"We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go."
We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.
And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.
“Broken/hearted” by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
That is what Judith Viorst explores in her 1987 consolation of a book Necessary Losses (public library) — an inquiry into the profound and far-reaching relationship between our losses and our gains, revealing renunciation as a fulcrum of growth. She paints the vast landscape of loss upon which life plays out:
When we think of loss we think of the loss, through death, of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety — and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.
[…]
These necessary losses… we confront when we are confronted by the inescapable fact… that we are essentially out here on our own; that we will have to accept — in other people and ourselves — the mingling of love with hate, of the good with the bad;… that there are flaws in every human connection; that our status on this planet is implacably impermanent; and that we are utterly powerless to offer ourselves or those we love protection — protection from danger and pain, from the in-roads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death; protection from our necessary losses.
These losses are a part of life — universal, unavoidable, inexorable. And these losses are necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.
As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives. Viorst writes:
The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose… It is only through our losses that we become fully developed human beings.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a soulful illustrated elegy for loss and our search for light
We enter the realm of loss the moment the umbilical cord is cut to sever what Viorst calls the “blurred-boundary bliss of mother-child oneness” — the primal loss that sets off the ongoing task of becoming ourselves. From this origin point, she traces the lifelong vector of losses and gains:
Exchanging the illusion of absolute shelter and absolute safety for the triumphant anxieties of standing alone… we become a moral, responsible, adult self, discovering — within the limitations imposed by necessity — our freedoms and choices. And in giving up our impossible expectations, we become a lovingly connected self, renouncing ideal visions of perfect friendship, marriage, children, family life for the sweet imperfections of all-too-human relationships. And in confronting the many losses that are brought by time and death, we become a mourning and adapting self, finding at every stage — until we draw our final breath — opportunities for creative transformations.
In a sentiment the poet Mark Doty would echo — “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” he wrote in his beautiful reckoning with love and loss — she adds:
We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go."
We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.
And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.
“Broken/hearted” by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
That is what Judith Viorst explores in her 1987 consolation of a book Necessary Losses (public library) — an inquiry into the profound and far-reaching relationship between our losses and our gains, revealing renunciation as a fulcrum of growth. She paints the vast landscape of loss upon which life plays out:
When we think of loss we think of the loss, through death, of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety — and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.
[…]
These necessary losses… we confront when we are confronted by the inescapable fact… that we are essentially out here on our own; that we will have to accept — in other people and ourselves — the mingling of love with hate, of the good with the bad;… that there are flaws in every human connection; that our status on this planet is implacably impermanent; and that we are utterly powerless to offer ourselves or those we love protection — protection from danger and pain, from the in-roads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death; protection from our necessary losses.
These losses are a part of life — universal, unavoidable, inexorable. And these losses are necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.
As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives. Viorst writes:
The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose… It is only through our losses that we become fully developed human beings.
Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a soulful illustrated elegy for loss and our search for light
We enter the realm of loss the moment the umbilical cord is cut to sever what Viorst calls the “blurred-boundary bliss of mother-child oneness” — the primal loss that sets off the ongoing task of becoming ourselves. From this origin point, she traces the lifelong vector of losses and gains:
Exchanging the illusion of absolute shelter and absolute safety for the triumphant anxieties of standing alone… we become a moral, responsible, adult self, discovering — within the limitations imposed by necessity — our freedoms and choices. And in giving up our impossible expectations, we become a lovingly connected self, renouncing ideal visions of perfect friendship, marriage, children, family life for the sweet imperfections of all-too-human relationships. And in confronting the many losses that are brought by time and death, we become a mourning and adapting self, finding at every stage — until we draw our final breath — opportunities for creative transformations.
In a sentiment the poet Mark Doty would echo — “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” he wrote in his beautiful reckoning with love and loss — she adds:
We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown...
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.
One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.
Long before Maurice Sendak insisted that “the child is the best part of the human self” and that the measure of a well-formed adult is “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” Le Guin writes:
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.
Our job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can’t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we’re led to think there isn’t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.
This is the paradox we must live with as we go on dying: that we are finite but unfinished, that maturity is not the prelude to mortality but the discovery of the immortal in us.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown...
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.
One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.
Long before Maurice Sendak insisted that “the child is the best part of the human self” and that the measure of a well-formed adult is “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” Le Guin writes:
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.
Our job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can’t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we’re led to think there isn’t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.
This is the paradox we must live with as we go on dying: that we are finite but unfinished, that maturity is not the prelude to mortality but the discovery of the immortal in us.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."
“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 — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”
“I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) resolved in contemplating his literary future, beseeching his impoverished mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts, and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live.
And then, at the last minute, a pompous announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives — the whole spectacle had been orchestrated as a cruel publicity stunt to depict the despot as a benevolent ruler. The real sentence was then read: Dostoyevsky was to spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar’s armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty by the time he picked up the pen again to resume his literary ambitions. But now, in the raw moments following his close escape from death, he was elated with relief, reborn into a new cherishment of life.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871
He poured his exultation into a stunning letter to his brother Mikhail, penned hours after the staged execution and found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete correspondence, the 1988 treasure Dostoevsky Letters (public library).
Brother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and 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 — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!
Still, even through this elation, the animating force of his being — his identity as a writer — grounds him into a depth of despair. “Can it be that I’ll never take pen in hand?” he asks in sullen anticipation of the next four years at the labor camp. “If I won’t be able to write, I’ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!” But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact of being alive and, reassuring his brother not to grieve for him, continues:
I haven’t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me… After all I was at death’s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I’m alive again!
In a beautiful testament to the elemental fact that when all the static of our self-righteousness dies down, what remains between good people is only love, he writes:
If anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
[…]
When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
Now, changing my life, I’m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better. That’s my entire hope, my entire consolation.
Life in the casemate has already sufficiently killed off in me the needs of the flesh that were not completely pure; before that I took little care of myself. Now deprivations no longer bother me in the slightest, and therefore don’t be afraid that material hardship will kill me.
Having spent years in material privation myself — though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured — and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings), I can’t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty. It certainly reverberates throughout Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and especially The Brothers Karamazov; it certainly informed his ideas about the meaning of life, set forth decades later in the guise of a dream, and inspired his insistence upon the existential duty of seeing the goodness in people “despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches.”
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."
“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 — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”
“I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) resolved in contemplating his literary future, beseeching his impoverished mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts, and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live.
And then, at the last minute, a pompous announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives — the whole spectacle had been orchestrated as a cruel publicity stunt to depict the despot as a benevolent ruler. The real sentence was then read: Dostoyevsky was to spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar’s armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty by the time he picked up the pen again to resume his literary ambitions. But now, in the raw moments following his close escape from death, he was elated with relief, reborn into a new cherishment of life.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871
He poured his exultation into a stunning letter to his brother Mikhail, penned hours after the staged execution and found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete correspondence, the 1988 treasure Dostoevsky Letters (public library).
Brother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and 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 — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!
Still, even through this elation, the animating force of his being — his identity as a writer — grounds him into a depth of despair. “Can it be that I’ll never take pen in hand?” he asks in sullen anticipation of the next four years at the labor camp. “If I won’t be able to write, I’ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!” But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact of being alive and, reassuring his brother not to grieve for him, continues:
I haven’t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me… After all I was at death’s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I’m alive again!
In a beautiful testament to the elemental fact that when all the static of our self-righteousness dies down, what remains between good people is only love, he writes:
If anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
[…]
When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
Now, changing my life, I’m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better. That’s my entire hope, my entire consolation.
Life in the casemate has already sufficiently killed off in me the needs of the flesh that were not completely pure; before that I took little care of myself. Now deprivations no longer bother me in the slightest, and therefore don’t be afraid that material hardship will kill me.
Having spent years in material privation myself — though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured — and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings), I can’t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty. It certainly reverberates throughout Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and especially The Brothers Karamazov; it certainly informed his ideas about the meaning of life, set forth decades later in the guise of a dream, and inspired his insistence upon the existential duty of seeing the goodness in people “despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches.”
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 detachment... as much as we need engagement in our lives... transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear."
“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.”
“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent experiences, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
All of us experience altered states of consciousness all the time, without the aid of mind-altering substances. When blood sugar plummets with hunger, a wholly different moodscape takes hold. Under the monthly tempest of hormones, almost a wholly different person can emerge. Every night we feel the edges of consciousness as we slip into the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. Every day we engage in various delusions and willful blindnesses in order to maintain our self-image, keep our imperfect relationships intact, and guard our deepest hopes from the fearsome fangs of reality.
Given consciousness renders reality what it is, and given this selfsame consciousness is so susceptible to misperceiving reality, it is hardly a wonder that we so easily slip into illusions that appear entirely persuasive and internally coherent — from conspiracy theories to misplaced infatuations to hallucinations. And yet evolution must have had a reason to make us so vulnerable to such deviations from the path of reason — perhaps our misshapen views of reality serve us, perhaps they even save us; perhaps Virginia Woolf was right to write that “illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things.”
Humans share much with other animals — the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example — but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 detachment... as much as we need engagement in our lives... transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear."
“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.”
“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent experiences, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
All of us experience altered states of consciousness all the time, without the aid of mind-altering substances. When blood sugar plummets with hunger, a wholly different moodscape takes hold. Under the monthly tempest of hormones, almost a wholly different person can emerge. Every night we feel the edges of consciousness as we slip into the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. Every day we engage in various delusions and willful blindnesses in order to maintain our self-image, keep our imperfect relationships intact, and guard our deepest hopes from the fearsome fangs of reality.
Given consciousness renders reality what it is, and given this selfsame consciousness is so susceptible to misperceiving reality, it is hardly a wonder that we so easily slip into illusions that appear entirely persuasive and internally coherent — from conspiracy theories to misplaced infatuations to hallucinations. And yet evolution must have had a reason to make us so vulnerable to such deviations from the path of reason — perhaps our misshapen views of reality serve us, perhaps they even save us; perhaps Virginia Woolf was right to write that “illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things.”
Humans share much with other animals — the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example — but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person."
“It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person.”
“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “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.” And yet we are increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves out in various social contexts, lacerating the parchment of our identity in the process. As Courtney Martin observed in her insightful On Being conversation with Parker Palmer and Krista Tippett, “It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places.” Today, as Whitman’s multitudes no longer compose an inner wholeness but are being wrested out of us fragment by fragment, what does it really mean to be a person? And how many types of personhood do we each contain?
In the variedly stimulating 1976 volume The Identities of Persons (public library), philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) considers the seven layers of personhood, rooted in literature but extensible to life. She writes:
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Rorty offers a brief taxonomy of those conceptions before exploring each in turn:
Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable. Presences are descendants of souls; they are evoked rather than presented, to be found in novels by Dostoyevsky, not those by Jane Austen.
Depending on which of these we adopt, Rorty argues, we become radically different entities, with different powers and proprieties, different notions of success and failure, different freedoms and liabilities, different expectations of and relations to one another, and most of all a different orientation toward ourselves in the emotional, intellectual, and social spaces we inhabit.
And yet we ought to be able to interpolate between these various modalities of being:
Worldliness consists of [the] ability to enact, with grace and aplomb, a great variety of roles.
Rorty begins with the character, tracing its origin to Ancient Greek drama:
Since the elements out of which characters are composed are repeatable and their configurations can be reproduced, a society of characters is in principle a society of repeatable and indeed replaceable individuals.
Characters, Rorty points out, don’t have identity crises because they aren’t expected to have a core unity beneath their assemblage of traits. What defines them is which of these traits become manifested, and this warrants the question of social context:
To know what sort of character a person is, is to know what sort of life is best suited to bring out his potentialities and functions… Not all characters are suited to the same sorts of lives: there is no ideal type for them all… If one tries to force the life of a bargainer on the character of a philosopher, one is likely to encounter trouble, sorrow, and the sort of evil that comes from mismatching life and temperament. Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic… Two individuals of the same character will fare differently in different polities, not because their characters will change through their experiences (though different aspects will become dominant or recessive) but simply because a good fit of character and society can conduce to well-being and happiness, while a bad fit produces misery and rejection.
Rorty’s central point about character takes it out of the realm of the literary and the philosophical, and into the realm of our everyday lives, where the perennial dramas of who we are play out:
“To be a character” is to maintain a few qualities, nourish them to excess until they dominate and dictate all others. A character is delineated and thus generally delimited. To “have character” is to have reliable qualities, to hold tightly to them through the temptations to swerve and change. A person of character is neither bribed nor corrupted; he stands fast, is steadfast.
[…]
Because characters are public persons, even their private lives can have universal form, general significance. The dramatic character, writ large, can represent for everyman what only later came to be thought of as the inner life of some; it can portray the myth, the conflicts, reversals and discoveries of each person, each polis.
After characters come figures, which Rorty describes as “characters writ large,” “defined by their place in an unfolding drama.” Figures are allegorical archetypes — rather their being defined by their vocations or social roles, their traits originate in ancient stories. Rorty writes:
A figure is neither formed by nor owns experiences: his figurative identity shapes the significances of the events in his life.
[…]
Individuals who regard themselves as figures watch the unfolding of their lives following the patterns of their archetypes… They form the narratives of their lives and make their choices according to the pattern…
In contrast with the wholly external perspective on characters, the concept of a figure introduces the germ of what will become a distinction between the inner and the outer person. An individual’s perspective on his model, his idealized real figure, is originally externally presented, but it becomes internalized, becomes the internal model of self-representation.
This shift from self-discovery to active choice, to locus of agency, brings us to the person. Rorty writes:
A person’s roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system related to others. The person thus comes to stand behind his roles, to select them and to be judged by his choices and his capacities to act out his personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama.
The idea of a person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of person come together.
Central to the concept of the person — unlike the character and the figure — is the idea of free will, which springs from our capacity for making choices and implies the responsibility for those choices. Rorty explains:
If judgment summarizes a life … then that life must have a unified location. Since they choose from their natures or are chosen by their stories, neither characters nor figures need be equipped with a will, not to mention a free will… The actions of characters and figures do no emerge from the exercise of a single faculty of power: there is no need for a single source of responsibility… Persons are required to unify the capacity for choice with the capacities for action.
This very capacity, Rorty argues, is what defines personhood. But unlike the powers of characters, which exist on a spectrum, personhood is a binary notion — because it arises from responsibility, and in any given instance we are either liable or not, there are no degrees in personhood. The more obvious dark side to this binary conception is the sociopolitical one: Throughout its evolving understanding of what it means to be human, our civilization has systematically treated various classes of people — women, children, people of color — as less-than-persons by denying them basic human rights of choice. But there is also a private psychological downside to our capacity for choice, one that plays out from the inside out rather than the outside in. Rorty writes:
It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person. Here the stage is set for identity crises, for wondering who one really is, behind the multifold variety of actions and roles. And the search for that core person is not a matter of curiosity; it is a search for the principles by which choices are to be made.
Art by Oliver Jeffers from This Moose Belongs to Me, an illustrated parable of the paradox of ownership
One of these principles is the notion of property, which determines the rights and agency of persons, thus transforming them into selves and conferring upon them the status of souls and minds. Rorty writes:
The two strands that were fused in the concept of person diverge again: When we focus on persons as sources of decisions, the ultimate locus of responsibility, the unity of thought and action, we must come to think of them as souls and minds. When we think of them as possessors of rights and powers, we come to think of them as selves. It is not until each of these has been transformed into the concept of individuality that the two strands are woven together again.
[…]
When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self… The quality of an individual self is determined by his qualities: they are his capital, to invest well or foolishly.
In a sentiment that calls to mind young Sylvia Plath’s meditation on free will and what makes us who we are, Rorty considers the identity level of soul and mind:
Because persons are primary agents of principle, their integrity requires freedom; because they are judged liable, their powers must be autonomous. But when this criterion for personhood is carried to its logical extreme, the scope of agency moves inward, away from social dramas, to the choices of the soul, or to the operations of the mind.
[…]
From character as structured dispositions, we come to soul as pure agency, unfathomable, inexpressible.
Judgments of persons are moral; judgments of souls are theological; judgments of selves are economic and political. Societies of persons are constructed to assure the rights of choice and action; they emerge from a contract of agents; societies of selves are also formed to protect and guarantee the rights of their members. But when the members of a society achieve their rights by virtue of their possessions, the protection of rights requires the protection of property, even though in principle everyone is equally entitled to the fruits of his labors and protection under law.
[…]
The concerns of selves are their interests; their obligations are the duties with which they are taxed or charged. The grammar and the semantics of selfhood reveal the possessive forms. Whatever will come to be regarded as crucial property, or the means to it, will be regarded as the focus of rights; the alienation of property becomes an attack on the integrity if not actually the preservation of the self.
Alongside property, the other essential component of the self is the faculty of memory, which, as Oliver Sacks has memorably demonstrated, is the seedbed of what makes us who we are to ourselves. Rorty writes:
The conscious possession of experiences [is] the final criterion of identity. The continuity of the self is established by memory; disputes about the validity of memory reports will hang on whether the claimant had as hers the original experience. Puzzles about identity will be described as puzzles about whether it is possible to transfer, or to alienate memory (that is, the retention of one’s own experience) without destroying the self.
Today, two generations later, this puzzle is all the more puzzling, for it illuminates the central paradox of the singularity movement and its escapist fantasy of somehow decentralizing, downloading, and transferring the self across different corporeal and temporal hosts. Rorty speaks to this indirectly but brilliantly:
There is difficulty in describing the core possessor, the owner of experiences who is not herself any set of them. One can speak of characters as sets of traits without looking for a center; but it is more difficult to think of bundles of properties without an owner, especially when the older idea of the person as an agent and decision-maker is still implicit. It is presumed that the self as an owner is also endowed with capabilities to choose and to act.
Out of this necessity to reconcile the ownership of experience with the capacity for choice arises the level of the individual. Rorty writes:
From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves — the divergence of practice from ideological commitments — comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.
Unlike characters and figures, individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Individuals are indivisible entities… Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. Although in its inception, individuality revives the idea of person, the rights of persons are formulated in society, while the rights of individuals are demanded of society. The contrast between the inner and outer person becomes the contrast between the individual and the social mask, between nature and culture.
A society of individuals is quite different from one composed of selves. Individuals contract to assure the basic rights to the development of moral and intellectual gifts, as well as legal protection of self and property. Because a society of individuals is composed of indivisible autonomous units, from whose natures — their minds and conscience — come the principles of justice, their rights are not property; they cannot be exchanged, bartered. Their rights and their qualities are their very essence, inalienable.
Therein lies Rorty’s most important point — the integrity of our identity requires a locus of agency that is honored by the collective but cultivated in solitude. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s immortal defense of that integrity, Rorty writes:
Being an individual requires having a room of one’s own, not because it is one’s possession, but because only there, in solitude, away from the pressure of others, can one develop the features and styles that differentiate one’s own being from others. Integrity comes to be associated with difference; this idea, always implicit in individuality, of preserving one’s right against the encroachment of others within one’s own society, emerges as dominant… Conscientious consciousness is then the transparent eye that illuminates the substance of social life.
And yet there is a level of personhood that exists even above the individual — one that represents our highest mode of being, beyond the ego’s ambitions and preoccupations — the level of presence:
Presences [are] the return of the unchartable soul… They are a mode of attending, being present to [one’s] experiences, without dominating or controlling them.
[…]
Understanding other conceptions of persons puts one on the way of being them; but understanding presences — if indeed there is understanding of them to be had — does not put one any closer to being one. It cannot be achieved by imitation, willing, practice, or a good education. It is a mode of identity invented precisely to go beyond of achievement and willfulness.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person."
“It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person.”
“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “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.” And yet we are increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves out in various social contexts, lacerating the parchment of our identity in the process. As Courtney Martin observed in her insightful On Being conversation with Parker Palmer and Krista Tippett, “It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places.” Today, as Whitman’s multitudes no longer compose an inner wholeness but are being wrested out of us fragment by fragment, what does it really mean to be a person? And how many types of personhood do we each contain?
In the variedly stimulating 1976 volume The Identities of Persons (public library), philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) considers the seven layers of personhood, rooted in literature but extensible to life. She writes:
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Rorty offers a brief taxonomy of those conceptions before exploring each in turn:
Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable. Presences are descendants of souls; they are evoked rather than presented, to be found in novels by Dostoyevsky, not those by Jane Austen.
Depending on which of these we adopt, Rorty argues, we become radically different entities, with different powers and proprieties, different notions of success and failure, different freedoms and liabilities, different expectations of and relations to one another, and most of all a different orientation toward ourselves in the emotional, intellectual, and social spaces we inhabit.
And yet we ought to be able to interpolate between these various modalities of being:
Worldliness consists of [the] ability to enact, with grace and aplomb, a great variety of roles.
Rorty begins with the character, tracing its origin to Ancient Greek drama:
Since the elements out of which characters are composed are repeatable and their configurations can be reproduced, a society of characters is in principle a society of repeatable and indeed replaceable individuals.
Characters, Rorty points out, don’t have identity crises because they aren’t expected to have a core unity beneath their assemblage of traits. What defines them is which of these traits become manifested, and this warrants the question of social context:
To know what sort of character a person is, is to know what sort of life is best suited to bring out his potentialities and functions… Not all characters are suited to the same sorts of lives: there is no ideal type for them all… If one tries to force the life of a bargainer on the character of a philosopher, one is likely to encounter trouble, sorrow, and the sort of evil that comes from mismatching life and temperament. Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic… Two individuals of the same character will fare differently in different polities, not because their characters will change through their experiences (though different aspects will become dominant or recessive) but simply because a good fit of character and society can conduce to well-being and happiness, while a bad fit produces misery and rejection.
Rorty’s central point about character takes it out of the realm of the literary and the philosophical, and into the realm of our everyday lives, where the perennial dramas of who we are play out:
“To be a character” is to maintain a few qualities, nourish them to excess until they dominate and dictate all others. A character is delineated and thus generally delimited. To “have character” is to have reliable qualities, to hold tightly to them through the temptations to swerve and change. A person of character is neither bribed nor corrupted; he stands fast, is steadfast.
[…]
Because characters are public persons, even their private lives can have universal form, general significance. The dramatic character, writ large, can represent for everyman what only later came to be thought of as the inner life of some; it can portray the myth, the conflicts, reversals and discoveries of each person, each polis.
After characters come figures, which Rorty describes as “characters writ large,” “defined by their place in an unfolding drama.” Figures are allegorical archetypes — rather their being defined by their vocations or social roles, their traits originate in ancient stories. Rorty writes:
A figure is neither formed by nor owns experiences: his figurative identity shapes the significances of the events in his life.
[…]
Individuals who regard themselves as figures watch the unfolding of their lives following the patterns of their archetypes… They form the narratives of their lives and make their choices according to the pattern…
In contrast with the wholly external perspective on characters, the concept of a figure introduces the germ of what will become a distinction between the inner and the outer person. An individual’s perspective on his model, his idealized real figure, is originally externally presented, but it becomes internalized, becomes the internal model of self-representation.
This shift from self-discovery to active choice, to locus of agency, brings us to the person. Rorty writes:
A person’s roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system related to others. The person thus comes to stand behind his roles, to select them and to be judged by his choices and his capacities to act out his personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama.
The idea of a person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of person come together.
Central to the concept of the person — unlike the character and the figure — is the idea of free will, which springs from our capacity for making choices and implies the responsibility for those choices. Rorty explains:
If judgment summarizes a life … then that life must have a unified location. Since they choose from their natures or are chosen by their stories, neither characters nor figures need be equipped with a will, not to mention a free will… The actions of characters and figures do no emerge from the exercise of a single faculty of power: there is no need for a single source of responsibility… Persons are required to unify the capacity for choice with the capacities for action.
This very capacity, Rorty argues, is what defines personhood. But unlike the powers of characters, which exist on a spectrum, personhood is a binary notion — because it arises from responsibility, and in any given instance we are either liable or not, there are no degrees in personhood. The more obvious dark side to this binary conception is the sociopolitical one: Throughout its evolving understanding of what it means to be human, our civilization has systematically treated various classes of people — women, children, people of color — as less-than-persons by denying them basic human rights of choice. But there is also a private psychological downside to our capacity for choice, one that plays out from the inside out rather than the outside in. Rorty writes:
It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person. Here the stage is set for identity crises, for wondering who one really is, behind the multifold variety of actions and roles. And the search for that core person is not a matter of curiosity; it is a search for the principles by which choices are to be made.
Art by Oliver Jeffers from This Moose Belongs to Me, an illustrated parable of the paradox of ownership
One of these principles is the notion of property, which determines the rights and agency of persons, thus transforming them into selves and conferring upon them the status of souls and minds. Rorty writes:
The two strands that were fused in the concept of person diverge again: When we focus on persons as sources of decisions, the ultimate locus of responsibility, the unity of thought and action, we must come to think of them as souls and minds. When we think of them as possessors of rights and powers, we come to think of them as selves. It is not until each of these has been transformed into the concept of individuality that the two strands are woven together again.
[…]
When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self… The quality of an individual self is determined by his qualities: they are his capital, to invest well or foolishly.
In a sentiment that calls to mind young Sylvia Plath’s meditation on free will and what makes us who we are, Rorty considers the identity level of soul and mind:
Because persons are primary agents of principle, their integrity requires freedom; because they are judged liable, their powers must be autonomous. But when this criterion for personhood is carried to its logical extreme, the scope of agency moves inward, away from social dramas, to the choices of the soul, or to the operations of the mind.
[…]
From character as structured dispositions, we come to soul as pure agency, unfathomable, inexpressible.
Judgments of persons are moral; judgments of souls are theological; judgments of selves are economic and political. Societies of persons are constructed to assure the rights of choice and action; they emerge from a contract of agents; societies of selves are also formed to protect and guarantee the rights of their members. But when the members of a society achieve their rights by virtue of their possessions, the protection of rights requires the protection of property, even though in principle everyone is equally entitled to the fruits of his labors and protection under law.
[…]
The concerns of selves are their interests; their obligations are the duties with which they are taxed or charged. The grammar and the semantics of selfhood reveal the possessive forms. Whatever will come to be regarded as crucial property, or the means to it, will be regarded as the focus of rights; the alienation of property becomes an attack on the integrity if not actually the preservation of the self.
Alongside property, the other essential component of the self is the faculty of memory, which, as Oliver Sacks has memorably demonstrated, is the seedbed of what makes us who we are to ourselves. Rorty writes:
The conscious possession of experiences [is] the final criterion of identity. The continuity of the self is established by memory; disputes about the validity of memory reports will hang on whether the claimant had as hers the original experience. Puzzles about identity will be described as puzzles about whether it is possible to transfer, or to alienate memory (that is, the retention of one’s own experience) without destroying the self.
Today, two generations later, this puzzle is all the more puzzling, for it illuminates the central paradox of the singularity movement and its escapist fantasy of somehow decentralizing, downloading, and transferring the self across different corporeal and temporal hosts. Rorty speaks to this indirectly but brilliantly:
There is difficulty in describing the core possessor, the owner of experiences who is not herself any set of them. One can speak of characters as sets of traits without looking for a center; but it is more difficult to think of bundles of properties without an owner, especially when the older idea of the person as an agent and decision-maker is still implicit. It is presumed that the self as an owner is also endowed with capabilities to choose and to act.
Out of this necessity to reconcile the ownership of experience with the capacity for choice arises the level of the individual. Rorty writes:
From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves — the divergence of practice from ideological commitments — comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.
Unlike characters and figures, individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Individuals are indivisible entities… Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. Although in its inception, individuality revives the idea of person, the rights of persons are formulated in society, while the rights of individuals are demanded of society. The contrast between the inner and outer person becomes the contrast between the individual and the social mask, between nature and culture.
A society of individuals is quite different from one composed of selves. Individuals contract to assure the basic rights to the development of moral and intellectual gifts, as well as legal protection of self and property. Because a society of individuals is composed of indivisible autonomous units, from whose natures — their minds and conscience — come the principles of justice, their rights are not property; they cannot be exchanged, bartered. Their rights and their qualities are their very essence, inalienable.
Therein lies Rorty’s most important point — the integrity of our identity requires a locus of agency that is honored by the collective but cultivated in solitude. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s immortal defense of that integrity, Rorty writes:
Being an individual requires having a room of one’s own, not because it is one’s possession, but because only there, in solitude, away from the pressure of others, can one develop the features and styles that differentiate one’s own being from others. Integrity comes to be associated with difference; this idea, always implicit in individuality, of preserving one’s right against the encroachment of others within one’s own society, emerges as dominant… Conscientious consciousness is then the transparent eye that illuminates the substance of social life.
And yet there is a level of personhood that exists even above the individual — one that represents our highest mode of being, beyond the ego’s ambitions and preoccupations — the level of presence:
Presences [are] the return of the unchartable soul… They are a mode of attending, being present to [one’s] experiences, without dominating or controlling them.
[…]
Understanding other conceptions of persons puts one on the way of being them; but understanding presences — if indeed there is understanding of them to be had — does not put one any closer to being one. It cannot be achieved by imitation, willing, practice, or a good education. It is a mode of identity invented precisely to go beyond of achievement and willfulness.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are...
The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “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,” he wrote. Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time — knew this: “It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” she wrote as she approached her untimely death.
An epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne’s unnerving assertion that the subject, the substance, the very purpose of philosophy is to learn to die, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.
Samurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
Born to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era’s life expectancy twofold, Tsunetomo grew up so sickly that the family doctor deemed him unlikely to live past twenty. And yet despite his precocious proximity to death — or perhaps precisely because of it — he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo came to see that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Sensing that strength springs from sinew and spirit entwined, he apprenticed with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took work as a scribe, fell under the spell of poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.
Anchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves — is the idea that death is the beating heart of bushido, the Way of the warrior, and yet we are wired to turn away from the very thing that makes us strong, constantly caging ourselves in denial. He writes:
We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.
He offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease… And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
Our difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source — a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,” he writes:
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are...
The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “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,” he wrote. Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time — knew this: “It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” she wrote as she approached her untimely death.
An epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne’s unnerving assertion that the subject, the substance, the very purpose of philosophy is to learn to die, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.
Samurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
Born to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era’s life expectancy twofold, Tsunetomo grew up so sickly that the family doctor deemed him unlikely to live past twenty. And yet despite his precocious proximity to death — or perhaps precisely because of it — he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo came to see that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Sensing that strength springs from sinew and spirit entwined, he apprenticed with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took work as a scribe, fell under the spell of poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.
Anchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves — is the idea that death is the beating heart of bushido, the Way of the warrior, and yet we are wired to turn away from the very thing that makes us strong, constantly caging ourselves in denial. He writes:
We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.
He offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease… And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
Our difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source — a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,” he writes:
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
"My life... runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment."
“My life… runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.”
To be alive is to marvel — at least occasionally, at least with glimmers of some deep intuitive wonderment — at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are as we half-stride, half-stumble down the improbable paths that lead us back to ourselves. My own life was shaped by one largely impulsive choice at age thirteen, and most of us can identify points at which we could’ve pivoted into a wholly different direction — to move across the continent or build a home here, to leave the tempestuous lover or to stay, to wait for another promotion or quit the corporate day job and make art. Even the seemingly trivial choices can butterfly enormous ripples of which we may remain wholly unwitting — we’ll never know the exact misfortunes we’ve avoided by going down this street and not that, nor the exact magnitude of our unbidden graces.
Perhaps our most acute awareness of the lacuna between the one life we do have and all the lives we could have had comes in the grips of our fear of missing out — those sudden and disorienting illuminations in which we recognize that parallel possibilities exist alongside our present choices. “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live,” wrote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his elegant case for the value of our unlived lives. “But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”
No one has captured that ultimate existential awareness more beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than the trailblazing French existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her autobiography, All Said and Done (public library).
Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 (Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson)
From the fortunate rostrum of her own long life, Beauvoir reflects on this constellation of chance and choice:
Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement — why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?
With an eye to the element of chance and its myriad manifestations, she adds:
The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.
But the most curious part of this perplexity, Beauvoir notes, is that despite the larger cosmic accident of all life and the chance nature of our particular lives within it, we experience ourselves and our existence as non-accidental — a disconnect that fringes on the free will paradox. She writes:
Tossed into the world, I have been subjected to its laws and its contingencies, ruled by wills other than my own, by circumstance and by history: it is therefore reasonable for me to feel that I am myself contingent. What staggers me is that at the same time I am not contingent. If I had not been born no question would have arisen: I have to take the fact that I do exist as my starting point. To be sure, the future of the woman I have been may turn me into someone other than myself. But in that case it would be this other woman who would be asking herself who she was. For the person who says “Here am I” there is no other coexisting possibility. Yet this necessary coincidence of the subject and his history is not enough to do away with my perplexity. My life: it is both intimately known and remote; it defines me and yet I stand outside it.
Like Einstein’s universe, it is both boundless and finite. Boundless: it runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.
[…]
And yet life is also a finite reality. It possesses an inner heart, a centre of interiorization, a me which asserts that it is always the same throughout the whole course. A life is set within a given space of time; it has a beginning and an end; it evolves in given places, always retaining the same roots and spinning itself an unchangeable past whose opening toward the future is limited. It is impossible to grasp and define a life as one can grasp and define a thing, since a life is “an unsummed whole,” as Sartre puts it, a detotalized totality, and therefore it has no being. But one can ask certain questions about it.
Of course, as De Beauvoir’s American peer and contemporary Susanne Langer has memorably pointed out, our questions invariably shape our answers. But to this central question of whether and to what degree we are contingent upon chance, De Beauvoir offers an answer that radiates the ultimate antidote to regret:
Chance … has a distinct meaning for me. I do not know where I might have been led by the paths that, as I look back, I think I might have taken but that in fact I did not take. What is certain is that I am satisfied with my fate and that I should not want it changed in any way at all. So I look upon these factors that helped me to fulfill it as so many fortunate strokes of chance.
Simone de Beauvoir, 1952 (Photograph: Gisèle Freund)
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
"My life... runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment."
“My life… runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.”
To be alive is to marvel — at least occasionally, at least with glimmers of some deep intuitive wonderment — at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are as we half-stride, half-stumble down the improbable paths that lead us back to ourselves. My own life was shaped by one largely impulsive choice at age thirteen, and most of us can identify points at which we could’ve pivoted into a wholly different direction — to move across the continent or build a home here, to leave the tempestuous lover or to stay, to wait for another promotion or quit the corporate day job and make art. Even the seemingly trivial choices can butterfly enormous ripples of which we may remain wholly unwitting — we’ll never know the exact misfortunes we’ve avoided by going down this street and not that, nor the exact magnitude of our unbidden graces.
Perhaps our most acute awareness of the lacuna between the one life we do have and all the lives we could have had comes in the grips of our fear of missing out — those sudden and disorienting illuminations in which we recognize that parallel possibilities exist alongside our present choices. “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live,” wrote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his elegant case for the value of our unlived lives. “But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”
No one has captured that ultimate existential awareness more beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than the trailblazing French existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her autobiography, All Said and Done (public library).
Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 (Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson)
From the fortunate rostrum of her own long life, Beauvoir reflects on this constellation of chance and choice:
Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement — why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?
With an eye to the element of chance and its myriad manifestations, she adds:
The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.
But the most curious part of this perplexity, Beauvoir notes, is that despite the larger cosmic accident of all life and the chance nature of our particular lives within it, we experience ourselves and our existence as non-accidental — a disconnect that fringes on the free will paradox. She writes:
Tossed into the world, I have been subjected to its laws and its contingencies, ruled by wills other than my own, by circumstance and by history: it is therefore reasonable for me to feel that I am myself contingent. What staggers me is that at the same time I am not contingent. If I had not been born no question would have arisen: I have to take the fact that I do exist as my starting point. To be sure, the future of the woman I have been may turn me into someone other than myself. But in that case it would be this other woman who would be asking herself who she was. For the person who says “Here am I” there is no other coexisting possibility. Yet this necessary coincidence of the subject and his history is not enough to do away with my perplexity. My life: it is both intimately known and remote; it defines me and yet I stand outside it.
Like Einstein’s universe, it is both boundless and finite. Boundless: it runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.
[…]
And yet life is also a finite reality. It possesses an inner heart, a centre of interiorization, a me which asserts that it is always the same throughout the whole course. A life is set within a given space of time; it has a beginning and an end; it evolves in given places, always retaining the same roots and spinning itself an unchangeable past whose opening toward the future is limited. It is impossible to grasp and define a life as one can grasp and define a thing, since a life is “an unsummed whole,” as Sartre puts it, a detotalized totality, and therefore it has no being. But one can ask certain questions about it.
Of course, as De Beauvoir’s American peer and contemporary Susanne Langer has memorably pointed out, our questions invariably shape our answers. But to this central question of whether and to what degree we are contingent upon chance, De Beauvoir offers an answer that radiates the ultimate antidote to regret:
Chance … has a distinct meaning for me. I do not know where I might have been led by the paths that, as I look back, I think I might have taken but that in fact I did not take. What is certain is that I am satisfied with my fate and that I should not want it changed in any way at all. So I look upon these factors that helped me to fulfill it as so many fortunate strokes of chance.
Simone de Beauvoir, 1952 (Photograph: Gisèle Freund)
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity."
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.”
It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.
With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity."
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.”
It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.
With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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."
“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.)
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.)
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.
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’Donohue
In 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.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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."
“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.)
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.)
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.
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’Donohue
In 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.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation."
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (September 24, 1794–January 25, 1871) was eleven when her mother died. Just before her eighteenth birthday, she set out for Paris from her home in rural France, on foot — a walk of more than 300 kilometers along the vector of her dream to become a dressmaker. On the way, the cousin assigned as her travel guardian assaulted her and fled with her identity papers. Jeanne made her way to a convent and, as soon as she managed to have new travel documents made by local police, kept going. But by the time she made it to Paris, the position she had been promised was already taken. The only job she could secure was as a seamstress’s assistant.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power
Four years and thousands of dresses later, Jeanne was tasked with outfitting a duchess for a royal wedding. At the ceremony, she met and fell in love with an English merchant, married him, and moved with him to the harbor city of Messina on the island of Sicily. There, she immersed herself in passionate reading about geology, archeology, and natural history — the closest a woman could get to a scientific education at the time — and set out to study the island’s ecosystem.
Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, she fell in love with one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small sepia-like octopus Argonauta argo, known as paper nautilus for the thin, intricately corrugated shell of its females and the sail-like membranes protruding from it like a pair of bunny ears.
Argonauta argo by Frederick Nodder, 1793. (Available as a print and as a bath mat, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
The argonaut had fascinated naturalists since Aristotle with the mystery of its spiral shell.
They wondered whether the animal made it, or, like the hermit crab, inherited as a hand-me-down.
They wondered why only the females had a shell, why its shape was so unlike that of the animal body it housed, and why the dweller could completely detach from the shell like no other mollusk did, yet never abandoned it.
They wondered how the shell managed to quadruple in size during the five-month reproductive period — an astonishing feat of on-demand engineering seen nowhere else in the animal kingdom.
In the memoir of her researches, Jeanne Villepreux-Power wrote:
Having for several years devoted to the natural sciences the hours that remained to me free from my domestic affairs, while I was classifying some marine objects for my study, the octopus of the Argonauta transfixed my attention above the rest, because naturalists have been of such various opinions about this mollusk.
Argonauta argo from an Italian natural history book, 1791. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Observing argonauts in the wild is incredibly difficult — the shy, skittish creatures flee the surface and plunge into the depths as soon as they feel they are being approached, puffing a cloud of ink between themselves and their perceived predator, even if she is only a scientist:
When the air is serene, the sea calm, and she believes herself unobserved, the Argonauta adorns herself with her beauties; but I had to be prudent enough to enjoy her rich colors and graceful pose, for this animal is very suspicious, and as soon as it perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees to the bottom of the cage or the sea, reemerging to the surface only when it thinks it is safe from all danger. It is at this time that we can observe its movements and its habits.
And so, for ten years, Jeanne Villepreux-Power made it her “duty” to do “serious research” on the most contested aspects of the physiology, morphology, reproduction, and habits of these tender cephalopods. A skilled self-taught artist, she made her own drawing of what she saw.
Argonauta argo by Jeanne Villepreux-Power, 1839.
Unlike other naturalists, who had studied preserved specimens, Jeanne realized that she could only discover the true origin of the shell if she observed living creatures. To bypass the evolution-mounted obstacle of their extreme shyness, she designed and constructed one of the world’s first offshore research stations — a system of immense cages she anchored off the coast of Sicily, complete with observation windows through which she could study the argonauts undisturbed. Every day, she prepared food for them, rowed her boat to the cages in her long skirts, and knelt at the platform, observing for hours on end.
But long skirts and long hours in cold water make not for a felicitous scientist. And so, in order to transfer her observations and experiments ashore, Jeanne Villepreux-Power pioneered the aquarium.
Her home became a marine biology lab, stacked with vast tanks, which she populated with living argonauts. Conducting experiment after experiment and observation after observation, magnifying eggs and shell fragments under her microscope, she set about illuminating the mysterious living realities of these otherworldly earthlings, following her intuition that — contrary to what her male peers believed — the females did make their own shells. She wrote:
I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.
In a series of groundbreaking experiments she began in 1833 — the final year of her thirties — the seamstress-turned-scientist solved the ancient nested mysteries of whether (yes), how (through a marvel of biochemistry), and when (within days of hatching) the argonaut makes its spiral home: With her elegant empiricism, Jeanne Villepreux-Power managed to “demonstrate, by unequivocal proofs, that the Argonauta octopus is the builder of its shell.”
She started with the obvious yet radical insight that you cannot understand the living morphology of a creature by studying dead specimens — to find out when and how the argonaut gets to have a shell, you must observe it from birth. And so she acquired three pregnant females, each housing thousands of eggs in its enlarged shell, and watched them hatch — tiny baby octopuses, naked in their gelatinous sacs. Every six hours, she visited the babies to observe them closely for three continuous hours.
One day, she carefully removed a nine-millimeter baby octopus from the mother and, upon examining it, noticed that it was in a position of self-embrace, its membranous arms enfolded around its sac, the end of which the baby had begun to fold into the shape of a spire. Not wishing to disturb the hatchling, she put it back under the mother and returned six hours later to examine it again. To her astonishment, the tiny octopus had already begun building its shell out of a thin film, following the geometry of the mother’s. Within hours, the thin film had begun to thicken into the signature furrows of the argonaut shell — here was living proof that the argonaut was the maker of its own shell, beginning almost at birth.
Extended morphology of a female argonaut with egg case by Giuseppe Saverio Poli. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Jeanne made a small puncture in the shell of an adult female to see whether and how the animal would repair itself, and what that might reveal about its intelligence, in an era when science was yet to recognize the consciousness of non-human animals. She watched in marvel as the octopus protruded its front arms and, sweeping the silvery membranes previously thought to function as sails over the puncture like a windshield wiper, seal it back into cohesion with a glutenous substance, the chemical composition of which she analyzed and determined to be identical to the calcium carbonate of the original shell. The restored part, she observed, was more robust than the shell itself, “somewhat bumpy, puffy,” not following the regular furrows of the shell but corrugating sideways, almost perpendicularly to them — a sort of scar, the mollusk equivalent of what is known as “proud flesh” in horses.
In a wildly imaginative twist of the experiment, she decided to see whether the argonaut could repair its shell using not its own substance but spare parts, so to speak. She broke off a small piece of an adult’s shell, but this time she placed in the tank next to it fragments from other shells. To her astonishment, the argonaut rushed to the pieces and began feeling them out with its arms, searching for the suitable puzzle shape, then applied it to its own shell and, once again waving the membranes over it, began the work of welding, struggling to orient the furrows of the borrowed piece parallel to those of its existing shell.
She spent hours bent over the cage, watching this staggering feat of multiple intelligences. Naturalists before her, working only with dead specimens and theoretical conjecture, had declared this impossible. But after repeating her experiment for five years and obtaining the same result over and over, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated that the octopus is indeed this planet’s patron saint of the possible.
Since women were excluded from the scientific establishment, unable to attend universities or present at learned societies, her research traveled into the world by proxy. The week photography was born in 1839, Sir Richard Owen — England’s preeminent scientists in the era before Charles Darwin, with whom she had been in regular correspondence throughout her experiments — read one of her letters and presented her findings before the London Zoological Society. Her research was a revelation. Soon, it was being published in English, French, and German, and circulated widely across Europe. By the end of her long life, Jeanne Villepreux-Power belonged to more than a dozen scientific societies. Her research not only illuminated an enduring mystery about the physiology and biology of a particular species of octopus, but, through her experiments on shell repair, laid the groundwork for the study of octopus intelligence, which has forever changed our understanding of consciousness itself.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation."
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (September 24, 1794–January 25, 1871) was eleven when her mother died. Just before her eighteenth birthday, she set out for Paris from her home in rural France, on foot — a walk of more than 300 kilometers along the vector of her dream to become a dressmaker. On the way, the cousin assigned as her travel guardian assaulted her and fled with her identity papers. Jeanne made her way to a convent and, as soon as she managed to have new travel documents made by local police, kept going. But by the time she made it to Paris, the position she had been promised was already taken. The only job she could secure was as a seamstress’s assistant.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power
Four years and thousands of dresses later, Jeanne was tasked with outfitting a duchess for a royal wedding. At the ceremony, she met and fell in love with an English merchant, married him, and moved with him to the harbor city of Messina on the island of Sicily. There, she immersed herself in passionate reading about geology, archeology, and natural history — the closest a woman could get to a scientific education at the time — and set out to study the island’s ecosystem.
Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, she fell in love with one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small sepia-like octopus Argonauta argo, known as paper nautilus for the thin, intricately corrugated shell of its females and the sail-like membranes protruding from it like a pair of bunny ears.
Argonauta argo by Frederick Nodder, 1793. (Available as a print and as a bath mat, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
The argonaut had fascinated naturalists since Aristotle with the mystery of its spiral shell.
They wondered whether the animal made it, or, like the hermit crab, inherited as a hand-me-down.
They wondered why only the females had a shell, why its shape was so unlike that of the animal body it housed, and why the dweller could completely detach from the shell like no other mollusk did, yet never abandoned it.
They wondered how the shell managed to quadruple in size during the five-month reproductive period — an astonishing feat of on-demand engineering seen nowhere else in the animal kingdom.
In the memoir of her researches, Jeanne Villepreux-Power wrote:
Having for several years devoted to the natural sciences the hours that remained to me free from my domestic affairs, while I was classifying some marine objects for my study, the octopus of the Argonauta transfixed my attention above the rest, because naturalists have been of such various opinions about this mollusk.
Argonauta argo from an Italian natural history book, 1791. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Observing argonauts in the wild is incredibly difficult — the shy, skittish creatures flee the surface and plunge into the depths as soon as they feel they are being approached, puffing a cloud of ink between themselves and their perceived predator, even if she is only a scientist:
When the air is serene, the sea calm, and she believes herself unobserved, the Argonauta adorns herself with her beauties; but I had to be prudent enough to enjoy her rich colors and graceful pose, for this animal is very suspicious, and as soon as it perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees to the bottom of the cage or the sea, reemerging to the surface only when it thinks it is safe from all danger. It is at this time that we can observe its movements and its habits.
And so, for ten years, Jeanne Villepreux-Power made it her “duty” to do “serious research” on the most contested aspects of the physiology, morphology, reproduction, and habits of these tender cephalopods. A skilled self-taught artist, she made her own drawing of what she saw.
Argonauta argo by Jeanne Villepreux-Power, 1839.
Unlike other naturalists, who had studied preserved specimens, Jeanne realized that she could only discover the true origin of the shell if she observed living creatures. To bypass the evolution-mounted obstacle of their extreme shyness, she designed and constructed one of the world’s first offshore research stations — a system of immense cages she anchored off the coast of Sicily, complete with observation windows through which she could study the argonauts undisturbed. Every day, she prepared food for them, rowed her boat to the cages in her long skirts, and knelt at the platform, observing for hours on end.
But long skirts and long hours in cold water make not for a felicitous scientist. And so, in order to transfer her observations and experiments ashore, Jeanne Villepreux-Power pioneered the aquarium.
Her home became a marine biology lab, stacked with vast tanks, which she populated with living argonauts. Conducting experiment after experiment and observation after observation, magnifying eggs and shell fragments under her microscope, she set about illuminating the mysterious living realities of these otherworldly earthlings, following her intuition that — contrary to what her male peers believed — the females did make their own shells. She wrote:
I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.
In a series of groundbreaking experiments she began in 1833 — the final year of her thirties — the seamstress-turned-scientist solved the ancient nested mysteries of whether (yes), how (through a marvel of biochemistry), and when (within days of hatching) the argonaut makes its spiral home: With her elegant empiricism, Jeanne Villepreux-Power managed to “demonstrate, by unequivocal proofs, that the Argonauta octopus is the builder of its shell.”
She started with the obvious yet radical insight that you cannot understand the living morphology of a creature by studying dead specimens — to find out when and how the argonaut gets to have a shell, you must observe it from birth. And so she acquired three pregnant females, each housing thousands of eggs in its enlarged shell, and watched them hatch — tiny baby octopuses, naked in their gelatinous sacs. Every six hours, she visited the babies to observe them closely for three continuous hours.
One day, she carefully removed a nine-millimeter baby octopus from the mother and, upon examining it, noticed that it was in a position of self-embrace, its membranous arms enfolded around its sac, the end of which the baby had begun to fold into the shape of a spire. Not wishing to disturb the hatchling, she put it back under the mother and returned six hours later to examine it again. To her astonishment, the tiny octopus had already begun building its shell out of a thin film, following the geometry of the mother’s. Within hours, the thin film had begun to thicken into the signature furrows of the argonaut shell — here was living proof that the argonaut was the maker of its own shell, beginning almost at birth.
Extended morphology of a female argonaut with egg case by Giuseppe Saverio Poli. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Jeanne made a small puncture in the shell of an adult female to see whether and how the animal would repair itself, and what that might reveal about its intelligence, in an era when science was yet to recognize the consciousness of non-human animals. She watched in marvel as the octopus protruded its front arms and, sweeping the silvery membranes previously thought to function as sails over the puncture like a windshield wiper, seal it back into cohesion with a glutenous substance, the chemical composition of which she analyzed and determined to be identical to the calcium carbonate of the original shell. The restored part, she observed, was more robust than the shell itself, “somewhat bumpy, puffy,” not following the regular furrows of the shell but corrugating sideways, almost perpendicularly to them — a sort of scar, the mollusk equivalent of what is known as “proud flesh” in horses.
In a wildly imaginative twist of the experiment, she decided to see whether the argonaut could repair its shell using not its own substance but spare parts, so to speak. She broke off a small piece of an adult’s shell, but this time she placed in the tank next to it fragments from other shells. To her astonishment, the argonaut rushed to the pieces and began feeling them out with its arms, searching for the suitable puzzle shape, then applied it to its own shell and, once again waving the membranes over it, began the work of welding, struggling to orient the furrows of the borrowed piece parallel to those of its existing shell.
She spent hours bent over the cage, watching this staggering feat of multiple intelligences. Naturalists before her, working only with dead specimens and theoretical conjecture, had declared this impossible. But after repeating her experiment for five years and obtaining the same result over and over, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated that the octopus is indeed this planet’s patron saint of the possible.
Since women were excluded from the scientific establishment, unable to attend universities or present at learned societies, her research traveled into the world by proxy. The week photography was born in 1839, Sir Richard Owen — England’s preeminent scientists in the era before Charles Darwin, with whom she had been in regular correspondence throughout her experiments — read one of her letters and presented her findings before the London Zoological Society. Her research was a revelation. Soon, it was being published in English, French, and German, and circulated widely across Europe. By the end of her long life, Jeanne Villepreux-Power belonged to more than a dozen scientific societies. Her research not only illuminated an enduring mystery about the physiology and biology of a particular species of octopus, but, through her experiments on shell repair, laid the groundwork for the study of octopus intelligence, which has forever changed our understanding of consciousness itself.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
"Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world."
“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 Cave
A 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.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
"Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world."
“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 Cave
A 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.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).
Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.
Dylan Thomas, early 1940s
In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.
When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.
Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend:
It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.
In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius:
I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.
The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas:
Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.
“Do not go gentle into that good night” remains, indeed, Thomas’s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive — both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas’s life.
By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques — work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.
At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind’s eye.
In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).
Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.
Dylan Thomas, early 1940s
In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.
When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.
Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend:
It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.
In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius:
I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.
The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas:
Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.
“Do not go gentle into that good night” remains, indeed, Thomas’s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive — both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas’s life.
By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques — work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.
At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind’s eye.
In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the...
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.
Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.
The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.
In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:
All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”
Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:
The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.
A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:
Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.
In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.
Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:
My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.
[…]
I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the...
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.
Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.
The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.
In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:
All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”
Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:
The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.
A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:
Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.
In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.
Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:
My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.
[…]
I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the...
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring.
In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.
Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some unrecorded heartbreak in her volcanic relationship with Susan, the first attack of epilepsy — but the most intriguing theory came nearly a century after the poet encrypted these words.
In 1951, after years of research and travel to various archives, the scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a wholly novel candidate for the “terror” of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon — a newly widowed young woman Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell into an intense romantic and possibly physical affair with the enticing newcomer before Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Emily would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry.
Their story is a mosaic assembled from various surviving documents, as direct as Emily’s letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate’s favorite books.
Unauthenticated daguerreotype of (most scholars believe) Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Anthon
In the late winter of 1859, Kate descended a sleigh in her fashionable black hat and widow’s veil in front of her former classmate’s home in Amherst. Almost immediately, Susan introduced her to the beloved auburn-haired friend who lived across the hedge in the brick house painted deep red and who had been hearing of her for nearly a decade. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met the tall, handsome woman with the penetrating dark eyes, musical voice, and lively passion for literature and astronomy, she was instantly entranced.
During the three weeks of Kate’s first stay in Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, became inseparable. They took long walks with Emily’s dog, Carlo, read Aurora Leigh aloud to each other, and spent evenings at the piano as Emily improvised — “weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration,” Kate would remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her — “Goliath,” the petite poet would call her.
When Kate left to go home, Emily beckoned her for another visit to Amherst:
I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don’t wait till I land, for I’m going ashore on the other side.
Emily’s early letters to Kate pulsate with electricity. Writing weeks after they first met, she tries to disguise with playfulness the push-and-pull of irrepressible, frustrated longing in the code language of botany that was her first poetic tongue:
I never missed a Kate before. . . . Sweet at my door this March night another Candidate — Go Home! We don’t like Katies here! — Stay! My heart votes for you, and what am I indeed to dispute her ballot –? What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the Sun? — When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute?… Will you still come?… Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear — but what it lacks in size, it gains in fadelessness, — Many can boast a hollyhock, but few can bear a rose! … So I rise, wearing her — so I sleep, holding, — Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower. —
In the late winter of 1860, they spent a night together in Emily’s bedroom — unrecorded, inarticulable, except perhaps in verse:
Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie —
When, stirring, for Belief’s delight,
My Bride had slipped away —
If ’twas a Dream — made solid — just
The Heaven to confirm —
Or if Myself were dreamed of Her —
The power to presume —
Several weeks after that momentous night, Emily would channel this precious perishability in a letter to Kate:
Finding is slow, facilities for losing so frequent, in a world like this, I hold with extreme caution. A prudence so astute may seem unnecessary, but plenty moves those most, dear, who have been in want… Were you ever poor? I have been a Beggar.
Whatever took place between them, they never addressed it overtly — it is always impossible to articulate the possibility between two people, but especially in a time and place that confined the possible to such narrow parameters for permissible love. Feeling the impossibility of it all, Emily shuddered with anticipatory loss:
Kate, Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phantom niche — I touch your hand — my cheek your cheek — I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred?… There is a subject, dear, on which we never touch.
Little is known of Kate’s side of the experience. None of her letters to Emily survive. (The poet had instructed her sister that all letters be burned after her death — a request which Lavinia Dickinson promptly obliged before discovering the trove of poems that made her realize her sister’s correspondence might have immense literary value.) But Kate — who signed many of her surviving letters to other correspondents “Thomas” or “Tommy” — did have an unambiguous and lifelong proclivity for romantic attachment to women, culminating later in life with a longtime relationship with a young Englishwoman.
Perhaps at twenty-eight, she was simply not ready to so radically dismantle the superstructure of her life as she knew it. In April 1861, she severed the relationship with Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the devastation was complete and lifelong. Many years later, Emily would write to Higginson:
If ever you lost a friend… you remember you could not begin again because there was no world —
A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.
In the immediacy of the loss, she interpolated between hope and despair, as we all do when discomposed by a sudden abandonment. A month after her “terror,” which might just be her painful acceptance that Kate was gone, her friend Samuel Bowles — whose newspaper had printed one of the only four poems published in her lifetime — came to Amherst. She refused to see him. Most of her letters from that period were burned, but Samuel was one of her most intimate friends — it is likely that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. “We tell a Hurt to cool it,” she would write in a poem. Among his own letters is one from that summer to a recipient whose name has been scrubbed — an extraordinary letter of consolation to somebody anguishing with unrequited love, somebody who may well have been Emily:
My dear — :
… You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give — what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with… One will not give us what we give them — others will more than we can or do give them — and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships — it is so with everybody’s.
Emily was not ready to let go of the love she had given, of the hope that it might one day be returned, though alchemised and transmuted into a different form. She wrote to Kate plaintively:
How many years, I wonder, will sow the moss upon them, before we bind again, a little altered, it may be, elder a little it will be, and yet the same, as suns which shine between our lives and loss, and violets.
That season, she composed her most famous poem — read here by twenty-first-century children who are yet to have their loves and losses, and animated by artist Olga Ptashnik:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —
And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —
I’ve heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the...
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring.
In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.
Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some unrecorded heartbreak in her volcanic relationship with Susan, the first attack of epilepsy — but the most intriguing theory came nearly a century after the poet encrypted these words.
In 1951, after years of research and travel to various archives, the scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a wholly novel candidate for the “terror” of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon — a newly widowed young woman Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell into an intense romantic and possibly physical affair with the enticing newcomer before Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Emily would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry.
Their story is a mosaic assembled from various surviving documents, as direct as Emily’s letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate’s favorite books.
Unauthenticated daguerreotype of (most scholars believe) Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Anthon
In the late winter of 1859, Kate descended a sleigh in her fashionable black hat and widow’s veil in front of her former classmate’s home in Amherst. Almost immediately, Susan introduced her to the beloved auburn-haired friend who lived across the hedge in the brick house painted deep red and who had been hearing of her for nearly a decade. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met the tall, handsome woman with the penetrating dark eyes, musical voice, and lively passion for literature and astronomy, she was instantly entranced.
During the three weeks of Kate’s first stay in Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, became inseparable. They took long walks with Emily’s dog, Carlo, read Aurora Leigh aloud to each other, and spent evenings at the piano as Emily improvised — “weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration,” Kate would remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her — “Goliath,” the petite poet would call her.
When Kate left to go home, Emily beckoned her for another visit to Amherst:
I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don’t wait till I land, for I’m going ashore on the other side.
Emily’s early letters to Kate pulsate with electricity. Writing weeks after they first met, she tries to disguise with playfulness the push-and-pull of irrepressible, frustrated longing in the code language of botany that was her first poetic tongue:
I never missed a Kate before. . . . Sweet at my door this March night another Candidate — Go Home! We don’t like Katies here! — Stay! My heart votes for you, and what am I indeed to dispute her ballot –? What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the Sun? — When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute?… Will you still come?… Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear — but what it lacks in size, it gains in fadelessness, — Many can boast a hollyhock, but few can bear a rose! … So I rise, wearing her — so I sleep, holding, — Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower. —
In the late winter of 1860, they spent a night together in Emily’s bedroom — unrecorded, inarticulable, except perhaps in verse:
Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie —
When, stirring, for Belief’s delight,
My Bride had slipped away —
If ’twas a Dream — made solid — just
The Heaven to confirm —
Or if Myself were dreamed of Her —
The power to presume —
Several weeks after that momentous night, Emily would channel this precious perishability in a letter to Kate:
Finding is slow, facilities for losing so frequent, in a world like this, I hold with extreme caution. A prudence so astute may seem unnecessary, but plenty moves those most, dear, who have been in want… Were you ever poor? I have been a Beggar.
Whatever took place between them, they never addressed it overtly — it is always impossible to articulate the possibility between two people, but especially in a time and place that confined the possible to such narrow parameters for permissible love. Feeling the impossibility of it all, Emily shuddered with anticipatory loss:
Kate, Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phantom niche — I touch your hand — my cheek your cheek — I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred?… There is a subject, dear, on which we never touch.
Little is known of Kate’s side of the experience. None of her letters to Emily survive. (The poet had instructed her sister that all letters be burned after her death — a request which Lavinia Dickinson promptly obliged before discovering the trove of poems that made her realize her sister’s correspondence might have immense literary value.) But Kate — who signed many of her surviving letters to other correspondents “Thomas” or “Tommy” — did have an unambiguous and lifelong proclivity for romantic attachment to women, culminating later in life with a longtime relationship with a young Englishwoman.
Perhaps at twenty-eight, she was simply not ready to so radically dismantle the superstructure of her life as she knew it. In April 1861, she severed the relationship with Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the devastation was complete and lifelong. Many years later, Emily would write to Higginson:
If ever you lost a friend… you remember you could not begin again because there was no world —
A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.
In the immediacy of the loss, she interpolated between hope and despair, as we all do when discomposed by a sudden abandonment. A month after her “terror,” which might just be her painful acceptance that Kate was gone, her friend Samuel Bowles — whose newspaper had printed one of the only four poems published in her lifetime — came to Amherst. She refused to see him. Most of her letters from that period were burned, but Samuel was one of her most intimate friends — it is likely that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. “We tell a Hurt to cool it,” she would write in a poem. Among his own letters is one from that summer to a recipient whose name has been scrubbed — an extraordinary letter of consolation to somebody anguishing with unrequited love, somebody who may well have been Emily:
My dear — :
… You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give — what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with… One will not give us what we give them — others will more than we can or do give them — and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships — it is so with everybody’s.
Emily was not ready to let go of the love she had given, of the hope that it might one day be returned, though alchemised and transmuted into a different form. She wrote to Kate plaintively:
How many years, I wonder, will sow the moss upon them, before we bind again, a little altered, it may be, elder a little it will be, and yet the same, as suns which shine between our lives and loss, and violets.
That season, she composed her most famous poem — read here by twenty-first-century children who are yet to have their loves and losses, and animated by artist Olga Ptashnik:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —
And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —
I’ve heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?” In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the...
“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”
In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature — a distinction between scientific fact and poetic truth, between ways of looking and styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture an epoch later with her astute observation that while both celebrate what they describe, science objectifies the universe by describing it from the outside, while poetry subjectifies it by describing it from the inside, and life is the land of subjects.
With her short, searing insistence on the subject in the specimen, Dickinson was warning us that despite all the facts we may discover about birds in the epochs to come — now we know how they fly and how they see and what they dream about — the truth about them, the poetic truth we may call spirit, will always remain elusive, irreducible, unreachable by means of reason, reachable only by love. A century after her, Rachel Carson — a scientist who wrote like a poet and sparked the modern environmental movement with her prophetic, poetic Silent Spring — would insist that an indestructible sense of wonder is our mightiest antidote to the silencing of the birds that augurs the erasure of nature. We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge — none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing between Carson’s lifetime and ours — but love.
Bullfinch by Jackie Morris
It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s exquisite Book of Birds (public library) — a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode, animated by an I/Thou relationship that implicates both reader and read by addressing each bird directly as a subject rather than explicating an object. In this luminous lacuna between conservation and consecration, what emerges is the spirit in the species, the numinous in the named, the isness in the itness.
Common tern by Jackie MorrisGannet by Jackie Morris
The foreword casts the spell and hands the summons:
What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere.
Starling by Jackie Morris
In the tradition of their Lost Spells and Lost Words (one of my all-time favorite books), the lyrical essays — tender as a lullaby, urgent as a warning bell — are accompanied by almost unbearably beautiful paintings, emanating a portrait’s reverence for reality and an icon’s fidelity to the poetic truth beyond the material fact.
Nightingale by Jackie MorrisSwan by Jackie MorrisHouse martin by Jackie MorrisGreenfinch by Jackie MorrisSparrowhawk by Jackie Morris
What David Whyte did for words, Robert Macfarlane has done for birds; what Rachel Carson said of the sea — “no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry” — can be said, must be said of birds, and no one has drawn out their poetry more truthfully, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, his rhythmic incantations summoning the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their fierce, fragile wonder: the gannet, “graceful and precise as an equation”; the avocet, who “seen at sunset in silhouette seems blown of glass — as if a breath of wind would leave her in shards amid the reeds”; the bar-tailed godwit traversing six thousand miles between Alaska and Australia in “a single, epic super-flight”; the black-throated diver crying out his prehistoric “fog-born ululation”; the eider, who “can fly as fast as a cheetah can run” on wings feathered with fibers so delicate that they “make angora feel dense as lead”; the tawny owl, her eyes “pure night, two twelve-bore barrels, a pair of shadow planets.”
Tawny owl by Jackie Morris
Punctuating these love letters to particular species are the seven wonders of the bird world — Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration — each essayed into a revelation between the scientific and the spiritual. Pulsating through it all is a beckoning to see the world in a bird more clearly in order to love it more deeply:
Noticing is the first step to naming; knowing the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken — its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over.
How lucky we are that there are still those unresigned people — stubborn enough, loving enough — who keep reforging and rejoining the chain with links more beautiful, more durable than we could have imagined, lustrous with that indestructible sense of wonder in which lies our only salvation, in which resounds our most everlasting song.
Yellowhammer by Jackie Morris
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?” In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the...
“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”
In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature — a distinction between scientific fact and poetic truth, between ways of looking and styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture an epoch later with her astute observation that while both celebrate what they describe, science objectifies the universe by describing it from the outside, while poetry subjectifies it by describing it from the inside, and life is the land of subjects.
With her short, searing insistence on the subject in the specimen, Dickinson was warning us that despite all the facts we may discover about birds in the epochs to come — now we know how they fly and how they see and what they dream about — the truth about them, the poetic truth we may call spirit, will always remain elusive, irreducible, unreachable by means of reason, reachable only by love. A century after her, Rachel Carson — a scientist who wrote like a poet and sparked the modern environmental movement with her prophetic, poetic Silent Spring — would insist that an indestructible sense of wonder is our mightiest antidote to the silencing of the birds that augurs the erasure of nature. We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge — none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing between Carson’s lifetime and ours — but love.
Bullfinch by Jackie Morris
It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s exquisite Book of Birds (public library) — a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode, animated by an I/Thou relationship that implicates both reader and read by addressing each bird directly as a subject rather than explicating an object. In this luminous lacuna between conservation and consecration, what emerges is the spirit in the species, the numinous in the named, the isness in the itness.
Common tern by Jackie MorrisGannet by Jackie Morris
The foreword casts the spell and hands the summons:
What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere.
Starling by Jackie Morris
In the tradition of their Lost Spells and Lost Words (one of my all-time favorite books), the lyrical essays — tender as a lullaby, urgent as a warning bell — are accompanied by almost unbearably beautiful paintings, emanating a portrait’s reverence for reality and an icon’s fidelity to the poetic truth beyond the material fact.
Nightingale by Jackie MorrisSwan by Jackie MorrisHouse martin by Jackie MorrisGreenfinch by Jackie MorrisSparrowhawk by Jackie Morris
What David Whyte did for words, Robert Macfarlane has done for birds; what Rachel Carson said of the sea — “no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry” — can be said, must be said of birds, and no one has drawn out their poetry more truthfully, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, his rhythmic incantations summoning the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their fierce, fragile wonder: the gannet, “graceful and precise as an equation”; the avocet, who “seen at sunset in silhouette seems blown of glass — as if a breath of wind would leave her in shards amid the reeds”; the bar-tailed godwit traversing six thousand miles between Alaska and Australia in “a single, epic super-flight”; the black-throated diver crying out his prehistoric “fog-born ululation”; the eider, who “can fly as fast as a cheetah can run” on wings feathered with fibers so delicate that they “make angora feel dense as lead”; the tawny owl, her eyes “pure night, two twelve-bore barrels, a pair of shadow planets.”
Tawny owl by Jackie Morris
Punctuating these love letters to particular species are the seven wonders of the bird world — Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration — each essayed into a revelation between the scientific and the spiritual. Pulsating through it all is a beckoning to see the world in a bird more clearly in order to love it more deeply:
Noticing is the first step to naming; knowing the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken — its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over.
How lucky we are that there are still those unresigned people — stubborn enough, loving enough — who keep reforging and rejoining the chain with links more beautiful, more durable than we could have imagined, lustrous with that indestructible sense of wonder in which lies our only salvation, in which resounds our most everlasting song.
Yellowhammer by Jackie Morris
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.”
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.”
“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her luminous letter of advice to the young. “A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.” Anger, indeed, is one of the emotions we judge most harshly — in others, as well as in ourselves — and yet understanding anger is central to mapping out the landscape of our interior lives. Aristotle, in planting the civilizational seed for practical wisdom, recognized this when he asked not whether anger is “good” or “bad” but how it shall be used: directed at whom, manifested how, for how long and to what end.
Many of Whyte’s meditations invert the common understanding of each word and peel off the superficial to reveal the deeper, often counterintuitive meaning — but nowhere more so than in his essay on anger. Whyte writes:
ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker
Such a reconsideration renders Whyte not an apologist for anger but a peacemaker in our eternal war with its underlying vulnerability, which is essentially an eternal war with ourselves — for at its source lies our tenderest, timidest humanity. In a sentiment that calls to mind Brené Brown’s masterful and culturally necessary manifesto for vulnerability — “Vulnerability,” she wrote, “is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” — Whyte adds:
What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.
One need only think of Van Gogh — “I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do,” he wrote in a letter as he tussled with mental illness — to appreciate Whyte’s expedition beyond anger’s surface tumults and into its innermost core: profound frustration swelling with a sense of personal failure. (Hannah Arendt captured another facet of this in her brilliant essay on how bureaucracy breeds violence — for what is bureaucracy if not the supreme institutionalization of helplessness?)
With remarkable intellectual elegance and a sensitivity to the full dimension of the human spirit, Whyte illuminates the vitalizing underbelly of anger:
Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.
In a related meditation, Whyte considers the nature of forgiveness:
FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.
Strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks — after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.
Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.
To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.
This question of maturity, so intimately tied to forgiveness, is the subject of another of Whyte’s short essays. Echoing Anaïs Nin’s assertion that maturity is a matter of “unifying” and “integrating,” he writes:
MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.
Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even, living only two out of the three.
Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.
Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.
Maturity, Whyte seems to suggest, becomes a kind of arrival at a sense of enoughness — a willingness to enact what Kurt Vonnegut considered one of the great human virtues: the ability to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” Whyte writes:
Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.”
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.”
“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her luminous letter of advice to the young. “A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.” Anger, indeed, is one of the emotions we judge most harshly — in others, as well as in ourselves — and yet understanding anger is central to mapping out the landscape of our interior lives. Aristotle, in planting the civilizational seed for practical wisdom, recognized this when he asked not whether anger is “good” or “bad” but how it shall be used: directed at whom, manifested how, for how long and to what end.
Many of Whyte’s meditations invert the common understanding of each word and peel off the superficial to reveal the deeper, often counterintuitive meaning — but nowhere more so than in his essay on anger. Whyte writes:
ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker
Such a reconsideration renders Whyte not an apologist for anger but a peacemaker in our eternal war with its underlying vulnerability, which is essentially an eternal war with ourselves — for at its source lies our tenderest, timidest humanity. In a sentiment that calls to mind Brené Brown’s masterful and culturally necessary manifesto for vulnerability — “Vulnerability,” she wrote, “is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” — Whyte adds:
What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.
One need only think of Van Gogh — “I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do,” he wrote in a letter as he tussled with mental illness — to appreciate Whyte’s expedition beyond anger’s surface tumults and into its innermost core: profound frustration swelling with a sense of personal failure. (Hannah Arendt captured another facet of this in her brilliant essay on how bureaucracy breeds violence — for what is bureaucracy if not the supreme institutionalization of helplessness?)
With remarkable intellectual elegance and a sensitivity to the full dimension of the human spirit, Whyte illuminates the vitalizing underbelly of anger:
Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.
In a related meditation, Whyte considers the nature of forgiveness:
FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.
Strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks — after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.
Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.
To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.
This question of maturity, so intimately tied to forgiveness, is the subject of another of Whyte’s short essays. Echoing Anaïs Nin’s assertion that maturity is a matter of “unifying” and “integrating,” he writes:
MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.
Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even, living only two out of the three.
Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.
Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.
Maturity, Whyte seems to suggest, becomes a kind of arrival at a sense of enoughness — a willingness to enact what Kurt Vonnegut considered one of the great human virtues: the ability to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” Whyte writes:
Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative."
“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 family
After more than a year at sea, just after sailing through the Panama Canal 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.
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.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative."
“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 family
After more than a year at sea, just after sailing through the Panama Canal 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.
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.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of...
It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of suffering. We say we “fall” in love precisely because we know we can get bruised, know that the trap door it opens beneath our feet hurls us into depths we are entirely unprepared to fathom.
The interesting question, the transformative question, is what happens after the fall.
“It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth,” Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) writes in his long, passionate, searching essay on falling in love. “There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience.” He is writing out of his own experience: Twenty-seven and struggling to make a name for himself as a writer, he had fallen painfully in love with the radical Fanny Osbourne — ten years his senior, still married to the philandering husband she left, attending art school in Paris with her daughter. They would eventually marry and magnify each other’s lives beyond all imagination. (“Without Fanny’s influence,” Camille Peri writes in her excellent biography of the two, “Louis might now be a forgotten man of letters instead of one of the greatest voices in Scottish literature.”)
Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
Love, Stevenson argues, is the only experience that truly astonishes us, jolt us awake from the slumber of preconception and expectation. And when it does, “it is not without something of the nature of dismay” that we look upon our new position — discomposed, disoriented, out of control. He writes:
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.
That feeling, Stevenson reflects, infuses one’s sense of being with “a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be.” And yet at the center of something so concrete, so palpable, is a mystery:
It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.
What makes love astonishing is precisely the way it blindsides us, the way it cannot be willed or achieved or won on merit. He writes:
There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person’s spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every one to fall in love… Many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do there cease and determine.
And yet love is not a matter of persuasion. In a sense, the declaration of it becomes superfluous when the fact of it is self-evident and mutual. It is, Stevenson observes, something we must simply show up for, with passion and patience entwined. He outlines the discovery, the deepening, the development of love past “the simple accident of falling in love”:
Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared.
To remain in love, Stevenson argues in another essay, two people “must bring kindness and goodwill” to life beyond the fall. He considers the single most important element of lasting love, which is also the greatest kindness we can give each other and the most durable gesture of goodwill:
Veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion — that is the truth which makes love possible… With our chosen friends… and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love’s essence)… we must strive and do battle for the truth.
A century later, Adrienne Rich would sharpen this sentiment in her timeless definition of love as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of...
It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of suffering. We say we “fall” in love precisely because we know we can get bruised, know that the trap door it opens beneath our feet hurls us into depths we are entirely unprepared to fathom.
The interesting question, the transformative question, is what happens after the fall.
“It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth,” Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) writes in his long, passionate, searching essay on falling in love. “There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience.” He is writing out of his own experience: Twenty-seven and struggling to make a name for himself as a writer, he had fallen painfully in love with the radical Fanny Osbourne — ten years his senior, still married to the philandering husband she left, attending art school in Paris with her daughter. They would eventually marry and magnify each other’s lives beyond all imagination. (“Without Fanny’s influence,” Camille Peri writes in her excellent biography of the two, “Louis might now be a forgotten man of letters instead of one of the greatest voices in Scottish literature.”)
Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson
Love, Stevenson argues, is the only experience that truly astonishes us, jolt us awake from the slumber of preconception and expectation. And when it does, “it is not without something of the nature of dismay” that we look upon our new position — discomposed, disoriented, out of control. He writes:
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.
That feeling, Stevenson reflects, infuses one’s sense of being with “a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be.” And yet at the center of something so concrete, so palpable, is a mystery:
It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.
What makes love astonishing is precisely the way it blindsides us, the way it cannot be willed or achieved or won on merit. He writes:
There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person’s spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every one to fall in love… Many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do there cease and determine.
And yet love is not a matter of persuasion. In a sense, the declaration of it becomes superfluous when the fact of it is self-evident and mutual. It is, Stevenson observes, something we must simply show up for, with passion and patience entwined. He outlines the discovery, the deepening, the development of love past “the simple accident of falling in love”:
Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared.
To remain in love, Stevenson argues in another essay, two people “must bring kindness and goodwill” to life beyond the fall. He considers the single most important element of lasting love, which is also the greatest kindness we can give each other and the most durable gesture of goodwill:
Veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion — that is the truth which makes love possible… With our chosen friends… and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love’s essence)… we must strive and do battle for the truth.
A century later, Adrienne Rich would sharpen this sentiment in her timeless definition of love as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures...
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in a ChatGPT query. That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.
With an eye to the human subject as the beating heart of the reckoning with life we call art, she writes:
What good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn’t that mankind is all that important. I don’t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don’t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential… And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness.
In this sense, the meaning of life is less like a postulate than like a poem. Half a lifetime later, Le Guin would make a beautiful distinction between how science explicates the universe and poetry implicates it. Knowing that we are implicated in the universe and implicate it in ourselves, touching that knowledge, holding it at the center of our lives, may be the full stop beyond the question of meaning.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures...
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in a ChatGPT query. That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.
With an eye to the human subject as the beating heart of the reckoning with life we call art, she writes:
What good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn’t that mankind is all that important. I don’t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don’t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential… And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness.
In this sense, the meaning of life is less like a postulate than like a poem. Half a lifetime later, Le Guin would make a beautiful distinction between how science explicates the universe and poetry implicates it. Knowing that we are implicated in the universe and implicate it in ourselves, touching that knowledge, holding it at the center of our lives, may be the full stop beyond the question of meaning.
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of...
It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of proximity — we live too close to the bone of our personal predicaments, have drawn the horizon of time too close to see the of chance.
Ursula K. Le Guin believed that the great instrument of our works of the imagination, and of science fiction in particular, is “distancing” — “the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better” by exposing the “coherent complexity” we are part and revealing “reality translated to a higher plane, a more passionate intensity, than most of us can experience at all without the help of art or religion or profound emotion.” And yet given that the imagination of nature will always surpass our own because we are a figment of it, given that science is the instrument we have invented to decipher and translate the language in which nature imagines reality into being, then science itself can offer us this lens-clearing distancing without an ounce of fiction — nowhere more so than in pulling us back from the mundanity of our lives in order to behold with bewilderment the miraculousness, the fantastical improbability, of life itself; of what Le Guin called “the scene of our mortality.”
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
That is what physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores in a wonderful Atlantic essay contemplating the bright improbability of life, from the cosmic dice of star formation to the cellular roulette of biological conception. Having written so movingly about the poetic science of what happens when we die, he turns his sensitive intellect toward the poetic science of what had to happen so that we may live. With an eye to how difficult it is for us to regard ourselves as part of just another civilization that will go the way of the Aztecs and the Greeks, he reflects:
It is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all… Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe — each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.
The fact of any one human being, he observes, is a triumph against the staggering odds that accompany every fertilization attempt — about a hundred thousand billion to one, numbers so immense that they bleed into abstraction we can’t apprehend. He offers a startling visualization:
If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.
If hope is the work of believing that the improbable is possible — believing that the wildest bet can be the winning bet — then each of us is a living axiom of hope. Alan writes:
Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous… From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.
We don’t have a right to life, to this unbidden gift of chance, but we have a responsibility to it — one the poet and astronomer Rebecca Elson so perfectly termed “a responsibility to awe.” Agains the backdrop of our own improbability, even the subtlest posture of entitlement becomes absurd, anti-natural; the only adequate posture is to kneel in the “cosmic overwhelm,” saying over and over the shortest prayer there is: “Thanks.”
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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 there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of...
It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of proximity — we live too close to the bone of our personal predicaments, have drawn the horizon of time too close to see the of chance.
Ursula K. Le Guin believed that the great instrument of our works of the imagination, and of science fiction in particular, is “distancing” — “the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better” by exposing the “coherent complexity” we are part and revealing “reality translated to a higher plane, a more passionate intensity, than most of us can experience at all without the help of art or religion or profound emotion.” And yet given that the imagination of nature will always surpass our own because we are a figment of it, given that science is the instrument we have invented to decipher and translate the language in which nature imagines reality into being, then science itself can offer us this lens-clearing distancing without an ounce of fiction — nowhere more so than in pulling us back from the mundanity of our lives in order to behold with bewilderment the miraculousness, the fantastical improbability, of life itself; of what Le Guin called “the scene of our mortality.”
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
That is what physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores in a wonderful Atlantic essay contemplating the bright improbability of life, from the cosmic dice of star formation to the cellular roulette of biological conception. Having written so movingly about the poetic science of what happens when we die, he turns his sensitive intellect toward the poetic science of what had to happen so that we may live. With an eye to how difficult it is for us to regard ourselves as part of just another civilization that will go the way of the Aztecs and the Greeks, he reflects:
It is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all… Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe — each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.
The fact of any one human being, he observes, is a triumph against the staggering odds that accompany every fertilization attempt — about a hundred thousand billion to one, numbers so immense that they bleed into abstraction we can’t apprehend. He offers a startling visualization:
If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.
If hope is the work of believing that the improbable is possible — believing that the wildest bet can be the winning bet — then each of us is a living axiom of hope. Alan writes:
Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous… From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.
We don’t have a right to life, to this unbidden gift of chance, but we have a responsibility to it — one the poet and astronomer Rebecca Elson so perfectly termed “a responsibility to awe.” Agains the backdrop of our own improbability, even the subtlest posture of entitlement becomes absurd, anti-natural; the only adequate posture is to kneel in the “cosmic overwhelm,” saying over and over the shortest prayer there is: “Thanks.”
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our...
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed. To be able to build such a world, to make it believable and beguiling, to leap across the abyss that gapes between any one consciousness and any other, the storyteller must draw on an immense library of experiences and impressions across the infinite spectrum of life’s possibilities — those building blocks of which we make the combinatorial work we call creativity.
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
Another epoch earlier, Walt Whitman distilled these eternal truths even further. Under the heading “Laws of Creation,” addressed to “strong artists and leaders… fresh broods of teachers… and coming musicians,” he considers the elemental material of creative work:
All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.
Whether the words be few or many, practical or poetic, emanating from them all is the same fundamental truth about the nature of creativity, demanding the same basic qualifications: nonjudgmental curiosity, an empathic imagination, and a willingness to live not flawlessly but fully.
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our...
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed. To be able to build such a world, to make it believable and beguiling, to leap across the abyss that gapes between any one consciousness and any other, the storyteller must draw on an immense library of experiences and impressions across the infinite spectrum of life’s possibilities — those building blocks of which we make the combinatorial work we call creativity.
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
Another epoch earlier, Walt Whitman distilled these eternal truths even further. Under the heading “Laws of Creation,” addressed to “strong artists and leaders… fresh broods of teachers… and coming musicians,” he considers the elemental material of creative work:
All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.
Whether the words be few or many, practical or poetic, emanating from them all is the same fundamental truth about the nature of creativity, demanding the same basic qualifications: nonjudgmental curiosity, an empathic imagination, and a willingness to live not flawlessly but fully.
donating = loving
For 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.
newsletter
The 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.
