The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we so vehemently resist change, too afraid to unsettle the structure of our lives — even when it doesn’t serve us. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson wrote, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” In another epoch, another prophet consecrated the elemental: “All that you touch you change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

If suffering is the magnitude of our resistance to reality, and if change is the fundamental constant of reality, then our resistance to change is our self-directed instrument of suffering.

Half a lifetime before her brilliant meditation on menopause as a microcosm of the human animal’s hostility to change, Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) offered a perfect refutation of the central fallacy at the heart of our resistance to change — our tendency to mistake stasis for equilibrium and to mistake the complacency of equilibrium for contentment — in a passage from her 1971 novel The Lathe Of Heaven (public library).

Speaking to a part that lives in all of us — the “self-cancelling, centerpoised personality” that leads us “to look at things defensively” — one character urges another:

Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? Try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is essentially change… When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is — and the more life.

Observing that life itself, like love, is “a huge gamble against the odds,” he insists that, just as we must love anyway, we must live anyway:

You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully.

Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Terry Tempest Williams on the paradox of change, and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then revisit Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain.

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

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

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“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.”

And yet we do go back, over and over. The tragic flaw of our species is the price we pay for the mind’s magnificent ability to move in time: the superpower of prospection that makes us capable of making a plan and making a promise comes bundled with the singular suffering of retrospection: the remorse, the regret, the past romanticized and voided of its own consequence.

It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity.

The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence. That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).

WEEDS
by Diane Seuss

The danger of memory is going

to it for respite. Respite risks

entrapment. Don’t debauch

yourself by living

in some former version of yourself

that was more or less naked. Maybe

it felt better then, but you were

not better. You were smaller, as the rain

gauge must fill to the brim

with its full portion of suffering.

What can memory be in these terrible times?

Only instruction. Not a dwelling.

Or if you must dwell:

The sweet smell of weeds then.

The sweet smell of weeds now.

An endurance. A standoff. A rest.

Couple with Virginia Woolf on the nature of memory and Oliver Sacks on the necessity of forgetting, then revisit George Saunders on how to live an uregretting life.

donating = loving

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

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We may call that tremendous effort faith.

The wives of whalers had it when their husbands left on perilous voyages of months or years — faith that time and chance would smile upon that particular precious life adrift on the turbulent waters. Parents have it when their child takes those first steps, runs that first errand, goes to college — faith that across the developmental stages of individuation and separation, some unbroken bond of love will remain. Friends and lovers have it each time they embrace goodbye — faith that it will not be the last embrace.

But no one in the history of the world has had more faith in the face of separation and uncertainty than the penguin.

Penguins mate for life and lay one egg per year, which the parents take turns incubating and nursing for long stretches as each ventures into the sea hunting for food. The separation can last for months, during which the starving parent protecting the egg must retain unfaltering faith in the mate’s return — for if they too leave the nursery and go in search of food, the egg will perish.

The extraordinary extent of that faith and the heroic patience it requires of the penguin come alive on the pages of Voyage Through the Antarctic (public library) — a collaboration between ornithologist and conservationist Ronald Lockley and novelist Richard Adams, who traveled together through the polar regions a decade after Adams wrote the repeatedly rejected manuscript turned modern classic Watership Down.

Celebrating the emperor penguin as “a miracle of antarctic evolution” — its six-month courtship, its immense single-file march to remembered nursery sites far from the sea, its devoted co-parenting — Adams writes:

On the frozen breeding-grounds no food is accessible. The sea steadily retreats — perhaps for as much as 125 miles — as the winter ice extends outwards from Antarctica.

When at last, in May, the female lays the single large (about 0.5 kg) egg, there is much excitement and mutual “talk.” The male awaits its appearance intently, and with his curved beak at once rolls it over his feet and up into a kind of pouch between his legs, where it is protected by a large flap of feathered belly skin and warmed by contact with the naked, hidden brood patch. If he did not do this, the egg would freeze within one minute. Exhausted by her efforts, and starving, having lost much weight during the long fast of mating and egg-building, the female now waddles seaward, tobogganing down slopes and now and then sleeping for short periods among the ice-hills.

It takes her days, even weeks to reach open water, where she sets about restoring her body fat — a long recovery of vitality before she can return to the nursery at the end of the two-month incubation period. During that time, the males survive by crowding together in a solid shield known as testudo, which allows them to maximize body heat and keep from being blown away by the ferocious polar gales. It is only when the female returns to take over parenting duties that the male, weak and famished, can set out to sea to restore himself, having persevered through his mate’s long absence with total trust in her return.

Adams marvels at this unparalleled act of faith:

The male’s stoic, heroic devotion to his duty as incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving that almost incredibly long fast under conditions of exposure to intense frost that would kill most other living creatures. It is at last rewarded, while the rookery is still sunless in July, by the return of his mate, fat an full-bellied from her long sojourn amid the krill and small fishes. She has had an even longer walk back to the rookery, since water ice is still forming far at sea. She usually arrives a few days after the chick is born at the time when, getting hungry, it begins to poke its head into the air and whine for food. The male, by an unusual provision of nature, manufactures sufficient nourishing fluid from bile and stomach secretions to keep the infant alive until the female arrives.

In a testament to voice as the fingerprint of the soul, Adams adds:

When the female returns, she calls to and recognizes her mate by voice. This is a kind of ceremony, which may take some time, since after two months of testudo and other movement the mate is not likely to be where she left him nursing the precious egg. Once the ceremony of vocal recognition is over, the female persuades her mate to yield the chick to her. Within seconds it is transferred to her pouch. The male, in his turn, is now free to set out on the long walk to the ocean feeding-grounds… And here we rind another remarkable and unusual natural provision: the mother is able not only to live off her body fat but also to conserve the contents of her stomach to dole out enough daily food to keep the chick going until the male returns.

That penguins have survived by an act of faith since they first diverged from albatrosses 71 million years ago is not only a miracle of evolution — there alongside such improbable and astonishing things as the eye of the scallop, the periodicity of the cicada, and REM — but a living testament to patience as the guardian of love and the engine of the possible, a model for refusing to experience absence as abandonment, that miniature of death. For only love — the tenacity of it, the faith in it, the infinity of shapes it can take — makes life more stubborn than death.

donating = loving

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

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The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether or not we believe in them — is pocked with myriad subjective realities, each lensed through the particular qualia of the perceiver, each a function not of the mind alone but of the entire organism and the whole of its lived experience, embodied and enacted by the total creature. What we call truth, and how we arrive at it, has more to do with that tessellated totality than with the mind’s rational analysis of reality.

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) explores this with her characteristic rigor of thought and passion for language in a wonderful essay about the Ancient Greeks later included in The Common Reader (public library) — the classic collection that also gave us Woolf on how to hear your soul.

With an eye to “the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth” that made Socrates such a timeless fulcrum of wisdom (which, I suppose, is the ultimate use of the truth), and in fiery defiance of Descartes, she insists that we arrive at the truth — about the world, about ourselves, about the substance life is made of — with more than the mind:

What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it… Truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it… Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than others.

The great paradox is that truth — the truth — is at once multifarious and unitary, something Woolf captures in her altogether exquisite meditation on creativity as the antipode to the “non-being” that slips over reality like cotton wool, at the end of which she writes:

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

donating = loving

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

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“Live as if you were living already for the second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 masterwork on the human search for meaning, “and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise — a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us, in the sublime words of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “ill-prepared for the privilege of living.” All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become. “Our lived lives,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his magnificent manifesto for missing out, “might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.” We perform this existential dance of yeses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to want?

Czech-French writer Milan Kundera (March 31, 1929–July 11, 2023) examines our ambivalent amble through life with unparalleled grace and poetic precision in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library) — one of the most beloved and enduringly rewarding books of the past century.

Because love heightens all of our senses and amplifies our existing preoccupations, it is perhaps in love that life’s central ambivalences grow most disorienting — something the novel’s protagonist, Tomáš, tussles with as he finds himself consumed with the idea of a lover he barely knows:

He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger.

[…]

But was it love? … Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? … Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

The woman eventually becomes Tomáš’s wife, which only further affirms that even the rightest choice can present itself to us shrouded in uncertainty and doubt at the outset, its rightness only crystallized in the clarity of hindsight. Kundera captures the universal predicament undergirding Tomáš’s particular perplexity:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

[…]

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it bears repeating, is one of the most life-magnifying books one could ever read. Complement this particular point of inflection with Donald Barthelme on the art of not-knowing and Adam Phillips on the rewards of the unlived life.

donating = loving

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

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“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion observed in her classic meditation on loss. Abraham Lincoln, in his moving letter of consolation to a grief-stricken young woman, wrote of how time transmutes grief into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart.” But what, exactly, is the mechanism of that transmutation and how do we master it before it masters us when grief descends in one of its unforeseeable guises?

Long before Didion, before Lincoln, another titan of thought — the great Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca — addressed this in what might be the crowning achievement in the canon of consolation letters, folding into his missive an elegant summation of Stoicism’s core tenets of resilience.

In the year 41, Seneca was sentenced to exile on the Mediterranean island of Corsica for an alleged affair with the emperor’s sister. Sometime in the next eighteen months, he penned one of his most extraordinary works — a letter of consolation to his mother, Helvia.

Helvia was a woman whose life had been marked by unimaginable loss — her own mother had died while giving birth to her, and she outlived her husband, her beloved uncle, and three of her grandchildren. Twenty days after one the grandchildren — Seneca’s own son — died in her arms, Helvia received news that Seneca had been taken away to Corsica, doomed to life in exile. This final misfortune, Seneca suggests, sent the lifelong tower of losses toppling over and crushing the old woman with grief, prompting him in turn to write Consolation to Helvia, included in his Dialogues and Letters (public library).

Although the piece belongs in the ancient genre of consolatio dating back to the fifth century B.C. — a literary tradition of essay-like letters written to comfort bereaved loved ones — what makes Seneca’s missive unusual is the very paradox that lends it its power: The person whose misfortune is being grieved is also the consoler of the griever.

Seneca writes:

Dearest mother,

I have often had the urge to console you and often restrained it. Many things have encouraged me to venture to do so. First, I thought I would be laying aside all my troubles when I had at least wiped away your tears, even if I could not stop them coming. Then, I did not doubt that I would have more power to raise you up if I had first risen myself… Staunching my own cut with my hand I was doing my best to crawl forward to bind up your wounds.

But what kept Seneca from intervening in his mother’s grief was, above all, the awareness that grief should be grieved rather than immediately treated as a problem to be solved and done away with. He writes:

I realized that your grief should not be intruded upon while it was fresh and agonizing, in case the consolations themselves should rouse and inflame it: for an illness too nothing is more harmful than premature treatment. So I was waiting until your grief of itself should lose its force and, being softened by time to endure remedies, it would allow itself to be touched and handled.

[…]

[Now] I shall offer to the mind all its sorrows, all its mourning garments: this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife.

In consonance with his strategy for inoculating oneself against misfortune, Seneca considers the benefits of such a raw confrontation of sorrow:

Let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness.
Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.

In a sentiment of uncompromising Stoicism, he adds:

All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.

Observing the particular difficulty of his situation — being both his mother’s consoler and the subject of her grief — Seneca finds amplified the general difficulty of finding adequate words in the face of loss:

A man lifting his head from the very funeral pyre must need some novel vocabulary not drawn from ordinary everyday condolence to comfort his own dear ones. But every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself.

Instead of mere words, Seneca proceeds to produce a rhetorical masterpiece, bringing the essence of Stoic philosophy to life with equal parts logic and literary flair. He writes:

I decided to conquer your grief not to cheat it. But I shall do this, I think, first of all if I show that I am suffering nothing for which I could be called wretched, let alone make my relations wretched; then if I turn to you and show that your fortune, which is wholly dependent on mine, is also not painful.

First I shall deal with the fact, which your love is longing to hear, that I am suffering no affliction. I shall make it clear, if I can, that those very circumstances which you think are crushing me can be borne; but if you cannot believe that, at least I shall be more pleased with myself for being happy in conditions which normally make men wretched. There is no need to believe others about me: I am telling you firmly that I am not wretched, so that you won’t be agitated by uncertainty. To reassure you further, I shall add that I cannot even be made wretched.

We are born under circumstances that would be favourable if we did not abandon them. It was nature’s intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself.

Echoing his animating ethos of deliberate preparation for the worst of times, he adds:

Fortune … falls heavily on those to whom she is unexpected; the man who is always expecting her easily withstands her. For an enemy’s arrival too scatters those whom it catches off guard; but those who have prepared in advance for the coming conflict, being properly drawn up and equipped, easily withstand the first onslaught, which is the most violent. Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me — money, public office, influence — I relegated to a place whence she could claim them back without bothering me. I kept a wide gap between them and me, with the result that she has taken them away, not torn them away.

Seneca makes a sobering case for the most powerful self-protective mechanism in life — the discipline of not taking anything for granted:

No man has been shattered by the blows of Fortune unless he was first deceived by her favours. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own for ever, who wanted to be admired on account of them, are laid low and grieve when the false and transient pleasures desert their vain and childish minds, ignorant of every stable pleasure. But the man who is not puffed up in good times does not collapse either when they change. His fortitude is already tested and he maintains a mind unconquered in the face of either condition: for in the midst of prosperity he has tried his own strength against adversity.

For this reason, Seneca points out, he has always regarded with skepticism the common goals after which people lust in life — money, fame, public favor — goals he has found to be “empty and daubed with showy and deceptive colours, with nothing inside to match their appearance.” But the converse, he argues, is equally true — the things people most commonly dread are as unworthy of dread to the wise person as the things they most desire are of wise desire. The very concept of exile, he assures his mother, seems so terrifying only because it has been filtered through the dread-lens of popular opinion.

With the logic of Stoicism, he goes on to comfort his mother by lifting this veil of common delusion. Urging her to “[put] aside this judgement of the majority who are carried away by the surface appearance of things,” he dismantles the alleged misfortune of all the elements of exile — displacement, poverty, public disgrace — to reveal that a person with interior stability of spirit and discipline of mind can remain happy under even the direst of circumstances. (Nearly two millennia later, Bruce Lee would incorporate this concept into his famous water metaphor for resilience and Viktor Frankl would echo it in his timeless assertion that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”)

Seneca then comes full-circle to his opening argument that grief is better confronted than resisted:

It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad, or spend a lot of time carefully going through your accounts and administering your estate, or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it.

Seneca points unwaveringly to philosophy and the liberal arts as the most powerful tools of consolation in facing the universal human experience of loss — tools just as mighty today as they were in his day. Commending his mother for having already reaped the rewards of liberal studies despite the meager educational opportunities for women at the time, he writes:

I am leading you to that resource which must be the refuge of all who are flying from Fortune, liberal studies. They will heal your wound, they will withdraw all your melancholy. Even if you had never been familiar with them you would have need of them now. But, so far as the old-fashioned strictness of my father allowed, you have had some acquaintance with the liberal arts, even if you have not mastered them. If only my father, best of men, had been less devoted to ancestral tradition and had been willing that you be steeped in the teaching of philosophy and not just gain a smattering of it: you would not now have to acquire your defence against Fortune but just bring it forth. He was less inclined to let you pursue your studies because of those women who use books not to acquire wisdom but as the furniture of luxury. Yet thanks to your vigorously inquiring mind you absorbed a lot considering the time you had available: the foundations of all formal studies have been laid. Return now to these studies and they will keep you safe. They will comfort you, they will delight you; and if they genuinely penetrate your mind, never again will grief enter there, or anxiety, or the distress caused by futile and pointless suffering. Your heart will have room for none of these, for to all other failings it has long been closed. Those studies are your most dependable protection, and they alone can snatch you from Fortune’s grip.

He concludes by addressing the inevitability of his mother’s sorrowful thoughts returning to his own exile, deliberately reframeing his misfortune for her:

This is how you must think of me — happy and cheerful as if in the best of circumstances. For they are best, since my mind, without any preoccupation, is free for its own tasks, now delighting in more trivial studies, now in its eagerness for the truth rising up to ponder its own nature and that of the universe. It seeks to know first about lands and their location, then the nature of the encompassing sea and its tidal ebb and flow. Then it studies all the awesome expanse which lies between heaven and earth — this nearer space turbulent with thunder, lightning, gales of wind, and falling rain, snow and hail. Finally, having scoured the lower areas it bursts through to the heights and enjoys the noblest sight of divine things and, mindful of its own immortality, it ranges over all that has been and will be throughout all ages.

The full letter was later included as an appendix to the Penguin edition of On the Shortness of Life (public library) — Seneca’s timeless 2,000-year-old treatise on busyness and the art of living wide rather than long. Complement it with these unusual children’s books about navigating grief, a Zen teacher on how to live through loss, and more masterworks of consolation from such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, and Albert Einstein, then revisit the great Stoics philosophers’ wisdom on character, fortitude, and self-control.

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

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Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly beautiful. Soon, they were laboring in obsidian workshops by the thousands, making from it delicate beaded jewelry and deadly weapons, household tools and ritual figurines, mirrors and surgical instruments, which traveled along trade routes to become the pillar of the Toltec economy. Its abundance and versatility may be why they never arrived at metallurgy, but obsidian became as important to the development of their civilization as steel has been to ours.

It would also become the ouroboros of their civilization — the source of prosperity by which they would flourish for centuries and the ominous overlord by which they would perish.

Not a mineral but a volcanic glass made of igneous rock, obsidian forms as lava cools too rapidly for mineral crystals to nucleate. It is composed primarily of silicon dioxide, with trace amounts of various oxides — mostly aluminum, iron, potassium, sodium, and calcium — the ratio of which varies by the circumstances of each eruption, creating a particular chemical fingerprint, so that each piece of obsidian can now be traced to its original source using nuclear and X-ray analyses.

As if volcanic glass weren’t already miraculous enough, the discovery of a special kind of obsidian — iridescent, with a green-gold sheen — catapulted Teotihuacán to the status of an ancient metropolis. Rainbow obsidian soon became the most valuable kind of obsidian in Mesoamerica, attracting people from faraway lands in search of wealth, much as the Gold Rush changed the demographics of nineteenth-century North America.

With the discovery of this doubly dazzling obsidian, Teotihuacán became home to people from different cultures with no common language and no common rituals. And yet they lived together harmoniously in the fertile valley, sharing its riches — it is hard to fight while flourishing — until the eruption of a different volcano in present-day Ecuador induced regional climate change that sent entire ecosystems into a protracted draught and left Teotihuacán on the brink of famine. Suddenly, the bedrock of this composite society began fissuring along class lines as the nobles feasted and the starving laborers clashed over resources. A kind of civil war broke out, from which Teotihuacán never recovered. The survivors abandoned the city, but not before burning the dwellings of the ruling class to the ground. Only its pyramids — Toltec temples to the Sun and the Moon — stood intact by the time the Aztecs came upon it nearly a thousand years later and named it “City of the Gods.”

One of the geochemical wonders of this Earth, iridescent obsidian occurs when nanoparticles of magnetite — an iron oxide present in most obsidian — form a thin film that reflects light waves at the upper and lower boundaries of the material in such a way that they interfere with one another, magnifying the reflection at some wavelengths and diminishing it at others. This process, known as thin-film interference, is what produces the colorful luster of oil spills and soap bubbles.

Magnetite gave Teotihuacán its rare rainbow obsidian, but it also fomented the destruction of Mesoamerican civilization by the Spaniards. Humans discovered the property of magnetism through naturally magnetized pieces of rock containing magnetite, known as lodestones, which became the first magnetic compasses, revolutionizing navigation. Without magnetite, Columbus may have ended up another anonymous sailor shipwrecked on an anonymous shore.

A seeming triumph of human nature’s ingenuity, the invention of the compass turned out to be a mere refraction of nature’s own imagination: Magnetite crystals have been found in the upper beaks of homing pigeons and many migratory birds — a kind of built-in internal compass that allows them to orient by Earth’s magnetic fields in their staggering feats of navigation. (Small amounts of magnetite are also found in various regions of the human brain, including the hippocampus — the crucible of our autonoeic consciousness; my friend Lia is convinced that my homing-pigeon sense of direction, which overcompensates for the mediocrity of my other senses, is due to abnormal amounts of magnetite in my brain.)

A built-in compass explains why, for instance, bar-tailed godwits — some of the longest-distance migrants on Earth — can leave their nesting grounds in Alaska and head for their breeding grounds in New Zealand not along the continental arc of Asia and the rim of Australia, where they can easily orient by visual landmarks like mountains and cities, but over the open Pacific Ocean. Across the immense monotony of blue, where a mistake by even a fraction of a degree would take them to a wholly different destination, they have found their way year after year, eon after eon.

Geologist and geophysicist Joe Kirschvink discovered magnetite while studying honeybees and homing pigeons as a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1970s. The idea that some animals navigate by magnetism was not new. At the dawn of the century, the Belgian playwright and amateur apiarist Maurice Maeterlinck had observed that bees navigate by “senses and properties of matter wholly unknown to ourselves,” which he termed “magnetic intuition.” A generation before him, and a decade before Darwin staggered the world with his evolutionary theory, the Russian zoologist and explorer Alexander Theodor von Middendorff had speculated:

The amazing steadfastness of migratory birds — despite wind and weather, despite night and fog — may be due to the fact that the birds are constantly aware of the direction of the magnetic pole and therefore know exactly how to keep to their direction of migration.

To have located the basis of biomagnetism in magnetite seemed like a triumph of science over mystery. But in the decades since, as our instruments have become more sophisticated and our theories more testable, research has revealed the presence of a protein in the retinal cells of birds — cryptochrome — that may be making use of quantum entanglement to provide a whole other mechanism of magnetoreception. More knowledge has only unlatched more mystery: The total system may involve multiple build-in instruments interacting with multiple fundamental laws and forces. I think of Henry Beston, who wrote a century ago that “in a world older and more complete than ours,” other animals “move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” I think of the difference between science and civilization: Science knows it is unfinished, a perennial process, whereas every civilization mistakes itself for the end point of progress.

Walking down Teotihuacán’s central promenade and watching the Sun pyramid gradually eclipse the volcano, the evolutionary triumph of my peripheral vision registers a flash of yellow. I turn to see a small bird aglow against the ruins, perched on a stone ledge above a man in a sombrero selling obsidian souvenirs. The warblers — godless, tradeless, needful only of sky and song — are among the most regular border-crossers between North and South America, their migratory routes stretching from Alaska to the Amazon. Older than the Toltecs, older than the sediment deposits that separated the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to bridge the Americas, older than our oldest myths, they have seen civilizations rise and crumble, and will one day see Hollywood overgrown with poppies and Manhattan returned to the sea. And when they fly over the ruins of the Sistine Chapel and Silicon Valley, they will be guided by the same mysterious forces that guided the first of their kind.

“From the basic biological perspective,” concluded a team of scientists studying the magnetic compass of warblers, “the perception of the magnetic field remains the only sense for which the sensory mechanism and its location still remain unknown.”

It is salutary for us to have regular reminders that we don’t understand many of nature’s mysteries because we don’t, and may never, understand ourselves; that all of our creative restlessness, everything of beauty and substance we have ever made — our temples and our theorems, the Moonlight Sonata and general relativity — has sprung from our confrontation with the mystery of which we are a part. The Toltecs and the Aztecs gave shape to the mystery in Quetzalcoatl — their feathered god of creation and knowledge — staring at me from the base of the pyramid with the stony serenity of the centuries, knowing everything and knowing nothing.

donating = loving

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

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Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved me and fed me, consoled me and inspirited me, were people who existed in the margins of their time and place. (That is why Brain Pickings became The Marginalian.) They were people who were already other enough by some variable (realists in a religious world, women in a man’s world, queer people in a corseted world) that they had little to lose by thinking and living outside the mainstream, by seeing what others did not want to look at and translating what they saw into the sort of radical ideas that have moved this world forward.

We are so accustomed to speaking of privilege as the unearned advantage of floating effortlessly atop the glittering surface of the mainstream, but we think little of the unlikely advantage that comes from this strange freedom of the margins. No one has articulated this more poignantly and precisely than bell hooks (September 25, 1952–December 15, 2021) in her 1984 classic Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (public library).

Looking back on growing up Black in a small Kentucky town, beyond the railroad tracks that demarcated the limits of the mainstream, she writes:

To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body… Living as we did — on the edge — we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity.

Insisting that “we need to have a revolutionary ideology that can be shared with everyone,” one in which “the experiences of people on the margin… are understood, addressed, and incorporated,” she adds:

At its most visionary, [the revolutionary ideology] will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.

Complement with Hannah Arendt on the power of being an outsider, then revisit hooks on love and language.

donating = loving

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

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“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship,” Seneca counseled in considering true and false friendship, “but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.” To lose a friend who has earned such wholehearted admission into your soul is one of life’s most devastating sorrows. Whatever shape the loss takes — death, distance, the various desertions of loyalty and love that hollow out the heart — it is one of life’s most devastating sorrows. It is also one of life’s most absolute inevitabilities — we will each lose a beloved friend at one point or another, to one cause or another.

No one has articulated the disorientation of that inevitability more beautifully than Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31, 1944) in Wind, Sand, and Stars (public library) — that endlessly rewarding collection of his autobiographical vignettes, philosophical inquiries, and poetic reflections on the nature of existence, published just as WWII was breaking out and four years before The Little Prince, which Saint-Exupéry would dedicate to his best friend in what remains perhaps the most beautiful book dedication ever composed.

With an eye to his life as a pilot, Saint-Exupéry considers with unsentimental sweetness the common experience of losing fellow pilots to accident or war. In a passage that radiates universal insight into the loss of a friend, whatever the circumstance, he writes:

Bit by bit… it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade.

Three years later, Saint-Exupéry would offer the most poetic consolation there is, only consolation there is for this existential sorrow, in the final pages of The Little Prince — a book very much about reconciling the great unbidden gift of loving a friend with the inevitability of losing that friend. In the closing scene, the little prince, about to depart for his home planet, tells the heartsick pilot unwilling to lose him and his golden laugh:

All men have the stars… but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For other they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You — you alone — will have the stars as no one else has them… In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content to have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky!

Months later, much to the sorrow of his own friends and the millions of strangers who had come to love him through his books, Saint-Exupéry himself would become one of the lost pilots, vanishing over the Mediterranean Sea on a reconnaissance mission, his stardust silently returned to the stars that made him.

Couple with trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell on how we co-create one another and re-create ourselves through friendship, then revisit Saint-Exupéry on love and mortality, what the desert taught him about the meaning of life, and how a simple human smile saved his life during the war.

donating = loving

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

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In the last week of April in 1685, in the middle of a raging naval war, the English explorer and naturalist William Dampier arrived on a small island in the Bay of Panama carpeted with claylike yellow soil. Dampier — the first person to circumnavigate the globe thrice, inspiring others as different as Cook and Darwin — made careful note of local tree species everywhere he traveled, but none fascinated him more than what he encountered for the first time on this tiny island.

Dampier described the black bark and smooth oval leaves of the tall “Avogato Pear-tree,” then paused at its unusual fruit — “as big as a large Lemon,” green until ripe and then “a little yellowish,” with green flesh “as soft as Butter” and no distinct flavor of its own, enveloping “a stone as big as a Horse-Plumb.” He described how the fruit are eaten — two or three days after picking, with the rind peeled — and their most common local preparation: with a pinch of salt and a roasted plantain, so that “a Man that’s hungry, may make a good meal of it”; there was also uncommonly delectable sweet variation: “mixt with Sugar and Lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate.” And then he added:

It is reported that this Fruit provokes to Lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards.

But far more fascinating than the cultural lore of the avocado are its own amorous propensities, uncovered in the centuries since by sciences that would have then seemed like magic, or heresy.

The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado — a mostly evergreen member of the laurel family — is a ghost of evolution that should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did. Mercifully, it did not. Ample in Europe and North American during the Ice Age, it somehow managed to survive in Mexico and spread from there. But even more impressively, it managed to survive its own self-defeating sexual relations — the botanical equivalent of the human wire-crossing Eric Berne described in his revelatory 1964 classic Games People Play.

Bald of petals though the tree’s small greenish blossoms may be, they are an example of “perfect flowers” — the botanical term for bisexual blooming plants, which can typically self-pollinate. The avocado, however, is far from reproductively self-sufficient due to an astonishing internal clock, which comes in two mirror-image varieties.

In some cultivars — like the Hass, Pinkerton, and Reed avocados — the blossoms open up into reproductive receptivity in their female guise each morning, then close by that afternoon; the following afternoon, they open in their male guise. Other cultivars — the Fuerte, Zutano, and Bacon avocado among them — bloom on the opposite schedule: female in the afternoon, male by morning.

This presents a Pyramus and Thisbe problem across the wall of time — while both partners inhabit the space of a single tree, they can’t reach each other across the day-parts and need to be pollinated by trees on the opposite schedule. Their reproduction is further derailed by the fact that some varieties, like the Hass, only fertilize to fruition every other year.

Ever since humans have cultivated Earth’s most nutritious fruit, they have tried to help the helpless romancer with various intervention strategies — grafting, planting trees with opposite blooming schedules near each other, even manually pollinating blossoms of the same tree.

The world’s most beloved avocado — the Hass — is the consequence of human interference consecrated by happenstance in the hands of a California mailman in the 1920s.

The year he turned thirty, Rudolph Hass (June 5, 1892–October 24, 1952) was leafing through a magazine when an illustration stopped him up short: a tree growing dollar bills instead of fruit. He was making 25 cents an hour delivering mail while raising a growing family. The tree, he learned, was an avocado and its fruit were promised to be the next great horticultural boon.

Rudolph took all the money he had, borrowed some from his sister Ida, and bought a small grove of the leading commercial avocado variety — the Fuerte — with a few other cultivars sprinkled in. Needing the greatest possible gain from his grove, he wanted only Fuertes but couldn’t afford to buy any new trees. Instead, he decided to cut down some of the old ones and graft them to become more fertile young Fuertes. He took counsel from a professional grafter, who said the best technique was to graft with his own seedlings. He had none. But it happened that a man on his mail route had a mighty green thumb and was experimenting with growing avocados from seeds, which he got from restaurant refuse.

Rudolph bought three of the lustrous dark orbs and planted them in his grove. They sprouted. When they grew strong enough, he grafted onto one of them a cutting from one of the mature Fuerte trees. The graft didn’t take. He tried again on another of the seedlings. This too failed.

Resigned, Rudolph abandoned the experiment and let his surviving seedling grow as it pleased. In a neglected corner of the grove, it quietly went on doing what trees, those masters of improvisation, do — press on with their blind optimism. When it reached maturity, it began bearing fruit that looked nothing like any other avocado — dark and luscious, the Braille of its skin glimmering with violet.

When Rudolph cut one open for his five young children, they declared those were the most delicious avocados they had ever tasted.

Soon, the world would agree.

This being America and that being the wake of the Great Depression, the Hass family had patented the avocado within a decade.

After describing his “new and improved variety of avocado which has certain characteristics that are highly desirable” and listing all the ways in which “the present invention” differed from existing avocados — higher oil content, superior flavor, doesn’t drop from the tree or rot inside before ripening, resists cold blasts, and, oh, it is almost purple — Rudolph ended his patent application with a summation of his creation that hums with a kind of humble pride:

I claim as my invention: The variety of avocado tree… characterized by its summer ripening, medium-sized fruits, of purple color having a leathery skin… and borne on long stemps [sic], with a small tight seed and with creamy flesh of excellent color and nutty flavor, smooth with no fibre and butter-like consistency.

In the near-century since Rudolph’s hopeful and hapless experiment, the Hass avocado has begun bringing in more than a billion dollars a year for growers, accounting for four fifths of the American avocado industry. But Rudolph Hass continued working as a mailman until he was felled by a heart attack months after his sixtieth birthday, months before Rachel Carson indicted her country with the reminder that “the real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.”

Today, every single Hass avocado in every neighborhood market that ever was and ever will be can be traced to a single mother tree grown by a destitute California mailman in 1926 — tender evidence that every tree is in some sense immortal, and a living testament to how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.

donating = loving

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

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

We are each born with a wilderness of possibility within us. Who we become depends on how we tend to our inner garden — what qualities of character and spirit we cultivate to come abloom, what follies we weed out, how much courage we grow to turn away from the root-rot of cynicism and toward the sunshine of life in all its forms: wonder, kindness, openhearted vulnerability.

Answering a young person’s plea for guidance in finding direction and meaning amid a “bizarre and temporary world” that seems so often at odds with the highest human values, the sage and sensitive Nick Cave offers his lens on the two most important qualities of spirit to cultivate in order to have a meaningful life.

A generation after James Baldwin observed in his superb essay on Shakespeare how “it is said that his time was easier than ours, but… no time can be easy if one is living through it,” Nick prefaces his advice with a calibration:

The world… is indeed a strange and deeply mysterious place, forever changing and remaking itself anew. But this is not a novel condition, our world hasn’t only recently become bizarre and temporary, it has been so ever since its inception, and it will continue to be such until its end — mystifying and forever in a state of flux.

He then offers his two pillars of a fulfilling life — orientations of the soul that “have a softening effect on our sometimes inflexible and isolating value systems”:

The first is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.

Couple with Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on what makes a fulfilling life and revisit Nick Cave’s humble wisdom on the importance of trusting yourself, the art of growing older, and the antidote to our existential helplessness, then savor his lush On Being conversation with Krista Tippett about loss, yearning, transcendence, and “the audacity of the world to continue to be beautiful and continue to be good in times of deep suffering.”

donating = loving

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

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“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of everything — a complete and final explanation of the universe, a universe only rendered real in the mind.

Around the same time, on another landmass, watching finches cling to the swaying branches in the wind, a scientist as original and unrelenting in his own quest was wondering about the “internal fires that fuel these wisps of feather and bone,” recognizing that each mind is itself a universe, that inside every skull, even the smallest, is a place black and fathomless as pure spacetime, housing an umwelt of which an outside observer can only ever have an incomplete theory.

Considered by many the most effective conservationist of the past century, George Schaller — the first researcher to walk among wild gorillas unarmed and be rewarded with unprecedented insight into their universe, the first to take a photograph of the elusive snow leopard, rigorous and sensitive biographer of the lives of species as varied as the African lion and the Tibetan antelope, and now himself the subject of Miriam Horn’s rigorous and sensitive biography Homesick for a World Unknown (public library) — has spent the better portion of his days in wild places where “one settles at times for mere survival,” bitten and blistered and burnt, often haunted by his sense of “terrible loneliness” and “utter insignificance,” yet determined to prevail over parasites and bureaucrats and armed rebels to bring us a little bit closer to the abiding mystery of that unreachable otherness dwelling inside every consciousness, every sensorium, every animal body nerved with the history of its habitat and its habits.
Out of his life arises the unnerving, redemptive intimation that all the whys of our theology and philosophy are dwarfed by a single how honed to the point of revelation on the whetstone of observation and interpretation we call science; that the most interesting question about life is not why it exists but how it coheres, how it sings, what it is like to be alive — a question only ever answerable through what Horn calls “sustained intimacy” with the other via our own animal bodies, only answered with a “willingness to confess bafflement.”

Of all the baffling creatures whose universes Schaller entered with his torch of thought and tenderness, none was a greater mystery than the giant panda — doubly so for having be so rampantly Disneyfied and Instagrammed into a stuffed toy for the modern mind, shorn of its creaturely reality, all the more unknown for being so voyeuristically objectified.

Born uncommonly vulnerable — a pink handful of hairless flesh one nine-hundredth of the weight they would grow to, entirely dependent on the mom that must carry the infant in her mouth or paw continuously until it has grown to what Schaller described as a “panda-colored beanbag with legs” — pandas, even in their full-grown gigantism, remain one of our planet’s most vulnerable creatures, dealt a cruel hand by evolution, displaced and enslaved in our own hands. Schaller saw that what was needed was not merely better science but a restitution of these creatures’ dignity by meeting them, with curiosity and empathy, on their own terms — not as a symbol, not as a plaything, but as a living mystery with a sensorium and umwelt all its own.

Contextualizing the alien world he entered when he began his work with the giant panda, Horn writes:

A wild panda… doesn’t announce its presence like gorillas with big, noisy families, nor does it roam like a tiger. Instead, it stays mostly alone and mostly still, inside a world that seems designed to hide it: of bamboo screens all around made still more opaque by near-constant mists and rains. There it sits, just quietly eating, day and night. It must, because in one of the clumsier turns of evolution, it has become wholly dependent on a food it can barely digest. Though the purest of herbivores, eating only bamboo, a panda still has its carnivorous ancestors’ gut. Lacking the internal fermentation vat and symbiotic microbes that enable cows, giraffes, and other grass and leaf eaters to access the nutrients in cellulose and lignin, a panda can assimilate just 17 percent of the bamboo it eats. It can’t build enough fat to hibernate or even to sleep all night, but can survive only (like the orbiting humans in WALL-E) by combining gluttony with sloth.

Horn observes that the qualities we find most endearing in pandas — those traits most emblematic of their commodified cuteness — are an evolutionary consequence of this metabolic dictum:

Their sweet, broad head provides a strong anchor for jaws powerful enough to snap, strip, crush, and grind woody stalks. Their roly-poly body serves as a big, bamboo-holding barrel: George calculated that his favorite panda ate on average eighty-five pounds a day, half her body weight. Their famous pseudothumb, an elongated wrist bone, allows them to grab and hold even the slenderest stem, and to eat with exceptional efficiency. As George counted, one big male bit into 3,481 stems, rhythmically feeding each into the side of his mouth like a pencil into a sharpener, levering it Bugs Bunny–style into pieces, and reaching for the next before the last was swallowed. Most passes right through: Schaller weighed a single scat pile at seventeen pounds.

Taking in such meager energy, pandas must spend just as little. Most barely budge in a day, traveling no farther than a few hundred meters. Like Roman emperors, they eat slouched or reclined; George watched one lie on his back and use his hindpaws to bend stems toward his mouth, saving both forepaws for shoveling in the leaves. They don’t build beds, their plush bodies serving as both mattress and comforter. More than once, George saw a sated panda abruptly flop over onto its side or belly like a wound-down toy, fall promptly to sleep, then wake like Winnie-the-Pooh: raising arms overhead to yawn, rubbing their back end against a tree, even (when fed) licking a porridgy paw clean. Yet for all that adorableness, they were the most truly solitary animal George had ever known.

But despite how closely and patiently he observed the pandas, Schaller felt the cold edge of their otherness. “Her being eludes me,” he wrote after countless hours observing a particular female he saw as “complete in herself… final and preordained,” finding himself “hopelessly separated by an immense space.” An epoch after Kepler invented science fiction with his imaginative parable about life on other worlds, Schaller turned to that most ancient of storytelling forms to imagine life in other worlds — the inner world of a panda — in a parable serving a moving reminder of just how alien this planet’s life-forms ultimately are to one another. Reaching across the immense space, he channeled the voice of the panda warning about her own unknowability:

You cannot divide me into… fragments of existence… I am, like any other being, infinite in complexity, indivisible. [Even] time is not the same for all living things. This fir lives more slowly than you, and I more quickly… Some of you… hold that language is necessary before one can think, and that makes me and all others — except you — unthinking creatures. What frivolous nonsense!… I think mainly with smells… Forget science now and then.”

Recognizing that we can only ever perceive other creatures the way we perceive one another — in fragmentary glimpses of a remote reality stitched together into a coherent picture by tenuous threads of theory and speculation — Schaller added in the urgent voice of his parable-panda:

Look at each other. Your ways of thinking are vastly different, yet you belong to the same species.

Exposing the weft of science’s warp, he wrote:

What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

In a sentiment part Emily Dickinson, part Wittgenstein, part Zen kaon, he captured the central mystery of aliveness:

The panda is the answer. But what is the question?

Complement this fragment of the wholly magnificent Homesick for a World Unknown with a taste, delicious and incomplete, of what it’s like to be an orca, what it’s like to be an owl, and what it’s like to be a falcon.

donating = loving

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

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

Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:

Learn something.

Help someone.

Feel it all.

We need our sciences to learn how the universe works, to know what we don’t yet know and to comprehend it. We need our arts to learn how the heart works, to feel what we are unwilling or unable to feel and hold it without apprehension. We need both — knowledge and feeling, intelligent comprehension and emotional intelligence — to be capable of empathy, as well as self-compassion.

The damage of our time is that it pragmatizes everything, reducing the wonder of curiosity to the practical application of discoveries, reducing the symphony of feeling to the hold music of self-help, reducing human beings to data points in a log of user statistics and political polls. It is not only an insult but a violence to our humanity, the only antidote to which is a passionate defense of the irreducible things that make us human — those things useless as moonlight, unnecessary as music, as love: There is no practical value to apprehending the magnificent eye of the scallop or the mystery of the ghost pipe, no practical value to Leaves of Grass, yet these are the things that mediate the worst propensities of our kind — our capacity for despair, which is the price of consciousness, and our capacity for war, which is the cost of despair.

A century ago, as the world was recovering from its first global war, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) foresaw another unless humanity could find a way to resist this dehumanizing cult of utility. We didn’t then, but maybe, just maybe, we can now with the prescription Russell offers in his wonderful essay “‘Useless Knowledge,'” later included in the altogether revelatory collection In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (public library).

Observing that the Renaissance was so transformative because its “main motive” was delight — “the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers” — and that the Enlightenment was so transformative because it probed the workings of the universe without expectation of practical gain, he writes:

Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, men have questioned more and more vigorously the value of “useless” knowledge, and have come increasingly to believe that the only knowledge worth having is that which is applicable to some part of the economic life of the community… Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill… This is part and parcel of the same movement which has led to compulsory military service, boy scouts, the organisation of political parties, and the dissemination of political passion by the Press.

In a sentiment he would soon develop in his excellent essay on the value of idleness, he adds:

We do not like to think of anyone lazily enjoying life, however refined may be the quality of his enjoyment. We feel that everybody ought to be doing something to help on the great cause (whatever it may be), the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not leisure of mind, therefore, to acquire any knowledge except such as will help us in the fight for whatever it may happen to be that we think important.

But while the usefulness of “useful” knowledge in making the modern world cannot be denied — here we are, with our computers and airplanes and ever-growing life-expectancies — we need its “useless” counterpart to make life not longer, not more productive, but wider and deeper and more present. Russell writes:

There is indirect utility, of various different kinds, in the possession of knowledge which does not contribute to technical efficiency. I think some of the worst features of the modern world could be improved by a greater encouragement of such knowledge and a less ruthless pursuit of mere professional competence… When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder… Narrowness of outlook has caused oblivion of some powerful counteracting force.

Several years before the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga composed his revelatory treatise on how play made us human, Russell adds:

Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment. But if play is to serve its purpose, it must be possible to find pleasure and interest in matters not connected with work.

And yet play is an active rather than passive form of leisure. In a prophetic sentiment anticipating the menacing mesmerism of social media, the way it would turn the human animal into a screen zombie, he observes:

The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others… If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.

Half a lifetime before he looked back to reflect on the key to growing old contentedly — “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life” — he writes:

[Such useless] knowledge, when it is successfully assimilated, forms the character of a man’s thoughts and desires, making them concern themselves, in part at least, with large impersonal objects, not only with matters of immediate importance to himself. It has been too readily assumed that, when a man has acquired certain capacities by means of knowledge, he will use them in ways that are socially beneficial. The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill… It must be admitted that highly educated people are sometimes cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are less often so than people whose minds have lain fallow. The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to the average. When a lynching takes place, the ring-leaders are almost invariably very ignorant men. This is not because mental cultivation produces positive humanitarian feelings, though it may do so; it is rather because it gives other interests than the ill-treatment of neighbours, and other sources of self-respect than the assertion of domination.

Even Bertrand Russell did not foresee that within a century bullies and lynchers with fallow minds would take the reins of superpowers, waging wars by whims and feeding the fragile ego’s lust for power by terrorizing the powerless. But he did give us, as plainly and precisely as possible, a prescription for prevention:

Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction… Hamlet is held up as an awful warning against thought without action, but no one holds up Othello as a warning against action without thought… For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion. A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.

Describing what Iris Murdoch would later term “unselfing,” which she identified as the chief reward of engaging with art and nature, he adds:

A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.

These contemplative acts of unselfing, Russell notes, have “advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound, [from] minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates [to] the difficulty of securing international co-operation.” In passage evocative of physicist Richard Feynman’s classic Ode to a Flower, he reflects:

Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word “precocious,” because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.

[…]

But while the trivial pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial worries of practical life, the more important merits of contemplation are in relation to the greater evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind march of nations into unnecessary disaster. For those to whom dogmatic religion can no longer bring comfort, there is need of some substitute, if life is not to become dusty and harsh and filled with trivial self-assertion.

In a passage of overwhelming prescience, he adds:

The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote. The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.

Complement with Russell on the secret of happiness, the two pillars of human flourishing, how to heal an ailing and divided world, then try an astronaut’s antidote to despair.

donating = loving

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

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

In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to “make this world worthy of its children.” Today, as we face a world that treats its children as worthless, we are challenged like we have never been challenged to consider the deepest existential calculus of bringing new life into a troubled world — what is the worth of children, what are our responsibilities to them (when we do choose to have them, for it is also an act of courage and responsibility to choose not to), and what does it mean to raise a child with the dignity of being an unrepeatable miracle of atoms that have never before constellated and will never again constellate in that exact way?

A century ago, perched between two worlds and two World Wars, the Lebanese-American poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) addressed these elemental questions with sensitive sagacity in a short passage from The Prophet (public library) — the 1923 classic that also gave us Gibran on the building blocks of true friendship, the courage to weather the uncertainties of love, and what may be the finest advice ever offered on the balance of intimacy and independence in a healthy relationship.

When a young mother with a newborn baby at her breast asks for advice on children and parenting, Gibran’s poetic prophet responds:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Complement with Susan Sontag’s 10 rules for raising a child and Crescendo — an Italian watercolor serenade to the splendid prenatal biology of becoming a being — then revisit Gibran on authenticity, why we make art, and his gorgeous love letters to and from the woman without whom The Prophet might never have been born.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two world wars. There are many species of despair — the private despair of ill health and heartbreak, the public despair we call politics, the existential despair of bearing our transience and our utter insignificance to the life of the cosmos.

In the autumn of 1978, Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) faced several species at once as a grim diagnosis first interrupted, then fortified her work as one the most personal yet most politically consequential voices of the past century. “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word ‘I,’” she had written in the prime of her life, in the bloom of health. Now, she came to hone her philosophy on the sharp edge of her mortality.

“Spring comes, and still I feel despair like a pale cloud waiting to consume me,” she writes at the outset of what became The Cancer Journals (public library) — Lorde’s effort, blazingly successful, “to give form with honesty and precision to the pain faith labor and loving which this period of my life has translated into strength.” Like all translation, however, it was a demanding task, a creative task, a task that required learning a new language of being well enough to channel through it the poetry of being alive.

It begins with the stammer of incomprehension that follows every existential shock: She finds herself “not feeling very hopeful these days, about selfhood or anything else.” But soon she discovers that the only way out of that “molten despair” is through.

In consonance with poet May Sarton’s hard-won insistence that “sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands,” Lorde comes to see how it is precisely by allowing the despair that she can reach beyond it:

If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again. I must be content to see how really little I can do and still do it with an open heart… I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch.

Along the way, consumed with writing while trying to stay alive, she trembles with the question haunting every artist: “What is this work all for?” But then, upon finishing a novel, she looks back to see it had been a lifeline. In what is by far the most concise, precise manifesto for those of us who process our loves and our losses in writing — or do whatever the world sees as our work — she reflects:

I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.

Calibrating her personal suffering against “the enormity of our task, to turn the world around,” and coming to see that despair “means destruction,” she allows her despair — that is, feels it — then refuses it — that is, refuses to act out of it, to live into it:

How do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy? I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning… It means trout fishing on the Missisquoi River at dawn and tasting the green silence, and knowing that this beauty too is mine forever.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling the reality of another into your own in order to fathom it. I have appropriated the English language — not my native — in order to write these words.

The tyranny of our time is that, because the hero of the modern myth is the victim, our catalogue of ways to be wounded has swelled to untenable proportions. The arsenal of possible offenses is so immense that we are left in a state of paralyzing hyper-vigilance, ever on the defensive, ever trying to preempt grievance and avoid indictment. Because it is hard to create from a defensive place, no region of life has suffered more by this than our arts — trembling before the whip of cultural appropriation, artists are left with narrower and narrower parameters of permission for whom and what they can imagine. We seem to have forgotten that the word empathy itself is just a little over a century old, invented by Rilke and Rodin to describe the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art that represents something other than yourself. We seem to have forgotten that, at its best, art is not a mirror but a kaleidoscope, casting on the walls of our own lives a thousand hues of experience we never could have lived. As a little girl in the mountains of Bulgaria in the early 1990s, I would have never known what it is like to be a little boy in the prairies of North America in the early 1900s had I not read a German woman’s novel about a Lakota father and son. You may never know what it is like to be the long-suffering wife of a Siberian serf, but you have Dostoyevsky.

Troubled by this tyrannical paralysis, Zadie Smith offers an antidote of uncommon potency and poignancy in one of the essays collected in Dead and Alive (public library), anchored in a recognition of the absurdity of turning identities into warfare given how mutable the self is, how inconstant, how tessellated a thing to begin with. She writes:

I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that. I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents — not least of which was the 400-trillion-to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God.

An epoch after Walt Whitman — a person utterly unlike her by all the unchosen variables we mistake for personhood — celebrated his contradictory multitudes, she considers the making of her own, borrowed from the lives of others, real and imagined:

I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe… And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

But if the purpose of art is to offer us, in Iris Murdoch’s perfect phrase, “an occasion for unselfing,” then it is not a defect but a natural advantage for an artist to have so unbounded a self, to be so indiscriminately curious about the interiority of other lives, about even the remotest reaches of possible experience. She offers an alternative to our culture’s antagonistic model of interpersonal curiosity:

What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious — but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think… I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture… should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.

Invoking Whitman’s timeless exhortation to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book [and] dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” she adds:

Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea — popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity — that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.

What a lovely reminder that art’s invitation to imagine what it is like to be another is precisely what allows us to discover the doom and glory of who we are and what we are. What a lovely insistence that far greater than the courage to be yourself is the courage to be more-than-yourself, the courage to remember that but a thin veil woven of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang falls between you and not-you, a veil we have found a way of parting — literature — in order to allay the fundamental loneliness, isolation, and plain tedium of the self.

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

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It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far as the Moon. Gravity is a brand new concept and the notion of a galaxy is still more than two centuries away. The universe is as big as our Solar System, which has six planets orbiting a sun we have only just conceded, after burning the seers at the stake, does not revolve around us.

Against this backdrop, having set the Scientific Revolution into motion with his landmark contributions to optics, mechanics, and astronomy, the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens has just finished his most daring work: Cosmotheoros: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets — our world’s first treatise speculating on the existence of life on other worlds not from a theological but from a scientific standpoint.

Although Huygens outlived his era’s life expectancy twofold, he never lived to see its publication — published in Latin and English by his brother at his own expense, Cosmotheoros entered the world like a shockwave three years after Huygens’s death, changing not only the course of science but of art. It was the spark that led Shelley to scandalize Georgian England with the “plurality of worlds” he augured in his philosophical poem Queen Mab. It was the seed for the marvelously multifaceted field of astrobiology, at the beating heart of which is the question not of where life is but what life is.

More than three centuries later, Chilean artist Alejandra Acosta conjures up the visionary spirit of Cosmotheoros in a gorgeous Spanish edition illustrated with her intricate embroideries of the life-forms Huygens imagined inhabiting other worlds, radiating a lovely strangeness partway between Borges’s imaginary beings and the creatures of Indian folk mythology, yet entirely original, as daring artistically as the book was scientifically.

Without the concept at the center of Cosmotheoros, we wouldn’t have one of the finest metaphors in all of literature: “There is nothing new under the sun,” Octavia Butler wrote, “but there are new suns.”

donating = loving

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

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Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.

When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.

But it was the first poem Emily ever read to me, to break me in, that stands as eternal testament to her spirit, to the playfulness with which she approached even the most poignant aspects of this life.

Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887–February 5, 1972) was in her early thirties and the world had just come undone by its first global war when, reckoning with the eternal question of what the point of art is in these matters of life and death, she composed this perfect poem — a vindication, a consecration, and, perhaps above all, an invitation:

POETRY
by Marianne Moore

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the

   same thing may be said for all of us — that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand. The bat,

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—

   ball fan, the statistician — case after case

      could be cited did

      one wish it; nor is it valid

         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

   nor till the autocrats among us can be

      “literalists of

      the imagination” — above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion —

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness, and

      that which is on the other hand,

         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then savor Emily reading the ravishing “You Can’t Have It All.”

donating = loving

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

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The answer, drawn out by the tenuous thread of selective collective memory we mistake for history, is a story of empire and ecology, of love and ruin and more love.

In 1990, Expedition magazine published an image of a coin excavated almost a decade earlier at the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone in Cyrene, present-day Libya. Emblazoned on the silver drachm circa 500 B.C.E. is a small heart so familiar it feels strangely modern — a depiction not of the human organ but of the seed of a mysterious plant, whose stem and bloom appear on the back of another Cyrenean coin.

The ancients called it silphium. Its fate may be the first case of extinction in the common record. Its legacy is the most enduring graphic symbol of the modern world.

With its golden pom-pom blossoms and neatly fractal branches, silphium didn’t just look magical — it was heralded as a panacea. But none among its panoply of medicinal properties was more revered than its dual potency as aphrodisiac and contraceptive, which earned it the moniker “the lovers’ plant.” In a society where women had no political power and no civil rights, here was a path to empowered embodiment, here was a plant that put their pleasure and their reproductive rights into their own hands.

But despite how meticulously the ancients tended to their silphium, it resisted cultivation. Hippocrates himself reported two failed attempts to transplant it from Cyrene to Athens. Long before Erasmus Darwin sensationalized the sexual reproduction of plants, before Gregor Mendel seeded the modern science of genetics, the Greeks had no way of understanding how silphium’s peculiar evolutionary adaptation crippled it, made them all the more responsible for its survival.

A monoecious shrub, silphium grows both male and female flowers on the same plant, the male ones fruitless and the female ones giving the heart-shaped seeds. But unlike the androgynous plants known as “perfect flowers” — which contain both the male pollen-producing stamen and the female ovule-producing pistils, and can therefore self-pollinate — silphium’s female flowers grow under the leaves and the male ones above, so that they need the help of an insect or a human gardener to pollinate.

For seven centuries, the Greeks meticulously tended to it, passing down the lore of its vulnerable secret from generation to generation. By the time of the Roman Empire, silphium had become so precious that it was traded at the price of silver and accepted as tax payment to be held at the public treasury.

But as the Romans began their brutal conquest and cultural assimilation, they did what all colonizers do, discounting the indigenous knowledge that had ensured silphium’s survival. By the first century of the modern era, Pliny the Elder lamented in his Natural History that only “a single stem was found.” In a cruel twist of irony, the last of this ancient symbol of female empowerment was given to the troubled tyrant Nero, who famously murdered his mother and all of his wives, then played his lyre while Rome was burning before committing suicide.

Considered extinct for two thousand years, silphium grew so remote in our collective memory that some began to doubt it ever existed.

But then came a bright testament to how the love of life and of truth is always more powerful than the lust for power: In the early 2020s, Turkish botanist Mahmut Miski, leading a group of researchers and farmers in Anatolia, discovered a rare endemic shrub — Ferula drudeana — whose morphology and chemical properties closely match the ancients’ descriptions of silphium.

Two civilizations after the Greeks failed to cultivate the precious plant, Miski and his team found that it could be grown in a greenhouse using cold stratification — a process of breaking seed dormancy by mimicking winter conditions: cold, moist, and dark. This means that, with proper tending, silphium can go the way of the black robin, the way of the ginkgo, and come back from extinction, its tiny hearts once again growing roots and shoots into Earth’s soil — a lovely reminder that even after all the depredations of time and terror, the heart can come back to life.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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