“Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” And yet, with our reflex for teleological thinking — that childish grab at “I know!” — we habitually cut ourselves off from the mystery that houses the most creative, and therefore the most vulnerable and alive, part of our own souls, forgetting what Carl Sagan’s ghost so poetically reminds us: that “the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

Nothing restores our porousness and receptivity to that richness more readily than music — the backdoor of consciousness, through which something transcendent slips past all of our reasoned reservations, all of our guardedness and confusion, at once releasing us from the solitary confinement of the self and restoring us to ourselves, reminding us that we are always half-opaque to ourselves and this opacity shimmers with possibility.

These questions — the power of music, the power of porousness — animate Nick Cave, whom I see as a kind of sculptor of the spirit, turning the raw materials of life — a life that has not been easy — into something of transcendent beauty.

In Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — his long and luscious conversation with Seán O’Hagan — he considers how music parts the veil between the known world and the mystery of being:

I think music, out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence.

[…]

I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.

In a passage evocative of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s contour of the edges of consciousness, he considers that “impossible” place where transcendence lives — “a semi-conscious place, a twilight place, a distracted place, a place of surrender” — the place where his dead son also lives, and the life-deep sorrow of the loss, and the portal to beauty the loss unlatched in his creative spirit:

There is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters… It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond.

That otherness, that beyondness, is what we commonly call mystery — the realm of experience inaccessible to our analytical minds, unaccountable by reason, and yet a stratum of reality we touch beyond doubt in those rare transcendent moments, as palpable as a lover’s hand, as alive as prayer.

Nick reflects on the supreme portal our species has devised for accessing that realm:

Of all things, music can lift us closer to the sacred.

[…]

[Music] has the ability to lead us, if only temporarily, into a sacred realm. Music plays into the yearning many of us instinctively have — you know, the God-shaped hole. It is the art form that can most effectively fill that hole, because it makes us feel less alone, existentially. It makes us feel spiritually connected. Some music can even lead us to a place where a fundamental spiritual shift of consciousness can happen. At best, it can conjure a sacred space.

In that sacred space, we get to see the world more whole — not artificially, not as a pretty delusion, but with greater fidelity to the deeper reality. He weighs the robust salvation to be found in that space:

The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful.

But because there are no absolutes in beauty, everything we experience as beautiful is a projection of something we long for — a fragmentary fulfillment of our existential longing, or what C.S. Lewis called “the thing itself.” Every artist makes what they make out of the raw material of longing, conscious of it in varying degrees, codified in various forms. Nick considers his:

All my songs are written from a place of spiritual yearning, because that is the place that I permanently inhabit. To me, personally, this place feels charged, creative and full of potential.

[…]

Songs have the capacity to be revealing, acutely so. There is much they can teach us about ourselves. They are little dangerous bombs of truth.

Self-revelation is the most vulnerable-making thing of which human beings are capable, and yet in that vulnerability we find our deepest freedom. Echoing Bob Dylan’s insistence that “you must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality,” he adds:

My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom… To be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually… It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.

Faith, Hope and Carnage is a joy in its wide-roaming entirety. Complement these fragments with the poetic physicist and pianist Alan Lightman on music as a language for the exhilaration of being alive and other superb writers, from Whitman and Woolf to Kurt Vonnegut and Oliver Sacks, on the singular power of music, then revisit Nick Cave on songwriting, the remedy for despair, and art as an instrument of self-forgiveness.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Some of us call it chance; those less at peace with the randomness that governs the universe may call it “God.” But however we name it, there are moments in life when we feel its workings deeply and seek to make meaning out of them — that is part of our creaturely inheritance as the sensemaking species, the pattern-seeking animal. Hindsight is the enchanted loom on which we weave the pattern of our destiny, threading together fragmentary memories and chance occurrences into a thing of cohesion, from which a shape and a story emerge — a story we call fate. Suddenly, we find in our past omens of our present — synchronicities that become signposts, pointing us to where we were always meant to go.

In this haunting sense of fatedness, the determinism of science and the predestination of spirituality converge.

Because love is the supreme magnifying lens of our human experience, through it all of our hopes and fears are enlarged with life; through it the smallest coincidences swell with meaning. It is when we fall in love that we come to feel this eerie fatedness most acutely — something James Baldwin illuminated as he reckoned with love and the illusion of choice. Suddenly, every smallest serendipity is rife with assurance and every found overlap in yesterday’s shadow — the stuffed snail you both snugged as your most beloved toy eons before you knew of each other’s existence, the song you both secretly loved in high school, the shared aversion to pickled radish — a promise of blissfully joined tomorrows.

Long before she furnished the greatest definition of love in her prose, the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) winked at its fundamental chance-nature in a playful and poignant poem about how lovers cast the spell of fatedness on each other.

Szymborska’s beloved poem, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak — her longtime translators, whose work prompted the poet to exult in “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original” — comes newly alive as an illustrated book by Italian graphic artist Beatrice Gasca Queirazza.

On the pages of Queirazza’s Love at First Sight (public library), the text of Szymborska’s poem unspools across a magical-realist sequence of illustrations, woven together by the floating leaf that emerges as the poem’s central symbol for the serendipities we read into love.

The strangers who populate the pages — melancholy, dreamsome people all moving through the world as if distracted by some unseen preoccupation — remind us that any two people may cross each other’s path at any given moment without knowing who they would become to one another in some future season of being, unwittingly enacting the poem’s closing verse:

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Complement with Szymborska’s poem “Life While-You-Wait” and her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the relationship between uncertainty and creativity, then revisit David Whyte’s poem “The Truelove” and Emily Dickinson’s poem love-poem to nature reimagined as an animated song.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness. We may know that uncertainty is the crucible of creativity, we may know that uncertainty is the key to democracy and good science, and yet in our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes. The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject — and us along with it — from the interconnected totality of deep truth.

A mighty antidote to that very human and very life-limiting impulse comes from The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) by John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968).

In 1940, as humanity’s most ferocious war was rupturing the world, Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts decamped to the nonhuman world and its elemental consolations of interdependence, embarking on an exploratory expedition in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California — “a long, narrow, highly dangerous body of water… subject to sudden and vicious storms of great intensity.”

Wading through the tide pools, his hands callused from collecting specimens, his feet stung by poisonous worms and spiked by urchins, his mind invigorated by the ravishing interconnectedness of life, the 38-year-old writer found himself contemplating the deepest strata of reality and its intercourse with the human imagination. What emerges is a meditation on the nature of knowledge — a kind of prose counterpart to Elizabeth Bishop’s deep-seeing poem “At the Fishhouses” — disguised as an expedition journal: a wanderer’s delight in the adjacent pleasure gardens of science and philosophy of mind, composed two decades before Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for his fiction. Despite his magnificent novels, despite his large-souled letters, I consider this his slender book of nonfiction his finest work.

At its heart is Steinbeck’s passionate refutation of the Western compulsion for teleological thinking — the tendency to explain things in terms of the purpose they serve, antithetical both to science and to the Eastern notion of being: the idea that everything just is and fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself, is simply because it is. Science — the supreme art of observation without interpretation, of meeting reality on its own acausal and impartial terms, free from the tyranny of why and its tendrils of blame — puts us a leap closer to understanding both particulate and pattern through non-teleological thinking — which, as Steinbeck astutely observes, is an inadequate term to begin with, for it asks of us more than thinking in how we parse any sort of information:

The method extends beyond thinking even to living itself; in fact, by inferred definition it transcends the realm of thinking possibilities, it postulates “living into.”

[…]

The greatest fallacy in, or rather the greatest objection to, teleological thinking is in connection with the emotional content, the belief. People get to believing and even to professing the apparent answers thus arrived at, suffering mental constrictions by emotionally closing their minds to any of the further and possibly opposite “answers” which might otherwise be unearthed by honest effort — answers which, if faced realistically, would give rise to a struggle and to a possible rebirth which might place the whole problem in a new and more significant light.

Such rebirth of perspective allows us to move beyond questions of cause in thinking and blame in feeling, which are related reflexes of the teleological mindset. The moment we regard something simply as it is, because it is, we have understood it more fully, for we have shed the narratives layer of why:

The non-teleological picture… goes beyond blame or cause. And the non-causal or non-blaming viewpoint… arises emergently from the union of two opposing viewpoints, such as those of physical and spiritual teleologies, especially if there is conflict as to causation between the two or within either. The new viewpoint very frequently sheds light over a larger picture, providing a key which may unlock levels not accessible to either of the teleological viewpoints. There are interesting parallels here: to the triangle, to the Christian ideas of trinity, to Hegel’s dialectic, and to Swedenborg’s metaphysic of divine love (feeling) and divine wisdom (thinking).

The factors we have been considering as “answers” seem to be merely symbols or indices, relational aspects of things — of which they are integral parts — not to be considered in terms of causes and effects. The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is. This is actually and truly a reason, more valid and clearer than all the other separate reasons, or than any group of them short of the whole. Anything less than the whole forms part of the picture only, and the infinite whole is unknowable except by being it, by living into it.

A thing may be so “because” of a thousand and one reasons of greater or lesser importance… The separate reasons, no matter how valid, are only fragmentary parts of the picture. And the whole necessarily includes all that it impinges on as object and subject, in ripples fading with distance or depending upon the original intensity of the vortex.

In a passage of exquisite intellectual elegance and emotional truth, Steinbeck considers the continuum that is the essence of reality — the continuum we artificially sever into fragments with our teleological explanations and causally compulsive opinions:

No one thing ever merges gradually into anything else; the steps are discontinuous, but often so very minute as to seem truly continuous. If the investigation is carried deep enough, the factor in question, instead of being graphable as a continuous process, will be seen to function by discrete quanta with gaps or synapses between, as do quanta of energy, undulations of light. The apparently definitive answer occurs when causes and effects both arise on the same large plateau which is bounded a great way off by the steep rise which announces the next plateau. If the investigation is extended sufficiently, that distant rise will, however, inevitably be encountered; the answer which formerly seemed definitive now will be seen to be at least slightly inadequate and the picture will have to be enlarged so as to include the plateau next further out. Everything impinges on everything else, often into radically different systems, although in such cases faintly. We doubt very much if there are any truly “closed systems.”

Okay. Enough abstraction. Let us land this into the loveliness of the concrete:

The ocean, with reference to waves of water, might be considered as a closed system. But anyone who has lived in Pacific Grove or Carmel during the winter storms will have felt the house tremble at the impact of waves half a mile or more away impinging on a totally different “closed” system.

This interconnectedness, this indivisibility, is the raw antidote to teleological thinking — something Steinbeck illustrates with a living wonder observed from the deck of his expedition vessel:

Seeing a school of fish lying quietly in still water, all the heads pointing in one direction, one says, “It is unusual that this is so” — but it isn’t unusual at all. We begin at the wrong end. They simply lie that way, and it is remarkable only because with our blunt tool we cannot carve out a human reason. Everything is potentially everywhere — the body is potentially cancerous, phthisic, strong to resist or weak to receive. In one swing of the balance the waiting life pounces in and takes possession and grows strong while our own individual chemistry is distorted past the point where it can maintain its balance. This we call dying, and by the process we do not give nor offer but are taken by a multiform life and used for its proliferation. These things are balanced. A man is potentially all things too, greedy and cruel, capable of great love or great hatred, of balanced or unbalanced so-called emotions. This is the way he is — one factor in a surge of striving. And he continues to ask “why” without first admitting to himself his cosmic identity.

Leaning once again on a living metaphor from the world of marine biology, he illustrates how our multitudes compose our totality in something beyond pure equivalence:

There are colonies of pelagic tunicates [Pyrosoma giganteum] which have taken a shape like the finger of a glove. Each member of the colony is an individual animal, but the colony is another individual animal, not at all like the sum of its individuals. Some of the colonists, girdling the open end, have developed the ability, one against the other, of making a pulsing movement very like muscular action. Others of the colonists collect the food and distribute it, and the outside of the glove is hardened and protected against contact. Here are two animals, and yet the same thing—something the early Church would have been forced to call a mystery. When the early Church called some matter “a mystery” it accepted that thing fully and deeply as so, but simply not accessible to reason because reason had no business with it. So a man of individualistic reason, if he must ask, “Which is the animal, the colony or the individual?”’ must abandon his particular kind of reason and say, “Why, it’s two animals and they aren’t alike any more than the cells of my body are like me. I am much more than the sum of my cells and, for all I know, they are much more than the division of me.” There is no quietism in such acceptance, but rather the basis for a far deeper understanding of us and our world. And now this is ready for the taboo-box.

Composing a sort of modern Aesopian fable of our faulty sensemaking, he adds:

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones. The tree-frog in the high pool in the mountain cleft, had he been endowed with human reason, on finding a cigarette butt in the water might have said, “Here is an impossibility. There is no tobacco hereabouts nor any paper. Here is evidence of fire and there has been no fire. This thing cannot fly nor crawl nor blow in the wind. In fact, this thing cannot be and I will deny it, for if I admit that this thing is here the whole world of frogs is in danger, and from there it is only one step to anti-frogicentricism.” And so that frog will for the rest of his life try to forget that something that is, is.

There is, Steinbeck cautions, nothing mystical about this recognition of an underlying patter — it is where all science ultimately points and where all knowledge, once freed from the clutch of causality, leads. Echoing the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” he adds:

The whole is necessarily everything, the whole world of fact and fancy, body and psyche, physical fact and spiritual truth, individual and collective, life and death, macrocosm and microcosm (the greatest quanta here, the greatest synapse between these two), conscious and unconscious, subject and object. The whole picture is portrayed by is, the deepest word of deep ultimate reality, not shallow or partial as reasons are, but deeper and participating… And all this against the hot beach on an Easter Sunday, with the passing day and the passing time. This little trip of ours was becoming a thing and a dual thing, with collecting and eating and sleeping merging with the thinking-speculating activity. Quality of sunlight, blueness and smoothness of water, boat engines, and ourselves were all parts of a larger whole and we could begin to feel its nature but not its size.

No excerpt or annotation can do justice to the indivisible wonder that is The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Complement these fragments from it with Hannah Arendt on the life of the mind, Thoreau on how to see reality unblinded by our preconceptions, and Ursula K. Le Guin on apprehending reality through the dual lens of poetry and science, then revisit Steinbeck love and the key to good writing.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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A century before Emily Dickinson wrote that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Erasmus Darwin (December 12, 1731–18 April 18, 1802) — Charles’s grandfather and his great influence on evolutionary ideas — set out “to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy.”

Having spent seven years translating Linnaeus’s groundbreaking classification system from Latin into English, coining several common English names for flowers in the process, Darwin was especially thrilled by the new science of the sexual reproduction of plants. In 1791, he published one of the world’s first popular science books — the book-length poem The Botanic Garden, which endeavored to introduce Linnaeus’s sexual system to the common reader.

In the second half of the book, titled The Loves of Plants, Darwin celebrated the lushest part of the living world through the lens of romance and sex, slicing through the era’s corseted propriety with the intimation that human sexuality is just another part of Nature, as beautiful and valid as a flower.

Animating the book is the insistence that all living things are interlinked in a chain of being; it was in a long footnote to The Loves of Plants that he outlined the rudiments of evolutionary theory, which his grandson went on to develop in On the Origin of Species.

Predictably, having made science scintillating and orthogonal to theological dogma, The Botanic Garden became a bestseller deemed too explicit for unwed women to read.

In addition to being a “natural philosopher” (the term for “scientist” before the word was coined for Mary Somerville), inventor, and ardent advocate for women’s education and the abolition of slavery, Erasmus Darwin was celebrated as a supreme English poet before the rise of Coleridge and Wordsworth. A quarter millennium before The Universe in Verse, he channeled its animating spirit, seeing in poetry a powerful portal of feeling into the life of the mind — a portal through which scientific ideas otherwise intimidating or alienating may enter freely, into a temperament of receptivity.

Darwin devoted his life to illuminating how nature works, meeting reality on its own terms and making of those terms a thing of beauty. These ideas came abloom anew in The Temple of Nature — his final and finest poem. He died before he could see its life in the world — it was published a year after his death and went on to influence generations of scientists, poets, naturalists, and philosophers.

Among them was the English physician and botanical writer Robert John Thornton (1768–1837). Between 1807 and 1812, Thornton published The Temple of Flora — a lavishly illustrated, poetry-laced effort to popularize Linnaeus’s sexual system, heavily influenced by The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature.

Perhaps because Thornton was not a poet and his attempts at verse were a poor imitation of Darwin’s, the book was not a popular success — the 800 copies printed nearly bankrupted him. But the illustrations from it — scrumptious color engravings of some of Earth’s most magnificent flowers, based on paintings by the eminent artist Philip Reinagle — endure as some of the most breathtaking botanical art of all time.

Complement with the stunning botanical paintings of the artist and poet Clarissa Munger Badger, who inspired Emily Dickinson, then savor the science of “perfect flowers” — the botanical term for nonbinary plants — with a side of Emily Dickinson. (All roads in nature lead back to Emily.)

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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To take the vaster perspective of time and space is always an act of resistance to seeing the present as islanded in time — the depiction menacing us from TV screens and news headlines. But it is also a deeply disorienting experience, for it plunges us into the immensity of being, asking us to learn to swim in the stream of time — or else we sink into our isolated smallness, and drown.

How to swim in the stream of time without drowning is what the great poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan (February 24, 1925–November 14, 2021) explores throughout her entire body of work, but nowhere more passionately than in her slender, splendid 1993 book Paris, When It’s Naked (public library).

Born and raised in Lebanon, Adnan found her artistic voice in America, at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, then fell in love with the artist Simone Fattal and spent the latter part of her century-long life with her love in Paris, where she had earned her degree in philosophy half a lifetime earlier.

As Notre-Dame reminds her of Aleppo’s Citadel from her Arab childhood and the Seine transports her to her time on the Neva in Russia, she considers the comforting proximity to river and cathedral, the way it both locates and dislocates the now:

They are there, protecting our meanderings. You don’t fear hunger, in such places, neither fear poverty of the spirit. Close, again, to water and stone, near the symbols of ancient European unity and Arab History, I can dismiss the present as a passage. The trouble, though, is that I don’t know where I come from, and even less, where I’m heading for.

And yet we only ever find ourselves by getting lost — in time, in space, in being and belonging. Walking the embankments of the Seine, she writes:

I sense the hands that built this open canyon through which the city’s blood runs to the ocean. Such beauty enslaves more than any conquest. The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist. That’s what we are: beings made through the contact of water with stone, of a chilly sunset with pure geometry. My hands touch the remnants of the day’s warmth on cobblestones, walls, moorings. In this moment no boats are going up or downstream. Three elements concur here: the river, the walls, and me. I will sit here. My thinking will reach low fire, my various desires will vanish. Now I am water, and the wall’s surface, and then I am a flow, and a line, and further on I become many, or one, of the dimensions of Being, maybe the basic molecule of Time. Here. It’s always here. It’s only through this ultimate solitude reached by the very fact of living, that one can find the kind of peace that makes tangible the accumulated absurdities that constitute everyone’s personal truth.

Couple this fragment of Paris, When It’s Naked with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on time and the antidote to our existential anxiety, then revisit Adnan on how to live and how to die, the sea and the soul, and the relationship between the self and the universe.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress is the Densmore Collection of cylinder phonographs — a bygone medium containing the living songs of an ancient culture.

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. government continued its assault on Native Americans by demanding they relinquish their tribal languages and belief systems, teach their children English, and enter the American mainstream. As a result of this concerted erasure campaign, the average American came to see indigenous peoples as living fossils on the brink of cultural extinction.

Frances Densmore (May 21, 1867–June 5, 1957) — a young music teacher from Red Wing, Minnesota — was appalled. In consonance with the eternal truth that the best way to complain is to create, she set out to singlehandedly preserve a vital aspect of indigenous culture, the one art that is the heartbeat of every culture: music.

Thomas Edison had invented the phonograph — a mechanical means of recording and reproducing sound, using a wax-coated cardboard cylinder and a cutting stylus — when Frances was ten. Around that time, listening to the songs of the Dakota Indians near her home, she fell in love with music. In an era when higher education was closed to women with only limited exceptions, she spent three years studying music at Oberlin College — the first university to admit women, and the first to admit students of ethnic minorities — then devoted herself to teaching Western music to Native Americans (the academic term for whom was then “American Indians”) and learning their own traditional songs as they taught her in turn.

With her simple box camera and cylinder phonograph, wearing trousers and a bow-tie, Frances Densmore spent years traveling to remote settlements where no scholar dared venture. She worked with dozens of tribes — the Sioux, the Chippewa, the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the northern Pawnee of Oklahoma, the Winnebago and Menominee of Wisconsin, the Seminoles of Florida, the Ute of Utah, the Papago of Arizona, the Pueblo Indians of the southwest, the Kuna Indians of Panama, and various tribes across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

Everywhere she went, her pure-hearted devotion to preserving traditional music magnetized the warmth of the community. The eminent Sioux elder Red Fox adopted her as a daughter.

Whenever Frances returned to her monastic one-room apartment, she perched at her heavy black typewriter to record her evolving understanding of a complex musical world in a way that no scholar before her had, and none since, detailing everything from children’s songs to the design of wind instruments to the spell-like songs sung as “love charms.”

Word of her work had spread beyond academic journals. In 1907, the Smithsonian approached her to make recordings for their Bureau of American Ethnography. Within a year, she had compiled her recordings in the popular LP Healing Songs of the Native Americans.

To use an ahistorical term she far predates, Frances Densmore became the premiere ethnomusicologist of her time and place. She opened her 1926 book The American Indians and Their Music (public library | public domain) with an insight that reaches beyond culture, into the very heart of our species:

Music is closely intertwined with the life of every race. We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.

In the book, she detailed the singular role of music in Native American culture, teleologically distinct from the spiritual function it served in early Western culture:

The radical difference between the musical custom of the Indian and our own race is that, originally, the Indians used song as a means of accomplishing definite results. Singing was not a trivial matter, like the flute-playing of the young men. It was used in treating the sick, in securing success in war and the hunt, and in every undertaking which the Indian felt was beyond his power as an individual. An Indian said, “If a man is to do something more than human he must have more than human power.” Song was essential to the putting forth of this “more than human power,” and was used in connection with some prescribed action.

This function of music shaped its form:

One of the musical requirements of the white race is that a song and its accompaniment shall be “exactly together,” but an Indian song may be either a little faster or a little slower than the accompanying drum without disturbing the Indian musician. The Indian takes his music seriously and has nothing that corresponds to our popular songs. There are standards of excellence in his music and he practices in order to attain them, although Indians do not have musical performances corresponding to our concerts. The Indians have no melody-producing instruments except the flute, which has its special uses, so the voices of the singers around the drum are like the melody-producing instruments in our orchestras or bands, while the drum is like the bass or percussion instruments which supply the rhythm. The singers and the drum provide the music at all dances and social gatherings as well as at the tribal ceremonies. They have rehearsals, as we do, and practice and learn new songs. If a man goes to visit another tribe he tries to remember and bring home songs, which are always credited to the source whence they came. Songs are taught to one person by another, and in the old days it was not unusual for a man to pay the value of one or two ponies for a song. He did not buy such a song for his own pleasure but because it had a ceremonial connection or was believed to have magic power. To this class belong the songs for treating the sick and those believed to bring rain.

In some elemental sense, however, this is the selfsame function music serves in every culture since the dawn of our species: We use music to heal ourselves, to save ourselves. We have, since before we discovered the mathematics of harmony. We will, long after everything we know of civilization has crumbled into discord. Nothing refracts the light of being like music. Nothing reflects the health of a culture and nothing predicts its durability better than how well it treats its song-makers.

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For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”

But we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we, the conflicted species, spend our lives resisting it yet craving its liberations.

Nin herself — a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness — took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (public library), composed when she was still in her twenties.

With an eye to D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) and his “philosophy that was against division,” his “plea for whole vision,” she writes:

When the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion… Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.

In a sentiment central to my own animating ethos, she adds:

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

It was Lawrence’s own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness — the way “livingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.”

In his 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all — the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment:

All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.

This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrence’s worldview — the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo, reckoning with the most universal reality of life — the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitman’s defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when every woman was a “man” purely as a matter of linguistic convention:

If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.

In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended the wisdom of the inner voice, Lawrence’s protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence:

I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life.

Complement with Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness and Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Nin on the meaning of maturity and how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living.

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For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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A generation after the trailblazing cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict insisted that “there is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem,” heralding instead “the great diversity of social solutions” that different cultures have devised for the same common human problems — love and death, beauty and terror, the daily puzzle of being — Dervla Murphy (November 28, 1931–May 22, 2022) set out to see them for herself by going halfway around the world on a bicycle, with little more than a passport, map, two pens, and Blake’s poems in her sole saddlebag. (If you don’t yet know of this remarkable woman — that is, if you haven’t yet fallen hopelessly in love with her — read this first.)

Along the journey, the record of which endures in her almost unbearably wonderful book Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (public library), she fell in love with Afghanistan — “it’s a pity brainwashing tactics were used to dissuade me” — and with the astounding natural beauty of this land of blue and yellow, and with the uncommon physical beauty and soul-warmth of its people. Fascinated by the extremely low level of technological development in a society so capable of joy, she marveled at the local custom of wearing watches as ornaments without actually begin able to tell the time — a peculiar homily on the present as the only crucible of aliveness, animated by a sense that “yesterday is over, today is something to be enjoyed without fuss.”

Aware that a cynic who has not experienced such cultures would readily accuse her of “a tiresome outburst of romanticism,” she considers the deeper paradoxes such contrasts expose. In a passage evocative of Denise Levertov’s sublime poem “Sojourns in the Parallel World,” she writes:

The more I see of unmechanised places and people the more convinced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature. The mere fact that we think and talk as we do about Nature is symptomatic. For us to refer to Nature as a separate entity — something we admire or avoid or study or paint — shows how far we’ve removed ourselves from it.

With an eye to the tragic hijacking of pure science — that wonder-smitten human impulse to befriend the most elemental strata of reality — for purposes of power, economic advancement, and personal gain, she adds:

I suppose all our scientific advances are a wonderful boost for the superior intellect of the human race but what those advances are doing to us seems to me quite literally tragic. After all, only a handful of people are concerned in the excitement and stimulation of discovering and developing, while millions lead feebler and more synthetic lives because of the achievements of that handful.

An unlikely antidote to the double-edged sword of what we call “progress” — a sword that goes on razing us of some of our tenderest humanity and most vibrant capacity for aliveness — is to be found in travel, in the willingness for full-bodied engagement with the variousness of the world, which demands of us both our highest humanity and our animal nature:

People now use less than half their potential forces because “Progress” has deprived them of the incentive to live fully. All this has been brought to the surface of my mind by the general attitude to my conception of travelling, which I once took for granted as normal behaviour but which strikes most people as wild eccentricity, merely because it involves a certain amount of what is now regarded as hardship but was to all our ancestors a feature of everyday life — using physical energy to get from point A to point B. I don’t know what the end result of all this “progress” will be — something pretty dire, I should think. We remain part of Nature, however startling our scientific advances, and the more successfully we forget or ignore this fact, the less we can be proud of being men*.

Complement with Dylan Thomas’s short, stunning poem “Being But Men” and the great nature writer Loren Eiseley on reclaiming our sense of the miraculous in a mechanical age, then revisit the beloved Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s fan letter to Rachel Carson about wisdom in the age of technology and Nick Cave on transcendence in the age of algorithms.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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In the late 1780s, as the air of revolution was swarming Europe, the young Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) took improbable refuge in Bonn as a piano teacher to a kindly widow’s children. Her husband had died trying to save court documents in a fire when she was twenty-seven and had never remarried, raising their four children by herself — children she was determined to equip with all possible access to life’s beauty, despite, and perhaps because of, their early lashing of loss. Under her wing, the Breuning family became one of the most cultured in Bonn, animated by a passionate love of literature and the arts. When the children entered adolescence, she decided to hire a piano teacher to refine and magnify their love of music.

A teenager himself, Beethoven was practically adopted by the family, whom he would later recall as “the guardian angels” of his youth. It was the first nurturing home he ever had. He dined there day after day, slept over many nights, feasted on the volumes of Shakespeare and Homer in the lavish library, and frequently played Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, as well as his own improvisation, for the regular salons held at the Breuning house.

Along the way, he developed an especially strong bond with one of the siblings, Eleonore, a year younger than him — a bond tinted with feelings beyond friendship.

In one of those vast unrecorded interludes that pock all biography, only refractions of which can be glimpsed in letters, only a fraction of which survive, Eleonore and Ludwig’s relations reached some kind of breaking point. We only know that Beethoven had a notorious temper even before he began losing his hearing, that his furies savaged him with shame, and that he felt he had acted toward Eleonore in a way “degrading” to himself.

Whatever transpired between the two, a year later, having left Bonn for Vienna, he set out to make amends in a genuine way that would have made Maimonides proud.

In the early autumn of 1793, six weeks before his twenty-third birthday, he wrote:

My highly esteemed Eleonore, my dearest friend… The most vivid remembrance of you is ever present with me. I have often conversed in thought with you and your dear family, though not always in the happy mood I could have wished, for that fatal misunderstanding still hovered before me, and my conduct at that time is now hateful in my sight. But so it was, and how much would I give to have the power wholly to obliterate from my life a mode of acting so degrading to myself, and so contrary to the usual tenor of my character!

With an eye to the damaging ways in which third parties can deepen the wounds between two people, he added:

Many circumstances, indeed, contributed to estrange us, and I suspect that those tale-bearers who repeated alternately to you and to me our mutual expressions were the chief obstacles to any good understanding between us. Each believed that what was said proceeded from deliberate conviction, whereas it arose only from anger, fanned by others; so we were both mistaken.

And yet Beethoven, in the spirit of true repentance, took care not to make excuses for the rift:

We are told that the best proof of sincere contrition is to acknowledge our faults; and this is what I wish to do. Let us now draw a veil over the whole affair, learning one lesson from it… When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.

As a token of his affection and contrition, he vowed to dedicate to her a new sonata, then assured her of his reformation — the second piece, after repentance, necessary for forgiveness:

My sole wish is that the work were greater and more worthy of you… Oh! if it only gives you pleasure, my wishes will be fulfilled. May it in some degree recall the time when I passed so many happy hours in your house! Perhaps it may serve to remind you of me till I return, though this is indeed a distant prospect. Oh! how we shall then rejoice together, my dear Eleonore! You will, I trust, find your friend a happier man, all former forbidding, careworn furrows smoothed away by time and better fortune.

Then, a curious psychological twist: Referencing a waistcoat Eleonore had once knitted for him, he asked her to knit him a new one because “change of fashion has made it look so antiquated.” Consciously or not, Beethoven was employing Benjamin Franklin’s ingenious strategy for turning enemies into friends — that peculiar reverse-psychology way in which doing a favor makes us feel more favorably toward its object. He ended the letter with an appeal beyond the customary pomposities of epistolary etiquette:

You would make me very happy by soon writing me a kind letter. If mine cause you any pleasure, I promise you to do as you wish, and write as often as it lies in my power; indeed everything is acceptable to me that can serve to show you how truly I am your admiring and sincere friend,

L. V. Beethoven

Eleonore wrote back. Although the letter does not survive, she enclosed in it a gift of her own as a token of forgiveness — not a waistcoat, but a beautiful hand-embroidered neckcloth, the kind Beethoven wears in each one of his subsequent portraits.

Completely surprised, he teared up to receive the gift, then wrote to her bittersweetly:

Welcome as the gift was, it awakened within me feelings of sadness. Its effect was to recall former days, and to put me to shame by your noble conduct to me. I, indeed, little thought that you still considered me worthy of your remembrance… Little as I may deserve favor in your eyes, believe me, my dear friend, (let me still call you so,) I have suffered, and still suffer severely from the privation of your friendship.

He included the manuscript of the sonata he had promised her.

Although their lives unfolded along very different paths — Beethoven grew deaf and threw himself into music even more obsessively, which is always, as Nick Cave would observe two centuries later, an artist’s best “living amends” — they remained obliquely in each other’s lives, Eleonore’s brother becoming one of Beethoven’s few lifelong friends.

I like to imagine him wearing her embroidered neckcloth the night he finally premiered his Ode to Joy, having triumphed over its three-decade creation.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Regard anything attentively enough and it becomes an astonishment, shimmering with the miraculous.

Take lizards — some of Earth’s commonest creatures, populating every continent except Antarctica in their infinite varieties, and at the same time some of Earth’s most otherworldly life-forms. They move through the world in their contortionist bodies, waterproof and heatproof in their keratin-scaled skinsuits, navigating not by smells in our familiar sense but by pheromones streaming in through their vomeronasal sensory system. Some have tongues longer than their bodies. Some have gloves of primordial velcro that helps them scale the steepest and most slippery of surfaces. Some change color to blend with their environment. Some can steer their eyes in different directions. Some can run across water.

An epoch before the chemical birth of photography, the German zoologist Alfred Edmund Brehm (February 2, 1829–November 11, 1884) set out to capture the science and wonder of lizards in one of the volumes in his voluminous series Brehms Tierleben (Brehm’s Animal Life). Illustrating the detailed scientific writing are hundreds of black-and-white etchings and a dozen consummate color lithographs that capture these strange and wondrous creatures in a way partway between diorama and fairy tale.

Complement with some stunning natural-history illustrations of owls, marine mollusks, and beetles from the same century, then leap another century back with these striking drawings of real and mythic serpents and the trailblazing artist Sarah Stone’s paintings of exotic, endangered, and now-extinct species.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Each winter, on the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska, one of Earth’s most otherworldly spectacles pours its cascade of white and crimson: the mass migration of sandhill cranes, Grus canadensis — elegant emissaries of prehistory carrying the story of this world on their back.

No photograph or footage can capture the sweeping grandeur of their myriad, the surreality at scale.

In the opening pages of his 2006 novel The Echo Maker (public library), Richard Powers paints in words the truly unphotographable — a transportive piece of deep history that is at once a ravishing invitation to absolute presence:

Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls. A neck stretches long; legs drape behind. Wings curl forward, the length of a man. Spread like fingers, primaries tip the bird into the wind’s plane. The blood-red head bows and the wings sweep together, a cloaked priest giving benediction. Tail cups and belly buckles, surprised by the upsurge of ground. Legs kick out, their backward knees flapping like broken landing gear. Another bird plummets and stumbles forward, fighting for a spot in the packed staging ground along those few miles of water still clear and wide enough to pass as safe. Twilight comes early, as it will for a few more weeks. The sky, ice blue through the encroaching willows and cottonwoods, flares up, a brief rose, before collapsing to indigo. Late February on the Platte, and the night’s chill haze hangs over this river, frosting the stubble from last fall that still fills the bordering fields. The nervous birds, tall as children, crowd together wing by wing on this stretch of river, one that they’ve learned to find by memory. They converge on the river at winter’s end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.

[…]

There is only here, now, the river’s braid, a feast of waste grain that will carry these flocks north, beyond the Arctic Circle. As first light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free, bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since before this river started.

Previous unphotographables: Georgia O’Keeffe on the grandeur of Machu Picchu; Iris Murdoch on the sea and the stars; an Alpine transcendence with Mary Shelley; an Alaskan paradise with Rockwell Kent.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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We see it in nature all the time — only when entropy hurls matter into chaos, into dissolution, can it be composted and reconstituted into entirely new life-forms, the autumn leaves becoming soil for spring’s crocuses. We see it, and still we forget that everything we call society — that complex organizing principle of human natures — is but a fractal of nature, obeying the same laws, pulsating with the same forces.

It is no wonder, then, that it is also through immense upheaval and the discomfiting dissolution of existing structures — power structures, ideologies, customs, parameters of possibility — that we get to compost the old into the new.

That is what Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) — who lived through the ferment of the European revolutions and renounced his hereditary title of Prince to become a scientist and dissident — explores in a portion of his altogether fantastic compendium Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (public library).

In his 1880 pamphlet The Spirit of Revolt, Kropotkin writes:

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions. The accepted ideas of the constitution of the State, of the laws of social equilibrium, of the political and economic interrelations of citizens, can hold out no longer against the implacable criticism which is daily undermining them… The need for a new life becomes apparent. The code of established morality, that which governs the greater number of people in their daily life, no longer seems sufficient. What formerly seemed just is now felt to be a crying injustice. The morality of yesterday is today recognized as revolting immorality… Daily, the popular conscience rises up against the scandals which breed amidst the privileged and the leisured, against the crimes committed in the name of the law of the stronger, or in order to maintain these privileges.

In such periods, the inevitable realization arrives that justice cannot be attained under the present conditions; that the conditions themselves, which both arise from and feed the status quo, must be reconstituted for new possibilities to arise.

In a passage that applies as much to Kropotkin’s epoch as it does to ours, he considers the conditions surest to set the wheels of necessary revolution into motion:

In periods of frenzied haste toward wealth, of feverish speculation and of crisis, of the sudden downfall of great industries and the ephemeral expansion of other branches of production, of scandalous fortunes amassed in a few years and dissipated as quickly, it becomes evident that the economic institutions which control production and exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are supposed to guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result. Instead of order they bring forth chaos; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity; instead of reconciled interests, war; a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of workers among themselves. Human society is seen to be splitting more and more into two hostile camps, and at the same time to be subdividing into thousands of small groups waging merciless war against each other. Weary of these wars, weary of the miseries which they cause, society rushes to seek a new organization; it clamors loudly for a complete remodeling of the system of property ownership, of production, of exchange and all economic relations which spring from it.

Only one thing, Kropotkin observes, ever catapults societies out of both complacency and warring confusion, and into a new social order more conducive to widespread human flourishing:

Action, the continuous action, ceaselessly renewed, of minorities brings about this transformation. Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.

Complement this fragment of Anarchism with Albert Camus, writing two world wars later, on what it really means to be a rebel and Hannah Arendt on our mightiest antidote to evil, then revisit Kropotkin’s advice on how to put your talent in the service of the world.

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For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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For all their ravishing beauty, numbers remain abstractions cold and austere without a foothold of similitude in the living world, the world of touch and sight, of things and thingness. Seven has no meaning to the human mind without an object — we need to know seven what in order to fathom its sevenness. This may be why data, no matter their numerical grandeur, hold poor sway over the human soul; why metaphor, with its tangible tapestry of abstraction and concreteness, can move the mountain of the mind more powerfully than any human implement.

That is what Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020) explores in a fragment of his altogether magnificent posthumous collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (public library), which also gave us his cure for our existential loneliness.

Echoing Rachel Carson’s poetic-scientific observation that because our origins of the Earth, “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Lopez writes:

I’ve felt for a long time that the great political questions of our time — about violent prejudice, global climate change, venal greed, fear of the Other — could be addressed in illuminating ways by considering models in the natural world. Some consider it unsophisticated to explore the nonhuman world for clues to solving human dilemmas, and wisdom’s oldest tool, metaphor, is often regarded with wariness, or even suspicion, in my culture. But abandoning metaphor entirely only paves the way to the rigidity of fundamentalism. To my way of thinking, to prefer to live a metaphorical life — that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance — as opposed to living a literal life, where most things mean in only one way, is the norm among traditional people like the Warlpiri.

With an eye to his many years of living, traveling, and working with native people, Lopez observes a distinct difference in styles of argument and persuasion — native cultures make more open-ended arguments that are not “trapped in literalness,” whereas industrialized societies default to logic and bulldoze with data. And yet, as human beings, we respond much more deeply to the former. Lopez writes of the older style of persuasion:

The goal in these conversations, from a traditional point of view, is to put off for a good while arriving at any conclusion, to continue to follow, instead, several avenues of approach until a door no one had initially seen suddenly opens. My own culture — I don’t mean to be overly critical here — tends to assume that while such conversations should remain respectful, the outcome must conform to what my culture considers “reality.”

Reality, of course, is a tapestry of subjectivities and tacit consensuses, trapped often in the frames of reference laid down by any given life and always in the limitations of human consciousness, with its myriad blind spots for strata of reality we are physiologically and psychologically unequipped to perceive. It is only through metaphor that we can begin to conceive of what we cannot perceive, be it an atom or the black hole at the center of our galaxy or the pain of another.

Complement with poet Jane Hirshfield on the power of metaphor, Nietzsche on its peril, and the story of how Newton propagated one of humanity’s most enduring metaphors, then revisit Giorgia Lupi and Stevanie Posavec’s poetic project Dear Data and Blaise Pascal on the art of persuasion.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“It troubled me,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “how an Atom fell and yet the Heavens held.” The Heavens hold, and so do we. We hold still. We hold hopes. We hold our pain and the world’s pain. We hold each other. We hold up our values and hold down our tasks. We hold on, and this might be the single most defining feature of human life. We hold on.

In Women Holding Things (public library), artist Maira Kalman — an uncommon philosopher of the quietly magnificent in the mundane — celebrates all the things we hold: flowers and lovers, grief and children, grudges and balloons, a stranger’s gaze, the barely bearable lightness of being, the weight of the world.

She writes in the opening pages:

What do women hold?

The home and the family.
And the children and the food.
The friendships.
The work.
The work of the world.
And the work of being human.
The memories.
And the troubles
and the sorrows
and the triumphs.
And the love.

Men do as well, but not
quite in the same way.

Populating the pages are strangers and friends and friends of friends; Maira’s mother and grandmother in Belarus, her daughter and granddaughters in America; her imperfect father holding her, her beloved son holding one of her paintings of women holding things; ordinary women glimpsed in some blooming buzzing corner of the world and extraordinary women who have changed the way we see that world — Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, Gertrude Stein, Rose McClendon, Edith Sitwell, Ayana V. Jackson, Natalia Ginzburg — refracted through the lens of this particular artist, the way we all refract our heroes through the subjective lens of our lived experience and its saturation of values.

The tender, infinitely expressive paintings are captioned with spare words that lend each vignette an extra air of human fragility and resilience.

“My mother holding her sister the day of her ill-fated marriage,” says one such miniature novel drawn from real life.

“Virginia Woolf barely holding it together,” says another miniature biography.

“Sally Hemmings holding history accountable.”

Coursing through it all is the indivisible totality of existence, its beauty and terror entwined in an eternal helix — the guns and the violins, the mass graves into which the Nazis dumped the bodies of her grandparents and the blue skies into which a bouquet of red balloons tries to escape from a stranger’s hand as Central Park blooms its cherry blossoms.

Punctuating the paintings are brief meditations partway between poetry and philosophy. In one, evocative of Seneca’s taxonomy of time spent, saved, and wasted, she writes:

My mother would ask us
“what is the most important thing?”
We knew that the correct answer was Time.

You could say that my mother lost a great deal of time to an unhappy marriage.
But how unhappy was it? Shakespearean level? Run of the mill unhappy? Impossible to say.
I can’t ask her because she is no longer alive.
But she ultimately left my father and found her time.

Finding time is all we want to do.
Once you find time, you want more time.
And more time in between that time.
There can never be enough time.
And you can never hold on to it.

It is so strange.
We live. And then we die.
So unutterably strange.

If you meet the Holocaust, you can never escape its grip. You are obliged to feel it reverberate through all things for the rest of your life.

The terrors of the world exist.
And we are wounded.

It would be so nice to never be afraid.
But I am afraid that is just not possible.

Coursing through it all is Maira’s singular species of optimism, bearing the feeling-tone of an overcast afternoon after the storm, the last layer of clouds backlit by the low sun, casting the world in a numinous light.

You may be exhausted from holding things
and be disheartened. And even weep if
you are very emotional. Which could be
anyone on any day. With good reason.

But then there is the next moment
and the the next day and

hold on

Complement Women Holding Things — a gem of a book to hold dear — with the subversive time-capsule Women in Trees, then revisit Maira Kalman’s illustrated love letters to dogs and Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s love, and this painted poem of perspective.

Artwork by Maira Kalman courtesy of the artist

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her splendid antidote to the irreversibility of life, “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”

And yet our culture holds up forgiveness as a moral virtue in too binary a way, placing the brunt of repair on the wounded, making little demand of the wounder. We need more nuance than this, and such nuance is what rabbi Danya Ruttenberg offers in On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (public library) — a field guide to the rewards and nuances of forgiveness, drawing on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides’s classic Laws of Repentance, using their ancient wisdom to calibrate our cultural reflexes and modernizing their teachings to account for our hard-earned evolution as a species conscious of its own blind spots.

She writes:

The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.

And yet, Ruttenberg observes, such a conception of forgiveness makes repair a wholly one-sided process, tasking the person wounded with the whole of it. The Hebrew language itself offers a vital remedy of greater subtlety:

In Hebrew, two different words, each with its own shade of meaning and weight, are used in the context of forgiveness. The first is mechila, which might be better translated as “pardon.” It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender; it’s transactional. It’s not a warm, fuzzy embrace but rather the victim’s acknowledgment that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation. You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back, and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me — it seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila, whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.

Slicha, on the other hand, may be better translated as “forgiveness”; it includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability, recognizes that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy. Like mechila, it does not denote a restored relationship between the perpetrator and the victim (neither does the English word, actually; “reconciliation” carries that meaning), nor does slicha include a requirement that the victim act like nothing happened. But it has more of the softness, that letting-go quality associated with “forgiveness” in English.

At the core of this ancient distinction is a central concern with what is needed for closure. (Here, we must remember that closure itself is largely a myth.) Maimonides offers a fascinating and very precise prescription: The wounder should make three earnest attempts at apology, showing both repentance and transformation — evidence that they are no longer the type of person who, in the same situation, would err in the same way; if after the third attempt they are still rebuffed by the wounded, then — and this is Maimonides’s brutal twist — the sin now belongs to the wounded for withholding forgiveness. The intimation is that a person who, in the face of genuine remorse and evidence of change, remains embittered is too small of spirit and too cut off from their own noblest nature. Mic-drop.

Maimonides wrote:

It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and not appeased; instead, a person should be satisfied easily and get angry slowly. And at the moment when the sinner asks for pardon — pardon with a whole heart and a desirous soul. And even if they caused them suffering and sinned against them greatly, [the victim] should not take revenge or hold a grudge.

While Ruttenberg acknowledges that no one is obligated to grant forgiveness at all costs, she considers how withholding forgiveness harms not only the repentant but the withholder:

Maimonides’ concern about the victim being unforgiving was likely at least in part a concern for their own emotional and spiritual development. I suspect that he thought holding on to grudges was bad for the victim and their wholeness. That is, even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason. And perhaps he believed that the granting of mechila can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.

[…]

If you are still so resolutely attached to the narrative that you were forever wronged, you are harming yourself and putting a kind of harm into the world. Try to respond to those who approach you sincerely — and who are sincerely doing the work — with a whole heart, not with cruelty.

Still, at the heart of the book is not the responsibility of the forgiver but the responsibility of the repentant, and the complex question of what repentance even looks like in order to be effective toward repair, doubly complicated by the fact that, in many situations, one can be both wrongdoer and wronged.

With an eye to the myriad causes that might drive even the best-intentioned people to do harm — our blind spots, our unexamined beliefs, our own tender places and past traumas, our despair — Ruttenberg considers the necessity of letting go of our attachment to a particular self-image as a person who means well and therefore could not possibly have caused harm:

Addressing harm is possible only when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves — the one in which we’re the hero, fighting the good fight, doing our best, behaving responsibly and appropriately in every context — and the reality of our actions. We need to summon the courage to cross the bridge over that cognitively dissonant gulf and face who we are, who we have been — even if it threatens our story of ourselves. It’s the only way we can even begin to undertake any possible repair of the harm we’ve done and become the kind of person who might do better next time. (And that, in my opinion, is what’s truly heroic.)

[…]

This work is challenging enough when facing the smaller failings in our lives — how much more difficult is it when our closest relationships or our professional reputation is at stake, or even the possibility of facing significant consequences? And yet this is the brave work we have to do. All of us. We are each, in a thousand different ways, both harmdoer and victim. Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.

Complement Ruttenberg’s wholly salutary On Repentance And Repair with Martha Nussbaum — whom I continue to consider the greatest philosopher of our time — on anger and forgiveness, then revisit Nick Cave — whom I continue to consider one of the great unheralded philosophers of all time — on self-forgiveness and art as an instrument of living amends.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace. I was a college student still shaken with the disorientation of landing alone in America at the tail end of my teens, a world apart from my native Bulgaria, still baffled by the foreignness of fitted sheets, brunch, and “How are you?” as a greeting rather than a question. I was also living through my first episode of severe depression and weaving, without knowing it, my own lifeline to survival out of what remains the best material I know: wonder.

Once a week, I dispatched my ledger of curiosity — a brief digest of interesting, inspiring, or plainly wondrous things I had encountered on the internet, at the library, or in the city, from exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese woodblocks to a fascinating new neuroscience study to arresting graffiti on the side of a warehouse.

It was sweet, at first, when my friends kept asking to add their girlfriends or parents to the list, who in turn asked to add their own friends, until it exceeded the time I had for such administration.

I had the obvious idea to make a website of it, so that anyone who wanted to read could just visit it without any demands on my time. The only trouble was that I didn’t know how to make a website. (Blogging platforms as we now know them were not a thing, and even the rudimentary options that existed required some HTML proficiency.) We have a way of not always knowing whether the hard way is the easiest way or vice versa. In addition to my full college course load and the four jobs I was working to pay for it, I decided to take a night class and learn to code — it seemed the simplest solution for maximal self-reliance. I calculated that if I replaced two meals a day with canned tuna and oatmeal — the white label brand from the local grocery store in West Philly — in a few weeks I could pay for the coding class. And so I did. A crude website was born, ugly as a newborn aardvark.

Eventually, when email newsletter delivery services became available and affordable to my bootstrapped budget, the website got a newsletter, coming full circle. To this day, it goes out weekly, carrying into a far vaster digital universe a spare selection of the writings I publish on the website throughout the week.

In those early years, working my banal day jobs hostage to my visa and the demands of my metabolism, not once did it occur to me that this labor of love would become both the pulse-beat of my life and the sole source of my livelihood. And yet, in a baffling blur of time and chance — the anthropocentric term for which is luck — the seven friends somehow became several million readers without much effort on my behalf beyond the daily habit of showing up for the blank page. (There is, of course, nothing singular or surprising about this — Earth carves canyons into rock with nothing more than a steadfast stream. Somehow we keep forgetting that human nature is but a fractal of nature itself.)

Several years in, I thought it would be a good exercise to reflect on what I was learning about life in the course of composing The Marginalian, which was always a form of composing myself. Starting at year seven, I began a sort of public diary of learnings — never revising those of the previous years, only adding some newly gleaned understanding with each completed orbit, the way our present selves are always a Russian nesting doll containing and growing out of the irrevisible selves we have been.

And now, at year sixteen, here they all are, dating back to the beginning.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) was twenty-seven when he was arrested for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime and sentenced to death. His sentence was repealed at the last moment, prompting him to pen an ecstatic letter about the meaning of life that evening. But he was not set free — instead, he served four years in a hard labor camp in Siberia.

Upon his release, the thirty-three-year-old Fyodor remained in Siberia, destitute and directionless, trying to restart his life. He befriended a Russian expatiate working as a minor local official — a painful alcoholic who was nonetheless “an intelligent, educated, and good man,” and whom he came to love as a brother. He had a wife, Maria, and a seven-year-old son. They welcomed him into their home as part of the family while he struggled to find his footing. Maria took a lively interest in his conversation and a great pity in his fate, this young and desperate man heavy with unhappiness and savaged by epilepsy.

By the following spring, ready to reenter the world and find a means of subsistence, he joined the Siberian Army Corps as a soldier. Leaving the family, he found parting with them harder “than parting with life.”

But as soon as he left, his friend’s alcoholism finally caught up with him and felled him. Suddenly widowed and with no means of providing for her son, Maria plummeted into the depths of despair — in her time and place, a woman with no husband and no property was, as Mary Shelley put it in the same epoch, “the world’s victim.” Fyodor was moved to see “with what selflessness, with what strength” Maria bore her misfortune. Dangerously in debt himself, he borrowed some money and immediately sent it to her, then spent months petitioning to get her son admitted into a good school.

What he dared not tell her was that he was deeply in love with her. But Maria — a woman of bright intelligence and passionate curiosity — had already guessed it.

They remained in weekly correspondence. A hope swelled in his heart that he might have his chance at hers.

It came as a shock when, a year later after her husband’s death, Maria announced that she was to marry a Siberian schoolteacher five years her junior, poor and uneducated. Immediately, Fyodor cobbled together some money to make the 1,700-mile journey across the tundra to see her. He recounted what happened in an electric letter to his closest friend, writing the summer before his thirty-fifth birthday:

I saw her! What a noble, what an angelic soul! She cried, and kissed my hands, but she loves another. I spent two days here. In those two days she remembered the past and her heart was again turned towards me.

He was unsure whether he could trust what he felt to be true, but when she beckoned him not to be sad, not to cry, because “not everything is decided yet,” he clung to her words like a drowning man. For two days, he was plunged into “unbearable bliss and torment.” He left with “complete hope.”

But by the time he arrived home, a letter awaited him. Maria loved the other man more than him. He was crushed. “I don’t know what will will become of me without her,” he told his friend, then added: “I am done for, but she is too.”

Mixing a jilted lover’s sorrowful unreason with reasonable concerns, he worried that the young schoolteacher was unsuited for Maria, intellectually and spiritually, and unable to provide for her and her son. He wrote to his friend:

She is 29 years old; she is educated, a bright girl who has seen the world, knows people, has suffered, has been tormented, ill from the last years of her life in Siberia, who is searching for happiness, is self-willed, strong, she is now ready to marry a 24-year-old youth, a Siberian who hasn’t seen anything, doesn’t know anything, who is barely educated, who is beginning the first idea of his life… without significance, without a place in the world, with nothing, a teacher in a provincial school… Who knows how far the discord, which I unavoidably foresee in the future, will go; for even if he were an ideal youth, he’s nevertheless not a strong person. And he’s not only not ideal, but… Anything might happen later on.

He proceeded to catastrophize with a panoply of possible hurts the young man could inflict on Maria’s way. “My God — my heart is breaking,” he wailed on the page, extolling her worthiness to his friend, intimating the other man’s unworthiness of her:

If you knew what an angel she is… every minute something original, sensible, witty, but paradoxically too, infinitely good, truly noble — she has a chivalrous heart: she will do herself in.

But then, in an act of extraordinary moral grandeur — “I love her happiness more than my own,” he wrote — he asked his friend, who was also his sometime-patron and a man of influence, to intercede on the young schoolteacher’s behalf and push forward his application for a raise that would double his salary. “She must not suffer. If she marries him, then let there be at least some money.” Later, Dostoyevsky would transmute this gesture into a story-line in his 1861 novel The Insulted and the Injured. “This is all for her, for her alone. If only so that she wouldn’t be impoverished,” he told his friend.

Despite being deeply in debt himself, he kept cobbling together funds to go visit Maria, hoping she would change her mind. The long journeys worsened his epileptic attacks, which leveled him bodily and mentally, leaving him in “despondency and a state of psychic abasement.”

The seasons turned, but his resolve was only growing stronger. On the cusp of winter, living up to the drama of the nineteenth-century Russians, he was writing to his friend again:

I love her madly, more than before. My longing for her would have driven me to my grave and literally reduced me to suicide, if I hadn’t seen her… I know that I’m acting imprudently in many ways in my relations with her, since I have almost no hope — but whether there’s hope or not — it’s all the same to me. I don’t think about anything else. If only I could see her, hear her! I’m an unfortunate madman!

And then, with helpless self-awareness, he added:

Love in such a guise is an illness. I sense that.

Throughout his courtship, Fyodor had been troubled by one glaring gap in his reasoning. A decent man, a practical man, he was aware that he too had no way of providing for Maria and her son on his meager soldier’s salary — if she married him instead of the young schoolteacher, she would still suffer the privations of poverty. But then, in the final weeks of 1856, everything changed: He was promoted to officer and, immediately, he made a formal proposal. Just before the Christmas holidays, after keeping the entire tortuous story of the romance from his family, he finally wrote to his sister:

I’ve loved this woman for a long time, insanely, more than my own life. If you knew her, this angel, then you wouldn’t be surprised. She has so many wonderful, excellent qualities. She is intelligent, sweet, educated, as women rarely are, with a meek character… My friend, dear sister! Don’t object, don’t be sad, don’t worry about me. I couldn’t have done anything better. We make a good couple… We understand each other, we are of the same inclinations, rules. We have been friends for a very long time. We respect each other, I love her.

Maria said “yes.”

Fyodor wrote to his friend, in whom he had first confided of his love:

I am getting married… Nobody but this woman will be able to make me happy. She still loves me… She loves me. That I know for certain. I knew it then, too, when I wrote my letter to you last summer. She soon lost faith in her new attachment… Oh, if only you knew what this woman is!

They were married on February 7, 1857, and remained together until her untimely death of tuberculosis seven years later. Under the auspices of Maria’s love, Fyodor Dostoyevsky became the eternal voice singing in the cathedral of literature.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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It bears repeating: Right now, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known.

Even in the sliver of spacetime that is our present, perishable like every present of the past, an infinity of things are going on all at once, menacing and magnificent — a vast simultaneity of which we notice only a fleck, our attention narrowed by evolution and exploited by the news media. But the fact remains — and this has always been so — that even in the most tumultuous of circumstances, human beings have managed to divert their attention and its tendrils of intention away from destruction and toward creation. Some of the greatest achievements of civilization, from mathematics to Nina Simone, have sprung up in the darkest of times.

That is what C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) explores in a sermon he delivered in England at the peak of World War II, later included in his 1949 collection of addresses The Weight of Glory (public library).

Addressing an audience of frightened young scholars, unsure of what use their intellectual passion and creative labor have in a war-torn world, Lewis offers an elixir of perspective:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.

With an eye to our particular evolutionary inheritance, he adds:

The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men* are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

In a splendid rebuttal of the view that culture is an extravagance — “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we” — he offers a salve for our ahistorical rashes of panic:

We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

[…]

The war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

In a sentiment Albert Camus would come to echo a decade later in his insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” he adds:

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

Complement with Toni Morrison on our creative duty in dark times and Nick Cave on the necessity of hope in a fragile world, then revisit Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

My meditation teacher of many years often reckons with the difficult question of how we are to reconcile acceptance — the need to meet reality uncomplainingly on its own terms, so central to Buddhist philosophy, so central to all spiritual freedom — with activism in a world badly in need of repair.

Thinking about this paradox recently, I was reminded of a passage from the indispensable 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son (public library) by James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987), who was not a Buddhist but was and remains one of the most spiritually enlightened specimens our species has produced.

In an autobiographical reflection, he writes:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.

Complement with Baldwin’s lifeline for the hour of despair and his reflections on free will and the paradox of freedom, then revisit Eleanor Roosevelt on our individual power in social change and the forgotten X-ray crystallography pioneer and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale’s quiet masterpiece of moral courage.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

It can pivot a hard day to remember that we are “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.” But for all of its innumerable glories, consciousness comes with a price that can be difficult to bear — consciousness, with its immense capacity for love, and for loneliness.

We must bear it all, as we watch our humanity and its crowning cognitive achievement dishonored by superstition and senseless violence and cruelties of which no other animal is capable, finding it more and more difficult to take pride in our evolutionary inheritance.

On those days when the costs of consciousness mount to heavy the heart, when I long to fall in love again with being human, I return to some calibrating passages by the poetic anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977) from his altogether transcendent 1957 book The Immense Journey (public library) — his record of “the prowlings of one mind which has sought to explore, to understand, and to enjoy the miracles of this world, both in and out of science.”

Descending into an enormous slit in Earth’s crust — “a perfect cross section through perhaps ten million years of time” — in search of fossils, Eiseley describes the skull he discovers entombed in stone several million years down this chute of time:

It was not, of course, human. I was deep, deep below the time of man* in a remote age near the beginning of the reign of mammals. I squatted on my heels in the narrow ravine, and we stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I. There were marks of generalized primitiveness in that low, pinched brain case and grinning jaw that marked it as lying far back along those converging roads where… cat and man and weasel must leap into a single shape.

Eiseley meets the bygone creature with a jolt of perspective:

The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see? … I thought, as I patiently began the task of chiseling into the stone around the skull, I would never again excavate a fossil under conditions which led to so vivid an impression that I was already one myself. The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.

With an eye to the heedful opposable thumbs excavating the skull, he adds:

It is not a bad symbol of that long wandering, I thought again — the human hand that has been fin and scaly reptile foot and furry paw.

To remember this, just like remembering that we only exist because of flowers, is to allow an awareness that reaches beyond cerebral knowledge and into some deep creaturely gladness that, in an instant, makes you feel connected to everything else alive, grateful to be part of this immense living symphony of time and chance.

Out of this awareness Eiseley wrests the supreme reward of consciousness — its irrepressible impulse to make meaning out of indifferent fact. In consonance with Alan Watts’s assertion that “if the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so [for] the meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance,” he writes:

Perhaps there is no meaning in it at all, the thought went on inside me, save that of journey itself, so far as men can see. It has altered with the chances of life, and the chances brought us here; but it was a good journey — long, perhaps — but a good journey under a pleasant sun. Do not look for the purpose. Think of the way we came and be a little proud. Think of this hand — the utter pain of its first venture on the pebbly shore.

In a passage nothing less than countercultural today, when we live entombed in the news cycle of a perpetual present, he adds:

Perhaps the Slit, with its exposed bones and its far-off vanishing sky, has come to stand symbolically in my mind for a dimension denied to man, the dimension of time. Like the wistaria on the garden wall he is rooted in his particular century. Out of it — forward or backward — he cannot run. As he stands on his circumscribed pinpoint of time, his sight for the past is growing longer, and even the shadowy outlines of the galactic future are growing clearer, though his own fate he cannot yet see. Along the dimension of time, man, like the rooted vine in space, may never pass in person. Considering the innumerable devices by which the mindless root has evaded the limitations of its own stability, however, it may well be that man himself is slowly achieving powers over a new dimension — a dimension capable of presenting him with a wisdom he has barely begun to discern. Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it… We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

Complement this fragment of the endlessly perspectival The Immense Journey with Eiseley on the muskrat as a lens on the meaning of life, then revisit his equally poetic and kindred-minded contemporary Lewis Thomas on how to live with our human fragility.

donating = loving

For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.