousness is to own all the parts but not be owned by any of them, to choose with clarity and composure which ones to act from. To love fully — oneself, or another — is to accept all the parts and cherish the totality.
D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) captures this with poetic precision in his personal credo, composed in response to the thirteen qualities Benjamin Franklin identified as the wisest parts of personhood — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
D.H. Lawrence“The soul has many motions, many gods come and go,” Franklin had observed in recognition of our composite nature. “Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest.” Lawrence writes in response:
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:
“That I am I.”
“That my soul is a dark forest.”
“That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.”
“That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.”
“That I must have the courage to let them come and go.”
“That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”There is my creed.
Art by the 16th-century Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)It is not easy living with those constant visitations from conflicting gods, each with a different dictate, impelling you toward a different path. What makes it all bearable is seeing this constellation of parts as a part of something greater still — a vast and coherent universe governed by immutable laws and immense forces that vanquish the grandiose smallness of the self and its warring fragments, that render life too great and total a miracle to be met with anything but a resounding “yes yes — please.”
Lawrence channels this perspectival consolation in his 1930 book Apocalypse (public library) — a reflection on The Book of Revelation, composed as he lay dying from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, not yet midway through his forties.
Observing that what we most long for is our “living unison,” he writes:
The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the conciliation of our inner conflicts and Scottish philosopher John Macmurray on the key to wholeness, then revisit Lawrence on the strength of sensitivity and the key to fully living.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives?
Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet.
The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder of reality through science and poetry — occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive.
BUT WE HAD MUSIC
by Maria PopovaRight this minute
across time zones and opinions
people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poemswhile
at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of
four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
of oblivion.Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.I know this.
And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is enoughto stand here
for an irrevocable minute
agape with wonder.It is eternity.
At 7PM EST on April 7, tune into the livestream of the 2024 Universe in Verse, celebrating the science and wonder of eclipses, to hear Nick tell the ecliptic story of marrying the love of his life, alongside a constellation of other dazzling humans bringing to life the science of gravity and relativity, tides and black holes, the formation of the Moon and the chemistry of the Sun, through poems and stories that help us meet reality on its own terms and broaden the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.
Couple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from a previous season of The Universe in Verse, then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It began as an almost inaudible hum…”
I remember singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the choir of the Bulgarian Math Academy as a child. I remember my awe at learning that across centuries of warring nationalisms, this piece of music, based on an old Schiller poem and born of Beethoven’s unimaginable trials, had become the official Hymn of Europe — a bridge of harmony across human divides. I remember wondering as I sang whether music is something we make or something we are made of.
That is what Pythagoras, too, wondered when he laid the foundation of Western music by discovering the mathematics of harmony. Its beauty so staggered him that he thought the entire universe must be governed by it. He called it music of the spheres — the idea that every celestial body produces in its movement a unique hum determined by its orbit.
The word orbit did not exist in his day. It was Kepler who coined it two millennia later, and it was Kepler who resurrected Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in The Harmony of the World — the 1619 book in which he formulated his third and final law of planetary motion, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. For Kepler, this notion of celestial music was not mere metaphor, not just a symbolic organizing principle for the cosmic order — he believed in it literally, believed that the universe is singing, reverberating with music inaudible to human ears but as real as gravity. He died ridiculed for this belief.
Half a millennium after his death, our radio telescopes — those immense prosthetic ears built by centuries of science — detected a low-frequency hum pervading the universe, the product of supermassive black holes colliding in the early universe: Each merging pair sounds a different low note, and all the notes are sounding together into this great cosmic hum. We have heard the universe singing.
To me, this is what makes music so singular — the way it bridges the cosmic and the human, the ephemeral and the eternal. It is at once the most abstract of the arts, made of mathematics, feeling, and time, and the most concrete in its inescapable embodiment — we sing because we have a body, this bittersweet reminder that we are mortal, and we sing to celebrate that we are alive. Alongside love, music may be our best way of saying “yes” to life, and to our life together — I know from the most etymologically passionate person in my life that the Latin root of the word person means “to sound through,” in turn implying a listener: We sound through to something other than ourselves. When we speak, when we sing, when we channel this sound wave of the soul, we reach beyond the self and partake of the great harmonic of belonging.
That harmonic comes alive with uncommon beauty and ecstatic tenderness in Marie Howe’s poem “Hymn.”
Found in her altogether magnificent New and Selected Poems (public library) and animated here by the talented Ohara Hale (who has previously animated Patti Smith reading Rebecca Elson and Joan as Police Woman singing Emily Dickinson), the poem is an “Ode to Joy” for our own time and for the epochs to come, sonorous with what is best in us, sounding through the possible.
HYMN
by Marie HoweIt began as an almost inaudible hum,
low and long for the solar winds
and far dim galaxies,a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,
a song without words for the snow falling,
for snow conceiving snowconceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,
the hum turning again higher — into a riff of ridges
peaks hard as consonants,summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows
the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breakingwaves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:
the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming: some of us rising
as the planet turned into dawn, some lying downas it turned into dark; as each of us rested — another woke, standing
among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;
we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,
in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,
in the mud of the shanty towns, breaking intoharmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we
found our true place singing in a million
million keys the human hymn of praise for everysomething else there is and ever was and will be:
the song growing louder and rising.
(Listen, I too believed it was a dream.)
Complement with Marie Howe’s stunning poem “Singularity,” honoring Stephen Hawking, then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved.”
Love is a giver and a plunderer, the way it both anneals the self and alters it, the way it moors our wholeness and maps our incompleteness. At its heart is the ecstatic, disorienting recognition that our world is unfinished, that by entering the world of the other we broaden and magnify our own, that in the end there is no world — only a flowing exchange of energy, through which we become more entirely ourselves.
In this transformation, we partake of the miraculous.
The pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) explores this miraculous, world-remaking aspect of love in a passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (public library | free ebook) — the 1902 masterwork based on his Gifford Lectures about science, spirituality, and the human search for meaning, which also gave us James on the four features of transcendent experiences.
Falling Star by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884. (Available as a print.)Building on his revolutionary 1884 theory of emotion, James observes that feeling is what gives valence and meaning to experience — without it, “no one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective.” Seeing love as “the most familiar and extreme example of this fact,” he considers its power and its choicelessness:
If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.
Precisely because it lives beyond the reach of reason, love is never attained by willful effort, cannot be bargained for or earned — it is a gift and a miracle that comes unbidden as birdsong, total as a galaxy.
Reflecting on these deepest of human emotions, James writes:
If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts — gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always nonlogical and beyond our control.
The limitations of logic are why we so profoundly fail to imagine what lies on the other side of love’s transformation. The self-limitation of control is the cage of howling loneliness that keeps us from the freedom necessary for love — for love is “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms,” in Octavio Paz’s unforgettable definition. That mysterious aspect of love — unreachable by logic and reason, impervious to will and control — is why our choice in love is largely an illusion, why our slender margin of choice contains only the courage and patience with which we face its trembling uncertainty and choose to love anyway.
Complement with Kahlil Gibran on the courage to weather the uncertainties of love and Christian Wiman on love and the sacred, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention (because, lest we forget, love is “the quality of attention we pay to things.”)
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“A reanimated world is one in which spirit and matter are not just equally regarded but recognized as mutually dependent.”
“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances… that’s what life is all about, that’s its task,” the young Dostoyevsky exulted in a letter to his brother just after his death sentence was repealed — death, that great clarifying force for what it means to be alive, what the stakes and sanctities of living are.
In the two centuries since, our understanding of what it means to be human, to be mortal and imperfect and ablaze with feeling, has altered dramatically as we have entrusted the cold logic of computation with answering the soul’s cry for connection, for creativity, for meaning — something Dostoyevsky’s contemporary Samuel Butler anticipated in his far-seeing admonition against the dehumanization of humanity in the hands of our machines, something that has metastasized in today’s technocratic cult of posthumanism.
In Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age, Glen Slater bridges ecology, depth psychology, systems theory, and various post-Cartesian philosophies to explore how this civilizational cult has effected “a widening divide between fabrication and authenticity, a loss of more self-aware and soulful modes of living, and an increase in anxiety and depression,” and what we can do to rewild the psyche and reclaim the soul.
He begins by drawing an analogy between the catalytic impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on awakening the modern ecological conscience and the need for a conscious awakening from the dangerous dream of posthumanism into which Silicon Valley has lulled us. Just as the industrial capitalism of Carson’s era commodified our planet’s ecosystems and elemental resources, Slater observes that digital capitalism has “turned our habits of mind into the earth’s most valuable commodity”; just as Carson pioneered the holistic view of ecology that may be our only path to saving Earth, her contemporary Carl Jung pioneered the holistic view of psychology that might, just might, save the human soul from death by commodification.
Carl JungSlater writes:
Whether or not we have turned the ecological corner, there is more consciousness about the way we relate to the world around us and the actions required to avert a climate catastrophe.
However, the world within us, the inner life of thought and emotion, is another matter. Here integrative understanding has been resisted. The human psyche, the ecosystem of the mind, with its own structures and dynamics, our relation to which is surely as significant as our relation to the outer world, now faces its own significant disruption, one that essentially parallels the syndrome Carson described… The depths of human nature are becoming harder to recognize and protect. Abundant information has furthered scientific knowledge but not human understanding. It has instead left us dazed, confused, and disoriented. Attention, motivation, identity, self-image, and the capacity to reason clearly and imagine deeply are all impacted… While the advantages of digital technologies are impressed upon us at every turn, the rapid entry of these technologies into every aspect of life is evidently impacting our ecology of mind.
With an eye to the urgency of “moving beyond objectification of the earth and of the bodies and minds that inhabit it,” he adds:
The technosphere now overlays the ecosphere and we cannot help but inhale its post-industrial gases. Virtuality has begun to displace reality, making the ground of human existence hard to discern… The human psyche and the nature of the whole person are not only suffering in this technospheric environment, the suffering has itself been given over to technological solutions, resulting in a vicious cycle.
[…]
The penchant for digital ways of relating, expanding faith in AI, and the one-sided education designed to service these things are combining to generate reductive conceptions of psychological life. We are, in particular, discounting the deeply human… the essential qualities of human experience, which extend from the instinctual patterns that shape basic behavior to the timeless values that mold the cultural imagination. The deeply human anchors the vertical axis of inner understanding; it grounds the ecology of mind. It is also what connects us to the more-than-human. In our era, however, an almost exclusive dedication to a horizontal axis of data gathering threatens this verticality and grounding. This is leading to a world drowning in information and thirsting for understanding.
Primordial Chaos by Hilma af Klint, 1906-1907. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)At the heart of this civilizational crisis is the systemic compartmentalization of our experience, evident in the core polarities and dichotomies of Western culture — past and future, inner and outer, matter and spirit. Pulsating beneath it all is our dissociation from the life of the body, which connects us to the life of the Earth and the life of the universe. Everything beautiful that we touch and see and hear — birdsong, a sunrise, a kiss — is a bittersweet reminder that we have a body and are therefore mortal. Dissociation thrives on the denial of death that began with our ancestors’ mythologies of immortality and is culminating in Silicon Valley’s lurid and lucrative dreams of redesigning human nature, of downloading the mind onto disembodied machines and reducing the soul to a datum.
Pointing to Jung’s timeless cosmogony of the unconscious as the antidote to this damaging delusion, Slater writes:
Jung’s comprehension of the depths of human nature constitutes an incisive counterpoint to the assumptions of posthumanism and to the dissociative bubble that presently fosters these assumptions… Jung sheds light on the self-regulating nature of the psyche and the archetypal forms behind this — forms we may choose to overlook but cannot ultimately dismiss. These forms pertain to brain structure, anatomy, and evolved patterns of perception and behavior. But they also reflect the larger rhythms of the cosmos and are seemingly woven into the fabric of life itself. Jung pointedly demonstrates that even as we have embraced reason and science, the archetypal world of non-rational impulses and religious ideas have continued to unconsciously influence our thoughts and actions.
Jung’s crowning contribution was to invite an understanding of the psyche as the foundation of all perception, experience, thought, feeling, and action — the wellspring of our humanity. In exploring the psychology of the unconscious with all of its interlaced convolutions — archetypes and complexes, projections and introjections — Jung illuminated the way our dreams and fantasies unconsciously shape the course of our lives, the way our arts and sciences cohere into a vast collective unconscious that shapes the course of our civilization. With an eye to Jung’s legacy, Slater writes:
It is the psyche that contains the pursuit of the angelic, the claims of the animal body, and the structures and dynamics that join the two. It is the psyche that generates and insists upon the symbolic expressions of culture, which are often based on the transformative and aspirational power of ordinary, even elemental, things — mountains and rivers, suns and moons, fire and rain — thereby reminding us of the inextricable bond between mind and world. If cosmic matter has given rise to consciousness, and we are now called to grasp the nature of consciousness, realizing that thinking about our thinking is the necessary companion of any exploration and understanding of the universe that surrounds us, our grasp of the inner world becomes just as vital as our grasp on the outer world — perhaps even more so.
Art by Francisco de Holanda, 1573. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Nearly a century after the Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser made his exquisite case for the evolution of consciousness, Slater reflects on Jung’s legacy and writes:
Godlike power necessitates godlike responsibility. This begins with self-awareness, which is rooted in a sober consideration of the human psyche, the most critical part of which is shedding light on the shadow side of our willful pursuits… Will and reason alone cannot form a seat of wise agency — a far more expansive consciousness is required.
[…]
An expansion of consciousness is imperative if we are to make responsible use of the transformative power in our hands… With divine guidance largely beyond our secular vision, we are left to look within for something deeper than our controlling inclinations and to look without to perceive the guidance of nature’s intelligence. Guidance must ultimately come from dialogue with these marginalized sources of knowledge and from the cultural imagination, which shapes this dialogue. The result will be a “co-creation” — a partnership between innovation, self-knowledge, and a cosmology befitting this age. Such a co-creative process will mitigate and shape our technologies as well as generate opportunities for spiritual renewal.
Such co-creation, Slater argues, demands a reanimated view of existence — one that “counters the commodification of all things that is currently consuming us,” one that “conveys a confluence of spirit and matter — the very means by which a sense of soul is generated.” He writes:
A reanimated world is one in which spirit and matter are not just equally regarded but recognized as mutually dependent. The great task of this late modern era is thus to bring together what the spiritual preoccupations of the old world and the material focus of the new world have torn apart. The psyche shows us this dependency whenever a person or group attempts to embrace one without the other, in the way the neglected side begins to rule the unconscious… But the earth process itself suggests we rediscover nature as spirit as well as understand it as matter — nature as presence, intelligence, and root source of inspiration and imagination… Both mind and earth are calling for perspectives capable of marrying these dimensions of reality.
Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)Countering this fragmentation of reality requires, above all, learning to resist our dissociative tendencies and trust our emotions — for, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum observes in her masterwork on the intelligence of the emotions, “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.” Slater considers the building blocks of this self-trust:
Such trust begins with a natural appreciation of emotional intelligence and the guiding potential of this intelligence, which can feel like it emanates from a will of its own. This trust may grow over a long time or it may come as a sudden life-lesson. But few things beyond the contemplation of emotional responses open the door to the deeply human and the awareness of having an inner partner [that] operates apart from conscious, rational direction. To be full of emotion is to be animated by something in spite of ourselves; perhaps this is why we end up regularly conversing with the sadness or anger that grips us. Emotions like these stand in need of negotiation, mollification or perhaps just more attention. Often, when we want to keep moving on, the emotions will not allow it. And sometimes when we would choose to hold back, emotions charge ahead.
Because our emotions are a fundament of our human nature, which is itself a fractal of Nature, they are the raw material for the co-creative process that offers an antidote to the dehumanization of humanity. Slater writes:
We are affected by desire for more satisfying ways of being, outrage about all that is regularly exploited and destroyed, fear of what stresses and overwhelms, and shame about participating in the machinations of it all. To consider the way emotion comes upon us, from a nature we call “ours,” all the while being a branch of Nature itself, calls into question whether these emotions even belong to us or to the sufferings of the world, and we are being directed to feel and respond on its behalf. In other words, our animation may be the world’s way of speaking to us, and thus be an indispensable dimension of the co-creative process. Recognition of the autonomous intelligence of these deep emotional responses may be an invitation to attune ourselves to the presence of the earth’s own intelligence — or intelligences.
It is the psyche that bridges these regions of intelligence, the inner and the outer, the human and the cosmic, death and life. Slater writes:
The psyche, which is obviously grounded in nature, also leads us beyond this ground, into a concern with destiny and leaving some trace of ourselves in service to humanity… We neither have to lean on notions of a spirit that literally departs the body, nor on fantasies of downloading our minds. Rather, we accept that the substance of psychic experience, accumulated over a lifetime, marks everything we do and everyone around us. And such a marking can be dreamed on. Life and death thus intertwine to produce defining qualities of being.
Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.In a passage evocative of James Baldwin’s soulful insistence that “it is necessary… to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light,” and that “everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” Slater adds:
The wonder of psychological life is that this dimming of the ego-light allows the perception of another light, one that has been in the background all along… Posthumanism brightens the ego-light, the light of the intellect and will that blankets the light of natural consciousness the wise ape presents to us. It fails to reconcile our spiritual reach and our instinctual ground. It cracks cultural vessels that have always incubated this reconciliation and truncates rather than extends the human experiment.
Lensing Jung’s legacy through the light of thinkers as varied as Hannah Arendt, William James, Yuval Harari, and Oliver Sacks, Slater goes on to explore and celebrate the countercultural movement in the margins of this techno-trance — ways of seeing and of being that, unlike posthumanism, refuse to exclude beauty, eros, and transcendence from the human story, a story told in the language of the soul, irreducible to data. Complement Jung vs Borg with Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality, James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on bridging the scientific and the sacred, then revisit Jung himself on the most important paradigm for living.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment — a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself as projections give way to presence and complexes are composted into candid relation.
In his slender and splendid book Twice Alive (public library), poet, geologist, and translator Forrest Gander draws from the natural world a poetic “ecology of intimacies,” reverencing lichens’ “supreme parsimony in drought” and the “long soft sarongs of moss” as a way “to recover the play of life itself.”
An epoch after Beatrix Potter uncovered how lichens reproduce — asexually, scattering living matter from both partners to colonize a new habitat — Gander considers the “theoretical immortality” of such propagation and reflects:
The thought of two things that merge, mutually altering each other, two things that, intermingled and interactive, become one thing that does not age, brings me to think of the nature of intimacy. Isn’t it often in our most intimate relations that we come to realize that our identity, all identity, is combinatory?
I think of Einstein, who considered “combinatory play” the essence of creativity; I think of how love may be the supreme creative act, the way it remakes the self and the world between selves.
Art from The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel SilversteinIn one of the love poems anchoring the books, Gander considers how in such combinatorics of intimacy the partners are “not fused, not bonded, but nested.” Echoing the defiant question Mary McCarthy posed to Hannah Arendt — What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were? — he writes:
The reconfiguration is instantaneous
experience. It is being
itself. But whose being now? Was I
endowed with some special pliability so
that becoming part of you I didn’t pass
through my own nihilation? And what
does the death of who-you-were mean to me
except that now you are present, constantly.[…]
Without you I survived and with you
I live again in a radical augmentation
of identity because we have
effaced our outer limits, because
we summoned each other. In you,
I cast my life beyond itself.
This radical augmentation of the self is indeed the great recompense of intimacy, not only interpersonal but ecological — how organisms entwine with one another to become a system of interdependence greater and more fully alive than its parts, how grasping this new way of being requires a new way of seeing. Gander writes in another poem:
To see what’s there and not already
patterned by familiarity — for an unpredicted
whole is there, casting a pair of shadows, manipulating
its material, advancing, assembling enough
kinship that we call it life, our life, what
is already many lives, the dimensions of
its magnitude veiled to us as we live it —
Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin’s poem “Kinship” and Shel Silverstein’s timeless illustrated parable about the secret to nurturing relationships, then revisit this meditation on lichens and the meaning of life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.
I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
This, of course, is what life evolved to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the cold dark silence of an indifferent cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Every living thing is its singer and its steward — something the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with uncommon poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in his altogether magnificent posthumous collection The Star Thrower (public library).
Raven by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert MacfarlaneEiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:
Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.
Couple with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the warblers and the wonder of being.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself.”
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Whitman, who called himself a kosmos and believed of “the true poems” that “whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars.”
Shortly after Whitman returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, when quantum mechanics made it impossible to take seriously the image of the atom as a miniature solar system of electrons orbiting a nucleus but no one yet knew what image to replace it with, quantum pioneer Niels Bohr told quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg:
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Another half century later, after we had split the atom and split the world, James Baldwin insisted that poets are “the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” And if the truth, the elemental truth, is that we are matter yearning for meaning — “atoms with consciousness,” in the poetic words of the physicist Richard Feynman — then poetry, this supreme instrument of self-knowledge, is the mirror consciousness holds to the cosmos.
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)That is what poet, translator, and Chinese literature scholar David Hinton explores in Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry (public library) — an inquiry into poetry as spiritual practice, lensed through the life of Tu Fu: a man of uncommon depth and breadth of spirit, who lived as an impoverished wanderer through a civil war in the eighth century to become China’s greatest poet.
With an eye to poetry as the language of silence and a portal to unselfing, Hinton writes:
Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space. But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities — for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive than that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself. At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself — and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.
Epochs before the poet John Milton introduced the word space into the English lexicon to connote the cosmic expanse, ancient Chinese poets were reckoning with the relationship between the cosmos and the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrow that Taoists placed at the heart of human experience. Hinton writes:
Although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn’t describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them — though perhaps here existence is a better word than Cosmos, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue. This existence-tissue is the central concern of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (sixth century B.C.E.) — the seminal work in Taoism, the spiritual branch of Chinese philosophy that eventually evolved into Ch’an Buddhism. Lao Tzu called that existence-tissue Tao, which originally meant “Way,” as in a road or pathway. But Lao Tzu used it to describe the empirical Cosmos as a single living tissue that is inexplicably generative… an ontological pathway by which things emerge from the existence-tissue as distinct forms, evolve through their lives, and then vanish back into that tissue, only to be transformed and reemerge in new forms. It is a majestic and nurturing Cosmos, but also a refugee Cosmos: all change and transformation, each of the ten thousand things in perpetual flight, always on its way somewhere else.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)It is precisely because we are pilgrims of mortality that we so long for refuge and belonging, for something to balance the presence that we are with the void out of which we came and into which we will return. Hinton writes:
The abiding aspiration of spiritual and artistic practice in ancient China was to cultivate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself: looking at itself, hearing and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and also thinking itself, feeling itself — all in the singular ways made possible by the individuality of each particular person. This is consciousness in the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging.
[…]
At its deepest level, the tissue of Tao is described by that cosmology in terms of two fundamental elements: Absence (無) and Presence (有). Presence is simply the empirical universe, the ten thousand things in constant transformation, and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges. And so, Tao is the generative process through which all things arise and pass away — Absence burgeoning forth into the great transformation of Presence… The concepts of Absence and Presence are simply an approach to the fundamental nature of things. In the end, of course, they are the same: Presence grows out of and returns to Absence and is therefore always a manifestation of it. Or to state it more precisely, Absence and Presence are simply different ways of seeing Tao: either as a single formless tissue that is somehow always generative, or as that tissue in its ten thousand distinct and always changing forms.
We now know this to be not only a spiritual truth but a scientific fact — an equation written into the physics and chemistry of what happens when we die. Poetry, too, plays with this equivalence of absence and presence. Because it “articulates the emptiness surrounding the words,” Hinton observes, it “infuses everyday experience with that generative tissue of emptiness” and, in doing so, reveals enlightenment as the basic fabric of our existence in “a vast and indifferent Cosmos, a Cosmos that is in the end impervious to our attempts at wisdom.” He reflects:
A poem is not simply about its apparent content — the particular life-experience described in the poem — as it seems from the perspective of our own cultural assumptions, which is the view we see in a translation of such a poem. It is, instead, about the emptiness surrounding it, each poem revealing that emptiness in a singular way. And what is that emptiness? It is, finally, the wild existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself in the form of human consciousness.
Art by Olivier Tallec from This Is a Poem that Heals Fish — a tender French picture-book about how poetry works its magic on usNearly a century after the titanic poet Muriel Rukeyser observed that “however confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole,” Hinton adds:
However confused and unenlightened our lives may seem, however blind to that everyday enlightenment we may be — we are always already wild consciousness in the open, always already the Cosmos aware of itself, awakened to itself.
[…]
This awakening is the nature of everyday experience, the very fabric of our lives, for in the actual moment of pure perception, there is no self involved. If we look closely at what happens in consciousness, we find nothing more than the perceptual experience itself. It is only upon reflection afterward that we describe it as an “I” hearing — a description dictated not by experience itself, but by a body of philosophical assumptions.
Lao Tzu himself captured this as one of the many paradoxes the Tao Te Ching invites into consciousness:
If you aren’t free of yourself
how will you ever become yourself?Give up self-reflection
and you’re soon enlightened.
Give up self-definition
and you’re soon apparent.Knowing not-knowing is lofty.
Not knowing not-knowing is affliction.The Tao of heaven…
never speaks
and so answers perfectly.
In the remainder of Awakened Cosmos, Hinton leans on Tu Fu’s finest poems to examine the fundaments of memory and identity, the role of generative emptiness in creativity, the way language both limits and liberates our consciousness, and how we make meaning in a meaningless universe. Complement it with a poem about our cosmic destiny and non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson’s “Center of the Universe,” then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent more-than-translation of the Tao Te Ching.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.”
“We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything we know about the nature of the universe that the experience of freedom — which is different from the fact of freedom — is fundamental to our humanity; it is precisely because we were forged by these impartial forces, these handmaidens of chance, that our choices — which always have a moral valence — give meaning to reality.
Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944. (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive.)Arendt’s rigorously reasoned, boundlessly mobilizing defiance of helplessness and “the stubborn humanity of her fierce and complex creativity” come abloom in We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (public library) — Lyndsey Stonebridge’s erudite and passionate celebration of what Arendt modeled for generations and goes on modeling for us: “determined and splendid goodwill, refusing to accept the compromised terms upon which modern freedom is offered and holding out for something new.”
Stonebridge, who has been studying Arendt for three decades, writes:
Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.
[…]
She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.
She too lived in a “post-truth era,” she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind.
Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.In consonance with George Saunders’s lovely case for the courage of uncertainty and his insistence that possibility is a matter of trying to “remain permanently confused,” Stonebridge writes:
Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.
Having “escaped from the black heart of fascist Europe and its crumbling nation states,” having witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and the rise of totalitarian regimes around the world, Arendt never stopped thinking and writing about what it means to be human — an example of what she considered the “unanswerable questions” feeding our “capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
Celebrating Arendt as a “conservationist” who “traveled back into the traditions of political and philosophical thought in search of new creative pathways to the present,” Stonebridge reflects:
Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point. How can we think straight amidst cynicism and mendacity? What is there left to love, to cherish, to fight for? How can we act to best secure it? What fences and bridges do we need to build to protect freedom and which walls do we need to destroy?
In my own longtime immersion in Arendt’s world, I have often shuddered at how perfectly her indictment of political oppression applies to the tyranny of consumerist society, although Arendt did not overtly address that. In this passage from Stonebridge, one could easily replace “Nazism,” “totalitarianism,” and “the Holocaust” with “late-stage capitalism” and feel the same sting of truth:
Nazism was undoubtedly tyrannical, and self-evidently fascist in its gray-black glamour, racist mythology, and disregard for the rule of law. However, Arendt argued that modern dictatorship had an important new feature. Its power reached everywhere: not a person, an institution, a mind, or a private dream was left untouched. It squeezed people together, crushing out spaces for thought, spontaneity, creativity — defiance. Totalitarianism was not just a new system of oppression, it seemed to have altered the texture of human experience itself.
[…]
The moral obscenity of the Holocaust had to be recognized, put on trial, grieved, and addressed. But it could not be made right with existing methods and ideologies… You cannot simply will this evil off the face of the earth with a few good ideas, let alone with the old ones that allowed it to flourish in the first place. You have to start anew.
One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)This belief that “we are free to change the world and to start something new in it” animated Arendt’s life — a freedom she located not in what she termed reckless optimism (the divested shadow side of Rebecca Solnit’s notion of hope as an act of defiance), but in action as the crux of the pursuit of happiness — what Stonebridge so astutely perceives as “the determination to exist as a fully living and thinking person in a world among others.” She writes:
Freedom cannot be forced; it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it.
Echoing Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” she adds:
Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human condition.
Couple We Are Free to Change the World — a superb read in its entirety — with James Baldwin on the paradox of freedom, John O’Donohue on the transcendent terror of new beginnings, and Bertrand Russell on the key to a free mind, then revisit Arendt on how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world, the power of being an outsider, and what forgiveness really means.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review.
A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know.
Clouds are almost as old as this world, born when primordial volcanos first exhaled the chemistry of the molten planet into the sky, but their science is younger than the steam engine. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, still in his twenties, noticed that clouds form in particular shapes under particular conditions. He set out to devise a classification system modeled on the newly popular Linnaean taxonomy of the living world, naming the three main classes cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, then braiding them into various sub-taxonomies.
When a German translation reached Goethe, the polymathic poet with a passion for morphology was so inspired that he sent fan mail to the young man who “distinguished cloud from cloud,” then composed a suite of verses for each of the main classes. It was Goethe’s poetry, translating the lexicon of an obscure science into the language of wonder, that popularized the cloud names we use today.
Rachel Carson, 1951A century and a half later, six years before Rachel Carson awakened the modern ecological conscience with her book Silent Spring and four years after The Sea Around Us earned her the National Book Award as “a work of scientific accuracy presented with poetic imagination,” the television program Omnibus approached her to write “something about the sky,” in response to a request from a young viewer.
This became the title of the segment that aired on March 11, 1956 — a soulful serenade to the science of the clouds, emanating Carson’s ethos that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.”
Although celebrated for her books about the sea, Carson’s literary career had begun in the sky. She was only eleven when her story “A Battle in the Clouds” — a tale inspired by her brother’s time in the Army Air Service during World War I — was published in the popular young people’s magazine St. Nicholas, where the early writings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and E. E. Cummings also appeared. Despite her family’s meager means — a neighbor would recall stopping by at dinnertime and finding the Carsons gathered around a single bowl of apples — she enrolled in a women’s college aided by a $100 scholarship from a state competition, intent on studying literature at a time when fewer than four percent of women graduated from a four-year university.
And then, the way all great transformations slip in through the backdoor of the mansion of our plans, her life took a turn that shaped her future and the history of literature.
To meet the college science requirement she had put off for a year, Carson took an introductory biology course. She found herself enchanted by both the subject and its teacher: Miss Mary Scott Skinker, who wore miniskirts, taught cutting-edge disciplines like genetics and microbiology, and gave enthralling lectures on evolution and natural history that awakened in her students an awareness of the interdependence of life that would never leave Carson. By nineteen, she had changed her major to biology. But she never lost her love of literature. “I have always wanted to write,” Carson told her lab partner late one night. “Biology has given me something to write about.” She was also writing poetry, submitting it to various magazines, receiving rejection slip after rejection slip.
Somewhere along the way, as she followed in Skinker’s footsteps to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Observatory, then worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writing reports her boss deemed far too lyrical for a government publication and encouraged her to submit to The Atlantic Monthly, Carson realized that poetry lives in innumerable guises beyond verse, that the task of science is to discover the “wonder and beauty and majesty” inherent in nature. A lifetime later, she would rise from the table she shared with the poet Marianne Moore to receive her National Book Award with these words:
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction; it seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
If there was poetry in her writing, Carson believed, it was not because she “deliberately put it there” but because no one could write truthfully about nature “and leave out the poetry.”
It was a radical idea — that truth and beauty are not in rivalry but in reciprocity, that to write about science with feeling is not to diminish its authority but to deepen it. Rachel Carson was modeling a new possibility for generations of writers to come, blurring the line between where science ends and poetry begins in the work of wonder.
That was the ethos she took to “the writing of the wind on the sky,” detailing the science of each of the main cloud classes and celebrating them as “the cosmic symbols of a process without which life itself could not exist on earth.”
After coming upon fragments of Carson’s long-lost television script via Orion magazine, the artist Nikki McClure — who, like Carson, grew up in nature, worked for a while at the Department of Ecology, and finds daily delight in watching birds under the cedar canopy by her home — was moved to track down the complete original and bring it to life in lyrical illustrations: Something About the Sky (public library) was born.
Known for her singular cut-paper art, with its stark contrasts and sharp contours, she embraced the creative challenge of finding a whole new technique for channeling the softness of the sky. Using paper from a long-ago trip to Japan and sumi ink she freely applied with brushes, she let the gentle work of gravity and fluid dynamics pool and fade the mostly blue and black hues into textured layers — a process of “possibility and chance.” Then, as she recounts in an illustrator’s note at the back of the book, she “cut images with the paper, not just from it”: “The paper and I had a conversation about what might happen.”
What emerges is a tender visual poem, as boldly defiant of category as Carson’s writing.
Although Carson never wrote explicitly for children, she wrote in the language of children: wonder. Among the boxes of fan mail at the Beinecke is a letter from a geology professor who, after comparing her to Goethe, told her how enthralled his eight-year-old son was with her words.
Less than a year after Something about the Sky aired, Carson adopted her twice-orphaned grand-nephew Roger — the small boy romping across McClure’s illustrations. In what began as an article for Woman’s Home Companion and was later expanded into the posthumously published book The Sense of Wonder, she wrote:
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
Couple Something About the Sky with the animated story of how the clouds got their names, then revisit Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work and the ocean and the meaning of life.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.”
The price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening, the losses from lacerating, the galaxies from drifting apart.
Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the living flesh of is, sharp with sorrow, savage with self-blame — may be the supreme suffering of which we are capable. It poisons the entire system of being, for it feeds on the substance we are made of — time, entropic and irretrievable. It tugs at our yearning for, in James Baldwin’s perfect words, “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error” and stings with the reminder that eventually “one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”
Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the BirdThere is, therefore, no mightier spell against unhappiness than moving through the present in a way that preempts regret in the future — with integrity, with humility, with wholeheartedness.
That is what George Saunders reckons with in some lovely passages from his prophetic 2007 essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (public library).
In one of those tangents that give the essay form its fractal splendor, he writes:
You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away… That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?
[…]
At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.
In a sentiment he would later deepen in his moving 2013 Syracuse commencement address, he adds:
So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?
My mind, my limited mind.
The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.
In a wonderful aside from another essay, he offers what may be the best recipe for breaking out of the mind’s recursive and limiting stories:
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
Couple with artist Maira Kalman’s illustrated meditation on how to find joy on the other side of remorse and Ellen Bass’s superb poem “How to Apologize,” then revisit George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It is likely that fungi have been manipulating animal minds for much of the time that there have been minds to manipulate.”
“The mind is its own place,” Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” While this is psychologically true — the mind is, after all, how consciousness renders reality — it is not always physiologically true: The brain and body out of which the mind arises are a physical system, contiguous with every physical force and process that touches it, permeable to myriad invasions and reconfigurations that alter the system and thus transform the mind into a wholly different place.
Nowhere is this haunting vulnerability to transformation starker than in the case of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and the mind of the carpenter ant, challenging our most elemental intuitions about agency, about autonomy, about what a self is.
Part of a group known as “zombie fungi,” Ophiocordyceps hijacks an insect, driving it to disperse the fungus’s spores at the price of its own life. In his altogether fascinating book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (public library), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake details this sinister puppet show of biochemistry:
Once infected by the fungus, ants are stripped of their instinctive fear of heights, leave the relative safety of their nests, and climb up the nearest plant — a syndrome known as “summit disease.” In due course the fungus forces the ant to clamp its jaws around the plant in a “death grip.” Mycelium grows from the ant’s feet and stitches them to the plant’s surface. The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below. If the spores miss their targets, they produce secondary sticky spores that extend outward on threads that act like trip wires.
Zombie fungi control the behavior of their insect hosts with exquisite precision. Ophiocordyceps compels ants to perform the death grip in a zone with just the right temperature and humidity to allow the fungus to fruit: a height of twenty-five centimeters above the forest floor. The fungus orients ants according to the direction of the sun, and infected ants bite in synchrony, at noon. They don’t bite any old spot on the leaf’s underside. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the ants clamp onto a major vein.
Because the marks left on leaf veins by these death-bites are so distinct, evidence of them can be found in the fossil record as far back as the Eocene, nearly fifty million years ago — the dawn of modern fauna, a time when forests covered the Earth from pole to pole. Sheldrake reflects:
It is likely that fungi have been manipulating animal minds for much of the time that there have been minds to manipulate.
Art by Moomins creator Tove Jansson for a rare 1966 edition of Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandBut unlike the mind-controlling parasite that drives wasps to abandon their colonies, Ophiocordyceps seems to manipulate the mind through the backdoor of the body: Research indicates that the fungus may not have a physical presence in the ant’s brain, instead secreting chemicals that activate the ant’s muscles and steer its central nervous system (which we now know is the evolutionary underpinning of consciousness).
Couple with the new science of how fungi are altering human minds, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent meditation on how the relationship between a jellyfish and a sea slug illuminates the mystery of the self.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life and tore from its body our only satellite with its miraculous proportions that render randomness too small a word — exactly 400 times smaller than the Sun and exactly 400 times closer to Earth, so that each time it passes between the two, the Moon covers the face of our star perfectly, thrusting us into midday night: the rare wonder of a total solar eclipse.
It is impossible to know this and not see the miraculous in its nightly light.
One of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. (Available as a print.)Moonlight transforms the landscapes of daytime, dusts them with the numinous.
“The sky was a strange royal-blue with all but the brightest stars quenched, while on either side the mountains were transformed into silver barricades, as their quartz surfaces reflected the moonlight,” Dervla Murphy wrote in Pakistan.
“We found many pleasures for the eye and the intellect… in the play of intense silvery moonlight over the mountainous seas of ice,” Frederick Cook wrote in Antarctica.
“All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself,” Rockwell Kent wrote in Alaska.
I remember being small and lonely, those infinite summers in the mountains of Bulgaria, waiting for nightfall, waiting for the Moon to cast its soft light upon the sharp edges of tomorrow and give the bygone day something of the eternal.
Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Moonlight transforms the landscapes of the soul: It transported Leonard Cohen to where the good songs come from; Sylvia Plath found in it a haunting lens on the darkness of the mind; for Toni Morrison, loving moonlight was a measure of freedom; for Virginia Woolf, it was a magnifying lens for love as she beckoned her lover Vita to “dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight.”
I have encountered no more beautiful account of this dual transformation than a passage from Watership Down (public library) — the marvelous 1973 novel that began with a story Richard Adams dreamt up to entertain his two young daughters on a long car journey. Nested midway through his allegorical adventure tale of rabbits is Adams’s serenade to moonlight:
The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air… We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight.
Winter Moon at Toyamagahara by Hasui Kawase, 1931. (Available as a print.)Adams exults in moonlight as one of those unbidden graces that give ordinary life a “singular and marvelous quality” — a grace that didn’t have to exist and is in this sense unnecessary, like many of the loveliest things in life, which C.S. Lewis captured in asserting that “friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself [and] has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
A century after Walt Whitman exulted that the Moon “commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands,” Adams writes:
Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse’s mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers.
Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens by Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1888/1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)These passages from Watership Down reminded me of a kindred reverie Aldous Huxley composed half a century before Adams in his music-inspired meditation on the universe and our place in it, contemplating the Moon as a mirror not of the Sun but of the soul. In a splendid counterpart to Paul Goodman’s spiritual taxonomy of silence, Huxley offers a spiritual taxonomy of moonlight:
The moon is a stone; but it is a highly numinous stone. Or, to be more precise, it is a stone about which and because of which men and women have numinous feelings. Thus, there is a soft moonlight that can give us the peace that passes understanding. There is a moonlight that inspires a kind of awe. There is a cold and austere moonlight that tells the soul of its loneliness and desperate isolation, its insignificance or its uncleanness. There is an amorous moonlight prompting to love — to love not only for an individual but sometimes even for the whole universe.
Phases of the Moon by the self-taught 17th-century artist and astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart. (Available as a print.)Complement with the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, which changed our relationship to the universe, then savor this lovely picture-book about the Moon.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
"Human lives... are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence... into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life."
After breaking out of timidity with “Spell Against Indifference,” an offering of another poem — this one inspired by a lovely piece of science news that touched me with its sonorous existential echoes.
THE HALF-LIFE OF HOPE
by Maria PopovaWalking beneath the concrete canopy
of Manhattan
I find myself thinking about
Charles B. Kaufmann
who
just after the end
of the Second World War
invented bird spikes
who
thought it a fine idea
to fang the roofs
of hospitals and banks,
to weaponize the libraries
to keep the thing with feathers
from perching on our homes
to keep the angels
from alighting.Twenty bird generations later
atop a maple tree
outside a hospital in Belgium
a magpie has heisted
a thousand metal spikes
to make of them
a nest
to sing from it
the requiem
of the saved.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing just before the Little Prince sighed his timeless sigh: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
No one has written about what it takes to see — and how to do the looking — more poignantly than Jacques Lusseyran (September 19, 1924–July 27, 1971) in his stirring memoir And There Was Light (public library).
Looking back on his blissful early childhood, Lusseyran recounts his formative enchantment with the world:
Light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour… flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left. This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.
There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.
Art by Ping Zhu from The Snail with the Right Heart by Maria PopovaNightfall didn’t end the spell of the light, for he felt it in the very fabric of being:
Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.
And then, one May morning when he was seven, the light of the world went out — a classroom scuffle ended in a violent fall onto the corner of the teacher’s desk, leaving Lusseyran completely blind.
Somehow, he adapted, guided by the light within and by the discovery that the light without is a kind of vibration can we feel whenever we assume “the attitude of tender attention” — a vibration that reveals the world, its materiality and its mystery:
Objects do not stand at a given point, fixed there, confined in one form. They are alive, even the stones. What is more they vibrate and tremble. My fingers felt the pulsation distinctly, and if they failed to answer with a pulsation of their own, the fingers immediately became helpless and lost their sense of touch. But when they went toward things, in sympathetic vibration with them, they recognized them right away… Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead.
In a passage evocative of Virginia Woolf’s transcendent epiphany about the oneness of the world, he adds:
If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers which were heavy. I didn’t even know whether I was touching it or it was touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me. And that was how I came to understand the existence of things.
[…]
The reality — the oneness of the world — left me in the lurch, incapable of explaining it, because it seemed obvious. I could only repeat: “There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew UpLusseyran was still a teenager when, unnerved by Hitler’s rise to power, he set out to teach himself German in order to understand the menacing radio broadcasts. In 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of France, he formed a resistance group and began publishing an underground newspaper that soon became the voice of the French freedom fighters. He was seventeen.
Two months before his nineteenth birthday, Lusseyran was betrayed by a member of the resistance, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. For six months, he was kept in “a space four feet long and three feet wide, with walls like a medieval fortress, door three fingers thick with a peephole through which the jailers watched day and night, and a sealed window.” But his bright spirit remained undimmed — devoted to stirring the spirit of resistance among the thousands of inmates, he came to see the place not as a prison but as “a church underground.” He would recount:
The mechanism of hope in our hearts must have a thousand springs, almost all of them unknown to us.
Jacques LusseyranWhen liberation finally came two years later, Lusseyran was one of thirty inmates to leave the camp alive. Looking back on how he survived the unsurvivable, he returns to the lifeline of the light and the radiance of what the poet Muriel Rukeyser called “the living moment… in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” Aliveness, he intimates, is a matter of our receptivity to light, which is the quality of attention we pay the world — no matter our circumstance:
When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.
And There Was Light is a remarkable read in its entirety. Complement it with Viktor Frankl, shortly after his release from the concentration camps, on life’s deepest source of meaning, then revisit Rebecca Elson’s poetic love letter to the light of the universe.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In May 1941, next to news of the Nazi savagely bombing London, The Los Angeles Times published a memorial profile of “California’s Mother of Gardens” — a hopeful antidote to the undoing of the human world, celebrating the woman who covered Southern California with the loveliest trees and flowers, having made a life at the crossing point of nature’s capacity for beauty and human nature’s capacity for delight.
Kate Sessions in her 20sAfter becoming the first woman to earn a degree in science from Berkeley in 1881, Kate Sessions (November 8, 1857–March 24, 1940) took a job teaching mathematics at a San Diego public school. It was a shock to leave the redwoods for what appeared to her a desert landscape — plants had always been her great love: She had spent her childhood climbing trees and filling her herbarium with wildflowers; as a teenager, she had made an art of elaborate flower arrangements; as a young scientist, she had reveled in the dazzling molecular structure of trees under her microscope. Restless to do something about the dearth of greenery in her new home, she launched her own nursery and flower shop.
But then she dreamt bigger.
Just before her thirty-fifth birthday, Kate persuaded the city of San Diego to let her lease a 30-acre piece of barren public land to use as growing grounds. In exchange, she grew 100 new trees in it each year and gave another 300 to be planted along the city’s streets, around its plazas, in its public school yards. Soon, San Diego was covered in pine, oak, elm, cypress, eucalyptus, and pepper trees.
People rushed to her nursery to populate their own gardens with beauty. Vivacious and warmhearted, clad in her practical working clothes, Kate greeted visitors with a hug and led them through garden — across the miniature meadow of mesembryanthemums the colors of the rainbow, under the fragrant Australian eucalyptus trees never previously seen in California, past the rare heathers from South Africa — excited to show them “the latest plant pet,” as one friend recalled.
Auriculas from The Temple of Flora, 1812. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)She traveled up and down the California coast, searching for beautiful overlooked plants that could thrive in a drought-prone climate, which she cultivated in her nursery and shared with the community. Soon, gardeners all across Southern California were walking through their backyard wonderlands, lovingly touching their proudest plants and saying, “Kate Sessions gave me that.”
In the interlude between the two World Wars, Kate set out to learn about the world’s plants. She traveled to Hawaii and the Alps, drank in the “warm though bracing air and the wonderful blue of the Mediterranean” and admired the cypress-covered mountains of Italy “silvering with lichens on the rugged rocks,” visited the majestic gardens of Versailles and a tiny nursery on the shore of Lake Geneva, a stone’s throw from where Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein.
Kate returned from her expedition with 140 new species, among them the purple-blooming tree now so iconic of Southern California — the beloved Jacaranda mimosifolia, also known as fern tree, which for forty million springs has been gracing sub-tropical South America with its ravishing blossoms.
Jacaranda from a French botany book, 1822. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Throughout her life, Kate corresponded tirelessly with other horticulturalists, hosted tree-planting parties, and wrote hundreds of magazine articles and papers — notes from her foreign expeditions, reports from flower shows, meticulous growing tips for particular plants, from wisteria to Chilean jasmine.
She never married. Her life was animated by her relationship with the Canadian horticulturalist Alice Eastwood, rooted in their shared love of flowers: “our children,” Kate told Alice, “which I am growing and you are naming.”
Kate Sessions in her 40sWhen San Diego declared September 15 Kate Sessions Day, celebrating her botanical makeover of the city, she responded simply:
I didn’t do it. It was the plants that did it.
Complement her story with that of the Victorian visionary Marianne North, who traveled the world at the risk of her life to revolutionize art and science with her botanical paintings, then revisit this centuries-wide meditation on flowers and the meaning of life and this posy of poems celebrating the delights of gardening.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”
One of the most menacing things about depression is its elasticity — its way of suddenly receding, swinging open a window of light, only to return just as suddenly with redoubled darkness, just when life has begun to feel livable again, even beautiful.
On September 16, 1962, a voice unspooled from the BBC airwaves carrying an emblem of that cruel elasticity.
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) — who spent her life living with the darkness and making light of the barely bearable lightness of being, until she could no more — had composed the poem a year earlier, shortly after moving to a quiet market village in Devon. For the first time, she had a room of her own to write in. “My whole spirit has expanded immensely,” she wrote to her mother as she filled the house with “great peachy-colored gladiolas, hot red & orange & yellow zinnias” from the garden, that great living poem.
Within a month, in the fading autumn light, her spirit had begun contracting again in the grip of the familiar darkness. One night, unable to sleep, she tried a meditative writing exercise: to simply describe what she saw in the Gothic churchyard outside her window. That exercise became one of her finest poems and one of the most poignant portraits of depression in the history of literature.
Found in Plath’s indispensable Collected Poems (public library), it comes alive with uncommon poignancy in Patti Smith’s planetary voice — one of her regular poetry readings from her online journal.
THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE
by Sylvia PlathThis is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness —
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.
Complement with Jane Kenyon’s magnificent poem about living to the other side of depression and Galway Kinnell’s lifeline for the darkest hour, then revisit Zoë Keating reading Plath’s “Mushrooms,” Meryl Streep reading her “Morning Song,” the poet herself reading “Tulips,” and Patti Smith reading Emily Dickinson.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden. No wonder Emily Dickinson spent her life believing that “to be Flower, is profound Responsibility.” No wonder Virginia Woolf had her epiphany about what it means to be an artist in the garden.
The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them (public library). Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”
Dahlias by cyanotype artist Rosalind Hobley.Punctuating some of the loveliest poetic voices of our time are a handful of classics — Keats’s ode to autumn, a yawp of wildness from Whitman’s Song of Myself, Lucille Clifton’s spare, stunning “cutting greens” — and a miniature modern counterpart to the vintage gem John Keats’s Porridge: Favorite Recipes of American Poets: garden-grown delicacies like Jane Hirshfield’s braised fava beans, Ashley M. Jones’s glazed carrots, and Ellen Bass’s melon and cucumber gazpacho with basil oil.
In the garden, the poets find consolation for grief, connection to the cosmic compost that made us, consecration of our finitude and of the infinite in us — for “the gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”
Mostly, they find vitality, find reassurance, find reasons for rejoicing in the aliveness of life. Again and again, the most exultant of poetic forms rises from the page like a sun: There is an ode to the tulip and to the turnip, to fennel and to its cousin the carrot, that kindest of vegetables, and not one but two odes to garlic — but no ode more splendid than that to the peach by Ellen Bass, uncommon poet of perspective.
Gilded peach from Peach Culture by James Alexander Fulton, 1882. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
ODE TO THE FIRST PEACH
by Ellen BassOnly one insect has feasted here —
a clear stub of resin
plugs the scar. And the hollow
where the stem was severed
shines with juice.
The fur still silvered
like a caul. Even
in the next minute,
the hairs will darken,
turn more golden in my palm.
Heavier, this flesh,
than you would imagine,
like the sudden
weight of a newborn.
Oh what a marriage
of citron and blush!
It could be a planet
reflected through a hall
of mirrors. Or
what a swan becomes
when a fairy shoots it
from the sky at dawn.At the beginning of the world,
when the first dense pith
was ravished and the stars
were not yet lustrous
coins fallen from the
pockets of night,
who could have dreamed
this would be curried
from the chaos?
Scent of morning and sugar,
bruise and hunger.
Silent, swollen, clefted life,
remnant always remaking itself
out of that first flaming ripeness.
With her Buddhist training and her singular sensitivity to the elemental in us, Jane Hirshfield considers the meaning of faith:
NOVEMBER, REMEMBERING VOLTAIRE
by Jane HirshfieldIn the evenings
I scrape my fingernails clean,
hunt through old catalogues for new seed,
oil workboots and shears.
This garden is no metaphor —
more a task that swallows you into itself,
earth using, as always, everything it can.
I lend myself to unpromising winter dirt
with leaf-mold and bulb,
plant into the oncoming cold.
Not that I ever thought
the philosopher meant to be taken literally,
but with no invented God overhead,
I conjure a stubborn faith in rotting
that ripens into soil,
in an old corm that rises steadily each spring:
not symbols, but reassurances,
like a mother’s voice at bedtime reading a long-familiar book,
the known words barely listened to,
but joining, for all the nights of a life,
each world to the next.
Broken tulips by Clarissa Munger Badger, who inspired Emily Dickinson. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Given the special place snails hold in my heart, I was delighted to see Thom Gunn celebrate a creature regarded by many gardeners as a foe:
CONSIDERING THE SNAIL
by Thom GunnThe snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if laterI parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
Snail by Paul Sougy, 1955. (Available as a print.)Ross Gay — poet laureate of the garden’s delights — offers a poem almost too beautiful and bittersweet to bear, a poem as necessary as sunlight:
A SMALL NEEDFUL FACT
by Ross GayIs that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
From W.S. Merwin comes a lush prayer for presence, originally published in his poetic farewell to life — his breathtaking final collection Garden Time:
BLACK CHERRIES
by W.S. MerwinLate in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day’s colors in the day’s shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this
Complement these fragments from the wholly wonderful Leaning toward Light with Diane Ackerman’s sensuous poem “The Consolation of Apricots” and the Victorian poet and painter Rebecca Hey’s illustrated encyclopedia of poetic lessons from the garden, then revisit two centuries of great writers and artists on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening.
donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
"We have created a great, almost overwhelming incubus of falsity and ugliness on top of us, so that we are almost crushed to death. Now let us move it."
"You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge."
"There is no greatness without a little stubbornness... Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity."
I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do not understand, discounted. But under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being where the truest truths dwell, the most difficult and the most beautiful; how it sneaks in through the backdoor of consciousness to reveal us more fully to ourselves; how it gives us an instrument for paying attention, which is how we learn to love the world more. When I first… read article
"It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived... an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world."
"There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."
The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing that “no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human.” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry experienced it first-hand when a smile and a cigarette exchanged with an enemy saved his life while captive as a prisoner of war. In the spring of 1935, traveling through Nazi-occupied… read article
“There is no insurmountable solitude,” Pablo Neruda asserted in his stirring Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance.” The self-permission to dance into our authenticity, however clumsily, however lonesomely, may be the supreme achievement of life. A bright celebration of that self-permission, and its profound rewards, comes in Doris (public library) by Sarah Jacoby. Told in tender watercolors luminous with life, it… read article
"A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams."
Right this minute, people are making plans, making promises and poems, while at the center of our galaxy a black hole with the mass of four billion suns screams its open-mouth kiss of oblivion. Someday it will swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, swallow Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations, calculus and Leaves of Grass. When black holes first emerged from the mathematics of relativity, Einstein himself wavered on whether or not they could be real — he struggled to imagine that nature could produce so menacing a thing, that spacetime could bend… read article
"...or there will be genocide, atomic bombs, and we'll all perish and take the planet with us."
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that… read article
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough. This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along the way, we have… read article
"The day of a single universal language will dawn!... This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, one thought mounting another."
"You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power... Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace."
How to embrace our inheritance as "a creature of organic substance and electricity that can be eaten, injured and dissipated back into the enigmatic physics of the universe."
"If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination... begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling."
"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity."
How a brilliant woman rose against the tide of her time to fathom the mysteries of space.
"The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it."
"Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came."
An invitation to "a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world" and an exultation at "earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves."
"It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short."
"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions."
"We are carriers of spirit... into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation."
"This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it."
"Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only killing, but also eating their relations."
"To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair."
"The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that conflicts are resolved."
“The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.”
If wonder springs from the quality of attention we pay to things and joy springs from our capacity for presence with wonder, then the quality of our attention shapes the quality of our lives. It is a dangerous falsehood that to find wonder in reality is to relinquish our realism — rather, this attentive gladness, this fluency in the native poetry of the universe, may be the truest realism we have.
That is what Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) explores in some breathtaking passages from his long essay “The Lantern-Bearers,” found in his 1892 collection of personal writings Across the Plains (public library | free ebook).
Robert Louis Stevenson by William Notman © National Portrait Gallery, LondonStevenson writes:
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life, — the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, — seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.
Nightingale from The Birds of Great Britain, 1873. (Available as a print.)Half a century before Anaïs Nin contemplated the elusive nature of joy, he adds:
The ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside… in the mysterious inwards of psychology… It has so little bond with externals… that it may even touch them not, and the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy…. In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.
For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse… for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.
Complement with poet Ross Gay on the discipline of delight and René Magritte on the courage of joy, then revisit Hermann Hesse on the life-magnifying value of the little joys.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.”
To be human is to continually mistake our frames of reference for reality itself. We so readily forget that our vantage point is but a speck on the immense plane of possible perspectives. We so readily forget that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
The discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one increasingly rare in a culture where most people would rather armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would rather be right than understand.
The pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) explores the making of that triumph in a pair of wonderful lectures — “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes Life Significant” — posthumously collected in the 1911 volume Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (public library | public domain).
William JamesWith an eye to “the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures,” James considers those rare moments when our habitual blinders fall away and we see a fuller picture of reality:
Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world… the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
That new perspective includes the recognition that other people strive for happiness and meaning in ways other than our own, just as valid in the making of a life. James considers the value of this shift in understanding:
It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)Observing “the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals,” observing “how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view,” observing how often and how readily we judge the outward choices of others while losing sight of the “inward significance” of those choices, James writes:
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention, how our bodies affect our feelings, and the four features of transcendence.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.”
In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying reality — it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where joy and hope are equally valid ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted with the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the frightful stories we tell ourselves and are told about it.
Having lost his mother to suicide, having lived through two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) devoted his life and his art to creating such a parallel world of enchantment.
The Lovers II by René Magritte, 1928In a 1947 interview included in his Selected Writings (public library) — the first release of Magritte’s manifestos, interviews, and other prose in English, thanks to the heroic efforts of scholar Kathleen Rooney — he reflects:
Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy for the eyes and the mind. It is much easier to terrorize than to charm… I live in a very unpleasant world because of its routine ugliness. That’s why my painting is a battle, or rather a counter-offensive.
Magritte revisits the subject in his manifesto Surrealism in the Sunshine, indicting the cultural tyranny of pessimism and fear-mongering — a worldview we have been sold under the toxic premise that if we focus on the worst of reality, we are seeing it more clearly and would be prepared to protect ourselves from its devastations. A quarter century before the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm insisted that “pessimism [is] an alienated form of despair,” Magritte writes:
We think that if life is seen in a tragic light it is seen more clearly, and that we are then in touch with the mystery of existence. We even believe that we can reach objectivity thanks to this revelation. The greater the terror, the greater the objectivity.
This notion is the result of philosophies (materialist or idealist), that claim that the real world is knowable, that matter is of the same essence as mind, since the perfect mind would no longer be distinct from the matter it explains and would thus deny it. The man on the street is unknowingly in harmony with this idea: he thinks there is a mystery, he thinks he must live and suffer and that the very meaning of life is that it is a dream-nightmare.
In his art and the worldview from which it springs, Magritte presents an antidote to this warped thinking — a backdoor out of our elective suffering. An epoch before we began to understand the neurophysiology of enchantment, he echoes his contemporary Egon Schiele’s exhortation to “envy those who see beauty in everything in the world,” and writes:
Our mental universe (which contains all we know, feel or are afraid of in the real world we live in) may be enchanting, happy, tragic, comic, etc.
We are capable of transforming it and giving it a charm which makes life more valuable. More valuable since life becomes more joyful, thanks to the extraordinary effort needed to create this charm.
Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is “the truth”, that this terror is knowledge of the “extra-mental” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.
Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.
[…]
We must go in search of enchantment.
Complement with Viktor Frankl on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Walt Whitman on optimism as a force of resistance, then revisit Rebecca Solnit on hope in dark times.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The art-science that captured the wonder of some of “the most brilliant productions of Nature.”
While the French seamstress turned scientist Jeanne Villepreux-Power was solving the ancient mystery of the argonaut, her compatriot Jean Baptiste Vérany (1800–1865) — a pharmacist turned naturalist and founder of Nice’s Natural History Museum — set out to illuminate the wonders of cephalopods in descriptions and depictions of unprecedented beauty and fidelity to reality. Half a century before the stunningly illustrated Cephalopod Atlas brought the life-forms of the deep to the human imagination, Vérany published Mediterranean Mollusks: Observations, Descriptions, Figures, and Chromolithographs from Life — a consummately illustrated catalogue of creatures entirely alien to the era’s lay imagination, suddenly and vividly alive in full color.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
When Vérany began working on his dream of bringing the underwater world to life on the page, chromolithography — a chemical process used for making multi-color prints — was still in its infancy in France. Determined to capture the living vibrancy of these creatures that had so enchanted him, he set out to teach himself the craft. Looking back on his long labors at mastering this art-science and applying it to his dream, he reflects:
Despite having no practice at lithography and no knowledge of chromolithography, I launched myself, with courage and confidence, into this enterprise… Thanks to trial and error and patience, I have often succeeded in depicting the softness and transparency that characterize these animals.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
The German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology, was introduced to the wonders of cephalopods by Vérany’s work and incorporated some of the art into his own studies of symmetry. Balzac copied one of Vérany’s illustrations in ink for his 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea. The book itself became a catalyst for the study of octopus intelligence.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Radiating from the chromolithographs is Vérany’s shimmering passion for his subject. He was especially captivated by the red umbrella squid, Histioteuthis Bonelliana, which he saved from a fisherman’s net and placed in a tub to study and draw from life, wonder-smitten by its beauty. He recounts:
It was at this moment that I enjoyed the astonishing spectacle of the brilliant points whose forms so extraordinarily decorate the skin of this cephalopod; sometimes it was the brightness of the sapphire which dazzled me; sometimes it was the opaline of the topazes which made it more remarkable; other times these two rich colors confused their splendid rays. During the night, the opaline points projected a phosphorescent glare, making this mollusk one of the most brilliant productions of Nature.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.
Complement with Ernst Haeckel’s otherworldly drawings of jellyfish from the same era, then revisit Sy Montgomery on how the octopus illuminates the wonders of consciousness.
via Public Domain Review
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
How to bear the gravity of being.
In many ancient creation myths, everything was born of a great cosmic ocean with no beginning and no end, lapping matter and spirit into life. In the cosmogony of classical physics, a partial differential equation known as the wave equation describes how water waves ripple the ocean, how seismic waves ripple rock, how gravitational waves ripple the fabric of spacetime. In quantum physics, a probability amplitude known as the wave function describes the behavior and properties of particles at the quantum scale. Virginia Woolf described the relationship between consciousness and creativity as “a wave in the mind.”
Waves lap at the bedrock of being, beyond the scale of atoms, beyond the scale of stars, to wash up something elemental about what this is and what we are.
This dialogue between the elemental and the existential comes alive in a splendid poem by the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999), composed as she was dying in the prime of life, included in her superb posthumous collection A Responsibility to Awe (public library), and read here by Amanda Palmer to the sound of “Optimist” by Zoë Keating:
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE OCEAN AND THE UNIVERSE
by Rebecca ElsonIf the ocean is like the universe
Then waves are stars.If space is like the ocean,
Then matter is the waves,
Dictating the rise and fall
Of floating things.If being is like ocean
We are waves,
Swelling, traveling, breaking
On some shore.If ocean is like universe then waves
Are the dark wells of gravity
Where stars will grow.All waves run shorewards
But there is no centre to the ocean
Where they all arise.
Couple with Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit Elson’s poems “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” “Theories of Everything,” “Explaining Relativity,” and “Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter).”
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
How to “include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border.”
Life is an ongoing dance between the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad — what it feels like to be you — and the objective reality of a universe insentient to your hopes and fears, those rudiments of the imagination, the imagination at the heart of consciousness. We are yet to figure out how these two dimensions of being can be integrated into a totality. We are yet to figure out how the known physical laws can cohere with each other — relativity, the physics of the very large, is still at odds with quantum field theory, the physics of the very small — and yet to figure out how those physical laws give rise to the wonder of consciousness.
The urgency of this integration is what the physicist David Bohm (December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992) explores in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (public library).
“Planetary System, Eclipse of the Sun, the Moon, the Zodiacal Light, Meteoric Shower” by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Bohm — who devoted his life to “understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment” — writes:
To meet the challenge before us our notions of cosmology and of the general nature of reality must have room in them to permit a consistent account of consciousness. Vice versa, our notions of consciousness must have room in them to understand what it means for its content to be “reality as a whole.” The two sets of notions together should then be such as to allow for an understanding of how reality and consciousness are related.
Acknowledging that these immense questions might “never be resolved ultimately and completely” — that they might belong to what Hannah Arendt insisted were the unanswerable questions that make us human — he adds:
Man’s* general way of thinking of the totality, i.e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.
[…]
The way could be opened for a world view in which consciousness and reality would not be fragmented from each other.
A generation after the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser contoured a view of this unfragmented reality in his notion of “the ever-present origin,” Bohm considers what arriving at such a holistic view would take:
Our general world view is itself an overall movement of thought, which has to be viable in the sense that the totality of activities that flow out of it are generally in harmony, both in themselves and with regard to the whole of existence. Such harmony is seen to be possible only if the world view itself takes part in an unending process of development, evolution, and unfoldment, which fits as part of the universal process that is the ground of all existence.
Art by Thomas Wright from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Such a way of viewing reality, Bohm argues against the grain of our reductionist culture, requires fully inhabiting all aspects of the mind, including those that elude the clutch of quantification:
The proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known not only in formal, logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc… It is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society… This requires a continual flow and development of our general notions of reality.
[…]
A new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.
In the remainder of Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm goes on explore how the relationship between thought and reality illuminates the way this unbroken wholeness is enfolded within each region of space and time. Complement it with Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality and John Muir on the transcendent interconnectedness of the universe, then revisit Bohm on creativity, the paradox of communication, and how we shape reality.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment.
The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want, isn’t even knowing what we want, but knowing what to want. We think we want connection, but as soon as contact reaches deeper than the skin of being, we recoil with the terror of vulnerability. There is no place more difficult to show up than where marrow meets marrow. And yet that is the only place where two people earn the right to use the word “love.”
Our avoidance of that terrifying, transcendent place holds up a mirror to our most fundamental beliefs about life and love, about what we deserve and what we are capable of, about reality and the landscape of the possible. That is what Alain de Botton explores in this animated essay probing the psychological machinery of avoidance in intimate relationships — where it comes from, how to live with it, and where it can go if handled with enough conscientiousness and compassion.
In The School of Life: An Emotional Education (public library) — the book companion to his wonderful global academy for skillful living — De Botton explores the deeper dimensions of avoidance and how to live with it, both as its proprietor and its partner. Recognizing the paralyzing fear of hurt, rejection, and abandonment at the heart of avoidance, he writes:
One of the odder features of relationships is that, in truth, the fear of rejection never ends. It continues, even in quite sane people, on a daily basis, with frequently difficult consequences — chiefly because we refuse to pay it sufficient attention and aren’t trained to spot its counter-intuitive symptoms in others. We haven’t found a winning way to keep admitting just how much reassurance we need.
[…]
Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviors guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims.
Avoidance is one of the commonest ways of hedging against our fear of rejection and hurt — a coping mechanism for disappointment that we developed when the people first tasked with caring for us let us down. De Botton writes:
We grow into avoidant patterns when, in childhood, attempts at closeness ended in degrees of rejection, humiliation, uncertainty, or shame that we were ill-equipped to deal with. We became, without consciously realizing it, determined that such levels of exposure would never happen again. At an early sign of being disappointed, we therefore now understand the need to close ourselves off from pain. We are too scarred to know how to stay around and mention that we are hurt.
With an eye to the undertow of vulnerability beneath all avoidant patterns, he adds:
If this harsh, graceless behavior could be truly understood for what it is, it would be revealed not as rejection or indifference, but as a strangely distorted, yet very real, plea for tenderness.
A central solution to these patterns is to normalize a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how predictable it is to be in need of reassurance, and at the same time, how understandable it is to be reluctant to reveal one’s dependence. We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. “I really need you. Do you still want me?” should be the most normal of enquiries.
Complement with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of love’s loss, then revisit Alain de Botton on the importance of breakdowns, what makes a good communicator, and the key to existential maturity.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”
We know that the atoms composing our bodies and our brains can be traced back to particular stars that died long ago in some faraway corner of the cosmos. We know what will happen to our own atoms when we ourselves die. Still, something in us quivers with incomprehension at the notion that every single one of our capacities — love and mathematics, the bomb and the Benedictus — is the churn of discarded stardust. And yet it is precisely this fact that renders us miraculous — creatures of matter, capable of seeing beauty, capable of making meaning. This is our inheritance. This is the bright star of resurrection lighting up our exquisite aliveness.
U.S Poet Laureate Ada Limón channels this cosmic destiny of ours in her splendid poem “Dead Stars,” found in her collection The Carrying (public library) and read here by the poet herself during her altogether wonderful lecture at Portland’s Literary Arts, to which I have added the requisite benediction of Bach.
DEAD STARS
by Ada LimónOut here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising —to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. Whatwould happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
Complement with the uncommon astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s “Antidotes to Fear of Death” and “Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter),” then revisit the poetic physicist Brian Greene’s Rilke-lensed reflection on how our creaturely limitations give life meaning.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Notes on the eternal dialogue between art and science in our yearning to know reality.
On the morning of April 10, 1535, the skies of Stockholm came ablaze with three suns intersected by several bright circles and arcs. Awestruck, people took it for a sign from God — a benediction on the new Lutheran faith that had taken hold of Sweden. Catholics took it for the opposite — punishment lashed on King Gustav Vasa for having ushered in the Protestant Reformation a decade earlier.
What the pious were actually witnessing was a parhelion, from the Greek for “beside the sun,” also known as sundog or mock sun — an atmospheric optical phenomenon caused by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals in high, cold cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, or in moist ground-level clouds known as diamond dust.
Vädersolstavlan, 1535 / 1636Parhelia have staggered the human imagination since the dawn of our common record, epochs before empiricism could cast its ray of illumination upon their mystery. “Two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day until sunset,” Aristotle wrote in the oldest known account of the phenomenon. “Those that affirm they witnessed this prodigy are neither few nor unworthy of credit, so that there is more reason for investigation than incredulity,” Cicero wrote in urging the Roman Senate to examine “the nature of the parhelion.” A generation after him, Seneca included sundogs in his epochal Naturales Quaestiones. They appear in the Old Farmer’s Almanac as omens of storms.
That awe-smiting April in Stockholm, the Chancellor and Lutheran scholar Olaus Petri commissioned a painting of the wondrous event — a painting that became the epicenter of a political controversy when the King took it as an insult and narrowly spared Petri capital punishment. Known as Vädersolstavlan — Swedish for “The Sundog Painting” — it is considered the oldest known depiction of sundogs.
More than three centuries later, a little girl beheld the enormous painting in a Swedish cathedral, absorbing its magic and its mystery into the cabinet of curiosities that is a child’s imagination. Half a lifetime and a revelation later, Hilma af Klint (October 26, 1862–October 21, 1944) would draw on it in many of her own immense and unexampled paintings reckoning with the hidden strata of reality.
Art by Hilma af Klint from her series Childhood Paintings, 1907.Because of the conditions they requires, perihelia are among the least common and most dramatic of atmospheric optical phenomena. They appear when flat hexagonal ice crystals drift into a horizontal orientation relative to the surface of the Earth and catch sunlight, acting as prisms to refract rays sideways with a minimum deflection of 22°. This is why sundogs appear in pairs at around 22° on either side of the sun, and why they are often accompanied — as they were that spring morning in 1535 — by a 22° halo forming a ring at the same angular distance from the sun as the sundogs, thus appearing to intersect and connect all three stars into a luminous orrery of circles. It is difficult to behold its exquisite geometry and not feel it to be sacred. It is difficult not to see these geometric elements as an organizing principle of Hilma af Klint’s mystical paintings. Art, after all, might just be our sensemaking mechanism for wonder. In this respect, it is not the opposite of science but its twin.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The people we love are built into us.”
“There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the young May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) wrote in her stunning ode to solitude — the solitude she came to know, over the course of her long and prolific life, as the seedbed of creativity.
Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. It is not for everyone. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It is only for the whole.
In her elder years, living alone on the coast of Maine and savoring a renaissance of creative energy after a long depression, Sarton returns to the subject of what solitude is and is not on the pages of her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea (public library).
May SartonLooking back on her life, she writes:
Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time.
But what solitude brings to a person is shaped by what the person brings to solitude. One August day, life brings Sarton a prompt to consider the art of living alone and the necessary preconditions for making of solitude not a resignation but a rapture:
Yesterday I had a letter from a young woman who is living alone, a film maker of some reputation. She wants to do a film on people who live alone, and will come next week to talk about her plans. I gather she has some doubts about the solitary life. I told her that I feel it is not for the young (she is only thirty-three). I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. The people we love are built into us. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago — or just yesterday — of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.
Complement with the Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor on the art of solitude, Emerson on what solitude really means, and a contemporary field guide to how to be alone, then revisit Sarton on gardening and creativity, how to cultivate your talent, how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and her stunning poem about the relationship between presence, solitude, and love.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Searching for “that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life.”
“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” Baudelaire wrote — something Newton embodied in looking back on his life of revolutionary discoveries, only to see himself appearing “like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” What we are really recovering from childhood in those moments of discovery and exaltation is a way of looking at the world — looking for a glimpse of some small truth that illuminates the interconnectedness of all things, looking and being wonder-smitten by what we see.
That is what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) explores in some lovely passages from The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) — his forgotten masterpiece that turns the record of an ordinary marine biology expedition in the Gulf of California into an extraordinary lens on how to think.
John SteinbeckOn a collecting expedition in the tide pools of coastal Mexico, Steinbeck considers what it is we really look for when we are looking:
As always when one is collecting, we were soon joined by a number of small boys. The very posture of search, the slow movement with the head down, seems to draw people. “What did you lose?” they ask.
“Nothing.”
“Then what do you search for?” And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting. These little boys and young men on the tide flat do not even know that they search for such things too. We say to them, “We are looking for curios, for certain small animals.”
Then the little boys help us to search.
Tide pool creatures from A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast by Philip Henry Gosse, 1853. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)But the children do something more than help the grown men search — they help them see; they help them find the only thing worth looking for. Steinbeck writes:
Small boys have such sharp eyes, and they are quick to notice deviation. Once they know you are generally curious, they bring amazing things. Perhaps we only practice an extension of their urge. It is easy to remember when we were small and lay on our stomachs beside a tide pool and our minds and eyes went so deeply into it that size and identity were lost, and the creeping hermit crab was our size and the tiny octopus a monster. Then the waving algae covered us and we hid under a rock at the bottom and leaped out at fish. It is very possible that we, and even those who probe space with equations, simply extend this wonder.
How reminiscent this last sentiment is of Dylan Thomas’s poem “Being But Men,” how consonant with G.K. Chesterton’s insistence that our task in life is to dig for the “submerged sunrise of wonder.”
Couple this fragment from The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) — which is a remarkable read in its entirety — with the pioneering neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington on the spirituality of wonder, then revisit Steinbeck on hope, creativity, the art of receiving, and his timeless advice on love.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.”
Love is both the tenderest mirror and the cruelest. How much and how well we show up for love reflects what we believe ourselves worthy of. What we desire reflects what we believe we deserve. What we long for reflects both our limitations and our restless yearning to transcend them. In love’s mirror, we are revealed to ourselves, stripped of the ego’s flattering self-image, our vulnerabilities and inadequacies laid bare — a revelation laced with the sublime, both beautiful and terrifying to the bone.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toHow to live with the transcendent terror of love is what the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, priest, and musician George Herbert (April 3, 1593–March 1, 1633) explores in one of his poems — poems composed in the hope that they might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.” Reaching across space and time the way only art can, the poem’s final line went on to inspire the final line of Derek Walcott’s superb “Love After Love,” composed nearly four centuries later.
LOVE
by George HerbertLove bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here:”
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”“Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “Who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
Complement with David Whyte’s poem “The Truelove” and Robert Graves’s “Advice to Lovers,” then revisit the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love and Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of love’s loss.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but… the prime moral privilege.”
The measure of growth is not how much we have changed, but how harmoniously we have integrated our changes with all the selves we have been — those vessels of personhood stacked within the current self like Russian nesting dolls, not to be outgrown but to be tenderly incorporated. True growth is immensely difficult precisely because it requires befriending the parts of ourselves we have rejected or forgotten — what James Baldwin so memorably called “the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are”; it requires shedding all the inauthentic personae we have put on in the course of life under the forces of convention and compulsion; it requires living amicably with who we have been in order to fully live into who we can be.
Those delicate and often difficult fundaments of true growth are what the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (September 16, 1885–December 4, 1952) examined in the final years of her life in her uncommonly insightful book Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization (public library).
Karen HorneyA generation before Joan Didion observed that “character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Horney writes:
A person can grow, in the true sense, only if he* assumes responsibility for himself.
Noting that a fulfilled and fulfilling life necessitates “the liberation and cultivation of the forces which lead to self-realization,” she considers the well-spring of that ultimate ideal in relation to growth:
You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree, but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities. He will develop then the unique alive forces of his real self: the clarity and depth of his own feelings, thoughts, wishes, interests; the ability to tap his own resources, the strength of his will power; the special capacities or gifts he may have; the faculty to express himself, and to relate himself to others with his spontaneous feelings. All this will in time enable him to find his set of values and his aims in life. In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization.
One of Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a stunning rare edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)Growth is only possible when the self being realized is the authentic self — “the real self as that central inner force, common to all human beings and yet unique in each, which is the deep source of growth.” And yet it can be maddeningly difficult to discern that real self beneath the costume of shoulds, beneath the armors donned in our confrontations with reality, beneath all the personae learned in the course of adapting to the world’s demands and assaults. E.E. Cummings knew this when he observed that “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” From the moment we are born, we begin morphing that tender real self to the pressures of our emotional and physical environment — a process of adaptation that is also the beginning of our lifelong process of self-alienation, marked by an ongoing tyranny of shoulds — our parents’, our culture’s, our own. Horney considers the path to liberation and self-possession:
All kinds of pressure can easily divert our constructive energies into unconstructive or destructive channels. But… we do not need an inner strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of inner dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no doubt that such disciplinary methods can succeed in suppressing undesirable factors, but there is also no doubt that they are injurious to our growth. We do not need them because we see a better possibility of dealing with destructive forces in ourselves: that of actually outgrowing them. The way toward this goal is an ever increasing awareness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth.
In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but at the same time, in a very real sense, the prime moral privilege. To the extent that we take our growth seriously, it will be because of our own desire to do so. And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we become free to grow ourselves, we also free ourselves to love and to feel concern for other people.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toGrowth, then, is not something we do only for and by ourselves, but something we do for and with others — a testament to the fact that human connection is “a root-factor of ordinary human growth.” And yet we alone are responsible — to ourselves and to others — for undertaking the process and following through with its unfolding. A century after Nietzsche considered the path to finding yourself, insisting that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Horney writes:
Only the individual himself can develop his given potentialities. But, like any other living organism, the human Individuum needs favorable conditions for his growth “from acorn into oak tree”; he needs an atmosphere of warmth to give him both a feeling of inner security and the inner freedom enabling him to have his own feelings and thoughts and to express himself. He needs the good will of others, not only to help him in his many needs but to guide and encourage him to become a mature and fulfilled individual. He also needs healthy friction with the wishes and wills of others. If he can thus grow with others, in love and in friction, he will also grow in accordance with his real self.
Neurosis and Human Growth is a revelatory read in its entirety. Complement this fragment with poet, philosopher, and activist Edward Carpenter on love, pain, and growth and poet Robert Penn Warren on the paradox of “finding yourself,” then revisit philosopher Amélie Rorty on the seven layers of selfhood.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin observed in recognizing how limited our freedom is and how illusory our choices, for he knew that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”
And yet we move through the world with an air of agency, without which life would feel unlivable — a gauntlet of causality stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, into which we are hurled as helpless pawns in some cosmic game that has already played out. It is a disquieting notion — one we have countered with our dream of free will, continually mistaking the feeling of freedom for the fact of freedom.
But even within the presets and parameters conferred upon us by the cosmic and cultural forces that made us, there exists a margin of movement in which notions like control, agency, and moral responsibility live. In that margin, we become fully human.
In this fascinating BBC documentary, journalist Melissa Hogenboom and a constellation of neuroscientists, physicists, and philosophers explore the science and subtleties of the free will question — a question that remains not only unanswered but a testament to Hannah Arendt’s astute observation that “to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to lose] the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
Complement with Einstein on free will and the power of the imagination, C.S. Lewis on suffering and what it means to have free will in a universe of fixed laws, and neuroscientist Christof Koch on the paradox of freedom.
HT Aeon
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Soulful art from stories that speak “to the childhood of all times and all races.”
We spend our lives yearning for three things above all else: love, meaning, and magic — all else is a compound of these building blocks. Of the them, the third is both the most elusive and the most readily available in the daily landscape of life, if only we know how to look.
In the final year of his twenties, two decades before he created the beloved Bambi character for Disney, the artist and naturalist Maurice “Jake” Day (July 2, 1892–May 17, 1983) lent his time and talent to an unusual project — illustrating a collection of Tibetan magic tales, resinous with ancient wisdom on the most elemental aspects of living: the meaning of wisdom, the measure of kindness, the yearning for transformation, the cost of cruelty and arrogance, how to love and how to live with our human fallibility.
Art from the story “Six Friends.” (Available as a print.)Selected and retold by the American author Eleanore Myers Jewett, Wonder Tales from Tibet (public library | public domain) appeared in 1922, collecting “tales of wonder and magic” that had traveled orally from India to Tibet centuries earlier, then continued their migration to become “as familiar to Kalmuck and Mongolian children as St. George and his dragons are to us.” When European travelers first reached Tibet, these wonder-tales captured their imagination and followed them home, until in 1866 a German scholar published a pamphlet of the stories. They were eventually translated into English and made their way to the young Jewett in New York. When she told the tales to a small group of local boys and girls “one hot, happy summer,” she was moved by the lively enchantment the tales cast upon the children and set out to make that enchantment available to every child. She reflects:
The element of repetition, the distinctly human characters, the atmosphere of another land and strange people, and the romance of quest these things give to the Wonder Tales from Tibet the appeal to the childhood of all times and all races, which is their reason for having lived so long and traveled so far.
Art from the story “The Golden Mouth.” (Available as a print.)While Day’s soulful paintings are entirely original and unmistakably his own, he was working in a golden age of illustration that shared a certain sensibility in depicting the magical, the fantastical, and the numinous — one that included Arthur Rackham’s whimsical take on classic Irish fairy tales, Dorothy Lathrop’s poetic dreamscapes, and Virginia Frances Sterrett’s illustrations for old French fairy tales.
Much of the tales’ enchantment comes from evocative depictions of nature and what ecologist David Abram has termed the more-than-human world — a world that is not supernatural but supranatural. In one of the tales, Jewett writes:
At length, turning a corner, [the Prince] came upon the fountain sparkling in the sun. Crystal clear it was and very beautiful, and beside it was a marble bench looking cool and restful. The Prince sank down upon it, for he felt suddenly very weary, but scarcely had he seated himself before the sunlight disappeared and a strange half darkness covered him. The sound of the splashing water grew louder, but it was very pleasant to hear, and mingled with it was a whispering and pattering as of small voices and tiny feet, and a brushing as of garments against the bushes. He looked around him and then stood up the better to see. From behind every flower and bush danced forth a little form, shimmery and indistinct but beautiful beyond belief.
Over and over, these encounters with nature hold up a mirror to human nature. The wisdom of the tales lies in what they make of the reflection. This, too, may be the supreme wisdom of living.
Art from the story “Six Friends.” (Available as a print.)Art from the story “The White Bird’s Wife.” (Available as a print.)Art from the story “The Promise of Massang.” (Available as a print.)Art from the story “Sunshine and Moonshine.” (Available as a print.)Art from the story “Fortunes of Shrikantha.” (Available as a print.)Couple with Einstein on the value of fairy tales, then revisit Kay Niesen’s hauntingly beautiful 1914 illustrations for Scandinavian stories.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.”
Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown.
How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (public library) — an investigation of how “the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it,” and what a richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and more felicitous communion with reality. At its heart is the recognition that “the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’” and that “there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.”
Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.Punctuating his ambitious 3,000-page effort to braid neuropsychology (the way our brains shape our impression of reality), epistemology (the way we come to know anything at all), and metaphysics (our yearning to wrest meaning from fundamental truth as we try to discern the nature of the universe) is an ongoing inquiry into our way of looking at the world — the lens of consciousness we call attention. He writes:
The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent… What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it — if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
This property of reality is what Iris Murdoch had in view when she observed that “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” and what the poet J.D. McClatchy captured in his insistence that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”
One of artist Margaret C. Cook’s rare 1913 illustrations for Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman’s supreme serenade to the art of paying attention. (Available as a print.)McGilchrist considers the way our attention constructs our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:
The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.
Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he writes:
The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.
A century-some after William James insisted that our experience is what we agree to attend to, and two generations after Simone Weil asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” McGilchrist adds:
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being.
[…]
Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.
In the vast remainder of The Matter With Things, McGilchrist goes on to explore how “the type, and extent, of attention we pay changes the nature of the world that we experience,” shaped largely by the difference between the way the brain’s two hemispheres pay attention — “narrow-beam, highly focussed attention” in the left, “broad, sustained vigilance” in the right. Complement this tiny fragment of it with Mary Oliver on attention and love, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz’s wonderful field guide to eleven ways of paying attention to the everyday wonderland of life.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Know thyself, and that thou art mortal. But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal.”
“To study philosophy is to learn to die,” Montaigne wrote in his most famous essay as he reckoned with how to live. Indeed, we spend our lives learning to die while trying to bear our mortality, using our religions and our materialism to look away from the great unknown, to fill with myths and negations what is undeniably the supreme mystery on the other edge of existence. We may know what happens to our physical being when we die, but what happens to consciousness at the boundary of life remains the ultimate enigma.
A revelatory new study has found, through electrogram recordings, heightened brain activity and connectivity at the transition to death: Upon being taken off life-support equipment, patients exhibit a surge of gamma waves — an indication of amplified rather than diminished consciousness. This finding, refuting the classic conception of death as a fade-out of consciousness, calls to mind a lovely line from a D.H. Lawrence poem composed at the end of his life, depicting death as “the last wonder.”
D.H. LawrenceIn a different poem from his final years, Lawrence examines the uneasy relationship between our self-knowledge as creatures capable of infinite emotional experience and our knowledge of our creaturely finitude:
Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.
But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:
a thing of kisses and strife
a lit-up shaft of rain
a calling column of blood
a rose tree bronzey with thorns
a mixture of yea and nay
a rainbow of love and hate
a wind that blows back and forth
a creature of beautiful peace, like a river
and a creature of conflict, like a cataract:
know thyself, in denial of all these things —
Surge in brain activity and connectivity at near-death (S4) after ventilator removal (S2). (Source.)In consonance with Montaigne, Lawrence picks up the urgency of befriending our mortality in the poem I thought of upon encountering these new findings about the dying-living brain:
THE SHIP OF DEATH
by D.H. LawrenceHave you built your ship of death, or have you?
Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
Of peace, and build your little ship
Of death, that will carry the soul
On its last journey, on and on, so still
So beautiful, over the last of seas.When the day comes, that will come.
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
The last day, and the setting forth
On the longest journey, over the hidden sea
To the last wonder of oblivion.Oblivion, the last wonder!
When we have trusted ourselves entirely
To the unknown, and are taken up
Out of our little ships of death
Into pure oblivion.Oh build your ship of death, be building it now
With dim, calm thoughts and quiet hands
Putting its timbers together in the dusk,Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
That will spread in death to the breeze
Of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
The little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth
Then build your ship of death, in readiness
For the longest journey, over the last of seas.
Complement with Rebecca Elson’s superb poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death” and Richard Dawkins on the luckiness of death, then revisit D.H. Lawrence on the key to living fully.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy and transcendence.
Imagine what life would be like if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.” That is what Beethoven imagined, and invited humanity to imagine, two centuries ago in the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony, known as “Ode to Joy” — an epochal hymn of the possible, half a lifetime in the making.
In the spring of 2012, the Spanish city of Sabadell set out to celebrate the 130th anniversary of its founding with a most unusual, electrifying, and touchingly human rendition of Beethoven’s masterpiece, performed by a flashmob of 100 musicians from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l’Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs. Watching the townspeople — children with kites, elders with walkers, couples holding hands — gather to savor the unbidden music in a succession of confusion, delight, and ecstasy is the stuff of goosebumps: living proof that “music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”
Couple with the remarkable story of the making of “Ode to Joy,” then revisit the neurophysiology of enchantment and how music casts its spell on us.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”
“Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” Ronald Johnson wrote in a stunning prose poem. How it did — how we became, in the poetic words of the physicist Richard Feynman, “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity” — may be the supreme mystery of existence. And yet here we are, each of us having triumphed over staggering odds in order to exist at all, all of us moving through the sliver of spacetime we have been allotted as material creatures animated by rich spiritual lives, governed by entropy, yearning for eternity.
Few people have given voice to this existential tension between our materiality and our spirituality more beautifully than the French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (May 1, 1881–April 10, 1955) — an uncommon bridge figure between the scientific and the sacred, who felt deeply at home in the world of gravity and gluons, and took part in the discovery of the Peking Man fossil that helped illuminate the evolutionary history of our species, but who also thought deeply and wrote beautifully about the most immaterial and transcendent regions of our experience.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinAn epoch before the poetic physicist Alan Lightman introduced the notion of spiritual materialism, Teilhard de Chardin took up these questions in The Heart of Matter (public library), titled after his long autobiographical essay chronicling his spiritual awakening to the wonder of reality and materiality.
In language of ravishing vibrancy and vitality, he contours his offering:
I shall try… to show how, starting from the point at which a spark was first struck, a point that was built into me congenitally, the World gradually caught fire for me, burst into flames; how this happened all during my life, and as a result of my whole life, until it formed a great luminous mass, lit from within that surrounded me.
This becoming, he argues, is available to every person fully awake to their own life and the life of the Earth:
Within every being and every event there was a progressive expansion of a mysterious inner clarity which transfigured them… Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a Universe that is Person… The Diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing Universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the Earth — the Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing Matter.
Art by Francisco de Holanda, 1573. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)At the heart of this luminous totality, Teilhard de Chardin places what he calls “the sense of plentitude.” He writes:
To be completely at home and completely happy, there must be the knowledge that “Something, essential by nature” exists, to which everything else is no more than an accessory or perhaps an ornament… which it is impossible (once one has experienced it) to confuse with any other spiritual emotion, whether joy in knowledge or discovery, joy in creation or in loving: and this not so much because it is different from all those emotions, but because it belongs to a higher order and contains them all.
Looking back on the greatest discoveries of science — “the vast cosmic realities (Mass, Permeability, Radiation, Curvatures, and so on) through which the Stuff of Things is disclosed to our experience” — he sighs:
I find it difficult to express how much I feel at home in precisely this world of electrons, nuclei, waves, and what a sense of plentitude and comfort it gives me.
Observing that the culmination of the spiritual is to be found in “what is most tangible and most concrete in the Stuff of Things,” he reflects on his own awakening between the ages of thirty and fifty:
Even at the peak of my spiritual trajectory I as never to feel at home unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter.
[…]
Matter and Spirit: these were no longer two things, but two states or two aspects of one and the same cosmic Stuff, according to whether it was looked at or carried further in the direction in which…. it is becoming itself or in the direction in which it is disintegrating.
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print.)Teilhard de Chardin closes his long reflection with a poetic “Hymn to Matter” — a kind of secular prayer for and to reality, in which he writes:
Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat.
Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us.
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God.
Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.
Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists.
[…]
I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim… I acclaim you as the universal power which brings together and unites, through which the multitudinous monads are bound together and in which they all converge on the way of the Spirit.
[…]
This I now understand.
If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must, having first established contact with the totality of all that lives and moves here below, come little by little to feel that the individual shapes of all we have laid hold on are melting away in our hands, until finally we are at grips with the single essence of all consistencies and all unions.
[…]
Raise me up then, matter, to those heights, through struggle and separation and death; raise me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me… to embrace the universe.
Complement The Heart of Matter with Leo Tolstoy on science, spirituality, and our search for meaning and John Burroughs’s splendid century-old manifesto for spirituality in the age of science, then revisit the pioneering neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on wonder and the spirituality of nature.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”
We love to forget ourselves, but also to remember what we are: mortal creatures lustful of meaning, radiant with life, eternally alone and eternally longing for home — home in ourselves and home in each other. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote in his exquisite reckoning with the interplay of freedom and togetherness in love — Rilke, who also knew that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”
The delicate, eternal, life-magnifying relationship between love and death, between union and freedom, is what Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores throughout his timeless book The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (public library), composed in the final years of his long life.
Octavio PazPaz writes:
In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect.
This dialogue between fate and freedom permeates Paz’s reckoning with love. Love, he observes, is not merely “the passionate attraction toward a single person” but, in the particularity of that person, requires “the transformation of the erotic object into a free and unique subject.” An epoch after Rilke, Paz writes:
Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other.
[…]
Love… transforms the subject and object of the erotic encounter into unique persons… Its cornerstone is freedom: the mystery of the person.
[…]
The transformation of the erotic object into a person immediately makes the person a subject who possesses free will. The object I desire becomes a subject who desires me — or rejects me. The giving up of personal sovereignty and the voluntary acceptance of servitude involves a genuine change of nature: by way of the bridge of mutual desire the object becomes desiring subject and the subject becomes desiring object. Love, then, is represented in the form of a knot. A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.
Art from An ABZ of LoveAgain and again, Paz returns to “the conjunction of fate and freedom” in love:
Whether the relationship is the result of accident or predestination, to reach fulfillment the complicity of our will is required. Love, any love, implies a sacrifice; and we choose that sacrifice without batting an eye. This is the mystery of freedom… In short, love is freedom personified, freedom incarnated in a body and a soul.
Lamenting the deficiency of language as a vessel to hold our most oceanic experiences, he adds:
How precarious and elusive are the ideas with which we attempt to explain the mystery of love. A mystery that is part of a greater one: the human being, who, suspended between chance and necessity, transforms his predicament into freedom.
[…]
There is an intimate, causal relation between love and freedom.
Freedom, Paz intimates, is not willed but attained through that most difficult of human achievements — surrender:
True love consists precisely of the transformation of the appetite for possession into surrender.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)But here is the transcendent, devastating heart of the matter: When we surrender to love, we are also surrendering to time — the entropic emperor of human destiny. Paz writes:
Human love is the union of two beings subject to time and its accidents: change, sickness, death. Although it does not save us from time, it opens it a crack, so that in a flash love’s contradictory nature is manifest: that vivacity which endlessly destroys itself and is reborn, which is always both now and never.
With an eye to our destiny as mortal creatures, “playthings of time and accident,” Paz insists that “love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face.” He writes:
Love is life to the full, at one with itself: the opposite of separation. In the sensation of the carnal embrace the union of the couple becomes feeling, and feeling in turn becomes awareness; love is the discovery of the unity of life. But in that instant the compact unity is broken in two, and time reappears: it is a great hole that swallows us… Total fusion includes the acceptance of death. Without death, life — ours, here on this earth — is not life. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.
Observing that love is “bound to earth by the body’s gravitation, which is pleasure and death,” Paz considers the essential polarity of our richest and most life-affirming experience:
Like all the great creations of humanity, love is twofold: it is the supreme happiness and the supreme misfortune… Lovers pass constantly from rapture to despair, from sadness to joy, from wrath to tenderness, from desperation to sensuality… The lover is perpetually driven by contradictory emotions. Popular language, in all times and all places, abounds in expressions that describe the vulnerability of a person in love: love is a wound, an injury. But as St. John of the Cross says, it is “a wound that is a gift,” a “gentle cautery,” a “delightful wound.” Yes, love is a flower of blood. It is also a talisman: the vulnerability of lovers protects them. Their shield is their lack of defense; their armor is their nakedness.
[…]
Yet despite all the ills and misfortunes it brings, we always endeavor to love and be loved. Love is the closest thing on this earth to the beatitude of the blessed.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toAll of our situational vulnerability springs from the supreme existential vulnerability we are born into — our mortality, the haunting fact of it, the stark assurance of it in every smallest act of dissolution pointing the arrow of time at death. A generation before the poet Mark Doty observed in his superb Whitman-lensed meditation on love and death that “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” Paz writes:
Love does not preserve us from the risks and misfortunes of existence. No love, not even those that are most peaceful and happy, escapes the disasters and calamities of time. Love, any love, is made up of time, and no love can avoid the great catastrophe: the beloved is subject to the assaults of age, infirmity, and death.
Echoing Borges’s timeless refutation of time and Kierkegaard’s insistence that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” he adds:
There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live.
[…]
We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.
What emerges is a conception of love not as an antidote to death but as its vitalizing antipode:
Love does not defeat death; it is a wager against time and its accidents. Through love we catch a glimpse, in this life, of the other life. Not of the eternal life, but… of pure vitality.
[…]
Love is not eternity; nor is it the time of calendars and watches, successive time. The time of love is neither great nor small; it is the perception of all times, of all lives, in a single instant. It does not free us from death but makes us see it face to face… We are the theater of the embrace of opposites and of their dissolution, resolved in a single note that is not affirmation or negation but acceptance… the presence that dissolves into splendor: pure vitality, a heartbeat of time.
The Double Flame is a superb read in its entirety. Complement it with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of its loss and French philosopher Alain Badiou on why we fall and how we stay in love, then revisit this florilegium of two centuries of great minds reckoning with time.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?'”
“The mind is its own place,” wrote Milton, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” But in an age when machines can simulate, with the sheer force of computation, mind-things like poems, is the mind still a sovereign place? What heavenly and hellish creations can it alone make that no algorithm can reproduce or mimic?
I read in Milton’s words the intimation that the mind makes meaning, and meaning — which is different from information, different even from knowledge — is uncomputable. Meaning might be the last stalwart of human consciousness in the age of AI — the supreme existential yearning irreducible to computation, the great creative restlessness that foments all our poems and our passions.
The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) takes up these questions in a prescient April 1993 New York Review of Books essay occasioned by the Nobel-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’s book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind but, like every great book review, soaring far beyond the book itself and into the broader questions of consciousness, the nature of the mind, and what it means to be human.
Oliver Sacks (Photograph: Adam Scourfield)Reviewing the surge of literature on the science of mind and matter, Sacks laments that “beneath the enthusiasm about scientific developments, there is a certain thinness, a poverty and unreality compared to what we know of human nature, the complexity and density of the emotions we feel and of the thoughts we have.” In a sentiment reminding us how miraculous it is that a cold cosmos kindled consciousness at all, he writes:
We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, “Is that all there is to it?”
With an eye to his own excitement upon first encountering Norbert Wiener’s pioneering cybernetics in the late 1940s, with its staggering insistence that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” and the generation of reckonings with logical automata and nerve nets that it inspired, he recounts thinking, like many did, that humanity was on “the verge of computer translation, perception, cognition; a brave new world in which ever more powerful computers would be able to mimic, and even take over, the chief functions of brain and mind.” And yet, as a neurologist who has devoted his life to the inner workings of enfleshed human minds, he cautions:
We must indeed be very cautious before we allow that any artifact is (except in a superficial sense) “mind-like” or “brainlike”… If we are to have a model or theory of mind as this actually occurs in living creatures in the world, it may have to be radically different from anything like a computational one. It will have to be grounded in biological reality, in the anatomical and developmental and functional details of the nervous system; and also in the inner life or mental life of the living creature, the play of its sensations and feelings and drives and intentions, its perception of objects and people and situations, and, in higher creatures at least, the ability to think abstractly and to share through language and culture the consciousness of others.
One of William Blake’s engravings for Milton’s Paradise LostIn a sentiment he would later develop in his insightful writing on narrative memory as the pillar of the self, he adds:
Above all such a theory must account for the development and adaptation peculiar to living systems. Living organisms are born into a world of challenge and novelty, a world of significances, to which they must adapt or die. Living organisms grow, learn, develop, organize knowledge, and use memory in a way that has no analogue in the nonliving. Memory itself is characteristic of life. And memory brings about a change in the organism, so that it is better adapted, better fitted, to meet environmental challenges. The very “self” of the organism is enlarged by memory.
Reflecting on Edelman’s work, Sacks considers the body as the ultimate representation of the self in consciousness, throwing a prescient stick in the spokes of ChatGPT:
To become conscious of being conscious… systems of memory must be related to representation of a self.
What is needed, Sacks observes, is a new theory that recognizes our mental life as more than the sum of computational processes — “a theory of self-organization and emergent order at every level and scale, from the scurrying of molecules and their micropatterns in a million synaptic clefts to the grand macro-patterns of an actual lived life.” Such a theory of mind can only be biological and not mechanistic — an increasingly urgent idea in our present era of disembodied AIs churning out increasingly convincing simulacra of consciousness, yet remaining forever severed from the pulsating totality that is life.
Katharina Fritsch: Display Stand with Brains, 1989. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Photograph: Maria Popova.)Much of our lust for artificial intelligence stems from what Sacks calls in an even older essay “our almost irresistible desire to see ourselves as being somehow above nature, above the body” — a desire channeled throughout the long history of our damaging dualism, from Plato to Descartes to the very notion of artificial intelligence. Spinoza threw down the first great gauntlet at it with his insistence that our entire conscious experience requires we be understood as embodied beings, for “the body can, by the sole laws of its nature, do many things which the mind wonders at.” The sum total of those things is what we might call experience, and it becomes the lens through which we comprehend — which is different from compute — the world:
The world does not have a predetermined structure: our structuring of the world is our own — our brains create structures in the light of our experiences… Through this structuring and restructuring, the infant, the growing individual, constructs a self and a world.
[…]
It is characteristic of a creature, in contrast to a computer, that nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced; that there is, rather, a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory, so that no two experiences (or their neural bases) are ever precisely the same. Experience is ever-changing, like Heraclitus’ stream. This streamlike quality of mind and perception, of consciousness and life, cannot be caught in any mechanical model — it is only possible in an evolving creature… One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine. I do not feel alive, psychologically alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling — perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me. I am that stream — that stream is me.
Consciousness thus emerges not as an operation of the mind but as an embodied interaction between mind and world — a dynamic flow of exchanges in which the whole organism, not just the brain, participates and, in the act of participation, creates itself. (The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has since made a compelling case for consciousness not as a brain function but as a full-body phenomenon, and other work has demonstrated again and again that “our mind is body-bound.”)
Sacks writes:
During the development of the fetus, a unique neuronal pattern of connections is created, and then in the infant experience acts upon this pattern, modifying it by selectively strengthening or weakening connections between neuronal groups, or creating entirely new connections.
Thus experience itself is not passive, a matter of “impressions” or “sensedata,” but active, and constructed by the organism from the start. Active experience “selects,” or carves out, a new, more complexly connected pattern of neuronal groups, a neuronal reflection of the individual experience of the child, of the procedures by which it has come to categorize reality.
One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known drawings of the brain.Eventually, these distinct neuronal circuits synchronize with each other to shape “the inner life, the mind, the behavior of the creature.” With an eye to this and other strong evidence for a biological basis of consciousness, he writes:
From Boole, with his “Laws of Thought” in the 1850s, to the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence at the present day, there has been a persistent notion that one may have an intelligence or a language based on pure logic, without anything so messy as “meaning” being involved… This is not the case, and cannot be the case.
Our search for meaning, Sacks intimates, will be forever part of the human organism’s experience of optimal functioning — an experience, to me, qualitatively different from anything an artificial intelligence can approximate, to the extent that it can even have experience at all. In a passage that strikes me as the supreme refutation of ChatGPT’s bid for consciousness, he writes:
That feeling we have when we are functioning optimally, of a swift, effortless, complex, ever-changing, but integrated and orchestrated stream of consciousness… coincides with the sense that this consciousness is ours, and that all we experience and do and say is, implicitly, a form of self-expression, and that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development; it coincides, finally, with our sense that life is a journey — unpredictable, full of risk and uncertainty, but, equally, full of novelty and adventure, and characterized (if not sabotaged by external constraints or pathology) by constant advance, an ever deeper exploration and understanding of the world.
Again and again, the correlates of consciousness root it in the life of the body, the pulse-beat of experience hungry for meaning — something lacking in a machine of even the most astonishing computational capacity. In a lyrical antidote to millennia of dualism and a maelstrom of trendy hyperboles about the future of AI, Sacks writes:
We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually growing and revised. The brain is not a bundle of impersonal processes, an “It,” with the “mind,” the “self,” hovering mysteriously above it. It is a confederation, an organic unity, of innumerable categorizations, and categorizations of its own activities, and from these, its self-reflection, there arises consciousness, the Mind, a metastructure… built upon the real worlds in the brain… Through experience, education, art, and life, we teach our brains to become unique. We learn to be individuals. This is a neurological learning as well as a spiritual learning.
Complement with Meghan O’Gieblyn on consciousness and our search for meaning in the age of AI, then revisit Oliver Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, the psychology of writing, and mortality and the meaning of life.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.”
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” wrote Walt Whitman a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death as a radiant token of the improbable odds of having lived at all. Death — the harrowing fact of our mortality — is the central animating force of life, the one great terror for which we have devised the coping mechanisms of love and art. Everything we make, everything we do, is a bid for bearing our transience. And yet this is the native poetry of the cosmos — in a universe churned by entropy, the very fact of our impermanence is life’s most enduring source of meaning.
That is what the uncommonly poetic and penetrating Annie Dillard explores throughout her book For the Time Being (public library), published in the final year of the world’s deadliest century.
Total solar eclipse by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)With an eye to sand — Earth’s emissary of deep time, builder and dismatler of civilizations — Dillard writes:
Since sand and dirt pile up on everything, why does it look fresh for each new crowd? As natural and human debris raises the continents, vegetation grows on the piles. It is all a stage set — we know this — a temporary stage on top of many layers of stages, but every year fungus, bacteria, and termites carry off the old layer, and every year a new crop of sand, grass, and tree leaves freshens the set and perfects the illusion that ours is the new and urgent world now. When Keats was in Rome, he saw pomegranate trees overhead; they bloomed in dirt blown onto the Colosseum’s broken walls. How can we doubt our own time, in which each bright instant probes the future? We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.
In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs — sure, we know this. But do not the dead generations seem to us dark and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii?
We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out.
Art from Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Elbruch — a German picture-book about making sense of death“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness,” David Foster Wallace wrote as he reckoned with mortality and redemption, “has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.” In consonance with Wallace, Dillard writes:
Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold, as one creature — but us? When we people differ, and know our consciousness, and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers who will love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish our selves in an abstract “humanity” whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the notion of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self. Huston Smith suggests that our individuality resembles a snowflake’s: The seas evaporate water, clouds build and loose water in snowflakes, which dissolve and go to sea. The simile galls. What have I to do with the ocean, I with my unique and novel hexagons and spikes? Is my very mind a wave in the ocean, a wave the wind flattens, a flaw the wind draws like a finger?
We know we must yield, if only intellectually. Okay, we’re a lousy snowflake. Okay, we’re a tree. These dead loved ones we mourn were only those brown lower branches a tree shades and kills as it grows; the tree itself is thriving. But what kind of tree are we growing here, that could be worth such waste and pain? For each of us loses all we love, everyone we love. We grieve and leave.
Complement with Marcus Aurelius on embracing mortality and the key to living fully, Rilke on befriending our transience, Marguerite Duras on our only taste of immortality, and physicist Alan Lightman on what actually happens when we die, then revisit Dillard on how to live with mystery and what Earth’s most otherworldly tree teaches us about being human.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”
The great paradox of consciousness is that it constitutes both our entire experience of reality and our blindfold to reality as it really is. Forever trapped within it, we mistake our concepts of things for the things themselves, our theories for the universe, continually seeing the world not as it is but as we are. The supreme frontier of human freedom may be the ability to accept that something exists beyond understanding, that understanding is a machination of the mind and not a mirror of the world — that the world simply is, and our consciousness is a participant in its being but not a creator of it.
The English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) explores how to do that in her 1914 book Practical Mysticism (public library | public domain) — a field guide to mystical experience that is secular rather than religious, the product of “ordinary contemplation” springing from the very essence of human nature, available to all.
Evelyn UnderhillAcknowledging what modern cognitive scientists well known — that our attention is “an intentional, unapologetic discriminator” — Underhill observes that “only a few amongst the wealth of impressions we receive are seized and incorporated into our picture of the world,” and reflects on the spiritual significance of this tendency to mistake representation for reality:
The distinction between mystic and non-mystic is not merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between intellect and intuition. The question which divides them is really this: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon — with what aspects of the universe shall it “unite”?
It is notorious that the operations of the average human consciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, and aspects of things. The verb “to be,” which [the self] uses so lightly, does not truly apply to any of the objects amongst which the practical man supposes himself to dwell. For him, the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged [jugged hare is a traditional English dish of hare marinated in wine and juniper berries, cooked in the animal’s blood]: he conceives not the living, lovely, wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the deplorable dish which he calls “things as they really are.” So complete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from the facts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough “understanding,” garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which the principle of life and growth has been ejected. He is happy enough “understanding,” garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which the principle of life and growth has been ejected, and whereof only the most digestible portions have been retained.
This, Underhill observes, is the opposite of the mystical orientation, which opens us up to a kind of knowledge beyond understanding — the kind that Elizabeth Bishop invoked in her astonishing poem “At the Fishhouses,” consonant with the notion of adaequatio and kindred to Maurice Bucke’s notion of cosmic consciousness.
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Five years earlier, Underhill had voiced these existential reckonings through the heroine of her novel The Column of Dust:
She had seen, abruptly, the insecurity of those defences which protect our illusions and ward off the horrors of truth. She had found a little hole in the wall of appearances; and peeping through, had caught a glimpse of that seething pot of spiritual forces whence, now and then, a bubble rises to the surface of things.
That bubble, she intimates in Practical Mysticism, is what mysticism as “the art of union with Reality” surfaces in us. She writes:
Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simply do not attempt to unite with Reality. But now and then that symbolic character is suddenly brought home to us. Some great emotion, some devastating visitation of beauty, love, or pain, lifts us to another level of consciousness; and we are aware for a moment of the difference between the neat collection of discrete objects and experiences which we call the world, and the height, the depth, the breadth of that living, growing, changing Fact, of which thought, life, and energy are parts… Then we realise that our whole life is enmeshed in great and living forces; terrible because unknown… The more sacred plane of life and energy which seems to be manifested in the forces we call “spiritual” and “emotional” — in love, anguish, ecstasy, adoration — is hidden from us too. Symptoms, appearances, are all that our intellects can discern: sudden irresistible inroads from it, all that our hearts can apprehend. The material for an intenser life, a wider, sharper consciousness, a more profound understanding of our own existence, lies at our gates. But we are separated from it, we cannot assimilate it; except in abnormal moments, we hardly know that it is.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Those who bridge the separation, Underhill argues, are the mystics. Pointing to Walt Whitman as one such secular mystic — a person who “has achieved a passionate communion with deeper levels of life than those with which we usually deal” — she invites a layered understanding of what this notion of practical mysticism means:
The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to be a part of a greater activity. Blake, Plotinus, Joan of Arc, and John of the Cross — there is a link which binds all these together: but if he is to make use of it, the inquirer must find that link for himself.
This practical mysticism, she argues as she contrasts it with an “indolent and useless mysticality,” is available to the ordinary person as an invitation “to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world.” She offers a sentiment of winged assurance:
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone — though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men — so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
The Dove No. 1 by Hilma af Klint. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Underhill considers the ultimate reward of practical mysticism:
Mysticism [is] the art of union with Reality [and], above all else, a Science of Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and towards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching out, is a condition of being, not of seeing. As the bodily senses have been produced under pressure of man’s physical environment, and their true aim is not the enhancement of his pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment to those aspects of the natural world which concern him — so the use and meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too. These, when developed by a suitable training, reveal to man a certain measure of Reality: not in order that he may gaze upon it, but in order that he may react to it, learn to live in, with, and for it; growing and stretching into more perfect harmony with the Eternal Order, until at last, like the blessed ones of Dante’s vision, the clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable radiance of the Enkindling Light.
Indeed, she places the ability — the willingness — to “look with the eyes of love” at heart of this practice of seeing reality clearly — a practice containing “the whole art of spiritual communion.” In a passage consonant with Dostoyevsky’s insistence that “nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason,”, and evocative of Hilton Als’s notion of love as the art of receptivity, Underhill writes:
The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness; without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender your I-hood; see things at last as the artist does, for their sake, not for your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to the unity that is in them: and you achieve the “Simple Vision” of the poet and the mystic — that synthetic and undistorted apprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single vision of practical men. The doors of perception are cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light, are poured from the outward world. The conscious love which achieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate… But the will which that love has enkindled can hold attention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unreal and egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness, and in the suffering which such darkness brings to the awakened spirit, its appointed task, cutting a way into new levels of Reality.
Complement these fragments of Underhill’s wholly revelatory Practical Mysticism with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on transcendence for the science-spirited, then revisit Emerson on nature, transcendence, and how we become our most authentic selves.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.”
“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman,” the visionary psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote as he considered the mother as a pillar of society. Having a mother is a lifelong complexity. Losing a mother, no matter the nature or duration of the relationship, is the cataclysm of a lifetime.
That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) reckoned with in his thirty-ninth year, recording the loss in a breathtaking diary entry found in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James (public library).
Henry James and his mother, Mary Robertson Walsh JamesJames writes:
I came back from Washington on the 30th of last month (reached Cambridge the next day), to find that I should never again see my dear mother. On Sunday, Jan. 29th, as Aunt Kate sat with her in the closing dusk (she had been ill with an attack of bronchial asthma, but was apparently recovering happily), she passed away. It makes a great difference to me! I knew that I loved her — but I didn’t know how tenderly till I saw her lying in her shroud in that cold North Room, with a dreary snowstorm outside, and looking as sweet and tranquil and noble as in life. These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.
After making funeral arrangements with his father and his sister Alice — herself a writer of genius and consummate wisdom on the art of dying — he reflects on the kaleidoscopic nature of the loss:
It is impossible for me to say — to begin to say — all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us all together, and without her we are scattered reeds. She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity. Her sweetness, her mildness, her great natural beneficence were unspeakable, and it is infinitely touching to me to write about her here as one that was.
Kinship by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)One of the greatest betrayals of our illusion of permanence, one of the sharpest daggers of loss, is the retroactive recognition of lasts — the last time you sat across from a person you now know you will never see again, the last touch of a hand that is no more, the last kiss of lips that shall never part again — lasts the finality of which we can never comprehend in the moment, lasts we experience with sundering shock in hindsight. James shudders with this recognition, then finds in it an exhale of relief, of reconciliation with reality that borders on sanctity:
When I think of all that she had been, for years when I think of her hourly devotion to each and all of us — and that when I went to Washington the last of December I gave her my last kiss. I heard her voice for the last time — there seems not to be enough tenderness in my being to register the extinction of such a life. But I can reflect, with perfect gladness, that her work was done — her long patience had done its utmost. She had had heavy cares and sorrows, which she had borne without a murmur, and the weariness of age had come upon her.
I would rather have lost her forever than see her begin to suffer as she would probably have been condemned to suffer, and I can think with a kind of holy joy of her being lifted now above all our pains and anxieties. Her death has given me a passionate belief in certain transcendent things — the immanence of being as nobly created as hers — the immortality of such a virtue as that… She is no more of an angel today than she had always been; but I can’t believe that by the accident of her death all her unspeakable tenderness is lost to the things she so dearly loved. She is with us, she is of us — the eternal stillness is but a form of her love. One can hear her voice in it — one can feel, forever, the inextinguishable vibration of her devotion.
In a bittersweet reminder that we must never hold back our tenderness, for we never know how many chances to share it are left us, he adds:
I can’t help feeling that in those last weeks I was not tender enough with her — that I was blind to her sweetness and beneficence. One can’t help wishing one had only known what was coming, so that one might have enveloped her with the softest affection.
Complement with My Mother’s Eyes — a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love — and Mary Gaitskill on how to move through life when your parents are dying — some of the simplest, most redemptive advice for those who have the chance-granted luxury of choosing it — then revisit James on how to stop waiting and start living.
HT Diaries of Note
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.”
“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” And yet one of the supreme challenges of humans life is, to borrow Rilke’s lovely phrase, to “go to the limits of your longing” — to fully surrender to your suffering, to fully step into your hope and own your desire for a grand life, desire not fueled by the grandiosity of ego but aimed at the grandeur of the cosmos that betokens our longing for homecoming to the Ultimate. The ability to do that is the deepest root of heroism and our mightiest, most vulnerable means of wresting meaning from our mortality.
How to own our heroism and our cosmic longing is what the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924–March 6, 1974) explores in his 1973 classic The Denial of Death (public library), published just before his untimely return to the Ultimate.
Ernest BeckerBecker — whose concept of the hero is not dissimilar to Leonard Cohen’s concept of the saint — writes:
Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.
Echoing Milan Kundera’s admonition about knowing what we really want, he considers how modern culture cauterizes the heroic impulse within us:
When we appreciate how natural it is for man* to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it.
We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill… We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are.
The Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)The templates of heroism, Becker observes, are handed down to us by our particular culture as proscribed roles to be assumed in our struggle to give shape to the creative impulse — that supreme expression of our yearning for a counterforce to mortality:
The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.
It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)And yet, half-opaque to ourselves as we are, we remain largely unconscious that much of what we do, we do to earn this feeling of heroism — an admission that would come as “a devastating release of truth,” making us demand of our culture what we most long for: “a primary sense of human value as unique contributors to cosmic life.” In a sentiment of extraordinary cultural sensitivity and pertinence to the social tumult of our own time, he writes:
The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism of which they have been cheated historically… But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There’s the rub… To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.
Becker observes that modern culture has supplanted the cosmic heroism we long for with the counterfeit heroism of demagogues and the “silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life,” selling us on a simulacrum of life:
The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
Writing a decade before Lewis Hyde’s epochal manifesto for the gift of creativity, Becker considers the relationship between the heroic and the creative impulse in the singular blessing and curse of the artist:
The whole thing boils down to this paradox: if you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance. If you are an artist you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification of your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men… To renounce the world and oneself, to lay the meaning of it to the powers of creation, is the hardest thing for man to achieve — and so it is fitting that this task should fall to the strongest personality type.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Throughout the book, Becker examines various hero-systems across the history of our species, all inseparable from our struggle to live with our transience. “All historical religions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life,” he writes, then traces how death became “the muse of philosophy” from its dawn in Ancient Greece to its golden hour in twentieth-century existentialism. With an especially keen eye to the cosmology of Kierkegaard, he considers our search for meaning and spiritual fulfillment through the lens of the heroic in us:
Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. This invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith… The truly open person, the one who has shed his character armor, the vital lie of his cultural conditioning… is absolutely alone and trembling on the brink of oblivion — which is at the same time the brink of infinity.
With an eye to the diversity of our gifts, he adds:
The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can.
The Denial of Death is a revelatory read in its entirety. Complement these particular fragments from it with Joseph Campbell’s seminal monomyth of the hero’s journey and Walter Lippmann’s magnificent reckoning with what makes a hero in his tribute to Amelia Earhart, then revisit Kierkegaard on how to bridge the ephemeral and the eternal.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.”
We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life — life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control — to rush in.
How to live with that generative brokenness is what composer Tina Davidson explores throughout her memoir Let Your Heart Be Broken: Life and Music from a Classical Composer (public library) — a lyrical reckoning with what it takes to compose a life of cohesion and beauty out of shattered bits and broken stories.
She recounts attending a talk by Stephen Levine — the poet and author best known for his work on death and dying — at which an audience member asked what the meaning of life is. Acknowledging the vastness of the question, Levine paused, then offered: “I think the meaning of life is to let your heart be broken.” Reflecting on his words, Davidson writes:
Let your heart be broken. Allow, expect, look forward to. The life that you have so carefully protected and cared for. Broken, cracked, rent in two. Heartbreakingly, your heart breaks, and in the two halves, rocking on the table, is revealed rich earth. Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin.
The Human Heart. One of French artist Paul Sougy’s mid-century scientific diagrams of life. (Available as a print.)Davidson — who is living with congestive heart failure after a savage bacterial infection — was a small child when her heart was first broken. Long before she became an accomplished pianist and composer, she was a three-year-old girl living with her foster parents and siblings in Sweden, until she was ripped from the only family she knew to be adopted by an English teacher from Ohio, who eighteen years later was revealed to be her birth-mother, having abandoned her newborn in the heartbreak of an ill-fated love affair. Davidson writes:
Here was the heart of loss. To my three-year-old self, my foster family was my family. The day my mother rang Solvig’s doorbell and brought me home as an adopted child, I lost my first mother and father, my three brothers, a home, a country, and a language. I lost myself and became another child. The shining child waited at the window. The dark child emerged. To the passing eye, I was unremarkable, even normal — but my inner self was silent, dark, and eternally sad for a loss that had no name.
Soon, her single mother married and Tina became the eldest of five children living in an itinerant family across Turkey, Germany, and Israel. Eventually, that dark inner child found light in music as she became an accomplished classical composer, creating with “that wonderful absorbing feeling of being,” with “a sigh of homecoming.” She writes:
Music, like life, is no more than itself. There is no implicit reason to it except that it is. And that is its magic. Like swimming in a dark underground grotto, life miraculously pulses open.
Music by Maria Popova. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)And yet an unslaked longing lurked beneath it all. Thirty years after the separation, Davidson set out to reconnect with her foster family, only to find that her foster mother had died of carcinoma a year earlier. Inhabiting her grief — grief “patient and enduring” that untucked hidden griefs she had been living with at the edges of being — became her way of wresting new life from the broken pieces of her heart. She reflects on this tender and tumultuous process:
The path of memory was littered with startling beliefs and perceptions that operated, silent and deadly, behind the scenes. My progress was uneven. I reworked an understanding, leaped ahead, then wallowed for weeks in a fog. After a remission, I emerged to work on a new piece of the puzzle. The darkness began to lighten, my rage abated, my depressions lessened; I began to breathe.
Punctuating the particular story of her own life with reflections on the universal pulse-beat of all life, she considers what readies the soil for this new fecundity as we continually tussle with our past, with the selves we have been and the lives we have lived and the losses we have lost:
The past presses on the present with staggering consistency. Nothing is separate or fresh, always an afterimage. The slow time-lapse photograph catches the multi-image movement of our lives. Danger lurks in every corner. To reconstruct will challenge perceptions of self, to restore will allow old pain to well up.
The price of forgotten memories, however, is more costly. My puppeteer of darkness is cruel. He perpetuates false beliefs and forces reenactments I cannot control.
The miracle is light. The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering. The miracle is the persistence of the soul to find itself, to look hard into the darkness, reach back, and grasp remnants of ourselves. The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)With an eye to both creative work and life itself, she echoes Henry Miller’s penetrating insight on control and surrender, and contours the most generative orientation of being:
The word allow asks for balance and helps me rethink the issue of ownership and parentage. Allow provides a medium for growth and questions authority. Too much control forces a finger into sacred ground, leaving a trail of infection. To allow, in the end, is to have.
Let Your Heart Be Broken is a consummate read in its entirety, exploring with uncommon sensitivity and poetic insight the fundamentals of love, forgiveness, creativity, and what it takes to emerge from the inner darkness into a vast vista of light, rooted in the life-tested truth that “we are, in the end, a measure of the love we leave behind.” Complement these fragments from it with Kahlil Gibran on how to weather the uncertainties of love, Hannah Arendt on love and the fundamental fear of loss, and Alain de Botton on surviving heartbreak.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Bertrand Russell counseled in his timeless advice on how to grow old. There is a lovely symmetry between this orientation to the winter of life and the natural state of its springtime — in youth, curiosity unfurls centripetally from the self to the world, touching more and more facets of it with that electric jolt of discovery when everything is new and interesting and dazzling with delight.
How to harness youth’s centripetal curiosity as a creative force for bettering the world is what Nick Cave — himself an insightful reckoner with the art of growing older — explores in answering a 13-year-old boy’s question about how to live a full, creative, actualized, spiritually rich life in “a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect.”
Nick CaveIn consonance with W.E.B. Du Bois’s advice to his teenage daughter and with David Bowie’s idea of perfect happiness, Cave writes:
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
This openhearted curiosity, this aura of astonishment, becomes an antidote to the spiritual poison most corrosive to the world — cynicism, that supreme enemy of hope. At any stage of life, the refusal to succumb to cynicism is among our greatest triumphs of the spirit. It is certainly our mightiest force of courage and resistance to the cowardly denouncements of possibility that pock the countenance of humanity.
One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.Cave’s urgent words to the boy speak to the tender, hopeful, openhearted child in each of us — for, in the plainest existential sense, we are daily beginners at life:
Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world.
Complement with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s advice on life and Rebecca Solnit’s lovely letter to children about the value of reading, then revisit Nick Cave on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”
The matter that we know — the stuff we can see and touch — comprises a mere 5% of the universe. All the rest is dark matter. We can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t discern what it is made of or how it came to be. And yet dark matter is what holds galaxies together, what keeps the regular matter in place so that we may live.
I believe every creative practice is like that — only a small fraction of it we can see and touch in the works of art we can point to, made possible and alive by all the invisible devotions and despairs that animate the maker’s life, that fill the days and hours, that occupy the heart and the hands. These private practices are anchors of sanity vital to the public work, for they are vital to the soul from which creative work springs.
The poet, novelist, and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores this
throughout her altogether ravishing journal The House by the Sea, nowhere more poignantly than in her contribution to the canon of great artists and writers on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening.
May SartonIn a diary entry penned as spring is cusping into summer, after a season of devoted planting and tending to her garden, she writes:
I complained to Lee that no one really looks at the garden. Her answer was accurate, “You do the garden for yourself, after all.” Yes, I do, but I also long to give it, and in this it is very much like poetry — that is, I would write poems whether anyone looked at them or not, but I hope someone will.
A generation before Rebecca Solnit contemplated the creative purpose of Orwell’s rose garden, Sarton considers the role of gardening as a sanity-salving device for her creative practice:
Do I spend too much time at this ephemeral task? In spring, summer, and autumn I work harder at it than at writing, and I expect that looks crazy, but what it does is balance all the anxieties and tensions and keep me sane. Sanity (plus flowers) does make sense.
Wildflowers by Clarissa Munger Badger. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)In a sentiment that evokes her lovely insistence on “joy instead of will,” she celebrates gardening as an antidote to the cult of achievement — the cult that makes a travesty of all creative work:
Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little.
Complement with more reflections on gardening from Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, and Jamaica Kincaid, then revisit Sarton on how to cultivate your talent, the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, grieving a pet, the cure for despair, and her timeless ode to the art of being alone.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her.”
Know as we might what actually happens when we die, we spend our lives trembling at the fact of our finitude, trying to wrest from it some greater poetic truth — something that slakes the soul’s thirst for meaning. Even the spiritual materialists among us are haunted by incomprehension at the cessation of consciousness — how can this entire carnival of wonder just, one day, melt into nothingness? And what, in the end, does it all mean, will it all have meant?
These questions come alive in the 1908 book An Indian Study of Love and Death (public library | public domain) by the Irish teacher and activist Margaret Elizabeth Noble (October 18, 1867–October 13, 1911), christened Sister Nivedita by Swami Vivekananda after she emigrated to Calcutta when she was twenty-one to begin devoting her life to India and the sacred search for meaning.
Sister NiveditaTo be clear, Sister Nivedita’s intimation that the soul is immortal is a fundamentally unprovable fact — a claim counter to everything we know about the universe, beyond the reach of our empiricism — and yet radiating it from it is that larger poetic truth Whitman too touched, as did Tracy K. Smith, which is its own consolation, its own consecration.
Sister Nivedita writes:
All things bring forth their opposites… Life is a rhythm, a rhythm of rhythms, and rhythm is but a continuous movement from one point to the reverse. Every experience within life is made up of such movement between two, and we cannot conceive that life itself should be different from all its elements. But if so, it must itself, in experience, be succeeded by death. Bodily consciousness must be succeeded by bodily unconsciousness. Manifestation by non-manifestation. This mode of acting and knowing, by not acting and not knowing in this mode.
Yet as I am myself a constant factor, in my own waking and sleeping, in health and in disease, so there must be a factor which remains constant, and undergoes this experience, of death as well as of life. This factor we call the soul.
The soul then persists.
[…]
For the soul dwells ever in the presence of the soul. At death, a veil that confused and dimmed has been withdrawn. Shall we weep for the veil, as for the wearer of the veil?
I see my soul reflected in Nature by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)Such a conception of the soul renders it something different from consciousness — for we now know that consciousness is a full-body phenomenon that does not survive the entropic undoing of death. Sister Nivedita paints the afterlife she imagines for this supra-conscious entity:
To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her.
To her, death brings no change. Death changes the body alone. The soul loses not her own consciousness: she loses body-consciousness. And that is all.
The cares of the body are gone. The hopes and fears and memories of the body no longer exist. But that which was the life of the soul, the thought of God, or the yearning to bless, or the burning hope of truth, remains still, gathers ever to its perfect consummation in the eternal.
But inside this metaphysical meditation is a quiet invitation for something else, something consummately earthly — no matter what happens at death, imagine what life would be like if lived with a passionate love of truth and “the yearning to bless” everything it touches. Imagine.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On cruelty, kindness, and the song of life.
Pastel-colored apparitions of tenderness, magnolias are titans of resilience. They have been consecrating Earth with their beauty since the time dinosaurs roamed it, long before bees evolved to give our planet its colors, pioneering the exquisitely orchestrated pollination strategies by which perfect flowers survive.
Today, for a precious week in spring, they bloom to remind us that life is livable, then die to remind us that it must be lived.
Magnolia under a dawn redwood in Downtown BrooklynWhen Western botanists first encountered these ravishing flowering trees on an island in the West Indies, they named them after the trailblazing French botanist Pierre Magnol — originator of the concept of plant families and the first person to devise a system of natural classification, a century ahead of Linnaeus. The word magnolia was heartily adopted, so that by the time Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum, introducing his revolutionary binomial naming system, the magnolia appeared in it as a single species. Today, we know there to be hundreds, some of them deciduous and some evergreen, with the American evergreen species Magnolia grandiflora the most widely recognizable.
Magnolias have a long history of enchanting humanity with their splendor and symbolic intimations. As early as the year 650, Buddhist monks in China made of the wild magnolia a garden deity, planting a white-blooming Magnolia denudata at their temple as a symbol of purity. The magnolia planted at the White House from a Tennessee sprout in the 1820s lived through thirty-nine presidencies and came to grace the back of the $20 bill for seven decades. Magnolia sieboldii is the national flower of North Korea, and Magnolia grandiflora the state flower of both Mississippi and Louisiana.
Magnolias have long figured in our efforts to mediate between the body and the mind — the mediation we call medicine. In the early nineteenth century, American physicians began using the dried bark of Magnolia virginiana, Magnolia acuminata, and Magnolia tripetala to treat malaria, rheumatism, and gout. For millennia, Chinese medicine has been transmuting the bark of Magnolia officinalis into a tonic known as hou-phu, used for treating neurological and gastric disorders. Twentieth-century science isolated from it the compounds magnolol and honokio — sedatives with relaxant effects on the central nervous system, found to help reduce tremors in Parkinson’s patients. Throughout Asia, the common drug hsin-i, made of the flowering buds of several magnolia species, is used to treat headaches, fever, allergies, and respiratory disorders.
Humans are not the only animals to wrest vitality from magnolias. Migrating songbirds relish them, drawn to the bright seeds and nourished by their unusually high fat content of 40% — more than twice that of the avocado, Earth’s most nutritious fruit. Squirrels, raccoons, and possums also savor them. Their leaves are a favorite food for the larvae of the giant leopard moth — one of Earth’s most majestic and resplendent insects.
Humans, too, have feasted on the magnolia — in rural England, the petals of Magnolia grandiflora are used to spice stews, in Japan the young leaves and buds of Magnolia hypoleuca are broiled as a vegetable, and in other Asian cuisines the flower buds of various magnolia species are used to scent tea and flavor rice. The aromatic hoba miso is made with magnolia.
To me, magnolias are the most existential of trees, their weeklong bloom an open-mouth scream of exhilaration at the transient miracle of being alive. There is cruelty to beauty so fierce and so fleeting. “Blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white,” Robert Lowell wrote in a poem. But there is also kindness in its gentle reminder not to squander a single moment of living. In five days, a whole life can spin on its axis.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On inviting the state of being that “allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.”
I suspect our ability to ask the unanswerable questions that Hannah Arendt knew are the heartbeat of civilization is intimately related to our capacity for dwelling in a particular state of being beyond the realm of our compulsive doing. Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to enact such states of being — states in which our inner voice becomes audible, the voice with which we sing the song of our lives.
The Pakistani-British psychoanalyst Masud Khan (July 21, 1924–June 7, 1989) calls this mode of being “lying fallow” and unfurls its psychological tendrils in a short, brightly penetrating essay included in his 1983 collection Hidden Selves (public library).
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss.With an eye to the dictionary definition of fallow as “ground that is well-ploughed and harrowed, but left uncropped for a whole year or more,” Khan considers his choice of compound phrasing:
Through the metaphor of an active verb, I wish to indicate that the mood I am trying to discuss is not one of inertia, listless vacancy or idle quietism of the soul; nor is it a flight from harassed purposiveness and pragmatic action. Lying fallow is a transitional state of experience, a mode of being that is alerted quietude and receptive wakeful lambent consciousness.
Noting the strange deficiency of our language in describing “positive nonconflictual moods” — a language with a vast lexicon for conveying tension and friction — Khan defines lying fallow not as “a neurotic, conflictual, or distress state” but as “a healthy function of the ego in the service of the individual,” one of those “intractably silent states which we associate with the healthy individual.” Radiating from this notion is a reminder that we are infinitely complex totalities forged by a process of slow incubation and incremental becoming, and that how we govern our interiority — how we tend to those processes as they shape us — shapes every outward expression of our lives. Khan writes:
The capacity for lying fallow is a function of the process of personalization in the individual. This process of personalization achieves its sentient wholeness over a slow period of growth, development and acculturation, and its true matrix is a hierarchy of relationships… This is a long process and it is waylaid by many a traumata — personal, familial and social. But if all goes well — and it does, more often than not — what crystallizes and differentiates into the separate status of adult selfhood is a personalized individual with his own privacy, inner reality and sense of relatedness to his social environment.
Noting the extreme cult of the individual in Western society, with its militant focus on self-help and self-improvement, Khan adds:
In this excessive zeal to rescue and comfort the individual, we have perhaps overlooked some of the basic needs of the person to be private, unintegrated and to lie fallow.
Art by Olivier Tallec from What If…Observing that we all experience lying fallow “frequently in fleeting patches” — in our moments of procrastination between tasks, in our states of idleness and our restless sense that we must snap out of this “benignly languid passive mood” — he considers the rewards of surrendering to rather than fleeing from this state:
What does the fallow mood achieve for us? The answer is a paradox: a great deal and nothing. It is a nutrient of the ego and a preparatory state. It supplies the energic substratum for most of our creative efforts, and through it unintegrated, psychic suspended animation… allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.
Lying fallow is, in other words, the antidote to the deadly trap of efficiency. Khan outlines the five features of the fallow state:
- A transitional and transient mood
- A nonconflictual, noninstinctual, and intellectually uncritical state
- A capacity of the ego
- An alert wakeful mood — unintegrated, receptive and labile
- A largely nonverbal and imagistic state, kinaesthetic in expression
In the history of creative culture, many great and enduring artistic productions have arisen out of this state — evidence that lying fallow is not a form of idleness but “a cogent capacity in a well-established, disciplined and personalized individual.” Half a century after Bertrand Russell admonished that “a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation… in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase,” Khan writes:
Lying fallow is, above all, the proof that a person can be with himself unpurposefully.
Art by Austrian artist Tom Seidmann-Freud — Freud’s niece — from David the Dreamer, 1922But while lying fallow is the antipode of productivity, it is also, paradoxically, the antipode of leisure. In a passage of extraordinary prescience given our present epoch of endless social media streams supplanting every moment of stillness with a reflexive hit of on-demand entertainment, Khan writes:
It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. Hence the emergence of a colossal trade in organizing people’s leisure. This need is perhaps one of the real absurdities of our existence today, and it reflects the decay of some crucial value-systems… in all types and kinds of human beings. The pursuit of frantic leisure… is perhaps one of the most dissipating qualities of the technical cultures. The individual on whom leisure has been imposed in massive doses, and who has little capacity to deal with it, then searches for distractions that will fill this vacuum… A great deal of the distress and psychic conflict that we see clinically… is the result of a warped and erroneous expectancy of human nature and existence. It is the omnipresent fallacy of our age that all life should be fun and that all time should be made available to enjoy this fun. The result is apathy, discontent and pseudo-neurosis.
[…]
A craving for leisure, and the concomitant yearning for distractions to fill the void of given-leisure, is the result of our failure to understand the role and function of the need to lie fallow in the human psyche and personality… We have industriously misinformed ourselves about the essentials of human nature. We have confused the necessity to relieve human poverty and misery with the demand that all life should be fun and kicks. The entertainment media of modern cultures have further exploited this leisure void for commercial gain and flooded citizens with ready-made switchable distractions, so that no awareness of the need to develop personal resources to cope with fallow states can actualize as private experience.
The consequence, Khan cautions, is that we have developed a narcissistic personality style — one that makes myriad outward demands on the world with “little comprehension of the necessity of the responsibility for an inner relation to its own self.” Under this warping of the soul, we have come to our core existential problems — loneliness, misery, grief, alienation — “with no inkling of insight into the person’s primary human responsibility for a commitment to sustain and nourish himself.” Lying fallow is how we begin to nourish ourselves, how we begin to take responsibility for ourselves as transient miracles of aliveness and creative agents of destiny.
Complement with May Sarton’s stunning poem about the relationship between solitude, presence, and love and Hermann Hesse on solitude and how to find your destiny, then revisit two centuries of titanic minds, from Kierkegaard to Sontag, on the spiritual and creative rewards of boredom.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).”
Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.
How to love the world more by negotiating our hunger for certainty and our gift for story is what George Saunders explores in some lovely passages from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library) — the boundlessly wonderful and layered book in which he reckoned with the key to great storytelling and the way to unbreak our hearts.
Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of BeingIn consonance with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s insight into narrative as the pillar of personal identity, Saunders examines the elemental impulse for storytelling as the basic organizing principle by which we govern our lives:
The instant we wake the story begins: “Here I am. In my bed. Hard worker, good dad, decent husband, a guy who always tries his best. Jeez, my back hurts. Probably from the stupid gym.”
And just like that, with our thoughts, the world gets made.
Or, anyway, a world gets made.
This world-making via thinking is natural, sane, Darwinian: we do it to survive. Is there harm in it? Well, yes, because we think in the same way that we hear or see: within a narrow, survival-enhancing range. We don’t see or hear all that might be seen or heard but only that which is helpful for us to see and hear. Our thoughts are similarly restricted and have a similarly narrow purpose: to help the thinker thrive.
All of this limited thinking has an unfortunate by-product: ego. Who is trying to survive? “I” am. The mind takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating from that point of view. Just like that, that entity (George!) becomes real, and he is (surprise, surprise) located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie, so to speak; it is all, somehow, both for and about him. In this way, moral judgment arises: what is good for George is… good. What is bad for him is bad. (The bear is neither good nor bad until, looking hungry, it starts walking toward George.)
So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world. Evil and dysfunction (or at least obnoxiousness) occur in proportion to how solidly a person believes that his projections are correct and energetically acts upon them.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Over time, our stories harden into certainties that collide with each other every time we engage with another person, who is another story — another embodiment of the unreliable first-person narration known as skaz that permeates classic Russian literature. With an eye to the inescapable fact that “there is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see,” Saunders contours the commonplace tragicomedy of colliding in the mind-made world of skaz:
I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.
[…]
The entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves as the center of the universe, thinking highly of themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything.
Trying to communicate across this fissure of understanding yields results sometimes comical and sometimes tragic, always affirming that reality is not singular but plural, not a point of view but a plane of possible vantages. With an eye to Chekhov — who was a physician by training and an excellent one, but an even better writer because a diagnosis is a forced conclusion of curiosity but art is the eternal sandbox of doubt — Saunders writes:
In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).
One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.After a close reading of Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries,” he reflects:
It’s hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system of belief can be a great relief.
[…]
As long as we don’t decide, we allow further information to keep coming in. Reading a story like “Gooseberries” might be seen as a way of practicing this. It reminds us that any question in the form “Is X right or wrong?” could benefit from another round of clarifying questions. Question: “Is X good or bad?” Story: “For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more.”
Art by Paloma Valdivia from Pablo Neruda’s Book of QuestionsThis openness to more — to truth beyond story, to beauty beyond certainty — is precisely what teaches us how to love the world more. With a deep bow to Chekhov as the master of this existential art, Saunders writes:
This feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination. (“Am I sure? Is it really so? Is my preexisting opinion causing me to omit anything?”) He has a gift for reconsideration. Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it. In other words, we have to stay open (easy to say, in that confident, New Age way, but so hard to actually do, in the face of actual, grinding, terrifying life). As we watch Chekhov continually, ritually doubt all conclusions, we’re comforted. It’s all right to reconsider. It’s noble — holy, even. It can be done. We can do it. We know this because of the example he leaves in his stories, which are, we might say, splendid, brief reconsideration machines.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain remains one of my all-time favorite books. Complement these fragments from it with Virginia Woolf on finding beauty in the uncertainty of time, space, and being and Kurt Vonnegut on uncertainty as the crucible of creativity, then revisit some thoughts on figuring forward in an uncertain world.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.”
There is but one emotion that claws at the heart with the twin talons of anger and shame, savaging self-regard with haunting ferocity that feeds on itself. “Jealousy,” wrote the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his insightful treatise on love, “is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.” And yet jealousy is also one of the commonest human experiences — one that visits upon even the noblest heart, warping reality and reason beyond recognition.
The complex psychological underpinnings of jealousy, and what they might reveal in the way of relief, and how they might illuminate the most hopeful frontiers of love, is what the pioneering psychiatrist Leslie Farber (July 12, 1912–March 24, 1981) explores in his 1973 essay “On Jealousy,” found in his altogether penetrating collection The Ways of the Will (public library).
One of Aubrey Beardsley’s radical 1893 illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. (Available as a print.)Farber writes:
Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.
Defining the central animating spirit of jealousy as “a state of virtual paralysis in which the will races around a single point,” Farber investigates its most salient psychological characteristic and its relation to the will:
What sets jealousy apart from other possible responses to real or imagined infidelity — such as rage or grief — is its quality of obsession… Literally, obsession means being oppressed or besieged, as if by an evil spirit. On the one hand, one wills one’s obsession to disappear, thereby ensuring its perpetuation. On the other hand, the obsession is the condition of the will — simultaneously assertive and impotent, simultaneously frenzied and paralyzed. The role of the will here is crucial. Whether one is alone or with others, whether one rages or is silent, berates one’s mate with questions and accusations or refrains from berating one’s mate with questions and accusations, the internal drama remains the same: the will has become fixed in a rigid orbit of injury — it spins and burns, but cannot escape its tiny, terrible sphere.
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920s illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)This internal drama takes on a life of its own, contracting the whole of reality into its narrow aperture of self-concern, and eventually subsuming reality altogether — a gruesome counterpoint to the unselfing through which we attain the heights of our nature and the antithesis of Iris Murdoch’s wonderful definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Farber writes:
In the grip of jealous passion one’s state is reduced to a kind of craven non-being. One strives to appear to be the person he was, but he knows that he has lost his autonomy — his sense of self — and has become a slave whose diminished existence is at the mercy of his mate. His human space has shrunk to the narrow boundaries of the jealous melodrama in which he must perform. The world beyond those boundaries seems utterly alien, unreal, and his participation in it — insofar as it is compelled — will strike him not as reassuring and comforting, but hollow and mocking.
This bottomless craving for reassurance leads the jealous person to seek constant evidence of their mate’s presence, compulsively reaching out for contact as their experience of the relationship becomes increasingly “tortured and fragile.” The paradox is that no amount of external affirmation can counteract the internal melodrama of the obsession, leading every littlest gap in presence to read like total abandonment and betrayal, like death itself:
Once the mate goes through the door, moves outside the allotted space, the jealous one dies; the mate holds, in the shift and attention of his or her very eye, the power to grant or withhold permission to be. Small wonder that jealousy contains so striking a portion of anger. In his desperate need to prove the unprovable — namely affection, both his own and his mate’s — [the jealous person] wills what cannot be willed, demanding an enactment of relation that can only be grotesque in its deceits and disgusts.
Another of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome. (Available as a print.)In a sentiment that calls to mind Adrienne Rich’s poignant definition of honorable human relationships, Farber notes that in such a dynamic neither person is “morally qualified” to use the word love — for it is exceedingly rare “that a fit of jealousy, whatever its provocation, is met with an outpouring of love from a guileless heart.” Instead, what commonly happens is a catastrophe of confirmation bias, wherein the mate’s every gesture and movement is seen as affirmation of the jealous person’s suspicions. Farber captures the parasitic nature of this ouroboros of thinking:
Jealousy is self-confirming; it breeds itself… In no simple way (such as: OK, I was wrong all along) will this state of torment and anguish give up its claims or its existence.
[…]
The imagination not to imagine is an important power of intelligence disabled here by the seeming necessities of obsession.
As jealousy folds consciousness unto itself with self-reference, the jealous person grows insentient to the impact of their jealousy:
The experience of jealousy always includes so strong a conviction of being injured that it is most unusual for the jealous person to be able to consider the injury his jealousy causes others. For this reason, the real guilt that is jealousy’s inevitable consequence is seldom acknowledged by a jealous person; it is obliterated by his overriding absorption in his own injury.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)The extreme passions of jealousy can also be mistaken for other emotions, further blinding the jealous person not only to external reality but also to the internal, occluding the very nature of the relationship within which the passions play out:
These paradoxical surges of desire, in the midst of reduction and alienation, may be misconceived by either partner or both as a transcendent return to being-in-love and an escape from jealousy’s claims. Because of this misconception, jealousy has brought about marriages that were ill-advised, and prevented the dissolution of relationships in which meaning had altogether failed.
Farber considers how open relationships — a standard attempt to bypass the very potential for jealousy, aiming at “the achievement of an attitude toward, and practice of, sex that would combine total freedom with total invulnerability” — may in fact misunderstand and underestimate the force of these fundamental psychological dynamics. He cautions:
It seems unlikely to me that such an ancient fox as jealousy will be so simple-mindedly outwitted. I suspect that the new permissiveness offers him a vastly enlarged arena for his operations. If the new generation is serious about its ambitions in relation to sex and serenity of mind, it may be forced to reinvent fidelity.
Locating what he calls the “ground of jealousy” in the developmental psychology of childhood and the elemental pain of our quest for individuation, he writes:
As the child grows gradually aware of the absolute separateness of his being from all other beings in the world, he discovers that this condition offers both pleasure and terror. On the one hand he cherishes his separate, individual, regal self, and on the other he yearns for the loneliness of his autonomy to be relieved by relation with others. The manner in which he seeks and finds such relief, and the manner in which those about him not only answer his overtures but also turn to him for their own consolation, will have considerable bearing on his interpretation of his (and their) condition — and his handling of it.
Art by Paloma Valdivia for Pablo Neruda’s Book of QuestionsIf this delicate process of interbeing is mishandled, if the child learns that approval is the ground for connection, a kind of constant apprehension sets in — one that can metastasize into a dangerous alienation from ourselves:
This apprehension will, of course, proceed from, and present itself as, sensations of inadequacy, unaccaptability, and so on, requiring an habitual dissembling on his part to render himself lovable. This uneasy state is both painful and corrupting, the pain and the corruption… being consequences of his low self-esteem and fear of others’ indifference or rejection, which in turn causes him to project himself falsely.
So habituated, we can begin to lose sense of our true selves as the approval-seeking falsehoods take on a life of their own. This erects an insurmountable obstacle to love, for all emotional intimacy requires, as Tom Stoppard knew, “the mask slipped from the face” — a mutual revelation and mirroring of innermost truth. As Adrienne Rich so memorably wrote, “an honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” Without access to our own truth, we are forever doomed to withholding it from one another, withholding the very breath of love. Farber writes:
Telling the truth is, to be sure, no simple thing. Sometimes it is uncalled for; often it is hard. But telling it is by no means always the most difficult aspect of truth. That may be knowing it. Ordinary people — you and I — not in the grip of inner separation… often encounter uncertainty and confusion in their efforts to reveal by word and gesture what they do actually think and feel. They, too, cherish their integrity, and tend to believe that what they say, by virtue of their saying it, does indeed accurately represent them. Often it is only later, when the moment has passed, that one realizes, gradually and grudgingly, that, for one reason or another, caught up in the occasion, one falsified. One spoke with silence would have been truer; one was silent when he should have spoken. One spoke, and aimed at the right meaning, but used words of the wrong color. And so on. Most of us do not habitually betray ourselves — or others — with sweeping deceits. We just crowd a little here and there, we make ourselves a bit more comfortable than our good sense or loyalties should permit, we take refuge in discretion… One way and another we compromise in tiny steps until, we come to realize — perhaps with a shock — we are standing on alien ground. To make such discoveries, and to retrace our steps, it is essential not to be willfully caught up in sustaning an illusion of truth-telling. It is hard enough without it.
[…]
There are some things it is impossible both to do and at the same time to impersonate oneself doing. Speaking truthfully is one of them.
One of Arthur Rackham’s 1920 illustrations for The TempestThis tendency to impersonate ourselves is an essential form of self-abandonment that inclines us toward that dangerous territory of relinquishing our self-regard to the approval of others. With an eye to “the inevitable jealousies that lie in store for a life lived on these terms,” Farber writes:
Out of this ground, with its racking insufficiency of self and harsh dependence on the excessive regard of others — no degree of excess ever being truly adequate — springs again and again the inescapable jealousy that follows the failure of one person after another to fulfill the impossible demand: make me whole.
That obsessive longing to be made whole by another is the pulse-beat of jealousy. Observing that obsession is “so poignantly lonely a condition” — what a searing insight — Farber charts the common ground between jealousy and its counterintuitive twin:
There is another affliction of passion which may be seen as a companion obsession to jealousy; that is the state called being-in-love. Unlike jealousy, about which, to my mind, there is really nothing redeeming to be said, being-in-love does have pleasures, even virtues, which can survive its transformation into some more reasonable relation. But the state of being-in-love itself is strikingly similar to jealousy. The imperative of total possession rules them both. In being-in-love each appropriates the other’s history as painlessly as possible (“I want to know everything about you, but be careful with the details”), at the same time that they rush to develop their own history and mutuality together, metaphorically fortified by their restaurant, song, drink, movie, first fight, and so on. Not only do they merge their lives, loyalties, passions, but their beliefs, attitudes, and opinions must match as well. Any hint of imperfection in his fusion… causes crisis. The smallest real difference of opinion… stands for the impossibility and unreality of the ideal of total mutual possession, and thus provokes jealousy, even in the absence of any rival whatsoever.
Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)This impulse toward merging and total possession is the very opposite of the spacious togetherness at the heart of healthy relationships. Farber cautions against the central impossibility of such an orientation:
There is a blasphemous character to this endeavor, in which each singles the other out as an object of worship. To do this, and to be “worthy” of it, each implicitly yields — or tries to yield — up his separate existence to the exalted unity. He abandons — or tries to abandon — or tries to appear to abandon — his independence of spirit as though it were a false idol. Of course it doesn’t work. No matter how willing, one can never totally possess or be totally possessed by another. But before disillusionment sets in, and while the inevitable interruptions of jealousy are serving, paradoxically, both to cripple and to keep feverishly alive, being-in-love is often experienced as a miraculous rebirth, a time of exhilaration, inspiration, and ready transcendence, not to mention overstatement. Like jealousy, and all obsessions, it is addictive, requiring larger and larger doses of itself to satisfy the terms of its illusions.
With an optimistic eye to the capacity for self-transcendence that dwells in the human soul even at its most tangled, Farber adds:
But it is possible for two people and their relation to survive being-in-love. With enough appetite for each other’s company and enough hope in the possibilities for commonality that this life affords, they may go on to find a way of being together that includes being apart, a way that combines passionate affection with the reality of distance. A way that is also uncertain, vulnerable, and ever open to the contaminations of jealousy. There is no happy ending. But there is happy getting on with it.
Complement with Anne Carson on what Sappho teaches us about jealousy and the trailblazing French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet on jealousy and the metaphysics of love, then revisit philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s boundlessly insightful inquiry into anger, forgiveness, and the emotional machinery of trust.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually.”
All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence.
All joy is the act of remembering — the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.
This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay’s essay collection Inciting Joy (public library) — a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)With an eye to the community orchard he helped create — a “long sweaty collaborative dream” — Gay writes:
Though I didn’t yet have the words for it, planting that orchard — by which I mean… joining my labor to the labor by which it came to be — reminded me, or illuminated for me, a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future. A rhizomatic care I so often forget to notice I am every second in the midst of. By which I came to be, and am, at all. Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it. It’s certainly not the only thing we’re in the midst of, but it’s the truest thing. By far.
Tapping into that microrhizal mesh that stretches between us — between all of our individual joys and sorrows, lacing them together into an ecology of interdependence — is our surest way of tapping into joy itself. Gay reflects:
My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toThis animating spirit of joy as a force-field of connection comes alive in Gay’s poem “Patience” from his altogether vivifying collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (public library):
PATIENCE
by Ross GayCall it sloth; call it sleaze;
call it bummery if you please;
I’ll call it patience;
I’ll call it joy, this,
my supine congress
with the newly yawning grass
and beetles chittering
in their offices
beneath me, as I
nearly drifting to dream
admire this so-called weed which,
if I guarded with teeth bared
my garden of all alien breeds,
if I was all knife and axe
and made a life of hacking
would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning
these sort of phallic spires
ringleted by these sort of vaginal blooms
which the new bees, being bees, heed;
and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell
from the words my mind makes
of the world, and everything
makes me mildly or more
hungry—the worm turning
in the leaf mold; the pear blooms
howling forth their pungence
like a choir of wet-dreamed boys
hiking up their skirts; even
the neighbor cat’s shimmy
through the grin in the fence,
and the way this bee
before me after whispering
in my ear dips her head
into those dainty lips
not exactly like one entering a chapel
and friends
as if that wasn’t enough
blooms forth with her forehead dusted gold
like she has been licked
and so blessed
by the kind of God
to whom this poem is prayer.
Complement with Borges on collective joy and collective grief and the remarkable story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” then revisit Ross Gay on what it takes to grow up and what it means to have grown.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great.”
The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe. Joan Didion knew this when she observed that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Jane Ellen Harrison knew it when, in her superb meditation on the art of growing older, she cautioned that “you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”
That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet.
Kahlil Gibran, self-portraitIn his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.
In a sentiment consonant with the aging Walt Whitman’s reckoning with what makes life worth living, he traces his path:
In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.
But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.
But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,
And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.
But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.
In a lovely metaphor rooted in the evolutionary history of life, he contrasts the spirit of youth to that of our later years:
The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.
A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.
But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,
Though life has been bitter upon his lips.
Passionflower and passionfruit by Étienne Denisse from Flore d’Amérique, 1846. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)With an eye to the restlessness of youth, Gibran echoes his earlier reflections on befriending time as he contemplates what might be the supreme reward of growing older — our widening capacity for patience, for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms and becomes one with the unfolding mystery:
In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.
But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.
Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.
And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.
In a poignant reminder that our aversive reactions reveal not the nature of the things we abhor but the nature of our blinders and the limits of our understanding, he adds:
In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.
But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;
And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.
A century before science illuminated the poetics of wintering trees as a lens on renewal, Gibran writes:
In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”
But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.
Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)Touching on a concept known in Eastern spiritual traditions as non-identification — the ability to inhabit our vaster nature beyond transient circumstances and conditions — he writes:
In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.
Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.
He ends the poem by looking back on the sad alienation of his youth as the rudiment of his fruition, indispensable and sacred:
Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.
And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.
Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.
And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.
In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.
Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.
Complement with Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older and how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, then revisit Gibran’s luminous wisdom on the courage to know yourself, the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, how to weather the uncertainties of love, and the secret to a lasting relationship.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender… Only unconditional surrender leads to real emptiness, and from that place of emptiness I can be prolific and free.”
To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem, a garden — is not to will something new into being but to surrender to the most ancient and alive part of ourselves — the stratum of spirit vibrating with every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read, every love we have ever loved, every dream we have ever dreamt. It is a process that requires great strength and great patience, for it asks of us to quiet the din of demand and break free from the straitjacket of habit in order to make audible the inner voice whispered from the depths of life, wild and free. “The most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote as she contemplated creativity, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
How to live into our creative power is what improvisational violinist and computer artist Stephen Nachmanovitch explores in his classic Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (public library), published the year I was born.
Art by Arthur Rackham from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. (Available as a print.)Writing in the spirit of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, Nachmanovitch considers a common stage of the creative process — what the polymathic mathematician Henri Poincaré called “sudden illumination” and the physicist Freeman Dyson called “a flash of illumination” — and offers an essential guardrail against the mythos of such Eureka! moments:
The literature on creativity is full of tales of breakthrough experiences. These moments come when you let go of some impediment or fear, and boom — in whooshes the muse. You feel clarity, power, freedom, as something unforeseeable jumps out of you. The literature of Zen… abounds with accounts of kensho and satori — moments of illumination and moments of total change of heart. There come points in your life when you simply kick the door open. But there is no ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
[…]
Our subject is inherently a mystery. It cannot be fully expressed in words, because it concerns the deep preverbal levels of spirit. No kind of linear organization can do justice to this subject; by its nature it does not lie flat on the page. Looking at the creative process is like looking into a crystal: No matter which facet we gaze into, we see all the others reflected.
Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.Echoing Emerson’s admonition against the cult of originality — an admonition Nick Cave would amplify two centuries later — Nachmanovitch examines the prerequisites of creation — “playfulness, love, concentration, practice, skill, using the power of limits, using the power of mistakes, risk, surrender, patience, courage, and trust” — and adds:
The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.
But there come moments in life when some monolith of agony or apathy lodges itself in the middle of the spiritual path, leaving us too painfully cut off from ourselves to create. We may call this creative block, we may experience it as depression, but no matter the conceptual container, the ineffable stuff inside pulsates with aching unease. In such moments, there is no way out we can claw our way to — there is only the soft allowing of the passage through. Echoing Henry Miller’s insistence on the value of surrender as an antidote to despair, Nachmanovitch writes:
Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender. Perhaps we are surrendering to something delightful, but we still have to give up our expectations and a certain degree of control — give up being safely wrapped in our own story. We still engage in the important practice of planning and scheduling — not to rigidly lock in the future, but to tune up the self. In planning we focus attention on the field we are about to enter, then release the plan and discover the reality of time’s flow. Thus we tap into living synchronicity.
[…]
Only unconditional surrender leads to real emptiness, and from that place of emptiness I can be prolific and free. We create and respond from the wonderful empty place that is generated when we surrender.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)With an eye to intelleto — Michelangelo’s notion of visionary intelligence beyond rational thought, capable of seeing beyond the veneer of appearances — and temenos — the magic circle of ancient Greece, demarcating a sacred space for play that summons the extraordinary — Nachmanovitch offers concrete strategies for active surrender:
When you are stuck, meditate, free associate, do automatic writing, talk to yourself and answer yourself. Play with the blocks. Stay in the temenos of the workplace. Relax, surrender to the bafflement; don’t leave the temenos, and the solution will come. Persevere gently. Use intelleto, the visionary faculty. Stay close to the zero mark; indulge neither in great highs nor in great lows. The depths are obscured in us when we try to force feelings; we clarify them by giving them adequate time and space and letting them come.
In a sentiment embodied in Pablo Neruda’s lovely childhood memory of the hand through the fence, Nachmanovitch considers the ultimate impetus of why we are called to create at all:
Beyond the drive to create is yet a deeper level of commitment, a state of union with a whole that is beyond us. When this element of union is injected into our play-forms, we get something beyond mere creativity, beyond mere purpose or dedication; we get a state of acting from love. Love has to do with the perpetuation of life, and is therefore irrevocably linked to deeply held values.
Complement these fragments of the altogether vitalizing Free Play with poet Diane Ackerman’s soulful inquiry into the spiritual and creative rewards of deep play and violinist Natalie Hodges on improvisation and the quantum of consciousness, then revisit some life-tested advice on getting unstuck from working artists, working writers, and Lewis Carroll.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature.
All relationships are asymmetrical. But there are some asymmetries that fray the fabric of the relationship and maim both people involved — none more so than those of a deep friendship where one person feels the tug of romantic love and the other does not, cannot. The challenge, then, is how to preserve the sanctity of friendship from being crushed beneath the weight of unequal expectations.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772–July 25, 1834) addressed this haunting paradox of friendship and romance in his marginalia while anguishing over a decade-deep chaste infatuation with his friend William Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson, all the while editing his literary journal, The Friend, which he dedicated to Sara.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeIn the margins of the 1669 classic Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne — himself a man of intense and anguished propensity for romantic friendship — the 38-year-old Coleridge writes:
Friendship satisfies the highest parts of our nature; but a [beloved], who is capable of friendship, satisfies all.
He contemplates why friendship alone will always feel less satisfying than a love that includes friendship but reigns supreme over all other relations:
We may love many persons, all very dearly; but we cannot love many persons, all equally dearly. There will be differences, there will be gradations — our nature imperiously asks a summit, a resting-place — it is with the affections in Love, as with the Reason in Religion — we cannot diffuse & equalize — we must have a SUPREME — a One the highest. All languages express this sentiment.
But such supremacy, Coleridge observes, is only real when buoyed by mutuality — by the sheer laws of logic, by the sheer laws of physics and their force-counterforce equivalence, there can be no such “summit” on one side only, or else it is merely an echo of selfishness or delusion. Pulsating beneath this fact is the necessity of accepting that, in some fundamental sense, all unrequited love is not real love but fantasia — and only by letting go of that fantastical longing can symmetry be restored to the lopsided relationship.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toColeridge writes:
In order that a person should continue to love another, better than all others, it seems necessary that this feeling should be reciprocal. For if it be not so, Sympathy is broken off in the very highest point. A. (we will say, by way of illustration) loves B. above all others, in the best & fullest sense of the word, love; but B. loves C. above all others. Either therefore A. does not sympathize with B. in this most important feeling; & then his Love must necessarily be incomplete, & accompanied with a craving after something that is not, & yet might be; or he does sympathize with B. in loving C. above all others — & then, of course, he loves C. better than B. Now it is selfishness, at least it seems so to me, to desire that your Friend should love you better than all others — but not to wish that a Wife should.
Coleridge considers the way a balanced love — be it friendship or romance — helps us integrate ourselves, uniting the mind and the heart into a single force-field of being:
The great business of real unostentatious Virtue is — not to eradicate any genuine instinct or appetite of human nature; but — to establish a concord and unity betwixt all parts of our nature, to give a Feeling & a Passion to our purer Intellect, and to intellectualize our feelings & passions.
Complement with Van Gogh on heartbreak and unrequited love as fuel for creativity and the philosopher-poet David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Coleridge on the interplay of terror and transcendence in nature and human nature.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal.”
There is an ineffable comfort that our non-human companions bless upon our lives — those beings whose daily task it is to “bite every sorrow until it fled” — and with their loss comes an ineffable species of grief.
Two centuries after the young Lord Byron tried to put it into words in his soulful elegy for his beloved dog, the poet and novelist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) captured it in stirring prose in the wake of her beloved cat’s death, reflecting on the emotional rollercoaster of loss — the syncopation of grief and relief that is any death.
May SartonIn a diary entry from the autumn of 1974, found in her uncommonly rewarding journal collection The House by the Sea, Sarton writes:
In some ways the death of an animal is worse than the death of a person. I wonder why. Partly it is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal, and also there is total dependency. I kept thinking as I drove home, this is all inside me, this grief, and I can’t explain it, nor do I want to, to anyone. Now, six days later, I begin to feel the immense relief of no longer being woken at five by angry miaows, “Hurry up, where’s my breakfast?” from the top of the stairs, no longer having to throw away box after box of half-eaten food because she was so finicky, no longer trundling up three flights with clean kitty litter — but, above all, no longer carrying her, a leaden weight, in my heart. She was the ghost at the feast, here where everything else is so happy. But, oh, my pussy, I wish for your rare purrs and for your sweet soft head butting gently against my arm to be caressed!
Complement with John Updike’s stirring elegy for his dog and Leonard Michaels’s playful, poignant meditation on how our cats reveal us to ourselves, then revisit May Sarton how to cultivate your talent, the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, the cure for despair, and her timeless ode to the art of being alone.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We are lichens on a grand scale.”
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the great naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a century later as he considered the meaning of life. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
Because of this delicate interconnectedness of life across time, space, and being, any littlest fragment of the universe can become a lens on the miraculous whole. Sometimes, it is the humblest life-forms that best intimate the majesty of life itself.
Take, for instance, lichens.
The Cowarne Red Apple with lichen, 1811. (Available as a print, as a backpack, and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Lichens — which are not to be confused with mosses — are some of Earth’s oldest life-forms: emissaries of the ocean gone terrestrial. For epochs, their exact nature was a mystery — until an improbable revolutionary illuminated that they are, in fact, part algae.
In the final stretch of the nineteenth century, Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter punctuated her writing and her painting with a series of experiments with spores, demonstrating that lichens — which Linnaeus considered the “poor peasants of the plant world” — are in fact not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae: living reminders that the supreme vital force of life is not competition but interdependence, that we survive and thrive not through combat but through collaboration.
Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (public library).
Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:
The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.
Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” In their biology lies a poignant metaphor for how we think of the relationships that surround us, lacing our human lives:
Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist. The heartbeat of humans and the flowering of domesticated plants are one life. “Alone” is not an option… Lichens add physical intimacy to this interdependence, fusing their bodies and intertwining the membranes of their cells, like cornstalks fused with the farmer, bound by evolution’s hand.
But the most beguiling manifestation of lichens’ gift for the art of relationship is found in how they acquire their haunting otherworldly color:
Blue or purple lichens contain blue-green bacteria, the cyanobacteria. Green lichens contain algae. Fungi mix in their own colors by secreting yellow or silver sunscreen pigments. Bacteria, algae, fungi: three venerable trunks of the tree of life twining their pigmented stems.
The algae’s verdure reflects an older union. Jewels of pigment deep inside algal cells soak up the sun’s energy. Through a cascade of chemistry this energy is transmuted into the bonds that join air molecules into sugar and other foods. This sugar powers both the algal cell and its fungal bedfellow. The sun-catching pigments are kept in tiny jewel boxes, chloroplasts, each of which is enclosed in a membrane and comes with its own genetic material. The bottle-green chloroplasts are descendants of bacteria that took up residence inside algal cells one and a half billion years ago. The bacterial tenants gave up their tough outer coats, their sexuality, and their independence, just as algal cells do when they unite with fungi to make lichens. Chloroplasts are not the only bacteria living inside other creatures. All plant, animal, and fungal cells are inhabited by torpedo-shaped mitochondria that function as miniature powerhouses, burning the cells’ food to release energy. These mitochondria were also once free-living bacteria and have, like the chloroplasts, given up sex and freedom in favor of partnership.
With an eye to the ancient union of bacterial genes that gave rise to all modern DNA, Haskell considers the elemental and existential role of symbiosis in every life, including our own:
We are Russian dolls, our lives made possible by other lives within us. But whereas dolls can be taken apart, our cellular and genetic helpers cannot be separated from us, nor we from them. We are lichens on a grand scale.
Complement with what remains the loveliest thing ever written about the symbiotic unself, then revisit bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer on the enchanting universe of moss and the poetic science of why leaves change color.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.”
Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life, friendship has been the lifeline for my darkest hours of despair, the magnifying lens for my brightest joys, the quiet pulse-beat beneath the daily task of living. You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship. Her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — whom she taught to look through a telescope — believed that all true friendship rests on two pillars. In his own life, he put the theory into practice in his friendship with his young protégé Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — a solitary and achingly introverted person himself, who thought deeply and passionately about the rewards and challenges of friendship.
Henry David Thoreau (Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856)Like all unusual people, Thoreau had a hard time connecting. In a desponded diary entry from his mid-thirties, found in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (public library), he writes:
Why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away.
Several months later, just before the Christmas holidays with their cruel magnifying lens of loneliness for the lonely, he rues his inability to connect openheartedly:
My difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle. There is no precept in the New Testament that will assist me. My nature, it may be, is secret. Others can confess and explain; I cannot.
Thoreau finds himself pocked with self-doubt about his ability to connect, his sense of isolation at times swelling into punitive despair:
Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up by John MillerOver and over, Thoreau anguishes with the extreme shyness and reticence of his nature, longs for a confidante beyond the diary page, longs for companionship beyond the birds and the trees. On a beautiful spring Sunday, he despairs:
I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is none to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even. Awful as it is to contemplate, I pray that, if I am the cold intellectual skeptic whom he rebukes, his curse may take effect, and wither and dry up those sources of my life, and my journal no longer yield me pleasure nor life.
Months after publishing Walden, with its lyrical celebration of solitude, his loneliness deepens into a primal scream of longing for connection:
What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn; but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me.
And yet this openhearted longing is itself the only real raw material of friendship — only by surrendering to it, with all the vulnerability this demands of us, do we become receptive to the longing of others, the mutual yearning for connection that is shared heartbeat of humanity. Thoreau quietly intuits this equivalence, so that when he does connect, when he does feel the warm glow of friendship envelop him, it is nothing less than an exultation:
Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May UdryAt only twenty-four, Thoreau had arrived at a foundational fact of living — his own grand unified theory of human connection, which he spent the remainder of his short life trying, often with touching difficulty, to put into practice:
Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother.
Pulsating beneath all of his uneasy reckonings is a deep-thinking, deep-feeling recognition of the essence of friendship:
The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toComplement these fragments from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau — a biblical kind of book, replete with his deep-souled wisdom on how to see more clearly, the myth of productivity, the greatest gift of growing old, the sacredness of public libraries, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, and the only worthwhile definition of success — with Seneca on true and false friendship, Kahlil Gibran on the building blocks of meaningful connection, Henry Miller on the relationship between creativity and community, Lewis Thomas on the poetic science of why we are wired for connection, and this lovely vintage illustrated ode to friendship.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The making of our densely networked crucible of thought and tenderness.
It seems inconceivable — that everything we know, everything we love, everything that ever was and ever will be, banged into being from the singularity, and out of that near-nothingness arose mitochondria and music and “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” all of it conspiring in the wonder of consciousness — the universe’s way of comprehending itself.
Down here on Earth, as if the way life evolved weren’t miracle enough, we were handed down through billions of years of evolution the miraculous benediction of brains — those densely networked crucibles of thought and tenderness, out of which our capacity for transcendence arises.
One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s revolutionary drawings of the brain.In an uncommonly poetic passage from his novel The Echo Maker (public library), Richard Powers traces the evolution of that benediction, from its cellular beginnings to its existential end:
Energy fell on an ancient cell; the cell registered. Some prodding set off a chemical cascade that incised the cell and changed its structure, forming a cast of the signals that fell on it. Eons later, two cells clasped, signaling each other, squaring the number of states they might inscribe. The link between them altered. The cells fired easier with each fire, their changing connections remembering a trace of the outside. A few dozen such cells slung together in a lowly slug: already an infinitely reshaping machine, halfway to knowing. Matter that mapped other matter, a plastic record of light and sound, place and motion, change and resistance. Some billions of years and hundreds of billions of neurons later, and these webbed cells wired up a grammar — a notion of nouns and verbs and even prepositions. Those recording synapses, bent back onto themselves — brain piggy-backing and reading itself as it read the world — exploded into hopes and dreams, memories more elaborate than the experience that chiseled them, theories of other minds, invented places as real and detailed as anything material, themselves matter, microscopic electro-etched worlds within the world, a shape for every shape out there, with infinite shapes left over: all dimensions springing from this thing the universe floats in. But never hot or cold, solid or soft, left or right, high or low, but only the image, the store. Only the play of likeness cut by chemical cascades, always undoing the state that did the storing. Semaphores at night, cobbling up even the cliff they signaled from… Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile.
Complement with the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas’s forgotten masterpiece The Fragile Species and the fascinating science of how we think not with the brain but with the world, then revisit Powers on the power of music, living in bewilderment, and how to begin rewriting our planetary future.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The ultimate anthem of resistance to the assaults on life.
There is a nonspecific gladness that envelops humanity in the first days of spring, as if kindness itself were coming abloom in the cracks of crowded sidewalks, quelling our fears, swallowing our sorrows, salving the savage loneliness. We are reminded then that spring — this insentient byproduct of the shape of our planet’s orbit and the tilt of its axis — may just be Earth’s existential superpower, the supreme affirmation of life in the face of every assault on it.
That superpower comes alive with dazzling might in a century-old poem by E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962), originally published in his 1923 collection Tulips & Chimneys (public library) — that epochal gauntlet at the conventions of poetry, which went on to influence generations of writers, readers, and daring makers of the unexampled across the spectrum of creative work — and read at the fifth annual Universe in Verse by the polymathic creative force that is Debbie Millman, with a side of Bach.
[O SWEET SPONTANEOUS]
by e.e. cummingsO sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
dotingfingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
pokedthee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thybeauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing andbuffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
trueto the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
loverthou answerest
them only with
spring)
Couple with spring with Emily Dickinson, then revisit E.E. Cummings (who, contrary to popular myth, signed his name both lowercase and capitalized) on the courage to be yourself.
For other highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor Roxane Gay reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s “To the Young Who Want to Die,” Zoë Keating reading Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms,” Rebecca Solnit reading Helene Johnson’s “Trees at Night,” and a series of animated poems celebrating nature.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In praise of our “property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.”
We know that life is the self-correcting mechanism for error — as much in its evolutionary history as in its existential reality. And yet we are living our lives under the tyranny of perfection, as if all the right answers await us at the end of some vector we must follow infallibly until we arrive at the ultimate ideal. But the truth is that we simply don’t know — we don’t know where life ultimately leads, we don’t know what we want or what to want, and we don’t really know ourselves. It is by erring again and again that we find the shape of the path, by tripping again and again that we learn to walk it. Along the way, the answers emerge not before us but in us.
Van Gogh knew this when he reckoned with how inspired mistakes propel us forward, and the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) knew it when he composed his wonderful essay “To Err Is Human,” found in his 1979 collection The Medusa and the Snail (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books.
Lewis Thomas (Photograph: NYU archives)With an eye to the advances in so-called artificial intelligence that our machines made in a blink of evolutionary time — the fruition of Samuel Butler’s prescient Victorian prophecy of the emergency of a new “mechanical kingdom” of life — Thomas writes:
A good computer can think clearly and quickly, enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides.
An epoch before ChatGPT, he adds:
As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.
Rather than measuring the merit of our machines the punitive way we measure our own — by fidelity to some ideal of perfection — Thomas argues that this capacity for error is the supreme gift of the mind, of the more-than-machine we live inside, capable of surprising itself and capable, therefore, of glorious deviations from course, into new vistas of possibility:
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)This generative possibility of being wrong is by definition a function of the friction around being right — contention is the crucible of creation, within us and between us. (The great writer and jazz scholar Albert Murray called this creative friction “antagonistic cooperation.”) Thomas observes:
Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand. With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing, there is an amiable understanding that one is right and the other wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides, and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments.
The possibility of wrong choices is itself an assurance of multiple options — a multiplicity that is always our best bet for creative paths forward that transcend the blockages of the past. Thomas writes:
We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground. This process is called exploration and is based on human fallibility. If we had only a single center in our brains, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made, instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurons that provide for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we could only stay the way we are today, stuck fast.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)In a sentiment that applies as much to our personal existential evolution as to the collective creative challenge of abating climate change, he adds:
What we need, then, for moving ahead, is a set of wrong alternatives much longer and more interesting than the short list of mistaken courses that any of us can think up right now… If it is a big enough mistake, we could find ourselves on a new level, stunned, out in the clear, ready to move again.
Complement with philosopher Daniel Dennett on the art-science of making fertile mistakes and philosopher Amélie Rorty on the value of our self-delusions, then revisit Lewis Thomas on the mystery of the self, our human potential, and his forgotten masterpiece about how to live with ourselves and each other.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
From peacocks to penguins, a winged menagerie of wonder.
“How can the bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing?” wrote William Blake, who lived in the golden age of the cage as entertainment. Zoos were new and exciting, and people readily overlooked their cruelty to slake their curiosity about creatures from faraway lands. But even so, zoos held only a tiny fraction of the dazzling variousness of the animal kingdom — in the age before photography, before easy global travel, the average person encountered the wondrous strangeness of animals not in the cage but on the page.
In the 1820s, a French natural history encyclopedia titled La Galerie de Oiseaux set out to bring to European eyes the most exquisite birds of North America, many of them now endangered, some extinct. Radiating from the consummate illustrations is the quiet dignity of these bright emissaries of our planet’s evolutionary history — feathered inheritors of the dinosaurs, winged with a kaleidoscope of joy.
Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as a bath mat.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as a bath mat.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as a bath mat.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as a bath mat.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Available as a print and as stationery cards.Complement with some consummate centuries-old illustrations of monkeys, owls, lizards, butterflies, and flowers.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I want to sleep and dream the life of trees, beings from the muted world…”
We see ourselves in them. We lean on them for lessons on how to be more human and what resilience means. They are our timekeepers, our spiritual guides, our kin.
I spend a great deal of time in an old-growth forest awned by trees older than me by centuries. Trees beneath which thousands of other humans have walked on feet that are no more, carrying their sorrows and their dreams in hearts that are now soil. Trees that have witnessed world wars and weddings, that have been growing since before we built the bomb and decoded the human genome, before Einstein dreamt up relativity and Nina Simone dreamt up “Mississippi Goddam,” some of them alive when Bach was alive.
I often wonder what they would say if they could speak. But perhaps they would say nothing at all — perhaps they would speak a truth beyond words.
That is what poet Dorianne Laux intimates in her lovely poem “The Life of Trees,” found in her collection Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems (public library) and read here to the sound of cellist and composer Zoë Keating’s piece “Optimist” from her transcendent record Into the Trees.
THE LIFE OF TREES
by Dorianne LauxThe pines rub their great noise
into the spangled dark, scratch
their itchy boughs against the house,
and the moan’s mystery translates roughly
into drudgery of ownership: time
to drag the ladder from the shed,
climb onto the roof with a saw
between my teeth, cut
those suckers down. What’s reality
if not a long exhaustive cringe
from the blade, the teeth? I want to sleep
and dream the life of trees, beings
from the muted world who care
nothing for Money, Politics, Power,
Will or Right, who want little from the night
but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl
lifting from their limbs, who want only
to sink their roots into the wet ground
and terrify the worms or shake
their bleary heads like fashion models
or old hippies. If trees could speak
they wouldn’t, only hum some low
green note, roll their pinecones
down the empty streets and blame it,
with a shrug, on the cold wind.
During the day they sleep inside
their furry bark, clouds shredding
like ancient lace above their crowns.
Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear
nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,
that whipped bully who rises up
and becomes his own dead father.
In the storms the young ones
bend and bend and the old know
they may not make it, go down
with the power lines sparking,
broken at the trunk. They fling
their branches, forked sacrifice
to the beaten earth. They do not pray.
If they make a sound it’s eaten
by the wind. And though the stars
return they do not offer thanks, only
ooze a sticky sap from their roundish
concentric wounds, straighten their spines
and breathe, and breathe again.
Complement with Mary Oliver’s poem “When I Am Among the Trees” and Helene Johnson’s “Trees at Night,” then revisit Hermann Hesse’s poetic century-old love letter to trees.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity.
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter to his first wife turned lifelong friend. “Kindness, kindness, kindness,” Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year’s Day in 1972. Half a century later, the Dalai Lama placed a single exhortation at the center of his ethical and ecological philosophy: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”
Nothing broadens the soul more than the touch of kindness, given or received, and nothing shrivels it more than a flinch of unkindness, given or received — something we have all been occasionally lashed with, and something of which we are all occasionally culpable, no matter how ethical our lives and how well-intentioned our conduct. Everyone loves the idea of kindness — loves thinking of themselves as a kind person — but somehow, the practice of it, the dailiness of it, has receded into the background in a culture rife with selfing and cynicism, a culture in which we have come to mistake the emotional porousness of kindness for a puncture in the armor of our hard individualism. And yet kindness remains our best antidote to the fundamental loneliness of being human.
Gathered here are two millennia of meditations on kindness — its challenges, its nuances, and its rippling rewards — from a posy of vast minds and vast spirits who have risen above the common tide of their times to give us the embers of timelessness.
Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)MARCUS AURELIUSOnce a heartbroken queer teenager raised by a single mother, Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) was saved by Stoic philosophy, then tried to save a dying world with it when he came to rule Rome as the last of its Five Good Emperors. Across the epochs, he goes on saving us with the sonorous undertone of his entire philosophy — his humming insistence on kindness as the only effective antidote to all of life’s assaults. In his timeless Meditations (public library) — notes on life he had written largely to himself while learning how to live more nobly in an uncertain world that blindsides us as much with its beauty as with its brutality — he returns again and again to kindness and the importance of extending it to everyone equally at all times, because even at their cruelest, which is their most irrational, human beings are endowed with reason and dignity they can live up to.
Drawing on the other great refrain that carries his philosophy — the insistence that embracing our mortality is the key to living fully — he writes:
You should bear in mind constantly that death has come to men* of all kinds, men with varied occupations and various ethnicities… We too will inevitably end up where so many [of our heroes] have gone… Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates… brilliant intellectuals, high-minded men, hard workers, men of ingenuity, self-confident men, men… who mocked the very transience and impermanence of human life…. men… long dead and buried… Only one thing is important: to behave throughout your life toward the liars and crooks around you with kindness, honesty, and justice.
The key to kindness, he observes, is keeping “the purity, lucidity, moderation, and justice of your mind” from being sullied by the actions of those you encounter, no matter how disagreeable and discomposed by unreason they may be. In a passage itself defying the laziness of labels, rooted in a metaphor more evocative of a Buddhist parable or a Transcendentalist diary entry or a Patti Smith Instagram poem than of a Stoic dictum, he writes:
Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface. Even if he throws mud or dung in it, before long the spring disperses the dirt and washes it out, leaving no stain. So how are you to have the equivalent of an ever-flowing spring? If you preserve your self-reliance at every hour, and your kindness, simplicity, and morality.
LEO TOLSTOYIn the middle of his fifty-fifth year, reflecting on his imperfect life and his own moral failings, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) set out to construct a manual for morality by compiling “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,” whose wisdom “gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness” — thinkers and spiritual leaders who have shed light on what is most important in living a rewarding and meaningful life. Such a book, Tolstoy envisioned, would tell a person “about the Good Way of Life.” He spent the next seventeen years on the project. In 1902, by then seriously ill and facing his own mortality, Tolstoy finally completed the manuscript under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. It was published two years later, in Russian, but it took nearly a century for the first English translation to appear: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts (public library). For each day of the year, Tolstoy had selected several quotes by great thinkers around a particular theme, then contributed his own thoughts on the subject, with kindness as the pillar of the book’s moral sensibility.
Perhaps prompted by the creaturely severity and the clenching of heart induced by winter’s coldest, darkest days, or perhaps by the renewed resolve for moral betterment with which we face each new year, he writes in the entry for January 7:
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.
At the end of the month, in a sentiment Carl Sagan would come to echo in his lovely invitation to meet ignorance with kindness, Tolstoy writes:
You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.
In the entry for February 3, he revisits the subject:
Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.
After copying out two kindness-related quotations from Jeremy Bentham (“A person becomes happy to the same extent to which he or she gives happiness to other people.”) and John Ruskin (“The will of God for us is to live in happiness and to take an interest in the lives of others.”), Tolstoy adds:
Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
ALBERT EINSTEINIn a 1931 essay for the magazine Forum and Century, later included in his altogether indispensable book Ideas and Opinions (public library), Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) writes:
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
ROSS GAYIn The Book of Delights (public library) — his soul-broadening yearlong experiment in willful gladness — the poet and gardener Ross Gay recounts harvesting carrots from the garden with his partner, and pirouettes in his signature way of long sunlit sentences into a meditation on the etymology of kindness:
Today we pulled the carrots from the garden that Stephanie sowed back in March. She planted two kinds: a red kind shaped like a standard kind, and a squat orange kind with a French name, a kind I recall the packet calling a “market variety,” probably because, like the red kind, it’s an eye-catcher. And sweet, which I learned nibbling a couple of both kinds like Bugs Bunny as I pulled them.
The word kind meaning type or variety, which you have noticed I have used with some flourish, is among the delights, for it puts the kindness of carrots front and center in this discussion (good for your eyes, yummy, etc.), in addition to reminding us that kindness and kin have the same mother. Maybe making those to whom we are kind our kin. To whom, even, those we might be. And that circle is big.
ADAM PHILLIPS & BARBARA TAYLORIn the plainly titled, tiny, enormously rewarding book On Kindness (public library), psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor observe that although kindness is central to all of our major spiritual traditions, it has somehow become “our forbidden pleasure.” They write:
We usually know what the kind thing to do is — and kindness when it is done to us, and register its absence when it is not… We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us. There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.
Defining kindness as “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself,” they chronicle its decline in the values of our culture:
The kind life — the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others — is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it. Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves; and how we have come to believe that there are pleasures greater than kindness…
In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness — like all the greatest human pleasures — are inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess.
[…]
In giving up on kindness — and especially our own acts of kindness — we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being.
Returning to their foundational definition of kindness, they add:
Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. Bearing other people’s vulnerability — which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it — entails being able to bear one’s own. Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other.
GEORGE SAUNDERSIn his wonderful commencement address turned book, the lyrical and largehearted George Saunders addresses those just embarking on the adventure of life with hard-won wisdom wrested from his own experience of being human among humans:
I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.
So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”
Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.
One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.
End of story.
Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.
But still. It bothers me.
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
But kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include… well, everything.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYEMost failures of kindness, most triumphs of cruelty, are flinches of fear, unreconciled in the soul. In 1978, drawing on a jarring real-life experience, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye captured the difficult, beautiful, redemptive transmutation of fear into kindness in a poem of uncommon soulfulness and empathic wingspan that has since become a classic, turned into an animated short film and included in countless anthologies, among them the wondrous 100 Poems to Break Your Heart (public library).
KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab NyeBefore you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.”
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary. How much trust and love we wrest from life and lavish upon life is largely a matter of how well we have befriended our existential loneliness — a fundamental fact of every human existence that coexists with our delicate interconnectedness, each a parallel dimension of our lived reality, each pulsating beneath our days.
In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library) — her timeless field guide to transformation through difficult times — the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explores what it takes to cultivate “a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness,” to transmute it into a different kind of “relaxing and cooling loneliness” that subverts our ordinary terror of the existential void.
Sunlit Solitude by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)She writes:
When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.
In Buddhism, all suffering is a form of resistance to reality, a form of attachment to desires and ideas about how the world should be. By befriending our loneliness, we begin to meet reality on its own terms and to find contentment with the as-is nature of life, complete with all of its uncertainty. Chödrön writes:
We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.
Lone Man by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)So faced, loneliness becomes a kind of mirror — one into which we must look with maximum compassion, one that beams back to us our greatest strength:
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
Complement with Rachel Carson on the relationship between loneliness and creativity and Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, then revisit poet May Sarton’s splendid century-old ode to the art of being contentedly alone.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The most moving story of self-sacrifice in the history of science.
I spent large swaths of my childhood by my grandmother’s side in rural Bulgaria as she tended to her subsistence garden, tilling and planting, watering and weeding. Each August, we did something that felt to me like partaking of magic — we would choose the sweetest, most succulent tomatoes from the vine, cut them open, carefully extract the seeds, and lay them out on newspaper to dry, knowing that they would become next spring’s seedlings and, with nothing more than sunlight and water, next summer’s bright red orbs of delight. So it is that, year after year, my grandmother refined her tomatoes into a cornucopia of unparalleled sweetness and perfection. Last summer’s seeds are already growing as I write.
This magic was made possible by a visionary of science who set out to save humanity and died for his values the year my grandmother turned nine.
Tomato, or Love-Apple, from Elizabeth Blackwell’s pioneering 1737 encyclopedia of medicinal plants. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)While the physicist Sergei Vavilov was presiding over Stalin’s Academy of Sciences and spearheading the Soviet atomic bomb project, his idealistic older brother was laboring at something of orthogonal impact on humanity — a way to end an elemental form of suffering that has haunted our species since its dawn.
The botanist, geneticist, and explorer Nikolai Vavilov (November 25, 1887–January 26, 1943) was still a boy when he arrived at his dream of ending famine. He had heard his father’s stories of growing up in poverty and constant hunger due to crop failures. When Nikolai himself was four, the early arrival of winter decimated crops all over the country, sending millions into starvation. All the tsar could do was offer his subjects “famine bread” — loaves made of milled husks, bark, weeds, and moss, rationed out in the freezing cold. Vavilov’s father had spent his life rising from poverty and now had a comfortable life as a merchant, so the family was protected from the worst of the famine — but from his precarious island of comfort, the boy watched the ocean of suffering and sorrowed. Half a million peasants perished that winter as the aristocracy feasted on imported delicacies from Europe — grim structural inequality that became the ignition spark for the long-seething people’s revolution a quarter century later.
Vavilov saw the contours of a different kind of revolution — one no one else could envision, not in Russia and not anywhere in the world.
Nikolai Vavilov
He wrote in the diary of his youth:
Do what you can. If you can’t do something you wanted to do, then you will be forgiven, but if you don’t want to try to do anything, you will not be forgiven.
He decided to do nothing less than end the world’s hunger, vowing in his diary to devote his life to science — an endeavor aimed at “everything that brings joy, calmness of emotion and reason” — so that he may “understanding nature for the betterment of humankind.”
After graduating from the Soviet agricultural academy as a botanist, he set out to travel through Europe and absorb all he could from the best scientists in every related discipline. In England, he worked with William Bateson, who had coined the word genetics to explain heredity and had pioneered the study of this script for transmitting the message of life.
Upon returning to Russia, Vavilov founded an institute under which to commence the great project of his life — collaborating with nature on enhancing her strengths and allaying her weaknesses by using the new science of genetics to cultivate plant species that would thrive in conditions none had survived before. He had a revolutionary insight: There must be wild varieties of common agricultural plants with different genes that make them more resilient than their farmed cousins — genes that could be used to strengthen agricultural crops by breeding stronger species that would feed humanity even through droughts and freezes. He called them his miracle plants. It wasn’t just an idealist’s dream — he knew the science that would make it a reality, and he would devote his life to it.
When World War I broke out, Vavilov, already established as a preeminent botanist, was dispatched to present-day Iran to solve a mystery — Soviet soldiers there were suffering from brain fog and inexplicable dizziness. He discovered that the mysterious malady was caused by a fungus growing on the wheat of which their bread was made. As bullets flew around him, Vavilov carefully collected samples of local plants, wrapped them in wax paper, and tucked them into his breast pocket. He didn’t yet know it, but this was the birth of Earth’s largest botanical collection.
The pea by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)When a drought lashed Russia in 1921 and killed the harvest, more than 5 million people died of starvation in a year, most of them peasants. Vavilov grew determined to never let this happen to anyone again. He understood that if he could equip farmers with the basic science of genetics, they could control for which traits of their crops would dominate, rather than entrusting their harvest to the roulette of chance — they could do what my grandmother did with her tomatoes, selecting for the best traits year over year. Mendel had made a science of agriculture by expressing mathematically the probabilities of genetic variance. Vavilov set out to make of that science an art of resilience, having vowed as a young man to “work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved class of my country, to raise their level of knowledge.”
He spent the 1920s roaming the world to collect wild varieties of staple foods. He slept little, smiled much, and trekked through the jungle in his tailored three-piece suit, tie, and felt fedora. He traveled to places frequented by droughts and food shortages, from Africa to the Middle East, taking care to learn the language and talk to locals about their lore of growing food in inhospitable conditions. He traveled to the birthplaces of the most nutritious plants. In Brazil, he got cacao, oranges, mangoes, and papayas. In China, poppy and sugarcane. In Korea, soybeans and rice. In Ethiopia, he discovered the mother plant from which all the world’s coffee originated.
Cacao by Étienne Denisse from his Flore d’Amérique, 1846. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)By the end of the decade, Vavilov had completed numerous ethnobotanical expeditions to collect hundreds of thousands of seeds from five continents, including many places where no scientist had set foot before. He was quietly building something unexampled: the world’s first seed bank — a living library of biodiversity that would come to the rescue of the people of any land whose crops were decimated by a drought or a blight. There were 600 kinds of apples and more than a thousand varieties of strawberries among its quarter million plants — a lush repository of resilience, housed at Vavilov’s institute in Leningrad.
Lenin, who had assumed power in the 1917 Russian Revolution, had immediately recognized the political value of Vavilov’s humanistic work — its insurance against the country’s crop failures, its promise of making Russia a superpower of global food production — and had thrown his full support behind it. But when he died in 1924, everything changed.
As Stalin usurped power, he forced peasant farmers off their farms and into large industrial agriculture collectives — tumult that disrupted the harvest and hurled the country into mass starvation. He knew that a widespread famine would hamper his revolution; he knew that more resilient crops would be the solution. But it was not Vavilov’s science he turned to.
On August 7, 1927, Pravda — the newspaper voice of the Communist Party — published a fawning profile of a young “barefoot scientist” in rural Azerbaijan who had never gone to university but was promising an agrarian revolution.
Trofim Lysenko considered scientific education “harmful nonsense.” He rejected Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, instead subscribing to Lamarckian inheritance with its outlandish claim that organisms acquire traits in immediate response to their environments and pass those traits immediately to the next generation — a pseudoscience that fueled the menace of eugenics. There were echoes of alchemy in Lysenko’s bravado — he promised he could cultivate wheat that would turn into rye and rye that would turn into barley. He bragged that his pea crop had withstood winter thanks to an innovative “training” strategy — soaking the seeds in ice-cold water, which he called vernalization. He claimed he could “train” plants within a single generation, making the very next generation more resilient.
Trofim Lysenko measuring wheatStalin, having no understanding of science, was blinded by the luster of the young man’s instant gratification claims. So began the greatest anti-science campaign of the twentieth century.
The dictator, who declared 1929 the year of the “Great Break with the Past,” gave Vavilov an ultimatum: he had to breed his miracle plants in three years, or face grave consequences. It was a biological impossibility; in reality — the evolutionary reality of reproductive cycles and genetic development — it would take at least four times as long for new genetic traits to manifest in a species on the scale of a crop. Seizing upon his spotlight moment and his nascent promotion within Stalin’s scientific establishment, Lysenko launched a concerted attack on Vavilov’s research, pitting it against his own “science” as too slow for the urgently needed famine relief in the country, too humble for the economic domination Stalin craved. He did not hesitate to falsify his own research to bolster its claims.
Vavilov had spent years laboring to bring the seventh International Congress of Genetics to the USSR and although it had been initially approved by the government, now the Communist Party abruptly cancelled the global gathering. When it was eventually convened in Edinburgh after a two-year delay and Vavilov was banned from attending, his international colleagues placed an empty chair on the stage to protest his absence — he was already one of the most respected geneticists in the world.
With science itself under assault, Vavilov devoted all of his energies to his institute and the seed bank, vowing:
We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.
When his plants developed in accordance with nature and failed to meet the dictator’s timeline, Vavilov was accused of treason and sabotage. In the middle of a field expedition in the Ukraine, he was arrested as “an active participant of an anti-Soviet wreckage organization and a spy for foreign intelligence services.” His home was raided and all of his field notes destroyed, but his colleagues managed to save his voluminous correspondence with other scientists and his manuscripts, tucking them away in the basement of the institute, beneath the seed bank.
Nikolai Vavilov’s arrest photoUpon receiving news of the arrest, Vavilov’s brother wrote in his diary:
His big useful life is being ruined… life of tireless and intense work for his homeland, for the people. All his life spent in work, with no other hobbies. Wasn’t it obvious and clear to everybody? What else can be asked and demanded of individuals? This is a cruel mistake and an injustice. It is even more cruel because it is worse than death. The end of scientific work, the slander, ruining the lives of family members, the threat of it all.
Over the next eleven months in jail, Vavilov was interrogated and tortured hundreds of times, sometimes for thirteen hours a time, for a total of 1,700 hours, with the intention of coercing a confession of sabotage and espionage. He remained adamant that his research had been only in the service of science and human welfare.
Like Dostoyevsky, he was sentenced to death by firing squad, but his death sentence was repealed and reduced to twenty years in a prison camp.
This was an epoch of sweeping terror. While Stalin was terrorizing scientists, Hitler was savaging Europe. Leningrad was next on his conquest list — not only because of its geopolitical advantages as a major international port, but because it housed something precious: the seed bank. The Führer well understood that controlling the world’s food supply was key to controlling the world’s population, so he tasked a special SS unit with looting Vavilov’s seed collections.
On September 8, 1941, the Nazis began their assault on Leningrad by severing the last road to the city. The siege would last 872 days as Leningrad refused to surrender. Food ran out fast. By the winter of 1942, all the government could provide was a ration of two slices of bread, made of 50% sawdust. This too ran out. People took to stripping the wallpaper in their apartments, scraping the adhesive paste made of flour and water, and boiling it to make soup. Death swept the city — 800,000 human beings, one out of every three citizens. Bodies lined the streets unburied. Rats emerged by the millions, feasting on the corpses.
At Vavilov’s institute, scientists barricaded themselves to protect the seed bank from the rats and the Nazis. Famished themselves, they took turns staying up all night, warding off the rodents with metal rods. In what may be the most moving sacrifice in the history of science, nine scientists died of starvation, guarding a cornucopia of nuts, beans, rice, and grains. The curator of legumes was found at his desk, an envelope of peas by his side.
The vault survived unharmed, holding the seeds of life.
Clitoria, or butterfly pea. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Meanwhile, Vavilov was languishing in prison. Inmates were fed nothing but flour and frozen cabbage. He survived for two years, his vivacious body shrinking to a skeleton. And then, biology gave way to entropy. In the icy Russian winter of 1943, Nikolai Vavilov died of starvation — the selfsame terror he had devoted his life to preventing. His body was dumped in an unmarked mass grave.
He had once written to a friend:
I really believe deeply in science; it is my life and the purpose of my life. I do not hesitate to give my life even for the smallest bit of science.
Like Alan Turing, Nikolai Vavilov was posthumously pardoned by a new government and eventually celebrated as a hero of science. A Russian postage stamp bears his image and the Russian Academy of Sciences awards a prestigious medal in his honor. A small planet discovered by a Soviet astronomer is named after him, as is a crater on the far side of the Moon. A monument of him rises from a plaza near the prison where he died — a site of frequent resistance protests to this day. The Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg is still home to one of the world’s largest seed banks and was the inspiration for the creation of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank near the North Pole in 2008.
When the next global famine savages our species, Vavilov’s legacy will be a lifeline, purchased with his life.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.”
“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity,” Rachel Carson told a class of young people in what became her bittersweet farewell to life, after catalyzing the modern environmental movement. She told them: “You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”
More than half a century later, another visionary of uncommon tenderness for the living world addresses another generation of young people with a kindred message of actionable reverence for the ecosystem of interdependence we call life.
In Heart to Heart: A Conversation on Love and Hope for Our Precious Planet (public library), the fourteenth Dalai Lama and artist Patrick McDonnell — who illustrated Jane Goodall’s inspiring life-story — invite an ethical approach to climate change, calling on young people to face a world of wildfires and deforestation with passionate compassion for other living beings, and to act along the vector of that compassion with the Dalai Lama’s fundamental philosophy:
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Told in the simplicity and sincerity of language native to Buddhist teaching, the story begins with an improbable visitor showing up at the Dalai Lama’s doorstep: a giant panda — the vulnerable bear species Ailuropoda melanoleuca, endemic to China and beloved the world over, both ancient symbol and Instagram star.
His Holiness greets the furry visitor with the same attitude he greets everyone:
I welcome everyone as a friend. In truth, we all share the same basic goals: we seek happiness and do not want suffering.
Together, they venture out into the wilderness to savor the natural gift of the forest and contemplate the delicate interleaving of life within it. Along the way, the Dalai Lama tells his life-story, laced with his relationship to the natural world — the wild yaks, gazelles, antelopes, and white-lipped deer he encountered on his first journey across Tibet when he was recognized as the next Dalai Lama as a young boy, the comfort he took in the smell of wildflowers after leaving his home, the long-eared owl he watched soar over his first monastery, the mountain foxes, wolves, and lynx roaming the surrounding forest.
With a wistful eye to the decimation of wildlife populations in his lifetime, he tells his new friend:
We must never forget the suffering humans inflict on other sentient beings. Perhaps one day we will kneel and ask the animals for forgiveness.
But forgiveness, he intimates, is not enough — we must urgently amend our actions and recover our respect for other living beings, which demands nothing less than a transformation of the human heart and a radical unselfing. Leaning on the Buddhist precepts, His Holiness writes:
Compassion, loving-kindness, and altruism are the keys not only to human development but also to planetary survival.
Real change in the world will only come from a change of heart.
What I propose is a compassionate revolution, a call for radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with the self.
It is a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.
There is, of course, nothing radical in the notion itself — it is a simple recognition of reality, consonant with the great evolutionary biologist and Gaia Hypothesis originator Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” The radical portion is the commitment to actionable course-correction and recalibration of habitual action — something young people are uniquely poised to do as they take our planetary future into their growing hands and growing hearts.
A century and a half after the great naturalist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” His Holiness writes:
Everything is interdependent, everything is inseparable.
Our individual well-being is intimately connected both with that of all others and with the environment within which we live.
Our every action, our every deed, word, and thought, no matter how slight or inconsequential it may seem, has an implication not only for ourselves but for all others, too.
In a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher and activist Simone Weil’s poignant meditation on the relationship between our rights and our responsibilities, he adds:
We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.
He goes on to explore how this change begins within, with cultivating “a peaceful mind and a peaceful heart” for oneself — the fulcrum of all kindness and compassionate action. Again and again, he returns to Hannah Arendt’s insight that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation,” inviting his young readers to remember that the smallest actions in the present accrete into sizable change for the future:
There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done.
One is called Yesterday, and the other is called Tomorrow.
Today is the right day to love, believe, do, and mostly to live positively to help others.
He ends with a prayerful meditation on the inner transformation necessary for civilizational evolution of consciousness:
May I become at all times, both now and forever,
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those who have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need.For as long as space endures,
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I, too, abide
To dispel the misery of the world.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Illuminating the pitfalls of the mind in felt and gingerbread.
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” Albert Camus wrote as he considered what it really means to be in solidarity with justice — an elegantly phrased reminder that the decisions we make today are the only fulcrum by which we move the outcomes of tomorrow. And yet the greatest pitfall of human consciousness might be our habitual forgetting of this fundamental fact.
In 1950, two mathematicians working on game theory devised a cruelly brilliant thought experiment demonstrating just how poorly we manage to calibrate future outcomes for our own best interests, exposing a secret underground of consciousness where mathematics and morality converge. Known as The Prisoner’s Dilemma, it illuminates the complex dynamics that govern loyalty, betrayal, collaboration, and trust — dynamics that play out in myriad subtle ways across our everyday lives.
The classic thought experiment comes alive with unexpected delight in this animated short film from TED-Ed by economist Lucas Husted and animators Ivana Bošnjak and Thomas Johnson Volda:
Complement with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on the emotional machinery of trust and the only fruitful response to betrayal, then revisit other animated adaptations of classic thought experiments: The Ship of Theseus (exploring what makes you you), Plato’s Cave (exploring the central mystery of consciousness), Boltzmann’s Brain Paradox (exploring whether reality is a hallucination), The Infinite Hotel Paradox (exploring the mind-bending nature of infinity), and Mary’s Room (exploring the limits of knowledge).
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
An inquiry into the eternal enchantment of why the world exists.
“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her exquisite reckoning with the life of the mind, would be to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
I have returned to this sentiment again and again in facing the haunting sense that we are living through the fall of a civilization — a civilization that has reduced every askable question to an algorithmically answerable datum and has dispensed with the unasked, with those regions of the mysterious where our basic experiences of enchantment, connection, and belonging come alive. A century and half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler prophesied the rise of a new “mechanical kingdom” to which we will become subservient, we are living with artificial intelligences making daily decisions for us, from the routes we take to the music we hear. And yet the very fact that the age of near-sentient algorithms has left us all the more famished for meaning may be our best hope for saving what is most human and alive in us.
So intimates Meghan O’Gieblyn in God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning (public library).
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Once a theologian in the making, studying at a fundamentalist Bible school, O’Gieblyn left the faith for a life as a rational materialist, but remained animated by the selfsame questions that course through the human-made story myths we call religion — questions about the relationship between the body and the tremors of consciousness we call soul, about the nature of reality, about the wellspring of meaning in an austere universe governed by fundamental forces and impartial laws with no room for blame or mercy. She takes up these questions with rigor and passion, tracing tendrils that reach into the vast and varied body of culture, from a robot dog to The Brothers Karamazov, from vitalism to transhumanism, from Descartes to Arendt.
A century and a half after Nietzsche considered how metaphors both reveal and conceal truth, O’Gieblyn writes:
To discover truth, it is necessary to work within the metaphors of our own time, which are for the most part technological. Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)O’Gieblyn recounts her early encounter with transhumanism and its patron saint, Ray Kurzweil, with his blazing prophecy that we shall reach the Singularity by the year 2045 — a point by which we would have so merged our bodies with our machines that we would survive death, our consciousness itself “resurrected” in a supercomputer. I have long marveled at the comical symmetry between such supposedly materialist models of reality and the religious mythologies of life after death from epochs past — a touching reminder of that elemental human yearning for permanence in a universe governed by constant change, a reminder that everything we dream up, everything we poetize and prophesy and code, is just our coping mechanism for the eternal struggle to bear our own mortality. O’Gieblyn arrives at a kindred conclusion:
It became clear to me that my interest in Kurzweil and other technological prophets was a kind of transference. It allowed me to continue obsessing about the theological problems I’d struggled with in Bible school, and was in the end an expression of my sublimated longing for the religious promises I’d abandoned.
[…]
Most transhumanists are outspoken atheists, eager to maintain the notion that their philosophy is rooted in modern rationalism and not in fact what it is: an outgrowth of Christian eschatology.
Art from The First Book of Urizen by William Blake, 1796. (Available as a print.)Our restlessness about mapping the relationship between mind and matter far predates the transhumanist movement. The dawn of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century only complicated things, with its strange ricochets of causality between observer and observed. Drawing on the influential theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s It from Bit theory — in which he argued that “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe,” that “observer-participancy gives rise to information” — O’Gieblyn writes:
Once you enter the quantum realm, the smallest particles, at a certain scale, dissolve into energy and fields, entities that have so little substance they appear nearly inseparable from the conceptual tools — math, probabilities — we use to describe them. This is baffling. How can objects as solid as rocks and chairs have nothing substantial at their core?
Wheeler’s answer was that matter itself does not exist. It is an illusion that arises from the mathematical structures that undergird everything, a cosmic form of information processing. Each time we make a measurement we are creating new information — we are, in a sense, creating reality itself. Wheeler called this the “participatory universe,” a term that is often misunderstood as having mystical connotations, as though the mind has some kind of spooky ability to generate objects. But Wheeler did not even believe that consciousness existed. For him, the mind itself was nothing but information. When we interacted with the world, the code of our minds manipulated the code of the universe, so to speak. It was a purely quantitative process, the same sort of mathematical exchange that might take place between two machines.
Against this backdrop of pure information arose another field that anchored reality not in the almighty bit but in the relationships between bits of information: cybernetics, whose founding father had declared that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” O’Gieblyn writes:
The reason that cybernetics privileged relationships over content in the first place was so that it could explain things like consciousness purely in terms of classical physics, which is limited to describing behavior but not essence — “doing” but not “being.” When Wheeler merged information theory with quantum physics, he was essentially closing the circle, proposing that the hole in the material worldview — intrinsic essence — could be explained by information itself.
Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. (Available as a print and coasters.)Nowhere have our models of reality inclined further past the comprehension limits of the human mind than in multiverse theory — the idea that ours is not the only universe but one of numberless coexistent universes all forged by randomness, and ours, by a lucky play of statistical mechanics and probability theory, just happens to be hospitable to the chance-configuration of us. At first glance, multiverse theory appears like the ultimate antidote to the illusion that we are special — the same illusion that once placed us at the center of the universe, then at the center of the biosphere, and now at the center of consciousness. But O’Gieblyn exposes the basic human bias of even this model:
The multiverse theory and other attempts to transcend our anthropocentric outlook so often strike me as a form of bad faith, guilty of the very hubris they claim to reject. There is no Archimedean point, no purely objective vista that allows us to transcend our human interests and see the world from above, as we once imagined it appeared to God. It is our distinctive vantage that binds us to the world and sets the necessary limitations that are required to make sense of it. This is true, of course, regardless of which interpretation of physics is ultimately correct.
Total eclipse of 1878, one of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Delving into the far fringes of the speculative, that strange lacuna between science and spiritualism, she arrives at panpsychism — a theory particularly fashionable in our age of alienation and disconnection, satisfying that aching need for belonging, for communion, for interbeing with the world. She writes:
What interests me most about panpsychism is not what it says about the world but what it suggests about our knowledge of it. While popular debates about the theory rarely extend beyond the plausibility of granting consciousness to bees and trees, it contains far more radical implications. To claim that reality itself is mental is to acknowledge that there exists no clear boundary between the subjective mind and the objective world.
A century after quantum pioneer Niels Bohr observed that there is a realm of reality religions have always accessed through images and parables and that “splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far,” she adds:
If consciousness is the ultimate substrate of everything, these distinctions become blurred, if not totally irrelevant. It’s possible that there exists a symmetry between our interior lives and the world at large, that the relationship between them is not one of paradox but of metonymy — the mind serving as a microcosm of the world’s macroscopic consciousness. Perhaps it is not even a terrible leap to wonder whether the universe can communicate with us, whether life is full of “correspondences,” as the spiritualists called them, between ourselves and the transcendent realm.
[…]
Panpsychism clearly satisfies a longing to escape modern alienation and merge once again with the world at large. But it’s worth asking what it means to reenchant, or reensoul, objects within a world that is already irrevocably technological. What does it mean to crave “connection” and “sharing” when those terms have become coopted by the corporate giants of social platforms?
At every turn, with every theory, we inevitably collide with the blinders of human bias, encoded in our machines — in algorithms that perpetuate the systemic biases of our society, in artificial intelligences that repeat the same pitfalls of reason that pock our own minds. Having begun with the observation that “for centuries we said we were made in God’s image, when in truth we made him in ours,” O’Gieblyn ends with the question of what it would take to dehumanize the universe and rehumanize ourselves:
The more we try to rid the world of our image, the more we end up coloring it with human faults and fantasies. The more we insist on removing ourselves and our interests from the equation, the more we end up with omnipotent systems that are rife with human bias and prejudice.
And yet pulsating beneath this hard-edged realism is a buoyancy, a largehearted curiosity, something we might even call faith — faith that “the most fascinating thing about the world [is] that we don’t know why it exists.” Radiating from it, at least for me, is a hint at how all of our why-probing instruments, from religion to ChatGPT, are but a gasp of gladness at the improbable fact that the world exists.
Couple God, Human, Animal, Machine with Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of AI, then consider some thoughts on consciousness and the universe, lensed through cognitive science and poetry.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident.”
There is cosmic consolation in knowing what actually happens when we die — that supreme affirmation of having lived at all. And yet, however much we might understand that every single person is a transient chance-constellation of atoms, to lose a beloved constellation is the most devastating experience in life. It feels incomprehensible, cosmically unjust. It feels unsurvivable.
In the final years of his short and loss-riddled life, Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) wrote in his diary:
I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. After long watching around the sickbed of a friend, we, too, partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be identified with this state of things.
Henry David Thoreau (Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856)Thoreau’s life of losses had begun seventeen years earlier. He was twenty-five when his beloved older brother died of tetanus after cutting himself shaving — a gruesome death, savaging the nervous system and contorting the body with agony. Thoreau grieved deeply. A lifelong diarist, he slipped into a five-week coma of the pen. He tried to listen to the music-box, which had always flooded him with delight, but the sounds came pouring out strange and hollow.
Eventually, the fever dream of grief broke into a new orientation to death. Two months into his bereavement, as the harsh New England winter was cusping into spring, Thoreau wrote to a friend — a letter quoted in the altogether wonderful book Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives (public library):
What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder? We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a great grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin on Arabian trees. Only Nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent.
Having resumed his journal, he took up the subject in the privacy of its pages:
I live in the perpetual verdure of the globe. I die in the annual decay of nature. We can understand the phenomenon of death in the animal better if we first consider it in the order next below us the vegetable. The death of the flea and the Elephant are but phenomena of the life of nature.
This was a season of losses in Thoreau’s universe. His friend and mentor Emerson, who had hastened to stay with him and nurse him in the wake of his brother’s death, lost his beloved five-year-old son to scarlet fever, as incurable as tetanus in their era. Now it was Thoreau’s turn to comfort his friend. Leaning on his new acceptance of the naturalness of death as an antidote to grief, he wrote to Emerson:
Nature is not ruffled by the rudest blast. The hurricane only snaps a few twigs in some nook of the forest. The snow attains its average depth each winter, and the chic-a-dee lisps the same notes. The old laws prevail in spite of pestilence and famine. No genius or virtue so rare and revolutionary appears in town or village, that the pine ceases to exude resin in the wood, or beast or bird lays aside its habits.
Art by Sophie Blackall for “Dirge Without Music” from The Universe in Verse.An epoch before Rilke insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” and a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death, Thoreau adds:
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident — It is as common as life… Every blade in the field — every leaf in the forest — lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. When we look over the fields we are not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither — for their death is the law of new life.
Couple these fragments from Three Roads Back with Thoreau on nature as prayer, then revisit the neuroscience of grief and healing, Emily Dickinson on love and loss, Seneca on the key to resilience in the face of loss, and Nick Cave on grief as a portal to aliveness.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.”
Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy. After a Japanese attack on a steamship during WWII killed his wife and young son, he left the navy and moved to Hong Kong, where he eventually met and married a nurse.
Together, they began a new life as dairy farmers in the English countryside, on a farm without electricity or running water. Eventually, they had a daughter, then a son, then a pair of twins.
After nearly two decades on the farm, the family had an unorthodox idea for how to best educate their children, how to show them what a vast and wondrous place the world is, full of all kinds of different people and all kinds of different ways of living: They sold everything they had, bought a schooner, and set out to sail around the world, departing on January 27, 1971.
The Robertson familyAfter more than a year at sea, just as they were rounding the tip of South America to begin their Pacific crossing, killer whales attacked the schooner 200 miles off the coast of Galapagos, sinking it in less than a minute. They piled into the inflatable life-raft, managed to grab a piece of sail from the water, and rigged it to the 9-foot dinghy they had on board to use it as a tugboat for the raft now housing six human beings.
Suddenly, they were a tiny speck in Earth’s largest ocean, enveloped by the vast open emptiness of infinite horizons. With no nautical instruments or charts, powered only by their makeshift sail, they had no hope of reaching land. Their only chance was rescue by a passing vessel. Given the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, it was an improbability bordering on a miracle.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai, 1831. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Seventeen days into their life as castaways, the raft deflated. All they had now was the narrow fiberglass dinghy, its rim barely above the water’s edge with all the human cargo.
By that blind resilience life has of resisting non-life, they persisted, eating turtle meat and sweet flying fish that landed in the bottom of the boat, drinking rainwater and turtle blood. Storms lashed them. Whales menaced them. Thirst and hunger subsumed them. Their bodies were covered in salt-water sores. Enormous ships passed within sight, missing their cries for help. But they pressed on, hoping against hope, toiling in every conceivable way to keep the spark of life aflame.
After 37 days as castaways, chance smiled upon them — a Japanese fishing boat spotted their distress flare and came to their rescue. Their tongues were so swollen from dehydration that they could hardly thank their saviors.
Restaging of the rescue, demonstrating how the family fit inside the dinghy.Throughout it all, Dougal kept a journal in case they lived — an act itself emblematic of that touching and tenacious optimism by which they survived. He later drew on it to publish an account of the experience, then distilled his learnings in Sea Survival: A Manual (public library).
Nested amid the rigorously practical advice is a poetic sentiment that applies not only to survival at sea but to life itself — a soulful prescription for what it takes to live through those most trying periods when you feel like a castaway from life, beyond the reach of salvation, depleted of hope.
He writes:
I have no words to offer which may comfort the reader who is also a castaway, except that rescue may come at any time but not necessarily when you expect it; and that even if you give up hope, you must never give up trying, for, as the result of your efforts, hope may well return and with justification.
Echoing Einstein’s views on free will and personal responsibility, he adds:
You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative, as is good or bad management.
This simple advice reads like a Zen koan, to be rolled around the palate of the mind, releasing richer and richer meaning, deeper and deeper assurance each time.
Complement with John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope, Jane Goodall on its deepest wellspring, and some thoughts on hope and the remedy for despair from Nick Cave and Gabriel Marcel, then zoom out to the civilizational scale and revisit Road to Survival — that wonderful packet of wisdom on resilience from the forgotten visionary who shaped the modern environmental movement.
Thanks, Nina
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”
We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.
In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathizer George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) for what became his most extensive interview about life — reflections ranging from science to spirituality to the elemental questions of existence. It was published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 29, 1929 — a quarter century after Einstein’s theory of relativity reconfigured our basic understanding of reality with its revelation that space and time are the warp and weft threads of a single fabric, along the curvature of which everything we are and everything we know is gliding.
Albert Einstein by Lotte Jacobi. (University of New Hampshire Museum of Art.)Considering the helplessness individual human beings feel before the immense geopolitical forces that had hurled the world into its first global war and the decisions individual political leaders were making — decisions already inclining the world toward a second — Einstein aims in his sensitive intellect at the fundamental reality of existence:
I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
When asked about any personal responsibility for his own staggering achievements, he points a steadfast finger at the nonexistence of free will:
I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)For Einstein, the most alive part of the mystery we live with — the mystery we are — is the imagination, that supreme redemption of human life from the prison of determinism. With an eye to his discovery of relativity, he reflects:
I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, funded by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would totally tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.
[…]
I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Complement with Robinson Jeffers’s superb science-laced poem “The Beginning and the End” and Simone Weil on the relationship between our rights and our responsibilities, and neuroscientist Sam Harris on our primary misconception about free will, then revisit Einstein on the interconnectedness of our fates.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.”
“Love the earth and sun and the animals,” Walt Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life — advice anchored, like his poetry, in that all-enveloping totality of goodwill that makes life worth living, advice at the heart of which is the act of unselfing; poetry largely inspired by the prose of Emerson, who had written of the “secret sympathy which connects men to all the animals, and to all the inanimate world around him.”
A quarter century after Leaves of Grass, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) took up this bright urgency in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (public library | public domain) — one of the great moral masterworks in the history of literature.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871Dostoyevsky — who felt deeply the throes of personal love — contours the largest meaning of love:
Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exhale yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!
In our era of ecological collapse, as we reckon with what it means to pay reparations to our home planet, the next passage rings with especial poignancy, painting the antidote to the indifference that got us where we are:
My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.
Complement with Shelley’s prescient case for animal rights and Christopher Hitchens on the lesser appreciated moral of Orwell’s Animal Farm, then revisit Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the meaning of life.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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On loving the world enough to surrender to the laws of gravity and chance.
In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the sacred wonder of reality, most capable of awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us when we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That word was “saint.”
Saints still walk our world, though now we might simply call them heroes, if we recognize them at all — heroes whose superpower is love.
Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) — one of the modern heroes — explores what makes a saint in a passage from his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers (public library).
Leonard Cohen, 1967He writes:
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
A year later, Cohen contemplated what these “balancing monsters of love” do for us in his song “Sisters of Mercy”:
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
Complement with Walter Lippmann’s magnificent meditation on what makes a hero, inspired by Amelia Earhart, then revisit Leonard Cohen on creativity at the end of life, language and the poetry of presence, democracy’s breakages and redemptions, and when (not) to quit a creative project.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Inside the silent scream of life.
Those of us who have lived with depression know the way it blindfolds us to beauty, the way it muffles the song of life, until we are left in the solitary confinement of our own somber ruminations, all the world a blank. It might feel like the visitation of some monster, but it is not something that happens upon us from the outside — it is our own undulating neurochemistry, it is the parts of ourselves we have not yet befriended, integrated, understood. “The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” William Styron wrote in his timeless account of depression. The pain can feel interminable. It is a lifeline to remember that it is not — that there is an other side, that the blindfold and the muffler can come off just like they came on.
That is what Swedish-born, London-based printmaker and graphic artist Staffan Gnosspelius explores with great subtlety and soulfulness in Bear (public library) — a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from depression.
We meet a bear with a body bent in the shape of sorrow and a cone on its head — a cone that won’t come off, only plunging the bear deeper into despair with each failed attempt.
One day, a white rabbit comes along and tries to help the bear take the cone off, but the small creature is powerless to remove it by force — the cone remains, and through it the bear growls the terrifying growl of menacing despair, terrifying his new friend.
So blinded to the reality of the wilderness, the bear comes to perceive the branches of the trees as the tentacles of some monstrous octopus and the blades of the grass as an assault of sharp swords.
Still, the rabbit persists, embracing the bear’s large cone-bowed body and simply being near, bearing witness to the suffering — that best aid for a friend in sorrow.
Watching its friend struggle, the rabbit begins gently singing to the bear.
Everywhere bear and cone go, rabbit and song go.
But when the bear tries to sing back through the cone, only those terrifying growls come out.
And so they continue — the sorrowing bear, the singing rabbit — until one day a trap in the forest snaps shut on the bear’s foot.
It is then, as pain mounts onto pain and becomes unbearable, that something breaks open in the bear and it sings out for help.
Across the forest, the rabbit hears the faint song and rushes over to release its friend.
Set free, the bear thanks the singing rabbit and timidly begins singing back, until a storm of song fills the forest — that great operatic scream of catalytic release, primal and numinous.
So it is that the song of life begins singing itself through the bear and the cone comes gently off — a tender reminder that no one can save anyone, not even with love; that we only ever save ourselves when we are ready: but love is what readies us to be our own savior.
Complement Bear with Bloom — a touching animated short film about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being — and The Rabbit Box — a wondrous vintage picture-book for grownups about the mystery of life — then revisit some of humanity’s most beloved writers on the mightiest antidote to depression.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
In my darkest hours, what has saved me again and again is some action of unselfing — some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle, the dazzling galaxy just discovered millions of lightyears away, the cardinal trembling in the tree outside my window. We know this by its mirror-image — to contact happiness of any kind is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” something beyond the bruising boundaries of the ego. The attainment of happiness is then less a matter of pursuit than of surrender — to the world’s wonder, ready as it comes.
That is what the Nobel-winning philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) explores in The Conquest of Happiness (public library) — the 1930 classic that gave us his increasingly urgent wisdom on the vital role of boredom in flourishing.
Bertrand RussellRussell writes:
The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The man* who can forget his worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.
In a sentiment he would expand in his final years as he contemplated what makes a fulfilling life, he adds:
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Couple this fragment of the wholly nourishing The Conquest of Happiness with Kurt Vonnegut on the secret of happiness, then revisit Russell on the key to the good life, how to heal a divided world, and his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the four desires driving all human behavior.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Truth cannot die; it passes from mind to mind, imparting light in its progress, and constantly renewing its own brightness during its diffusion. The True is the Beautiful; and the truths revealed to the mind render us capable of perceiving new beauties on the earth.”
“Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her wonderful meditation on subjectifying the universe. “Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.”
We have a word for that common celebration: wonder — the sense that the world is strange and beautiful, and we are hovering on the edge between understanding and awe as we behold the naked poetry of reality.
A century and a half before Le Guin, a century and a half before the inception of The Universe in Verse, the polymathic scientist and poet Robert Hunt (September 6, 1807–October 17, 1887) explored the consonance and complementarity of these twin languages of wonder in his 1848 book The Poetry of Science; or, Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature (public library | public domain) — an ambitious summation of all the major discoveries of science to that point, from gravity and light to the molecular forces and the reproduction of plants, revealing the poetry and aesthetic ecstasy inside the scientific facts.
Light distribution on soap bubble from a 19th-century French science textbook. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)In the epoch when Keats laid down the Romantic dictum that “beauty is truth, truth is beauty,” Hunt considers the interdependence of poetry, philosophy, and science through the lens of their common pursuit of truth and beauty:
The True is the Beautiful. Whenever this becomes evident to our senses, its influences are of a soul-elevating character. The beautiful, whether it is perceived in the external forms of matter, associated in the harmonies of light and colour, appreciated in the modulations of sweet sounds, or mingled with those influences which are, as the inner life of creation, ever appealing to the soul through the vesture which covers all things, is the natural theme of the poet, and the chosen study of the philosopher.
[…]
Science solicits from the material world, by the persuasion of inductive search, a development of its elementary principles, and of the laws which these obey. Philosophy strives to apply the discovered facts to the great phenomena of being, — to deduce large generalities from the fragmentary discoveries of severe induction, — and thus to ascend from matter and its properties up to those impulses which stir the whole, floating, as it were, on the confines of sense, and indicating, though dimly, those superior powers which, more nearly related to infinity, mysteriously manifest themselves in the phenomena of mind. Poetry seizes the facts of the one and the theories of the other; unites them by a pleasing thought, which appeals for truth to the most unthinking soul, and leads the reflective intellect to higher and higher exercises; it connects common phenomena with exalted ideas; and, applying its holiest powers, it invests the human mind with the sovereign strength of the True.
Double rainbow from Les phénomènes de la physique, 1868. (Available as a print.)So viewed, science is not a materialist diminishment of the world’s magic but a magnifying lens for it — a kind of spirituality of wonder. A century and a half before Richard Feynman’s classic Ode to a Flower and two decades before Emily Dickinson captured this very sentiment in her great ecological poem, Hunt writes:
The form and colour of a flower may excite our admiration; but when we come to examine all the phenomena which combine to produce that piece of symmetry and that lovely hue, — to learn the physiological arrangement of its structural parts, — the chemical actions by which its woody fibre and its juices are produced, — and to investigate those laws by which is regulated the power to throw back the white sunbeam from its surface in coloured rays, — our admiration passes to the higher feeling of deep astonishment at the perfection of the processes.
Tulips from The Temple of Flora, published the year Hunt was born. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)With an allusion to Shakespeare, he adds:
There are, indeed, “tongues in trees;” but science alone can interpret their mysterious whispers, and in this consists its poetry.
He returns to the dialogue between truth and beauty that animates the best parts of the human spirit:
The human mind naturally delights in the discovery of truth; and even when perverted by the constant operations of prevailing errors, a glimpse of the Real comes upon it like the smile of daylight to the sorrowing captive of some dark prison… Truth cannot die; it passes from mind to mind, imparting light in its progress, and constantly renewing its own brightness during its diffusion. The True is the Beautiful; and the truths revealed to the mind render us capable of perceiving new beauties on the earth. The gladness of truth is like the ringing voice of a joyous child, and the most remote recesses echo with the cheerful sound. To be for ever true is the Science of Poetry, — the revelation of truth is the Poetry of Science.
[…]
As each atom of matter is involved in an atmosphere of properties and powers, which unites it to every mass of the universe, so each truth, however common it may be, is surrounded by impulses which, being awakened, pass from soul to soul like musical undulations, and which will be repeated through the echoes of space, and prolonged for all eternity.
Complement with the science and poetry of astronomer Rebecca Elson — the twenieth century’s high priestess of our “responsibility to awe” — then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on the shared psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language.”
Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of feeling and time. When the vessel becomes too small to hold what we pour into it, language spills into poetry.
In this respect, poetry serves the same function as prayer: to give shape and voice to our unspoken and often unspeakable hopes, fears, and inner tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and passed from hand to compassionate hand. Poetry thus becomes an instrument of self-transcendence — an instrument that, in Adrienne Rich’s abiding words, “can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”
That function of poetry as the language of the unsaid is what the Canadian poet and Native American culture scholar Robert Bringhurst explores in the final pages of his altogether fascinating book The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (public library).
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by poet Ruth KraussA century after William James placed the ineffable atop his list of the four features of transcendence, Bringhurst reflects on the differences between English and the native language of the Haida people of British Columbia, and writes:
It is not necessary that the same things should be ineffable in all languages. It is only necessary that in each language plenty of things should be so: unsayable, or, at the very least, unsaid.
It seems to me that a kind of speechlessness — the inability to say a quite significant number of things — is actually built into every language. But language itself is a self-transcending mechanism. It tries, and lets us try, to say what it can’t. The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language. The reason language exists, it seems to me, is that poetry — the resonance of being — needs it. If you live in a place that hasn’t been pillaged and ruined, the silence of language’s failure, and of poetry’s success, is present and vivid almost everywhere you listen, almost everywhere you look.
Complement with Muriel Rukeyser on what poetry does for us, David Whyte on the power of poetry and silence as a portal to presence, and this wonderful story of how poetry saves lives, then savor three life-giving poems: “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower” by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Singularity” by Marie Howe, and “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by Rebecca Elson.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?”
“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life. It can only be so — given how many parallel truths comprise any given situation, given how multifarious the data points packed into any single experience, given that this very moment “you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)But what we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life. That is what philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) explores in a marvelous 1994 paper in the Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, marvelously titled User-Friendly Self-Deception.
Recognizing that “many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful,” Rorty writes:
We should not wish to do without the active, self-induced illusions that sustain us. Nor can we do without second order denials that they are illusions, the second order and regressive strategies that we self-deceptively believe rationalize our various self-deceptive activities. The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?
Self-deception, she notes, has various “cousins and clones” — among them “compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false consciousness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection” — some of which are socially rewarded for their adaptive value in helping us attain our goals:
When we admire persistent and dedicated single-minded attention that systematically resists the distraction of fringe phenomena, we call it courage or purposeful resolution.
But as much as self-deception might animate our own inner lives, with our reflexive tendency to mistake self-righteousness for morality, we too readily indict with self-delusion anyone whose model of reality differs from ours:
The person who does not have our favoured reactions is open game for the charge of self-deception, if not of a more serious form of psychological abnormality.
One necessity of self-deception is the paradox of the self in time: We must each answer the question of what makes us and our childhood selves the “same” person despite a lifetime physical and psychological change, and we can only do so with a certain measure of self-deception, because, of course, in some essential sense we are not the same person — our personhood is pocked by inconstancy and inner contradiction, unstable across time. As Iris Murdoch reminds us, “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion” — the fundamental illusion upon which the structure of human life is built.
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print.)Rorty considers the psychological roots and mechanisms of self-deception:
Like deception, self-deception is a species of rhetorical persuasion; and like all forms of persuasion, it involves a complex, dynamic and co-operative process. Successful deceivers are acute rhetoricians, astute seducers who know how to co-opt the psychology of their subjects. They begin with minute and subtle interactions designed to establish trust, with a manner of approach, certain gestures and intonation patterns, intimations of directed and redirected attention.
With an eye to the social dimension of all deception, she adds:
Deception and self-deception are not merely detached conclusions of invalid arguments: they are interactive processes with a complex cognitive and affective aetiology.
[…]
The canny self-deceiver puts herself in situations where her deflected attention will be strongly supported by her fellows.
[…]
It is extremely difficult to sustain self-deception without a little help from our friends, often rendered by observant but tactful silence.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)This very fact points at the best antidote to harmful self-deception:
Since we are highly susceptible to socially induced self-deception, the wisest practical course is to be very careful about the company we keep… Unfortunately self- deception is just the thing that prevents us from seeking its best therapy: it does not know when to expand, and when to limit its epistemological company. Fortunately, we have many other kinds of reasons for being astute about the company we keep. With luck, a canny self-deceiver’s other psychological and intellectual habits — a taste for astringency and a distrust of hypocrisy, for instance — can prevent the wild imperialistic tendencies of self-deception from becoming entrenched and ramified.
Much self-deception, Rorty observes, is not a matter of outright lying to oneself, but of selective attention and fragmentation of truth:
Self-deception need not involve false belief: just as the deceiver can attempt to produce a belief which is — as it happens — true, so too a self-deceiver can set herself to believe what is in fact true. A canny self-deceiver can focus on accurate but irrelevant observations as a way of denying a truth that is importantly relevant to her immediate projects.
This is something that stems from the psychological machinery of all deception, possible because “any experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptions”:
Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers — something red, something anomalous, something desirable — in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. The strategy of perceptual self-deception is identical: the trick is to place oneself where patterns of salience are likely to deflect attention away from what we do not wish to see.
But for all of its pitfalls, and for all the urgency of continually questioning when it becomes self-defeating, self-deception can be greatly beneficent in our endeavors of self-transformation and growth, offering assurance that bolsters our will and an antidote to the “generalized uncertainty about the worth of our projects.” Rorty writes:
By convincing themselves that a desired self-transformation is within relatively easy reach, canny self-improvers can use self-deception as an energizing instrument.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Self-deception is also necessary in propping up the precarious pillar of modern life in this century of selfing — identity:
We invent something we call our identity, resting our self-respect on our engaging in its projects, independently of any other measure of their merits.
But perhaps the most essential function of healthy self-deception is in allaying our ambivalence about projects and life-choices that bring us tremendous rewards, but also have tremendous personal costs, an accurate assessment of which might undermine our willingness to undertake them:
Without some species of self-deception, our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse. In deciding to have children, we ignore the travails of parents, obliterating our otherwise keen awareness of the typical relations among parents and children; in devoting ourselves to writing philosophy, we conveniently forget how little philosophy we are willing to read; in the interest of sanity and joy, we sidestep our deep ambivalences about our kith and kin.
[…]
Disguising and submerging the ambivalence that is natural to most of our enterprises not only brings us the energy, verve, style and ease that successful action requires; it also helps to assure the social co-operation that is equally essential to our individual and collective projects. A good deal of the polite conversation of social life, — the public description of the joys of our social roles and functions (friend, mother, teacher, scholar) — channels and streams us to play our parts without the mess, confusion and upheaval that would occur if we openly expressed our natural and sensible ambivalence about these roles. It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.
Complement with Walter Lippmann’s superb century-old anatomy of deception and self-delusion, then revisit Rorty on what makes a person: the seven layers of identity, in literature and life.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“…and joy instead of will.”
May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) was thirty-three when she left Cambridge for Santa Fe. She had just lived through a World War and a long period of personal turmoil that had syphoned her creative vitality — a kind of deadening she had not experienced before. Under the immense blue skies that had so enchanted the young Georgia O’Keeffe a generation earlier, she started coming back to life. Her white-washed room at the boarding house had mountain views, a rush of sunlight, and a police dog and “a very nice English teacher” for neighbors. As the sun rose over the mountains, she woke up each morning “simply on fire” with poetry — new poems she read to the English teacher, not yet knowing she was falling in love with her. Judy would become her great love, then her lifelong friend and the closest she ever had to family.
Among the constellation of Santa Fe poems composed during this creative renaissance is an especially beguiling reflection on the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, soon published in Sarton’s 1948 poetry collection The Lion and the Rose (public library) — her first in a decade — and read here for us by my longtime poetry co-invocator Amanda Palmer in her lovely oceanic voice:
MEDITATION IN SUNLIGHT
by May SartonIn space in time I sit
Thousands of feet above
The sea and meditate
On solitude on loveNear all is brown and poor
Houses are made of earth
Sun opens every door
The city is a hearthFar all is blue and strange
The sky looks down on snow
And meets the mountain-range
Where time is light not shadowTime in the heart held still
Space as the household god
And joy instead of will
Knows love as solitudeKnows solitude as love
Knows time as light not shadow
Thousands of feet above
The sea where I am now
Complement with Sarton on the cure for despair, how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and her stunning ode to solitude, then revisit Amanda’s soulful readings of Jane Kenyon’s meditation on life with and after depression, Elizabeth Bishop’s timeless consolation for loss, Ellen Bass’s immense and intimate poem of perspective and possibility, and Mary Oliver’s “When I Am Among the Trees.”
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On aligning the things we make with basic human values for an enduring world.
“No one is fated or doomed to love anyone,” the philosopher-poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “the accidents happen.”
What is true of interpersonal love is also true of our labors of love — creative accidents are a mighty instrument of art, often steering entire trajectories of expression and endeavor in directions we could not have willed.
That is what the visionary ceramicist Edith Heath (May 24, 1911–December 27, 2005) explores in a previously unpublished lecture titled “The Creative Accident.”
Edith Heath at the wheel, 1960. (UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives.)Heath discovered art while studying to become a schoolteacher, then fell in love with the particular creative potential of clay. Largely self-taught, she spent WWII foraging materials from defunct clay pits closed during the war — brick clay from the Bay Area, talc from Southern California, fire clays from the Sierra Nevada foothills. In the final years of the war, she learned ceramic chemistry from an émigré physicist, then went on to revolutionize pottery with her alchemical approach to clay and glaze, becoming ceramicist and chemist, designer and inventor, idealist and entrepreneur, using the principles of science to place everyday beauty within reach of the working class. She lived nearly a century as an unstoppable creative force, touching millions of lives with her work that endures as the iconic Heath Ceramics.
At the heart of Heath’s creative practice was the element of fire, reminding her always of a time when “the Earth was a red-hot molten mass of chemicals and minerals,” primordial and uncontrollable. Seeing in fire a parallel of the creative force itself, Heath argues that at the center of art lies a kind of “acceptance of the accidental” that is counter to the basic human instinct for controlling chaos. The artist then emerges as a kind of shaman of the accidental, dancing between its acceptance and its control.
She writes:
Perhaps the artist has been trying to do both — accept the accident through finding meaning in it. And in finding meaning in it, it is no longer accidental and disquieting, but rather presents a state of equilibrium. This equilibrium manifests in the controlled accident of a work of art may be symbolic of all the controlled accidents that non-artists accept every day.
In sentiments epochs ahead of her time, Heath holds capitalism accountable for its tacit acceptance of practices that foment economic inequality and environmental collapse. While on the other edge of the landmass Rachel Carson was insisting that “the real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife,” Heath writes:
We accept the accidents of economics that necessitates (designing for obsolescence in order to maintain high employment and high standard of living). We accept the accident of over-production of food stuff in this country — setting a ceiling on what can be grown — while millions of people go hungry in other countries. We accept the accident that more natural resources are wasted in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world and proceed to waste them with no guilty conscience… We accept the accident that some people are born with dark skin, or are born to wealth of poverty, with high or low IQs.
By “accident,” of course, she means outcomes beyond the reach of our individual control — functions of a confluence of chance and choice on behalf of forces far larger than us, operating on time scales far beyond our individual lifetimes. She observes:
We can safely refer to these happenstances as accidents, for certainly no one would say they were “planned”. Certainly an error in judgment in diplomacy is not intentional. Planned obsolescence is intentional but it is nevertheless a negative solution to the unpredictability of economic forces. The farmer did not know he would be growing too much food. Our forefathers did not know this land would be filled with natural resources. Since nature bestowed them upon us, why shouldn’t we exploit them? Race, color, creed, intelligence and national pride too are accidents of heritage over which the individual had no control.
Heath Ceramics buffet service pieces, 1955 (UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives)Heath was far ahead of her time in her understanding of cultural dynamics and civilizational urgencies. Observing that, historically, creative breakthroughs have come far more frequently from individuals than from groups, she presages that a great impending calamity — atomic destruction in her day, climate catastrophe in ours — has the power of fomenting extraordinary collective creativity:
Because we are teetering on the probability of the most terrible accident in history… it may force more individuals to become creative as a group. In other words, terrible accidents motivate group actions toward creative solution. Potential accident is not a good motivating force, just as capital punishment does not deter crime. Real accidents, however, do in time motivate a group.
An epoch before the term “sustainability” came to bear its ecological connotations, and long before the world awoke to the hazard of climate change, Heath — whose working ethos was to “use the Earth to save the Earth” — adds:
Design for obsolescence as well as depletion of natural resources are real accidents of history that do exist today, which are beginning to compel creative people to design for more basic human values than superficial “styling.” The designer sees in these two accidents of economy a new potential for genuine development in… our whole way of life around the world.
With the depletion of natural resources, we will begin to make and build things to last. Since they must last longer, they must… take on a timeless quality.
This timeless quality, she argues, must be cultivated in all creative works — “whether a painting, a house, a piece of music, a car, or a piece of pottery.” With an eye to her own field, she offers five pillars of timelessness that a maker must follow:
TRUTH — to materials, method, use. Materials not faked to look like something else. Respect material and let it state its unique esthetic… Method of production should not simulate or be imitative of another process — respect the handmade — respect the machine-made — each has its own beauty.
USE — does it function well? Does it please the senses as well as the mind?
SENSE OF EVOLUTION — does it reflect a concept of evolution? In other words, does it give one a sense of well-being because it has evolved through man’s search for new understanding of materials, processes, and a good way of life?
SPIRIT — does it make you feel snobbish or superior or does it excite and exalt you to the point where you want to share the experience with others? In other words, does it ignoble or demean or does it bring dignity and pleasure to you and your fellow-man?
PERSPECTIVE — does it recognize relevance, relationship? Does it exist harmoniously in relationship to other things? Is it too dominant, too weak, too trite, or does it function genuinely, lively, appropriately?
Couple “The Creative Accident” with artist Ann Hamilton’s lovely notion of “making not knowing,” then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.
Special thanks to Sarah C. Rich at Heath Ceramics and Jennifer Volland at the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives for granting me access to Edith Heath’s unpublished manuscripts.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around.”
“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth,” the visionary Elizabeth Peabody, who coined the term transcendentalism, wrote in her timeless admonition against the trap of complacency. “The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”
A century and a half after her, contemplating how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, Simone de Beauvoir observed: “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living — the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition.
How to honor the unfolding of life without a punitive clinging to past selves is what Nick Cave explores in a passage from Faith, Hope and Carnage — one of my favorite books of 2022.
Nick Cave in Newcastle, 2022.At sixty-five, he reflects:
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.
In consonance with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s insight that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he considers what is found on the other side of that self-shattering:
Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.
A generation earlier, Bertrand Russell touched on this in his astute observation that growing older contentedly is matter of being able to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
Complement with Grace Paley on the art of growing older, then revisit Nick Cave on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The mind enjoys the complete and perfect benefit of its human destiny only when… entering the secret heart of nature.”
Until the word scientist was coined for the polymathic mathematician Mary Somerville, the term for those who devoted their lives to the contemplation and investigation of the wonder of reality was natural philosopher — the study of nature fell within the domain of philosophy and was indivisible from the humanistic concerns of morality.
Two millennia ago, when the universe revolved around an Earth many still considered flat, before anything was known of galaxies or genomes, of atoms or antibodies, the great Stoic philosopher Seneca placed what we now call science — that shimmering systematic curiosity about how nature works — at the heart of a fulfilling life. In a selection of advice to his pupil Lucilius, grouped under the heading Natural Questions and included in Seneca’s altogether indispensable Dialogues and Letters (public library), he considers how the passion to know reality on its own terms — the passion we call science — focuses a life:
If I had not been admitted to these studies it would not have been worth while being born.
I see my soul reflected in Nature by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)For Seneca, the study of nature is the closest we get to a true theology — a way of reclaiming God:
I myself am grateful to nature, both when I view it in the aspect which is open to everyone, and when I have entered into its mysteries: when I learn what is the material substance of the universe; who is its author or guardian; what god is; whether he is entirely wrapped up in himself or sometimes has regard for us as well; whether he creates something daily or has created it only once; whether he is part of the world or he is the world; whether he can make a decision today and modify in some respect the law of fate, or whether to have done things that need to be changed is a diminution of his grandeur and a confession of his error.
Crucially, pursuing questions about how the world works invites us to unself, thus saving us from the greatest flaw of character — our compulsive self-reference, which worms our capacities for selflessness, compassion, generosity, love, and all the moral virtues.
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Addressing his pupil, Seneca intimates that eradicating evil in ourselves is not enough — we must also generate good, and the highest good is self-transcendence, which the study of nature affords us more readily than any other means:
You have avoided the faults of the soul. You don’t have a deceitful air; your speech is not adapted to someone else’s wishes; your heart is not veiled; you do not suffer from greed, which denies to itself what it has taken from everyone else, nor extravagance, which wastes money shamefully only to recover it even more shamefully, nor ambition, which will raise you to a worthy status only through unworthy means. So far you have achieved nothing; and though you have escaped many evils, you have not yet escaped yourself.
[…]
The mind enjoys the complete and perfect benefit of its human destiny only when it has spurned every evil, seeking the heights and entering the secret heart of nature.
Couple with a beautiful Victorian perspective on the spirituality of nature and our responsibility to wonder, then revisit Seneca on creativity, gratitude, the antidote to anxiety, and the key to resilience in the face of loss.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
There is singular magic to seeing a mass of creatures move in unison along the vector of a common purpose, as if commanded by a single mind. In those ultimate instances of unselfing, we are reminded that all of nature is one grand synchrony, in which we are mere particles existing in conviviality and consanguinity with every other particle.
A century and a half before Richard Powers painted in words the majestic migration of sandhill cranes, Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) channels one such spectacle of humbling grandeur in Specimen Days (public library) — the exquisite collection of prose fragments that also gave us his reflections on democracy, music, and the wisdom of trees.
Walt Whitman circa 1854 (Library of Congress)Under the heading “BIRDS MIGRATING AT MIDNIGHT,” Whitman writes:
Did you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies, changing their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be forgotten. A friend called me up just after 12 last night to mark the peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating north (rather late this year.) In the silence, shadow and delicious odor of the hour, (the natural perfume belonging to the night alone,) I thought it rare music. You could hear the characteristic motion — once or twice “the rush of mighty wings,” but oftener a velvety rustle, long drawn out — sometimes quite near — with continual calls and chirps, and some song-notes. It all lasted from 12 till after 3. Once in a while the species was plainly distinguishable; I could make out the bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, white-crown’d sparrow, and occasionally from high in the air came the notes of the plover.
Complement with Whitman, shortly after his paralytic stroke, on what makes life worth living and his eternal advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life, then revisit other enchanting Unphotographables: Henry Williamson on the transcendence of a winter storm; Jack Kerouac on the self-revelation of the windblown world; Georgia O’Keeffe on the grandeur of Machu Picchu; Iris Murdoch on the sea and the stars; an Alpine transcendence with Mary Shelley; an Alaskan paradise with Rockwell Kent.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.”
The son of a nurse and a church janitor, entomologist Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867–February 14, 1923) died with a personal library of a thousand books, having published more than fifty scientific papers, having named his youngest son Darwin, and having revolutionized our understanding of the most abundant non-human animals on Earth by pioneering a psychological approach to insect learning, devoting his life to discovering “stubborn facts that should not be ignored.”
Charles Henry TurnerWithout a proper laboratory, without access to research libraries and university facilities, he became the first human being to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch, and the first scientist to achieve Pavlovian conditioning in insects, training moths to beat their wings whenever they heard his whistle and concluding that “there is much evidence that the responses of moths to stimuli are expressions of emotion.”
Moths by the Australian teenage sisters Helena and Harriet Scott, 1864. (Available as a print, benefitting the Nature Conservancy.)He studied the brains of birds, the web-making habits of spiders, the growth of grape-vine leaves, and why antlions feign death. He volunteered at the Cincinnati Observatory. He discovered new species of aquatic invertebrates. But insects were his great love. He constructed elaborate apparatuses and painstakingly painted tiny cardboard discs to conduct the first controlled studies of color vision and pattern recognition in honeybees, dismantling the scientific dogma of his day by proving that bees see color and create “memory pictures” of their environment. He illuminated sex differences in ant intelligence, musing that “the males seem unable to solve even the simplest problems.” Kneeling patiently for hours, he built intricate obstacle courses and mazes to study how twelve different species of ants navigate space. Two generations before E.O. Wilson, he concluded:
Ants are much more than mere reflex machines; they are self-acting creatures guided by memories of past individual (ontogenetic) experience.
Through a multitude of exquisitely designed experiments, he discovered that ants, bees, and wasps learn, remember, and recognize landmarks to get home rather than move by mindless instinct as previously thought. Observing and testing how gallery spiders weave and reweave their webs when destroyed, he challenged centuries of assumption about instinct versus intelligence by concluding that “an instinctive impulse prompts gallery spiders to weave gallery webs, but details of construction are the products of intelligent action.”
Spiders by the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone. (Available as a print.)Radiating from his vast body of work is revolutionary evidence against the prior belief that insects are insentient machines operating solely by kinesis and reflex — evidence that these simple-seeming animals are endowed with memory, problem-solving ability, learning, and even feeling, intimating a whole new way of thinking about the evolution of intelligence, emotion, and cognition.
Between experiments and observations, Turner became a prominent Civil Rights leader in St. Louis, developing the first social services for African Americans in the area. Bridging his scientific and humanistic work, he wrote:
Prejudice is older than this age. A comparative study of animal psychology teaches that all animals are prejudiced against animals unlike themselves, and the more unlike they are the greater the prejudice… Among men, however, dissimilarity of minds is a more potent factor in causing prejudice than unlikeness in physiognomy.
Dr. Turner in his later years.Despite his groundbreaking research, despite being the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and to publish a paper in the esteemed journal Science, Turner was turned away from every university post he applied to on account of his race. With the bittersweet recognition that his life was at the mercy of his time, he decided to shape the landscape of possibility for the next generation and became a science teacher in the first black high school west of Mississippi, all the while continuing his rigorous independent research. Upon his death in 1923, a colleague reflected:
The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.
Complement with the kindred story of how Turner’s contemporary Edmonia Lewis blazed the way for women of color in art, then revisit the fascinating science of how nonhuman animals perceive and navigate the world.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world.
Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed an unusual adaptation that shaped its destiny: Despite being a conifer — needle-leaved trees that are usually evergreen — it became deciduous, losing all of its needles during the months-long lightless winter to conserve energy, then growing vigorously in the bright summer months — the fastest-growing of the redwoods. With this uncommon competitive edge, it conquered large swaths of the globe, spreading the seeds of its handsome cones across North America and Eurasia. But when the global climate plunged into the Ice Age, its victory march came to an abrupt halt.
We know this because, at the peak of WWII, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki discovered fossils of this small, mighty redwood species. Nothing like it had ever been described in the botanical literature, so he deemed it extinct, naming it Metasequoia after its kinship to Earth’s most majestic tree.
Metasequoia in winter. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)The World War was still raging when a Chinese forester traveling through Central China in the winter of 1941 came upon a majestic old tree of a kind he had never seen before. There was a small shrine at its foot, where locals had been lighting votives and leaving offerings for decades. They called it, he learned, shui-sa, or “water fir,” for its love of moist soil — a name he had never heard before. Because the tree was already denuded of needles for its seasonal hibernation, he was unable to collect a proper specimen for identification — but he told other foresters and botanists of it, until word reached Zhan Wang, director of China’s Central Bureau of Forest Research.
Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the “water fir” as a Metasequoia.
Metasequoia needles and bark. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)Here was a living fossil — a lovely ghost of evolution that had somehow survived the unsurvivable.
Across the flaming divide that placed China and Japan on opposite sides of the World War, a small group of scientists had transcended the deadly artifice of borders and the ugliness of weapons to remind the world that the human longing for truth and beauty is greater than our foibles.
The first Chinese person to be awarded a Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University, Hu still maintained a relationship with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum — one of the world’s largest living museums of trees. As news of this ancient tree began making international headlines, lauded by journalists as a “living vestige of younger world,” “as remarkable as discovering a living dinosaur,” the director of the Harvard arboretum cobbled together funds for a collecting expedition in China across the ashen world — one of the last collaborations between Chinese and Western scientists before the Chinese Revolution dropped its leaden wall for decades.
Metasequoia cones. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)As soon as the samples arrived at Harvard, the arborists planted several trees on Massachusetts soil — the first to grow in North America in more than two million years — and began distributing a kilogram of precious seeds to universities and botanical gardens across the globe. Hundreds of human hands from different nations and different creeds pressed them into moist soil, until this global effort to reanimate a ghost of evolution populated parks all over the world with Metasequoia.
Perhaps due to the rich orange color its feathery needles turn before falling, perhaps in homage to its improbable chance at a new day in the epochal calendar of existence, it became known as dawn redwood.
Metasequoia needles in autumn. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)In the 1950s, a retired forester planted eight in Oregon; the fire chief of a California county planted one at the fire department headquarters; eventually, many more were seeded across California and the Pacific Northwest. In the 1970s, New York City community garden patron saint Liz Christy planted one at the iconic Bowery community farm-garden now bearing her name. Today, dawn redwoods rise from the heart of London and thrive in Istanbul’s arboretum. Three stand sentinel over Strawberry Fields — the John Lennon memorial in Central Park. In the final years of the twentieth century, it was declared “the tree of the century.”
The year of the living fossil’s discovery, Einstein’s voice unspooled from the British radio waves, passionate and accented, to make a case for “the common language of science” as the only impartial understanding that can save humanity from itself. Each dawn redwood rising from a patch of spacetime somewhere on this divided and indivisible world is a living monument to what is truest and most beautiful in the human spirit.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness. Happiness to the individual in the first place. If individuals were universally happy, the species would be happy.”
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote as he reflected on how to stop limiting your happiness. “Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.”
A century and a half before him, the radical and far-seeing political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) — father of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley — examined the building blocks of the good life in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (public library) — the book he began writing when his wife, the radical and far-seeing political philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, was pregnant with the daughter whose birth would kill her.
William Godwin. Portrait by James Northcote. (National Portrait Gallery, London.)In a sentiment David Foster Wallace would echo in his own radical reflection on the true value of education, Godwin writes:
The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness. Happiness to the individual in the first place. If individuals were universally happy, the species would be happy.
A century and a half before Martin Luther King, Jr. incited us to see our “inescapable network of mutuality,” Godwin insists:
In society the interests of individuals are intertwisted with each other, and cannot be separated. Men should be taught to assist each other. The first object should be to train a man* to be happy; the second to train him to be useful, that is, to be virtuous.
But he also acknowledges the inescapable contradictions of human nature and considers the soundest strategy for their reconciliation:
All virtue is a compromise between opposite motives and inducements. The man of genuine virtue, is a man of vigorous comprehension and long views. He who would be eminently useful, must be eminently instructed. He must be endowed with a sagacious judgement, and an ardent zeal.
One of artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)In Bible Stories — a series for children he wrote under a pseudonym when his radical philosophy rendered him a pariah — Godwin considered the common variable beneath the twin pillars of the good life, central to both morality and love:
Imagination is the ground-plot upon which the edifice of a sound morality must be erected. Without imagination we may have a certain cold and arid circle of principles, but we cannot have sentiments: we may learn by rote a catalogue of rules, and repeat our lessons with the exactness of a parrot, or play over our tricks with the docility of a monkey; but we can neither ourselves love, nor be fitted to excite the love of others.
Pair with Nietzsche on how to find yourself and the true value of education, then revisit Godwin on how to raise an intelligent child and his advice to activists.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Living into the risk and responsibility of the multiple identities we carry.
“If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else,” the young poet Nikki Giovanni told the elder James Baldwin in their historic intergenerational conversation. Perhaps it is because we are such strangers to ourselves — so opaque in our own motives and vulnerabilities, so haunted by confusion and self-contradiction — that we so bruisingly misunderstand and mistreat others, so readily seize on their otherness, lashing our confusions at them, so readily forget that diversity and difference are the reason life exists.
The antidote to that reflex is what Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) considers in an interview found in Black Women Writers at Work (public library) — the superb collection that also gave us Maya Angelou on writing and our responsibility to our creative gifts.
Audre LordeA generation after Hannah Arendt’s insight into the power and opportunity of the outsider position, and an epoch before the term intersectionality existed, Lorde considers the challenge of the multiple identities we each inhabit, which further alienate us from each other for as long as they remain unreconciled and unintegrated within us:
When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain. In other words, when people of a group share an oppression, there are certain strengths that they build together. But there are also certain vulnerabilities. For instance, talking about racism to the women’s movement results in “Huh, don’t bother us with that. Look, we’re all sisters, please don’t rock the boat.” Talking to the black community about sexism results in pretty much the same thing. You get a “Wait, wait… wait a minute: we’re all black together. Don’t rock the boat.” In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
Considering her own responsibility to that recognition and that reconciliation, she adds:
My responsibility is to speak the truth as I feel it, and to attempt to speak it with as much precision and beauty as possible.
Complement with Lorde on kinship across difference, feeling as an antidote to fearing, and turning fear into creative fire, then revisit Bear and Wolf — a tender illustrated fable about walking side by side in otherness.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.”
It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work does, dishwashing or dentistry. And yet such labors of diligence and devotion — the kind William Blake called “eternal work” — are somehow different, different and more vulnerable, for they enter the world in a singular spirit and are recompensed in a singular spirit, distinct from dentistry or dishwashing.
That spirit is the spirit of a gift — not the transaction of two commodities but the interchange of two mutual generosities, passing between people who share in the project of a life worth living.
A year before I was born, the poet Lewis Hyde taxonomized that vital and delicate distinction between work and labor in his eternally giving book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) — a timeless inquiry into what it takes to harmonize “the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture.”
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Hyde writes:
Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify. “Getting the program” in AA is a labor. It is likewise apt to speak of “mourning labor”: when a loved one dies, the soul undergoes a period of travail, a change that draws energy. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors. Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them… We wake up to discover the fruits of labor.
At the heart of the distinction is the recognition that those fruits are offered to the world not as a service or a transaction but as a gift — “the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us.” The challenge arises when we try to reconcile the spiritual ecosystem of gifts with the material market economy within which they dwell — the economy of sustenance and solvency of which every modern person partakes just in the course of staying alive.
An epoch before Patreon and Kickstarter and Substack, Hyde issues a clarion call for honoring the gifts we receive:
If we really valued these gift labors, couldn’t we pay them well? Couldn’t we pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers, pay the cellist in the orchestra as we pay the advertising executive in the box seat? Yes, we could. We could — we should — reward gift labors where we value them. My point here is simply that where we do so we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been “made” the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group. The costs and benefits of tasks whose procedures are adversarial and whose ends are easily quantified can be expressed through a market system. The costs and rewards of gift labors cannot.
Art by William Blake for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Available as a print.)In a sentiment that gladdens those of us who offer the fruits of our labors freely and are sustained by what is given freely in return, he adds:
The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation… The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.
The Gift remains a vitalizing read, all the more nourishing and necessary in our present culture that so commodifies creative labor and our market economy that so devalues those works of thought and tenderness that most help us live our lives: music, poetry, philosophy, art. Complement these fragments from it with some Hyde-fomented thoughts on music and the price of what we cherish, then revisit the story of how Van Gogh found his gift that revolutionized art and how Jeanne Villepreux-Power turned her gift into a breakthrough of science.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does.”
“Intelligence supposes good will,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “Sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself.” Yet our efforts to define and measure intelligence have been pocked with insensitivity to nuance, to diversity, to the myriad possible ways of paying attention to the world. Within the human realm, there is the dark cultural history of IQ. Beyond the human realm, there is the growing abashed understanding that other forms of intelligence exist, capable of comprehending and navigating the world in ways wildly different from ours, no less successful and no less poetic. One measure of our own intelligence may be the degree of our openness to these other ways of being — the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit with which we recognize and regard otherness.
The science-reverent English artist James Bridle invites such a broadening of mind in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (public library). He writes:
The tree of evolution bears many fruits and many flowers, and intelligence, rather than being found only in the highest branches, has in fact flowered everywhere.
[…]
There are many ways of “doing” intelligence: behaviourally, neurologically, physiologically and socially… Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does; it is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act. We have already learned — from the gibbons, gorillas and macaques — that intelligence is relational: it matters how and where you do it, what form your body gives it, and with whom it connects. Intelligence is not something which exists just in the head — literally, in the case of the octopus, who does intelligence with its whole body. Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.
Art from Cephalopod Atlas, 1909. (Available as a print and as a cutting board, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Borrowing ecological philosopher David Abram’s notion of “the more-than-human world,” he adds:
Intelligence, then, is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes. The task is to figure out how to become aware of it, to associate with it, to make it manifest. This process is itself one of entanglement, of opening ourselves to forms of communication and interaction with the totality of the more-than-human world, much deeper and more extensive than those which can be performed in the artificial constraints of the laboratory. It involves changing ourselves, and our own attitudes and behaviours, rather than altering the conditions of our non-human communicants.
[…]
To think of intelligence in this way is not to reduce its definition, but to enlarge it. Anthropocentric science has argued for centuries that redefining intelligence in this way is to make it meaningless, but this is not the case. To define intelligence simply as what humans do is the narrowest way we could possibly think about it — and it is ultimately to narrow ourselves, and lessen its possible meaning. Rather, by expanding our definition of intelligence, and the chorus of minds which manifest it, we might allow our own intelligence to flower into new forms and new emergent ways of being and relating. The admittance of general, universal, active intelligence is a necessary part of our vital re-entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the emergence of a new branch on the tree of life — a “mechanical kingdom” of our own making, comprising our machines governed by a “self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race” — Bridle offers an optimistic implication of this redefinition for the future of what we now call “artificial intelligence”:
If intelligence, rather than being an innate, restrictive set of behaviours, is in fact something which arises from interrelationships, from thinking and working together, there need be nothing artificial about it all. If all intelligence is ecological — that is, entangled, relational, and of the world — then artificial intelligence provides a very real way for us to come to terms with all the other intelligences which populate and manifest through the planet.
What if, instead of being the thing that separates us from the world and ultimately supplants us, artificial intelligence is another flowering, wholly its own invention, but one which, shepherded by us, leads us to a greater accommodation with the world? Rather than being a tool to further exploit the planet and one another, artificial intelligence is an opening to other minds, a chance to fully recognize a truth that has been hidden from us for so long. Everything is intelligent, and therefore — along with many other reasons — is worthy of our care and conscious attention.
Complement with Walt Whitman on the wisdom of trees, Ursula K. Le Guin on the poetry of penguins, and Marilyn Nelson’s spare, splendid poem about octopus intelligence, then revisit Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of AI.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self.
One of the hardest things in life is watching a loved one’s mind slowly syphoned by cognitive illness — that haunting ambiguous loss of the familiar body remaining, but the person slowly fading into otherness, their very consciousness frayed and reconstituted into that of a stranger.
How to go on loving this growing stranger is the supreme challenge of accompanying a precious human being through the most disorienting experience in life — the great open question pocked with guilt but pulsating with possibility.
The poet and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores how to step into that possibility with uncommon sensitivity and tenderness in one of the diary entries collected in the altogether magnificent The House by the Sea (public library).
May SartonSarton was thirty-three when she met Judith Matlack, twelve years her senior. May and Judy fell in love — a love consecrated in Sarton’s almost unbearably beautiful poetry collection Honey in the Hive. When they separated thirteen years later, they remained not only friends but nothing less than family to each other.
Judy was not yet seventy when dementia began fraying her mind. Uncoupled and childless, she moved into a nursing home. Sarton visited regularly. Once she settled into her house by the sea in Maine, she often had Judy stay with her for several days at a time. During one of these visits, with Judy particularly disoriented, unable to hold a conversation, wandering into the neighbors’ yards, Sarton offers a passage of tender assurance:
Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person. I do cherish her so; can one maintain the image of love when so much has gone?” I guess the answer to that question is, yes, because when one has lived with someone for years, as I did with Judy, something quite intangible is there, as though in the bloodstream, that no change in her changes.
Couple with Mary Gaitskill on how to move through life when your parents are dying — some of the simplest, most beautiful and redemptive life-advice you’ll ever receive — then revisit Sarton on how to live with tenderness in a harsh world.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A vibrant foray into “a perfect world of wonders” fueled by the bittersweet dimension of life.
Marianne North (October 24, 1830–August 30, 1890) was twenty-six and had just lost her mother to a long tortuous illness when her father took her to an oasis of wonder in the heart of London — Kew Gardens, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth: a lush affirmation of life bustling with life-forms beyond the wildest imagination. In the majestic half-acre glass-and-iron palm house full of tropical plants, Marianne found a portal to another world. She fell under the spell of the exotic red Amherstia nobilis — “one of the grandest flowers in existence,” which made her “long to see the tropics,” she would recall a lifetime later, having obeyed the siren song of that longing and made of it a revolution.
Amherstia nobilis, Singapore, 1876. (© RBG Kew)Over the next three decades, Marianne North would defy the central conventions of her era — an era in which women were expected to marry, were neither permitted nor practically able to travel alone, had access to no formal education in either art or science, and were excluded from scientific and artistic societies. She would go on to traverse the world, painting the living world she saw. Enduring storms and snakes, typhus and broken bones, unimaginable heat and long stretches without access to clean drinking water, she visited Egypt and South Africa, Borneo and Sicily, India and California, Chile and Australia, immortalizing nearly a thousand plants — plants the vast majority of our species had never seen and would never see with their own eyes, plants new to most botanists, and even some plants never before seen.
Marianne North in South Africa, 1883.Nymphaea stellata, South Africa. (© RBG Kew)She painted unlike any other botanical artist of her time. Rather than isolated specimens rendered in pencil or watercolor, her plants came alive in oil amid the integrated context of their native ecosystems. In an era before photography was a portable instrument of science, the precision of her paintings and their transportive power twined to make for a revolution in both botany and fine art. Enchanted by her work, Francis Galton and Charles Darwin came to see her as a peer and soon became close friends.
Night-flowering lily and ferns, Jamaica. (© RBG Kew)Marianne’s first great creative love was not art but music — she trained to be a vocalist, but when her sonorous contralto voice broke and broke her dreams along with it, she found an alternate portal to beauty in painting, widened with wonder by her passion for plants. Her father, who never remarried, was the great champion and comrade of her calling. At their home in Hastings, he built three small greenhouses and populated them with exotic plants that sang to the young Marianne’s imagination as she tended to them alongside her father. “He was from first to last the one idol and friend of my life,” she would later recall, “and apart from him, I had little pleasure and no secrets.” She vowed never to leave his side.
After her sister married, father and daughter set out to travel Europe and the Middle East together, sharing a lively and generous curiosity in how other cultures live and what other lands are lush with. Taken with this “never-ending series of wonders,” Marianne captured what she saw in delicate and detailed watercolors.
In 1868, a new vista of the imagination burst open when Marianne, almost entirely self-taught, received her first lesson in oil painting from one of Australia’s most esteemed artists. She found it wildly addictive — “a vice, like dram-drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one.” It was also a revelation for botanical art, because oil preserves pigment perfectly, whereas the traditionally used watercolor fades and yellows with time.
Water lily (Nymphaea lotus), India. (© RBG Kew)But only a year after this creative awakening, Marianne was struck by the greatest loss of her life — her father went to sleep and never again awoke. She was overcome by a profound existential loneliness, feeling as though she had been left entirely alone in the world. She would never cease grieving him. “I have no love to give you or anyone — it is all gone with him,” she would tell a suitor years later.
Just like her contemporary Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology while turning his personal tragedy into transcendent art for science, Marianne leaned on the only consolation she knew — nature’s steadfast beauty and the fragile, tenacious wonder of plants. She left Hastings forever and set out to visit all the lands that had enraptured her imagination ever since that long-ago visit to Kew Gardens with her father. She never married — wonder became her primary relationship.
Mount Fujiyama framed by wisteria, Japan. (© RBG Kew)She traveled to America first, determined to capture its “natural abundant luxuriance,” and was awed by the redwoods of California, making an impassioned and prescient plea to save them from destruction. Epochs ahead of the modern environmental movement, a century before Rachel Carson cautioned that “the real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife,” Marianne North sorrowed to see the quarrying and chemicalizing of nature:
It broke one’s heart to think of man, the civiliser, wasting treasures in a few years to which savages and animals had done no harm for centuries.
On Christmas Eve 1871, she arrived in Jamaica — the portal into the tropics of her dreams. She found herself wonder-smitten by the majestic palms — some of Earth’s most ancient tree species, and some of the most otherworldly. She also found herself “alone and friendless.” But everywhere she went, Marianne seemed to attract kindness and sympathy with the sincerity of her pursuit — almost immediately “a young Cuban engineer appeared from the moon or elsewhere,” helped her with her boat, and shepherded her to her next destination, where she was met with more friendliness from strangers. Even so, her days were mostly solitary, but filled with wonder. “I was in a state of ecstasy and hardly knew what to paint first,” she wrote in her diaries, collected in Abundant Beauty: The Adventurous Travels of Marianne North, Botanical Artist (public library).
Cocoa tree (Theobroma Cacao), 1867. (© RBG Kew)For a year, she lived in hut in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest, painting incessantly amid “all these wonders seeming to taunt us mortals for trespassing on fairies’ grounds, and to tell us they were unapproachable.” Assaulted by armies of Earth’s most bloodthirsty ticks, she found them “worth bearing for the sake of the many wonders and enjoyments of the life I was leading in that quiet forest-nook” — a life that was for her “a series of wonders and endless beauties,” to be savored and celebrated in paint.
Old banyan trees, Java. (© RBG Kew)Sacred lotus (Nelumbium speciosum), Java. (© RBG Kew)In Java, she found “a perfect world of wonders.” Her passionate curiosity and amiable humor were always at her side:
The lycopodiums were in great beauty there, particularly those tinted with metallic blue or copper colour; and there were great
metallic arums with leaves two feet long, graceful trees over the streams with scarlet bark all hanging in tatters, and such huge black apes! One of these watched and followed us a long while, seeming to be as curious about us as we were about him. When we stopped he stopped, staring with all his might at us from behind some branch or tree-trunk; but I had the best of that game, for I possessed an opera-glass and he didn’t, so could not probably realise the whole of our white ugliness.
Everywhere she went, she walked for hours into the wilderness, often without companions. “Every day’s ramble showed me fresh wonders,” she wrote in what may be the single best summation of her life, and of any life well lived.
Marianne North by Julia Margaret Cameron.When Marianne finally returned to England after many years of rambles, she wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker — the founding father of geographical botany, Darwin’s closest friend, and the longtime director of Kew Gardens — and offered to donate her paintings, by then numbering several hundred and featuring plants wholly alien to European eyes. Hooker heartily agreed and a dedicated gallery for her work was built at Kew Gardens, which Marianne herself funded and helped design.
With her health failing, Marianne began composing an account of her extraordinary life, entrusting the manuscript to Hooker, by then her oldest friend. It was posthumously published as Recollections of a Happy Life (public library | public domain).
Today, several exotic plant species bear her name — including Nepenthes northiana (the tropical pitcher plant that was her greatest botanical infatuation), Areca northiana (a palm), Crinum northianum (also known as Seashore Lily or Asiatic Poison Lily), Kniphofia northiae (the vibrant red-hot poker beloved by gardeners), and Chassalia northiana (a blue-berried tropical plant only named in 2021) — as well as the entire genus Northia, containing some of Earth’s most ravishing flowering plants and so named by Hooker himself.
To this day, the North Gallery at Kew Gardens remains the only permanent solo exhibition by a woman in Great Britain.
Nepenthes northiana — a pitcher plant native to Borneo. (© RBG Kew)Complement with the stunning botanical paintings of the artist and poet Clarissa Munger Badger, who inspired Emily Dickinson, and this sensuous botanical art inspired by the scandalous scientific poetry of Darwin’s grandfather, which popularized the Linnaean classification system of nature, then savor the wondrous work of North’s marine counterpart — the scientific artist Else Bostelmann, who brought the submarine wonderland to human eyes.
HT Sheril Kirshenbaum
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“Everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.”
There is a peculiar existential loneliness that entombs us whenever we lose our sense of connection to the web of being — the self begins to feel like a twig torn from the tree of life, and something inside us withers with longing. We are left without sanctuary — a word that comes from the Latin sanctorium: a repository for holy things. The word “holy” shares its own Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things. When we lose that sense of connection, that sense of belonging to the sanctorium of life, we are left less whole.
Naturalist and ecological philosopher Lyanda Lynn Haupt offers a remedy for this in Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit (public library) — a lovely lens on “how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth.” She writes:
Rootedness is a way of being in concert with the wilderness — and wildness — that sustains humans and all of life.
[…]
The word rooted’s own root is the Latin radix, the center from which all things germinate and arise. The radix is the radical — the intrinsic, organic, fervent heart of being and action. Rooted lives are radically intertwined with the vitality of the planet. In a time that evokes fear and paralysis, rooted ways of being-within-nature assure us that we are grounded in the natural world. Our bodies, our thoughts, our minds, our spirits are affected by the whole of the earthen community, and affect this whole in return. This is both a mystical sensibility and a scientific fact. It is an awareness that makes us tingle with its responsibility, its beauty, its poetry. It makes our lives our most foundational form of activism. It means everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.
One of artist Margaret C. Cook’s 1913 illustrations for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)For those of us who live with secular rationality and a tenderness for life, that sense of wonder and connection is a kind of spirituality — the fundament of the sacred, in which the everyday holiness of this world comes alive.
Haupt gives shape to the way in which “apprehension of life’s radical interconnection” — whether we call it rootedness, or belonging, or love — reclaims the meaning of “God” for us who don’t abide by religion:
When the fraught name God comes up in conversation or reading, I always remind myself that whatever the source or language used, we are at root on common ground — invoking the graced, unnamable source of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and beyond. I know that prayer is the lifting of our hearts, our thoughts, and even our bodies in conversation, or contemplation, or remembrance, or supplication, or gratitude within this whole, requiring no dogma, only openness. Hildegard counseled, “To be alive is to give praise.”
Complement with poet Diane Ackerman’s wonderful personal religion of “the Earth ecstatic” and the young poet Marissa Davis’s exquisite ode to our primeval bond with nature and each other, then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on science, transcendence, and our spiritual connection to nature.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Great genial power… consists… in being altogether receptive.”
The best things in life we don’t choose — they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination — they happen unto us, like light falling upon that which is lit. We have given a name to these unbidden greatnesses — genius, from the Latin for “spirit,” denoting the spirit of a universe we can only submit to but cannot govern.
A generation after Wordsworth defined the proof of genius as “the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) took up the mystery of genius — where it comes from, how it shapes the lives it befalls, and what it demands of them — in a wonderful essay on another great poet — Shakespeare — found in his indispensable Essays (public library).
Ralph Waldo EmersonIn a resounding answer to the abiding question of whether genius is born or made, Emerson writes:
There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say, “I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:” no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries.
In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo in his own superb meditation on Shakespeare, in which he observed that “the greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people,” Emerson adds:
Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in.
Altarpiece by Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)This recognition that art works with the raw materials of life undermines the cult of originality, which is itself the great hubris of the creative spirit — as Mark Twain wrote to Helen Keller, “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” Stripping true creativity of this fetish for originality, Emerson anticipates Oscar Wilde’s insistence that creativity is the product of “the temperament of receptivity” and observes:
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.
Couple with Schopenhauer on the crucial difference between genius and talent, then revisit Emerson on becoming your most authentic self and the key to living with presence.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore,” Rachel Carson wrote in her stunning meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, “we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”
That mystery comes alive through the lens of the humble, miraculous oyster in the opening pages of Rowan Jacobsen’s altogether wonderful book The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World (public library), modeled on John Steinbeck’s forgotten masterpiece The Log from the Sea of Cortez.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)Jacobsen writes:
When the full moon hauls back the waters, they emerge, a glittering band along the shore, like doubloons washed up from the wreck of a Spanish galleon. They close their shells tight and, for a few hours, become land. Bears slip out of the cedary woods and trundle over them, picking at small fish that lingered too long. From a distance you might think they were glinting rocks, just another cobbly beach, rather than acres of living coastline. But if you stepped out of your boat and explored, old shells popping softly beneath your boots, you’d smell their salt-spray aroma and hear the crackling of receding water droplets and know that they were the living sea itself, holding on to the land to keep it from squirming away. And if you sat down among them and pried open some shells and tipped the briny flesh into your mouth, you might get some sense of how it had always been.
Then the moon lets go and the water returns, snaking along the low points, bubbling up like springs from under the shells. Soon they are covered, and they phase back to their other existence. They open their shells and drink in the sea. The bears withdraw and sixteen-armed purple sea stars pull their way up the tide’s advancing edge, gobbling as they go. Tiny creatures hunker down beneath the shells, within the shells, spinning out little lives in a biogenic world. For a few hours, they disappear beneath the waves. And if you arrived at high water and didn’t take the time to poke around, or if you were from some place where the land and the water have already come unglued and you assumed that the world you knew was the one that had always been, then you’d probably keep on going, and you’d never even know they existed at all.
Complement with the optimism of the oyster, then revisit other enchanting Unphotographables: Henry Williamson on the transcendence of a winter storm, Jack Kerouac on the self-revelation of the windblown world, Richard Powers on the majestic migration of sandhill cranes; Georgia O’Keeffe on the grandeur of Machu Picchu; Iris Murdoch on the sea and the stars; an Alpine transcendence with Mary Shelley; an Alaskan paradise with Rockwell Kent.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Paths run through people as surely as they run through places.”
“All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are,” Pablo Neruda observed in his soulful Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But paths are more than metaphors — they do lead places and, along the way, do reveal us to ourselves in ways inconceivable at the outset, unattainable at home.
That is what the poetic nature writer (and spell-writer, and songwriter) Robert Macfarlane explores in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (public library) — the final book in his trilogy on landscape as a lens on inner life, exploring “the relationship between paths, walking and the imagination” through his experience of walking more than one thousand miles along ancient paths, only to find himself delivered more fully in the present.
Art by Arthur Rackham for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)He writes:
Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own… Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people. Paths are consensual, too, because without common care and common practice they disappear: overgrown by vegetation, ploughed up or built over (though they may persist in the memorious substance of land law). Like sea channels that require regular dredging to stay open, paths need walking.
In consonance with Thomas Bernhard’s observation that “there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking,” he considers an ancient creative relationship:
The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature — a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
Cemetery paths by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward toThis natural narrative undertone to paths has an even deeper effect on the fundaments of the psyche, for in walking we get to reexamine the story of the self as the landscapes we move through mirror us back to ourselves, magnified and transformed. Macfarlane considers the particular rewards of trodden paths which generations have walked as channels of self-discovery:
These are the consequences of the old ways with which I feel easiest: walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape; paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing.
[…]
Paths run through people as surely as they run through places… I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can “enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.”
Complement with the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark’s wonderful prose poem “In Praise of Walking” — which Macfarlane led me to through a fractal branching of the literary path he treads — then revisit Macfarlane’s splendid inquiry into the wonderland beneath our feet.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.”
There is a phenomenon in forests known as inosculation — the fusing together of separate trees into a single organism after their branches or roots have been entwined for a long time. Sometimes, one of the former individuals may be cut or broken at the base, but it remains fully alive through its sinewy fusion with the former other. This is no longer symbiosis between two distinct organisms but a hybrid new organism fully sharing in the resources of life.
Everything alive has the potential for inosculation in one form or another. That, perhaps, is what the great naturalist John Muir meant when he observed that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” To be proper citizens of that universe is to recognize ourselves as particles of it, indelibly linked to every other particle — particles each minuscule but majestic with possibility; it is to recognize that, as Dr. King observed, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
Few have captured the responsibility and power of that mutuality more passionately, nor lived them more fully, than Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928–July 2, 2016).
Elie WieselIn Conversations with Elie Wiesel (public library), the Biblical question Cain poses to God after killing Abel — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — becomes a lens on what makes for brotherhood in the broadest humanistic sense. Wiesel reflects:
We are all our brothers’ keepers… Either we see in each other brothers, or we live in a world of strangers… There are no strangers in a world that becomes smaller and smaller. Today I know right away when something happens, whatever happens, anywhere in the world. So there is no excuse for us not to be involved in these problems. A century ago, by the time the news of a war reached another place, the war was over. Now people die and the pictures of their dying are offered to you and to me while we are having dinner. Since I know, how can I not transform that knowledge into responsibility? So the key word is “responsibility.” That means I must keep my brother.
Whenever we quiet the voices of so-called civilization — the voices of selfing and hard-edged individualism — that sense of the interconnectedness of life and of lives becomes audible. And yet we are habitually deafened to it by a kind of desensitization — the kind the poet May Sarton so poignantly captured as she contemplated how to live with tenderness in a harsh world. Much of it, Wiesel observes, is a form of paralysis that comes from the sheer mismatch between the scale of the problems the world hurls at us and our individual locus of agency — a particular pathology of the information age, further exploited by the news media and their crisis-mongering. Wiesel considers the consequence:
We are careless. Somehow life has been cheapened in our own eyes. The sanctity of life, the sacred dimension of every minute of human existence, is gone. The main problem is that there are so many situations that demand our attention. There are so many tragedies that need our involvement. Where do you begin?
With an eye to a central problem of our time — how to live with wisdom in the age of information — he adds:
We know too much. No, let me correct myself. We are informed about too many things. Whether information is transformed into knowledge is a different story, a different question.
He traces the emotional attrition that happens when we are bombarded with news of crises and traumatic events — at first deeply moved and invested in allaying the suffering we see, we grow exhausted by trauma-sighting and help-canvassing, just as news of the latest calamity or injustice is piling atop the previous one:
You couldn’t take it. There is a need to remember, and it may last only a day or a week at a time. We cannot remember all the time. That would be impossible; we would be numb. If I were to remember all the time, I wouldn’t be able to function. A person who is sensitive, always responding, always listening, always ready to receive someone else’s pain… how can one live?
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)The antidote to this paralysis, Wiesel argues, is small action — a testament to Hannah Arendt’s conviction that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” A century and a half after Van Gogh insisted that “however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth… steps in and does something,” Wiesel insists on choosing from among the innumerable causes soliciting your attention and aid just one in which to get involved — an act seemingly small that, on the cumulative scale of humanity, moves the world.
The greatest challenge facing us all, however, is how to be with each other’s suffering. In consonance with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight that “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence,” Wiesel considers the wellspring of universal love and brotherhood:
I believe in dialogue. I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence. I would like my students to be presence whenever people need a human presence. I urge very little upon my students, but that is one thing I do. To people I love, I wish I could say, “I will suffer in your place.” But I cannot. Nobody can. Nobody should. I can be present, though. And when you suffer, you need a presence.
[…]
If there is a governing precept in my life, it is that: If somebody needs me, I must be there.
Brother’s keeper — inosculation at work. (Photograph: @lily_kdwong.)Couple this fragment of the wholly vitalizing Conversations with Elie Wiesel with Wiesel’s stirring Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, then revisit Nick Cave on the antidote to our existential helplessness and the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale on moral courage and our personal power.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
On the emotional machinery that suspends us between rapture and tears.
“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” It is a wonderful metaphor in part because it dances with the literal: So often, what strums the resonance of our identity most powerfully is music — that most expansive and embodied repository of memory, the memory that strings the narrative of selfhood we call identity.
Music as a fundament of identity and a portal to spiritual homecoming is what Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915–June 5, 1998) explores in a passage from A Walker in the City (public library) — his absolutely wonderful inquiry into loneliness, otherness, and belonging.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)Looking back on his childhood as the son of Russian Jewish refugees, in an era of routine discrimination and othering, he recounts how music filled his home with a sense of belonging, of homecoming, invoking the world his parents had left behind and rooting his own young self in a sense of communion with some greater whole:
You could melt their hearts with it; the effect of the violin on almost everyone I knew was uncanny. I could watch them softening, easing, already on the brink of tears — yet with their hands at rest in their laps, they stared straight ahead at the wall, breathing hard, an unforeseen smile of rapture on their mouths. Any slow movement, if only it were played lingeringly and sagely enough, seemed to come to them as a reminiscence of a reminiscence. It seemed to have something to do with our being Jews. The depths of Jewish memory the violin could throw open apparently had no limit — for every slow movement was based on something “Russian,” every plaintive melody even in Beethoven or Mozart was “Jewish.” I could skip from composer to composer, from theme to theme, without any fear, ever, of being detected, for all slow movements fell into a single chant of der heym and of the great Kol Nidre sung in the first evening hours of the Day of Atonement, in whose long rending cry — of contrition? of grief? of hopeless love for the Creator? — I relived all of the Jews’ bitter intimacy with death.
One of Arthur Rackham’s rare 1917 illustrations for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. (Available as a print.)In a testament to the elemental fact that music is the most spiritual and the most spiritualizing of the arts, the one that most directly touches the mystery of aliveness, he adds:
Then I cranked up the old brown Victor, took our favorite records out of the red velvet pleated compartments, and we listened to John McCormack singing Ave Maria, Amelita Galli-Curci singing Caro Nome… and Alma Gluck singing Comin’ Thro’ the Rye. The high point was Caruso singing from La Juive. He inspired in my father and mother such helpless, intimidated adoration that I came to think of what was always humbly referred to as his golden voice as the invocation of a god. The pleasure he gave us was beyond all music.
Complement with other great writers on the singular power of music, the neurophysiology of how music moves us, and the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe, then join me in reckoning with our shared responsibility in the fate of music in our own time.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being.
Hermann Hesse believed that trees are our greatest spiritual teachers. Walt Whitman cherished them as paragons of authenticity amid a world of mere appearances. Remembering his most beloved friend, he wrote that she was “true, honest; beautiful as a tree is tall, leafy, rich, full, free — is a tree.” I too consider the people I most love my human trees — people firmly rooted in a foundation of moral beauty, relentlessly reaching for the light, bent into their particular beloved shape by the demands and traumas of their particular lives.
Ram DassA century after Whitman, Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) drew on the human-tree analogy in a soulful invitation to treat ourselves — and each other — with the same nonjudgmental spaciousness with which we regard trees. Answering a question about how we can judge ourselves less harshly, he writes:
Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally… When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.
Art by Corinna Luyken from The Tree in MeIn his landmark 1971 book Be Here Now (public library), he leans on trees for a different metaphor in considering the stages of our spiritual development:
When a tree is very small we protect it by surrounding it with a fence so that animals do not step on it. Later when the tree is bigger it no longer needs the fence. Then it can give shelter to many.
Our spiritual growth, Ram Dass observes, follows a similar pattern. The fence is the community of support, sangha in the Buddhist tradition: the kindred spirits with whom we surround ourselves when we are still vulnerable, still finding our rootedness — a lovely reminder of that mycelial connection that binds us to each other, just like the mycorrhizal network undergirds the forest with its web of communication and nutrition.
Complement with Paul Klee on how an artist is like a tree and artist Art Young’s wondrous century-old silhouettes of trees at night as a lens on human experience, then revisit Ram Dass on love.
HT swissmiss
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.”
To be fully awake to life is a matter of ceaselessly digging for that “submerged sunrise of wonder” — a matter of living, in the astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s immortal words, with “a responsibility to awe.” Out of that responsibility arises a kind of quietly rapturous spirituality — a way of moving through the world wonder-smitten by reality.
The great English neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington (November 27, 1857–March 4, 1952), laureate of the 1932 Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking discoveries of the function of neurons, termed this orientation “Natural Religion” and explored its rewards in his 1937 Gifford Lectures, later published as Man on His Nature (public library | public domain) — a book composed in the epoch when every woman was a “man,” yet replete with dazzling universal wisdom on our human experience of being material creatures moving through a cold cosmos as living hearths of consciousness.
Charles Scott SherringtonSherrington’s Natural Religion is rooted in Natural Science — in the living reality of this world, governed by the fundamental laws of the universe. Tracing the astonishing process by which we came to be — primordial matter becoming atoms becoming living cells becoming bodies crowned with minds — he writes:
We dismiss wonder commonly with childhood. Much later, when life’s pace has slackened, wonder may return. The mind then may find so much inviting wonder the whole world becomes wonderful. Then one thing is scarcely more wonderful than is another. But, greatest wonder, our wonder soon lapses. A rainbow every morning who would pause to look at? The wonderful which comes often or is plentifully about us is soon taken for granted. That is practical enough. It allows us to get on with life. But it may stultify if it cannot on occasion be thrown off. To recapture now and then childhood’s wonder, is to secure a driving force for occasional grown-up thoughts.
Double rainbow from Les phénomènes de la physique, 1868. (Available as a print.)Wonder, Sherrington argues, is the appropriate mood with which to approach the workings of our improbable planet and their echo in the workings of the exquisite cathedral of chemistry and chance that is a human being. That is where traditional religions have both thrived and fallen short, emotionally compelling in their humanistic self-reference, yet limiting of wonder, which has to do with what lies beyond ourselves:
Anthropomorphism is perforce charged with the human and the personal, and the great historical religions are frankly anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism with its lien on the personal is always quick with emotion… Commonly the human is the strongest source of emotive appeal to human kind. Human doings, human feelings, human hopes and fears move man as does nothing which is not human. The great religions as part of their anthropomorphism cultivate the Deity as a personal Deity. That for their followers forms an element fraught with emotional drive of power, for some minds, elsewise unattainable… This source of emotional strength Natural Religion is without, for it sublimes personal Deity to Deity wholly impersonal.
Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)With an eye to the “sacred curiosity” that is the hallmark of human consciousness, Sherrington mounts a defense of the emotional dimension of a spirituality grounded in science:
Surely Truth, Beauty, Charity provide passion… Natural Religion has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its values Truth. Its view of the world and of itself is based upon the purview of what by its lights it can accept as true. In that way, for it, much that is comfortable in other religions lapses. If you will, man’s situation is left bleaker. One feature of that situation is that the human mind, such as it is, is left the crown of mind to which human life in all its needs has direct access. Compared with a situation where the human mind beset with its perplexities had higher mind and higher personality than itself to lean on and to seek counsel from, this other situation where it has no appeal and no resort for help to beyond itself, has, we may think, an element of enhanced tragedy and pathos. To set against that, it is a situation which transforms the human spirit’s task, almost beyond recognition, to one of loftier responsibility. It elevates that spirit to the position of protagonist of a virility and dignity which otherwise the human figure could not possess. It raises the lowliest human being conjointly with the highest, Prometheus-like, to a rank of obligation and pathos which neither Moses in his law-giving nor Job in all his suffering could present. We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve, no, not as once was thought, even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.
Complement with quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger, who was inspired by Sherrington, on mind and matter and the great Lewis Thomas on the miraculous in a material world, then revisit Rachel Carson, writing the year Sherrington returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, on the sense of wonder as the antidote to self-destruction.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?”
There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light.
A century ago, Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) extended a timeless invitation to listening for the light in his poem “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower,” translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows in their altogether indispensable book In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (public library).
I read it here accompanied by another patron saint of turning darkness into light — Bach, and his Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, performed by Colin Carr:
LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER
by Rainer Maria RilkeQuiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Complement with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through dark times, Emily Dickinson’s darkness-inspired ode to resilience, and Rebecca Solnit on hope in the dark, then revisit Rilke on the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity, the lonely patience of creative work, and the difficult art of giving space in love.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.”
One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.
It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact, and a life’s triumph to accept it not with bitterness but with love.
How to make that liberating shift of perspective is what the playwright, suffragist, and psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell (September 14, 1883–March 6, 1979) considers in a passage from her 1968 autobiography The Measure of My Days (public library).
Art by Alessandro Sanna from CrescendoShe writes:
A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Kahlil Gibran’s insight into the delicate balance of intimacy and independence essential for romantic love — which is always an echo of our formative attachments — she adds:
It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.
Art by Alessandro Sanna from CrescendoWith a wary eye to the brunt of parental expectation under which all children live, well into adulthood, she writes:
No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.
Perhaps that glimpse is what Maurice Sendak meant when he observed that life is largely a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”
Complement with Kahlil Gibran’s advice on children, the pioneering psychologist Donald Winnicott on the mother’s contribution to society, and Alison Bechdel’s superb Winnicott-inspired Are You My Mother?, then savor My Mother’s Eyes — a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love — and Mary Gaitskill’s poignant advice on how to move through life when your parents are dying.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.”
“Be a good steward of your gifts,” the poet Jane Kenyon urged in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life ever committed to words. Our gifts come unbidden — that is what makes them gifts — but with them also comes a certain responsibility, a duty to live up to and live into our creative potential as human beings. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James Baldwin admonished in his advice on writing. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” That durational willingness to work at our gifts, to steward them with disciplined devotion, is our fundamental responsibility to them — our fundamental responsibility to ourselves.
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) considers what that means and what it takes in a wonderful 1983 interview, included in Black Women Writers at Work (public library).
Maya AngelouShe reflects:
I try to live what I consider a “poetic existence.” That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.
[…]
My responsibility as a writer is to be as good as I can be at my craft. So I study my craft… Learning the craft, understanding what language can do, gaining control of the language, enables one to make people weep, make them laugh, even make them go to war. You can do this by learning how to harness the power of the word. So studying my craft is one of my responsibilities. The other is to be as good a human being as I possibly can be so that once I have achieved control of the language, I don’t force my weaknesses on a public who might then pick them up and abuse themselves.
With an eye to the abiding mystery of our creative gifts, she adds:
I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.
When asked how she fits her art into her life, Angelou responds:
Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. They all feed into the writing. I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with “being an artist.” It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done. The pondering pose — the back of the hand glued against the forehead — is baloney. People spend more time posing than getting the work done. The work is all there is. And when it’s done, then you can laugh, have a pot of beans, stroke some child’s head, or skip down the street.
Complement with Susan Sontag on writing and what it means to be a decent human being and Olga Tokarczuk’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech about storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Maya Angelou on courage and facing evil, identity and the meaning of life, and her cosmic clarion call to humanity.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”
“Music,” the trailblazing composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on the peoples of the world, because they all understand and love it… And when they find themselves enjoying and loving the same music, they find themselves loving one another.” But there is something beyond humanistic ideology in this elemental truth — something woven into the very structure and sensorium of our bodies; as the great neurologist Oliver Sacks observed, “music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
Psychologist Dacher Keltner examines what that unmediated something is and how it pierces us in a portion of his altogether fascinating book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (public library) — a taxonomy of wonder derived from his study of twenty-six cultures around the world, across which music, above all other forms of beauty and spirituality, emerges as the most universal of our creaturely portals into transcendence.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)After observing the virtuoso concert cellist Yumi Kendall respond bodily to the music she plays and cast an embodied enchantment upon those hearing it, Keltner writes:
When Yumi moves her bow across her cello’s strings, or when Beyoncé’s vocal cords vibrate as air moves through them, or when Gambian griot superstar Sona Jobarteh plucks the strings of her kora, those collisions move air particles, producing sound waves — vibrations — that move out into space. Those sound waves hit your eardrums, whose rhythmic vibrations move hairs on the cochlear membrane just on the other side of the eardrum, triggering neurochemical signals beginning in the auditory cortex on the side of your brain.
Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs, and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins.
This neural representation of music, now synced up with essential rhythms of the body, moves through a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which adds layers of memories to the ever-accreting meaning of the sounds. Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible, spatiotemporal journeys that can be awe-inspiring.
And finally, this symphony of neurochemical signals makes its way to our prefrontal cortex, where, via language, we endow this web of sound with personal and cultural meaning. Music allows us to understand the great themes of social living, our identities, the fabric of our communities, and often how our worlds should change.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a symphony. (Available as a print.)With an eye to a suite of studies examining the neurophysiology of awe through the lens of music — how different types of music affect our heart rate and hormones, how different people’s brains synchronize when listening to the same music — he adds:
When we listen to music that moves us, the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain is activated, which opens the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often tear up and get the chills, those embodied signs of merging with others to face mysteries and the unknown… Music breaks down the boundaries between self and other and can unite us in feelings of awe… When we listen to music with others, the great rhythms of our bodies — heartbeat, breathing, hormonal fluctuations, sexual cycles, bodily motion — once separate, merge into a synchronized pattern. We sense that we are part of something larger, a community, a pattern of energy, an idea of the times — or what we might call the sacred.
Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe, Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of algorithms, and some thoughts on music and the price of what we cherish, then revisit the kindred science of “soft fascination” and how nature helps us think.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Reawakening to the rapture and responsibility of “a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.”
In a universe governed by randomness and impartial laws, chance has been kind to us — a kindness so immense it feels like a benediction. Here we are, drifting through the austere blackness of pure spacetime on a planet just the right distance from its home star to have an atmosphere and water and warmth for life. And what life! A cornucopia of creatures moving through lushness beyond measure, born of blue oceans and shimmering shores.
It didn’t have to exist, not one bit of it — not the oceans, not the redwoods, not the octopus, not the miracle of consciousness that turns back on itself to stand wonder-smitten by the majesty of it all. And yet here it is and here we are, children of the flowers, captives of this wonderland, lulled by habit and hubris into dishonoring our benediction by forgetting the staggering improbability of it all.
Richard Powers extends an uncommonly beautiful invitation to unforgetting in his novel Bewilderment (public library) — the story of an astrobiologist father searching for habitable worlds beyond our Solar System and his sensitive son lovesick for Earth.
Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to EarthA generation after the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Cosmic Ball” eulogized the Fermi paradox — the mournful question of where, if all probability points to the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, that other life is — Powers wrests poetry from this great puzzlement of science:
There was a planet that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.
In the novel, another world, Earthlike but further along the evolutionary cycles of the universe, becomes a lens on our own — both on the precariousness of life and on its persistence: life as a force of resistance to entropy. Much like Kepler used the imaginative trope of lunar beings to awaken earthlings to the realities of our own world in the first work of true science fiction, Powers uses the fate of that other world to jolt us awake to the improbable wonder of our own:
The first time Thea died, a comet tore off a third of the planet and turned it into a moon. Nothing on Tedia survived. After tens of millions of years, the atmosphere came back, water flowed again, and life sparked a second time. Cells learned that symbiotic trick of how to combine. Large creatures spread once more into every niche of the planet. Then a distant gamma ray burst dissolved Tedia’s ozone shield and ultraviolet radiation killed most everything. Patches of life survived in the deepest oceans, so this time it was faster coming back. Ingenious forests set out again across the continents. A hundred million years after that, just as a species of cetacean was beginning to make tools and art, a neighborhood star system supernovaed, and Tedia had to start again. The problem was that the planet lay too near the galactic center, packed in too closely to the calamities of other stars. Extinction would never be far away. But there were periods of grace, between the devastations. Forty resets in, the calm lasted long enough for civilization to take hold. Intelligent bear-people built villages and mastered agriculture. They harnessed steam, channeled electricity, learned and built simple machines. But when their archaeologists revealed how often the world ended, and their astronomers figured out why, society broke down and destroyed itself, millennia before the next supernova would have. This, too, happened again and again.
“Planetary System, Eclipse of the Sun, the Moon, the Zodiacal Light, Meteoric Shower” by Levi Walter Yaggy. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)Hinting at this eternal dialogue between nature and human nature, Powers considers the time arrow of the mind, reminding us that curiosity and all the tendrils of human longing exist only for as long as we ourselves exist; lest we forget, life as we know it — as we are it — is but “a flash in the pan, a few moments in the vast unfolding of time and space in the cosmos.” He writes:
Light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second. It takes ninety-three billion years to cross from one end of space to the other, past black holes and pulsars and quasars, neutron and preon and quark stars, metallics and blue stragglers, binaries and triple-star systems, globular and hypercompact clusters, coronal, tidal, and halo galaxies, reflection and plerion nebulae, stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic disks, dark matter and energy, cosmic dust and filaments and voids, all spun from the laws folded up into vibrations far smaller than the smallest units we have names for. The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.
Set a half-tone up the scale of time from the menacing tritone of our present predicament, the novel paints a world for which time has run out in order to awaken a world, this world, teetering on the event horizon of too late. The story ends with that rarest and most beautiful of compositional triumphs — a requiem that is also a clarion call:
Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.
Complement with Richard Powers on how to live with bewilderment, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s almost unbearably wonder-full meditation on our destiny as the fragile species and Rachel Carson on wonder as the antidote to self-destruction.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
How to ferment our natural gifts into nectar for the world.
A founding credo of The Marginalian is what I long ago termed combinatorial creativity — the idea that everything of beauty and substance we contribute to the world is composed of myriad influences and inspirations acquired in the course of being alive and awake to ideas, unconsciously composited into something new. Rilke understood this when he considered what it takes to create, and Einstein understood it when he placed “combinatory play” at the center of his way of thinking.
Millennia before me and you and Rilke and Einstein, the great Stoic philosopher Seneca captured this spirit of combinatorial creativity in Letter 84 from his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later collected as the indispensable Letters from a Stoic (public library).
Still from Bloom.Long before we understood the role of pollinators in the creation of life on Earth, Seneca writes:
We should follow… the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in… The materials which the bees have culled from the most delicate of blooming and flowering plants is transformed into this peculiar substance by a process of preserving and careful storing away, aided by what might be called fermentation, — whereby separate elements are united into one substance.
Two thousand years before Audre Lorde drew human wisdom from the way of the bee, Seneca adds:
We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, — in other words, our natural gifts, — we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.
Complement with David Bowie on creativity, Virginia Woolf on the courage to create rather than cater, and the fascinating science of how time in nature magnifies our creative ability, then revisit Seneca on gratitude, the antidote to anxiety, and the key to resilience in the face of loss.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe.”
We hope, we despair, and then we hope again — that is how we stay afloat in the cosmos of uncertainty that is any given life. Just as the universe exists because, by some accident of chance we are yet to fathom, there is more matter than antimatter in it, we exist — and go on existing — because there is more hope than despair in us. “Hope,” the great Czech dissident playwright turned president Václav Havel wrote, “is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” Hope, I have long believed, is the antidote to cynicism — that most cowardly and self-defeating of existential orientations. Hope, Rebecca Solnit reminds us, “is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” For it is a power indeed — the power to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from even the darkest and most dispiriting of circumstances, so that we may go on reaching for the light. In this capacity, hope might be our greatest evolutionary adaptation — the mitochondria of our spiritual metabolism, the opposable thumb of our grip on life.
That function of hope is what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) explores from an uncommonly illuminating perspective in a portion of The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) — his forgotten masterpiece about how to think, wrested from a marine biology expedition into the Gulf of California at the outbreak of a World War.
John SteinbeckSteinbeck weighs what we are against the living reality — the living brutality — of other species, considering hope as our adaptive calibration of what is most brutal in our own nature. Writing two years before his humanistic reckoning with hope and despair, he reflects:
We have looked into the tide pools and seen the little animals feeding and reproducing and killing for food. We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, “This species typically does thus and so,” but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species, although we know the individuals fairly well. When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, “It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined.” Hope, which is another species diagnostic trait — the hope that this may not always be — does not in the least change the observable past and present. When two crayfish meet, they usually fight. One would say that perhaps they might not at a future time, but without some mutation it is not likely that they will lose this trait. And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one place the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way. We have what we are. Perhaps the crayfish feels the itch of jealousy, or perhaps he is sexually insecure. The effect is that he fights. When in the world there shall come twenty, thirty, fifty years without evidence of our murder trait, under whatever system of justice or economic security, then we may have a contrasting habit pattern to examine. So far there is no such situation. So far the murder trait of our species is as regular and observable as our various sexual habits.
Common crayfish from The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, 1895. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)The Log from the Sea of Cortez is very much an admonition against the traps of teleological thinking — the antiscientific tendency to explain things by some purpose they serve, usually in relation to us, as opposed to meeting reality on its own terms and accepting that things are because they are. With an eye to “how the strictures of the old teleologies infect our observation,” keeping us from seeing reality clearly and seducing us with “causal thinking warped by hope,” Steinbeck builds on this idea of hope as a diagnostic trait for our species:
Hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live… In saying that hope cushions the shock of experience, that one trait balances the directionalism of another, a teleology is implied, unless one know or feel or think that we are* here, and that without this balance, hope, our species in its blind mutation might have joined many, many others in extinction.
Art Giuliano Cucco by from Before I Grew UpBut this shock-absorber of survival serves another, far subtler purpose as an emblem of our incompleteness, reminding us, as James Baldwin knew, that “nothing is fixed”; reminding us, as Lewis Thomas knew, that we are a fragile species still in its adolescence. Steinbeck considers hope as our valve of becoming:
We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time… In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the trait of hope still controls the future… Man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps… his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming.
Complement this fragment of The Log from the Sea of Cortez — which was among the finest things I read all year — with Jane Goodall on the deepest wellspring of hope and some thoughts on hope and the remedy for despair from Nick Cave and Gabriel Marcel, then revisit Steinbeck on the art of seeing the pattern beyond the particular and his timeless advice on love.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys.”
This world is radiant with beauty. This world is also capable of bone-chilling brutality and the small, corrosive daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow. For a sensitive person to live with the duality, to keep the light aflame without turning away from the darkness that needs illumination, may be the most difficult thing in life — and the most rewarding.
What it takes, and how it rewards us, is what the great poet and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores in a journal entry from her altogether dazzling 1977 book The House by the Sea (public library).
May SartonWith an eye to the daily reality of teenagers killing with firearms — a reality that, in the decades since, has been magnified from interpersonal violence to mass shootings — she considers the long roots of desensitization, fanged into the body of the world with every war:
What have we done to our children that such indifference is possible? A total disconnection between the act and the human terror and despair involved?
In a passage of stunning prescience and relevance to our own epoch, she answers:
We are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere, and where the so-called civilized peoples must go on eating candy and drinking whiskey while millions die of hunger. So one has to extrapolate the morally indifferent boys to the whole ethos in which they live. And at the root of it all is the lack of imagination. If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?
Art by Olivier Tallec from What If… — a child’s vision for a better world.Sarton offers a cure for this deadly indifference — a cure that honeys this twenty-first-century soul with its poignancy and its potency:
I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything — ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to “hold onto.” It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates. How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence — nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years.
Complement this fragment of the wholly ravishing The House by the Sea with Sarton on the cure for despair, then revisit Walt Whitman, writing shortly after his paralytic stroke, on what makes life worth living and Mary Oliver on the measure of a life well lived.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life.
We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both. Forged of the dust of dying stars, we move through a universe of impartial laws with our dreams and desires, passionate pawns in the hands of grand-master chance, daily watching the world spin counter to our wishes, daily watching ourselves bend against our own will.
How, against the backdrop of this cosmic helplessness, can we muster the sense of agency necessary for conducting our human lives, much less fill them with the majesty of meaning?
That is what Nick Cave addresses in answering a fan’s lament about the devastating feeling of existential helplessness and impotence.
Nick Cave in Newcastle, 2022.Unpacking the central creative image one of his songs, he writes:
The everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous — [remember] that ultimately we make things happen through our actions, way beyond our understanding or intention; that our seemingly small ordinary human acts have untold consequences; that what we do in this world means something; that we are not nothing; and that our most quotidian human actions by their nature burst the seams of our intent and spill meaningfully and radically through time and space, changing everything… Our deeds, no matter how insignificant they may feel, are replete with meaning, and of vast consequence, and… they constantly impact upon the unfolding story of the world, whether we know it or not.
Turning directly to the man who had lost the sense of personal significance and power, he adds:
Rather than feel impotent and useless, you must come to terms with the fact that as a human being you are infinitely powerful, and take responsibility for this tremendous power. Even our smallest actions have potential for great change, positively or negatively, and the way in which we all conduct ourselves within the world means something. You are anything but impotent, you are, in fact, exquisitely and frighteningly dynamic, as are we all, and with all respect you have an obligation to stand up and take responsibility for that potential. It is your most ordinary and urgent duty.
One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)In Faith, Hope and Carnage — one of my favorite books of 2022 — Cave illustrates this potency of the subtle acts with one such “small but monumental gesture” extended by a near-stranger with seemingly very small locus of power in the world, yet one who made an immense difference in his life in the wake of grieving his son:
There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange, because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money… As she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully.
It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me… because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe. She wished the best for me, in that moment. There was something truly moving to me about that simple, wordless act of compassion… I’ll never forget that. In difficult times I often go back to that feeling she gave me. Human beings are remarkable, really. Such nuanced, subtle creatures.
Complement with E.B. White’s wonderful answer to a man who had lost faith in humanity, Erich Fromm’s antidote to helplessness and disorientation, and Adrienne Rich’s magnificent poem “Power,” then revisit Nick Cave on creative work as living amends, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the real meaning and muscle of hope.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In praise of the “voiceless, soulless messenger” that comforts and sustains.
Everything we wish for, everything we plan for, is but a house of cards to be blown into oblivion by the slightest gust of chance. Somehow, we must live with this knowledge, stacking our days one over the other along the edge of life’s inherent uncertainty. In those moments when this elemental precariousness is exposed — by a global pandemic, by a personal loss, by a brush with some narrowly evaded inevitability — we seek grounds of stability in forces larger than us, none more assuring than the unassailable cycle of the season.
Emily Brontë, age 15This is a lesson Emily Brontë (July 30, 1818–December 19, 1848) learned over and over again in her short life, wresting from her learning works of abiding beauty.
She was only nineteen when her beloved younger sister Anne fell gravely ill one icy December. Circling the event horizon of loss, Emily channeled her anticipatory grief and anxiety into a poem about the elemental consolation of the seasons, composed a decade before Wuthering Heights, yet already radiating the sweep of her genius.
In a December installment of her Substack, Patti Smith brings the poem to life with the lovely patina of her voice:
TO A WREATH OF SNOW
by Emily BrontëO transient voyager of heaven!
O silent sign of winter skies!
What adverse wind thy sail has driven
To dungeons where a prisoner lies?Methinks the hands that shut the sun
So sternly from this mourning brow
Might still their rebel task have done
And checked a thing so frail as thou.They would have done it had they known
The talisman that dwelt in thee,
For all the suns that ever shone
Have never been so kind to me!For many a week, and many a day
My heart was weighed with sinking gloom
When morning rose in mourning grey
And faintly lit my prison room.But angel like, when I awoke,
Thy silvery form so soft and fair
Shining through darkness, sweetly spoke
Of cloudy skies and mountains bare;The dearest to a mountaineer
Who, all life long has loved the snow
That crowned her native summits drear,
Better, than greenest plains below.And voiceless, soulless messenger
Thy presence waked a thrilling tone
That comforts me while thou art here
And will sustain when thou art gone.
Complement with Patti Smith reading Emily Dickinson and her animated reading of Rebecca Elson’s ode to dark matter, then revisit her reflections on the difference between writing poetry and songwriting.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.”
A decade ago, several years after I started writing The Marginalian (under the outgrown name Brain Pickings, in my twenties, while working four jobs), a musician friend gave me a book she said captured the animating spirit of my labor of love: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) by the poet Lewis Hyde, published a year before I was born.
Like a generation of creative people, I devoured it with a rare and rapturous sense of being seen in the elemental strata of my being. Here was shimmering affirmation that creative work gives something which cannot be quantified or commodified, and those whose lives it touches can give back to its makers in a way that is not a transaction but a bow of mutual appreciation, mutual respect, mutual cherishment. At the center of Hyde’s premise is that idea that creative works exist simultaneously in a market economy and a gift economy. “Only one of these,” Hyde writes, “is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.”
I found myself thinking about The Gift anew recently in the context of music and the abyssal disconnect between how much we value it in our lives and how much it has been devalued by the market economy we inhabit.
Music by Maria Popova. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)“Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche declared. But set his characteristic drama aside and ask people across ages and cultures what art-form most helps them live their lives, and they will overwhelmingly point to music. It is, quite literally, the soundtrack to our lives — to our fallings in love, to our seasons of grief, to our workouts and our commutes and our parties and our most private moments. It is the sacrament we reach for when we want to feel what we feel more deeply, the daily pulsebeat that helps us move through even our most challenging days with more composure and resilience. It is the sunshine of the spirit. “This indeed is music,” Whitman exulted. “[It] whirls me wider than Uranus flies, it wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them.” Music, the most abstract of the arts, is the most concrete in how it unlocks us to ourselves, how it “opens a path into the realm of silence.”
Music is also something people make — living people, who put a foot on the floor each morning and set about making day: food and love and laundry. People who have a gift, in both senses of the word, and give if freely because making music is a lifeline for them — a fundament of who they are and why they live.
We know this. We feel it the moment we pause to reflect on the inner life of creative labor. And yet we have been complicit in allowing Silicon Valley — that handmaiden of late-stage capitalism — to make of this elemental sacrament a market commodity of lesser value than a latte, so that the artists who make it are the least rewarded creative laborers of our time.
Revisiting The Gift, I was delighted to discover a new foreword by Margaret Atwood, in which she shines a sobering gleam on this astonishing asymmetry between value and worth, inviting us to reconsider it.
Margaret AtwoodObserving that “gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot,” she writes:
Gifts create bonds and obligations, and not everyone wants these or understands them… If you’ve got something out of it, as we say — if you’ve treated it as a gift, which by its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, being priceless — what do you owe its creator, who has been the instrument through which it has arrived in your hands? Your gratitude, via a word of thanks? Your serious attention? The price of a latte deposited in a beggar’s bowl e-tip jar?
The answer is never “nothing.”
So, today, this day, think of a musician or two whose music you cherish, whose gift has touched your life and helps you live it. Find their website. Find their BandCamp. Find the “donate” button on their Spotify. And give back not-nothing. It might help them put food on the table. It will help them feel the radiance we all live for — the sense that we matter, that we belong in the great scheme of beauty and understanding. It sill help you feel like something more than the consumer, the “user,” to which Silicon Valley has endeavored to reduce us.
Without the gift of music, life would be sub-life.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We usually define ourselves by what we do… There’s a big trip with all of that.”
We are makers of our own myths, but the more we live into them, the more we risk becoming their captives. All creativity rests upon unbelieving our own myths — seeing the world and our place in it afresh over and over, so that we may go on making what has not been made before, remaking ourselves in the process. Burnout is simply what a creative person experiences when they have begun believing their own myth too much. E.E. Cummings hinted at this in his exquisite observation that “the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.” Because the work of self-knowledge is never-ending, to trap ourselves into a static myth of who we are and what we do is to doom ourselves to creative death.
Herbie Hancock was thirty-two and just beginning to inhabit his powers, just beginning to make his myth, when he discovered Nichiren Buddhism — a spiritual tradition based on the teachings of the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist priest Nichiren. For decades to come, he would practice daily and devotedly. His Buddhist practice, he tells interviewer Paul Zollo in More Songwriters on Songwriting (public library), became his antidote to burnout — it gave him an ever-unfolding “new vision” for himself and the winking assurance that “seventy is the new forty.”
Herbie Hancock, 1976Hancock reflects:
I’m really fortunate I was able to discover Buddhism. It helped me develop a clearer idea of my relationship with the environment. My personal relationship with everything that’s outside of my personal self. Which includes the people and circumstances that manifest themselves externally. Buddhism really helps you to understand what that is. And in doing so, you have a much better chance. If you recognize something, you stand a fighting chance of dealing with it in a more positive way. It’s when something blindsides you and you don’t see it coming, then you can be knocked over and defeated. So I continue to chant. That is where I went this morning. I went and chanted for an hour at a center that’s near here. In Buddhism we practice and we chant every day.
But the gift of his practice is something more than resilience — something closer to continual regeneration, made possible by the fundamental Buddhist attitude of non-attachment and non-identification with the self. Hancock observes:
We usually define ourselves by what we do: I’m a writer. Or I’m a doctor. Or I’m a dancer. Whatever it is. Or I do construction. That’s usually how we define ourselves. There’s a big trip with all of that.
[…]
Buddhism really promotes the truth and the fact that the human being really has limitless possibilities. And that the core of what we are is not that thing that we normally define ourselves as. The core of what we are is a human being. And when we define ourselves as a human being, it changes everything. So music now, I look at it from the standpoint of being a human being and use that as the foundation. And then I use what I do to translate what initiates from my humanity into musical terms. That’s why I’m able to make every record be different from every other record.
Complement this fragment of More Songwriters on Songwriting — which also gave us Patti Smith on listening to the creative impulse — with John Lennon on the value of meditation and Bob Dylan’s favorite rabbi teaching, then revisit John Coltrane on perseverance against rejection and David Bowie’s advice to artists.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Living beings defy neat definition… We abide in a symbiotic world.”
It bears remembering that we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The puzzlement is so immense precisely because the boundary between us and not-us is profoundly permeable — we become ourselves through communion and conviviality with what is not us. This is as true existentially as it is evolutionarily, for symbiosis — not competition — is the mightiest propulsive force of evolution.
To this truth the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938–November 22, 2011) devoted her life, crystalized in her influential Gaia hypothesis — the notion that organisms interact with their environment to make of Earth a synergistic, self-regulating crucible of life.
Lynn MargulisIn her book Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (public library), Margulis — who understood uniquely the spirituality of science — writes:
Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings together different life-forms, always for a reason. Often, hunger unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal victim. Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are even more unlike than their unlikely “parents.” “Individuals” permanently merge and regulate their reproduction. They generate new populations that become multiunit symbiotic new individuals. These become “new individuals” at larger, more inclusive levels of integration. Symbiosis is not a marginal or rare phenomenon. It is natural and common. We abide in a symbiotic world.
Properly understood, the biology of symbiosis undermines our most tightly held intuitions about the nature of the self as a distinct entity separate from other selves — an illusory separation dissolved in the biological reality of all living beings, but rendered most clearly visible in some of the simplest. A generation after Lewis Thomas wrote so lyrically about the symbiotic life of a jellyfish and a sea slug — which remains the finest thing I have ever read on the paradoxes and mysteries of the self — Margulis details another living antidote to what Pablo Neruda rightly indicted as our illusion of separateness:
In Brittany, on the northwest coast of France, and along beaches bordering the English Channel is found a strange sort of “seaweed” that is not seaweed at all. From a distance it is a bright green patch on the sand. The patches slosh around, shimmering in shallow puddles. When you pick up the green water and let it slip through your fingers you notice gooey ribbons much like seaweed. A small hand lens or low-power microscope reveals that what looked like seaweed are really green worms. These masses of sunbathing green worms, unlike any seaweed, burrow into the sand and effectively disappear. They were first described in the 1920s by an Englishman, J. Keeble, who spent his summers at Roscoff. Keeble called them “plant-animals” and diagrammed them splendidly in the color frontispiece of his book, Plant-Animals. The flatworms of the species Convoluta roscoffensis are all green because their tissues are packed with Platymonas cells; as the worms are translucent, the green color of Platymonas, photosynthesizing algae, shows through. Although lovely, the green algae are not merely decorative: they live and grow, die and reproduce, inside the bodies of the worms. Indeed they produce the food that the worms “eat.” The mouths of the worms become superfluous and do not function after the worm larvae hatch. Sunlight reaches the algae inside their mobile greenhouses and allows them to grow and feed themselves as they leak photosynthetic products and feed their hosts from the inside. The symbiotic algae even do the worm a waste management favor: they recycle the worm’s uric acid waste into nutrients for themselves. Algae and worm make a miniature ecosystem swimming in the sun. Indeed, these two beings are so intimate that it is difficult, without very high-power microscopy, to say where the animal ends and the algae begin.
Art from Margaret Gatty’s Victorian guide to British algaeThe living world, Margulis observes, is rife with such symbiotic bonds that challenge the notion of where one self ends and another begins. There is the Plachobranchus snail, inside which is an inner garden of green symbionts so perfectly arranged in neat rows that they appear planted by an invisible hand; there is the Mastigias jellyfish with its tiny green umbrellas animated by single-celled zooxanthellae; there is the giant clam, Tridacna gigas, which orients ints entire colossal body toward the light for the benefit of the greenhouse of algae living inside it.
Then there are, of course, we — we who contain multitudes, our microbiome living as a portable universe within us. “Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence,” Emerson inveighed. “I wish… to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.” But the patron saint of self-reliance was tragically antiscientific in his philosophy — in the living world, individuals as such simply don’t exist. There are only masses, some of whom move about with the illusion of individuality. Margulis writes:
We animals, all thirty million species of us, emanate from the microcosm. The microbial world, the source and well-spring of soil and air, informs our own survival. A major theme of the microbial drama is the emergence of individuality from the community interactions of once-independent actors.
One of the otherworldly drawings of jellyfish by Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology. (Available as a print.)With an eye to our evolutionary future, itself a vista of tremendous humility, she adds:
The tendency of “independent” life is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. I suspect that the near future of Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation toward the fusions and mergers of the planetmates that have preceded us in the microcosm.
Complement with Iris Murdoch on how art unselves us and Helen Macdonald on the total solar eclipse as an instrument of unselfing, then revisit Margulis on the interconnectedness of life across time, space, and species.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“To possess the key is to lose it.”
When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.
This is a difficult notion for the Western mind to grasp — too easy to mistake for the psychopathology of codependence, too quick to slip into the tyrannical Romantic ideal of merging.
At its heart is something else altogether: a kind of transcendent ego-dissolution under which the self ceases to be and becomes Being.
That is what Ram Dass (April 6, 1931–December 22, 2019) explores in his landmark 1971 book Be Here Now (public library), largely responsible for introducing ancient Eastern teachings to the modern West.
Ram DassHe considers the paradox of our ordinary experience of loving:
When we speak of falling in love, we might find that a slight restatement of the experience would help clarify our direction. For when you say “I fell in love” with him or her you are saying that he or she was the key that unlocked your heart — the place within yourself where you are love. When the experience is mutual, you can see that the psychic chemistry of the situation allows both partners to “fall in love” or to “awake into love” or to “come into the Spirit.” Since love is a state of being — and the Divine state at that — the state to which we all yearn to return, we wish to possess love. At best we can try to possess the key to our hearts — our beloved — but sooner or later we find that even that is impossible. To possess the key is to lose it.
A remedy for this paradox comes from a central concept in bhakti yoga: the non-dualistic merging of lover and beloved into a single totality of being, a great universal One — a notion best articulated by the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba (February 25, 1894–January 31, 1969), whom Ram Dass quotes:
Love has to spring spontaneously from within: and it is in no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together: but though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened in him through love itself. Love is essentially self-communicative: Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True love is unconquerable and irresistible; and it goes on gathering power and spreading itself, until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.
Complement with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s abiding wisdom on how to love, then, for a Western counterpart, revisit the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on our greatest obstacle to love.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.”
When you walk, you move more than the body — you move the mind, the spirit, the entire system of being. As you traverse spatial distance, you gain vital spiritual distance with which to see afresh the problems that haunt your day, your work, your life. Ideas collide and connect in ways they never would have on the static plane. Pains are left behind in the forward motion. Doubts fall away by the footfall. I do my best writing on foot — the rest, what happens at the desk, is mere transcription. Nietzsche saw the link between walking and creativity. “There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking,” wrote Thomas Bernhard, “just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking.” A passionate walker herself, Rebecca Solnit has defined the act as “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.”
But no writer has composed a more succinct and symphonic manifesto for walking than the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark in his 1988 chapbook In Praise of Walking (public library).
One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.Clark writes:
Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least
possible baggage, and discover the world.It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property,
triviality, to simply walk away.That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations,
so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.
But while walking is a hallmark of our creaturely inheritance — we are, after all, “the small bipeds with the giant dreams” — it is something more than our primary means of getting about. We bring a different quality of being to the different ways in which we change our position in spacetime by our own propulsion. Clark makes a vital distinction:
A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed,
while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along
the way.There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.
Walking is a mobile form of waiting.
What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance
than what I discover along the way.
Art by Paloma Valdivia for Pablo Neruda: Book of QuestionsIn a fragment that calls to mind the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s life-tested wisdom on the ideal walking companion, Clark observes:
In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our
companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
Hinting at Kahlil Gibran’s admnoition that “in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered [for] thought is a bird of space,” Clark captures something the introverted among us can attest to in the marrow of our being:
When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it
walking I am pleasantly tired.
Echoing Thoreau — that eternal patron saint walking, even in the harshest weather — Clark considers walking as a kind of sacrament to the self irrespective of any outside circumstance or condition:
Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of
ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences
are registered clearly.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)In a verse that calls to mind the ancient art of walking meditation, Clark offers a qualitative calibration to preserve the purity of walking:
We lose the flavour of walking if it becomes too rare or too
extraordinary, if it turns into an expedition; rather it should be
quite ordinary, unexceptional, just what we do.
In consonance with Rebecca Solnit’s insistence that “never to get lost is not to live,” he adds:
To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.
[…]
Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute
to the dislocation of a persistent self-interest.[…]
There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to
myself again.
Couple with Lauren Elkins’s splendid manifesto for why we walk, then let Thoreau awaken you to the brute rewards of winter walks.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.”
It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy (which assumes knowledge of another’s experience), some of the most magical things in life come abloom. Those are the places we grow, and grow into — the openings that are our portals to the possible.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) shines a sidewise gleam on those places in a passage tucked into her superb century-old meditation on illness as a portal to self-understanding.
Virginia WoolfChallenging the dangerous allure of being perfectly understood and held in perfect sympathy — by others, or by ourselves — she writes:
That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you — is all an illusion.
In a sentiment the poet May Sarton — who was half in love with Woolf — would echo in her abiding insistence on solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery, Woolf adds:
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
Complement with James Baldwin on love, freedom, and the illusion of choice, then revisit Woolf on the remedy for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the consolations of growing older, and her epiphany about the meaning of creativity.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
In praise of “the poetry of silence and darkness,” from which life emerges “fresher, fairer, sweeter for its long winter rest.”
Bleak and barren, winter is the season when nature is silently preparing to burst forth in spring — the grand incubator of life. Rilke saw a human equivalence when he celebrated winter as the time for tending to your inner garden. His contemporary Dallas Lore Sharp (December 13, 1870–November 29, 1929) — a former clergyman, whom the great John Burroughs lauded as America’s greatest nature writer — captured this delicate dialogue between nature and human nature in his 1912 book Winter (public library | public domain) — a lyrical effort “to catch the spirit of the season… the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter,” to channel “the bitter boreal might… that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us.”
Dallas Lore Sharp near the summit of Mt. Hood, 1912.Sharp serenades the season within and the season without:
Winter within us means vitality and purpose and throbbing life; and without us in our fields and woods it means widened prospect, the storm of battle, the holiness of peace, the poetry of silence and darkness and emptiness and death.
And yet this deadness is illusory, concealing the profound resilience of wintering nature. Sharp counters the surface impression:
The winter world is not dead… The cold is powerless to destroy… Life flees and hides and sleeps, only to waken again, forever stronger than death — fresher, fairer, sweeter for its long winter rest.
In what can best be described as a prose poem, he exults in the life-force behind the stillness:
I love the winter, and so do all children — its bare fields, empty woods, flattened meadows, its ranging landscapes, its stirless silences, its tumult of storms, its crystal nights with stars new cut in the glittering sky, its challenge, defiance, and mighty wrath. I love its wild life — its birds and animals; the shifts they make to conquer death. And then, out of this winter watching, I love the gentleness that comes, the sympathy, the understanding! One gets very close to the heart of Nature through such understanding.
With an eye to an empty robin’s nest, he adds:
Laughter and tears are companions. Life begins, but death sometimes ends the trail. Yet the sum of life, outdoors and in, is peace, gladness, and fulfillment.
Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward ToWinter, Sharp argues, is training ground for attention and the art of noticing. Decades before the great nature writer Henry Beston reverenced the sacredness of smallness and a century before the bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer composed her love letter to the splendors of the small scale, he writes:
Winter, when the leaves are off, the ground bare, the birds and flowers gone, and all is reduced to singleness and simplicity — winter is the time to observe the shapes, colors, varieties, and growth of the lichens.
But no small wonder of winter is worthier of attentive reverence than snowflakes — a generation after Wilson Bentley first photographed them under his microscope, Sharp beckons us to find a microscope of our own and marvel at their fractal beauty, each snowflake seemingly “shaped by an infinitely accurate hand according to a pattern that seems the perfection, the very poetry, of mechanical drawing.”
Fragment of Wilson Bentley’s pioneering photomicroscopy of snow crystalsAbove all, winter is the season for looking twice — for seeing the second layer of nature, the beauty beyond the bleakness. In a sentiment crowned with a quote from the unsurpassable John Burroughs, Sharp writes:
See the winter bleak and cheerless as at times you will, and as at times you ought; still if you will look twice, and think as you look, you will see… the bare empty woodland fresh budded to the tip of each tiny twig — life all over the trees thrust forward to catch the touch of spring! You will see the wide flinty fields thick sown with seeds — life, more life than the sun and the soil can feed, sleeping there under “the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow”!
From winter’s harshest guise, Sharp wrests a tempest of soul-slaking beauty:
The sorrows of winter are its storms. They are its greatest glories also. One should no more miss the sight of the winter storms than he should miss the sight of the winter birds and stars, the winter suns and moons! A storm in summer is only an incident; in winter it is an event, a part of the main design. Nature gives herself over by the month to the planning and bringing off of the winter storms — vast arctic shows, the dreams of her wildest moods, the work of her mightiest minions. Do not miss the soft feathery fall that plumes the trees and that roofs the sheds with Carrara marble; the howling blizzard with its fine cutting blast that whirls into smoking crests; the ice-storm that comes as slow, soft rain to freeze as it falls, turning all the world to crystal: these are some of the miracles of winter that you must not fail to see.
Couple with Adam Gopnik’s modern love letter to winter, then take a winter walk with Thoreau.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A furry celebration of the dazzling variousness of this world.
In 1835, three years after the death of Georges Cuvier — the influential French naturalist and zoologist regarded as the founding father of paleontology — a lavish Scottish volume set out to celebrate his legacy: The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier. The 572 pages of its first volume were crowned with four dozen consummately illustrated plates of animals in their natural habitat, totaling more than 300 species, arranged in groups resembling autistic savant Gregory Blackstock’s astonishing visual lists.
Among the most marvelous are those of tree-dwelling mammals: a wild variety of monkeys and other primates, more squirrel types than one could imagine existed, a panoply of other small rodents, a fleet of bats, and even wondrous creatures like flying lemurs.
Radiating from them all is a living reminder of the dazzling variousness of this world, populated by beings so humanlike yet so very unlike us, and so very unlike one another, yet caught in the same single web of interbeing.
Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Complement with some marvelous antique natural history illustrations of lizards, owls, beetles, mollusks, and psychedelic fishes.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Lives don’t work the way most books do… Lives are funny and sad, scary and comforting, beautiful and ugly, but not when they’re supposed to be, and sometimes all at the same time.”
Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910–November 13, 1952) lived her life on her own terms and died, far too young, kicking her leg up can-can style out of a hospital bed, leaving behind Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny and a hundred — hundred! — more beloved children’s books and some devastatingly beautiful poems. She was unapologetically strange: She swam naked in the cold ocean, put a door in her house that opened out into a plunging cliff, and bought all of a flower vendor’s bouquets when she received her first paycheck for a book. Even the love of her life was named Michael Strange. (Her real name was Blanche Oelrichs.) Out of that strangeness she made wondrous, unexampled books that enchanted children with their playful poetics and their largehearted candor. In her will, she decreed that an epitaph be etched onto her granite tombstone: “Margaret Wise Brown. Writer of Songs and Nonsense.” Beneath it, the following inscription was added by those who loved her:
Dear Margaret,
You gave us all so much —
A chance to love
A place to rest
A window into living.
A splendid window into her world opens up in The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown (public library) by writer Mac Barnett and artist Sarah Jacoby, playfully titled after Brown’s essentialist masterpiece The Important Book.
With his simply worded richness of sentiment, Barnett promises on the opening page:
Margaret Wise Brown lived for 42 years.
This book is 42 pages long.
You can’t fit somebody’s life into 42 pages,
so I am just going to tell you some important things.
Somehow, these few “important things” end up distilling the essence of Brown’s spirit. Emanating from them all is a larger love letter to the life of books rendered through the lives of those who make them:
It can be odd to imagine the lives of the people who write the books you read,
like running into your teacher at the supermarket.
But authors are people.
They are born and they die.
They fall in love and they fall in love again.
They go to the supermarket to buy tomatoes,
which they keep in the bottom drawers of their refrigerators,
even though tomatoes should stay out on the counter.
But which of these things is important? And to whom?
Often, the seemingly unimportant things — the mundane choices, the quirks, the daily circumstance of being — end up becoming the building blocks of character and creativity. We learn, for instance, of the pets Margaret Wise Brown kept as a little girl living in a house by the woods: a dog, two squirrels, seven fish, a pair of guinea pigs, a wild robin, and thirty-six rabbits — rabbits that inspired the central characters in some of her most beloved books. Even Michael Strange’s nickname for her was “Bunny-no-good.”
In one of the vignettes that string together the story of her life, Barnett writes:
This is a story about a rabbit.
Margaret’s rabbits lived in a great big hutch.
At first there were a few,
and then there were many.
That’s how it is with rabbits.
They are born,
and they die,
and when one of Margaret’s rabbits died,
she skinned the rabbit
and wore its pelt.
Margaret wrapped herself in that rabbit’s fur
and paraded before her brother and sisters
(and the other rabbits as well).
In consonance with Brown’s contemporary E.B. White’s insistence that “anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time [because] you have to write up, not down,” Barnett adds:
There are people who will say a story like this
doesn’t belong in a children’s book.
But it happened.
Margaret Wise Brown took up a rabbit
and took off its pelt,
and she did it when she was a child.
And isn’t it important that children’s books
contain the things children think of
and the things children do,
even if those things seem strange?
In Jacoby’s almost unbearably tender illustrations, we see Brown swim joyously in the icy waters of her beloved Maine and romp with her beloved dog Crispin’s Crispian and write story after story and persevere as a single powerful librarian launches a censorship crusade against her books, leaving her out — quite literally — on the steps of the New York Public Library toasting tea with her editor, the indomitable Ursula Nordstrom (who once composed the single finest response to censorship I have ever encountered when another one of her authors, the young Maurice Sendak, came under fire).
Barnett handles Brown’s tragic death with touching candor and sensitivity, emanating a larger meditation on the nature of life:
Lives don’t work the way most books do.
They can end suddenly,
as fast as you kick your leg in the air.
Lives are funny and sad,
scary and comforting,
beautiful and ugly,
but not when they’re supposed to be,
and sometimes all at the same time.
There are patterns in a life,
and patterns in a story,
but in real lives and good stories
the patterns are hard to see,
because the truth is never made of straight lines.
Lives are strange.
Complement The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown with Brown’s own least known, strangest and most wondrous book about life and death, then revisit some other fantastic picture-book biographies of cultural icons: Emily Dickinson, John Lewis, Keith Haring, Maria Mitchell, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, E.E. Cummings, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, Frida Kahlo, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, Wangari Maathai, and Nellie Bly.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Creation is a delicate and experimental thing… Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.”
In a lifetime of reading, there are few books I have loved more than Willard Gibbs: American Genius (public library) by the poet Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980): her magnificent more-than-biography of the lonely forgotten visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics — the story not only of a person and his far-reaching legacy, but the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that colored every realm of the human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics.
Radiating centripetally from Gibbs’s life is the birth and maturation of America — the country, the character, the creative spark.
Muriel RukeyserRukeyser writes:
From the beginnings… we have been heretics and axiom-breakers, willful outcasts, exiles. We are a nation of eager refugees; we were planted as that. When the seaboard was settled, and a second generation learned a sense of place, and the new desires arrived, sweeping westward, the desire for unity came, too. Unity, at any cost. Integration was the word of the Puritans. To integrate themselves they were willing to amputate emotions, the complexity in which the mortal mixes himself and mires himself and grows; they were willing to amputate, or they would never have sailed, and broken with the mother world.
[…]
We were freemen set on a crusade, members of the largest tribe ever banded together by purpose, and growing with a velocity never before known, according to the rules of a violent and lonesome status quo.
But out of that loneliness, out of that amputation, arose a new vitality, a fierce creative spark that took shape in America’s first great love: science. Rukeyser writes:
The reception of work in science in this country has always been a reliable indication of the American attitude toward all creative effort. In the double and mixed reaction is our mirror of the acceptance and rejection of imagination.
From this fundament of national character — occluded today by the rampant untruth and antiscientific attitudes of our liminal epoch, but still there beneath it all — she wrests a larger truth about the essence of American creativity:
The American genius has been the spirit of foreboding, of foreshadowing and combining… With the foreboding… went other essentially tragic qualities of waste and conquest and the application of these to a new earth. Fighting these went the rare men and women who could capture the clues and in their flashes of knowledge see combining grace, the virtue of form. So often formless, so often a chaos without shape, thought in this country — the wish of the country — has known a sunken tradition of one of the deepest desires: the wish to meet formlessness, evil, dissolution, and to find their place in form. Our greatest works as well as our greatest vulgarities have started here. Our giantism which is our disease is not only a reflection of a huge country and a huge effort, but of this; our immense expeditions and engineering achievements, the books and skyscrapers and flying fortresses, have some of this; and the pomp of acceptance as well as the smashing gestures of rejection perhaps all depend on hidden kinship with this chaos, and kinship in the wish to strike it down in thought.
She considers the two different types of creators who built the country — who build the world daily — and the two distinct time-scales on which their creative power and their legacy play out:
Those who did nothing but write, on bits of paper, formulas and single concepts and poems, symptoms of an abstract burning of the brain… would in all probability not be within a lifetime… The inventors were justified almost overnight. It takes a little longer for some of the others. America [in its first century] was deeply engrossed with space; it cared rather less for time.
With an eye to the parallel creative processes of poetry and science, Rukeyser zooms out into the largest truth about all creativity:
Creation is a delicate and experimental thing. The process of combining depends on experimentation. Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.
Complement with Rukeyser on what it means to be alive and the source of our strength in times of trouble, then revisit Jill Lepore on how the shift from mythology to science shaped the early dream of democracy and the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on the parallel psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.”
“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” Loren Eiseley wrote in his exquisite meditation on nature, human nature, and the meaning of life. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.” In the same epoch, Rachel Carson invited an elemental unforgetting as she considered our spiritual bond with nature: “Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.”
In light of how life on Earth evolved, this appears as a clear, almost commonplace reality. But the foundation for it was laid out more than a century before Eiseley and Carson, well before Darwin shaped this understanding of reality with his evolutionary theory.
In 1833, just as the term Transcendentalism was being coined for the philosophical movement sweeping New England, an essay appeared that became its founding document: “Nature” by the thirty-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882).
In the Body of Being by Maria Popova. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Emerson’s soaring essays would go on to inspire generations — among them the young Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass emanates the Emersonian recognition that each of us contains “the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together,” that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” But it was in “Nature” that Emerson laid out the founding credo of his body of work — a credo that became the animating spirit of an entire epoch of thought and feeling.
A generation before his young nature-ecstatic protege Henry David Thoreau proclaimed, “In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean,” Emerson writes:
Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.
Celebrating the “quarantine powers of nature” and its singular “ministrations to the imagination and the soul,” he offers an antidote to the deadening effects of city life:
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her… The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year.
Art from Trees at Night by Art Young. (Available as a print.)There, Emerson observes, we find ourselves enraptured in a kind of embodied transcendence:
I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty… A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces.
Sobered to this ugliness, we see afresh all the naïve ways in which we try to cheat nature — ways that have grown infinitely more elaborate in the two centuries since, but just as naïve:
We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, — of our condensation and acceleration of objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man’s life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.
Art by Laura Carlin for The Iron GiantAnd yet our mortality — the haunting reality of our transience — shimmers in a new light when seen in the context of nature in its totality, for then it becomes a sacrament to the eternal flow of energy in the universe, of which we are each a passing particle, linked to every other passing particle. Emerson writes:
The knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the center to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime luster to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas.
A century before the Vedanta-inspired Nobel-winning quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made his koan-like observation that “the over-all number of minds is just one,” Emerson — who was among the first Americans to read Eastern philosophy — adds:
The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.
Complement with Robinson Jeffers’s epic poem about the interwoven mystery of mind and universe, then revisit Emerson on how to trust yourself, the key to living with presence and authenticity, resisting the tyranny of the masses, and his conflicted love letters with Margaret Fuller.
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From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and transcendence.
In this sixteenth year of The Marginalian, which draws primarily on the timeless wonders and wisdoms of the past, here are sixteen books of the immediate present that left on me a mark on par with those immortals — books that shimmer with the eternal and the universal, books bound to go on nourishing generations to come, books that offer succor for the elemental challenge of how to live a harmonious, fulfilling, and wonder-smitten life.
As usual, think of the selection not as a hierarchy but as a bookshelf, organized by an internal logic native to the home and the mind in which the bookshelf is suspended.
JOHN HIGGS: WILLIAM BLAKE VS. THE WORLDIn the middle of a London August in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits at Bunhill Fields, named for “bone hill,” longtime burial ground for the disgraceful dead. There, in what was now a dissenters’ cemetery, the English Poor Laws had ensured a pauper’s funeral for the man who had died five days earlier in his squalid home and was now being lowered into an unmarked grave. The man whose “Songs of Innocence” would light the creative spark in the young Maurice Sendak’s imagination a century-some later. The man Patti Smith would celebrate as “the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation” — a guiding sun in the human cosmos of creativity.
Those who knew William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) cherished his overwhelming kindness, his capacity for delight even during his frequent and fathomless depressions, his “expression of great sweetness, but bordering on weakness — except when his features are animated by expression, and then he has an air of inspiration about him.” He was remembered for the strange, koan-like things he said about Jesus (He is the only God. And so am I and so are you.), about the prosperous artists who held his poverty as proof of his failure (I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.), about the nature of creativity (The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.)
Art from Blake’s First Book of Urizen, 1796. (Available as a print.)Unseen by his own world, he saw deep into the worlds to come, channeling his visions through anything at hand. It was not the medium that mattered, but its pliancy as he bent it to his vision of the mystery that is itself the message — the message we call art: He was a painter, a poet, a philosopher without meaning to, an early prophet of panpsychism, a mystic who lived not to solve the mystery but to revel in it, to encode it in verses and etch it onto copper plates and stain it onto canvases and seed it into souls for centuries to come.
As an artist, he was resolutely his own standard, his own guiding sun. Like Beethoven, with whom he shared a death-year and the stubborn unwillingness to compromise on the artistic vision he experienced as life, Blake was determined to make what he wanted to make and to make it on his own terms — in a world unready for the art and unfriendly to the terms.
There is no greater act of creative courage than this.
Another engraving from Blake’s Paradise Lost.And so, centuries before the technologies existed to enable the proof, William Blake became the first living conjecture of the 1,000 True Fans theory. He knew what we all eventually realize, if we are awake and courageous enough: that the best way — and the only effective way — to complain about the way things are is to make new and better things, untested and unexampled things, things that spring from the gravity of creative conviction and drag the status quo like a tide toward some new horizon.
How he did that is what John Higgs explores in the superb biography William Blake vs. the World (public library). Read more about and of it here.
ED YONG: AN IMMENSE WORLDWithout color, life would be a mistake. I mean this both existentially and evolutionarily: Color is not only our primary sensorium of beauty — that aesthetic rapture without which life would be a desert of the soul — but color is how we came to exist in the first place. Our perception of color, like our entire perceptual experience, is part of our creaturely inheritance and bounded by it — experience that differs wildly from that of other species, and even varies vastly within our own species. In that limitation lies a glorious invitation to fathom the fundaments of our humanity and step beyond ourselves into other sensoria more dazzling than our consciousness is even equipped to imagine.
That is the invitation Ed Yong — one of the most insightful science writers of our time, and one of the most soulful — extends in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (public library), appropriately titled after a verse by William Blake:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
A quarter millennium of science after Blake — a quarter millennium of magnifying delight through the lens of knowledge — Yong writes:
Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.
Color wheel based on the classification system of the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul from Les phénomènes de la physique by Amédée Guillemin, 1882. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)With an eye to the Umwelt — that lovely German word for the sensory bubble each creature inhabits, both limiting and defining its perceptual reality — he adds:
Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.
[…]
Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.
We are insentient to myriad realities readily available to our fellow creatures — the temperature currents by which a fly, Blake’s supreme existentialist, navigates the air; the ultrasonic calls with which hummingbirds hover between science and magic; the magnetic fields by which nightingales migrate. With the perspectival felicity that science singularly confers, Yong writes:
The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity… When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.
Read more here.
SOPHIE BLACKALL: THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless meditation on living with presence. “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s,” Seneca exhorted two millennia earlier as he offered the Stoic balance sheet for time spent, saved, and wasted, reminding us that “nothing is ours, except time.”
Time is all we have because time is what we are — which is why the undoing of time, of time’s promise of itself, is the undoing of our very selves.
In the dismorrowed undoing of 2020 — as Zadie Smith was calibrating the limitations of Stoic philosophy in a world suddenly time-warped by a global quarantine, suddenly sobered to the perennial uncertainty of the future — loss beyond the collective heartache besieged the miniature world of my sunny-spirited, largehearted friend and Caldecott-winning children’s book maker Sophie Blackall. She coped the way all artists cope, complained the way all makers complain: by making something of beauty and substance, something that begins as a quickening of self-salvation in one’s own heart and ripples out to touch, to salve, maybe even to save others — which might be both the broadest and the most precise definition of art.
One morning under the hot shower, Sophie began making a mental list of things to look forward to — a lovely gesture of taking tomorrow’s outstretched hand in that handshake of trust and resolve we call optimism.
№3: hot showerAs the list grew and she began drawing each item on it, she noticed how many were things that needn’t wait for some uncertain future — unfussy gladnesses readily available in the now, any now. A century after Hermann Hesse extolled “the little joys” as the most important habit for fully present living, Sophie’s list became not an emblem of expectancy but an invitation to presence — not a deferral of life but a celebration of it, of the myriad marvels that come alive as soon as we become just a little more attentive, a little more appreciative, a little more animated by our own elemental nature as “atoms with consciousness” and “matter with curiosity.”
№5: hugging a friendSophie began sharing the illustrated meditations on her Instagram (which is itself a rare island of unremitting delight and generosity amid the stream of hollow selfing we call social media) — each part record of personal gladness, part creative prompt. Delight begets delight — people began sending her their responses to these prompts: unbidden kindnesses done for neighbors, unexpected hobbies taken up, and oh so many sweet strange faces drawn on eggs.
A slipstream of tomorrows hence, her list became Things to Look Forward to: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day (public library) — a felicitous catalogue partway between Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom and poet Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, every page of it radiant with the warmth and wonder that make life worth living and mark everything Sophie makes.
№14: listening to a song you’ve heard beforeYou can relish a rainbow and a cup of tea, sunrise and a flock of birds, a cemetery walk and a friend’s newborn, the first blush of wildflowers in a patch of dirt and the looping rapture of an old favorite song. You can’t tidy up the White House, but you can tidy up that neglected messy corner of your home; you can’t mend a world, but you can mend the hole in the polka-dot pocket of your favorite coat. They are not the same thing, but they are part of the same thing, which is all there is — life living itself through us, moment by moment, one broken beautiful thing at a time.
Read and see more here.
SUSAN CAIN: BITTERSWEET“Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness… to let the form be felt… but let the whole be sombre,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother as he exulted in the beauty of sorrow — not in that wallowing way some have of making an identity of their suffering, not in the way our culture has of fetishizing the tortured genius myth, but in the way of Whitman, who saw the plain equivalence between feeling deeply all of life’s hues and so touching its beauty more deeply, the contact we call art: Those who reach “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights,” Whitman knew, are also apt “to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses.” He had “a theory that no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them”; his own life was living proof of that theory. Two millennia before him, Aristotle too had wondered why an undertone of melancholy seems to reverberate across the personalities of the most fertile minds, the greatest leaders, and the finest artists.
Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)I too have wondered this while falling in love with the people I live with — Rachel Carson, with her uncommon grasp of the beauty inside the tragedy of transience; Rockwell Kent, who went to the remotest wilderness to discover loneliness as a catalyst of creativity; Beethoven, who turned a lifetime of sorrow into universal joy; Lincoln, who made of his melancholy a source of poetry and power; and Emily Dickinson, who turned the interleaving of love and loss into an eternal garden of delight.
I suspect that beneath it all is not an acceptance of but the longing for an acceptance of the elemental interplay between darkness and light, beauty and sorrow, mortality and meaning — the longing we transmute into meaning, that great act of creation.
Virginia Woolf called this the “shock-receiving capacity” necessary for being an artist — the willingness to see the totality of life, in all its syncopations of grief and gladness, of beauty and brutality, and feel the shock of it all, and make of that shock something that shimmers with meaning. Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet” — “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” Whitman and Woolf, Carson and Kent, Lincoln and Dickinson were all paragons of the bittersweet.
The Dreaming Horses (1912) by Franz Marc, a classic bittersweet type. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)First awakened to it by a curiosity about her own disproportionate love of music in a minor key, Cain realized that “the music was just a gateway to a deeper realm, where you notice that the world is sacred and mysterious, enchanted even” — a realm we can enter through music or a walk in an old-growth forest, through poetry or prayer. She began seeing echoes of this nebulous yet surprisingly common capacity for noticing in the lives of artists and thinkers she admired — Beethoven and Buckminster Fuller, Rumi and Alexander the Great, but none more exemplary than the creative patron saint of her life: Leonard Cohen.
So she gave that flavor of the spirit a name, then set out to understand it by following a procession of researchers who study its kaleidoscopic facets across neurobiology, psychology, social science.
In Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (public library), she writes:
The bittersweet is… an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know — or will know — loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.
Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)There is in this notion an echo of Oscar Wilde’s stirring prison letter, in which he resolved to turn his suffering into transcendence; an echo of Beethoven’s resolve to “take fate by the throat” once he began losing his hearing; an echo of Marina Abramovič, who turned a harrowing childhood into raw material for art.
At the heart of it all is an inspired inquiry into “transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love,” posed with sensitivity to the realities and varieties of pain we live with, not all of them easily mutable into a poem or a painting or a song.
Read more here.
HERMANN HESSE: TREES“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees, “no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
But this century-old classic, part meditation and part manifesto, is far from Hesse’s only contribution to the reliquary of our species’ tender kinship with trees — those “slim sentinels” watching over our existence, recalibrating our sense of time, fomenting our richest metaphors and our finest poems, speaking deeply to every deep-thinking, deep-feeling person and enchanting every noticer (which is the other word for artist). Trees strew Hesse’s novels and essays, his letters and diaries, his poems and paintings — all that survives of a life so clearly and mirthfully animated by them, from his Black Forest childhood to the Swiss mountain village of his old age.
Hermann HesseAfter the heroism of editing the first-ever complete edition of Hesse’s writings writings, scholar Volker Michels has culled the finest sylvan musings from this immense body of work and curated thirty of Hesse’s own drawings to illustrate them in the slender gem of a book Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings (public library).
Read some of it, and see some his paintings, here.
RUMI: GOLDIn his sixty-six years, Rumi (September 30, 1207–December 17, 1273) composed nearly sixty-six thousand verses, animated by an ecstatic devotion to living more fully, loving more deeply, and moving through the world with the knowledge that you must “gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.” He rises from the page ancient and eternal. Magnetic in his eloquent reverence and his soulful intelligence. Majestic in his whirling silk robe and his defiant disdain for his culture’s worship of status. Volcanic with poetry.
Having mastered the mathematical musicality of the quatrain, he became a virtuoso of the ghazal with its series of couplets, each invoking a different poetic image, each crowned with the same refrain — a kind of kinetic sculpture of surprise, rapturous with rhythm.
A dazzling selection of his poetry, including some never previously alive in English, appears in Gold (public library), newly translated and inspirited by poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori.
Reflecting on the creative challenge of invoking the poetic truth of one epoch and culture into another, she writes:
The languages of Farsi and English possess quite different poetic resources and habits. In English, it is impossible to reproduce the rich interplay of sound and rhyme (internal as well as terminal) and the wordplay that characterize and even drive Rumi’s poems. Meanwhile, the tropes, abstractions, and hyperbole that are so abundant in Persian poetry contrast with the spareness and concreteness characteristic of poetry in English, especially in the modern tradition. I have sought to honor the demands of contemporary American poetry and conjure its music while, I hope, carrying over the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poetry… I have chosen poems that seem to me beautiful, meaningful, and central to Rumi’s vision, poems that I felt I could successfully translate and that speak to our times.
What emerges is a testament to the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lovely notion of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original.”
Hear Haleh Liza Gafori read one of the finest poems in the book here.
RACHEL CARSON: THE SEA TRILOGYIn the entire sweep of our species history, no one has written more beautifully — or more truthfully — about the sea than the poetic marine biologist and ecology patron saint Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964). Her three masterpieces about the water world — Under the Sea-Wind (which began as her groundbreaking essay Undersea), The Sea Around Us (which occasioned her superb National Book Award acceptance speech), and The Edge of the Sea (which gave us her exquisite meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life) — are now collected in a single Library of America volume: Rachel Carson: The Sea Trilogy (public library), introduced by Carson’s modern-day counterpart and kindred spirit Sandra Steingraber.
Animating all three is Carson’s singular lyrical prose about the native poetry of nature:
Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us — a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.
KATHRYN SCHULZ: LOST & FOUND“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb early work on love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
It is a handsome observation, an elemental truth we might glimpse — and be saved by glimpsing — in those rare moments of pure presence that dissolve all too quickly into what Borges knew to be true of human nature: that time is the substance we are made of.
As creatures made of time, we live in the present and the past and the future all at once, continually shaken by all the fears and hopes, all the anxieties and anticipations, that are the price we pay for our majestic hippocampus — that crowning glory of a consciousness capable of referencing its memories and experiences in the past, capable of projecting its goals and desire into the future, capable of the bleakest despair and of the brightest dreams.
This might be, as Elizabeth Gilbert observed in the wake of losing the love of her life, why love and loss have something elemental in common — each is “a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted,” one that “comes and goes on its own schedule… does not obey your plans, or your wishes [and] will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to.”
Out of this arises a basic equation we accept as a function of life, as an echo of the fundamental laws. We accept it unwittingly, or wittingly but unwillingly, but it is an entropic given indifferent to our assent: We love, then we lose. We lose our loved ones — to death or the dissolution of mutuality — or we lose ourselves. (This is also why flowers move us so.)
Vanish by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)But if we are lucky enough, if we are are stubborn enough, we love and we lose and then the loss opens us up to more love — different love, because each love is unrepeatable and irreplaceable — on the other side of grief; love unimaginable from the barren landmass of loss, love without which, once found, the world comes to feel unimaginable.
Because these are the two most all-consuming and all-pervading of human experiences, the labels in which we try to classify and contain them are bound to be too small — as with love, so with loss. (This is what Joan Didion captured in her classic observation that “grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”)
All of this, with all of its subtleties, comes alive on the pages of Lost & Found (public library) by Kathryn Schulz — part personal memoir, part existential inquiry into the two great universals of human life.
Read more here.
DAVID BYRNE: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD (IN DINGBATS)“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote in the closing lines of his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” in the spring of 1819, in the spring of modern science. Humanity was coming abloom with new knowledge of reality as astronomy was supplanting the superstitions of astrology and chemistry was rising form the primordial waters of alchemy. Ten years earlier, when Keats was a teenager, Dalton had at last confirmed the existence of the atom — the great dream Democritus had dreamt civilizations earlier; the dream Aristotle, drunk on power and certitude, had squashed with his theory of the four elements. A beautiful truth buried in a Grecian urn and laid to rest, roused two thousand years later by the kiss of chemistry.
The story of our species is punctuated with a thousand analogous atoms of experience. Truth is beauty in the workings of the world, but in the workings of humanity, truth is often sleeping beauty. Even on the miniature timescale of our own lifetimes — these grunts in the story of the world — it can take us years or decades of hindsighted reflection to arrive at the truth of our experience, any experience, and all the more so the greater its complexity and its toll on us.
Two hundred springtimes after Keats, David Byrne explores this facet of the human condition in his felicitously uncategorizable book A History of the World (in Dingbats) (public library) — a playful yet poignant meditation, in words and drawings, on the human truths unveiled as the world came unworlded by the global pandemic that became the great shared experience of our lifetimes.
Radiating from the pages, delightfully designed and typeset by Alex Kalman, is Byrne’s buoyant vision for the new world, a world of magnified mutuality and widespread poetry of possibility; a vision for life not merely restored to how it used to be but reset, recalibrated, revitalized — life that is a little bit more alive.
See more here.
ANNIE MURPHY PAUL: THE EXTENDED MIND“Our minds are all threaded together,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the dawn of the twentieth century, “and all the world is mind.” Meanwhile in Spain, the middle-aged Santiago Ramón y Cajal was birthing a new science that would both greatly expand our knowledge of the brain and greatly contract our understanding of the mind. Over the following half-century, in its noble effort to render comprehensible what William James so poetically termed the “blooming and buzzing confusion” of consciousness, neuroscience would become both a great leap forward and a great leap back. Again and again, its illuminating but incomplete findings would be aggrandized and oversimplified into a sort of neo-phrenology that incarcerates some of our most expansive human experiences and capacities — love and grief, intelligence and imagination — in particular brain regions with particular neural firing patterns.
A century later and half a millennium after Descartes cleaved Western consciousness into its disembodied dualism, we are only just beginning to reckon with the growing understanding that consciousness is a full-body phenomenon, perhaps even a beyond-body phenomenon.
In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (public library), Annie Murphy Paul explores the most thrilling frontiers of this growing understanding, fusing a century of scientific studies with millennia of first-hand experience from the lives and letters of great artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Challenging our cultural inheritance of thinking that thinking takes place only inside the brain, she illuminates the myriad ways in which we “use the world to think” — from the sensemaking language of gestures that we acquire as babies long before we can speak concepts to the singular fuel that time in nature provides for the brain’s most powerful associative network.
LEFT: Glial cells in the cerebral cortex of a child by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1920s. RIGHT: One Mind by Maria Popova, 2020s.Paul distills this recalibration of understanding:
Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us — drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.
Read more here.
DEBBIE MILLMAN: WHY DESIGN MATTERSIf we are not at least a little abashed by the people we used to be, the voyage of life has halted in the windless bay of complacency. This renders the interview a curious cultural artifact by design — a consensual homily of future abashment, etching into the common record who we were at a particular point in life, in a particular state of being, with all the temporary totality of thoughts and feelings that we so often mistake for final destinations of personhood. An interview petrifies us in time, then lives on forever, the thoughts of bygone selves quoted back to us across the eons of our personal evolution — a strange and discomposing taxidermy diorama of life that is no longer living.
But a great interview does something else, too. A great touches the nucleus of being and potential, untouched by the forces of time and change.
One January afternoon several selves ago, I entered the corrugated black walls of a snug recording studio at the School of Visual Arts to sit at a microphone across from a woman dressed entirely and impeccably in black — a woman all stranger, all sunshine. I didn’t expect that, over the next hour, the warmth of her generous curiosity and her sensitive attention would melt away my ordinary reticence about discussing the life beneath the work. I didn’t expect that, over the next decade, we would become creative kindred spirits, then friends, then longtime romantic partners, and finally dear lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.
Debbie Millman with Amanda Palmer at the Design Matters studio, 2016.Over the years, I have witnessed Debbie interview a kaleidoscope of visionaries — artists, writers, designers, scientists, musicians, philosophers, poets. Every time, guests leave the studio with that distinctive glow of feeling deeply understood and appreciated, a little bit more in touch with ourselves beyond our selves, reminded of who and what we are in the hull of our being, in that place from which we make everything we make as we go on making ourselves. In the nearly two decades since the birth of Design Matters — born in that primordial epoch before podcasts, when Debbie actually had to pay for the radio waves transmitting these conversations — she has interviewed more than 450 creative people about the arc of their lives. Roxane Gay — once her interview subject, now her wife — describes the resulting totality as “a gloriously interesting and ongoing conversation about what it means to live well, overcome trauma, face rejection, learn to love and be loved, and thrive both personally and professionally.”
The best parts of the best interviews from this immense body of work are now gathered in Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People (public library). Pulsating through them are a handful of common themes — the elementary particles of which any creative life, any life of passion and purpose, any fully human life is built — none looming larger than the relationship between vulnerability and belonging, which constellates our entire cosmos of being: what we make, how we love, why we long for the things we long for, in love and in work.
Read some of the highlights here.
NICK CAVE: FAITH, HOPE AND CARNAGEThe world reveals itself through our engagement with it — a truth as true in the “It for Bit” sense of physics as it in the Dzogchen sense of Tibetan Buddhism.
It is the fundamental truth of our human experience.
All cynicism is a denial of it.
All hope is a tribute to it.
This awareness pulsates throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — Nick Cave’s yearlong conversation with journalist turned friend Seán O’Hagan.
Art from a 19th-century French science textbook. (Available as a print.)Two decades after Rebecca Solnit’s epochal Hope in the Dark, with its lucid and luminous case for our grounds against despair, Cave — who has long championed the generative value of hope — reflects:
I have no time for cynicism. It feels hugely misplaced at this time.
[…]
I remain cautiously optimistic. I think if we can move beyond the anxiety and dread and despair, there is a promise of something shifting not just culturally, but spiritually, too. I feel that potential in the air, or maybe a sort of subterranean undertow of concern and connectivity, a radical and collective move towards a more empathetic and enhanced existence… It does seem possible — even against the criminal incompetence of our governments, the planet’s ailing health, the divisiveness that exists everywhere, the shocking lack of mercy and forgiveness, where so many people seem to harbour such an irreparable animosity towards the world and each other — even still, I have hope. Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former. I feel there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe.
Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Having long reckoned with the relationship between cynicism and hope, I often say that cynics — who are the people most deserving of our pity — are just brokenhearted optimists. There is both a lovely confluence and a lovely inversion of these ideas in Nick Cave’s assertion that “hope is optimism with a broken heart,” which seems to me more like an aphoristic spear nobly thrown at our perpetual tangle of semantics in trying to differentiate between optimism and hope than a genuine and useful definition. But, of course, we each arrive at these notions so trapped in our own frames of reference, so saturated with our subjective experience, that no two portraits of a mental state or emotional orientation could ever possibly be precisely alike.
What is certain is that no matter what we call this openhearted yearning for betterment, pulsating beneath it is the infinite vulnerability of remaining unmet — all daring is forever haunted by the specter of crushing disappointment, and there is nothing more daring than a reach from the real to the ideal.
And yet this yearning springs from our most fundamental nature. Living with it and living up to it is the highest homage we can pay, and must pay, to the unbidden gift of life.
Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from Mr. Gauguin’s Heart by Marie-Danielle Croteau.With an eye to “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world,” Cave observes:
In a way my work has become an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity. I simply have no time for it. I mean that quite literally, and from a personal perspective. No time for censure or relentless condemnation. No time for the whole cycle of perpetual blame. Others can do that sort of thing. I haven’t the stomach for it, or the time. Life is too damn short, in my opinion, not to be awed.
In my own experience, nothing seeds cynicism more readily than the withholding of forgiveness — forgiveness of others, of the world, of Father Chance and Mother Circumstance; above all, of oneself. Self-forgiveness is indeed the most potent antidote to cynicism I know.
Cave shines a sidewise gleam on the same intimation. Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm made his countercultural case for why self-love is the foundation of a sane society, he turns to art as the supreme instrument of self-forgiveness:
We all have regrets and most of us know that those regrets, as excruciating as they can be, are the things that help us lead improved lives. Or, rather, there are certain regrets that, as they emerge, can accompany us on the incremental bettering of our lives. Regrets are forever floating to the surface… They require our attention. You have to do something with them. One way is to seek forgiveness by making what might be called living amends, by using whatever gifts you may have in order to help rehabilitate the world.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)For many of us, our creative contribution — our art, to use the term in Baldwin’s broadest sense — is the gift we offer to rehabilitate the world and, in the process, rehabilitate ourselves. Cave reflects on his own experience of making music while living with the incomprehensible loss of his teenage son and its attendant vortex of self-blame:
Art does have the ability to save us, in so many different ways. It can act as a point of salvation, because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world. And that in itself is a way of making amends, of reconciling us with the world. Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins… By “sins,” I mean those acts that are an offence to God or, if you would prefer, the “good in us” — that live within us, and that if we pay them no heed, harden and become part of our character. They are forms of suffering that can weigh us down terribly and separate us from the world. I have found that the goodness of the work can go some way towards mitigating them.
Read more here and here.
PABLO NERUDA: BOOK OF QUESTIONS“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb meditation on the life of the mind, would mean to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
But our questions, besides having the power to civilize us, also have the power — perhaps even more needed today — to rewild us.
Often, our deepest questions are our simplest ones, and our wildest questions — the most maddeningly unanswerable ones — are our most resaning, most redolent with meaning. This is why children’s questions are so often portals to the profoundest answers.
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) channeled 320 such questions — questions earthly and cosmic about art and life, dreams and death, nature and human nature; magical-realist questions that could have been asked by a child or a sage — into his final work of poetry, originally published months before his sudden death.
His Book of Questions (public library) now comes alive in a stunning bilingual picture-book, illustrated by Chilean artist Paloma Valdivia, whose father grew up in the same coastal region that shaped Neruda’s boyhood and whose grandmother was friends with Neruda’s sister.
Of Neruda’s original questions — each of them unanswerable, all of them worth asking, crackling with some vital spark of playfulness or poignancy — seventy come ablaze amid the vibrant illustrations and fold-out delights, radiant with the colors and textures of Latin American tapestry.
Read and see more here.
BILL HAYES: SWEAT“And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” wondered Whitman two years before he wrote a manual on “manly health and training” and two decades before he recovered from his paralytic stroke with a rigorous exercise regimen in the gymnasium of the wilderness.
But this natural equivalence, as obvious as it was to Whitman and as evident as the neurophysiology of consciousness is making it in our own epoch — was opaque, even obscene, for much of human history.
The world’s first known book on exercise was written almost exactly two millennia ago, sometime in the 220s, by the Greek philosopher and teacher Flavius Philostratus, then in his fifties. In On Gymnastics, he argued that athletic training is an art and “a form of wisdom,” on par with the other arts, no less beautiful or substantive than poetry or music. His treatise was in part an act of resistance to the wave of oppression and erasure sweeping in with the new regime of Roman rule and the advent of Christianity, which was beginning to eradicate the ancient Greek culture of Olympic Games and casual athletics, of public bathhouses and gymnasia.
Under Christian doctrine, the body was too sinful an instrument to be afforded public celebration or private homilies. The cerebral solemnity of the cathedral replaced the joyful physicality of the gymnasium, where crowds had once gathered as much to tone their bodies as to hone their minds on Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy lectures. (The one place where Christianity and ancient Greek culture converged was that women were not permitted to compete in the Olympic Games or enter the gymnasium — even though the athletic Plato, outlining the laws of civilization in his last and longest dialogue, decreed that “women, both young and old, should exercise… together with the men” — and, to this day, women are not permitted to sing in the Vatican choir or hold major leadership positions in the Catholic Church.)
Group Apparatus by Alice Austen, 1893.And so it is that the notion of exercise fell out of the popular imagination for a millennium. The word itself did not enter the English language until the fourteenth century, when it was originally used in the context of animal farming and husbandry, meaning “to remove restraint.” Like the etymological evolution of “to lose,” “to exercise” came to encompass other contexts beyond the literal and the physical: one could exercise restraint, or altruism, or caution. But not one’s body — not yet.
And then, in the sixteenth century, while roaming the ruins of Greek and Roman gymnasia, an Italian physician named Girolamo Mercuriale (September 30, 1530–November 8, 1606) took it upon himself “to restore to the light the art of exercise, once so highly esteemed, and now plunged into deepest obscurity and utterly perished.” Far ahead of his time on both the scale of a lifetime and the scale of civilization, Mercuriale was only twenty-two when, writing a treatise on parenting, he made a passionate case against the prevalent use of wet nurses, insisting instead that breastfeeding by mothers made for healthier and happier children. His work inspired the world’s first formal proposal for physical education in school curricula, made by the English educator on whom Shakespeare modeled the schoolmaster in Love’s Labor Lost.
Girolamo Mercuriale. (Copperplate engraving by Johann Theodore de Bry, 1650.)But Mercuriale’s most lasting legacy was the 1573 book De Arte Gymnastica, or The Art of Exercise. (Incidentally, in my native Bulgarian, the academic term for gym class translates verbatim to “physical art.”) On its pages — writing in an elaborate form of medieval Latin that only a handful of scholars can translate today — Mercuriale resolved:
I have taken as my province to restore to the light the art of exercise, once so highly esteemed, and now plunged into deepest obscurity and utterly perished… Why no one else has taken this on, I dare not say. I know only that this is a task of both maximum utility and enormous labor.
If there is one person in the modern world who can reinvigorate Mercuriale’s enormous unfinished labor and bridge the physical, the philosophical, and the poetic — bridge Whitman and Warhol, Plato and Peloton, Kafka and Curie, Tennessee Williams and Serena Williams; bridge the “immediate bodily now” of exercise with “the wisdom of the past that had faded from living memory” — it is Bill Hayes. And so he does, in Sweat: A History of Exercise (public library) — an expedition, both existential and historical, spanning two thousand years and three continents, exploring “how the arts of exercise were invented, lost, and rediscovered,” raising questions about what distinguishes exercise from practice, labor, or sports; about whether, like art forms and literary genres and languages, there are “certain forms of exercise that are similarly endangered or have already gone extinct — unrecorded, undescribed”; questions like:
Do you choose your form of exercise, or does it choose you?
Read more here.
NATALIE HODGES: UNCOMMON MEASUREIn her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, the trailblazing philosopher Susanne Langer defined music as “a laboratory for feeling and time.” But perhaps it is the opposite, too — music may be the most beautiful experiment conducted in the laboratory of time.
In “the wordless beginning,” spacetime itself was crumpled and compacted into that spitball of everythingness we call the singularity. Even if sound could exist then — it did not, of course, because sound is made of matter — it would have existed all at once. Infinite numbers of every possible note would have been ringing at the same time — the antithesis of music. It is only because this single point of totality was stretched into a line that time was born and, suddenly, there was continuity. Suddenly, one moment became distinguishable from another — the strange gift of entropy, which makes it possible to have melody and rhythm, chords and harmonies.
Music — with all the mysterious power by which it “enters one’s ears and dives straight into one’s soul, one’s emotional center” — is made not of notes of sound but of atoms of time. And if music is made of time, and if time is the substance we ourselves are made of, then in some profound sense, we are made of music.
Art by Arthur Rackham from a rare 1926 edition of The Tempest. (Available as a print.)That — the physics and neuroscience of it, the poetry and unremitting wonder of it — is what the science-enchanted classical violinist Natalie Hodges explores in Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (public library). She writes:
Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events. Rhythm is at the heart of that arrangement, on every scale: the cycling and patterning of repeated sound or movement and the “measured flow” that that repetition creates. The most fundamental rhythm is the beat itself, the pulse that occurs at regular intervals and thus dictates the tempo, keeps musical time. In music, a beat is no fixed thing — it can quicken into smaller intervals (accelerando) and stretch out into longer ones (decelerando), depending on the character of a given musical moment and the feeling or fancy of the performer — but it does remain periodic, predictable, inexorable. Even at the level of pitch, which is really the speed of a given sound wave’s oscillation, we are really hearing the rhythmic demarcation of time, a tiny heart whirring at a beat of x cycles per second.
Yet in every piece of music there are also higher temporal structures at play. Repetition begets pattern, and pattern engenders form, at every scale; thus musical form itself constitutes a macro-rhythm, a pattern of alternations that move the listener through time.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s, inspired by the artist’s experience of listening to a Wagner symphony. (Available as a print.)Our minds structure time through the detection of patterns and the predictive anticipation of recurring elements. But although this cognitive function unfolds unconsciously, it is not mechanistic, not robotic, but a vital pulse-beat of our humanity, vibrating with the neural harmonics of emotion, suffused with feeling — for all anticipation is a form of hope and all hope can be shattered or redeemed, taking our hearts along with it. Ever since Pythagoras revolutionized the mathematical structure of music by composing the world’s first algorithm, musicians have been deliberately breaking the buildup of patterns or triumphantly completing them in order to orchestrate an emotional response — the sorrow of unmet hope, the elated relief of its redemption.
With an eye to the basic chord progression, rooted in a tonic, and the satisfying resolution of a rondo, revolving around a circular theme, Hodges writes:
Such patterns, formal and harmonic, relate their components to one another in time. The ear can sense the harmonies to come based on the relative intensities of those that came before, or when thematic material will return by the buildup of a cadence at the end of a development section or variation. It is through this higher sense of rhythm, then, that a simple phrase or a complex form becomes a temporal object: time molded in order to manipulate emotion, putting you through the changes of the present only to bring you back to the past, locating you in a moment that is simultaneously familiar and wholly new.
One of William Blake’s paintings for The Book of Job, 1806. (Available as a print.)In my native Bulgaria, the tonal tradition rests upon a pattern dramatically different from that of Western music and its twelve-tone scale. (This is why a Bulgarian folk song was encoded among the handful of sounds representing Earth on the Golden Record that sailed aboard the Voyager in humanity’s most poetic reach for making contact with the cosmos.) But while these underlying structures differ across cultures and epochs, music’s reliance on such patterns for its emotional effect is universal. Hodges observes:
The music of all cultures, each with its own unique rules to be followed and broken, both weaves and rends the tapestry of audible time. Our experience of musical temporality, like our experience of the day-to-day, consists of patterns of recurrence and, sooner or later, their violation.
Yet musical time differs from the quotidian passage of ordinary time, even as it exists within that passage. Or, at least, it manifests how susceptible time is to our conscious perception, as much as the other way around.
Read more here and here.
PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA: POETRY UNBOUNDIn the dawning hour of the pandemic, Irish poet and peace activist Pádraig Ó Tuama launched the soul-slaking podcast Poetry Unbound, part of the On Being Project. Two years and several million listeners later, it now has an equally soul-slaking book companion in Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (public library) — a vitalizing exploration of and invitation into poetry as protest, poetry as sacrament, poetry as exorcism, poetry as an instrument of deepening the truths we can tell each other, the truths we can see in and for ourselves, poetry as a reminder that these truths are of dazzling multiplicity and simultaneity, often in creative tension with each other, a tension that expands and magnifies our being; poetry as “a lonely art, written by a person with a sense that more must be done.”
Emerging from these pages above all is poetry as prayerful attention to life, captured in the perfectly chosen epigraph from poet Christian Wiman:
In the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
Echoing Emerson’s observation that “our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions,” Ó Tuama writes in the introduction:
A single moment can open a door to an experience that’s bigger than the single moment might imply. Sometimes that opening is a challenge, sometimes it’s a comfort, other times a question. Very occasionally it’s an answer.
[…]
A poem can be like a flame: helping us find our way, keeping us warm.
These moments come in many shapes, from poems of infinite variety. In one, a single word becomes “a solitary word, a word of arrival, a word of presence.” In another, the central image becomes “an exploration of what it means to be wished well by someone else.” Together, they become “a testament to the process of noticing” — something subtle and mighty that reveals “what can happen when we pay attention to our lives.”
For more timeless favorites, revisit the selections for 2021, 2020, 2019, and beyond.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.”
“There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the poet May Sarton wrote in her ravishing ode to solitude. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote a generation before her as he reckoned with the heart of a healthy relationship. It may be that our relationship with ourselves — the extent to which we are able to be intimate with our own spirit and make of that intimacy a sanctuary — is a matter of learning to stand guard over our own solitude.
That is what Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533–September 13, 1592) explores in some passages from his relentlessly insightful meditations predating psychology by centuries, rendered in a new translation by the Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor in his altogether wonderful book The Art of Solitude.
One of Salvador Dalí’s etchings for the essays of MontaigneMontaigne spent much of his own life in solitude — the crucible of his enduringly insightful meditations on the fundaments of life. With life-tested surety, he allays the three great fears haunting solitude — boredom, the loss of social rewards, and self-confrontation. He writes:
We have a soul that can turn in on itself; it can keep itself company. It has the means to attack and defend, to give and receive. Don’t worry that solitude will find you hunched up in boredom.
Rather than boredom, such inner stillness leads us to what Bertrand Russell so memorably termed “fruitful monotony” — an inner quieting that becomes fertile compost for creativity. But even at its most generative, solitude succumbs to the basic binary of life: being any one place means not being another — an equivalence that metastasizes in the classic fear of missing out. Montaigne cautions against such preoccupation with the external world and calls for the vital self-mastery of learning to govern the internal:
It should no longer be your concern that the world speaks of you; your sole concern should be with how you speak to yourself. Retreat into yourself, but first of all make yourself ready to receive yourself there. If you do not know how to govern yourself, it would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)To succeed in solitude, he argues, is to learn to “keep yourself settled, straight, inflexible, without movement or agitation,” so that you can begin to observe the mind as it happens unto itself — the happening that is our entire experience of life. He writes:
It is a tricky business to follow so meandering a course as that of our mind, to penetrate its opaque depths and hidden recesses, to discern and stop so many subtle shifts in its movements.
[…]
Others study themselves in order to advance and elevate their mind: I seek to humble it and lie it down to rest.
Complement with Emerson — Montaigne’s Transcendentalist inheritor — on how to trust yourself and what solitude really means and Rilke on the relationship between solitude, love, sex, and creativity, then revisit Montaigne’s cumulative wisdom on how to live.
donating = lovingFor a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
"The poets cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel the other’s warmth."
"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that... is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction... There can be no separate literature of science."
"Over a hill, at the end of a road, by a glittering stream that twists and turns, stands a house..."
"Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child's talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement."
Finding that vitalizing "a reciprocity between us perceiving the world together through art, and the world in turn reading us through what we make."
"It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness."
"Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it... It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our 'self.’"
“At night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat & sweet."
"What is that so-called reality; what is this theory other than a beautiful but primordially human illusion?"
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it "aesthetic consumerism" half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable -- Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
"Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through."
"There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things.... and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind."
"If thou art perfectly at leisure... walk in, and view the wonders of my enchanted garden."
"The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist."
"We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves."
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
"People now use less than half their potential forces because 'Progress' has deprived them of the incentive to live fully."
"When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other."
From geckos to chameleons, a scaly journey down the hallway of evolutionary time through the portal of beauty.
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it "aesthetic consumerism" half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable -- Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
"Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic."
What it takes "to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance."
"Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so."
"Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future... The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received."
"The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age."
"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."
In praise of "the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world."
"...if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist..."
"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy."
"A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom."
"A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom."
"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."
A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.”
"I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity."
"A storm always awakens whatever passion there is in me. I become eager, and seek relief in work."
"I think if I could subsist on you... I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent... I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around."
On that singular moment at the end of life when all creative energy is concentrated and consecrated.
"I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it."
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place."
"One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling."
"We are ourselves creating our own successors... We are daily giving them... that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race."
"It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
"People ask: 'Would you or would you not like to be young again?' Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible... You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no 'you' except your life — lived."
"Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel."
"Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it."
"A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure."
"Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost."
"...only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."
"Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds... may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live."
A humming serenade to the "awareness of awareness" from which our creative restlessness springs.
"One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us."
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it "aesthetic consumerism" half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable -- every Saturday, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
"No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body."
"The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels."
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it "aesthetic consumerism" half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable -- every Saturday, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
"We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon."
"The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before."
"Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music... Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive."
"...a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time."