The Half Room of Living and Loving
When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists.
Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself fragile.
One of the cases he relays is that of a bright woman in her sixties called Mrs. S., whose right hemisphere was savaged by a massive stroke. Although it left her with “perfectly preserved intelligence — and humor,” it also left her living in only half the world:
She sometimes complains to the nurses that they have not put dessert or coffee on her tray. When they say, “But, Mrs. S., it is right there, on the left,” she seems not to understand what they say, and does not look to the left. If her head is gently turned, so that the dessert comes into sight, in the preserved right half of her visual field, she says, “Oh, there is it — it wasn’t there before.” She has totally lost the idea of “left,” with regard to both the world and her own body. Sometimes she complains that her portions are too small, but this is because she only eats from the right half of the plate — it does not occur to her that it has a left half as well. Sometimes, she will put on lipstick, and make up the right half of her face, leaving the left half completely neglected: it is almost impossible to treat these things, because her attention cannot be drawn to them and she has no conception that they are wrong. She knows it intellectually, and can understand, and laugh; but it is impossible for her to know it directly.
Termed hemi-inattention in the 1950s when it was first clinically described, this condition is now better known as hemispheric neglect or unilateral neglect. A year after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was published, the physician M. Marsel Mesulam captured its startling semireality in his book Principles of Behavioral Neurology:
When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form… Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there.
What makes neurological disorders so fascinating is that their abnormal physiology is often a microcosm of the psychological pitfalls of the healthy brain. Who hasn’t shuddered with a flash of aphasia, suddenly unable to retrieve the right word or formulate a thought into a coherent sentence when in shock or in awe or tired to the bone? Hemispheric neglect menaces our sense of reality with the intimation that we too may be missing entire regions of reality because our attention simply cannot be drawn to them.
Perhaps we too are living in the half room.
And how can it be otherwise, given we are creatures of emotional incompleteness capable of extraordinary willful blindness, going through our days half-aware of our own interior, the other half relegated to an unconscious which our dreams, if we remember them, and our therapy, if it is any good, hint at but which remains largely subterranean. How, then, can we expect to have a complete picture of anything or anyone else?
There is no half room more extreme than infatuation. In those delirious early stages of falling in love, we magnify the positive qualities of the beloved to a point of crystalline perfection, turning a willfully blind eye to their shortcomings, only to watch the shiny crystals slowly melt to reveal the rugged reality of the actual person — imperfect and half-available, for they too are half-opaque to themselves.
To come to love someone after being in love with them is to be willing to walk the full room from corner to corner across every diagonal, to run your fingers over the floorboards and love every splinter, to run your gaze over the ceiling and love every crack — not because you love the pain and the leakage, but because you love the totality of the person, that incalculable sum we call a soul.
Mrs. S., intelligent and determined, refused to let her condition shape her experience of reality and developed a simple, brilliant compensatory strategy: Each time she knew something was there but she could not find it, unable to look left and therefore to turn left, she would turn right and rotate 180 degrees until it came into view. Suddenly, the hospital food portions she felt were too small doubled to their full size and she felt sated.
The trick, of course, is to be intelligent enough and humble enough to recognize that you might be missing half of reality.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 22 Mar 2025 | 4:30 am(NZT)
How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on the Three Demons of Creative Work
John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone,” he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself.
Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath — lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.
Early one morning in the pit of his fifty-eighth winter — having won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a $10,000 grant from the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts, having dined with the President at the White House, having nurtured the dreams of a generation of poets as a teacher and mentor and unabashed lavisher with praise, and having finally quit drinking — John Berryman jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis to his death, slain by the meaning confluence of biochemistry and trauma that can leave even the strongest of minds “so undone.”
Several months earlier, Berryman had written a long letter to his former teacher Mark Van Doren, who had emboldened him to make a life in poetry and who would lovingly remember him as “an overflowing man, a man who was never self-contained, a man who would have been multitudes had there been time and world enough for such a miracle.” Despite reporting a routine of astonishing vitality — studying theology before breakfast, keeping up “a fancy exercise-programme” in the afternoon, reading a canon of medical lectures as research for a novel he was writing, responding to a dozen letters a day, and “and supporting with vivacity & plus-strokes & money various people, various causes” — Berryman placed at the center of the letter a self-flagellating lament about his “lifelong failure to finish anything,” which he attributed to his twenty four years of alcoholism. (This may be the grimmest symptom of depression — a punitive hyperfocus on one’s perceived deficiencies, to the total erasure of one’s talents and triumphs.)
A generation after neuroscience founding father enumerated the six “diseases of the will” that keep the gifted from living up to their gifts and Kafka considered the four psychological hindrances of the talented, Berryman reflects on what he believed kept him from achieving all he wanted to achieve, distilling the three “capital vices” of creative work:
1. some bone-laziness but mostly DOLDRUMS, proto-despair, great-poets-die-young or at least unfulfilled like Coleridge & Co., all that crap.
2. the opposite, fantastic hysterical labor, accumulation, proliferation…
3. over-ambitiousness. Part of this is temperamental grandiosity but more of it — unless of course I am wrong — is legitimate self-demand on the largest conceivable scale.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who went on to become one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the nineteenth century not because of but despite the uncommon share of suffering she was dealt, had an antidote to the first.
Seamus Heaney, whose poetry won him the Nobel Prize, had an antidote to the second.
As we often give others the advice we most need ourselves, Berryman himself offered an antidote to the third — which he considered his “greatest problem” — in his answer to a student’s question. That student would go on to become a great poet himself, immortalizing his mentor’s advice in a poem that remains the finest blueprint I know to staying sane as an artist:
BERRYMAN
by W.S. MerwinI will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world wardon’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanityjust one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twicehe suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literallyit was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloophe was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in Englandas for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetryhe said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and inventionI had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’tyou can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 19 Mar 2025 | 2:03 pm(NZT)
How to Meet Your Mystery: Thomas Merton on Solitude and the Soul
“It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.”
“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny. “Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” On the one hand, destiny is a ramshackle concept, trembling with reverberations of determinism and self-recusal from responsibility — we shape the path of our lives with our choices, often not knowing or not wanting to know that we are choosing with every action at every turn, then look back on the trail and call it destiny. On the other, some things in life seem indeed to choose us and not we them: our birth, to begin with; our talents; great love. Solitude may be one of those things — a life of solitude, whether it lasts a lifetime or a season of being, chooses the solitary as much as the solitary chooses it.
The theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915–December 10, 1968) takes up the choice of solitude, its preconditions and its consequences, in a thirty-page essay titled “Notes for a Philosophy of a Solitude,” found in his 1960 collection Disputed Questions (public library) — a fine addition to the canon of great artists, writers, and scientists who have reaped and extolled the creative and spiritual rewards of solitude.
Merton defines the solitary as a person who undertakes “the lonely, barely comprehensible, incommunicable task of working his way through the darkness of his own mystery.” (A necessary note on the universal pronoun before you proceed.) To choose solitude or be chosen by it is “an arid, rugged purification of the heart,” “a quiet and humble refusal to accept the myths and fictions with which social life cannot help but be full,” a form of resistance to the “diversion” and “systematic distraction” our culture has designed to keep us from facing our mystery and our mortality. An epoch before social media, he observes:
The function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused.
[…]
The solitary is one who is called to make one of the most terrible decisions possible to man: the decision to disagree completely with those who imagine that the call to diversion and self-deception is the voice of truth and who can summon the full authority of their own prejudice to prove it.
Diversions, he notes, may be plainly absurd, such as the compulsion for status and the obsession with money, or they “may assume a hypocritical air of intense seriousness, for instance in a mass movement.” In a passage of extraordinary relevance today, he writes:
The break with the big group is compensated by enrollment in the little group. It is a flight not into solitude but into a protesting minority. Such a flight may be more or less honest, more or less honorable. Certainly it inspires the anger of those who believe themselves to be the “right thinking majority” and it necessarily comes in for its fair share of mockery on that account… [There is a] process of falsification and corruption which these groups almost always undergo. They abandon one illusion which is forced on everyone and substitute for it another, more esoteric illusion, of their own making. They have the satisfaction of making a choice, but not the fulfilment of having chosen reality.
The true solitary is not called to an illusion, to the contemplation of himself as solitary. He is called to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition.
There is a high price to pay for such renunciation of illusion:
[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude… The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos… It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patterns, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or asking if they have any practical consequences in one’s life.
Merton distills the reward on the other side of the renunciation:
Interior solitude… is the actualization of a faith in which a man takes responsibility for his own inner life.
It is interesting to read Merton — a deep thinker, but also a deeply religious thinker — as someone who believes that chance, not God, is the supreme creative agent of the universe; that the laws of nature, written in its native language of mathematics, are more sacred than any scripture; that we bless our own lives by being awake to the sheer wonder of existence. It is always salutary to engage with worldviews profoundly different from your own — it both expands and anneals your own sense of reality (reality being the thing that persists whether or not you believe in it) — until they open into something larger. In Merton’s faith, I find an invitation to self-transcendence that need not be religious, I find a poetics of the possible. And, as the teenage Sylvia Plath told her mother, “once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.”
Merton considers the meaning of self-transcendence:
The true solitary is not one who simply withdraws from society. Mere withdrawal, regression, leads to a sick solitude, without meaning and without fruit. The solitary of whom I speak is called not to leave society but to transcend it.
[…]
If every society were ideal, then every society would help its members only to a fruitful and productive self-transcendence. But in fact societies tend to lift a man above himself only far enough to make him a useful and submissive instrument in whom the aspirations, lusts and needs of the group can function unhindered by too delicate a personal conscience. Social life tends to form and educate a man, but generally at the price of a simultaneous deformation and perversion. This is because civil society is never ideal, always a mixture of good and evil, and always tending to present the evil in itself as a form of good.
Such self-transcendence can be found only by quieting the din of social conditioning to hear one’s inner silence — that empty and receptive place where true solitude is found, a place so remote from the surface of being that even those determined to reach it are regularly derailed:
Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth.
[…]
One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.
Merton admonishes against approaching solitude as another point of achievement to be worn as a badge on the lapel of the self in a society that fetishizes individualism. True solitude, rather — like love, like art — is an instrument of unselfing. He writes:
The price of fidelity in such a task is a completely dedicated humility — an emptiness of heart in which self-assertion has no place. For if he is not empty and undivided in his own inmost soul, the solitary will be nothing more than an individualist. And in that case, his non-conformity is nothing but an act of rebellion: the substitution of idols and illusions of his own choosing for those chosen by society. And this, of course, is the greatest of dangers… For to forget oneself, at least to the extent of preferring a social myth with a certain limited productiveness, is a lesser evil than clinging to a private myth which is only a sterile dream.
Noting that most people “cannot live fruitfully without a large proportion of fiction in their thinking,” he adds:
It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.
[…]
One who seeks to enter into this kind of solitude by affirming himself, and separating himself from others, and intensifying his awareness of his own individual being, is only travelling further and further away from it. But the one who has been found by solitude, and invited to enter it, and has entered freely, falls into the desert the way a ripe fruit falls out of a tree. It does not matter what kind of a desert it may be: in the midst of men or far from them. It is the one vast desert of emptiness which belongs to no one and to everyone.
In a sentiment evocative of Pablo Neruda’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Merton observes:
True solitude is not mere separateness. It tends only to unity. The true solitary does not renounce anything that is basic and human about his relationship to other men. He is deeply united to them — all the more deeply because he is no longer entranced by marginal concerns. What he renounces is the superficial imagery and the trite symbolism that pretend to make the relationship more genuine and more fruitful.
[…]
One who is called to solitude is not called merely to imagine himself solitary, to live as if he were solitary, to cultivate the illusion that he is different, withdrawn and elevated. He is called to emptiness. And in this emptiness he does not find points upon which to base a contrast between himself and others. On the contrary, he realizes, though perhaps confusedly, that he has entered into a solitude that is really shared by everyone. It is not that he is solitary while everybody else is social: but that everyone is solitary, in a solitude masked by that symbolism which they use to cheat and counteract their solitariness.
What the solitary renounces is not connection, not community, but “the deceptive fictions and inadequate symbols which tend to take the place of genuine social unity.” Merton writes:
The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual. Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men, whether or not they are capable of realizing the tragedy of their plight.
Complement with Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor on solitude as contemplative and creative practice and poet May Sarton on the art of living alone, then revisit Merton’s magnificent letter to Rachel Carson (which is how I first became acquainted with his mind) about civilizational self-awareness and the measure of wisdom.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 18 Mar 2025 | 1:49 pm(NZT)
Any Common Desolation
“You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive.”
The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy.
And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open.
Breaking alive.
It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.
Ellen Bass reckons with all of this in her splendid poem “Any Common Desolation,” originally published in The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day newsletter and later included in James Crews’s lifeline of an anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (public library), shared here with Ellen’s blessing.
ANY COMMON DESOLATION
by Ellen Basscan be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein —
that sudden rush of the world.
Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Hermann Hesse on how to be more alive, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poem “How to Apologize.” And if you are looking to break your poetry open, I couldn’t recommend her Living Room Craft Talks more heartily.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 15 Mar 2025 | 1:55 pm(NZT)
The Strength to Remember and the Strength to Forget: James Baldwin on What Makes a Hero
“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.”
It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.”
We have been great inventors but poor students of ourselves: The religions we invented, helpful though they have been to our moral development, split us further into angels and demons destined for heaven or hell; the psychotherapy we invented, helpful though it has been to allaying our inner turmoil, secularized original sin in its pathology model of the psyche, treating us as problems to be solved rather than parts to be harmonized. Both have sold us the alluring illusion that a state of permanent happiness can be attained — in Eden, or across the finish line of our self-improvement project — ultimately denying our fulness of being, denying the oscillation of “beauty and terror” that makes life alive.
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) defies this marketable myth in a stunning passage from Giovanni’s Room (public library) — the semi-autobiographical novel gave us Baldwin’s equally incisive reflection on love, freedom, and the paradox of choice.
When a man he encounters wonders why “nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” the narrator is stopped up short. With an eye to the banality of the question as a fractal of the banality of life — like the banality of evil, like the banality of survival — Baldwin writes:
The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
Considering the difficulty of reconciling our own darkness with our light, our innocence with our pain, he adds:
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
Complement with Walter Lippmann, writing in the wake of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, on what makes a hero and Leonard Cohen, wresting a secular truth from a religious concept, on what makes a saint, then revisit Baldwin on how to live through your darkest hour.
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.
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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.
Source: The Marginalian | 13 Mar 2025 | 5:51 am(NZT)
Miss Leoparda: A Painted Parable of How to Remake a World
When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations.
Some will try to find a third option to put on the table; they may or may not succeed, but they will still be sitting at the same table.
The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate of its surface with options others have not dared imagine. These are the visionaries — the only people who have ever changed this world.
These dynamics come alive with uncommon sweetness and charm in Miss Leoparda (public library) by Natalia Shaloshvili, translated into English by Lena Traer.
We meet Miss Leoparda asleep in her tree after another day of driving the packed community bus — something she does with gusto and a sense of purpose, delighted to provide a commons for all the animals going about their different daily tasks.
But this mobile idyll comes to a halt when one day “something unusual” passes by Miss Leoparda’s bus and speeds off into the distance — “a little black car coughing up clouds of smoke.”
Never having seen something so fast, all the animals fall under the spell of its expedience.
And so, the next morning, there is an empty seat on the bus. Day by day, more seats open up as more animals are seduced by this sleek private chamber of alienation and exhaust, more and more cars filling the street, until one day Miss Leoparda finds herself alone on the bus.
Abandoned amid the chaos of cars “coughing and spitting and passing each other” in a ruckus of arguments, Miss Leoparda grows visibly dispirited — but not defeated.
The animals, ensnared by their new addiction, begin demanding more space for their cars. And then the unthinkable happens: Miss Leoparda watches helplessly as her tree is cut down and carried away. (It is astonishing what infinities of emotion Shaloshvili can render with so few dabs of color and almost no defined lines.)
Shaken with disbelief but knowing that the most valiant way to complain is to create, she picks up one of the broken branches and plants it in a pot, then goes to sleep in the only home she has left — her bus — knowing she might have to wait a long time for a new tree to grow.
And then one day, as the city has turned to one great traffic jam swarmed by exhaust and quarrels, a leaf finally appears on the branch, and with it an idea — that flash of creative defiance in a mind, that inspired remaking of the world’s givens into the unimagined.
A new wave of amazement washes over the other animals and bicycles begin to punctuate the traffic.
Soon, the city is aspin with spokes and smiles, and I too — a lifelong bicyclist and tree-lover in a world of cars and concrete — smile as I reach the end of this simple, charming parable about the most difficult of choices for us creatures of momentum and mimicry: to find a new way askance from the status quo. “We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” wrote James Baldwin, who knew that although we don’t choose our lives, we can always choose to plant the new tree and build the new table.
Complement Miss Leoparda with Kamau & Zuzu Find a Way — a kindred parable of prevailing over limited options with courage and creativity, which was among my favorite books in its year — then revisit this delightfully defiant 19-century manifesto for the bicycle as an instrument of freedom.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 11 Mar 2025 | 7:16 am(NZT)
Obsidian and the Birds: An Odyssey of Wonder from the Aztecs to the Quantum World
A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a peculiar confluence of chemistry, culture, and chance that unrinds the layers of reality to put us face to face with the mystery at its core.
Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly beautiful. Soon, they were laboring in obsidian workshops by the thousands, making from it delicate beaded jewelry and deadly weapons, household tools and ritual figurines, mirrors and surgical instruments, which traveled along trade routes to become the pillar of the Toltec economy. Its abundance and versatility may be why they never arrived at metallurgy, but obsidian became as important to the development of their civilization as steel has been to ours.
It would also become the ouroboros of their civilization — the source of prosperity by which they would flourish for centuries and the ominous overlord by which they would perish.
Not a mineral but a volcanic glass made of igneous rock, obsidian forms as lava cools too rapidly for mineral crystals to nucleate. It is composed primarily of silicon dioxide, with trace amounts of various oxides — mostly aluminum, iron, potassium, sodium, and calcium — the ratio of which varies by the circumstances of each eruption, creating a particular chemical fingerprint, so that each piece of obsidian can now be traced to its original source using nuclear and X-ray analyses.
As if volcanic glass weren’t already miraculous enough, the discovery of a special kind of obsidian — iridescent, with a green-gold sheen — catapulted Teotihuacán to the status of an ancient metropolis. Rainbow obsidian soon became the most valuable kind of obsidian in Mesoamerica, attracting people from faraway lands in search of wealth, much as the Gold Rush changed the demographics of nineteenth-century North America.
With the discovery of this doubly dazzling obsidian, Teotihuacán became home to people from different cultures with no common language and no common rituals. And yet they lived together harmoniously in the fertile valley, sharing its riches — it is hard to fight while flourishing — until the eruption of a different volcano in present-day Ecuador induced regional climate change that sent entire ecosystems into a protracted draught and left Teotihuacán on the brink of famine. Suddenly, the bedrock of this composite society began fissuring along class lines as the nobles feasted and the starving laborers clashed over resources. A kind of civil war broke out, from which Teotihuacán never recovered. The survivors abandoned the city, but not before burning the dwellings of the ruling class to the ground. Only its pyramids — Toltec temples to the Sun and the Moon — stood intact by the time the Aztecs came upon it nearly a thousand years later and named it “City of the Gods.”
One of the geochemical wonders of this Earth, iridescent obsidian occurs when nanoparticles of magnetite — an iron oxide present in most obsidian — form a thin film that reflects light waves at the upper and lower boundaries of the material in such a way that they interfere with one another, magnifying the reflection at some wavelengths and diminishing it at others. This process, known as thin-film interference, is what produces the colorful luster of oil spills and soap bubbles.
Magnetite gave Teotihuacán its rare rainbow obsidian, but it also fomented the destruction of Mesoamerican civilization by the Spaniards. Humans discovered the property of magnetism through naturally magnetized pieces of rock containing magnetite, known as lodestones, which became the first magnetic compasses, revolutionizing navigation. Without magnetite, Columbus may have ended up another anonymous sailor shipwrecked on an anonymous shore.
A seeming triumph of human nature’s ingenuity, the invention of the compass turned out to be a mere refraction of nature’s own imagination: Magnetite crystals have been found in the upper beaks of homing pigeons and many migratory birds — a kind of built-in internal compass that allows them to orient by Earth’s magnetic fields in their staggering feats of navigation. (Small amounts of magnetite are also found in various regions of the human brain, including the hippocampus — the crucible of our autonoeic consciousness; my friend Lia is convinced that my homing-pigeon sense of direction, which overcompensates for the mediocrity of my other senses, is due to abnormal amounts of magnetite in my brain.)
A built-in compass explains why, for instance, bar-tailed godwits — some of the longest-distance migrants on Earth — can leave their nesting grounds in Alaska and head for their breeding grounds in New Zealand not along the continental arc of Asia and the rim of Australia, where they can easily orient by visual landmarks like mountains and cities, but over the open Pacific Ocean. Across the immense monotony of blue, where a mistake by even a fraction of a degree would take them to a wholly different destination, they have found their way year after year, eon after eon.
Geologist and geophysicist Joe Kirschvink discovered magnetite while studying honeybees and homing pigeons as a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1970s. The idea that some animals navigate by magnetism was not new. At the dawn of the century, the Belgian playwright and amateur apiarist Maurice Maeterlinck had observed that bees navigate by “senses and properties of matter wholly unknown to ourselves,” which he termed “magnetic intuition.” A generation before him, and a decade before Darwin staggered the world with his evolutionary theory, the Russian zoologist and explorer Alexander Theodor von Middendorff had speculated:
The amazing steadfastness of migratory birds — despite wind and weather, despite night and fog — may be due to the fact that the birds are constantly aware of the direction of the magnetic pole and therefore know exactly how to keep to their direction of migration.
To have located the basis of biomagnetism in magnetite seemed like a triumph of science over mystery. But in the decades since, as our instruments have become more sophisticated and our theories more testable, research has revealed the presence of a protein in the retinal cells of birds — cryptochrome — that may be making use of quantum entanglement to provide a whole other mechanism of magnetoreception. More knowledge has only unlatched more mystery: The total system may involve multiple build-in instruments interacting with multiple fundamental laws and forces. I think of Henry Beston, who wrote a century ago that “in a world older and more complete than ours,” other animals “move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” I think of the difference between science and civilization: Science knows it is unfinished, a perennial process, whereas every civilization mistakes itself for the end point of progress.
Walking down Teotihuacán’s central promenade and watching the Sun pyramid gradually eclipse the volcano, the evolutionary triumph of my peripheral vision registers a flash of yellow. I turn to see a small bird aglow against the ruins, perched on a stone ledge above a man in a sombrero selling obsidian souvenirs. The warblers — godless, tradeless, needful only of sky and song — are among the most regular border-crossers between North and South America, their migratory routes stretching from Alaska to the Amazon. Older than the Toltecs, older than the sediment deposits that separated the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to bridge the Americas, older than our oldest myths, they have seen civilizations rise and crumble, and will one day see Hollywood overgrown with poppies and Manhattan returned to the sea. And when they fly over the ruins of the Sistine Chapel and Silicon Valley, they will be guided by the same mysterious forces that guided the first of their kind.
“From the basic biological perspective,” concluded a team of scientists studying the magnetic compass of warblers, “the perception of the magnetic field remains the only sense for which the sensory mechanism and its location still remain unknown.”
It is salutary for us to have regular reminders that we don’t understand many of nature’s mysteries because we don’t, and may never, understand ourselves; that all of our creative restlessness, everything of beauty and substance we have ever made — our temples and our theorems, the Moonlight Sonata and general relativity — has sprung from our confrontation with the mystery of which we are a part. The Toltecs and the Aztecs gave shape to the mystery in Quetzalcoatl — their feathered god of creation and knowledge — staring at me from the base of the pyramid with the stony serenity of the centuries, knowing everything and knowing nothing.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 9 Mar 2025 | 2:51 pm(NZT)
Against Self-Improvement: Adam Phillips on the Danger of Treating Ourselves as Pathological Patients in Need of a Cure
“So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us.”
“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a pseudonym in her superb century-old field guide to the art of knowing what you really want — that most difficult, most rewarding among the arts of living. It is hard to know what we want because, disquieted daily by “this sadness of never understanding ourselves,” it is hard to know who we are. To want anything is to acknowledge a lack, a gap between the real and the ideal, between the life we have and the life we desire, which is fundamentally a gap between who we are and who we wish to be.
Pulsating beneath our lives is the most hautning, most universal question: “Why are we not better than we are?”
In our yearning for an answer, for a bridge between the real self and the ideal self, we have invented religion and psychotherapy, we have turned to shamans and self-help gurus, we have fasted and prayed, filled out personality tests and followed autosuggestion protocols. But while a certain level of restlessness is necessary to our creative vitality — that “divine dissatisfaction” out of which art is born — living with a sense of perpetual deficiency petrifies the possible in us. For, as Kurt Vonnegut knew, there is no greater enemy to happiness than the sense of not enough, the feeling that we need to have more or be more in order to live with a fullness of being and an inner completeness.
British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers an antidote to our civilizational cult of self-improvement in his slender, potent book On Getting Better (public library).
We are trapped, he observes, by our frame of reference:
If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear… Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.
[…]
Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one’s personal vision.
He considers the paradox at the crux of our zeal for self-improvement:
We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.
The problem with an idealized future is that every ideal is not only a form of wanting but a form of presumed knowledge — about what is optimal and desirable, about the vector of change — and yet the future is fundamentally unknowable. (This is why the things we most ardently desire are the most transformative, but we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation.) Phillips writes:
One cannot know the consequences of one’s wanting, because one can’t know the future except as an assumed replication of the past… It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want.
With an eye to a word so fashionable that we have hollowed it of meaning by overuse and mususe, by making it a catchall for anything that challenges and disquiets us — trauma — he adds:
There is, after all, no life without trauma; indeed, the word misleadingly makes us think of something being interrupted, rather than of something integral, something essential to our lives. So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do; on our being able to metabolize or digest our experience; on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it. When getting better doesn’t only mean getting safer, it means being able to risk feeling more alive, to risk taking risks, to risk learning and not learning from experience.
[…]
Learning from experience means learning what your experience can’t teach you — the nature and quality of future experience.
Those soul-broadening, life-deepening risks, those blessed unknowns of the future fometing the capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying, are precisely what Mario Benedetti placed at the center of his stunning poem “Do Not Spare Yourself.”
Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott — whose intellectual lineage Phillips continues — on the qualities of a healthy mind, then revisit Phillips on the paradoxes of transformation and the countercultural courage of changing your mind.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 6 Mar 2025 | 2:20 pm(NZT)
Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity
Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional regulation, and creativity. But the price we have paid for these crowning curios of consciousness has been savage self-consciousness, thought turned in on itself, nowhere more maddening in its mania for rumination than in insomnia — that awful moment when, facing the fissure between your conscious wishes and your unconscious will, you realize that you are helpless against yourself, that there is not a single you pulling the strings of the mind but a tangle of thought and feeling rendering you a troupe of marionettes.
Against this already discomposing backdrop, insomnia foregrounds an added cruelty: the more you think about not being able to sleep, the less able to sleep you are, spiraling into anxiety about how the night’s helpless wakefulness will compromise your day. But while lack of sleep does diminish basic functions like reflexes and recall, paradoxically, the brink of sleep can be salutary to creativity: In that liminal space between restlessness and rest, the mind’s organizing principles begin to fray with the fatigue of the day’s conscious labors and unbidden thoughts begin to emerge from the recesses of the unconscious, begin to collide with one another in the seething cauldron of the insomniac’s angst, begin to form the unexpected combinations we call originality.
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) — one of history’s most prolific insomniacs — knew this, celebrated it, relished it.
Throughout his struggles with creative block, Kafka regularly found himself sleepless. Like Patti Smith, who fights insomnia with an imaginative visualization, he would cross his arms and lay his hands over his shoulders, visualizing himself laying as heavy as possible “like a soldier with his pack.” On his good days, he saw his insomnia as a badge of honor for a mind ablaze with thought: “I can’t sleep because I write too much,” he writes in his diary. On his bad days, he felt in it the tension between “the vague pressure of the desire to write” and “the nearness of insanity,” feared it left him too tired for creative work. On one such day, he records:
Because of fatigue did not write and lay now on the sofa in the warm room and now on the one in the cold room, with sick legs and disgusting dreams. A dog lay on my body, one paw near my face.
But another part of him realized that sleeplessness, rather than a hindrance to his creative vitality, is a function of it, honed on the edges of the night:
Sleeplessness comes only because… I write. For no matter how little and how badly I write, I am still made sensitive by these minor shocks, feel, especially towards evening and even more in the morning, the approaching, the imminent possibility of great moments which would tear me open, which could make me capable of anything, and in the general uproar that is within me and which I have no time to command, find no rest.
In a passage that suggests the creative impulse may just be our best way of calibrating how much reality we can hold, how much of the pain and rapture of being alive we can bear — what Virginia Woolf called “the shock-receiving capacity” that makes one an artist — Kafka adds:
In the end this uproar is only a suppressed, restrained harmony, which, left free, would fill me completely, which could even widen me and yet still fill me. But now such a moment arouses only feeble hopes and does me harm, for my being does not have sufficient strength or the capacity to hold the present mixture, during the day the visible word helps me, during the night it cuts me to pieces unhindered.
It is in the liminal times bookending the sleepless night that he discovers the fount of his creative powers:
In the evening and the morning my consciousness of the creative abilities in me is more than I can encompass. I feel shaken to the core of my being and can get out of myself whatever I desire.
If you are not yet ready to embrace your sleeplessness as a fulcrum of creativity, try Maurice Sendak’s antidote to insomnia; if you are ready to live into your creative powers, take heed in Kafka’s insight into the four psychological barriers between the talented and their talent.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 4 Mar 2025 | 9:57 am(NZT)
The Souls of Animals
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”
Here was “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul — that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain why we make art, why we fall in love, why we yearn to converse with reality in prayers and postulates.
It is daring enough to ask what a soul actually is. Carl Jung knew that it defies the substance we are made of: “The soul is partly in eternity and partly in time.” Virginia Woolf knew that it defies our best technology of thought: “One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.” It is doubly daring to question the age-old dogma that the soul is the province of the human animal alone. Even as we have incrementally and reluctantly admitted other creatures into the temple of consciousness, we have denied them souls — denied them, because our tools of communication and computation have failed to probe it, an inner life capable of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder. And yet our very language defies our denial: the word animal comes from the Latin for soul.
In 1991, long before we came to consider the soul of an octopus, long before fMRI and EEG studies revealed not only that birds dream but what they dream about, Gary Kowalski took up this daring question in The Souls of Animals (public library) — an inquiry into the “spiritual lives” (and into what that means) of whooping cranes, elephants, jackdaws, gorillas, songbirds, horses, dogs, and cats. At its center is the idea that spirituality — which he defines as “the development of a moral sense, the appreciation of beauty, the capacity for creativity, and the awareness of one’s self within a larger universe as well as a sense of mystery and wonder about it all” — is a natural byproduct of “the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life.” (There are in this view echoes of Kepler, who believed that the Earth itself is an ensouled body, and of myriad native cosmogonies that regard other animals as sources of more-than-human wisdom and emissaries of the numinous.)
Kowalski — a parish minister by vocation, who spends his days praying with the dying, blessing bonds of love, and helping people navigate moral quandaries — celebrates the soul as “the magic of life,” as that which “gives life its sublimity and grandeur,” and reflects:
For ancient peoples, the soul was located in the breath or the blood. For me, soul resides at the point where our lives intersect with the timeless, in our love of goodness, our passion for beauty, our quest for meaning and truth. In asking whether animals have souls, we are inquiring whether they share in the qualities that make life more than a mere struggle for survival, endowing existence with dignity and élan.
[…]
Many people think of soul as the element of personality that survives bodily death, but for me it refers to something much more down-to-earth. Soul is the marrow of our existence as sentient, sensitive beings. It’s soul that’s revealed in great works of art, and soul that’s lifted up in awe when we stand in silence under a night sky burning with billions of stars. When we speak of a soulful piece of music, we mean one that comes out of infinite depths of feeling. When we speak of the soul of a nation, we mean its capacity for valor and visionary change… Soul is present wherever our lives intersect the dimension of the holy: in moments of intimacy, in flights of fancy, and in rituals that hallow the evanescent events of our lives with enduring significance. Soul is what makes each of our lives a microcosm — not merely a meaningless fragment of the universe, but at some level a reflection of the whole.
Half a century after Henry Beston insisted that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” for they are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Kowalski writes:
Without anthropomorphizing our nonhuman relations we can acknowledge that animals share many human characteristics. They have individual likes and dislikes, moods and mannerisms, and possess their own integrity, which suffers when not respected. They play and are curious about their world. They develop friendships and sometimes risk their own lives to help others. They have “animal faith,” a spontaneity and directness that can be most refreshing… all the traits indicative of soul. For soul is not something we can see or measure. We can observe only its outward manifestations: in tears and laughter, in courage and heroism, in generosity and forgiveness. Soul is what’s behind-the-scenes in the tough and tender moments when we are most intensely and grippingly alive.
By investigating the inner lives of other creatures, Kowalski argues, we are invariably deepening our own:
As [modern] shamans, we are allowed to examine enigmas like “What makes us human?” and “What makes life sacred?” We can ask not only about the mating behavior and survival strategies of other animals but whether they have souls and spirits like our own. The danger here is that we are often in over our heads. But at least we are swimming in deep water and out of the shallows. In searching for answers to such queries, I have found, we not only enrich our understanding of other creatures, we also gain insight into ourselves.
[…]
There is an inwardness in other living beings that awakens what is innermost in ourselves. I have often marveled, for instance, watching a flock of shore birds. On an invisible cue, they simultaneously rise off the beach and into the air, then turn and bank seawards in tight formation. They are so finely coordinated and attuned in their aeronautics it is as though they share a common thought, or even a group mind, guiding their ascent. At such moments, I feel there are depths of “inner space” in nature that can never be sounded. And it is out of those same depths, in me, that awe arises as I contemplate the synchronicity of their flight. To contain such depths is to participate in the realm of spirit.
We have invented no greater expression of our inwardness than music — the language of the soul, with its eternal translation between mathematics and mystery. We know that other animals partake of that language — each spring birds sing the world back to life, each summer cicadas serenade the sun with their living mandolin, and when we set out to tell the cosmos who we are, a whale song joined Bulgarian folk music and Bach on The Golden Record.
Birds, Kowalski observes, sing for reasons beyond the pragmatic — their song is “far from a mechanical performance” and “much more complex than a simple cry of self-assertion.” It is music, which is distinguished from noise by an organizing principle of creative intent, and creativity may be the purest evidence of soul. Kowalski writes:
Surprisingly, many birds are relatively insensitive to pitch. But the best singers employ all the elements of tone, interval, rhythm, theme, and variation in complex and highly pleasing combinations. And what is music if not the deliberate arrangement of sound in aesthetic patterns?
Greatly influenced by philosopher Martin Buber’s I-Thou model of relating, Kowalski admonishes against relying on our own frames of reference in assaying what other creatures are expressing and how it is being expressed:
The tempo of life is faster-paced for birds than for people. This is one of the reasons the individual notes in bird song are so short, sometimes distinguishable only with a spectrograph, and why the compositions of birds last a few seconds at most, compared to an hour or more for a human symphony. It is also why birds sing in the upper registers (just as the pitch on a phonograph record rises when played at high speed). To the birds, with a metabolism continually in allegro, human beings must appear to be lazy and dim-brained creatures indeed. Just as our music reflects the rhythm and intensity of our inner life, the music of birds expresses the flash and flutter of their nervous and high-strung existence.
Examining another subset of the creative impulse — visual art — Kowalski cites Desmond Morris’s famous 1950s studies, which found that non-human primates given pens and paints not only became adept at using them with “a distinct feel for symmetry and balance,” but developed individual styles of drawing. He considers what that indicates:
Art arises from a spiritual longing that all people share: to make our mark on the world and to spend our life energy in a work that rises above the mundane, adding grace to existence. We respond to the light of the world around us by giving expression to our own inner light, and when the two are on the same wavelength, the world seems more brilliant and finely focused.
Insisting that such spiritual longings do not belong to human beings alone, he cites an astonishing case study:
In 1982 Jerome Witkin, a professor of art at Syracuse University and a respected authority on abstract expressionism, was invited to view a collection of drawings by a “mystery artist.” The professor was busy at the time, preparing for a traveling exhibition. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently intrigued to accept the invitation.
“These drawings are very lyrical, very, very beautiful,” the professor said when he saw the portfolio. “They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it’s just incredible.”
“This piece is so graceful, so delicate,” he said of one drawing. “I can’t get most of my students to fill a page like this.”
Only after he had finished his professional evaluation did Witkin learn the identity of the artist: a fourteen-year-old, 8,400-pound Asian elephant named Siri who lived in Syracuse’s Burnet Park Zoo. Siri’s keeper, David Gucwa, had seen her tracing lines with sticks and stones in the dust of her cage. Against the wishes of the zoo’s superintendent, who scoffed at the notion of an artistic elephant, Gucwa had given her pads of paper and charcoal, permitting her to express herself more freely.
When Witkin showed Siri’s drawings to a colleague without context — an expert on children’s drawings charing the university’s art education department — she firmly concluded that they were not done by a child. Witkin himself readily likened them to the work of Willem de Kooning, wishing the painter himself could see Siri’s art.
It was this report of Siri that inspired May Sarton — one of my favorite poets and favorite thinkers — to reimagine these reckonings in a poem. (The footnote of credit in Sarton’s collection is how I discovered Kowalski’s book.)
THE ARTIST
by May SartonThe drawings were abstract,
Delicate,
Like Japanese calligraphy.
When the painter de Kooning
Was shown them, he said,
“Interesting.
Not done by a child, I think,
Or if so, an extraordinary child.”
“The artist is an elephant, Sir,
Named Siri.”It had once come about
That the keeper noticed
Her sensitive trunk
Drawing designs in the dust.
After an argument
With the head of the zoo
Who laughed at him,
The keeper himself
Brought large sheets of paper
And boxes of charcoal
And laid them at Siri’s feet.
For an hour at a time
In happy concentration
The elephant created designs.
Like Japanese calligraphy.
What artist’s hand
As skillful
As that sensuous, sensitive trunk?
Two decades after Iris Murdoch found psychological symmetry between art and morality, locating in both “an occasion for unselfing,” Kowlaski turns to the acts of selflessness and compassion that evince a moral faculty — that fundament of a soul. Pelicans and crows, he notes, have been known to care for blind comrades. Darwin himself reported of a band of monkeys coming to the aid of member seized by an eagle, at the risk of their own lives. But nothing renders such morally tinted actions more vivid and more moving than one nineteenth-century naturalist’s account of a misfire.
Working in an era when “collecting specimens” meant killing creatures, he aimed at a tern but only wounded the bird, which fell helplessly into the sea. Immediately, other terns began circling above “manifesting much apparent solicitude,” until two of them dove down toward their wounded comrade. They lifted him up, one at each wing, carried him several yards, and gently put him down before another two picked him up, and so the group took turns carrying him the entire distance to the shore. The naturalist was so moved by this display of compassion and solidarity that, although he was within shot of the rock on which the wounded tern had been rested, he couldn’t bring himself to finish what he had set out to do.
To witness such a scene is to be stilled with wonder and with humility — which, as Rachel Carson so poignantly wrote, “are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.” A generation after her, and well ahead of our still dawning awakening to the ecological and ethical dignity of other species, Kowalaski reflects:
If we are to keep our family homestead — third stone from the sun — safe for coming generations, we must awaken to a new respect for the family of life.
[…]
We are kin to, and must be kind to, all creation. Overcoming speciesism — the illusion of human superiority — will be the next step in our moral and spiritual evolution.
To behold such a display of moral feeling with our own eyes is stirring enough, but to be witnessed back by another creature’s eyes is nothing short of a spiritual experience. In a passage that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s transcendent account of looking into the eyes of an osprey, Kowalski writes:
It is difficult to probe the inward awareness of another being. The realm of what one mystic called “the interior castle” is wholly private and wrapped in solitude. But when we look into another’s eyes — even into the eyes of an animal — we may find a small window into that inner sanctum, a window through which our souls can hail and greet one another.
[…]
The act of making eye contact with another being presupposes a conscious self behind either pair of peepers: I see you seeing me, and I am aware that you are aware that we are looking at each other.
Perhaps in the end it is not we who have the power to acknowledge or deny the souls of other creatures but other creatures who confer soul-ness upon us. Kowalski writes:
If by soul we mean our sense of self, our identity as particular persons, then our souls are interwoven with those of other living beings… We know ourselves as human, in part, through our relationships with the nonhuman world.
[…]
We are rather unsure of ourselves. What distinguishes our species may be this inward anxiety. While other animals may be endowed with special gifts—acute hearing, keen eyesight, incredible speed — human beings are nothing special. This is both a biological and a moral judgment. Lack of specialization makes us highly adaptable, but it also means we have no fixed form or definite identity. Without many inborn instincts to guide us, we as human beings need models for how to live. We need a sense of our own possibilities and limits, and we find them not only in the artificial rules and restraints imposed by human society but in the lessons for living suggested by biology and the earth itself. We are the younger siblings in life’s family — the perpetual neonates of the animal world. In a fundamental way we need other creatures to tell us who we are.
Out of this arises an urgency more than ethical, more than ecological, but existential — nothing less than examining what we are and why we are here at all:
What profit do we have if we gain the whole world and lose or forfeit our own souls? The human race may survive without the chimpanzees, orangutans, and other wild creatures who share the planet. But we will have attenuated the conditions that are necessary for our own “ensoulment”… And when we look into the mirror there will be less and less to love.
[…]
There is a glimmering of eternity about our lives. In the vastness of time and space, our lives are indeed small and ephemeral, yet not utterly insignificant. Our lives do matter. Because we care for one another and have feelings, because we can dream and imagine, because we are the kinds of creatures who make music and create art, we are not merely disconnected fragments of the universe but at some level reflect the beauty and splendor of the whole. And because all life shares in One Spirit, we can recognize this indwelling beauty in other creatures.
Animals, like us, are microcosms.
Couple The Souls of Animals with John James Audubon — who was both a visionary ahead of his time and, like the tern-shooting naturalist, a product of its blind spots — on other minds and the secret knowledge of animals, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the wonder of being alive lensed through a bouquet of warblers and a reflection on signs vs. omens and our search for meaning lensed through a great blue heron.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 1 Mar 2025 | 2:22 pm(NZT)
Matrescence: The Cellular Science of the Unself
One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the bloody, sweaty flesh of another; the knowledge that your own flesh is made of someone else’s cells and genes, the fact of you a fractal.
While mothering can take many forms and can be done by many different kinds of people, the process of one organism generating another from the raw materials of its own being — a process known as matrescence — is as invariable as breathing, as inevitable to life as death. In blurring the biological boundary between the creature imparted and the one doing the imparting, matrescence is the ultimate refutation of the self, the ultimate affirmation that individuality is an illusion — a cocoon of ego to keep us from apprehending the plurality we are. The science behind it is so intricate and so defiant of our commonsense intuitions about the possible that it seems to partake of the miraculous. Nested within it are questions of profound and sweeping implications, questions relevant and deliriously fascinating even to those of us without the psychological impulse or biological ability to bear children, questions that touch on some of the most elemental experiences of being human: change, vulnerability, reciprocity, resilience, belonging.
English journalist Lucy Jones takes up these questions in Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood (public library), braiding together her own experience of originating new life, some revelatory scientific studies that undermine our basic assumptions about personhood and our most unquestioned political priorities, and some astonishing counterpoints to the illusion of individuality in the nonhuman world, from the maternity colonies of vampire bats to a species of tiny marine larvae that digest their own tail, brain, and nerve cord to become an unrecognizably different adult organism.
Recalling how her first pregnancy gave her a taste of this simultaneous dissolution and exponentiation of the self — the substance of which, as Borges so memorably observed, is time — Jones considers the infinities nested in any one life:
Time started to bend. I was carrying the future inside me. I would learn that I was also carrying the eggs, already within my baby’s womb, that could go on to partly form my potential grandchildren. My future grandchildren were in some way inside me, just as part of me spent time in the womb of my grandmother. I was carrying inside me a pool of amniotic fluid, which was once rivers, lakes and rain. I was carrying a third more blood, which was once soil and stars and lichen.[2] The baby was formed of the atoms of the earth, of the past and the future. Every atom in her body existed when the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.
Time brings space along with it, bending the universe itself toward the cosmic nativity story that is a human being. Jones recounts the postpartum awakening to a reality larger than herself, larger than her new baby, encompassing everything that ever was and ever will be, consonant with the deepest meaning of love as the act of unselfing:
Back at home with our daughter, just one day old, I found that our flat felt different, as if I’d stepped through a portal into a parallel universe, or onto the set of a film.
In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions.
We were both so old, made from stars born billions of years ago.
We were both so new, she, breathing, outside me; I being made again in matrescence.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t sleep for the beauty of her. Little pink mouth. Doughball cheeks. Plant-stalk soft bones. Her astral holiness.
Body of my body, flesh of my flesh.
I heard the contraction and expansion of the universe bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites; cells and love, cells and love.
This altered state is not merely a psychological experience — it is a profoundly physiological one. Jones cites a series of landmark studies of the cellular exchange between mother and baby via the placenta, which found that maternal cells, actual entire cells, remain in the child’s body throughout life, while fetal cells can dwell in the mother’s brain decades after giving birth. The medical geneticist and neonatologist Diana Bianchi, who spearheaded the research, termed this phenomenon microchimerism, after the chimera from Greek mythology — creatures composed of different parts from multiple animals. Microchimerism is possible because humans have one of the most invasive placentas among animals, colonizing one hundred uterine vessels and arteries with thirty-two miles of capillaries that would span the whole of London if laid out along the Thames — an enmeshment impossible to extract without a trace.
Because matrescence is such a system-wide neurobiological reconfiguration, impacting everything from metabolism to memory, research has found the pregnant brain to be as plastic as the adolescent — a time in which “dynamic structural and functional changes take place that accompany fundamental behavioural adaptations.”
These processes are so powerful that alter the neural basis of the self, so powerful that they reach beyond the biological boundaries of the mother and into the behavioral adaptations of anyone involved in post-birth childcare, which is also part of matrescence — fathers, grandparents, caretakers of any kind for whom the newborn becomes a primary focus of attention. Drawing on a body of research, Jones writes:
Caregiving neural circuitry exists in both male and female brains. Early neuroscientific research on humans is now showing that caregiver brains experience significant plasticity, even without the experience of pregnancy. Hands-on caring shapes brain circuitry and causes other biological changes. In 2020, a groundbreaking study showed that having a baby changes a father’s brain anatomy.
This caretaking is essential for our survival, as infant individuals and as an adolescent species, in a way that it is not for most other creatures, for out of it arise the hallmarks of our humanity. Unlike the newborn giraffe calf, who can rise to her feet and walk within hours of birth, or the newly hatched turtle, who can take to the woods or the waves immediately, human are born utterly helpless, to be fed and bathed and gurgled at, remaining dependent for years as the 400 grams of rosy flesh grow in their bone cave to become a three-pound miracle coruscating with one hundred trillion synapses, ablaze with the capacities for the guillotine and the Goldberg Variations.
Jones writes:
To be a smart species — to be able to learn and read and write and draw and solve and build and invent and empathize and imagine — humans have to be born vulnerable. Few other species of animal on earth are as helpless and immature as human babies. The brains of other primates are much more developed at birth. Humans are one of the only mammals with brains that grow so significantly outside the womb. The benefit of this early helplessness is that it means the brain can adapt and rewire as the infant grows.
Given how fundamental matrescence is to the flourishing of the human species and the human animal, to systemically deprioritize and marginalize pregnancy and motherhood, as our society does, seems like plain self-sabotage. With an eye to the disproportionate precedence of mental illness in new mothers and the consistent findings that social support is the single most effective means of inoculating them against it, Jones quotes those unforgettable lines by Gwendolyn Brooks — we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business / we are each other’s magnitude and bond — and writes:
Increasingly, social isolation and loneliness are recognized as risk factors for mental and physical health problems and early mortality. Loneliness is as damaging for health as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Although we know that it can increase during transitional periods of life — for example, during adolescence, illness, bereavement, retirement — researchers have only recently started studying loneliness in the perinatal period. In the last decade or so, the first work has been published recognizing that women experiencing loneliness in pregnancy and new motherhood are more likely to suffer from mental illness. Studies suggest that loneliness also exacerbates symptoms of depression in fathers. The findings suggest serious fault lines in our society. It is striking that we’ve so forgotten our interdependence that we need scientists to prove to us that we need other people to survive.
This is precisely why matrescence, in all its plasticity and its revelation of interdependence, in being “a crucible in which the dross can be burned off and the wilder, more authentic self remains,” can serve as a recalibration of our collective priorities far beyond the mother’s experience of motherhood. Jones writes:
Times of transformation, whatever they might be, are opportunities to find new connectedness; to choose and consolidate the things that matter; to bring repressed selves out of the shadows into the light; to forgive; to grow layers of nacre, of resilience, of acceptance.
Emanating from the book is a reminder of what we so readily forget and are so steadily conditioned to forget: that we don’t have to accept the choices handed down to us by our culture as givens. Noting that “a culture can choose what it diminishes and what it grow,” Jones envisions a different choice:
We have to see the structures we’ve inherited in order to tear them down. So many women believe their struggles with matrescence are the result of their own weakness and moral failing. This is a lie and it inhibits honest talk and social change. The difficulties of modern matrescence in neoliberal Western societies are structural and systematic. Seeing the oppressive nature of the institution of motherhood for what it is, and acknowledging the failure of society to support care work, allows us to think critically. Talking makes the structures of discrimination more visible. It allows us to identify what must change.
From pregnancy, women need health professionals who will give them full and accurate information without ideology or misinformation. We want the facts about birth and postnatal recovery, about breastfeeding, about what happens to the brain and our psychological lives. We need to improve maternal mental healthcare by introducing screening for issues in pregnancy and far more investment so mothers can get specialist treatment quickly. We need a meaningful focus on tackling systemic inequalities in maternal health outcomes. We need new birth rituals that acknowledge the gravity of childbirth without obscuring the reality and risks.
The government must urgently invest in midwives, mental health practitioners and wider postpartum care to fix the maternity crisis. Not investing in maternal health is a political decision.
These choices are the placenta permeating the body politic, its tendrils touching every aspect of life — not just the life of mother and baby, not even the life of the society in which they exist, but life itself as a planetary phenomenon. Bridging matrescence and ecology into what she terms matroecology, Jones writes:
The experience — one we have all had — of being part of another has much to teach us about our relations with the earth, the psychic and corporeal reality of our interdependence and interconnectedness with other species.
We have all experienced this becoming-within-another who is both known and unknown, an “otherness-in-proximity.”
[…]
What kind of world could we imagine and create if, instead of pretending we were thrown into existence, as though by magic, we truly considered our vulnerable, intimate, tactile, entangled, animal origins?
These are not merely political or philosophical questions — they are profoundly personal. (“The shortest statement of philosophy I have,” Audre Lorde wrote from the center of a politically invigorated life, “is my living, or the word ‘I.’”) Jones is not merely theorizing matroecology — walking home hand in hand with her small child, she is feeling it in the marrow of her being:
Seeds break through pods around us; buds break open with the leaves they have been holding folded, grown by the sunlight of the previous summer; green beads flecking the hedgerows break open; red beads in the maple trees above break open. The moon is up, and it pulls the ocean back and forth: a spring tide, the biggest tide, transforming the coasts of this island, breaking apart shell and stone, fish and bone. Beneath us, the trees are talking, making plans, breaking through soil and sediment. Above us, stars are being born and others are dying. We walk through the cemetery where organisms are being born and others are dying and creatures are being eaten and others are eating. The continent we are on is moving (at the speed of a fingernail growing), and the round rock we are on is moving (tilted on its axis, spinning). Farther below, plates are crushing and stretching, magma is cooling and heating and leaking, rock is forming and changing. The ebb and flow, the ebb and the glow. The lilting earth, and we lilting, too, in our one flicker of consciousness in this incessant motion. We sit underneath the canopy of a beech tree, a mother tree, and rake the earth, the soft brown soil, and the broken beech mast casings, and the hard brown seeds, and the chunks of soft white chalk made from the skeletons of ancient creatures from the sea, lit by a tender light, and we breathe.
Couple Matrescence with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on how to be animal, then revisit Florida Scott Maxwell on the most important thing to remember about your mother and Lincoln Steffens’s playful, profound 1925 meditation on fatherhood.
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.
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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.
Source: The Marginalian | 27 Feb 2025 | 7:26 am(NZT)
Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force
It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it — its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow — is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a “wave in the mind” — the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable.
Many writers have contemplated the mystery of creativity — take, for instance, David Bowie, Octavia Butler, John Lennon, May Sarton, Lewis Hyde, and Nick Cave — but none more articulately than the poet, anthropologist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who in his long life published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, influenced two generations of writers and activists, and inspired the main character in the most famous novel by Jack Kerouac (with whom he roomed for a while).
In a passage from Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of journal entries and poem fragments from his twenties and thirties — Snyder writes:
Poems that spring out fully armed; and those that are the result of artisan care. The contrived poem, workmanship; a sense of achievement and pride of craft; but the pure inspiration flow leaves one with a sense of gratitude and wonder, and no sense of “I did it” — only the Muse. That level of mind — the cool water — not intellect and not — (as romantics and after have confusingly thought) fantasy-dream world or unconscious. This is just the clear spring — it reflects all things and feeds all things but is of itself transparent. Hitting on it, one could try to trace it to the source; but that writes no poems and is in a sense ingratitude. Or one can see where it goes: to all things and in all things. The hidden water underground. Anyhow — one shouts for the moon in always insisting on it; and safer-minded poets settle for any muddy flow and refine it as best they can.
In another entry, he considers the fork in the channel an artist must face — to go toward tradition or toward the unexampled, toward order or toward chaos:
Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing.
But as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:
The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times… I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging — which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical — things.
In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature (public library):
HOW POETRY COMES TO ME
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
Complement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 23 Feb 2025 | 7:07 am(NZT)
Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by reason of demobilization of men.” When he received the discharge papers, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed “communist initiated.”
Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland), thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing Desert Solitaire, which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.
Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries, selections from which were posthumously published as Confessions of a Barbarian (public library). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life:
HOW TO DIE — but first, how not to:
Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.
Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.
Not in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.
Not the legal murder either — too grim and ugly such a martyrdom — down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial — not to be murdered so, no never.
But how to:
Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below — before the crash, before…
With none to say no, none.
Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.
When he did die a lifetime later, alone in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: “No Comment.” He requested that his useless body be used “to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.” Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry’s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, “lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,” and no formal speeches — “though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.” When the wake was held at Arches National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge.
Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:
It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.
Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman’s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 20 Feb 2025 | 8:01 am(NZT)
19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living
We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can’t control — the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of — how we choose to play the hand makes us who we are.
A lifetime before she looked back to contemplate how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, the teenage Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) began considering the choices before her in creating herself out of the raw material of her givens — the limiting horizons of her time and place, the vast vista of her mind. (“She thinks like a man,” her father boasted in a haunting testament to both.)
At seventeen, she had passed her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, then gone on to study math at the Catholic University in Paris before crossing over to the Sorbonne for a degree in philosophy. She would become only the eighth woman to ever pass the agrégation — the most rigorous exam in the French education system — narrowly losing first place in her class to Sartre.
It was at the Sorbonne where, still in her teens, she began bending her tensile and penetrating mind toward the kind of life she wanted to live and the kind of person she wanted to be. In her journal of that time, later published as the altogether magnificent Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library), she approaches these questions with the oscillation between determination and self-doubt inherent to any great endeavor — for there is no greater creative act than the making of a life.
Punctuating the diary are touching reminders that even exceptional people are not spared the ordinary perturbations of being human — she is in some ways a typical teenager (“My winter was occupied almost uniquely with love and suffering.”) and a typical person (“Unendingly I make resolutions that I never keep.”), and yet what she makes out of all that suffering, all that restlessness, all that yearning is what makes her — what makes anyone — extraordinary.
Finding herself “neither able to accept nor to refuse life,” she peers into her near and faraway future:
I will be twenty years old in a few months. My education will be almost finished. I will have learned, read, seen everything essential and well beyond. I will have lived with my intelligence and my heart and known a rather wide world. I will even have begun to think by myself; there will be no wasted time. But then it will be advisable to put myself to work. If I live, I must fully accept the game; I must have the most beautiful life. I don’t know why I am here, but since I remain here, I will construct a beautiful edifice.
Then she reaches for the building blocks. Deeming her suffering “useless,” she resolves to rise above it and aim her life toward “a written work that would say everything, that would analyze souls in minute detail while breathing life into each body.” Aware that this dream would demand of her absolute devotion and absolute discipline, she sets down a series of instructions to herself:
Take risks… Force myself to think for two pages per day… Don’t scatter myself… Don’t hurry, but work two hours per day, genius or not, even if I believe that it will come to nothing, and confide in someone who will criticize me and take me seriously.
[…]
I must… clarify my desire and proceed by trial and error in order to prepare what would eventually be a great written work… Analyze, understand, and descend more deeply into myself… It is imperative to begin. The questions that interest me must be studied in great depth… It would be necessary… to bring it together with the problems of the personality that love formulates so exactly — the problem of the act of faith that so closely touches the first two problems… It would be necessary to have the courage to write, not to expound ideas but to discover them, not to clothe them artistically but to animate them. The courage to believe in them.
Because there can never be great achievement without great despair, because demanding everything and more of yourself is always wormed with doubt that you might not have it to give, the pendulum keeps swinging between determination and despair. Just after deciding to devote her summer vacation to exploring “the subject of love” as a philosophical problem in “at least thirty condensed and coherent pages,” she plummets again:
What emptiness, what boredom! I hang on to some likable faces, but the too well loved face unendingly smiles at me with sorrow. For what indefinite crossing have I embarked at this precise point in time and space as though in the middle of an immense sea? A crossing whose goal is unknown.
First she uses the lever of her formidable intellect to lift the heavy emotion:
I do not have the right to despair. [If] despair was justified… it demands to be demonstrated — to say, “nothing is worth it,” and to sit idly by with your arms crossed, to have the certainty that no certainty is possible; this is still dogmatism… I too am setting forth a postulate: it is first necessary to seek what is, then, I will see if I must still despair.
But one can never reason one’s way out of a powerful feeling-state — it simply has to be felt, suffered, endured “for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it.” All despair of life is at bottom despair of oneself — something Beauvoir channels with the heightened intensity of adolescent feeling and the lashing censure of ambition:
I have examined my conscience, and here is what I have found: prideful, selfish, and not very good… I often have disgust for myself… I have closed myself in my ivory tower, saying, “Who is worthy of entering here?” I would sometimes open the door and that is all, but there are some people profoundly better than me, and this haughty attitude is stupid. Egoist — I love others only inasmuch as they are me; I easily scorn, and scornful, I no longer try to do my best… How severely I judge and with what right?
In a momentary flash of self-compassion immediately clouded by the same sharp self-excoriation, she adds:
I should suffer with gentleness. I am hard, hard and proud. Become conscious of your own poverty, my girl, and of all of your cowardice!… I have covered my own cowardice with sophisms — oh!
She considers the steps to the courage of creating — a great work, or a great life:
Systematize my thoughts and believe in the value of thought. Read… Delve more deeply. Take all of this seriously. Be more pitiless towards myself and less skeptical with regards to others… Stop only in front of the evidence. Write conclusions once they are acquired… And above all: think for myself.
And yet she locates the key to a fulfilling life not in the mind alone but in the largeness, the fulness, the unabashed openness of the heart:
Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!
Half a century later — having proven these postulates with her life, having written not just one great work but several — she would approach the art of growing old with the same depth of thought and feeling.
Complement with her contemporary Albert Camus on the three antidotes to the absurdity of life and Walt Whitman’s timeless recipe for a vibrant and rewarding life, then revisit this omnibus of resolutions for a life worth living borrowed from some extraordinary lives.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 18 Feb 2025 | 8:51 am(NZT)
Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on the Art of Presence and the “Moments of Being” That Make You Who You Are
In praise of “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of my favorite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his classic on anxiety that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity… the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.”
Given that nearly every cell in your body has changed since the time you were a child, given that nearly all of your values, desires, and social ties are now different, given that you are, biologically and psychologically, a different person from one moment to the next, what makes you and the child you were the same person — what makes a self — is nothing more than the thread of selective memory and internal narrative stringing together the most meaningful beads of experience into the rosary of meaning that is your personhood.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) called these beads “moments of being” — the “scaffolding in the background” of life, “invisible and silent” yet shaping the foreground of experience: our relationship to other people, our response to events, the things we make with our hands and our minds in our daily living. The most intensely felt of these moments, she believed, “have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence”; we don’t call them to memory — they call us into being. They are the antipode of what she called “non-being” — the lull of habit and mindless routine that drags us through our days in a state of near-living.
In Moments of Being (public library) — the posthumous collection of her autobiographical writings — she writes:
A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.
In her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway — part love letter to these moments of being, part lamentation about the proportion of non-being we choose without knowing we are choosing — she locates the key to righting the ratio in “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” Placing one of the characters in one such vivid moment of being — “coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand” — she writes him thinking:
Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
This question of life’s fullness — what fills it, what syphons it, how to live when it overflows beyond what we can hold — animates Woolf’s entire body of work. In the spring of 1928, while working on her trailblazing novel Orlando (“which is wretched,” she told her sister Vanessa in a letter, then wrote the relationship between creativity and self-doubt into the novel itself) — she reflected in her diary:
A bitter windy rainy day… Life is either too empty or too full. Happily, I never cease to transmit these curious damaging shocks. At 46 I am not callous; suffer considerably; make good resolutions — still feel as experimental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever… And I find myself again in the driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it?
In a sense, to live in the moment is always to live against time. Woolf captured his with uncommon splendor in another autobiographical fragment:
The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it is pressed so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of house moving — causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters.
As Woolf was thinking these beautiful thoughts and writing these beautiful sentences, she was enduring regular visitations the acute depression that would eventually lead her to fill her coat-pockets with stones and wade into the river, never to return. She had come to the brink once before, in her twenties. That she lived to fifty-nine despite such suffering, that she wrote the flashes of eternity she did, is an astonishing achievement of the spirit — a testament to her own power “of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”
It is through her protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway that Woolf best captures these luminous building blocks of personhood:
Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there — the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.
These moments, Woolf knew and devoted her life to having us know, are our best listening device for hearing the soul beneath the self — the soul that is little more than the quality of attention we pay to being alive.
It was one such almost painfully acute moment of being while walking through her garden that lifted what Woolf called “the cotton wool of daily life” and sparked her epiphany about why she became a writer — a lens on a larger truth about what it means to be an artist, a person of creative fire in the river of time — prompting her to exult in the revelation:
I reach… the idea… that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 13 Feb 2025 | 7:07 am(NZT)
How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love
“The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love.”
“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”
It is a beautiful sentiment, beautiful and incomplete. Art is but one way of contacting that deeper reality. Science is another, with its revelations of truths so beyond sight that they seem inconceivable, from the billions of neutrinos passing through your body this very second to the hummingbird’s flight to the quantum bewilderment of the subatomic world.
But more than art, more than science, we have invented one implement to cut through the curtain of habit and render the world new. Love alone blues the sky and greens the grass and brightens all the light we see. It is the last irreducible reality, whose mystery no painting or poem can fully capture and no fMRI can fully explain.
In 1965, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) moved from Los Angeles, where he had just finished a graduate program at UCLA, to New York, where he was offered a post at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He found the city a place of “fantastic creative furor,” but his painful introversion and sense of difference left him feeling friendless.
That summer, just before beginning his new job, he traveled home to London. While in Europe, he met Jenö Vincze — a charismatic Hungarian theater director living in Berlin. Oliver had been planning to go to a neurology conference in Vienna. Instead, he found himself in Paris, in Amsterdam, in love with Jenö. Here was a rigorous and original scientist, who would devote his life to illuminating the neurological underpinnings of our strangest mental states, suddenly subsumed in the strangest and most mysterious of them all. He would later look back on this time as one of “an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.”
When he reluctantly returned to New York, Oliver set about trying to bridge the abyss of physical absence by rendering his world alive in words, composing some of the greatest love letters I have read. In one of the treasures collected in his posthumously published Letters (public library), he writes:
My dearest Jenö:
I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is seven o’clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And soon there’ll be a billion lights.
He isn’t, of course, describing the city as it is but as he is. This, in the end, may be what love is — the billion lights inside that make the whole world luminous, an inner sun to render every dull surface and every dark space radiant:
I don’t feel the distance either, only the nearness. We’re together all the while. I feel your breath on the side of my neck… My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile.
[…]
I want to share my joys with you. To see the green crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg cases hung from seaweed. A little octopus, just hatched, jetting for joy in the salty water. Sea anemones. The soft sweet pressure if you touch their center. The chalky hands of barnacles. And polychaetes in their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), moving with insensate grace. And dive with me under the ocean, Jenö. Through fish, like birds, which accept your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the freedom, the complete and utter freedom of motion, second only to that of space itself.
Oliver yearned to transport Jenö not only to the world he walked through but to the world within, the world he would always best access and best channel in writing. “The act of writing,” he would reflect a lifetime later, “is a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.” Now, he tells his beloved:
I read Psalms in profanity, for the joy they contain, and the trust and the love, and the pure morning language… I write so much. I want to catch everything and share it with you. You will be deprived of all your social life, your sleep, your food, condemned to read interminable letters. Poor Jenö, committed to a lover who’s never silent, who talks all day, and talks all night, and talks in company, and talks to himself. Words are the medium into which I must translate reality. I live in words, in images, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can’t help it.
Again and again, he keeps returning to this new quality of light suddenly revealed by love:
The weather has been of supernal beauty. The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love… I never saw that golden light before we met in Paris.
Perhaps it was this brush with the irreducible immensity of love that would later lead Oliver to write so presciently about the limits of artificial intelligence and so poignantly about the meaning of our human lives.
Two days later, he writes again:
I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through ten layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known… I believe we are both infinite, Jenö. I see the future as an endless expansion of the present, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves.
Like all people in love, Oliver was envisioning a life with Jenö, not once imagining that they would never see each other again, that he would spend the next thirty-five years celibate and afraid of love, afraid of himself in love.
But love would find him in the end — a beautiful and bright love that would hold him through dying with dignity.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 10 Feb 2025 | 8:22 am(NZT)
The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison
“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”
The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, brutal and inevitable, we come to realize that no prayer or protest will bend reality to our will, that we are being bent to it instead and we have two options only: bow or break. Suffering, surrender, transformation — this may be the simplest formulation of the life process. It is the evolutionary mechanism of adaptation by which every creature on Earth became what it is. It is existential mechanism by which we become who we are. In a universe where free will may well be an illusion, what we make of our suffering may be the measure and meaning of our freedom. “Everything can be taken from a man,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his epochal memoir of surviving the unsurvivable, “but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Just before dawn on May 29, 1979, the Czechoslovakian State Security Police barged into the home of the playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011), dragged him out of bed, and threw him in a municipal jail along with ten other members of the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted — a human rights movement formed to bring to light cases of people harassed and imprisoned for speaking up against the dictatorship.
Havel was not surprised. A decade earlier, he had discovered a listening device in the ceiling of his Prague apartment. He had been trailed by the secret police ever since. He had watched his books removed from schools and public libraries, his plays banned from the stage.
“It’s Tuesday evening and I’ve just returned from court a sentenced man,” he wrote to his wife Olga when he was found guilty on charges of “subversion” a month after his forty-third birthday. “I’m taking my sentence, as they say, philosophically.” The philosophy he drew from the experience would lead him to write the finest thing I have ever read about the meaning of hope.
Havel was sent to a prison ruled by a sadistic admirer of Hitler who in his heyday had presided over a Stalinist prison camp. Now, all the more embittered by the knowledge that he was nearing the end of his career, the warden spent his days tormenting his captives in body and in mind. The prisoners, whose days were filled with hard labor, were allowed to write to just one person, a single four-page letter a week. Havel chose Olga — “a working-class girl, very much her own person, sober, unsentimental,” who had always been the first reader of all his work and his “main authority when it comes to judging it.” Looking back on his life, he would recall: “I needed an energetic woman beside me to turn to for advice and yet still be someone I could be in awe of.”
The letters had to be legible, with nothing corrected or crossed out. Quotation marks, foreign expressions, underlining, and humor were forbidden. Those deemed to contain too many “thoughts” were confiscated. Once, Havel was thrown into solitary confinement after it was discovered that he had been writing on behalf of an illiterate Roma man, just as Whitman had done for illiterate Civil War soldiers an epoch ago and a world away.
Still, as if to remind us that constraint is a catalyst of creativity, Havel managed to contraband a wealth of “thoughts” in these spare dispatches to his wife. They survive as Letters to Olga (public library) — the extraordinary record of the philosophy he drew from his plight, out of which arises a lucid and luminous field guide to suffering as an instrument of self-refinement, an ode to the refusal of having one’s spirit broken by any depredation of the body or the mind, and a stubborn insistence on kindness as the only lifeline amid cruelty.
Days after his sentence, with an eye to the five years ahead — an unimaginable time horizon of freedom — Havel outlines his spiritual strategy for survival:
I find myself in a radically new existential situation, and the first thing I have to do is learn to live with it, which means finding a completely new structure of values and a new perspective on everything — other hopes, other aims, other interests, other joys. I have to create a new concept of time for myself and ultimately a new concept of life.
But, in consonance with the visionary Elizabeth Peabody’s admonition that the greatest danger to the gifted is middle age, “when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth,” Havel realizes that this new concept is in fact a return to a prior purity occluded by the self we ossify into when we begin believing our own myth, which may be the greatest danger to the artist. (The recovery of that deeper purity is what Hermann Hesse meant when he contemplated discovering the soul beneath the self.) Suddenly horrified by the way we have of caving in on ourselves by becoming our own favorite subject, Havel tells Olga:
Learning to live with this new situation and one of the tasks I’ve set myself during this long stay in prison will be a kind of “self-consolidation.” When I began to write plays, I wasn’t as inwardly burdened as I have been in recent years; I had… far more equanimity; I saw most things in proportion; I had a balanced outlook and a sense of humor, without a trace of uptightness, hysteria, bitterness. The positions I took were not absolute; I wasn’t constantly brooding over myself, absorbed in my own feelings, etc. — and at the same time I possessed a kind of harmonious inner certitude. Obsessive critical introspection is the other side of “pigheadedness.”
With an eye to the fault lines that often become frontiers of growth, he adds:
Jail, of all places, may seem to you a strange instrument of this self-reconstitution, but I truly feel that when I’m cut off from all my former commitments for so long, I might somehow achieve inner freedom and a new mastery over myself. I don’t intend to revise my view of the world, of course, but rather to find a better way of fulfilling the demands that the world — as I see it — places on me. I don’t want to change myself, but to be myself in a better way… It also seems to me that the only way for someone like me to survive here is to breathe his own meaning into the experience.
Prison calibrated his metric for what constitutes a good or bad day. A hot bath, a healthy meal, and “a marvelous session of yoga” left him gladdened to the bone. Of the bad days he could say little — no record survives of the abuses he endured — other than reporting on the “sheer agony” of his hemorrhoids. (“It’s worse here than it would be outside… You’re alone with your pain and you have to go through with it.”) He decided that, “theoretically,” nothing could stop him from writing a new play while in prison. (He did.) He decided that, practically, he could use the time to improve his English and learn German. In one of his provision lists to Olga, in between a hard case for his glasses, a pocket calendar, warm socks, and “a lot of vitamins,” he requested the German-Czech dictionary from their home and a language textbook. And then he itemized his resolutions for serving his sentence:
- to remain at least as healthy as I am now (and perhaps cure my hemorrhoids);
- generally reconstitute myself psychologically;
- write at least two play;
- improve my English;
- learn German at least as well as I know English;
- study the entire Bible thoroughly.
Three years into his imprisonment, the state police visited Havel and told him he could be home within the week if only he would write a single sentence renouncing his views and asking for pardon. Unlike Galileo, he refused. Four months later, Havel fell ill with a fever so high that he feared he would not live. So did the wardens, who threw him in the back of a police van and drove him fifty miles to a prison hospital in Prague as he shivered with the delirium of death handcuffed in his pajamas.
When he slowly returned to the land of the living, Havel gambled that the hospital censors might be less severe than the prison’s and composed the first detailed letter to Olga describing his struggle. It made it. An epoch before social media, she immediately reached out to his friends aboard. Petitions on his behalf began pouring in from all over the world through this borderless network of solidarity.
One evening after he was sent back to prison, as he was about to go to sleep, several guards suddenly barged into his cell, along with a doctor and “a woman official of some kind.” They informed Havel that his sentence was terminated. He was so astonished that, in a literal embodiment of Dorris Lessing’s metaphor of the prisons we choose to live inside, he asked to spend one more night in his cell. They refused — he was now a civilian. He was taken out in his pajamas.
When Havel reentered the real world, he devoted himself to eradicating the tyrannical impulse that makes dictatorships and their systemic attack on the dignity of human beings possible. Six years after his release from prison, he was unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly. The following year, when the country held its first free election in nearly half a century, the was re-elected by the people. As tensions between Czechs and Slovaks rose in the 1990s, he governed a divided nation by the personal credo he had articulated in one of his prison letters to Olga — a sentiment as true of physical imprisonment as of the prisons of the mind we enter whenever we succumb to divisive ideologies or take a victim stance toward our suffering:
I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them. I have different opinions of different people, but I cannot say that I hate anyone in the world. I have no intention of changing in that regard. If I did, it would mean I had lost.
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.
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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.
Source: The Marginalian | 7 Feb 2025 | 9:56 am(NZT)
An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them
Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation — a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another.
And yet, in steps too unconscious and incremental even for me to perceive, I became a writer and not a mathematician. Words, in the end, are where we live and how we build the world inside the universe. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in one of the finest things I have ever read. Words are all we have to translate one consciousness to another. They are how we render ourselves real to each other — we need them to convey what the touch of life feels like on the skin of the particular psyche and the particular nervous system we have each drawn from the cosmic lottery: You will never know what blue looks like to me and I what a fever feels like to you. They are how we render reality for ourselves — it is in words that we narrate the events of our lives inside the lonely bone cave of the mind in order to make sense of what is happening and inscribe it into the ledger of memory, on the pages of which the story of the self emerges.
This fundamental subjectivity of experience makes every word we write and utter a bottle of pressurized ambiguity effervescent with myriad meanings, tossed into the ocean of experience in the touching hope that it will convey a clear message about what we see and what we feel. The great miracle is that we understand each other at all.
Artist Julie Paschkis (who illustrated those wonderful picture-book biographies of Pablo Neruda and Maria Merian) conjures up the magic of words and their blessed bewilderment of meaning in The Wordy Book (public library), each page of which opens up a question — simple yet profound, quietly poetic — and leaves you to wander into your own answer inside a painting alive with words.
There is an Alice in Wonderland quality to the book: The questions play with the limits of logic (What tells me more, an IF or an OR?) and with the existential restlessness of childhood (When does there become here? When does then become now?); they invite the fundamental curiosity at the heart of compassion (Do you see what I see?) and emanate a radiant love of life (What is the sum of a summer day?) consonant with the vitality of Paschkis’s paintings — this parallel language of shape and color just as rich and eloquent as the language of words, as playful and abstract as the language of mathematics.
Complement The Wordy Book with The Lost Words — writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris’s courageous rewilding of children’s imagination through nature words discarded from the modern dictionary as irrelevant — and The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s splendid invented words for real things we feel but cannot name — then revisit the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice, narrating her lyrical love letter to the art of words, and Mary Shelley on their world-revising power.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 5 Feb 2025 | 10:10 am(NZT)
Reworldling Humanity: E.B. White’s Magnificent 1943 Response to a Politician Who Wanted to Make the Pacific Ocean an American Lake
On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.”
White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on a tenderness for life with books like Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web — wasted no time polishing the absurd proposition into a lens on the deepest problem facing our civilization.
In one of his wartime editorials for The New Yorker, later collected in the hauntingly timely out-of-print gem The Wild Flag (public library), he writes:
The Pacific Ocean, said Clarence Budington Kelland firmly, must become an American lake. He didn’t make it clear why it should become an American lake rather than, say, a Chinese lake or a Russian lake. The Chinese were seaside dwellers along the Pacific many thousands of years before the Americans, and presumably even now like to gaze upon its blue and sometimes tranquil waters. This may seem annoying to a party leader, who is apt to find it difficult to believe that there can be anybody of any importance on the far end of a lake. Yet the Pacific and its subsidiary seas are presumably real and agreeable to the people who live on them. The Sea of Okhotsk is five times the size of Mr. Kelland’s state of Arizona, the Sea of Japan is longer than the longest serial he ever wrote, the Yellow Sea is as big as the Paramount Building and bigger, and the South China Sea runs on endlessly into the sunset beyond Borneo. Are these the coves in an American lake — little bays where we can go to catch our pickerel among the weeds?
What made Kelland’s postwar plan so preposterous is also what made it so dangerous — it lived by the same metastatic nationalism that had hurled the world into war in the first place. Against this malady humanity’s narrowly evaded self-destruction was evidently only a temporary vaccine that has since worn out: Here we are again, gulfing toward an abyss from which there may be no return.
E.B. White devoted his life to diagnosing the malady in the hope that future generations — that’s us — may arrive at a cure before another metastasis, this one deadly.
A generation before Gary Snyder considered what it would take to unbreak the world, urging us to place “community networks” at the center of how we govern ourselves and work “toward the true community of all beings,” White writes:
The answer to war is no war. And the likeliest means of removing war from the routine of national life is to elevate the community’s authority to a level which is above national level.
When I took the Oath of Allegiance at my naturalization ceremony twenty years after emigrating to America as a lone teenager from a poor post-communist country — an oath natural-born citizens never have to swear — I was taken aback by its demand to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required to do so.
The flag rose and I, standing between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, repeated the words, received my certificate in a daze, and left with an uneasy feeling.
Out in the sterile municipal parking lot, watching a yellow leaf flutter at the tip of an aspen branch, I wondered what the world would look like if this were the flag we all swore allegiance to — this bright burst of life holding onto itself.
E.B. White — who never lost faith in humanity, even as he lived through two world wars and the nuclear terror of the Cold War — wondered the same, observing in another 1943 editorial:
The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet.
And in another:
A nation asks of its citizens everything — their fealty, their money, their faith, their time, their lives. It is fair to ask whether the nation, in return, does indeed any longer serve the best interests of the human beings who give so lavishly of their affections and their blood.
[…]
Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part. This choice is implicit in the world to come. We have a little time in which we can make the choice intelligently. Failing that, the choice will be made for us in the confusion of war, from which the world will emerge unified — the unity of total desolation.
He envisioned a new organizing principle for the world, different from nationalistic government — one that would “impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom — although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.” Imagine if we all viewed our participation in humanity the way astronauts do, how naturally then we would unfist our nationalisms into an outstretched hand. White imagined it, with all the salutary disorientation it would entail:
A world made one, by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would deprive him of the enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he has never seen.
There is, White wrote, already a microcosm of that possibility:
The City of New York is a world government on a small scale. There, truly, is the world in a nutshell, its citizens meeting in the subway and ballpark, sunning on the benches in the square. They shove each other, but seldom too hard. They annoy each other, but rarely to the point of real trouble.
This little aside in the middle of a New Yorker editorial would become the seed for White’s timeless love letter to the city, penned just a few years after the end of the war. In it, he would write:
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines… [a] poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.
What if we governed human life not by politics but by poetry?
“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” James Baldwin would insist a generation after White — James Baldwin, who also insisted that “the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”
What if the choice White saw a century ago is yet to be made, can be made, fall on us to make? We can choose, we can, to make of this dying planet a living poem.
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.
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Source: The Marginalian | 4 Feb 2025 | 2:54 am(NZT)
Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World
“What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.”
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we’ve got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms to the atomic bomb.
I know no mightier or more mellifluous voice of resistance to this dangerous belief than the poet, anthropologist, and ecological steward Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who would surely resist being called a philosopher, but who for nearly a century has been teaching us with his writing and his living how to live and how to die — and what else is philosophy?
Born into a family that survived by subsistence farming after the Great Depression hurled them into poverty, Snyder was seven when an accident left him bedridden for months. He spent them devouring book after book from the public library, so that by the time he was back on his feet, he had read more than a college freshman. Reading, of course, teaches us that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives — it complicates our story of what it means to be alive, it opens our eyes and our hearts to how other people and peoples in other times and other places have lived, how their ways of being might deepen and broaden and elevate our own.
By the time he was a young man, Snyder was determined to bend his gaze beyond his era’s horizon of possibility.
He took a job as a seaman to better understand other cultures and enrolled in a graduate program for Asian languages at Berkeley.
He worked as a vagabond laborer up and down the West Coast, a trail-builder in Yosemite, a crewman in the engine room of an oil tanker, a fire lookout in the North Cascades, and a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
He roomed for a while with Jack Kerouac, studied for a while with Alan Watts, and climbed Glacier Peak with Allen Ginsberg at the belay.
He discovered Zen through D.T. Suzuki and learned ink and watercolor painting from Chiura Obata.
He spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities after boarding a marine freighter to study Zen Buddhism in Japan.
And all the while, he wrote poetry, thought deeply about the nature of the mind and the substance of the spirit, and paid tender attention to the living world, to the relational nature of being, to the meaning and making of freedom.
Snyder’s increasingly urgent and clarifying vision for remaking the world by rewriting our stories of the possible comes alive in Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of his journal entries and poem fragments.
Long before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Snyder makes a piercing parenthetical observation in a diary entry penned after “two days contemplating ecology, food-chains and sex”:
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
He considers the cages of our cultural ideologies:
There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities… The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.
The most merciless danger of our present world order is that we have turned these “violent and frustrated personalities” into leaders, largely because the power structures of secular life, which we call politics, are modeled on the power structures of large organized religions. But there are other organizing principles to be drawn from other, older spiritual traditions that may better address the problem of being alive in this time and place, of managing the superorganism we have become and the inner life of the spirit in each of us cells. In Distant Neighbors (public library) — the absolutely wonderful record of his epistolary friendship with Wendell Berry — Snyder (whose poetically titled graduate thesis “He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village” explored the wisdom of indigenous traditions) reflects:
Whereas “world religions” tend to have great charismatic human leader-founders, the natural religions, the old ways, take their teachings direct from the human mind, the collective unconscious, the ground of being. Rather than theology, they have mythology and visionary practice… The two levels, of course, are (1) acting as social glue and intensifying the bonds of the culture and the coherence of it; the other is liberating and transcendent, of freeing one from the bonds of ego and conditioning. It’s fascinating to see the dialectic of these two roles as they work out in different times and places. Some traditions within great traditions tend toward total mysticism, others ground themselves entirely in secular affairs. All religions are one at the point where life is given to the spirit, and real breakthrough is achieved. I doubt that any of the world religions ever have or could achieve a fusion of the two levels; I like to believe that some ancient religions — Old Ways — did achieve it: like perhaps the Hopi. The thing is, “world religions” are always a bad deal: they are evoked by the contradictions and problems of civilization, and they make compromises from the beginning to be allowed to live. The Great Fact of the last 8,000 years is civilization; the power of which has been and remains greater than the power of any religion within that time span.
Some mystics, Snyder observes, have always found ways to “crack through dogma” — he names Meister Eckhart among them, and I would add Hildegard of Bingen and Simone Weil — but he laments that Christianity, the dominant religion of the capitalist West, has become more and more of “a centralist teaching.” In most Eastern spiritual traditions, on the other hand, “the center of being is everywhere.” He writes:
Zen, as the arm of Buddhism most given to the life of the spirit, really doesn’t care about theology or dogma; it takes people where the spirit leads, and has a complete authenticity of its own, one must adjust this authenticity to whatever received teachings one started from on one’s own.
Echoing Nietzsche’s eternal admonition that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” he writes elsewhere:
Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.
Drawing on his life in Zen, he considers what he made for himself of the ancient teachings:
Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions… Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of “all beings.” This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior — defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West. It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one’s own responsibility, but willing to work with a group.
[…]
The traditional cultures are in any case doomed… The coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.
The story the “Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West” has sold us is that self-interest is the only path to growth — there goes Silicon Valley lining up with the fault line that is Donald Trump — and that parasitism the only way of securing resources for oneself. Snyder’s vision for this coming revolution of consciousness is not against growth but for symbiosis rather than parasitism, for interdependence rather than selfing, as the path to growth. In Turtle Island (public library) — his 1974 book of poems and essays, titled after the Native American term for North America — he reflects:
The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature… If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth — of the highest and most fascinating order — it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation.
In The Real Work (public library) — the collection of interviews and talks he gave in the 1960s and 1970s — he elaborates on this idea, considering what those alternative paths to growth look like and what they ask of us. Just as Rachel Carson was signing her untimely farewell to the world with her haunting instruction for how to save it, he writes:
The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people’s consciousness.
[…]
All of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because its drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving — real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind, and into liberation… And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting — that ask, “What is the natural-spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving?”
[…]
The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that… Nobody can move from [one] to [the other] in a vacuum as a solitary individual…. What have to be built are community networks… When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.
A decade later, Snyder would distill the essence of this orientation in a talk he delivered to an audience of college students:
What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.
And while it is true that no one else can walk the path and do the real work for us, it is also true that we can be helped and guided, that we especially need the help and guidance in such times of helplessness and disorientation. Snyder writes:
True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization… We need them.
Who are the true teachers of our time?
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 1 Feb 2025 | 1:19 pm(NZT)