“Do you need a prod?” the poet Mary Oliver asked in her sublime meditation on living with maximal aliveness. “Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” A paralytic prod descended upon Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) in his fifty-third year when a stroke left him severely disabled. It is a peculiar kind of darkness to be so violently exiled from one’s own body — a cascade of exiles, for it forced Whitman to leave his home in Washington, where he had settled after his noble work as a volunteer nurse in the Civil War that first taught him about the connection between the body and the spirit, and move in with his brother in New Jersey. Still, he kept reaching for the light as he slowly regained corporeal agency — a partial recovery he attributed wholly to being “daily in the open air,” among the trees and under the stars.

But as his body healed, the experience had permanently imprinted his mind with a new consciousness. Like all of our unexpected brushes with mortality, the stroke had thrust into his lap a ledger and demanded that he account for his life — for who he is, what he stands for, what he has done for the world and how he wishes to be remembered by it. As nature nursed him back to life in her embrace, Whitman found himself reflecting on the most elemental questions of existence — what makes a life worth living, worth remembering? He recorded these reflections in Specimen Days (public library) — the sublime collection of prose fragments, letters, and journal entries that gave us Whitman on the wisdom of trees and music as the profoundest expression of nature.

Writing to a German friend on his own sixty-third birthday, a decade after his paralytic stroke, Whitman reflects on what the limitations of living in a disabled body have taught him about the meaning of a full life:

From to-day I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain’d, with varying course — seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am very clumsy, cannot walk far; but my spirits are first-rate. I go around in public almost every day — now and then take long trips, by railroad or boat, hundreds of miles — live largely in the open air — am sunburnt and stout, (weigh 190) — keep up my activity and interest in life, people, progress, and the questions of the day. About two-thirds of the time I am quite comfortable. What mentality I ever had remains entirely unaffected; though physically I am a half-paralytic, and likely to be so, long as I live. But the principal object of my life seems to have been accomplish’d — I have the most devoted and ardent of friends, and affectionate relatives — and of enemies I really make no account.

Above all, however, Whitman found vitality in the natural world — in what he so poetically called “the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.” Looking back on what most helped him return to life after the stroke, Whitman echoes Seneca’s wisdom on calibrating our expectations for contentment and writes:

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.

[…]

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

Specimen Days remains a kind of secular bible for the thinking, feeling human being. Complement this particular fragment with Dostoyevsky’s dream about the meaning of life, Tolstoy on finding meaning when life seems meaningless, and the forgotten genius Alice James — William and Henry James’s brilliant sister — on how to live fully while dying, then revisit Whitman on why literature is central to democracy and his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding 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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Attention is less a lens on the world than a mirror for the mind. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James wrote in his foundational treatise on attention in the final years of the nineteenth century. In the epoch since, we have discovered just what an “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” attention is, just how much it shapes our entire experience of reality. But we are only just beginning to discover that, far from a passive observer of the outside world, our attention is an active creator of it as the brain makes constant conscious and unconscious predictions of what it expects to find when it looks, then finds just that; we are only beginning to understand how right Thoreau was when, in James’s epoch, he observed that “we hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

That is what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark explores in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (public library) — an illuminating investigation of the human brain as a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, replete with implications for neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health, neurodiversity, the relationship between the body and the self, and the way we live our lives.

Clark writes:

Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

Nothing we do or experience — if the theory is on track — is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.

Because these predictions are informed by our past experience, reality is not how the present self parses the world but how the Russian nesting doll of selves we carry — all the people we have ever been, with all the experiences we have ever had — constructs the world before its eyes. Our sensorium is a simulation we ourselves are constantly running. Clark traces this predictive process as it unfolds at the meeting point of stimulus and expectation:

Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction — the brain’s best expectations rooted in our own past histories.

[…]

When the brain strongly predicts a certain sight, a sound, or a feeling, that prediction plays a role in shaping what we seem to see, hear, or feel.

Emotion, mood, and even planning are all based in predictions too. Depression, anxiety, and fatigue all reflect alterations to the hidden predictions that shape our experience. Alter those predictions (for example, by “reframing” a situation using different words) and our experience itself alters.

At the heart of this equivalence is the recognition that changing our expectations changes our experience — not in a New Age way, but in a neurocognitive way. With an eye to the opportunity to “hack our own predictive minds,” which Bruce Lee intuited in his insistence that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Clark observes:

Since experience is always shaped by our own expectations, there is an opportunity to improve our lives by altering some of those expectations, and the confidence with which they are held.

Both the nature of our expectations and the confidence with which we hold them are shaped by a constellation of biological and psychological factors, from brain structure and neurochemistry to environment and personal history. Leaning on a large body of research, Clark examines how the brain’s unconscious compulsion for informed prediction shapes everything from our most basic sensations of heat and pain to our most complex experiences of selfhood and transcendence, revealing our brains to be not passive receptors of reality but “buzzing proactive systems that constantly anticipate signals from the body and from the world.” He writes:

To perceive is to find the predictions that best fit the sensory evidence. To act is to alter the world to bring it into line with some of those predictions… It is this deep reciprocity between prediction and action that positions predictive brains as the perfect internal organs for the creation of extended minds — minds enhanced and augmented by the use of tools, technologies, and the complex social worlds in which we live and work. Extended minds are possible because predictive brains automatically seek out actions that will improve our states of information, reducing uncertainty as we approach our goals (highly predicted future states). When such actions become parts of habit systems that call upon resources that are robustly available, trusted, and fully woven into our daily ways of dealing with the world, we become creatures whose effective cognitive apparatus exceeds that of the biological brain alone.

Emanating from the mind’s powerful predictive faculty is the haunting inevitability of personal responsibility for shaping our own experience. Centuries after Milton admonished in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Clark writes in a sentiment of especial poignancy in the context of our present reckoning with consciousness and artificial intelligence:

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

In the remainder of The Experience Machine, Clark goes on to explore how conscious expectations and unconscious predictions impact human experiences as varied as chronic pain and psychosis, and what we can do to hack this cognitive compulsion in order to ameliorate our suffering and magnify our vitality. Complement it with the fascinating science of the extended mind, then revisit Mary Oliver on what attention really means and Iris Murdoch on how it unmasks the universe.

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.

“Every advance of intellect beyond the ordinary measure,” Schopenhauer wrote in examining the relationship between genius and insanity, “disposes to madness.” But could what is true of the individual also be true of society — could it be that the more so-called progress polishes our collective pride and the more intellectually advanced human civilization becomes, the more it risks madness? And, if so, what is the proper corrective to restore our collective sanity?

That’s what the great German humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in his timely 1956 treatise The Sane Society (public library).

Fifteen years after his inquiry into why totalitarian regimes rise in Escape from Freedom, Fromm examines the promise and foibles of modern democracy, focusing on its central pitfall of alienation and the means to attaining its full potential — the idea that “progress can only occur when changes are made simultaneously in the economic, socio-political and cultural spheres; that any progress restricted to one sphere is destructive to progress in all spheres.”

Two decades before his elegant case for setting ourselves free from the chains of our culture, Fromm weighs the validity of our core assumption about our collective state:

Nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western world of the twentieth century, are eminently sane. Even the fact that a great number of individuals in our midst suffer from more or less severe forms of mental illness produces little doubt with respect to the general standard of our mental health. We are sure that by introducing better methods of mental hygiene we shall improve still further the state of our mental health, and as far as individual mental disturbances are concerned, we look at them as strictly individual incidents, perhaps with some amazement that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture which is supposedly so sane.

Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself.

Fromm notes that while modernity has increased the material wealth and comfort of the human race, it has also wrought major wars that killed millions, during which “every participant firmly believed that he was fighting in his self-defense, for his honor, or that he was backed up by God.” In a sentiment of chilling pertinence today, after more than half a century of alleged progress has drowned us in mind-numbing commercial media and left us to helplessly watch military budgets swell at the expense of funding for the arts and humanities, Fromm writes:

We have a literacy above 90 per cent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. But instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in a while. But while the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no “immorality” occurs on the screen. Any suggestion that the government should finance the production of movies and radio programs which would enlighten and improve the minds of our people would be met again with indignation and accusations in the name of freedom and idealism.

Less than a decade after the German philosopher Josef Pieper made his beautiful case for why leisure is the basis of culture, Fromm adds:

We have reduced the average working hours to about half what they were one hundred years ago. We today have more free time available than our forefathers dared to dream of. But what has happened? We do not know how to use the newly gained free time; we try to kill the time we have saved, and are glad when another day is over… Society as a whole may be lacking in sanity.

Fromm points out that we can only speak of a “sane” society if we acknowledge that a society can be not sane, which in turn requires a departure from previous theories of sociological relativism postulating that “each society is normal inasmuch as it functions, and that pathology can be defined only in terms of the individual’s lack of adjustment to the ways of life in his society.” Instead, Fromm proposes a model of normative humanism — a redemptive notion that relieves some of our self-blame for feeling like we are going crazy, by acknowledging that society itself, when bedeviled by certain pathologies, can be crazy-making for the individual.

One key source of that tension between sanity and insanity, Fromm argues, is our misconception of “human nature” as a single, static monolith, when in fact the nature of the human experience is varied and dynamic. In a sentiment which Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert would echo half a century later in his famous aphorism that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” Fromm writes:

Just as man* transforms the world around him, so he transforms himself in the process of history. He is his own creation, as it were. But just as he can only transform and modify the natural materials around him according to their nature, so he can only transform and modify himself according to his own nature. What man does in the process of history is to develop this potential, and to transform it according to its own possibilities. The point of view taken here is neither a “biological” nor a “sociological” one if that would mean separating these two aspects from each other. It is rather one transcending such dichotomy by the assumption that the main passions and drives in man result from the total existence of man, that they are definite and ascertainable, some of them conducive to health and happiness, others to sickness and unhappiness. Any given social order does not create these fundamental strivings but it determines which of the limited number of potential passions are to become manifest or dominant. Man as he appears in any given culture is always a manifestation of human nature, a manifestation, however, which in its specific outcome is determined by the social arrangements under which he lives. Just as the infant is born with all human potentialities which are to develop under favorable social and cultural conditions, so the human race, in the process of history, develops into what it potentially is.

The most pernicious effect of any given social order, Fromm suggests, is that it breeds a culture of truth by consensus rather than truth by evidence, truth relative to collective opinion rather than absolute truth — the sort of relativism which Karl Popper memorably admonished is “a betrayal of reason and of humanity.” In another passage of astounding pertinence today, as we witness a global groupthink elect destructive ideas to the status of truth and therefore power, Fromm observes something as true of religious delusions as it is of ruinous political ideologies:

What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the “consensual validation” of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health… The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

More than a century after Kierkegaard contemplated the individual vs. society, why we conform, and the power of the minority, Fromm writes:

For a minority, the pattern provided by the culture does not work… There are also those whose character structure, and hence whose conflicts, differ from those of the majority, so that the remedies which are effective for most of their fellow men are of no help to them. Among this group we sometimes find people of greater integrity and sensitivity than the majority, who for this very reason are incapable of accepting the cultural opiate, while at the same time they are not strong and healthy enough to live soundly “against the stream.”

He considers what a sane society actually means:

A sane society is that which corresponds to the needs of man — not necessarily to what he feels to be his needs, because even the most pathological aims can be felt subjectively as that which the person wants most; but to what his needs are objectively, as they can be ascertained by the study of man. It is our first task then, to ascertain what is the nature of man, and what are the needs which stem from this nature.

A decade after Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization atop his foundational hierarchy of needs, Fromm illustrates our ultimate need as analogous to the development of children:

Physical birth, if we think of the individual, is by no means as decisive and singular an act as it appears to be… In many respects the infant after birth is not different from the infant before birth; it cannot perceive things outside, cannot feed itself; it is completely dependent on the mother, and would perish without her help. Actually, the process of birth continues. The child begins to recognize outside objects, to react affectively, to grasp things and to co-ordinate his movements, to walk. But birth continues. The child learns to speak, it learns to know the use and function of things, it learns to relate itself to others, to avoid punishment and gain praise and liking. Slowly, the growing person learns to love, to develop reason, to look at the world objectively. He begins to develop his powers; to acquire a sense of identity, to overcome the seduction of his senses for the sake of an integrated life. Birth then, in the conventional meaning of the word, is only the beginning of birth in the broader sense. The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die — although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.

A sane society, Fromm suggests, is one which helps the individual continually give birth to herself, whereas a society which is not sane stymies that ongoing rebirth and renders the individual in a state of alienation. He outlines the consequences:

The psychological results of alienation are [that] man regresses to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that he loses his sense of self, becomes dependent on approval, hence tends to conform and yet to feel insecure; he is dissatisfied, bored, and anxious, and spends most of his energy in the attempt to compensate for or just to cover up this anxiety. His intelligence is excellent, his reason deteriorates and in view of his technical powers he is seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race.

[…]

Reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it. This alienation and automatization leads to an ever-increasing insanity. Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality.

Throughout history, Fromm observes, various thinkers have attempted to identify the root of alienation and to propose alternatives — while Marxists pointed to economic factors, thinkers like Tolstoy pointed to the spiritual and moral impoverishment of humanity. Fromm himself points to “robotism” — the mindless automation of our lives — as the seedbed of modern alienation, and proposes what he calls “humanistic democratic socialism” as the antidote. He writes:

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

Noting that the gravest dangers of his time — which are equally the dangers of our time — are war and robotism, Fromm offers his best recipe for a sane society:

[The alternative is] to get out of the rut in which we are moving, and to take the next step in the birth and self-realization of humanity. The first condition is the abolishment of the war threat hanging over all of us now and paralyzing faith and initiative. We must take the responsibility for the life of all men, and develop on an international scale what all great countries have developed internally, a relative sharing of wealth and a new and more just division of economic resources. This must lead eventually to forms of international economic co-operation and planning, to forms of world government and to complete disarmament. We must retain the industrial method. But we must decentralize work and state so as to give it human proportions, and permit centralization only to an optimal point which is necessary because of the requirements of industry. In the economic sphere we need co-management of all who work in an enterprise, to permit their active and responsible participation. The new forms for such participation can be found. In the political sphere, return to the town meetings, by creating thousands of small face-to-face groups, which are well informed, which discuss, and whose decisions are integrated in a new “lower house.” A cultural renaissance must combine work education for the young, adult education and a new system of popular art and secular ritual…

Holding up what he calls “humanistic communitarianism” as our only hope for protecting ourselves from the alienation of robotism, Fromm writes:

Man can protect himself from the consequences of his own madness only by creating a sane society which conforms with the needs of man, needs which are rooted in the very conditions of his existence. A society in which man relates to man lovingly, in which he is rooted in bonds of brotherliness and solidarity, rather than in the ties of blood and soil; a society which gives him the possibility of transcending nature by creating rather than by destroying, in which everyone gains a sense of self by experiencing himself as the subject of his powers rather than by conformity, in which a system of orientation and devotion exists without man’s needing to distort reality and to worship idols.

[…]

Man today is confronted with the most fundamental choice; not that between Capitalism or Communism, but that between robotism (of both the capitalist and the communist variety), or Humanistic Communitarian Socialism. Most facts seem to indicate that he is choosing robotism, and that means, in the long run, insanity and destruction. But all these facts are not strong enough to destroy faith in man’s reason, good will and sanity. As long as we can think of other alternatives, we are not lost; as long as we can consult together and plan together, we can hope. But, indeed, the shadows are lengthening; the voices of insanity are becoming louder. We are in reach of achieving a state of humanity which corresponds to the vision of our great teachers; yet we are in danger of the destruction of all civilization, or of robotization. A small tribe was told thousands of years ago: “I put before you life and death, blessing and curse — and you chose life.” This is our choice too.

Complement Fromm’s stimulatingly sane-making The Sane Society with H.L. Mencken on reclaiming democracy from the mob mentality that masquerades for it and Hannah Arendt on our only effective antidote to the normalization of evil, then revisit Fromm on the art of living, the art of loving, and how to transcend the common laziness of optimism and pessimism.

donating = loving

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

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

Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child.

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriend Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one of their sons fell ill, but it was their other son, Baoth, who died after a savage struggle with meningitis.

Upon receiving the news, the thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part consolation for and part consecration of a loss for which there is no salve, found in Shaun Usher’s moving compilation Letters of Note: Grief (public library).

On March 19, 1935, Hemingway writes:

Dear Sara and Dear Gerald:

You know there is nothing we can ever say or write… Yesterday I tried to write you and I couldn’t.

It is not as bad for Baoth because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something now that we all must do. He has just gotten it over with…

About him having to die so young — Remember that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better. And he is spared from learning what sort of a place the world is.

It is your loss: more than it is his, so it is something that you can, legitimately, be brave about. But I can’t be brave about it and in all my heart I am sick for you both.

Absolutely truly and coldly in the head, though, I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one ever made a happier childhood than you made for your children, has won a great victory. We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do, while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact and the death only by accident.

In a breathtaking sentiment evocative of Anaïs Nin’s admonition against the stupor of near-living, and of poet Meghan O’Rourke’s grief-honed conviction that “the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created,” Hemingway adds:

Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.

With this, echoing Auden’s insistence that “we must love one another or die,” he comes the closest he ever came to formulating the meaning of life. Like David Foster Wallace, who addressed the meaning of life with such exquisite lucidity shortly before he was slain by depression, Hemingway too would lose hold of that meaning in the throes of the agony that would take his life a quarter century later. Now, from the fortunate platform of the prime of life, he writes:

We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other. It seems as though we were all on a boat together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other. We are fortunate we have good people on the boat.

Complement with the young Dostoyevsky’s exultation about the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed, Emily Dickinson on love and loss, Thoreau on living through loss, and Nick Cave — who lived, twice, the unimaginable tragedy of the Murphys — on grief as a portal to aliveness, then revisit the fascinating neuroscience of your brain on grief and your heart on healing.

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.

Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write. At eleven, he entered the labor force as an office boy for two lawyers, one of whom took the boy’s intellectual development under his wing and introduced him to the splendors of literature with a gift of a circulating library subscription. Within a year, he was apprenticing with the Quaker editor of a Democratic newspaper.

His parents — a twenty-one-year-old woman descended from a lineage of Dutch Quakers and a twenty-seven-year-old man whose ancestors arrived from England in 1640 on a ship named True Love — married the summer of the Year Without a Summer. The rosy-cheeked boy was the second of their eight children. Conceived the year Frankenstein was born, born months after the landmark legislation that proposed the abolition of slavery in Missouri and sparked the tensions that would eventually erupt into the Civil War, this Brooklyn boy would soon be shaking his young country awake from the slumber of complacency — not with preachings, not with politics, but with poems: poems that would effect more spiritual elevation, kindle more moral courage, seed more ideas of the basic humanity we call social justice, and thumb them deeper into the soil of culture than all the preachings and politics of his era combined.

“I would compose a wonderful and ponderous book,” he would resolve, not yet out of adolescence, his gray-blue eyes already drooping with a weary wisdom. “Yes: I would write a book!” And so he would — his life would become this book, then the book would become his life. He would revise it obsessively until his dying hour, expanding and republishing this swelling book, hoping it would beckon to “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.”

The newspaper he himself had founded as a teenager would scoff and call it “a repulsive and nasty book.” On its pages, he would declare himself “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul,” inviting again and again the difficult, daring understanding that the two are one and the same, that we are ensouled as much as we are enskulled; on its pages, he would emerge as a composite creature — a creature capable of sinking to unfathomed darknesses and soaring to transcendent heights; a celebrator and elevator of the patriotic spirit, but an artist who would always place nature over nation; a poet of immense talent and immense ego, but never grudging, never ungenerous, never small. The most erudite man in America would describe him as “a compound of New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy,” melding the traits of an Emerson or a Thoreau with those of a fireman. “Do I contradict myself?” the poet himself would write on those lush pages. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” He would come to think of himself as a “chanter of pains and of joys, uniter of here and hereafter.” He would see his job, the poet’s job, as a joiner — of body and soul, of past and future, of the cosmic and the earthly, of races and genders and classes, of the disjointed parts in the body politic of the world—joining the myriad multitudes comprising personhood into an integrated, symphonic being. Against the starched proprieties of his time and place, he would kiss everyone he considered a friend — man or woman — in greeting and goodbye. He would make it his task to “show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results.” His book would live up to his own description as “the song of a great composite democratic individual, male or female,” foundation for “an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality.” He would tease out of his poems a single running thread: “that time and events are compact, and that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.” He would resolve:

I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to
        all days.

In the most eternal of these poems, written under the title “Sun-Down Poem” and later retitled to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he would peer across the epochs straight into your eye and straight into mine:

It avails not, time nor place — distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.
[…]
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

On Independence Day 1855, a strange book appeared in a handful of Brooklyn bookstores — a thin, capacious volume bound in green cloth, with delicate golden roots, branches, and leaves sprouting from the letters of the gilded title: Leaves of Grass. After the silence of the first blank page, a whispered shock: a portrait of the author, engraved from a photograph, thoroughly unlike the expected likeness of a poet. He is not a New England poet-as-scholar, a buttoned and collared Emerson gazing with intense intellect at you, demanding a commensurate gaze back. He is not a Romantic poet-as-spirit, a windswept, full-lipped Byron gazing into space with the distraction of inspiration, beckoning your gaze to that invisible place. In this new nobody is the poet-as-everybody. Bearded beneath his wide-brimmed hat, with his rough-hewn linen shirt parted at his chest, with one hand casually rested on his tilted hip and the other tucked into his pocket, he seems to have just risen from hulling corn, looking at you the way one looks at a mirror when one has finished dressing for a date.

There is no name on the book. Only, midway through the sixty-five-page opening miracle he would later title “Song of Myself,” this self-introduction:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual… eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist… no stander above men and women or apart from them

Immanuel Kant had proclaimed in his Critique of Judgment that there shall never be a Newton for a blade of grass. On the strange and wondrous pages of this book—one of the farthest-seeing and deepest-reaching works of literature ever composed — Walt Whitman emerges not as the Napoleon of poetry — a grandiosity of Byron had aspired to, commissioning for himself a replica of Napoleon’s carriage — but as the Newton for a blade of grass; not as a plundering conqueror and colonizer, recompensed with riches and living glory, but as a semaphore of elemental truth, born to be posthumous and glad for it, glad and ready to take his position as a grain of sand in the geologic layer of a present upon which the unwitnessed future would be built, glad to look at ordinary grass and see “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” to see himself in a grassy grave feeding other lives, to see the “the similitudes of the past and those of the future,” the continuities and consanguinities of life across the varied scales of existence and experience.

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” he writes. This overarching belief in the unity of everything, the interconnectedness and interbelonging of everything, colors his entire cosmogony. It would also render him wildly controversial, for he channeled this belief by writing about science and sex and the equality of the sexes and the races and the classes — ideas thoroughly countercultural in his day, in the most literal sense, for they are drawn not from culture but from nature. Verse after verse, detail after detail patiently recorded in his notebook, absorbed and distilled into some essential truth, he writes of the natural way of things, before society and civilization have disfigured them into biases and borders, into the hubrises and hierarchies of which the rickety scaffolding we call society is built.

At the same time, he recognizes that these hubrises and biases spring from the selfsame source as our noblest and most generous impulses, and in this recognition, he gives room for our own multitudes to unfold in his vast heart — the beautiful and the terrible equally welcome as particles of our humanity, for he knows that they are particles of his. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he writes in an era when atoms were still an exotic notion to the common citizen, an incomprehensible abstraction. Only by being porous to the whole of the universe, to every expression of existence, can he harmonize those particles — the cosmic and the earthly, the temporal and the timeless, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman — particles charged, always, by the reality of the present.

Because of his time and place and particular predilections, perhaps more so than any other poet’s in the history of our civilization, Whitman’s poetic development took place in the fragile, fertile ground between the personal and the political. Another titanic poet, Audre Lorde, would capture this fertility a century later: “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word I.” Walt Whitman was the great absorptive and adhesive I of his era. “The book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853,” he would later recall of Leaves of Grass, “absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”

In the 1840s, the New York Democratic Party had begun fissuring along the line of slavery, eventually splitting into two continents — one against slavery, known as the Barnburners, and one for it, known as the Hunkers. The owner of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where Whitman was hired as editor in 1846, was among the Hunkers. Whitman was not. That year the American invasion of Mexico and the resultant war aggravated the rift, leading the Barnburners to split off and form the Free Soil Party, predicated on preventing Western territories from becoming slave states. Until then, Whitman’s editorials had been primarily about concerts; without music, he would later reflect, he could not have written Leaves of Grass. But when a proviso was proposed to ban slavery from the newly conquered Mexican territory despite its adjacency to the South, Whitman put his impassioned pen behind it, urging those in support of it to turn up and vote for its proponent-candidate in the November election. “One vote may turn the election,” he exhorted on the typeset pages of the paper as his longhand unspooled on the pages of his private notebook trial lines for what would become “Song of Myself”:

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves…
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.

And so it is that Whitman’s most famous lines came abloom in the seedbed of his antiracist outrage, trellised by the yearning — so solipsistic, so human — for his own personhood to be understood.

By January, Whitman was fired from the Eagle

The following month, never having left New York, the twenty-eight- year-old unpublished poet left New York for New Orleans in search of freer journalism. Having met a Southern newspaper owner, who hired him on the spot to help establish an upstart paper, he traversed 2,400 miles via a Rube Goldberg machine of stage, train, and boat, accompanied by his fifteen-year-old brother Jeff. He left partly to pursue his journalistic career, yes — as Whitman himself later recounted, at the peak of the Mexican War, New Orleans was the “channel and entrepot for everything, going and returning,” the city with “the best news and war correspondents” and “the most to say.” But he left mostly, I suspect, to affirm with his own eyes the rightness of the outrage that had gotten him fired — the incomprehensible wrongness of slavery, which remained an abstraction, a party line, a moral and moralistic bargaining chip in the Northern bubble. He went from a city in which Black people comprised a mere 3 percent of the population to one in which they accounted for tenfold that — a proportion that had been even higher until the recent influx of immigrants; a city in which he witnessed the trade of goods and of ensouled bodies as goods. He saw persons treated as creatures or as commodities on the basis of their bodies, women sold into sexual slavery and priced out by the proportion of Blackness in their complexion. He pulled down a slave auction advertisement from a wall in the French Quarter, which he would keep for the next four decades — as a “warning,” he said — transmuting it into one of his steeliest, most indicting poems.

It was in New Orleans that his entire life-plan crumbled, and out of the rubble arose the realization that poetry was far more powerful an instrument for the propagation of ideas and ideals than journalism.

But something else happened in New Orleans, too — something profound and private that struck to the marrow of his own being.

New Orleans was not just a different city — it was a different world. In England, which remained the cultural and legislative model for the rest of America, the press frequently carried news of death sentences and executions for same-sex relations — barbarisms Whitman surely encountered as he sifted through the foreign papers at his newsroom desk. New Orleans, founded by French colonists a century before Whitman’s birth and eventually sold to the infant United States, was still legislated by a version of the Napoleonic Code, which had decriminalized sexual relations between consenting men. With its large rotating population of sailors and its permissive social mores, New Orleans was as close to an out gay life as nineteenth-century America could get.

Whatever happened to Whitman there, it was as much an experience of the body as it was of the soul, deep and beautiful and unsettling. He would allude to it only once, forty years later, obfuscating the details under a generality, deforming the reality of his heartbreak by inventing an ornate fiction about a romance with some mysterious Creole woman of higher social rank than his, invoked in his New Orleans poem “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City”:

Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

In the original draft of the poem, inscribed into Whitman’s private notebook, “the man I casually met” appears in place of the printed “a woman I casually met.” A poem that first appeared in 1860 hints at what quaked and quickened his heart that spring:

Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn’d love;
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love — the pay is certain, one way or another;
Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe, or written one of my poems, if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love.

Two decades after his time in New Orleans, Whitman would alter the ending to render it what might just be the central animating fact of all of Leaves of Grass and most of the art humanity has ever made:

Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn’d love;
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love — the pay is certain, one way or another;
(I loved a certain person ardently, and my love was not return’d;
Yet out of that, I have written these songs.)

After all the years, all the love, all the life poured into it, Leaves of Grass entered a world of indifference spiked here and there with derision and hostility. The tastemakers of literature hardly noticed the book at all. Even the handful of positive reviews punctuated their praise with caveats and cautions. Any artist — any person who has placed a piece of themselves in the lap of the world in the hope of enlarging its store of beauty and aliveness — knows intimately that awful physics of psychology by which the mind glides over the positive and latches onto the negative, however negligible, proving again and again that reading reviews at all is a peculiar form of willful self-assault with no victors.

One of America’s most prominent critics — Charles Eliot Norton, who would go on to endow Harvard’s esteemed series of lectures on “poetry in the broadest sense” — commended Leaves of Grass for entwining intellectual tradition and street culture with a thoroughly original style in which the two “fuse and combine with the most perfect harmony.” But he hastened to disclaim that Whitman’s free use of slang often “renders an otherwise striking passage altogether laughable.” Of the negative reviews, some were unabashedly vicious, saturated with that saccharine pleasure that small spirits and lesser talents take in denouncing what they don’t understand, can’t crush into conventional categories, or simply resent for the bold reach of a vision far exceeding anything they themselves could have conceived. A critic whose name rings hollow to anyone alive today and who left little in the world besides the hubris of his outrages, indicted the book — this life’s work, this personal record of becoming — as “a mess of stupid filth” and hurled the first major public grenade of homophobia at the poet for “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.” Another saw the book as an occasion for the author’s suicide. From Boston — America’s intellectual capital — came the diagnosis that Whitman “must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium,” for “there is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling.” Even the otherwise broad-minded Thomas Wentworth Higginson — the only editor Emily Dickinson ever had, a man who recognized the singular poetics of Negro spirituals and transcribed them for the world, a man who loved men — quipped that “it is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Across the Atlantic, a royal we managed to insult both the poet and his young nation in one fell scoff: “We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce,” the anonymous reviewer wrote, until Leaves of Grass arrived to show that this laughable country published poets “as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.”

These spare shrieks interrupted the cruelest verdict — that awful silence.

In his notebook, under the heading “Depressions,” Whitman scribbled:

Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious. — I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I supposed them, are not shallow — and people will most likely laugh at me. — My pride is impotent, my love gets no response. — the complacency of nature is hateful—I am filled with restlessness. — I am incomplete.

All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.

Within a year, Whitman would transmute this private passage of despair into a vessel of empathy in a new poem — one of twenty new poems in a second edition of Leaves of Grass he stubbornly published, determined to change the book’s course in the world; one of humanity’s masterworks of perspective and unselfing: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Whitman might never have shifted his suffering into the past tense, into a poem, into renewed resolve to continue growing his leaves in an inhospitable world, were it not for a single kindness that changed everything — a kindness soon to be emblazoned in gilded letters on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass to carry it into the canon of literature and to carry its author into his legacy as America’s first great poet.

Seventeen days after the first edition unspooled into the hostile void, Whitman was staggered to receive a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson — America’s reigning philosopher-king of intellectual life and literary sensibility — to whom he had mailed a copy, hoping for everything and expecting nothing. Emerson’s long 1844 essay The Poet — a manifesto for poetry as an instrument of culture-building, which can “penetrate into that region where the air is music” to compose “the songs of nations,” exhorting American poets to find an original voice in which to sing their young nation’s singular truths “yet unsung” — had emboldened Whitman to sing the body electric, the body of his being and the body of his country. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” he later recalled. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

In The Poet, Emerson had urged American poets to persist in the break with tradition, in the search for an authentic voice, and to be unafraid to “stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted” as that voice is denounced by the bastions of convention. Now, awestruck by the bold defiance of convention emanating from Leaves of Grass, the Sage of Concord wielded his words to nurture the daring young poet. Having introduced America to Eastern philosophy in his pioneering Transcendentalist journal The Dial, which Margaret Fuller had edited before leaving their frustrated love behind for New York to become the first female editor of a major newspaper at the Herald, Emerson found Leaves of Grass to be “the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald combined.” He knew the life of the mind and the half-life of ideas well enough to recognize that the debut of so unexampled a work must have had a long invisible incubation. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote to the young man in Brooklyn, “which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be… I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.

So profound was Emerson’s gratitude for the existence of this improbable fruition of his vision that he ended the letter by offering to travel to meet Whitman—his “benefactor,” he called him.

And so he did, making the arduous traversal from Concord to Brooklyn across snow and ice in the vicious winter of 1855 — one of the coldest winters since Tambora. Two weeks before Christmas, with the Erie Canal frozen and the roof of the Brooklyn sugar refinery blown off two hundred feet and the steeple of St. Mary’s Church blasted to pieces by the storm that had raged the night before, Emerson boarded a coach, then a train, then a ferry to Whitman’s home on Classon Avenue—a house I passed daily on my bicycle my first five years in Brooklyn.

There is no record of what was said between these two men with such overlapping ideals and such wildly divergent life paths. I picture Emerson, with his starched dignity and his combed reserve, sizing up the brushy-haired poet in the half-unbuttoned shirt—part Shelley, part sailor, entirely himself.

When Whitman’s father died seven days after Leaves of Grass was published — his father, a large-nosed, full-lipped, hollow-cheeked man of democratic sympathies and brutal moods who had known Thomas Paine in his youth and had failed at just about everything he’d ever undertaken except the drink, and whom Walt loved — there was still Emerson’s letter.

For Whitman, Emerson’s attention and encouragement were nothing less than a lifeline. For months, he carried the letter in his breast pocket, folded and unfolded it, read it to his mother, read it to his lover, read it to himself in the bleak small hours, the hours James Baldwin saw as the time when the unconscious self tries to “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error,” Baldwin who would emblazon his semi-autobiographical novel Giovanni’s Room, published exactly one hundred years after Leaves of Grass, with an epigraph from Whitman: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”

Nine months after Emerson’s visit to Brooklyn prompted by the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman published a second, with Emerson’s private praise gilded on the spine as public endorsement, haphazardly capitalized like a subtitle:

I Greet You at the Beginning of A Great Career
R.W. Emerson

Piqued, no longer sure what to make of the young poet who had so impressed him with his unbuttoned sincerity but who had so savvily appropriated his words of encouragement, Emerson dispatched one of his closest and most discerning friends to Brooklyn, to see for himself. And so, in the autumn of 1856, Whitman received another New England luminary in his Classon Avenue home: the utopian Transcendentalist and devout vegetarian Bronson Alcott, whose teenage daughter Louisa May was absorbing the ideas and experiences that would one day become Little Women.

The record Alcott left in his journal that October afternoon remains the most vivid direct portrait of Whitman — a portrait that is itself a poetic image of immense graphic power, crosshatched with admiration for the poet’s genius and warm amusement at his self-regard, sensitive and sentient of both the costumed performance of personhood and the naked soul beneath the performance:

To Brooklyn, to see Walt Whitman. I pass a couple of hours, and find him to be an extraordinary person, full of brute power, certainly of genius and audacity, and likely to make his mark on Young America — he affirming himself to be its representative man and poet…

A nondescript, he is not so easily described, nor seen to be described. Broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank, he wears his man-Bloomer in defiance of everybody, having these as everything else after his own fashion, and for example to all men hereafter. Red flannel undershirt, open-breasted, exposing his brawny neck; striped calico jacket over this, the collar Byroneal, with coarse cloth overalls buttoned to it; cowhide boots; a heavy round-about, with huge outside pockets and buttons to match; and a slouched hat, for house and street alike. Eyes gray, unimaginative, cautious yet sagacious; his voice deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting. When talking will recline upon the couch at length, pillowing his head upon his bended arm, and informing you naively how lazy he is, and slow. Listens well; asks you to repeat what he has failed to catch at once, yet hesitates in speaking often, or gives over as if fearing to come short of the sharp, full, concrete meaning of his thought. Inquisitive, very; over-curious even; inviting criticism on himself, on his poems — pronouncing it “pomes.” — In fine, an egotist, incapable of omitting, or suffering any one long to omit, noting Walt Whitman in discourse. Swaggy in his walk, burying both his hands in outside pockets. Has never been sick, he says, not taken medicine, nor sinned; and so is quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall. A bachelor, he professes great respect for women.

Much is striking about Alcott’s portrait, but two things especially: It radiates the author’s bewilderment at how such daring, arresting, supra- ordinary poems could have sprung from so sub-ordinary a maker, and it captures his warmhearted suspicion that Whitman was deliberately styling himself that way, art-directing his own image for this emissary of New England’s intellectual aesthetes, the portal to America’s literary consciousness. The irreconcilable tension ensnared Alcott. Wary of the hazards of first impressions and hasty assessments — especially on so grand a proposition as America’s first original poet — Alcott added with a scientist’s insistence on testing hypotheses with repeat observation: “I must meet him again, and more than once, to mete his merits and place in this Pantheon of the West.” This confusion, this inability to pin Whitman down—it was an echo of an intuition that Alcott could not name. Some haunting sense that beneath the poet’s posture of simplicity, beneath his monotone bravado, there was a real guardedness. Some roiling complexity, some trembling insecurity he did not want revealed. Perhaps even to himself.

Because Whitman saw his poetry as a proxy for his totality of being and a record of the ongoingness of his own development, he saw Leaves of Grass not as an isolated art object but as a living ethos, a creation in every aspect of which he wanted to be involved, immersed. Morning after morning, week after week, month after month, he had made his way to the print shop to oversee the production, typesetting some of the pages himself — a redemptive echo of his days as an apprentice printer, setting other writers’ work into the world; of his days as a bookshop proprietor, transacting other writers’ work into readers’ hands. I picture him in 1855, the age I am as I write this, crossing what is now Cadman Plaza, the promenade I too crossed daily for years when I first moved to New York, with the manuscript under his arm. He wanted that, of course. He wanted us — “men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” — to project ourselves onto him as he projected himself onto us. “I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.” He may have opened with “Song of Myself,” but you is the most common word in Leaves of Grass.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem…
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you,
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

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

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“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too,” the irreplaceable Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) reflected in her lovely autobiographical essay on how literature saved her life. But what does it take to write such buoyant literature — be it poetry or prose — that lends itself as a lifeboat to those far from the shore of being?

A decade after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and three years after receiving the National Book Award, Oliver distilled her wisdom on writing into a short prose poem titled “Sand Dabs, One,” found in her 1995 book Blue Pastures (public library) — just a few lines, largehearted and limber, each saturated with meaning and illustrating the principle it espouses in a clever meta-manifestation of that principle embedded in the language itself.

Oliver writes:

Lists, and verbs, will carry you many a dry mile.

To imitate or not to imitate — the question is easily satisfied. The perils of not imitating are greater than the perils of imitating.

Always remember — the speaker doesn’t do it. The words do it.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

The idea must drive the words. When the words drive the idea, it’s all floss and gloss, elaboration, air bubbles, dross, pomp, frump, strumpeting.

Don’t close the poem as you opened it, unless your name is Blake and you have written a poem about a Tyger.

Complement with this extensive collection of advice on writing from some of the finest writers in the English language, then revisit Oliver on love, the two building blocks of creativity, what attention really means, and how to live with maximal aliveness.

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.

The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony.

Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from what Rachel Carson called “those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss,” through the growling din of the engines that conduct consumerism between continents, orcas are communicating in their sonic hieroglyphics, speaking to each other in haunting and melodious voices that summon the most coordinated hunting strategy known in the animal kingdom.

Traveling in matrilineal groups, they search for seals across the frozen expanse, moving effortlessly through pack ice that sinks immense ships. As soon as they identify the prey, they swim together under the ice to shatter it with a sub-surface shock wave, then begin blowing bubbles beneath to push the broken pieces apart. Once the cracks are wide enough, they turn on their sides to create a synchronized surface wave so large its crest crashes onto the ice, pushing seals into the water, where the pod divides the bounty according to a complex calculus of social bonds.

All the while, they are teaching their young how to perform this collaborative symphony of physics and predation — a further testament to social learning as a key substrate of intelligence — and it is the females, particularly post-menopausal matriarchs, who are doing the teaching. Orcas have such strong maternal bonds that sons stay with their mothers for life — a phenomenon so well documented that the researchers behind one longitudinal study dubbed male orcas “mamma’s boys.”

But while these bonds are the orcas’ great strength, they are also their great vulnerability.

In 2018, while secluded on a small mossy island in Puget Sound to finish my first book, I watched the world turn with shattering tenderness toward an unfolding local event — for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean, an orca mother carried her dead calf draped over her head, hardly eating, barely keeping up with her pod. NPR called it her “tour of grief.” When she lost another calf in early 2025 — two thirds of orca pregnancies result in either miscarriage or infant death — she did the same, this time seventeen days.

Such sights so chill us because they are emblems of the miracle and tragedy of consciousness. Orcas would not be capable of such staggering success as predators if they were not also capable of such shattering grief, both a function of their intricate bonds, their collaborative interdependence, their complex consciousness that differentiates and bridges the difference between self and other. In the human realm, we call this love — the aspect of consciousness subject to the cruelest evolutionary equation: As Hannah Arendt so poignantly articulated, loss is the price we pay for love. It seems almost unbearable as we watch the mother orca carry her dead calf, and yet we too must bear it, and do bear it, however long and however far we may have to carry the dead weight of our grief — because we must, if we are worthy of our own aliveness, love anyway. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” wrote Rumi. Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth any price, any price at all.

donating = loving

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

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The 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.

Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names — Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet” and Portuguese has the lovely word saudade: the vague, constant longing for something or someone beyond the horizon of reality — but we recognize it in our marrow, in the strata of the soul beyond the reach of words.

No one has explored the paradoxical nature of longing more sensitively than the philosopher, storyteller, beloved Narnia creator, and modern mystic C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) in a sermon he delivered on June 8, 1941, which later lent its title to his 1949 collection of addresses The Weight of Glory (public library).

Lewis — who thought deeply about the significance of suffering and the secret of happiness — writes:

This desire for our own far off country [is] the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.

As Lewis considers the illusory nature of these shorthands for our longing, we are left with the radiant intimation that “the thing itself” is not something we reach for, something beyond us, but something we are:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.

For Lewis, who was religious, this notion of “the thing itself” — the ultimate object of longing — was anchored in his understanding of God. For me, it calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s exquisite epiphany about the meaning of art and life, found while strolling through her flower-garden:

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

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

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Novelist Samantha Harvey considers how to best resist being turned into passive pawns in the attention economy in her conversation with my friend Natascha McElhone who, besides being a beloved actor in her primary life (and generously lending her time and talent to narrating the audiobooks of Figuring and Traversal), co-hosts the excellent podcast Where Shall We Meet — a guided tour of the minds and worlds of some of the most interesting and creative people alive, from writers and philosophers to astrophysicists and polar explorers.

With an eye to the great heist of mind that is social media — a system built to benefit the bottom line of companies by exploiting our psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, training us to be passive “users” of “content” rather than active participants in the co-creation of meaning that is literature — Harvey offers a compassionate way of meeting ourselves where we (like or or not) are, and beginning there in the project of striking a better balance between passive and active attention:

There are times when it’s incredibly active and pleasurable and generative to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. It can spark all sorts of thoughts and challenge things that you felt and give you new information… It’s a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself… I just get to call it research… We have at our disposal this amazing world of not just information but of other people’s thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that’s a great invitation, I think. [The question is] how do we stay active in that process when built into the structure is this imperative to become passive.

Responding to Natascha’s observation that active reading is not unlike dreaming — a kind of sustained and thrilling presence in another world by an act of unselfing that requires, as Natascha puts it, “being in one place for long enough to traverse into someone else’s psyche, to be interested enough to get out of your own head and into someone else’s” — Harvey reflects:

When I write, and also when I read, and probably in slightly different ways, dream-like spaces open up. And I think that is [what good books] invite — they ask for attention in a way that nothing else does, quite… The act of attention and of imagination takes work… but [books] also offer us something… spellbinding… [A great book] will have you enraptured, it will hold you in this dream space. That’s what you want as a writer — to arrest your reader, to to take them up in the spell and not let them down and not make them want to leave.

This, she observes, is the difference between reading, which demands the active imagination, and consuming “content” by scrolling passively through a “feed”; the difference between being compelled to stay, by means of a generous offering of another world, and being coerced to stay, by means of nervous system manipulation. It is also the difference between reading for information and reading for illumination. Harvey likens the former to “a corridor along which information is carried” that you passively pace, whereas the latter — the experience great books give us — opens doors on all sides of the corridor so inviting that you begin to actively and joyfully wander all the different rooms, spellbound by what you find there:

Fiction… opens up the possibility of other consciousnesses, other spaces, other ideas — and not just the ones that the author provides by telling you information, but the ones that are opened up in your own psyche through your own memories… multiple, countless rooms that you walk through, one to the other, and you never really know what’s in the next room or how many rooms there are, but it’s space — in a life that can sometimes feel rather breathless and and full and stressful and and distracted, suddenly you’re in something quite palatial that is only limited by your own imagination.

This difference between passive consumption and active imagination sounds to me like the difference between a trance and a dream. In a trance, something other than ourselves is in possession of our minds. In a dream, parts of us — the shy, the unheard, the neglected, the wild — come to the fore and begin to live, boldly and imaginatively, returning us to reality a little more integrated, a little more awake to our own complexity. Dreaming, which evolved in the bird brain as a laboratory for practicing the possible, is a highly active and dynamic state in constant, if coded, conversation with the conscious self of our waking life. It is an act of unselfing in order to become more fully ourselves. To refuse to be entranced and choose to be enchanted may be the most important habit in that most important choice of investing our consciousness: to whom and what we gift our attention.

Couple with Doris Lessing on how to read a book and how to read the world, then revisit Virginia Woolf on why we read.

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

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Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings.

In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order. In the extreme conditions of the kiln, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance converge to make a third glaze that may turn out to be infinitely more beautiful than either of the two, or disastrous, discolored, hideously cracked with exposed impurities and cratered with burst bubbles.

This, of course, is what happens in our most intimate relationships, themselves the product of chemistry and chance. Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.

A century after the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore observed that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,” physicist Carlo Rovelli traces the scientific path to that same truth in his excellent quantum primer Helgoland (public library), titled after the windswept North Sea island on which the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg arrived at the idea that became the mathematical blueprint for the staggering cathedral of quantum field theory: that revolutionary description of how one aspect of reality — one object, one entity, one part of nature — manifests itself to any other. Because every description of a thing is a claim about its nature, at the heart of the theory is the claim that interaction is the fundamental reality of the universe, that there are no entities as such — only dynamic manifestations of which we catch an evanescent glimpse and call that flashing image entity.

Rovelli writes:

The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call “reality,” is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other.

[…]

The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions.

This is why objectifying — the impulse to reduce something or someone to a set of properties — always misses the point of the objectified, and why we always draw closer to reality when we instead “subjectify” the universe, as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her magnificent meditation on the interplay of poetry and science. The intersubjective — the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties — is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you — the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.

Observing that the “phantasmal world of quanta is our world,” Rovelli writes:

The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision. It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.

With an eye to quantum entanglement, he articulates what I learned at the kiln:

Even if we know all that can be predicted about one object and another object, we still cannot predict everything about the two objects together. The relationship between two objects is not something contained in one or the other of them: it is something more besides.

The great paradox of this subject-object approach to modeling reality is that all of our descriptive models are inherently claims of an outside perspective on it, and yet they all arise from our mental activity, which is inherently interior. In a passage that calls to mind quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” Rovelli writes:

If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world… is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based. If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.

This fundamental axiom of being is, to me, the first and final proof that the measure of our lives is the light between us.

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

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In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying reality — it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where joy and hope are equally valid ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted with the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the frightful stories we tell ourselves and are told about it.

Having lost his mother to suicide, having lived through two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) devoted his life and his art to creating such a parallel world of enchantment.

In a 1947 interview included in his Selected Writings (public library) — the first release of Magritte’s manifestos, interviews, and other prose in English, thanks to the heroic efforts of scholar Kathleen Rooney — he reflects:

Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy for the eyes and the mind. It is much easier to terrorize than to charm… I live in a very unpleasant world because of its routine ugliness. That’s why my painting is a battle, or rather a counter-offensive.

Magritte revisits the subject in his manifesto Surrealism in the Sunshine, indicting the cultural tyranny of pessimism and fear-mongering — a worldview we have been sold under the toxic premise that if we focus on the worst of reality, we are seeing it more clearly and would be prepared to protect ourselves from its devastations. A quarter century before the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm insisted that “pessimism [is] an alienated form of despair,” Magritte writes:

We think that if life is seen in a tragic light it is seen more clearly, and that we are then in touch with the mystery of existence. We even believe that we can reach objectivity thanks to this revelation. The greater the terror, the greater the objectivity.

This notion is the result of philosophies (materialist or idealist), that claim that the real world is knowable, that matter is of the same essence as mind, since the perfect mind would no longer be distinct from the matter it explains and would thus deny it. The man on the street is unknowingly in harmony with this idea: he thinks there is a mystery, he thinks he must live and suffer and that the very meaning of life is that it is a dream-nightmare.

In his art and the worldview from which it springs, Magritte presents an antidote to this warped thinking — a backdoor out of our elective suffering. An epoch before we began to understand the neurophysiology of enchantment, he echoes his contemporary Egon Schiele’s exhortation to “envy those who see beauty in everything in the world,” and writes:

Our mental universe (which contains all we know, feel or are afraid of in the real world we live in) may be enchanting, happy, tragic, comic, etc.

We are capable of transforming it and giving it a charm which makes life more valuable. More valuable since life becomes more joyful, thanks to the extraordinary effort needed to create this charm.

Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is “the truth”, that this terror is knowledge of the “extra-mental” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.

Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.

[…]

We must go in search of enchantment.

Complement with Viktor Frankl on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Walt Whitman on optimism as a force of resistance, then revisit Rebecca Solnit on hope in dark times.

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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Once, in an extreme of despair, I posed to my therapist a version of the haunting thought experiment Mary’s Room: How, I asked her, can a person who has never been modeled healthy, secure, steadfast love even recognize it when it comes along — to what extent is this knowing teachable, learnable? If a person has never seen the color blue, never experienced blueness in their creaturely sensorium, there are certain things you can do to convey to them a knowledge of it — give them the electromagnetic wavelength of the color and examples of blue things and a conceptual portrait of what blue feels like — but all they will ever do is run around the world with this checklist of criteria in hand, asking: “Is this blue? How about this?”

She paused for a moment, then said: “Maybe they will never see blue the way you or I see it, but they can have an experience that is entirely new and entirely wonderful — and that will be their blue.”

In 1672, holding up his finger in the shadow between the light from his candle and the rising sun, the German polymath Otto von Guericke was astounded to see his flesh turn an “azure blue of the utmost beauty.” Shadow, produced by the absence of light and therefore the absence of color we call black, suddenly had a hue — an optical effect caused by the contrast between different light sources.

Strolling through the royal gardens a century later, Goethe stopped to admire a yellow flower in the bright midday sun. When he blinked and looked away for a moment, a blue flower appeared before his closed eyes — he was seeing the opposite of the real flower, even though he was looking at nothing. (This negative after-image, we now know, when an image is too bright and brief for the retinal ganglion cells that carry signals from the brain to adapt to the changing stimulus.) Here was color not just as a function of light, as Newton had decreed upon unweaving the rainbow with his optics, but a function of the perceiving brain — a collaborative creation of the mind and the world.

Blue is not what we see but what we co-create with ourselves and each other.

Chilean philosophers Humberto Maturana (September 14, 1928–May 6, 2021) and Francisco Varela (September 7, 1946–May 28, 2001) explore this with uncommon subtlety and rigor in their 1984 classic The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (public library) — a timeless investigation of “why the apparent firmness of our experiential world suddenly wavers when we look at it up close,” and a timeless invitation “to let go of [our] usual certainties and thus to come into a different biological insight of what it is to be human.”

They write:

The experience of color corresponds to a specific pattern of states of activity in the nervous system which its structure determines … All knowing depends on the structure of the knower [but] the biological roots of knowing cannot be understood only through examining the nervous system… It is necessary to understand how these processes are rooted in the living being as a whole.

Our cognitive understanding may explicate blue, but our embodied experience implicates us in it, binds us both to our biology and to each other:

All cognitive experience involves the knower in a personal way, rooted in their biological structure. There, their experience of certainty is an individual phenomenon blind to the cognitive acts of others, in a solitude which… is transcended only in a world created with those others.

With the central premise that “every act of knowing brings forth a world,” they write:

Our experience is moored to our structure in a binding way. We do not see the “space” of the world; we live our field of vision. We do not see the “colors” of the world; we live our chromatic space… We are experiencing a world. But when we examine more closely how we get to know this world, we invariably find that we cannot separate our history of actions — biological and social — from how this world appears to us. It is so obvious and close that it is very hard to see.

Love, of course, is the deepest way we have of knowing one another. More than a psychological construct, more than a moral imperative, it is part of our creaturely inheritance. Defying the hollow dogma that questions of love are antiscientific, Maturana and Varela write:

To dismiss love as the biological basis of social life, as also the ethical implications of love, would be to turn our back on a history of living beings that is more than 3.5 billion years old… Love is a biological dynamic with deep roots. It is an emotion that defines in the organism a dynamic structural pattern, a stepping stone to interactions that may lead to the operational coherence of social life.

In a lovely biosocial echo of Iris Murdoch’s abiding formulation of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Maturana and Varela add:

Biology also shows us that we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought forth through reasoning, through the encounter with a stranger, or, more directly, through the expression of a biological interpersonal congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence behind us. This act is called love, or, if we prefer a milder expression, the acceptance of the other person beside us in our daily living. This is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us, there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness. Anything that undermines this acceptance of others, from competency to the possession of truth and on to ideologic certainty, undermines the social process because it undermines the biological process that generates it… Biologically, without love, without acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon. If we still live together that way, we are living indifference and negation under a pretense of love.

A generation after the paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley arrived at the same conclusion in his breathtakingly beautiful meditation on the first and final truth of life, and a generation before philosopher Iain McGilchrist explored how we render reality through love, they conclude:

We have only the world that we bring forth with others and only love helps us bring it forth.

donating = loving

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

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“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of the possible.

Everything that is possible is in some sense real, because behind every “what if” is the “if/then” of a causality tethered back to the first thing that ever happened — the inception of this particular universe with its particular set of permissions — and dominoing forward to what has not yet happened but is happenable in this very universe. Hope is the potential energy of reality. But it takes trust in the possible to release it.

Alongside physics and poetry, fairy tales may be our best instrument for discerning the axioms of reality and building from them scale models of possibility. (“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”)

In her revelatory reckoning with how fairy tales reveal us to ourselves, found in her posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) examines the relationship between the hope and trust, and the dangers of confusing them, in our quest for the possible. She writes:

The impossible awaits the hero of a fairy tale. But how is a person to reach the impossible if not, precisely, by means of the impossible?

[…]

The fairy-tale hero… must forget all his* limits when he contends with the impossible and pay constant attention to these limits when he performs the impossible.

The great appeal of the fairy tale and its ultimate payoff, Campo argues, is “victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships” — that is, a new organizing principle that is not deterministic but possibilistic. “I said to my soul,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Addressing the soul of the person who wishes to be the hero of their own fate — that is, to refuse to be a victim of the myth of the impossible — Campo writes:

Whom does a marvelous fate befall in fairy tales? He who trusts hopelessly in what is beyond hope. Hope and trust must not be confused. They are different things, as the expectation of fortune here on earth is different from the second theological virtue. He who blindly, obstinately repeats “let us hope” does not trust; he is really only hoping for a lucky break in the momentarily propitious game governed by the law of necessity. Those who trust, on the other hand, do not count on particular events, for they are sure there is an economy that encompasses all events and surpasses their meaning the way a tapestry, a symbolic carpet, surpasses the flowers and animals that compose it.

The great paradox of real life — this social contract so trammeled by permissions as to be blind to possibilities — is that those who see the tapestry are often seen as mad. (This, of course, has always been the case — take Kepler, take Blake, take Dickinson.) An epoch after G.K. Chesterton contemplated how we stay sane in a mad world and offered his insightful taxonomy of life as a poem, a novel, or a fairy tale, Campo writes:

In the fairy tale, the victor is the madman who reasons backward, who reverses the masks, who discerns the secret thread in the fabric, the inexplicable play of echoes in a melody; he who moves with ecstatic precision in the labyrinth of formulas, numbers, antiphons, and rituals common to the Gospels, fairy tales, and poetry. He believes, like the saint, that a person can walk on water, that a fervent spirit can leap over walls. He believes, like the poet, in the word, from which he can conjure concrete wonders.

Couple with Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope and J.R.R. Tolkien on fairy tales and the psychology of fantasy.

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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There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all — the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem that is the universe. It is a hollowing, a withering, a deadening of the spirit that can manifest as burnout or creative block, as a breakdown or a midlife crisis, or as the persistent low-frequency din of despair.

Often, it comes in the wake of some great achievement.

Often, it strikes at 4AM.

Always, you simply have to live through it until you glance over your shoulder staggered by the recognition that it had been a vital period of recalibration and regeneration — fallow ground for the rewilding of your spirit.

In 1995, shortly after a major retrospective of his work had been released, Brian Eno hit that point of pointlessness. In a stirring entry from A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary (public library), he writes:

After several months of work, I slowly grind down and it all starts to seem like “my job.” I do it, and I probably don’t do it too badly, but I find myself working entirely from the momentum of deadlines and commitments, as though the ideas are not springing forth but being painfully squeezed out. At the back of my mind, unadmitted to, are some nasty thoughts swimming about in the darkness. They whisper things like: “You’ve had it” and “You’re out of steam.”

Experience has shown me that, when I reach this point, all the distractions I can muster are only postponements. It’s time to face up to total, unmitigated despair.

I sometimes do this by going alone on a “holiday” — though that word scarcely conveys the crashing tedium involved, for I usually choose somewhere uneventful, take nothing with me, and then rely on the horror of my own company to drive me rapidly to the edge of the abyss.

One thing experience shows us over and over, if we pay enough attention, is that the way out of such suffering, out of the abyss of self-concern with our mattering project, is always unselfing. Eno describes the cycle:

It goes like this: me thinking, “What’s it all for?/ What’s the bloody point?/ I haven’t done anything I like and I don’t have a clue what to do next/ I’m a completely empty shell.” This lasts two days or so… Then I suddenly notice — apropos of something very minor, like the way a plane crosses the sky, or the smell of trees, or the light in the early evening, or remembering one of my brother’s jokes — that I am thoroughly enjoying myself and completely, utterly glad to be alive. Not one of the questions I asked myself has been answered. Instead, like all good philosophical questions, they’ve just ceased to matter.

By the end of the year, Eno had pioneered generative music and had traveled to war-torn Bosnia, across the border from where I was growing up, to lead music therapy workshops for orphaned children in the grounds of a shelled primary school.

Half a century earlier, traveling through these same troubled lands in the interlude between two world wars, Rebecca West had written:

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

It is, in the end, the taste of aliveness that saves us. But we must choose to raise the cup, may even have to make it. A generation after Albert Camus observed that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Eno captures the resuscitation of the creative spirit — that terrifying, transcendent transmutation of despair into a defense of joy:

The process involves reaching the point of not trying any more to dig inside, but just letting go, ceding control… And at the point of giving up I’m suddenly alive again. It’s like jumping resignedly into the abyss and discovering that you can just drift dreamily on air currents.

[…]

This feeling, of sheer mad joy at the world, is ageless. It’s the fresh, clear stream at the bottom of the abyss.

donating = loving

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

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The great paradox, the great pain of human relationships is that they are so often not relational: two lonelinesses colliding without real contact, one or both orienting to the other not as a person but as a projection, mistaking for intimacy its myriad illusions — admiration, adoration, desire. It is always dangerous and damaging, and we are almost never aware — or never willing to listen to the parts of us who are aware — that it is happening until the delirious turbine of the dynamic has spat us out with a concussing confusion and a dislocated heart.

We use each other all the time, of course, in benign ways — to draw inspiration from another mind, to see the world with another set of eyes, to broaden the repertoire of the heart. But such uses are more akin to the relationship between symbionts: two differently specialized organisms nurturing each other with their strengths. The damage happens when the relationship takes on the form of parasite-host or predator-prey, when the user devours the used and discards them after their use.

It can be hard to see these dangerous dynamics from the inside of our own lives, but we can shine a sidewise gleam on them through the lives of others, real or imagined. The great gift of all the works of the imagination — literature, theater, film — is that they hand us our experience back to ourselves, annealed and clarified, unfiltered by self-judgment or pride. This is why, as Zadie Smith observes in her magnificent essay collection Dead and Alive (public library), the people about whom such works are most curious are “the conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the wilfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect, the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided” — the people almost all of us have at some point loved, or been.

In one of the essays, anchored in the movie Tár, she paints a haunting portrait of one such dynamic: The protagonist, a narcissistic and image-conscious composer, has had some passionate involvement, never clearly detailed, with another woman and has terminated it abruptly, leaving her lover reeling with heartache and confusion, gaslighting her and giving the world the impression it never happened in order to rinse the knowledge that she has done harm:

First, like any bad guy, [Tár] attempts to cover her tracks. We watch her emailing everyone she knows in the music community to warn them of an unstable young woman called Krista Taylor, who may be spreading untrue rumours about her. Then checking Twitter to see if said rumours have broken out into the world. We begin to get the picture. Krista is a young, aspiring conductor. Tár was her mentor. Also (secretly) her lover — although only briefly… We never meet Krista, but from our glimpses of the many pleading emails she sends Tár’s assistant, we gather that an affair that proved seismic for Krista barely registered on her older lover’s radar… For Tár, it’s as if it never happened at all. She is already on to the next distraction.

It is one of the most discomposing experiences in life, to have felt a profound connection with someone and then to discover that it had been trivial to them — a fleeting fantasy, a frivolous experiment, a use. Smith writes:

There’s a word for this behaviour: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can.

Tár’s instrumentalism begins in actions but completes itself in words as she recasts the facts of her choices as another’s figments, accusing her lover of having imagined it all. Language itself becomes an instrument of manipulation.

In the introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of his diaries, Brian Eno addresses this obliquely in observing the same dynamic that plays out on the scale of the personal playing out on the scale of the political, the cultural, the civilizational:

This era has been called post-truth because language is increasingly intended to be instrumental — that is, intended to bring about an effect — rather than accurate.

It is not incidental that instrumentalizers always use emotionally charged language in their mendacity, preying on our human tendency to mistake the strength of the emotion for the strength of the evidence. And yet, in the end, the user is the true victim of her use: The instrumentalizer is left with the emptiness of her own incapacity for connection. We find Tár “stripped bare at last, with no theory, no defence, no prefabricated arguments,” faced with the aftermath of her lies, facing the final truth:

There is no redemption. Nothing to be said or done except feel it.

The paradox, and perhaps the redemption, is that the user always loses more than the used, for one has chosen erasure and the other is left with life — experience that is, however painful, lived. The person who is truly alive will always choose experience over erasure, for experience is the pulse-beat of aliveness while erasure — the disavowal of experience by means of denial, dissociation, and deceit — is always a living death.

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

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War is an ism — nationalism, dogmatism, capitalism — paid for by an is: the living beingness of human beings made a sacrificial offering to an ideology so powerful it has quelled the two things that make us most human: compassion and critical thinking.

“Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so,” the visionary Kathleen Lonsdale wrote in what remains the most lucid and luminous manifesto for how peace becomes possible. Few have seen this more clearly or articulated its cruel absurdity more persuasively than the Lebanese-American poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) in one of the meditations included in The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (public library) — the wonderful collection of essays and poems drawn from Gibran’s Arabic writings about the spiritual life, never before available in English.

Addressing personally and with great tenderness the individual soldier fighting the impersonal war, he writes:

You are my brother, and I love you… Why then… do you come to my country and try to subdue me, in order to please leaders who seek glory by exploiting your words and happiness by appropriating the fruits of your labors? Why do you forsake your wife and little ones, following death to a remote land for the sake of commanders who wish to buy high rank with your blood and great honor with the grief of your parents? But is it high honor for a human being to make war on his brother?

[…]

I have seen those ambitious for prestige attempt to instill in you a love of self-sacrifice, in order to make slaves of your brothers. They say that the desire to survive requires an attack on the rights of others. And I say, “Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.”

Anchoring the present in the past, evolutionary and cultural, he considers the cost — always the same across the aeons and epochs — of this dangerous delusion:

Egotism, my brother, was the origin of blind competition, and competition generated group loyalty, and group loyalty founded political power, which in turn became a motive for strife and enslavement. The soul asserts the rule of wisdom and justice over ignorance and tyranny, and it rejects the authority that extracts from mines knives and blades with which to spread folly and oppression. This is the political power that devastated Babylon, razed Jerusalem to its foundations, and pulled down Rome’s edifices.

Questioning why a human being would cede their humanity to serve “the nationalists” who “inaugurated bloodshed and killing,” he adds:

What has impelled you, O my brother… to be devoted to the one who harms you? True power is the wisdom that protects the universal, just, natural law. Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

[…]

You are my brother, and I love you, and love is justice in the most sublime of its manifestations.

Couple with C.S. Lewis, writing in the middle of a world war, on our task in turbulent times, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, how to weather the uncertainties of love, and his recipe for our spiritual perfection as a species.

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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That, at least, is what I think of as I read this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:

WHEREVER YOU THINK THERE IS NOTHING
by Hannah Fries

In the hollowed-out heartwood of an old tree.

In a jagged eggshell’s translucent blue.

Between bars,
between bombs,
between blows.

In the blossom’s chamber where the squash bee sleeps.

In the spiral cupped by the calcium shell.

Between sirens,
between slaughters,
between famine’s last grains.

In the great choral breath before Händel’s amen.

In the time-machine swirl of stone.

Beyond our blindness, the fabric
that holds                    sun and
sun​                    ​and sun.

The pupil’s black hole.

Garden scent of the fresh-dug grave.
The hand’s open palm.

Not in the flesh, but the wound.

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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One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.

Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters (public library) edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

From the outset, her letters command and caress at the same time. “Write to me often and long, the longer the better,” she urges him in one. “On Saturday I’ll bring your sweater, your books and a lot of violets,” she tells him in another. She takes love as seriously as it ought to be taken but also knows it dies without play: “Sorry about constantly repeating the word ‘love’ five times in a row, but it’s just that I’m very silly.” She signs herself “your pretty girl (monkey face),” “your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like,” “your sister (girlfriend, buddy, wife).” (It starts so early, that trembling gamble of the heart by which a person tries to discern what they mean to another.) Over and over, she offers glimpses into her uncommon inner world. In a letter penned the summer she turned seventeen, after some arrangements for how they can see each other — Frida’s parents disapproved of the relationship — she writes:

Now I’m going to read Salambo until half past 10, it’s 8 o’clock now, and then the Bible in three volumes and, finally, think for a while about huge scientific problems and then go to bed, and sleep until half past 7 in the morning, eh? Until tomorrow, may we have a good night and may we both think that great friends must love each other very, very much, much, much, much, much, mucho . . . with “m” for music or for “mundo.”

A month later, she offers that lovely unasked assurance that makes a fragile young love feel safe and solid:

My Alex, since I won’t see you for two days and I miss you so much, I’m writing you this so that you will start to believe something that you don’t believe, but which is very true.

And then, beneath a drawing, she adds:

Please forgive me for not writing any more but I started to draw the doll at 9 and it took me an astronomical three quarters of an hour to draw and another half hour to write, so it’s about 10 now and you know that makes me sleepy like the hens, but I’ll keep writing this letter in my dreams and you know that I would write enough to fill at least a thousand pages.

I love you very much.

Your pretty girl (monkey face)

On Christmas Day, she tells him:

My Alex: I loved you since I first saw you. What do you say to that? Since we probably won’t see each other for several days, I’m going to beg you not to forget your little woman, eh?

[…]

You must like easy things… I would like to be even easier, a tiny little thing that you could just carry in your pocket always, always… Alex, write to me often and even if it’s not true, tell me that you care for me a lot and that you can’t live without me…

Your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like
Frieda

Punctuating the teenage ardor is the stuff of life — she tells him about taking classes in shorthand and typing so as not to waste money on paying the telegraph operator, tells him about applying for a job at the Education Library for four pesos an hour, tells him about her material and domestic struggles, but always places him above all else. When he gets sick, she writes to him:

Right now the only thing I want is for you to get better and all the rest is in 5th and 6th place, because in 1st to 4th place is that you get better and that you love me… Get better very, very soon and think about me a little bit, that’s what your sister (girlfriend, buddy, wife) wants.

She couldn’t have known, in comforting him through his minor ailment, that only a few months later her own embodiment would be pushed to the brink of mortality. Twenty-five days after the accident, bedridden at the hospital where her mother had only visited her twice and her father once, she writes in a letter adorned with a drawing of skull and bones:

Alex of my life: You know better than anyone how sad I have been in this filthy hospital… Everyone tells me not to despair; but they don’t know what it is for me to be bedridden for three months, which is what I need to be, after having been a first-class stray cat all my life, but what’s there to do, since la pelona didn’t carry me away. Don’t you think?… The day I see you Alex, I’m going to kiss you, there’s no help for it; now I see more than ever how I love you with all my soul and I won’t trade you for anyone; you see how suffering something is always worthwhile.

On the eve of her discharge, she writes:

Here or there, I’ll be waiting for you. I’m counting the hours as I wait for you wherever, here or at home, because seeing you, the months in bed will pass much faster… Life begins tomorrow…! — I adore you —

But rather than revival, she entered a long convalescence, confined to bed and savaged by pain in every region of her body as both of her parents fell seriously ill. Six weeks into her confinement, just after her mother had a seizure, she writes to Alejandro:

I want you to come see me because I’m in over my head and I can’t help but hold on, because it would be worse if I despaired, don’t you think? I want you to come and talk to me like before, to forget everything and to come see me for the love of your holy mother and to tell me that you love me even if it’s not true, ok? (The pen doesn’t write very well with so many tears.)

Alejandro remained by her side for more than a year into her convalescence, then left for Europe in the early spring of 1927. In her passionate dispatches, she never minimized her pain, but she never let it dominate her stubborn will for life.

Four months into their separation, having just completed one of her tenderest self-portraits, she writes:

My Alex: I still can’t tell you I’m doing better, but nevertheless I feel much happier than before, I have so much hope of getting better by the time you return that you shouldn’t be sad on my account for a single moment. I almost never lose hope now… There is no reason for you to suffer for me, everything I tell you in my letters is because I’m such a “cry-baby” and at the end just a young girl, but it is not that much, it is fine to suffer a little, don’t you think, my Alex?… You are coming back, what more could I ask for? You can’t imagine how marvelous it is to wait for you with the same serenity as the portrait… Write to me a little bit more, your letters really heal me.

Two weeks later, amidst worries about having enough money for another X-ray, she writes:

You can’t imagine with what pleasure I would give all my life just to kiss you. I think this time I have really suffered, so I must deserve it.

[…]

Your Frieda
(I adore you)

Seven months into Alejandro’s absence, she names the terror of abandonment trembling in every lover’s heart even in the closest proximity, for between two people there is always an ocean in which to meet or drown:

Life is ahead of us… In Coyoacán the nights are amazing… and the sea, a symbol in my portrait, synthesizes life, my life.

You haven’t forgotten me?

It would almost be unfair, don’t you think?

She had first voiced this fear a season earlier, writing to him at the peak of summer:

Alex: I’m going to confess one thing: there are moments that I think you’re forgetting me, but you aren’t, right? You couldn’t fall in love with the Mona Lisa.

But he did. Alejandro broke off the relationship shortly after returning to Mexico that autumn. Frida may have intuited it, but she was not prepared, the way we never really are even for the blows we feel coming. Barely twenty, her body shattered and her heart broken, she found herself reeling with that most difficult, most eternal question: Where does love go when it goes?

It went where it always goes — into the totality of her person. We make everything we make with everything we are, everything we have touched that has touched us back in that tender and terrifying contact with life we call experience.

Several months later, Frida completed a portrait of Alejandro looking plaintive, almost fragile, and inscribed it at the top:

Alex, with affection I painted your portrait, that he is one of my comrades forever, Frida Kahlo, 30 years later.

Frida did not live another thirty years. But this young love that had shaped her life, possibly saved it, pulsates beneath every painting she ever painted to tell the centuries what it is like to be alive, with all the pain and passion of it — an inextinguishable reminder that every love we have ever loved, every loss we have ever suffered, becomes part of us, part of what we have to give; for, in the end, how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are.

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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But the flamboyance of flamingos does not come from within — it is acquired the way experience and life-history color a person. The story of how pink traveled from volcanos to wings is the story of life on Earth, the beauty of it and the bewilderment of it, forever defying and dismantling the categories in which we try to contain it.

When Carl Linnaeus laid the foundation of biological nomenclature in 1735, he divided the living world into two categories: Regnum Animale (the “animal kingdom”) and Regnum Vegetabile (the “vegetable kingdom”). Although microscopes had existed for more than a century, he excluded single-celled organisms, unsure where to place them. (It is the nature of the human animal to dismiss and negate what it cannot classify.) More than a century later, the year he coined the word ecology, the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a third category for microscopic organisms, which he called Protista — “the kingdom of primitive forms.” (Haeckel was so bewildered by the multifariousness and complexity of fungi, which defy our basic intuitions about life, that he kept moving them between Plantae and Protista, finally settling them in the latter; it would be another century until they were given their very own kingdom or, in the more representative term of mycologist Giuliana Furci, “kindom.”)

Pulsating beneath all these distinctions was the fundamental assumption that all organisms are either eukaryotes, ranging from the unicellular paramecium to the immense blue whale, or prokaryotes — bacteria and all remaining microscopic life-forms.

But then, in 1977, as the Voyager sailed into space carrying the Golden Record meant to represent life on our Pale Blue Dot, the microbiologist and biophysicist Carl Woese made a startling discovery — the tiny organisms found in volcanic hot springs, whose ribosomal DNA sequences he was investigating, turned out to be a wholly different microbial life-form sharing as little with bacteria as it did with eukaryotes. He called it Archaea. Suddenly, the tree of life had a third branch.

Born with grey plumage, flamingos spend the first years of their life feasting almost exclusively on brine shrimp — aquatic crustaceans that in turn feast almost exclusively on organisms containing the same carotenoid pigments that remain in autumn leaves when chlorophyll falls away. Haloarchaea — extremophile Archaea that thrive in hypersaline environments — are a chief source of these carotenoids in shrimp. (They are also why Himalayan salt is pink.) Unperturbed by the unremitting sun exposure of open water, these tiny titans of survival protect their DNA from UV radiation by synthesizing a red carotenoid that makes its way across the metabolic Rube Goldberg machine into the feathers of flamingos.

It is not simply that flamingos metabolize archaea, digesting them to turn their pigments into plumage coloration — modern molecular analysis reveals that archaea still live intact in the feathers of flamingos, perhaps the way our own past moves through us, lives in us, colors our present with the hue of something deeper than memory, something shimmering with the mystery of what makes life alive.

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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And so, a poem.

CORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART
by Maria Popova

Why all the threadbare drama,
the stale catastrophism
of calling it broken?
It still beats,
     doesn’t it,
still trembles at the sight
of fog flowing through the forest
like a slow dance song.
It was only
     dislocated,
lost its locus
for a while,
popped out of the socket
of good sense.
There is no one
to pick up the pieces
     because there are no pieces.
Only the firm, fastidious
hand of time
to slide it back
     into place.

And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.

We are here
to lose our way.

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.