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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

donating = loving

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

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“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).

Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.

In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.

When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.

Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend:

It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.

In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius:

I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.

The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas:

Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.

“Do not go gentle into that good night” remains, indeed, Thomas’s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive — both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas’s life.

By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques — work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.

At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind’s eye.

In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:

For more beloved writers reading their own work, see Mary Oliver reading from Blue Horses, Adrienne Rich reading “What Kind of Times Are These,” J.R.R. Tolkien singing “Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll,” Frank O’Hara reading his “Metaphysical Poem,” Susan Sontag reading her short story “Debriefing,” Elizabeth Alexander reading “Praise Song for the Day,”, Dorothy Parker reading “Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom,” and Chinua Achebe reading his little-known poetry.

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.

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.

Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.

The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”

Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.

In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:

All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.

In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”

Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:

The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.

(This is precisely why learning something is the best way to lift yourself up when the world gets you down.)

A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:

Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.

In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.

Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:

My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.

[…]

I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.

A century later, George Orwell would embody the same truth about the spirit, growing a rose garden while dismantling totalitarianism.

Couple with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Hawthorne on how to look and really see.

donating = loving

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

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

In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.

Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some unrecorded heartbreak in her volcanic relationship with Susan, the first attack of epilepsy — but the most intriguing theory came nearly a century after the poet encrypted these words.

In 1951, after years of research and travel to various archives, the scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a wholly novel candidate for the “terror” of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon — a newly widowed young woman Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell into an intense romantic and possibly physical affair with the enticing newcomer before Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Emily would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry.

Their story is a mosaic assembled from various surviving documents, as direct as Emily’s letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate’s favorite books.

In the late winter of 1859, Kate descended a sleigh in her fashionable black hat and widow’s veil in front of her former classmate’s home in Amherst. Almost immediately, Susan introduced her to the beloved auburn-haired friend who lived across the hedge in the brick house painted deep red and who had been hearing of her for nearly a decade. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met the tall, handsome woman with the penetrating dark eyes, musical voice, and lively passion for literature and astronomy, she was instantly entranced.

During the three weeks of Kate’s first stay in Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, became inseparable. They took long walks with Emily’s dog, Carlo, read Aurora Leigh aloud to each other, and spent evenings at the piano as Emily improvised — “weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration,” Kate would remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her — “Goliath,” the petite poet would call her.

When Kate left to go home, Emily beckoned her for another visit to Amherst:

I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don’t wait till I land, for I’m going ashore on the other side.

Emily’s early letters to Kate pulsate with electricity. Writing weeks after they first met, she tries to disguise with playfulness the push-and-pull of irrepressible, frustrated longing in the code language of botany that was her first poetic tongue:

I never missed a Kate before. . . . Sweet at my door this March night another Candidate — Go Home! We don’t like Katies here! — Stay! My heart votes for you, and what am I indeed to dispute her ballot –? What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the Sun? — When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute?… Will you still come?… Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear — but what it lacks in size, it gains in fadelessness, — Many can boast a hollyhock, but few can bear a rose! … So I rise, wearing her — so I sleep, holding, — Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower. —

In the late winter of 1860, they spent a night together in Emily’s bedroom — unrecorded, inarticulable, except perhaps in verse:

Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie —
When, stirring, for Belief’s delight,
My Bride had slipped away —

If ’twas a Dream — made solid — just
The Heaven to confirm —
Or if Myself were dreamed of Her —
The power to presume —

Several weeks after that momentous night, Emily would channel this precious perishability in a letter to Kate:

Finding is slow, facilities for losing so frequent, in a world like this, I hold with extreme caution. A prudence so astute may seem unnecessary, but plenty moves those most, dear, who have been in want… Were you ever poor? I have been a Beggar.

Whatever took place between them, they never addressed it overtly — it is always impossible to articulate the possibility between two people, but especially in a time and place that confined the possible to such narrow parameters for permissible love. Feeling the impossibility of it all, Emily shuddered with anticipatory loss:

Kate, Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phantom niche — I touch your hand — my cheek your cheek — I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred?… There is a subject, dear, on which we never touch.

Little is known of Kate’s side of the experience. None of her letters to Emily survive. (The poet had instructed her sister that all letters be burned after her death — a request which Lavinia Dickinson promptly obliged before discovering the trove of poems that made her realize her sister’s correspondence might have immense literary value.) But Kate — who signed many of her surviving letters to other correspondents “Thomas” or “Tommy” — did have an unambiguous and lifelong proclivity for romantic attachment to women, culminating later in life with a longtime relationship with a young Englishwoman.

Perhaps at twenty-eight, she was simply not ready to so radically dismantle the superstructure of her life as she knew it. In April 1861, she severed the relationship with Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the devastation was complete and lifelong. Many years later, Emily would write to Higginson:

If ever you lost a friend… you remember you could not begin again because there was no world —

A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.

In the immediacy of the loss, she interpolated between hope and despair, as we all do when discomposed by a sudden abandonment. A month after her “terror,” which might just be her painful acceptance that Kate was gone, her friend Samuel Bowles — whose newspaper had printed one of the only four poems published in her lifetime — came to Amherst. She refused to see him. Most of her letters from that period were burned, but Samuel was one of her most intimate friends — it is likely that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. “We tell a Hurt to cool it,” she would write in a poem. Among his own letters is one from that summer to a recipient whose name has been scrubbed — an extraordinary letter of consolation to somebody anguishing with unrequited love, somebody who may well have been Emily:

My dear — :

… You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give — what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with… One will not give us what we give them — others will more than we can or do give them — and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships — it is so with everybody’s.

Emily was not ready to let go of the love she had given, of the hope that it might one day be returned, though alchemised and transmuted into a different form. She wrote to Kate plaintively:

How many years, I wonder, will sow the moss upon them, before we bind again, a little altered, it may be, elder a little it will be, and yet the same, as suns which shine between our lives and loss, and violets.

That season, she composed her most famous poem — read here by twenty-first-century children who are yet to have their loves and losses, and animated by artist Olga Ptashnik:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —

I’ve heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.

“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.

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.

“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?”

In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spirit of a creature — a distinction between scientific fact and poetic truth, between ways of looking and styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture an epoch later with her astute observation that while both celebrate what they describe, science objectifies the universe by describing it from the outside, while poetry subjectifies it by describing it from the inside, and life is the land of subjects.

With her short, searing insistence on the subject in the specimen, Dickinson was warning us that despite all the facts we may discover about birds in the epochs to come — now we know how they fly and how they see and what they dream about — the truth about them, the poetic truth we may call spirit, will always remain elusive, irreducible, unreachable by means of reason, reachable only by love. A century after her, Rachel Carson — a scientist who wrote like a poet and sparked the modern environmental movement with her prophetic, poetic Silent Spring — would insist that an indestructible sense of wonder is our mightiest antidote to the silencing of the birds that augurs the erasure of nature. We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of wonder as well as its fulcrum is not knowledge — none of our discoveries have kept three billion birds from vanishing between Carson’s lifetime and ours — but love.

It is love that radiates from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s exquisite Book of Birds (public library) — a passionate and rigorous subjectifying of the wonder of the winged, seven years in the making, part field guide and part ode, animated by an I/Thou relationship that implicates both reader and read by addressing each bird directly as a subject rather than explicating an object. In this luminous lacuna between conservation and consecration, what emerges is the spirit in the species, the numinous in the named, the isness in the itness.

The foreword casts the spell and hands the summons:

What is lost when birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, in their own splendour and right. And for humans — language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, lifts of the spirit, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place-makers, memory-keepers, calendars and clocks. They stitch the world’s parts together: earth to sky, river to woodland, mountain to sea, country to country, hemisphere to hemisphere.

In the tradition of their Lost Spells and Lost Words (one of my all-time favorite books), the lyrical essays — tender as a lullaby, urgent as a warning bell — are accompanied by almost unbearably beautiful paintings, emanating a portrait’s reverence for reality and an icon’s fidelity to the poetic truth beyond the material fact.

What David Whyte did for words, Robert Macfarlane has done for birds; what Rachel Carson said of the sea — “no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry” — can be said, must be said of birds, and no one has drawn out their poetry more truthfully, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, his rhythmic incantations summoning the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their fierce, fragile wonder: the gannet, “graceful and precise as an equation”; the avocet, who “seen at sunset in silhouette seems blown of glass — as if a breath of wind would leave her in shards amid the reeds”; the bar-tailed godwit traversing six thousand miles between Alaska and Australia in “a single, epic super-flight”; the black-throated diver crying out his prehistoric “fog-born ululation”; the eider, who “can fly as fast as a cheetah can run” on wings feathered with fibers so delicate that they “make angora feel dense as lead”; the tawny owl, her eyes “pure night, two twelve-bore barrels, a pair of shadow planets.”

Punctuating these love letters to particular species are the seven wonders of the bird world — Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration — each essayed into a revelation between the scientific and the spiritual. Pulsating through it all is a beckoning to see the world in a bird more clearly in order to love it more deeply:

Noticing is the first step to naming; knowing the first step to knowing both things and the relations between things. Knowledge may lead to wonder, wonder to care, care to action, action to change. But this is a fragile chain, easily broken — its links must be reforged and rejoined, over and over.

How lucky we are that there are still those unresigned people — stubborn enough, loving enough — who keep reforging and rejoining the chain with links more beautiful, more durable than we could have imagined, lustrous with that indestructible sense of wonder in which lies our only salvation, in which resounds our most everlasting song.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

“Our emotional life maps our incompleteness,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her luminous letter of advice to the young. “A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.” Anger, indeed, is one of the emotions we judge most harshly — in others, as well as in ourselves — and yet understanding anger is central to mapping out the landscape of our interior lives. Aristotle, in planting the civilizational seed for practical wisdom, recognized this when he asked not whether anger is “good” or “bad” but how it shall be used: directed at whom, manifested how, for how long and to what end.

This undervalued soul-mapping quality of anger is what English poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in a section of Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (public library) — the same breathtaking volume “dedicated to words and their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” which gave us Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak.

Many of Whyte’s meditations invert the common understanding of each word and peel off the superficial to reveal the deeper, often counterintuitive meaning — but nowhere more so than in his essay on anger. Whyte writes:

ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

Such a reconsideration renders Whyte not an apologist for anger but a peacemaker in our eternal war with its underlying vulnerability, which is essentially an eternal war with ourselves — for at its source lies our tenderest, timidest humanity. In a sentiment that calls to mind Brené Brown’s masterful and culturally necessary manifesto for vulnerability — “Vulnerability,” she wrote, “is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” — Whyte adds:

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability… Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics.

One need only think of Van Gogh — “I am so angry with myself because I cannot do what I should like to do,” he wrote in a letter as he tussled with mental illness — to appreciate Whyte’s expedition beyond anger’s surface tumults and into its innermost core: profound frustration swelling with a sense of personal failure. (Hannah Arendt captured another facet of this in her brilliant essay on how bureaucracy breeds violence — for what is bureaucracy if not the supreme institutionalization of helplessness?)

With remarkable intellectual elegance and a sensitivity to the full dimension of the human spirit, Whyte illuminates the vitalizing underbelly of anger:

Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.

In a related meditation, Whyte considers the nature of forgiveness:

FORGIVENESS is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw center, to reimagine our relation to it.

Echoing Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s historic dialogue on forgiveness, Whyte — who has also asserted that “all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness” — explores the true source of forgiveness:

Strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks — after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.

Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

This question of maturity, so intimately tied to forgiveness, is the subject of another of Whyte’s short essays. Echoing Anaïs Nin’s assertion that maturity is a matter of “unifying” and “integrating,” he writes:

MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.

Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even, living only two out of the three.

Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.

Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.

Maturity, Whyte seems to suggest, becomes a kind of arrival at a sense of enoughness — a willingness to enact what Kurt Vonnegut considered one of the great human virtues: the ability to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” Whyte writes:

Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur.

Consolations, it bears repeating, is an absolutely magnificent read — the kind that reorients your world and remains a compass for a lifetime. Complement it with Whyte on ending relationships and breaking the tyranny of work-life balance.

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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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Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy. After a Japanese attack on a steamship during WWII killed his wife and young son, he left the navy and moved to Hong Kong, where he eventually met and married a nurse.

Together, they began a new life as dairy farmers in the English countryside, on a farm without electricity or running water. Eventually, they had a daughter, then a son, then a pair of twins.

After nearly two decades on the farm, the family had an unorthodox idea for how to best educate their children, how to show them what a vast and wondrous place the world is, full of all kinds of different people and all kinds of different ways of living: They sold everything they had, bought a schooner, and set out to sail around the world, departing on January 27, 1971.

After more than a year at sea, just after sailing through the Panama Canal to begin their Pacific crossing, killer whales attacked the schooner 200 miles off the coast of Galapagos, sinking it in less than a minute. They piled into the inflatable life-raft, managed to grab a piece of sail from the water, and rigged it to the 9-foot dinghy they had on board to use it as a tugboat for the raft now housing six human beings.

Suddenly, they were a tiny speck in Earth’s largest ocean, enveloped by the vast open emptiness of infinite horizons. With no nautical instruments or charts, powered only by their makeshift sail, they had no hope of reaching land. Their only chance was rescue by a passing vessel. Given the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, it was an improbability bordering on a miracle.

Seventeen days into their life as castaways, the raft deflated. All they had now was the narrow fiberglass dinghy, its rim barely above the water’s edge with all the human cargo.

By that blind resilience life has of resisting non-life, they persisted, eating turtle meat and sweet flying fish that landed in the bottom of the boat, drinking rainwater and turtle blood. Storms lashed them. Whales menaced them. Thirst and hunger subsumed them. Their bodies were covered in salt-water sores. Enormous ships passed within sight, missing their cries for help. But they pressed on, hoping against hope, toiling in every conceivable way to keep the spark of life aflame.

After 37 days as castaways, chance smiled upon them — a Japanese fishing boat spotted their distress flare and came to their rescue. Their tongues were so swollen from dehydration that they could hardly thank their saviors.

Throughout it all, Dougal kept a journal in case they lived — an act itself emblematic of that touching and tenacious optimism by which they survived. He later drew on it to publish an account of the experience, then distilled his learnings in Sea Survival: A Manual (public library).

Nested amid the rigorously practical advice is a poetic sentiment that applies not only to survival at sea but to life itself — a soulful prescription for what it takes to live through those most trying periods when you feel like a castaway from life, beyond the reach of salvation, depleted of hope.

He writes:

I have no words to offer which may comfort the reader who is also a castaway, except that rescue may come at any time but not necessarily when you expect it; and that even if you give up hope, you must never give up trying, for, as the result of your efforts, hope may well return and with justification.

Echoing Einstein’s views on free will and personal responsibility, he adds:

You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative, as is good or bad management.

This simple advice reads like a Zen koan, to be rolled around the palate of the mind, releasing richer and richer meaning, deeper and deeper assurance each time.

Complement with John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope, Jane Goodall on its deepest wellspring, and some thoughts on hope and the remedy for despair from Nick Cave and Gabriel Marcel, then zoom out to the civilizational scale and revisit Road to Survival — that wonderful packet of wisdom on resilience from the forgotten visionary who shaped the modern environmental movement.

Thanks, Nina

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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“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease — for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.

The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit — James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.

In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon — an old high school friend of his — to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book Nothing Personal (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits — of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age- and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope — are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:

Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.

It is a fearful speculation — or, rather, a fearful knowledge — that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.

Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds:

Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it — life — one more time?

After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay — lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” — Baldwin continues:

I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.

That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life — to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.

In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes:

For, perhaps — perhaps — between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct — I believe — causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death.

And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith — so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM:

At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor — the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self — death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. — And many of us perish then.

What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers:

But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality — oneself — which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again.

Baldwin — whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death — wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try — we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.

Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours:

Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost.

More than half a century later, Nothing Personal remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book.

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 things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the great love, the day we finally find ourselves — awaiting something or someone to deliver us from the tedium of life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of life-as-it-could-be, all the while vacating the only sanctuary from the storm of uncertainty raging outside the frosted windows of the here and now.

It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living.

If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.

That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) explores in his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, found in his collection The Better Sort (public library | public domain) — the story of a man whose entire life, from his earliest memory, has been animated by “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” something fated “sooner or later to happen” and, in happening, to either destroy him or remake his life. He calls it “the thing,” imagines it as a “beast in the jungle” lying in wait for him, and spends his life lying in wait for it, withholding his participation in the very experiences that might have that transformative effect — leaping after some great dream, risking his life for some great cause, falling in love.

It is, of course, a dramatized caricature of our common curse — the treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enoughness, to render our lives worthy of having been lived.

James writes:

Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

When the protagonist meets a woman to whom his entire being pulls him, he begins spending time with her but ultimately keeps her heart at arm’s length, too afraid to love her, telling himself that he is protecting her from his fatalistic fate, failing to recognize that love itself is that great force of self-annihilation and transformation, “rare and strange” even as the most commonplace human experience.

When Time forecloses possibility, as Time always ultimately does, he arrives at his final reckoning at her tombstone:

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself… The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips… This was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened — it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

Complement with Anaïs Nin on how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living and Mary Oliver on the key to living with maximum aliveness, then revisit Henry James’s equally brilliant sister Alice on how to live fully while dying.

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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It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of suffering. We say we “fall” in love precisely because we know we can get bruised, know that the trap door it opens beneath our feet hurls us into depths we are entirely unprepared to fathom.

The interesting question, the transformative question, is what happens after the fall.

“It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth,” Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) writes in his long, passionate, searching essay on falling in love. “There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience.” He is writing out of his own experience: Twenty-seven and struggling to make a name for himself as a writer, he had fallen painfully in love with the radical Fanny Obsourne — ten years his senior, still married to the philandering husband she left, attending art school in Paris with her daughter. They would eventually marry and magnify each other’s lives beyond all imagination. (“Without Fanny’s influence,” Camille Peri writes in her excellent biography of the two, “Louis might now be a forgotten man of letters instead of one of the greatest voices in Scottish literature.”)

Love, Stevenson argues, is the only experience that truly astonishes us, jolt us awake from the slumber of preconception and expectation. And when it does, “it is not without something of the nature of dismay” that we look upon our new position — discomposed, disoriented, out of control. He writes:

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.

That feeling, Stevenson reflects, infuses one’s sense of being with “a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be.” And yet at the center of something so concrete, so palpable, is a mystery:

It is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person’s experience. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

What makes love astonishing is precisely the way it blindsides us, the way it cannot be willed or achieved or won on merit. He writes:

There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person’s spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every one to fall in love… Many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do there cease and determine.

And yet love is not a matter of persuasion. In a sense, the declaration of it becomes superfluous when the fact of it is self-evident and mutual. It is, Stevenson observes, something we must simply show up for, with passion and patience entwined. He outlines the discovery, the deepening, the development of love past “the simple accident of falling in love”:

Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other’s eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared.

To remain in love, Stevenson argues in another essay, two people “must bring kindness and goodwill” to life beyond the fall. He considers the single most important element of lasting love, which is also the greatest kindness we can give each other and the most durable gesture of goodwill:

Veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion — that is the truth which makes love possible… With our chosen friends… and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love’s essence)… we must strive and do battle for the truth.

A century later, Adrienne Rich would sharpen this sentiment in her timeless definition of love as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

Couple with Stevenson on what makes life worth living, then revisit Roxane Gay on loving vs. being in love, Kahlil Gibran on how to weather the uncertainties of love, and Hannah Arendt on how to live with its central fear of loss.

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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“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her exquisite manifesto for the magic of real human conversation. Each word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the mycelial web of invisible connections undergirding our emotional lives — the way “sadness” shares a Latin root with “sated” and originally meant a fulness of experience, the way “holy” shares a Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things.

Because we know their power, we ask of words to hold what we cannot hold — the complexity of experience, the polyphony of voices inside us narrating that experience, the longing for clarity amid the confusion. There is, therefore, singular disorientation to those moments when they fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language turn out too small to contain emotions at once overwhelmingly expansive and acutely specific.

John Koenig offers a remedy for this lack in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (public library) — a soulful invitation to “get to work redefining the world around us, until our language more closely matches the reality we experience.”

The title, though beautiful, is misleading — the emotional states Koenig defines are not obscure but, despite their specificity, profoundly relatable and universal; they are not sorrows but emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capacity for affirming the joy of being alive: maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”), apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin”), the wends (“the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations”), anoscetia (“the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'”), dès vu (“the awareness that this moment will become a memory”).

Koenig composites his imaginative etymologies from a multitude of sources: names and places from folklore and pop culture, terms from chemistry and astronomy, the existing lexicon of languages living and dead, from Latin and Ancient Greek to Japanese and Māori. He writes:

In language, all things are possible. Which means that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is too obscure to define. We just have to do it.

[…]

Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.

There are various words addressing the maddening uncertainty of the two fundamental dimensions of human life: time and love.

ÉNOUEMENT
n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.

French énouer, to pluck defective bits from a stretch of cloth + dénouement, the final part of a story, in which all the threads of the plot are drawn together and everything is explained. Pronounced “ey-noo-mahn.”

QUERINOUS
adj. longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; wishing there were some way to know ahead of time whether this is the person you’re going to wake up next to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of having to count them out one by one, quietly hoping your streak continues.

Mandarin 确认 (quèrèn), confirmation. Twenty thousand days is roughly fifty-five years. Pronounced “kweh-ruh-nuhs.”

There are words that reckon with the challenges of self-knowledge.

AGNOSTHESIA
n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

Ancient Greek ἄγνωστος (ágnōstos), not knowing + διάθεσις (diáthesis), condition, mood. Pronounced “ag-nos-thee-zhuh.”

ZIELSCHMERZ
n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.

German Ziel, goal + Schmerz, pain. Pronounced “zeel-shmerts.”

There are words that anchor us in both the smallness and the grandeur of existence, its fierce fragility, its devastating beauty; words tasked with holding the hardest truth — that we are children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence, living with only marginal and mostly illusory control over the circumstances of our lives and other people’s choices, forever vulnerable to the accidents of a universe insentient to our hopes.

GALAGOG
n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.

From galaxy, a gravitationally bound system of millions of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”

CRAXIS
n. the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.

Latin crāstinō diē, tomorrow + praxis, the process of turning theory into reality. Pronounced “krak-sis.”

SUERZA
n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.

Spanish suerte, luck + fuerza, force. Pronounced “soo-wair-zuh.”

MAHPIOHANZIA
n. the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the burden of your own weight, which you’ve been carrying your entire life without a second thought.

Lakota mahpiohanzi, “a shadow caused by a cloud.” Pronounced “mah-pee-oh-han-zee-uh.”

Emerging from the various entries is a reminder, both haunting and comforting, that despite how singular our experience feels, we are all grappling with just about the same core concerns; that our time is short and precious; that all of our confusions are a single question, the best answer to which is love.

Couple The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows with Consolations — poet and philosopher David Whyte’s lovely meditations on the deeper meanings of everyday words — then revisit artist Ella Frances Sanders’s illustrated dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world and poet Mary Ruefle’s chromatic taxonomy of sadnesses.

donating = loving

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

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We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in a ChatGPT query. That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.

Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) leavens the onus and magnifies the gift in a wonderful passage from her 1975 essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” later included in her altogether magnificent collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library).

With an eye to the human subject as the beating heart of the reckoning with life we call art, she writes:

What good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn’t that mankind is all that important. I don’t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don’t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential… And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness.

In this sense, the meaning of life is less like a postulate than like a poem. Half a lifetime later, Le Guin would make a beautiful distinction between how science explicates the universe and poetry implicates it. Knowing that we are implicated in the universe and implicate it in ourselves, touching that knowledge, holding it at the center of our lives, may be the full stop beyond the question of meaning.

Complement with other beautiful perspectives on the meaning of life from Mary Oliver, Oliver Sacks, Loren Eiseley, Maya Angelou, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then revisit Le Guin on how to live fully.

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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“I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak once said in an interview. “I don’t write for children,” he told Colbert. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” This sentiment — the idea that designating certain types of literature as “children’s” is a choice entirely arbitrary and entirely made by adults — has since been eloquently echoed by Neil Gaiman, but isn’t, in fact, a new idea.

On March 8, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973), celebrated as one of the greatest fantasy writers in history, gave a lecture titled “Fairy Stories,” eventually adapted into an essay retitled “On Fairy-Stories” and included in the appendix to Tales from the Perilous Realm (public library). At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.”

Tolkien begins at the beginning, by defining what a fairy tale is:

A “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic — but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.

He then explores the relationship between fairy tales and language, denouncing Max Müller’s view of mythology as a “disease of language”:

Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power — upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

Like Sendak and Gaiman, Tolkien insists that fairy tales aren’t inherently “for” children but that we, as adults, simply decide that they are, based on a series of misconceptions about both the nature of this literature and the nature of children:

It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories. In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: “this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty.” But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: “this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy”; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate. Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags.

[…]

Among those who still have enough wisdom not to think fairy-stories pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connexion between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connexion between children’s bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.

He argues, instead, that the stereotype of fairy tales being associated with children and native to their world is “an accident of our domestic history”:

Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.

[…]

The nursery and schoolroom are merely given such tastes and glimpses of the adult thing as seem fit for them in adult opinion (often much mistaken). Any one of these things would, if left altogether in the nursery, become gravely impaired. So would a beautiful table, a good picture, or a useful machine (such as a microscope), be defaced or broken, if it were left long unregarded in a schoolroom. Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined; indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined.

Tolkien then moves on to the subject of fantasy, a frequently misunderstood faculty of the imagination.

The mental power of image-making is one thing, or aspect; and it should appropriately be called Imagination. The perception of the image, the grasp of its implications, and the control, which are necessary to a successful expression, may vary in vividness and strength: but this is a difference of degree in Imagination, not a difference in kind. The achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) “the inner consistency of reality,” is indeed another thing, or aspect, needing another name: Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation. For my present purpose I require a word which shall embrace both the Sub- creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image: a quality essential to fairy-story. I propose, therefore, to arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty-Dumpty, and to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notions of “unreality” (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed “fact,” in short of the fantastic. I am thus not only aware but glad of the etymological and semantic connexions of fantasy with fantastic: with images of things that are not only “not actually present,” but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there. But while admitting that, I do not assent to the depreciative tone. That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

He goes on to argue that, despite the many misconceptions that envelop it, fantasy is far more challenging an art than nonfiction, for it necessitates the creation of an elaborate, immersive world from scratch, without the crutch of reality:

Fantasy … is difficult to achieve. Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more sub-creative; but at any rate it is found in practice that “the inner consistency of reality” is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of “reality” with more “sober” material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains undeveloped; it is and has been used frivolously, or only half-seriously, or merely for decoration: it remains merely “fanciful.” Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough — though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

Tolkien makes a curious argument about the oil-and-water relationship between fantasy and drama, managing to slip in a subtle dig at none other than The Bard:

In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. … It is a misfortune that Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or “imagination” that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy. . . .

In Macbeth, when it is read, I find the witches tolerable: they have a narrative function and some hint of dark significance; though they are vulgarized, poor things of their kind. They are almost intolerable in the play. They would be quite intolerable, if I were not fortified by some memory of them as they are in the story as read. I am told that I should feel differently if I had the mind of the period, with its witch-hunts and witch-trials. But that is to say: if I regarded the witches as possible, indeed likely, in the Primary World; in other words, if they ceased to be “Fantasy.” That argument concedes the point. To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art.

Another misconception Tolkien debunks — speaking to Susan Sontag’s conviction that polarities only rob life of dimension — is the notion that the fantastical is somehow diametrically opposed to the rational:

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen.

Returning to his notion of the Secondary World driven by Secondary Belief, Tolkien contributes to history’s greatest definitions of art:

Art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief.

He then adds to the psychological functions of art by exploring the psychological functions of fairy tales, chief among which is their capacity for rebooting our chronically blunted attention:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.

[…]

Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.

The full fifteen-page essay, as well as the rest of Tales from the Perilous Realm, is well worth a read. Complement it with Tolkien’s little-known illustrations for the first edition of The Hobbit.

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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Ursula K. Le Guin believed that the great instrument of our works of the imagination, and of science fiction in particular, is “distancing” — “the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better” by exposing the “coherent complexity” we are part and revealing “reality translated to a higher plane, a more passionate intensity, than most of us can experience at all without the help of art or religion or profound emotion.” And yet given that the imagination of nature will always surpass our own because we are a figment of it, given that science is the instrument we have invented to decipher and translate the language in which nature imagines reality into being, then science itself can offer us this lens-clearing distancing without an ounce of fiction — nowhere more so than in pulling us back from the mundanity of our lives in order to behold with bewilderment the miraculousness, the fantastical improbability, of life itself; of what Le Guin called “the scene of our mortality.”

That is what physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores in a wonderful Atlantic essay contemplating the bright improbability of life, from the cosmic dice of star formation to the cellular roulette of biological conception. Having written so movingly about the poetic science of what happens when we die, he turns his sensitive intellect toward the poetic science of what had to happen so that we may live. With an eye to how difficult it is for us to regard ourselves as part of just another civilization that will go the way of the Aztecs and the Greeks, he reflects:

It is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all… Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe — each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

The fact of any one human being, he observes, is a triumph against the staggering odds that accompany every fertilization attempt — about a hundred thousand billion to one, numbers so immense that they bleed into abstraction we can’t apprehend. He offers a startling visualization:

If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

If hope is the work of believing that the improbable is possible — believing that the wildest bet can be the winning bet — then each of us is a living axiom of hope. Alan writes:

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous… From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

We don’t have a right to life, to this unbidden gift of chance, but we have a responsibility to it — one the poet and astronomer Rebecca Elson so perfectly termed “a responsibility to awe.” Agains the backdrop of our own improbability, even the subtlest posture of entitlement becomes absurd, anti-natural; the only adequate posture is to kneel in the “cosmic overwhelm,” saying over and over the shortest prayer there is: “Thanks.”

donating = loving

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

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“A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is the most indescribable of the arts, and that may be what makes it the most powerful — the creative force best capable of giving voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of containing them and expanding them at once. It is our supreme language for the exhilaration of being alive.

I have come upon no finer definition of music than philosopher Susanne Langer’s, who conceived of it as a laboratory for feeling in time. Time, indeed, is not only the raw material of music — the fundamental building block of melody and rhythm — but also its supreme gift to the listener. A song is a shelter in time, a shelter in being — music meets us at particular moments of our lives, enters us and magnifies those moments, anchors them in the stream of life, so that each time we hear the song again the living self is transported to the lived moment, and yet transformed.

That is what the uncommonly insightful painter, poet, and writer John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) explores in his essay “Some Notes on Song,” composed in the last months of his life and included in his altogether wonderful final collection Confabulations (public library).

Berger considers how music, in bridging the universal and the deeply personal, illuminates the meaning of intimacy:

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

It is the luscious corporeality of song that lends music its extraordinary powers of intimacy. In consonance with Richard Powers’s arresting observation that “the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,” Berger writes:

A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body… Again and again the song takes over the body of the singer, and after a while the body of the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song, are remembering and foreseeing.

A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. While it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension, which is uniquely theirs. A song fills the present, while it hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere. It leans forward, farther and farther. Without the persistence of this hope, songs would not exist. Songs lean forward.

[…]

A song borrows existent physical bodies in order to acquire, while it’s being sung, a body of its own.

Music is so embodied an experience because it is made of the same substance we ourselves are made of: time. With an eye to how “songs put their arms around linear time,” Berger adds:

The tempo, the beat, the loops, the repetitions of a song offer a shelter from the flow of linear time — a shelter in which future, present, and past can console, provoke, ironize, and inspire one another.

[…]

Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.

Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and the fascinating science of how music casts its spell on us, then savor Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” brought to life in a Spanish flashmob of 100 musicians.

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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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Long before the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks delineated the three essential elements of creativity, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captured this beautifully in a passage from his extraordinary meditation on mortality, copying out the “very necessary qualifications” of a great Persian storyteller from an unnamed book he was reading:

In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.

A generation before him, Rainer Maria Rilke offered a similar prescription for creativity to the young man asking his advice on how to be a poet:

For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.

Another epoch earlier, Walt Whitman distilled these eternal truths even further. Under the heading “Laws of Creation,” addressed to “strong artists and leaders… fresh broods of teachers… and coming musicians,” he considers the elemental material of creative work:

All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.

Whether the words be few or many, practical or poetic, emanating from them all is the same fundamental truth about the nature of creativity, demanding the same basic qualifications: nonjudgmental curiosity, an empathic imagination, and a willingness to live not flawlessly but fully.

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 commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.

In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.

In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.

Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.

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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It took years for Arthur Eddington’s dramatic eclipse expedition to confirm Einstein’s theory by watching light bend along the curvature of spacetime against the screen of totality rather than follow the straight lines Newton predicted.

“New theory of the universe,” the London Times proclaimed under the heading REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE, “Newtonian ideas overthrown.” But no one, not even Einstein himself, imagined that this purely theoretical revolution would have practical applications that would alter the fabric of human life — relativity was the paragon of “useless knowledge.”

Today, GPS governs everything from air traffic to world banking, relying heavily on relativity: A centerpiece of Einstein’s insight was that time dilations due to gravity and velocity make a clock in space run at a slightly different pace from a clock on Earth; the incredible accuracy of the atomic clocks on satellites, which must sync up with the clocks on Earth in order to yield coordinates, means that the minutest misalignment in time can result in immense dislocation in space.

Building on Hedy Lamarr’s technology for remote-controlling torpedoes, GPS was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense as a military technology two decades after Einstein’s death. (I wrote Traversal largely to reckon with this tendency of civilization to turn the most succulent fruits of our search for truth into grenades for power, and to celebrate its counterpoints, which are many and which in the end prevail — we must believe they do, or perish.)

But science, which is the reverence of nature, may have the last word.

Within two decades of its invention, Venezuelan cattle rancher turned biologist and conservationist Eduardo Alvarez pioneered the use of GPS as a tool of field biology. The wildlife tracking it made possible revolutionized conservation, shedding light on the movements and habits of animals too elusive or wide-ranging for close and consistent human observation.

It all began with a creature most of us have never encountered or even know exists.

Just out of school, Alvarez was charged with environmental evaluations of a dam-damaged river in Venezuela’s Guri Lake basin. In the decade he spent there, he kept hearing local stories about encounters with a living mystery of the rainforest — the rare harpy eagle.

So named by Linnaeus for the harpies of Greek mythology — half-woman, half-bird creatures personifying the storm winds — Harpia harpyja is our planet’s largest-taloned bird and one of its most vulnerable, its native habitat shrinking exponentially with the destruction of the Amazon.

Alvarez grew fascinated with this curious creature that looks like a character out of Lewis Carroll’s mind. Within a decade, he had founded a conservation program, pioneering GPS tracking to protect these strange, silent birds and their vanishing world.

Today, GPS is used in the conservation of an astonishing array of wildlife, from orcas to pandas. But, in an ouroboros kind of way, none of it would exist without birds: It was in the avian brain that evolution invented the dream-rich REM sleep as a laboratory for practicing the possible, and it was in a dream that Einstein arrived at the central insight of relativity. Every harpy eagle, every heron and every sparrow, carries on its wings the wondrous worlds we enter at night where we may find the deepest, most elusive truths.

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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It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have given shape to in laws and labels, weights and balances, hierarchies and categories. It has served us well, this instinct to categorize in order to contain, giving us music, the laws of planetary motion, and democracy. But it also pulsates beneath every ism we have ever invented, beneath every stereotype and every genocide, beneath every algorithm that reduces us to variables then adds them up to sell the sum of who we are, beneath all the parcels of preconception we trade daily and mistake the barter a for a genuine encounter with one another.

Two centuries ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) offered a pithy, powerful antidote to this double-edged instinct.

In a notebook entry from the autumn of 1836, penned shortly after his moving meditation on how not to waste your life, Hawthorne proposes a revision of our standard classification system for humanity — one that would rehumanize us with the simple awareness that what binds us is infinitely stronger than what divides us or by what affiliations we divide ourselves. He writes:

A new classification of society is to be instituted. Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps all through one darksome portal, — all his children.

What a magnificent way to remember that down where the spirit meets the bone, we are all facing the same struggle: to feel safe, to feel seen, to wrest some meaning and some marvel from the ephemeral bewilderment of being 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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I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction.

But cross it we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity necessary for improving our shortcomings, instead berating and belittling ourselves for our foibles with a special kind of masochism.

The undergirding psychology of that impulse is what the English psychoanalytical writer Adam Phillips explores in his magnificent essay “Against Self-Criticism”, found in his altogether terrific collection Unforbidden Pleasures (public library).

Phillips — who has written with beguiling nuance about such variousness of our psychic experience as the importance of “fertile solitude,” the value of missing out, and the rewards of being out of balance — examines how “our virulent, predatory self-criticism [has] become one of our greatest pleasures,” reaching across the space-time of culture to both revolt against and pay homage to Susan Sontag’s masterwork Against Interpretation. He writes:

In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire; and in which we praise whatever we can.

Our masochistic impulse for self-criticism, he argues, arises from the fact that ambivalence is the basic condition of our lives. In a passage that builds on his memorable prior reflections on the paradox of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance, Phillips considers Freud’s ideological legacy:

In Freud’s vision of things we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we love; wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize when we are frustrated — or when we are trying to describe our frustration, however obliquely — and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa. Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings.

[…]

Love and hate — a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us… Where there is devotion there is always protest… where there is trust there is suspicion.

[…]

We may not be able to imagine a life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in play.

But we have become so indoctrinated in this conscience of self-criticism, both collectively and individually, that we’ve grown reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured this pathology perfectly: “There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”) Phillips writes:

Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves.

[…]

Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.

But this self-critical part of ourselves, Phillips points out, is “strikingly unimaginative” — a relentless complainer whose repertoire of tirades is so redundant as to become, to any objective observer, risible and tragic at the same time:

Were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.

Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:

We are continually, if unconsciously, mutilating and deforming our own character. Indeed, so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we are like without it. We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic). Or, to put it differently, we can judge only what we recognize ourselves as able to judge. What can’t be judged can’t be seen. What happens to everything that is not subject to approval or disapproval, to everything that we have not been taught how to judge? … The judged self can only be judged but not known. [We] think that it is complicitous not to stand up to, not to contest, this internal tyranny by what is only one part — a small but loud part — of the self.

The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation as an accurate and complete representation of reality:

Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself.

[…]

We consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being.

With an eye to Freud’s legacy and the familiar texture of the human experience, Phillips makes his central point:

You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature — by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however apparently compelling it is. Indeed, the implication is — and here is Freud’s ongoing suspicion, or ambivalence, about psychoanalysis — that the more persuasive, the more compelling, the more authoritative, the interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should be. The interpretation might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no limit can be set.

Here, the ideological wink at Sontag becomes apparent. Indeed, the Sontag classic would’ve been better titled “Against an Interpretation,” for the essence of her argument is precisely that a single interpretation invariably warps and flattens any text, any experience, any cultural artifact. (How tragicomical to see, then, that a reviewer who complains that Phillips’s writing is too open to interpretation both misses his point and, in doing so, makes it.)

What Phillips is advocating isn’t the wholesale relinquishing of interpretation but the psychological hygiene of inviting multiple interpretations as a way of countering the artificial authority of the superego and loosening its tyrannical grip on our experience of ourselves:

Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and indeed interpretation itself.

Cuing in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “genius of self-reproach,” Phillips considers the cowardice of self-criticism:

Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea.

[…]

The first quarto of Hamlet has, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” while the second quarto has, “Thus conscience does make cowards.” If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we are all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience simply makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they are clearly different, conscience makes something of us; it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves. It is an internal artist, of a kind… The superego … casts us as certain kinds of character: it, as it were, tells us who we really are. It is an essentialist: it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions (when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation; no apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive; no good is purely and simply that).

Half a century after Eleanor Roosevelt’s memorable admonition that “when you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being,” Phillips urges us to question the superego’s despotic standards:

The superego is the sovereign interpreter… [It] tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the way it makes us suffer [and] take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment. That every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from.

Under this docile surrender to self-criticism, Phillips cautions, our conscience slips into cowardice:

Conscience … it is the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being. So when Richard III says, in the final act of his own play, “O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”, a radical alternative is being proposed. That conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and punitively forbidding part of ourselves; and yet this supposedly authoritative part of ourselves is itself a coward.

The most virulent and culturally contagious form of this cowardice, I would argue, is the resignation of cynicism — a resignation Phillips traces to the punitive system at the root of our culture’s moral framework, in which good behavior is incentivized largely through fear of punishment for bad behavior. This effort to foster the constructive by the destructive, he suggests, ends up turning us on ourselves as our fear of punishment metastasizes into self-criticism. (The cynic bypasses the constructiveness — that is, refuses to do anything about changing a situation for the better — and rushes straight to inflicting punishment, be it by insult or condemnation or that most cowardly and passive-aggressive fusion of the two, the eyeroll.)

Phillips returns to the central paradox, arguing for the importance of overinterpreting our self-critical conscience:

How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy… We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation.

Our self-criticism, to be sure, couldn’t be entirely eradicated — nor should it, for it is our most essential route-recalculating tool for navigating life. But by nurturing our capacity for multiple interpretations, Phillips suggests, self-criticism can become “less jaded and jading, more imaginative and less spiteful.”

Unforbidden Pleasures is a magnificent read in its entirety, exploring such strands of our psychic complexity as desire, disappointment, indifference, and idealism. Complement this particular portion with Albert Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, then revisit Phillips on why our capacity for boredom is essential for a full 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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