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.

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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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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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.

“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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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.

“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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“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote in one of her characteristic asides of immense insight as she considered the dying art of letter writing. This may be the most elemental paradox of existence: We yearn for permanence and stability despite a universe of constant change as a way of hedging against the inescapable fact of our mortality, our own individual impermanence. And yet this faulty coping mechanism results not in immortality but in complacency, stagnation, a living death. Emerson captured this paradox with sundering precision as he weighed the key to personal growth: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

That is what Emerson’s contemporary and collaborator, the great education reformer Elizabeth Peabody (May 16, 1804–January 3, 1894), explores in an 1838 letter to her friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister, included in Figuring. (Peabody’s own sister, Sophia, would eventually marry Hawthorne, living through his conflicted romantic attachment to Herman Melville.)

As a child, Peabody had taught herself Latin and Greek in order to access the world’s wisdom and cut off her curls in revolt against her culture’s preoccupation with young women’s appearance rather than their minds. She learned astronomy and geography in an era when higher education was not available to women and become the first woman allowed into Boston’s only lending library. (The exception only lasted a month, during which she borrowed twenty-one books.) In her ninety years, Peabody founded the first English-language kindergarten in America, translated the first American edition of Buddhist scripture, launched the country’s first foreign-language bookstore and circulating library, coined the term Transcendentalism to define the philosophical current sweeping New England, and introduced the king and queen of Transcendentalism. The epitome of intellectual restlessness and creative self-reinvention, she never married — she lived a life her younger sister described as one of “high thinking and plain living.”

Quoting advice a friend had once given her, Peabody writes:

The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.

Peabody ends with the admonition that the path to complacency is paved with complacent companions:

No being of a social nature can be entirely beyond the tendency to fall to the level of his associates.

The antidote to stagnation, therefore, lies in surrounding oneself with people of creative vitality. The pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell — a contemporary of Peabody’s and a key figure in Figuring — would articulate this beautifully two decades later in contemplating how we co-create one another and recreate ourselves through friendship: “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware.”

Complement with the pioneering social scientist John Gardner on the art of self-renewal and legendary cellist Pablo Casals, at age 93, on creative vitality and how working with love prolongs your 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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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.

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. And yet: “The art of seeing has to be learned,” Marguerite Duras reverberates — and it can be learned, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz invites us to believe in her breathlessly wonderful On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (public library) — a record of her quest to walk around a city block with eleven different “experts,” from an artist to a geologist to a dog, and emerge with fresh eyes mesmerized by the previously unseen fascinations of a familiar world. It is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating books of the year, if not the decade, and the most enchanting thing I’ve read in ages. In a way, it’s the opposite but equally delightful mirror image of Christoph Niemann’s Abstract City — a concrete, immersive examination of urbanity — blending the mindfulness of Sherlock Holmes with the expansive sensitivity of Thoreau.

Horowitz begins by pointing our attention to the incompleteness of our experience of what we conveniently call “reality”:

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.

By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.

This adaptive ignorance, she argues, is there for a reason — we celebrate it as “concentration” and welcome its way of easing our cognitive overload by allowing us to conserve our precious mental resources only for the stimuli of immediate and vital importance, and to dismiss or entirely miss all else. (“Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator,” Horowitz tells us. “It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.”) But while this might make us more efficient in our goal-oriented day-to-day, it also makes us inhabit a largely unlived — and unremembered — life, day in and day out.

For Horowitz, the awakening to this incredible, invisible backdrop of life came thanks to Pumpernickel, her “curly haired, sage mixed breed” (who also inspired Horowitz’s first book, the excellent Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know), as she found herself taking countless walks around the block, becoming more and more aware of the dramatically different experiences she and her canine companion were having along the exact same route:

Minor clashes between my dog’s preferences as to where and how a walk should proceed and my own indicated that I was experiencing almost an entirely different block than my dog. I was paying so little attention to most of what was right before us that I had become a sleepwalker on the sidewalk. What I saw and attended to was exactly what I expected to see; what my dog showed me was that my attention invited along attention’s companion: inattention to everything else.

The book was her answer to the disconnect, an effort to “attend to that inattention.” It is not, she warns us, “about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy or how to listen more carefully to your spouse.” Rather, it is an invitation to the art of observation:

Together, we became investigators of the ordinary, considering the block — the street and everything on it—as a living being that could be observed.

In this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new.

Her approach is based on two osmotic human tendencies: our shared capacity to truly see what is in front of us, despite our conditioned concentration that obscures it, and the power of individual bias in perception — or what we call “expertise,” acquired by passion or training or both — in bringing attention to elements that elude the rest of us. What follows is a whirlwind of endlessly captivating exercises in attentive bias as Horowitz, with her archetypal New Yorker’s “special fascination with the humming life-form that is an urban street,” and her diverse companions take to the city.

First, she takes a walk all by herself, trying to note everything observable, and we quickly realize that besides her deliciously ravenous intellectual curiosity, Horowitz is a rare magician with language. (“The walkers trod silently; the dogs said nothing. The only sound was the hum of air conditioners,” she beholds her own block; passing a pile of trash bags graced by a stray Q-tip, she ponders parenthetically, “how does a Q-tip escape?”; turning her final corner, she gazes at the entrance of a mansion and “its pair of stone lions waiting patiently for royalty that never arrives.” Stunning.)

But as soon as she joins her experts, Horowitz is faced with the grimacing awareness that despite her best, most Sherlockian efforts, she was “missing pretty much everything.” She arrives at a newfound, profound understanding of what William James meant when he wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”:

I would find myself at once alarmed, delighted, and humbled at the limitations of my ordinary looking. My consolation is that this deficiency of mine is quite human. We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.

These “blinders,” despite psychologists’ concentrated efforts to dissect this strange phenomenon we call “attention,” remain largely a mystery — or, at best, a series of misconstrued hypotheses:

Though paying attention seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. … To concentrate, to pay attention, is viewed as a brow-furrowing exercise. Sit still, don’t blink, and attend.

[…]

This may do for a moment of concentration, but it is not the way to better attention in your daily life. For that, we need to know what attention is. The very concept is odd. Is it an ability, a tendency, a skill? Is it processed in a special nugget in the brain, or by your eyes and ears? …

The longtime model used by psychologists is that of a “spotlight” that picks out particular items of interest to examine, bringing some things into focus and awareness while leaving other things in the dim, dusty sidelines. The metaphor makes me feel like a headlight-wearing spelunker who can only see what is right in front of her in the darkness of the cave. Such a comparison can be misleading, because in fact one can still report on what was within one’s peripheral vision at rates better than chance. And despite that spotlight, we seem to miss huge elements of the thing we are ostensibly attending to.

A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things, irregular things, smelly things.

Thus, evolution’s problem-solving left us modern humans with two kinds of attention: vigilance, which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight response to an immediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged boss, and selective attention, which unconsciously curates the few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enabling us to block out everything except what we’re interested in ingesting. (Selective attention, of course, can mutate to dangerous degrees, producing such cultural atrocities as the filter bubble.) Much like French polymath Henri Poincaré argued that to invent is simply to choose ideas, to attend, it turns out, is simply to choose stimuli — but what sounds so deceptively simple turns out to be marvelously complex. In her walks with expert companions, Horowitz tickles this latter type of attention to unravel all the unseen, unsmelled, and unheard miracles of a city block, the wonderlands of sensation and awareness that bloom behind the looking glass of our evolutionarily primed everyday inattention.

The first “expert” Horowitz walks with is her very own toddler, from whom we learn that a walk is not necessarily the purposeful and linear transfer of a body from point A to point B, but rather an exploratory exercise in touching and — eek! — tasting textures and surfaces, pointing at sights, pausing to absorb the tickling brush of the breeze:

A walk is, instead, an investigatory exercise that begins with energy and ends when (and only when) exhausted.

Much of what makes the story so compelling is Horowitz’s ability to swiftly weave scientific insight into the details of these anecdotal experiences. Here, she notes:

The perceptions of infants are remarkable. That infants reliably develop into adults, who for all their wisdom or kindness are often unremarkable, blinds us to this fact. The infant’s world is a case study in confused attention. … The world is not yet organized into discrete objects for these new eyes: it is all light and dark, shadow and brightness.

Infants, in fact, seem to experience syneshtesia as a baseline sensory given. (Perhaps MoMA’s Juliet Kinchin touched on a bigger cognitive truth when she reflected that “children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real.”) But, eventually, they grow out of this wondrous multidimensional awareness, which William James called “aboriginal sensible muchness,” and we, the sensible and selectively attentive adults, emerge:

Part of normal human development is learning to notice less than we are able to. The world is awash in details of color, form, sound — but to function, we have to ignore some of it. The world still holds these details. Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over; to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.

Part of toddlers’ extraordinary capacity for noticing has to do with their hard-wired neophilia — the allure of the new and unfamiliar, which for them includes just about everything that we, old and jaded, have deemed familiar and thus uninteresting. (Horowitz points to one systematic exception for us adults — vacations — which brim with enough novelty to produce such fascinating, reality-warping psychological phenomena as the holiday paradox. The reason, Horowitz argues, lies in two factors: “We actually do see new places and second, we bother to look.”)

In a way, “experts” have a toddler’s ability to zoom in on the details, the very fabric of experience, that most of us glide adaptively by.

From beloved artist and reconstructionist Maira Kalman — a woman of boundless wisdom on life and unrelenting faith in walking as a creative device, whom Horowitz aptly describes as “a hoarder, in the finest sense of that word, of both experience and image” — we learn that looking at the ordinary, looking and really seeing it, seeing its extraordinary wonder, is a special talent that takes patient cultivation. Horowitz writes:

One perceptual constraint that I knowingly labor under is the constraint that we all create for ourselves: we summarize and generalize, stop looking at particulars and start taking in scenes at a glance—all in an effort to not be overwhelmed visually when we just need to make it through the day. The artist seems to retain something of the child’s visual strategy: how to look at the world before knowing (or without thinking about) the name or function of everything that catches the eye. An infant treats objects with an unprejudiced equivalence: the plastic truck is of no more intrinsic worth to the child than an empty box is, until the former is called a toy and the latter is called garbage. My son was as entranced by the ubiquitous elm seeds near our doorstep as any of the menus, mail, flyers, or trash that concern the adults.

Echoing Anaïs Nin’s timeless words on the shared magic of the child and the artist, Horowitz writes:

To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant; little is unseen.

Once you look at what seems ordinary long enough, though, it often turns odd and unfamiliar, as any child repeatedly saying his own name aloud learns. I had the suspicion that walking with Kalman would be the ambulatory equivalent of saying my own name aloud a hundred times.

But Kalman’s singular spirit came to life not in the purposeful stride of a destination-walk but in the creative digression of an amble:

With Kalman, walking around the block entered a fourth dimension. … Eventually, we made it from A to B, but not before visiting all of the later letters of the alphabet. … Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them.

Kalman gently nudges Horowitz to remove the “invisibility cloak” so familiar to us urbanites as we shield ourselves from strangers, and the two do something city dwellers — especially New Yorkers — never do: They talk to policemen, movers, a mailman, churchgoers, and the social workers tending to a halfway house. In other words, they cease to simply coexist with their fellow citizens and, for the duration of the walk, live with them instead, attend to them with presence and curiosity, see them; they slow their cadence, now tourists in their native fast-paced New York; they amble. Horowitz once again returns to her potent blend of philosophical reflection and scientific substance:

I had not noticed, until forced to by Kalman’s sociability, how I was engaging in a fundamentally social activity by walking out in public.

Still, we all have a sense of the “appropriate” personal space around us — a kind of zone of privacy that we wear, even on the social sidewalk. Indeed, we have many coencentric circles of personal spaces, plural. The Swiss zoologist Heini Hediger, elaborating from studies of animal behavior, proposed that the personal zones around us fall into a few categories. Those with whom we do not mind “inescapable involvement” — as our loved ones — can broach the closest zone and get nearer than eighteen inches to us. At that proximity, we can smell them, feel the heat of their bodies, their breath, hear the small sounds they mutter or emit. We can whisper together. Most social interactions take place in a comfortable zone about one and a half to four feet away — closer in some cultures (Latin American) than others (North American). Friends can waltz through; acquaintances can hover on the edge. We have a social distance up to twelve feet from our bodies for more formal transactions, or for those we don’t know well. Beyond that is a kind of public distance in which we use our “outdoor” voice. All of these zones are artificial, varying with differing relationships, based on context and the physical setting — but we have a bodily sense of the reality of these spaces. Violate them, and we may feel stressed and anxious.

Eventually, Horowitz realizes that Kalman has a wholly different way not only of looking, but also of seeing — she challenges the normative expectations of where one is allowed to go in the city and experiences space not “as defined by an edge, but as an infinitely explorable openness” — and so she wonders what it is about the artist’s brain that enables that limitless perception of possibility. Though she is careful to insure against any phrenology-like pseudoscience of the “creative brain,” Horowitz does point to a curious study that suggests brains like Kalman’s might, in fact, be wired differently:

One research team, though, reported a correspondence between the brains of those who seem to be especially creative thinkers. Certain people, they found, have fewer of one kind of dopamine receptor in the thalamus of the brain. These people also performed well on tests of “divergent thinking,” in which people are asked to concoct more and more elaborate uses for ordinary objects, for instance. The reduction in receptors might actually increase information flow to various parts of the brain, essentially allowing them to think up new and interesting solutions. “Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” the researchers wrote.

(For more on this research by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, see this.)

From typography nerd Paul Shaw, who brought us the almost true story of New York’s subway Helvetica, we learn that our minds are constantly coerced into reading the “dull, tedious words” that bombard us from storefronts, billboards, and computer screens nearly every waking moment — but besides the linguistic burden, embedded in each letter we ingest is also a design one, for typography can quietly convey an unwritten message, set a mood, create an ineffable sense of something being either terribly wrong or terribly wonderful. A letter, Horowitz reminds us as she discovers the humanistic quality of words while touring New York’s type-smothered streets with Shaw, can be “jaunty” or “uncomfortable” amidst awkward kerning, an ampersand can be “pregnant” and an S “complacent.” She encapsulates:

Three hours of walking with Shaw later, I felt relieved, for the moment, of my compulsion to read what was readable, to parse text when I saw it. Surprisingly, this relief came not from avoiding text, but from seeking it out — only to zoom in on the details held within. It was a vision that let me miss the forest and see the trees. Rather than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguistic part) rested; the shape-identifying part hummed with activity.

[…]

The thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next.

From geologist Sidney Horenstein of the American Museum of Natural History we learn that our entire world consists of only two types of things: minerals and the biomass of plants and animals. A city suddenly becomes not a sterile “man-made” object but a thriving ecosystem of living and once-living landscapes, “an ersatz natural landscape writ small … on every single block,” a place suddenly brimming with reminders of its own impermanence:

Viewed with this lens, the city feels less artificial. The cold stone is natural, almost living: it absorbs water, warms under the sun, and sloughs its skin in rain. Like us, stone is affected by time, its outer layer softened and its veins made more prominent. And viewed as a natural landscape, the city feels less permanent: even the strongest-looking behemoth of an apartment tower is gradually deteriorating under the persistent, patient forces of wind, water, and time.

From field naturalist and insects advocate Charlie Eiseman, we learn that on every square inch of surface, entire microcosms oscillate between vibrant life and violent death. (“If a driveway holds an ecosystem,” Horowitz ponders, “what of a parking lot? Perchance a universe.”) Over the next few hours, the two proceed to discover traces of just about every kind of insect — from spider egg cases to discarded fly exoskeletons — lacing the most ordinary of city blocks. What emerges is a keen awareness that the negative space of the unseen is itself a source of rich information:

Surprisingly, those leaves that have no sign, no holes, no smattering of excrement, are themselves sign of something else. They indicate that the tree is probably not from around here.

Once again, Horowitz explores what enables Eisenman’s brain to function so differently from her own and pops the cognitive hood of his singular selective attention, tracing it to the work of notable early twentieth-century bird-watcher Luunk Tinbergen:

Tinbergen noticed that songbirds did not prey on just any insect that had recently hatched in the vicinity; instead, they tended to prefer one kind of bug — say, a particular species of beetle — at a time. As the numbers of young beetles rose through a season, the birds gorged on these beetlettes, ignoring any other available young insects nearby. Tinbergen suggested that, once the birds found a food they liked, they began to look just for that food, ignoring all others. He called this a search image: a mental image of a beetle—with its characteristic beetly shape, size, and colors—with which the bird scans her environment.

This search image, it turns out, is something all of us employ when we need to narrow our attention in a goal-oriented task, like spotting a friend across the crowded street or finding the brand of salsa we went looking for amidst the overwhelmingly well-stocked shelves at Whole Foods. But this search aid, Horowitz soon realizes, is only helpful or even possible if we know what to look for, and most of us won’t have the luxury of being escorted along our familiar walks by some of the world’s most fascinating brains. Horowitz shares this “melancholy thought” with Eiseman as they conclude their walk:

Eiseman reflected for a moment, and then quoted one of his tracking teachers, Susan Morse: “Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.” If you understand even the most superficial elements of the life histories of different animals — such as what kinds of things they are attracted to — once you start looking, you are going to find them everywhere. … A small bit of knowledge goes a long way when thinking about “where to look.” … Once you have an eye for these things, even when you’re not looking for them, they just jump out at you. Everything is a sign of something.

Next, from Humane Society senior wildlife scientist John Hadidian we learn that the main distinction in the city’s life is that between day and night, and a remarkable amount of wildlife floods the seemingly humdrum city streets once the sun averts its gaze — pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons. (And, lest we forget, the bountiful “wild cats” Gay Talese so poetically described.) High above, falcons, eagles, and hawks haunt the urban skies. Down below, rats — who spend most of their waking hours preening and who use their sensitive whiskers to navigate along walls and orient themselves — run their ceaseless races. (Of the latter, Hadidian says that “from a strictly natural history perspective, they’re one of the most poorly understood animals out there.”)

We also learn that “every animal you can think of is drawn to the persimmon tree” — a useful factlet should you ever find yourself lonely in your backyard. But most humbling of all is the sudden awareness that nearly every single crack, hole, and slit between buildings is part of a vast and elaborate transit system of urban wildlife passageways, with which comes the equally humbling reminder that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t the complacent kings of our own city we go about fancying ourselves to be:

This is what makes the urban animal so elusive. He is actually attempting to elude us, and our imaginations do not seem to account for animals (aside from pets) in cities. Even our sense of scale is distorted when considering urban wildlife corridors and passageways. Remembering, perhaps, a childhood inability to scale a fence or shimmy through a gate, we find it incredible that urban animals are not thwarted by the seemingly impenetrable stone walls and chain-linked barbed-wire fencing we present to them. But the descriptions of nearly all urban animals include an impressive dimension: the size hole the animal can squeeze into, through, or out of. Raccoons, even as adults, can fit in a four-inch space between grates, flattening themselves and taking advantage of their broad, short skulls. Squirrels fit through a hole the size of a quarter; mice, through dime-sized holes. Look around you on your next walk. See any holes at all? Gaps between stair and building? Between sidewalk and curb? An animal goes there (after you have passed).

And so we return to the straitjackets of our perception, that disconnect between seeing and knowing what to look for, filtered through the uncompromising sieve of our attention — something most memorably demonstrated in the famous invisible gorilla experiment. Horowitz writes:

Part of what restricts us seeing things is that we have an expectation about what we will see, and we are actually perceptually restricted by that expectation. In a sense, expectation is the lost cousin of attention: both serve to reduce what we need to process of the world “out there.” Attention is the more charismatic member, packaged and sold more effectively, but expectation is also a crucial part of what we see. Together they allow us to be functional, reducing the sensory chaos of the world into unbothersome and understandable units.

As intriguing as the city’s non-human dwellers are, its human ones brim with a deluge of data that something as seemingly simple as observing their bodies and movement can reveal. That’s precisely what Horowitz learns from her walk with Dr. Bennett Lorber, president-elect of the country’s oldest medical institution, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia:

Simply by being outside on the street, people are inadvertently revealing their life histories in their bodies, in their steps, in the hunch of their shoulders or set of their jaw.

Indeed, we learn that a man’s gait can reveal anything from his medical pathology to his occupation to, even, his religion. (Enter another curious factlet: the average step is divided into 62% stance, meaning contact with ground, and 38% swing, meaning no contact with ground.) We also realize that the extraordinary act of walking — a miracle of motion and alignment that propels us forward despite the awkward balance of our bodies’ bipedalism, a rarity in the animal kingdom — is an exquisite metaphor for the human spirit as “one becomes aware of how many different but successful ways there are to propel oneself around one’s day.” Still, there is such a thing as an ideal walker:

Their gaits had few asymmetries, were smooth and loose, and wasted no energy doing anything but going forward. From an evolutionary perspective, efficiency is the key. Our ancestors may have been easily outrun by any potential predator — we are not a particularly fast species — but we have endurance: those proto-humans who could keep running won their lives. And they could do that if their gait was efficient.

Horowitz once again considers the difference between her brain and the experts’:

While I had a vague sense of Hmm, something’s amiss . . . , they could diagnose. It is not only the diagnosis that I valued; it is the way that knowledge orients their looking — an ability to “see what they see,” as it were.

But partway through her experiment, Horowitz is befallen by a medical curveball of her own — a herniated disk in her back paralyzes her foot and renders her barely able to walk, which presents an obvious challenge to her walking exploration of city blocks. She writes:

The street changed for me during those months, as it certainly changes for anyone who is temporarily or permanently injured, or suffers the ultimate injury of simply aging.

Still, she perseveres and brings even greater awareness to the next portion of her urban anatomy — the sensory landscape of the city. She meets Arlene Gordon, a remarkable woman who has traveled the world and shares enchanting stories of the souvenirs filling her apartment. And this is where the gift of Horowitz’s narrative comes most viscerally alive: as she talks to Gordon and notes the subtle details of her dimly lit apartment and her too-blue eyes, you the reader (or at least I, the reader), already primed for this art of observation, realize before Horowitz reveals it that Gordon is completely blind — and oh how sweetly gratifying this earned micro-mastery is, and oh what plump promise it holds for the possibility of similarly broadening our everyday awareness as we follow Horowitz’s experiment.

As the two stroll together, their walk becomes a powerful revelation:

After a handful of city walks I realized that what many of them were missing was any experience other than a visual experience. This was not terribly surprising. After all, humans are visual creatures. Our eyes have prime positioning on our faces. We have trichromatic vision, which is sufficient to paint a Technicolor, million-colored landscape of the world. Our brains’ visual areas, with hundreds of millions of neurons designed to make sense of what we see, takes up a full fifth of each of our cortices. The resplendent scene our eyes carry to us is entrancing. As a result, we humans generally do not bother paying attention to much other than the visual. What we wear, where we live, where we visit, even whom we love is based in large part on appearance — visual appearance.

But the world around us is not entirely or even mostly defined by its light-reflective qualities. What of the odors of the molecules making up every object, and those loosened odors wafting in the space around us? Or the perturbations of air that we can hear as sound — and the frequencies higher or lower than we can hear? I imagined that someone who has lost her sense of sight could lead me, however superficially, into the invisible block that I miss with my wide open eyes.

And lead she does: Gordon navigates swiftly along the sidewalk, masterfully using her cane — a sort of sensory extension of herself and the “peripersonal space,” that bubble of space defined by our bodies and their immediate surroundings — and Horowitz marvels at our brains’ magnificent plasticity, the same adaptability behind the “limbic revision” of love.

Our brains are changed by experience — in a way directly related to the details of that experience. If we have enough experience doing an action, viewing a scene, or smelling an odor to become an “expert” in a field, then our brains are functionally — and visibly — different from nonexperts.

And yet:

The brain is plastic, and can creatively adapt to a new situation, but it changes right back when it no longer needs to be creative.

From the walk with Gordon, we learn about the physics of wind, which moves according to the Bernoulli principle and the Venturi effect, creating a whole new layer of aerial flux over the city’s landscape:

Winds over the rivers flanking Manhattan Island speed down side streets on land. … Tall buildings create other wind effects: winds that hit high on a building rush down its face, sometimes creating enough pressure to make passage in and out of the doorway difficult. Sheer glass towers can pull air not just down, but also up from below (the Bernoulli principle) — as well as lift any skirts being worn in the vicinity.

But most poignant of all are Gordon’s parting words, emblematic of the book’s broader underpinning message:

In front of her building she turned to shake my hand. “Nice to see you,” she said. And then, as if noticing my smile in response, she added: “There’s someone in my building who asked me, ‘How come you use that word, “see?” How can you say “I see it”?’ Well, I do see it. I said, ‘see’ has many definitions.”

Next, from sound designer and vocal engineer Scott Lehrer we learn that the urban soundscape is often a violent cacophony on which Dickens and Babbage were right to wage war, and our ability to tune it out is among the most fascinating manifestations of our selective attention — though our ears are always open, we only attend to a fraction of what is audible, and even to that we append our intellectual interpretations:

Simply giving a name to a sound can change the experience of it: when we see the thing that clatters or moans or sighs, we hear it differently.

(In fact, Horowitz herself employs, perhaps unwittingly, this emotional soundscape in a previous chapter: limping awkwardly and painfully with her paralyzed leg to meet Gordon, she encounters a door that “sighs” open for her.)

But with Lehrer she sets out to “to listen to the sounds in and of themselves, to hear beyond their names.” She learns that the tires of a car sound different when it rains and that sounds can reverberate with various levels of “wetness” in different spaces, depending on the size of the space, the objects filling it, and the distance of the sound source from the walls. She learns how the fact that even temperature alters sound perception explains why birds sing at dusk and dawn. She then ponders the man-made distinction between “sound” and “noise” as she considers legendary avant-garde composer John Cage’s legacy:

What makes that “noise” and not just neutral “sound” is another question. The avant-garde composer John Cage famously declared that “music is sounds,” and thus appropriated ordinary sounds to be his music. In one of his compositions, the orchestra is silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds; whatever sounds come in through the window of the concert hall or emerge from the increasingly restless and puzzled audience constitute his music. Still, if Cage was right, it need not follow that all sounds are music(al). Any sound we do not like we call noise, thereby introducing a subjective assessment to the din. That subjectivity is always there in talking about noise.

But Horowitz finds a certain reassurance in the relativity of noise as she realizes that sound resonates with what we bring to it and our experience of the city’s soundscape can change dramatically with exposure. (Cue in E. B. White, who embraced the hustle-and-bustle of New York’ with such memorable poeticism.) But one of her most chilling realizations has to do with the biology of our ear — itself a magnificent machine — and violent ways in which the city assaults it daily:

Decibels are the subjective experience of the intensity of a sound. Zero decibels marks the threshold for hearing a sound—and in a modern city, there is never a moment of zero decibel silence. We mostly reside in the 60–80 decibel range, which includes sounds from normal conversation across the dinner table, vacuum cleaners, and traffic noise. Once a sound gets to 85 decibels, it begins to damage the mechanism of our ears irreparably. The reason lies in the mechanism itself.

Cilia, tiny hair cells that stand upright in the cochlea, sway and jiggle when the vibration of air—the rush of air that is sound — wends its way into the inner ear. So stimulated, the cilia trigger nerves to fire, translating that vibration into electrical signals that give us the experience of hearing something. If those vibrations are strong enough, the hair cells bend deeply under their force. Air pressure can mow, crush, or sever the hairs until they are splayed, fused, floppy, or fractured — an earful of well-trodden grass. Bent and damaged enough because of exposure to loud sounds for prolonged periods, the hair cells do not grow back; the ears lose their neural downiness. The world becomes progressively quieter for the person attached to those ears, until there are no sounds, no music, no noise.

Cities are crowded with sources of sound regularly approaching this threshold of hearing loss. … Enormous numbers of man-made sounds occur in those same frequencies. We often find high pure tones the most irritating: the screech of a subway turning a tight corner or braking, at 3,000 or 4,000 hertz, or the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz. These sounds clobber us because of the shape of the human ear, which allows high frequencies to find their way efficiently to the cochlea. The very design of the ear amplifies these vibrations for waiting hair cells. But it is not just our ears that find the sound distressing; it is our brains. If we know that we are hearing what we have already deemed an “annoying sound,” our bodies react to it as though it is: we have a sympathetic nervous system response, usually reserved for final exams, suddenly appearing lions, and the sight of our beloved. We sweat, and then we notice that we are sweating, and we sweat some more.

And still, her walk with Lehrer yields a celebration rather than a lament of the city’s sounds — an invitation to know and love the city in yet another dimension:

What I heard had morphed from noxious urban noise into being the characteristic, flavorful clatter of my city. I enjoyed the roar of traffic and the buzz of flies; I looked at pigeons hoping they would coo; I stared down passersby, silently egging them on to hum or cough. I counted squeals and squeaks and squawks and measured them against whines and whistles. Each sound felt invited, a pleasure.

Horowitz’s final walking companion is — fittingly, given the original inspiration for the project — her new dog, the playfully curious Finnegan. (That a cognitive scientist would name her dog with a nod to James Joyce is only further evidence of Horowitz’s remarkably well-rounded mind.) And if you thought the human ear was a marvel, just wait for the dog’s nose:

The inside of the nose is a labyrinth of tunnels lined with specialized olfactory receptors waiting for an odorant molecule — a smell — to land on them. In the back of the nose is an “olfactory recess” separated from the main respiratory pathway by a bony plate, allowing smelling to be distinct from breathing, and letting odors loiter for a long time to be considered. Though we tend to think that only some things are smelly — a spring bloom, a trash can, a new car, a bus’s exhaust — just about everything has a scent. Anything with molecules that can be “volatile,” that can evaporate into the air and travel toward a receptor in someone’s nose, smells.

The dog nose has hundreds of millions of receptors in that nose; they even have a second kind of nose above the hard palate of their mouth, called a vomeronasal or Jacobson’s organ. Molecules such as hormones that do not stir the receptors of the nose to fire may find a rousing welcome here. All animals house hormones, which are involved in bodily and brain activities, and those hormones we emit, called pheromones, are detected by the vomeronasal organ. This is how a dog could detect another dog’s stress or sexual readiness in a spray of her urine left on the ground.

Dogs are called macrosmatic, or keen-scented, while humans are called microsmatic, or feeble-scented.

How humbling it is and how hard to maintain the typical human god-complex when the layman language describing our natural givens contains the word “feeble.” In fact, our feebleness is not due to software but to hardware — it’s not that we don’t know how to use our noses like a dog does, it’s that we lack the dog’s extravagant number of cells to detect and decode smells, which they’re able to do at the unimaginably low concentration of one or two parts per trillion. (As Horowitz puts it, “One part mustard, one trillion parts hot dog: dogs can detect the mustard.”) Even more remarkably, a dog’s nose is wired to detect the half-life of smells, with each noseful of the “same” smell delivering different information — a sort of stereo olfaction that gives them astounding precision in tracing where the smell has come from and where its carrier has gone next. Horowitz reflects:

To see a scene is not to stare fixedly at one point; it is to open our eyes to everything in front of us, looking to and fro. Similarly, to smell a scene, Finn approached it from the side, from above, sniffing the air to see if the artist who concocted this particular odor splotch was anywhere nearby. A dog can smell something different in each noseful — and there is something different there to smell. This taught me something about smells: they are not at fixed points, nor are they static and unchanging. They are a haze, a cloud, spreading out from their source. Viewed as odors, the street is a mishmash of overlapping object identities, each crowding into the next’s odorous scene.

After her olfactory adventure with Finn, Horowitz takes one final walk by herself as she attempts to implement all her new learnings in experiencing her city block with new layers of awareness. And she does:

A simple walk had become unrecognizably richer. … Part of seeing what is on an ordinary block is seeing that everything visible has a history. It arrived at the spot where you found it at some time, was crafted or whittled or forged at some time, filled a certain role or existed for a particular function. It was touched by someone (or no one), and touches someone (or no one) now. It is evidence.

The other part of seeing what is on the block is appreciating how limited our own view is. We are limited by our sensory abilities, by our species membership, by our narrow attention — at least the last of which can be overcome.

But the greatest learning is that our ability to see is a factor of two complementary forces — attention and intention — as the choices we make in what we attend to shape our entire experience of reality. And expertise is nothing but the carefully orchestrated osmotic balance of the two:

What allowed me to see the bits that I would have otherwise missed was not the expertise of my walkers, per se; it was their simple interest in attending. I selected these walkers for their ability to boost my own selective attention. An expert can only indicate what she sees; it is up to your own head to tune your senses and your brain to see it. Once you catch that melody, and keep humming, you are forever changed.

Indeed, one of Horowitz’s most piercing insights arrives during her walk with Paul Shaw:

One trouble with being human — with the human condition — is that, as with many conditions, you cannot turn it off. Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world.

But the greatest promise of On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes — which, it can’t be stressed enough, is a rare and necessary soul-expander for any city-dweller — appears as a poetic aside Horowitz drops during her walk with the geologist:

Follow me here: your brain will begin to change as you do.

She notes that he “can never walk down a block and not see its geology.” And that’s precisely the point: The art of seeing might have to be learned, but it can never be unlearned, just as the seen itself can never be unseen — a realization at once immensely demanding in its immutability and endlessly liberating in the possibilities it invites.

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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.

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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.

“Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) wrote in offering his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life in the preface to Leaves of Grass. When Whitman first published his masterpiece in 1855, it was met with indifference punctuated by bursts of harsh criticism. It is difficult to imagine just how insulting to the young poet’s soul such reception must have been, or what it took for him to dismiss it and carry on writing. What buoyed his spirit through the tidal wave of negativity was an extraordinary letter of appreciation from Ralph Waldo Emerson — the era’s most respected literary tastemaker and Whitman’s greatest hero, whose 1844 essay The Poet had inspired Leaves of Grass. The young poet wore Emerson’s praise of “incomparable things said incomparably well” like an armor, almost literally — he carried the letter folded in his shirt-pocket over his heart, regularly reading it to friends and lovers.

It is certainly easier, though never easy, to dismiss what insults one’s soul when it comes from critics who haven’t earned one’s confidence — “Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect,” Jeanette Winterson offered in her ten wise rules of writing. But to dismiss criticism that insults the soul from someone we respect — or, harder still, love — requires superhuman strength of spirit. How do we hold on to the integrity and solidity of our conviction and vision, be it creative or existential, when it is being challenged and censured by a person we regard with high intellectual esteem and tenderness of heart?

Whitman modeled this exquisitely in an encounter with Emerson himself.

On a crisp February afternoon in 1860, five years after the publication of Leaves of Grass, the two men took a two-hour walk along Boston Common. They had by then befriended one another and formed a courteous, frank relationship embodying Emerson’s ideal of friendship: “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.” That winter day, Whitman found Emerson to be “in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual.” When the criticism came, Whitman knew it sprang from that selfsame source — a quality of character he deeply respected, even revered. And yet, rather than coming undone by self-doubt, he was able to stay rooted in his own values and vision.

Writing in Specimen Days (public library) — the endlessly rewarding collection of prose fragments and diary entries, which gave us Whitman on the wisdom of trees, the power of music, the essence of happiness, the “meaning” of art, and optimism as a force of resistance — he recounts:

During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argumentstatement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, “Children of Adam.” More precious than gold to me that dissertation — it afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.’s statement was unanswerable, no judge’s charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. “What have you to say then to such things?” said E., pausing in conclusion. “Only that while I can’t answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it,” was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver’d or was touch’d with qualms, (as I confess I had been two or three times before).

Emerson — the patron saint of self-reliance, who exhorted: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” — no doubt appreciated this orientation of spirit. Whitman’s first and foremost biographer, the great naturalist John Burroughs, goes even further in his sublimely poetic 1896 biography Whitman: A Study:

In many ways was Whitman, quite unconsciously to himself, the man Emerson invoked and prayed for — the absolutely self-reliant man; the man who should find his own day and land sufficient; who had no desire to be Greek, or Italian, or French, or English, but only himself; who should not whine, or apologize, or go abroad; who should not duck, or deprecate, or borrow; and who could see through the many disguises and debasements of our times the lineaments of the same gods that so ravished the bards of old.

To be sure, Whitman did not dismiss criticism wholesale — rather, he separated the wheat from the chaff through the sieve of confidence and surefooted creative vision. But criticism, he believed, could be far more valuable than praise. In Leaves of Grass, he wrote under the heading “STRONGER LESSONS”:

Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you and were tender with you? and stood aside for you?
Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?

The kind of criticism he readily dismissed was that of the professional critics and opinionators — those aimed at tearing down rather than improving a writer’s art, for their judgments are based on the standards of their time and therefore tend to censure any vigorous break with convention. Such critics are apt to pronounce any work of true originality bad, and then to embody W.H. Auden’s incisive observation that “one cannot review a bad book without showing off.”

Burroughs noted this in his praiseful biography of Whitman, composed at a time when the poet was still more rejected than celebrated by his era:

There are no more precious and tonic pages in history than the records of men who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, in obedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature.

[…]

Every man is a partaker in the triumph of him who is always true to himself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions.

Whitman himself had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass:

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.

Later in life, he would reflect:

Has it never occurr’d to any one how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics?… I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied human soul giving its verdict.

[…]

The quality of BEING, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.

Whitman’s poetry, founded upon the unshakable foundation of his creative and spiritual vision, eventually catapulted him to the top of the English-language literary pantheon. Leaves of Grass endures as one of the most beloved poetic works of all time, having influenced generations of writers and buoyed ordinary livers of life through the worst existential upheavals — such is the power of poetic truth channeled with unwavering stability of confidence and vision.

Complement with Descartes on the crucial difference between confidence and pride, Bruce Lee on willpower and self-esteem, and some excellent advice from great writers on how to survive criticism, then revisit Whitman on creativity, democracy, his advice to the young, and his most direct definition of happiness.

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.

“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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”

Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same life-stage in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year and later published in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (public library).

Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:

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. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:

The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Portraits from Memory and Other Essays is an uncommonly potent packet of wisdom in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with Nobel laureate André Gide on how happiness increases with age, Ursula K. Le Guin on aging and what beauty really means, and Grace Paley on the art of growing older — the loveliest thing I’ve ever read on the subject — then revisit Russell on critical thinking, power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation.

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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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.

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.

Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of entropy or another, culminating with life itself. Suppose we agree that, as Rilke so passionately insisted, “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

This, then, is the agreement: Learning to live is learning to love, and learning to love is learning to die — the imperative in the inevitable that renders our transience meaningful and holy. The price of this holiness is absolute humility: There is no pact to be made with the universe — we die, whether or not we agree to it, whether or not we have learned how to love in the bright interlude between atom and dust. We may or may not be lucky enough to live out the two billion heartbeats our creaturely inheritance has allotted us. But no matter how many we actually get, it matters how we spend them and what we spend them on. It may be the only thing that matters.

Not long before his untimely death by an aggressive brain tumor, Brian Doyle — who described himself as “a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is” — took up these immense and eternal questions in what became his posthumous essay collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder (public library).

Because the harshest realities of our own lives are often easiest to see and easiest to bear lensed through the lives of other creatures cushioned in symbol and metaphor — this is why we have fables and fairy tales — Doyle finds himself reckoning with mortality and the meaning of life as he examines the dead body of a Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townsendii) in his garden. Curious about the animal, he turns to the scientific literature and is suddenly disquieted by reading about the species as a lump-sum of data points. Overcome with tenderness for “this particular individual, and the flavor and tenor and yearning of this one life,” he writes:

This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.

Over and over, through the different winding paths of the different essays, Doyle returns to his animating ethos that “love is our greatest and hardest work” — nowhere more poignantly articulated than in an essay about the people seen leaping out of the Twin Towers hand in hand, their hands “nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.” He reflects on this harrowing and holy emblem of our deepest humanity:

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe… that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

The trick, of course, is learning how to be here — how to remain fully present and filled with that ferocious love — knowing we will one day be gone, knowing it might be tomorrow. In what may be the most soulful and sensible advice on how to live an actualized life since Whitman’s, Doyle offers an anchor to that holy here:

You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.

Paradoxically, this active and conscious effort is a heart that can only beat in the chest of surrender. Doyle adds the ultimate disclaimer:

You cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.

At the center of this recognition is that most difficult triumph of unselfing for us creatures of self-importance: humility. In Doyle’s definition, humility is not a lowering down to the ground, as the word’s Latin root (humus) suggests, but a rising up and a reaching toward something we can never quite touch yet must trust is there. Some call this faith — faith that the world holds together, that our tiny and transient lives are nonetheless an essential part of the whole, that the choices we make within them change the shape of the whole, that love is the mightiest choice we could ever make and the highest form of faith.

Doyle writes:

Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

[…]

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

Complement with Seamus Heaney’s kindred advice on life and W.H. Auden’s kindred poem “The More Loving One,” then revisit Christian Wiman on love and the sacred and Oliver Sacks on finding meaning without religious faith

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.

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.

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.