Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his pocket watch.

I still remember the afternoon I picked it up from under the four majestic ginkgo trees standing sentinel at the northern entrance of Varna’s Sea Garden — the iconic park perched on the cliffs of the Black Sea in my father’s hometown, where my grandparents took me each summer; I still remember the shock of seeing something so strange and beautiful, so unlike my notion of a leaf, and then the gasp of revelation: I suddenly realized that anything — a leaf, a life — can take myriad shapes beyond the standard template, can bend and broaden the Platonic ideal.

The improbable presence of four ancient trees native to Asia in Communist Bulgaria is a microcosm of the story of the ginkgo itself.

Earth’s oldest surviving tree genus, ginkgos were there before the dinosaurs existed, before Africa and South America parted. But after a long epoch of triumph over droughts and floods and mass extinctions, they came teetering on the brink of extinction for reasons entombed in mystery.

Jared Farmer chronicles their evolutionary trajectory in his altogether fascinating book Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (public library):

These ginkgophytes were, in their evolutionary heyday, the foremost innovators of the plant kingdom. They could shed leaves in winter, go dormant in low-light seasons, switch between stub growth and branch growth depending on conditions, and resprout from lignotubers — energy-storing roots — after disturbances. On a prior planet with relatively few tall plants and no fast-growing angiosperms, ginkgophytes achieved dominance as generalists.

As Darwin said, “rarity precedes extinction,” but the duration of rarity varies greatly. Ginkgo is a temporal outlier. Ginkgophytes survived multiple mass extinction events and outlived their original seed dispersers, which might have been carrion-eating animals attracted by the sweet-rotten smell of the fleshy seedcoats. After a long period of glory in the Mesozoic era, ginkgophytes declined in the Cenozoic and dwindled to one species by the ice ages. Ginkgoes disappeared from North America, then Europe, and finally Japan, becoming, by the Pleistocene epoch, mountain refugees in China.

It was there that itinerant Buddhist monks discovered them. Taken both by the trees’ medicinal properties, which had become a staple of Chinese medicine, and by their uncommon beauty, the monks began landscaping Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines all over Japan with ginkgos.

In 1683, the polymathic German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer set out for Japan under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company. He spent a decade there, then another decade writing the first Western study of Japan’s history, culture, and flora, which included the first botanical description of this singular tree he had encountered in Nagasaki. He gave it the awkward name Ginkgo, likely in error, as the original Japanese name should have been transliterated as ginkio, ginkjo, or ginkyo.

The printed word, like the Internet that succeeded it, is a copying machine for error. The spelling spread across botany until Linnaeus himself adopted it in his taxonomical Bible, relegating Ginkgo biloba — which he had never seen or studied himself — to the appendix of “obscure plants.”

Still, the ginkgo captivated the Western imagination with its striking geometry and its dramatic dance with chlorophyll, casting its spell on masses and monarchs alike.

Among the enchanted was the Duke of Weimer.

When Goethe — the Duke’s personal adviser — encountered the ginkgo at the royal gardens in 1815, it lit him up with a metaphor for the nature of love and the nature of the self, which he rendered in a poem penned in a letter to a friend he may or may not have been in love with, signed with a pressed ginkgo leaf.

GINKGO BILOBA
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In my garden’s care and favor
From the East this tree’s leaf shows
Secret sense for us to savor
And uplifts the one who knows.

Is it but one being single
Which as same itself divides?
Are there two which choose to mingle
So that each as one now hides?

As the answer to such question
I have found a sense that’s true:
Is it not my songs’ suggestion
That I’m one and also two?

Goethe was by then Europe’s most eminent poet, his verses the era’s equivalent of viral. Just as he had popularized the cloud names we use today, his poem contributed to the ginkgo craze that overtook Europe, then spread to America. Soon, horticulturalists and urban planners all over the Western hemisphere were saturating botanical gardens and city parks with ginkgos. Among them was Anton Novak — the Czech visionary who spent forty-two years dreaming up Bulgaria’s Sea Garden and building it into the most admired urban wilderness of the Balkans, so that a six-year-old girl can pick up a ginkgo leaf a century later and have a revelation that lasts a lifetime.

Meanwhile, geology was in its heyday and evolutionary theory was taking root. Scientists were unearthing ginkgo fossils hundreds of millions of years old, beginning to wonder how the first land plants evolved, beginning to suspect the ancient trees might hold a key to the enigma.

In 1894, Japanese botanist Sakugorō Hirase set out to study the reproduction of ginkgos, which are not “perfect flowers” and therefore produce male and female gametes on separate trees. Under a microscope, Hirase discovered the ginkgo spermatozoid and, with surprise, watched it arrive at the ovum by swimming through the fluid — motility inherited from the marine past of plants, establishing the ginkgo as a primordial species, the missing link between ferns and conifers, and a living fossil, like the dawn redwood, reaching across deep time to bridge our stratum of being with that of the dinosaurs.

Today, ginkgos line the streets of countless cities and rustle in parks all over the world. The oldest survivors in the wild have witnessed the births of major religions and the deaths of massive civilizations. Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Openheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love.

Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation. “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in balancing the equation between love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Nearly two centuries after Goethe, poet Howard Nemerov lenses this elemental unit of aliveness through the ginkgos:

THE CONSENT
by Howard Nemerov

Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.

What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.

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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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“On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) wrote in reflecting on the art of living in 1939, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Over the course of his long life, Miller sought ceaselessly to orient himself toward maximal fruitfulness, from his creative discipline to his philosophical reflections to his exuberant irreverence.

More than three decades later, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Miller wrote a beautiful essay on the subject of aging and the key to living a full life. It was published in 1972 in an ultra-limited-edition chapbook titled On Turning Eighty (public library), alongside two other essays. Only 200 copies were printed, numbered and signed by the author.

Miller begins by considering the true measure of youthfulness:

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

He later adds:

I have very few friends or acquaintances my own age or near it. Though I am usually ill at ease in the company of elderly people I have the greatest respect and admiration for two very old men who seem to remain eternally young and creative. I mean [the Catalan cellist and conductor] Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso, both over ninety now. Such youthful nonagenarians put the young to shame. Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middleclass men and women who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

Miller considers the downside of success — not the private kind, per Thoreau’s timeless definition, but the public kind, rooted in the false deity of prestige:

If you have had a successful career, as presumably I have had, the late years may not be the happiest time of your life. (Unless you’ve learned to swallow your own shit.) Success, from the worldly standpoint, is like the plague for a writer who still has something to say. Now, when he should be enjoying a little leisure, he finds himself more occupied than ever. Now he is the victim of his fans and well wishers, of all those who desire to exploit his name. Now it is a different kind of struggle that one has to wage. The problem now is how to keep free, how to do only what one wants to do.

He goes on to reflect on how success affects people’s quintessence:

One thing seems more and more evident to me now — people’s basic character does not change over the years… Far from improving them, success usually accentuates their faults or short-comings. The brilliant guys at school often turn out to be not so brilliant once they are out in the world. If you disliked or despised certain lads in your class you will dislike them even more when they become financiers, statesmen or five star generals. Life forces us to learn a few lessons, but not necessarily to grow.

Somewhat ironically, Anaïs Nin — Miller’s onetime lover and lifelong friend — once argued beautifully for the exact opposite, the notion that our personalities are fundamentally fluid and ever-growing, something that psychologists have since corroborated.

Miller returns to youth and the young as a kind of rearview mirror for one’s own journey:

You observe your children or your children’s children, making the same absurd mistakes, heart-rending mistakes often, which you made at their age. And there is nothing you can say or do to prevent it. It’s by observing the young, indeed, that you eventually understand the sort of idiot you yourself were once upon a time — and perhaps still are.

Like George Eliot, who so poignantly observed the trajectory of happiness over the course of human life, Miller extols the essential psychoemotional supremacy of old age:

At eighty I believe I am a far more cheerful person than I was at twenty or thirty. I most definitely would not want to be a teenager again. Youth may be glorious, but it is also painful to endure…

I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. (Picasso once said: “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”) By this time I had lost many illusions, but fortunately not my enthusiasm, nor the joy of living, nor my unquenchable curiosity.

And therein lies Miller’s spiritual center — the life-force that stoked his ageless inner engine:

Perhaps it is curiosity — about anything and everything — that made me the writer I am. It has never left me…

With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it.

Two years later, Miller would come to articulate this with even more exquisite clarity in contemplating the meaning of life, but here he contradicts Henry James’s assertion that seriousness preserves one’s youth and turns to his other saving grace — the capacity for light-heartedness as an antidote to life’s often stifling solemnity:

Perhaps the most comforting thing about growing old gracefully is the increasing ability not to take things too seriously. One of the big differences between a genuine sage and a preacher is gaiety. When the sage laughs it is a belly laugh; when the preacher laughs, which is all too seldom, it is on the wrong side of the face.

Equally important, Miller argues, is countering the human compulsion for self-righteousness. In a sentiment Malcolm Gladwell would come to complement nearly half a century later in advocating for the importance of changing one’s mind regularly, Miller writes:

With advancing age my ideals, which I usually deny possessing, have definitely altered. My ideal is to be free of ideals, free of principles, free of isms and ideologies. I want to take to the ocean of life like a fish takes to the sea…

I no longer try to convert people to my view of things, nor to heal them. Neither do I feel superior because they appear to be lacking in intelligence.

Miller goes on to consider the brute ways in which we often behave out of self-righteousness and deformed idealism:

One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.

But despite observing these lamentable human tendencies, Miller remains an optimist at heart. He concludes by returning to the vital merriment at the root of his life-force:

My motto has always been: “Always merry and bright.” Perhaps that is why I never tire of quoting Rabelais: “For all your ills I give you laughter.” As I look back on my life, which has been full of tragic moments, I see it more as a comedy than a tragedy. One of those comedies in which while laughing your guts out you feel your inner heart breaking. What better comedy could there be? The man who takes himself seriously is doomed…

There is nothing wrong with life itself. It is the ocean in which we swim and we either adapt to it or sink to the bottom. But it is in our power as human beings not to pollute the waters of life, not to destroy the spirit which animates us.

The most difficult thing for a creative individual is to refrain from the effort to make the world to his liking and to accept his fellow man for what he is, whether good, bad or indifferent.

The entire On Turning Eighty chapbook, which includes two other essays, is a sublime read. Complement it with Miller on writing, altruism, the meaning of life, what creative death means, and his 11 commandments of writing.

donating = loving

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

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

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

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

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

Rovelli writes:

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

donating = loving

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

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

The year of reading more and writing better is well underway with writing advice the likes of David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and various invaluable insight from other great writers.

Now comes Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) — anarchist, Second Life dweller, imaginary interviewer of the dead, sad soul — with eight tips on how to write a good short story, narrated by the author himself.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Complement with Vonnegut on the shapes of stories, the secret of happiness, his daily routine, and his life-advice to his children, then dive into this evolving omnibus of famous writers’ collected advice on the craft.

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.

“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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“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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Four billion years ago, in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the world where serpentine is forged, chemistry trembled with the promise of consciousness and matter began its long metabolic pilgrimage toward mind. Perhaps our saline cells remember it: how we, pilgrims of the possible, crawled out of the tide pools to climb the trees, then came down from the trees to live under a canopy of one hundred trillion synapses animated by the oceanic yearning to make meaning of our mortality. Perhaps the ocean, with its primeval drama of life and death, will always remind us of where we came from and where we are going. Rachel Carson knew this when she contemplated the peculiar effect of facing the open ocean, the way it fills us with “an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”

Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) captures this with uncommon poignancy in a 1960 talk titled “Love of Waters,” found in the posthumously compiled lecture collection Zen Rascal.

Writing from his studio — a floating library on an old ferryboat tied to the waterfront of Sausalito just north of San Francisco — Watts begins with a fine contribution to the canon of literature’s best reckonings with time:

Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it’s not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It’s timeless time. Because I know I’m listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years. And it takes you out of the world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks, for some reason or other, always seem to be marching, and armies never march to anything but doom. But there’s no marching rhythm in the motion of waves. It harmonizes with the breath. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It’s the breathing of eternity, like the Brahmā of Indian mythology, who inhales and exhales, manifests and dissolves the worlds endlessly, for ever. As a mere conception, that sounds appalling and monotonous — until you listen to the breaking and washing of waves.

Observing how all the waste and want of our civilization are “transformed in the beneficent presence of the sea,” he considers the mysterious mechanism of the transformation in what reads like a prose poem:

Perhaps it’s the quality of the light, especially early in the morning and towards the evening, when the distinction of sky and water becomes uncertain, when the whole of space becomes opalescent; the sort of pearly, luminous grey, and the rising or setting moon is straw yellow. In this light, all the rambling mess of sheds and junkyards is magical, blessed with the white cries of gulls, and with the patterns of masts and ropes and boats at anchor which put me in mind of landfalls a long way away, and of all the voyages of which one has dreamed.

And yet in the ocean, this poetic dimension of life coexists with the teeming brutality of predator and prey, the merciless drama of death. In a stirring reminder that the evolutionary is inseparable from the existential, Watts writes:

This is the paradox of the ocean. Sand, flying spray, pebbles and shells, driftwood, sparkling water, space incredibly luminous, with cloud banks along horizons underlying skies into which one’s imagination can reach forever. But under the surface of both sky and water there’s the grim business of preying. Men and birds against fish, fish against fish. The torturous process of life continuing by the painful transformation of one form into another.

[…]

There’s no way of getting around it, is there? The gull isn’t rapacious or greedy. It’s just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish. Men are transformations of wheat, chickens, and steers. And a love for the food is the agony of the food. To object to this inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is simply to object to existence. But, of course, we cannot help objecting when the time comes. Objecting to pain is pain.

With an eye to the price of consciousness, Watts observes that the human animal, with its ability to stand outside of itself and think about itself — that is, “to comment on life” — has curled into a profound confusion about its own existence: By standing aside from life in order to think about it, we evicted ourselves from it and, as Watts puts it, “found it alien.” A generation before Ursula K. Le Guin wrote so movingly about subject vs. object in the meaning of life, Watts invites us out of this dualistic self-expatriation from the living world:

Perhaps thinking about the world and objecting to its whole principle are simply two aspects of the same mechanism. The very words suggest, don’t they: perhaps we must object to everything that becomes an object. But aren’t there also times when we speak of something that we know as a subject — the subject of this book, the subject I am now studying? Would it be possible to subject to life instead of objecting to it? Is this playing with words, or does it possibly mean something? Now, if the gulls and the fish don’t philosophize, they have no consciousness of life being either good as a whole or bad as a whole. So when we philosophize and pity the poor fish, that’s just our problem. From its own standpoint, the world of animals and insects doesn’t find itself problematic at all. There’s not the slightest evidence to suggest it. On the contrary. I’m inclined to feel that all these creatures really swing and go on living up to the very moment when the game is no longer worth the candle. I’m quite sure they don’t lecture each other about their duties or worry about where they’re going when they’re dead.

[…]

To be human is precisely to have that extra circuit of consciousness which enables us to know that we know, and thus to take an attitude to all that we experience. The mistake that we’ve made — and this, if anything, is the fall of man — is to suppose that that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude to life as a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate from what we see. We seem to feel that the thing which knows that it knows is one’s essential self. That, in other words, our personal identity is entirely on the side of the commentator. We forget that self-consciousness is simply a subordinate part and instrument of our being; a sort of mental counterpart to the finger-thumb opposition of the human hand.

And which is you, the finger or the thumb? Look at the stages of differentiation. First: the organism from its environment — and with this, knowledge of the environment. Second: the distinction of knowing knowledge from knowledge itself. But all this, like the finger-thumb opposition, is a difference which does not divide. The thumb isn’t floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At their roots they’re joined. And at our roots we are joined to the whole subject of nature.

Watts ends with a mighty corrective for the far-reaching damage Descartes has done and does us still:

Of course, you may say that nature or the universe is just a big abstraction. But tell me: is an orange just an abstraction from its component molecules?

I think our difficulty is that our consciousness is too superficial, as if all our sensation were in the tips of the fingers and not in the palm. Our comments on life are insufficiently balanced by the clear sensation that what we are talking about as ourselves, and ourselves in a sense far more basic and real than that extra circuit which knows knowing… Were we as spatially distant from the Earth as one atom of an orange from another, I suppose we should be somewhere out by the Moon.

[…]

I think this is why I love the ocean. It’s the most difficult part of nature to mess up with emblems and symptoms of man’s dissociated consciousness. It’s an environment in which the awareness of our roots can awaken, in which space (so real because of the light and color) can be seen to be joining things instead of separating them. Yes. And I’ve just discovered that knocking on the wall of space and consciousness was my own heart beating.

Couple with astronomer Rebecca Elson’s spare and lovely poem “Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe,” then revisit Watts on becoming who you really are, learning not to think in terms of gain and loss, and the only real antidote to fear.

donating = loving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

donating = loving

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

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

“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief,” Emily Dickinson wrote as she calibrated love and loss. But she did not mean that it is good to ruminate and wallow — Dickinson so deftly played with the surface of meaning, so delighted in startling us into a flinch or furrow before plunging us into the deeper truths she fathomed. She meant, I think, that a love lost is grieved forever, whatever the nature of the loss — this she knew, and turned the ongoingness of it into a lifetime of art — but by looking back, we are reminded over and over that the sharp edge of grief does smooth over time, that today’s blunt ache is worlds apart from the first stabs, until grief becomes, as Abraham Lincoln wrote in his stirring letter of consolation to a bereaved young woman, “a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.”

And besides, what does it mean to lose a love anyway? We never lose people, not really. I don’t mean this in some mystical sense — let there be no confusion about what actually happens when we die. I don’t even mean it in the poetic sense. I am speaking strictly from the point of view of the mind emerging from the dazzling materiality of the brain — that majestic cathedral of cortex and synapse shaping every thought we have and every feeling we tremble with.

I am speaking of the paradox inside the brain:

On the one hand, we lose people all the time — to death, to distance, to differences; from the brain’s point of view, these varieties of loss differ not by kind but only by degree, triggering the same neural circuitry, producing sorrow along a spectrum of intensity shaped by the level of closeness and the finality of the loss.

On the other hand, no person we have loved is ever fully gone. When they die or vanish, they are physically no longer present, but their personhood permeates our synapses with memories and habits of mind, saturates an all-pervading atmosphere of feeling we don’t just carry with us all the time but live and breathe inside. Or the opposite happens, which is its own devastation — the physical body remains present, but the person we have known and loved, that safehouse of shared memories and trust, is gone — lost to mental illness, to addiction, to neurodegenerative disease.

In both cases, the brain is tasked with the slow, painful work of reconstituting its map of the world, so that the world makes sense again without the beloved person in it. Mapping, in fact, is not a mere metaphor but what is actually going on in the brain, since our orientation in spacetime and our autonoeic consciousness — the capacity for mental self-representation — share a cortical region.

Where the missed and missing person goes on the map, how the remapping actually unfolds, and what it takes to redraw the map in such a way that the world feels whole again are the questions coursing through The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (public library) by neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor — a pioneer in fMRI research since the technology first became available, who has devoted a quarter century to studying the particular neurophysiology of grief. She writes:

The brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one.

[…]

Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.

Making an important distinction between grief (“the intense emotion that crashes over you like a wave, completely overwhelming, unable to be ignored”) and grieving (an ongoing process punctuated by recurring moments of grief but stringing the moments into a larger trajectory), O’Connor adds:

Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.

[…]

Grief never ends, and it is a natural response to loss. You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even years after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience. But… even if the feeling of grief is the same, your relationship to the feeling changes. Feeling grief years after your loss may make you doubt whether you have really adapted. If you think of the emotion and the process of adaptation as two different things, however, then it isn’t a problem that you experience grief even when you have been grieving for a long time.

Although volumes have been written about the psychology, philosophy, and poetics of grief — none more piercing than the Joan Didion classic, none more practical than Seneca’s advice to his bereaved mother — there is something singularly revealing about exploring grief from the point of view of the brain beneath the mind, which must begin at the developmental beginning. Childhood — the brain’s most fertile growth period, when most of its major infrastructure is laid out — is also our training ground for loss. Every time we are separated from our primary caregivers, we experience scale-models of loss; every time they return, we learn that the loss of their presence is not a loss of their person, of their love. (A pause worth taking: every abandonment is a miniature of grief.)

In those formative attachments, we also learn the role we ourselves play in the relationship. Because, in building its relational world-map, the brain is constantly computing our loved ones’ position in three dimensions — time, space, and closeness, also known as psychological distance — we learn the causal link between our behavior and a caregiver’s position in the closeness dimension, just like we learn the causal link between our bodily movements and our position in space. When there is secure attachment, the child learns that throughout various surface disruptions, situational factors, and passing emotional weather patterns, there is a steadfast underlying closeness. O’Connor writes:

Closeness is partially under our control, and we learn how to maintain and nurture this closeness, but we also trust those who love us to maintain that closeness as well.

The obvious — and heartbreaking — corollary is that children who grow up without secure attachment experience the pangs of miniature grief much more readily throughout life, with each departure of a loved one, however temporary, because trusting a continuity of closeness does not come naturally to us. But no matter the formative experience of closeness, human beings are universally undone by the death of someone close — the final abandonment, at once the most abstract and the most absolute absence, in which our brains simply cannot compute the total removal of a person so proximate and important from the fabric of psychological spacetime.

Citing the disoriented devastation of a woman ghosted by a lover, O’Connor notes that “ghosting” is the neurologically appropriate word-choice for such abandonments — studied under fMRI, the brain of a person who has lost a loved one to “ghosting” behaves much the same way as the brain of a person who has lost a loved one to death, the mental map suddenly crumbled and torn to pieces. O’Connor describes the strange yet strangely sensical way in which the brain copes with this incomprehensible disruption of reality:

If your brain cannot comprehend that something as abstract as death has happened, it cannot understand where the deceased is in space and time, or why they are not here, now, and close. From your brain’s perspective, ghosting is exactly what happens when a loved one dies. As far as the brain is concerned, they have not died. The loved one has, with no explanation, stopped returning our calls — stopped communicating with us altogether. How could someone who loves us do that? They have become distant, or unbelievably mean, and that is infuriating. Your brain doesn’t understand why; it doesn’t understand that dimensions can simply disappear. If they don’t feel close, then they just feel distant, and you want to fix it rather than believe they are permanently gone. This (mis)belief leads to an intense upwelling of emotions.

[…]

If a person we love is missing, then our brain assumes they are far away and will be found later. The idea that the person is simply no longer in this dimensional world, that there are no here, now, and close dimensions, is not logical.

Drawing on brain imaging studies, she adds:

The ephemeral sense of closeness with our loved ones exists in the physical, tangible hardware of our brain.

The particular bit of hardware is the brain’s posterior cingulate cortex — our built-in GPS of love. Scanning the environment and processing innumerable bits of sensory information, the PCC is constantly calibrating and recalibrating the psychological distance between us and the people we love, tightening the bond the closer we feel and loosening it when we sense distancing. Death turns the GPS into a crude compass trying to orient to an all-pervading, ever-shifting magnetic field suddenly bereft of its true north. O’Connor writes:

After the death of a loved one, the incoming messages seem scrambled for a while. At times, closeness with our deceased loved one feels incredibly visceral, as though they are present in the room, here and now. At other times, the string seems to have fallen off the board — not shorter or longer than it was before, but simply stolen from us entirely.

This confusion is so fundamental and so primal, so beyond the reach of reason, that it befalls minds indiscriminately along the spectrum of intelligence and self-awareness — a reality most clearly and devastatingly evinced in the extraordinary love letter Richard Feynman wrote to his wife 488 days after her death and 6,994 days before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

But O’Connor notes that while Western physicians long believed such continuing bonds across the life-death divide to be a symptom of poor coping with grief that makes for poorer bonds with the living, recent research drawing on various grief rituals and customs from cultures around the world has demonstrated that such ongoing inner dialogue with the dead might actually enrich our relationships with the living and allow us to show up for them in a fuller, more openhearted way. She writes:

Our understanding of ourselves changes as we gain wisdom through experience. Our relationships with our living loved ones can grow more compassionate and resonant with gratitude as we age. We can also allow our interactions with our beloved ones who are gone to grow and change, even if only in our minds. This transformation of our relationship with them can affect our capacity to live fully in the present, and to create aspirations for a meaningful future. It can also help us to feel more connected to them, to the best parts of them… Their absence from our physical world does not make our relationship to them any less valuable.

[…]

Instead of imagining an alternate what if reality, we must learn to be connected to them with our feet planted firmly in the present moment. This transformed relationship is dynamic, ever-changing, in the way that any loving relationship is ever-changing across months and years. Our relationship with our deceased loved one must reflect who we are now, with the experience, and perhaps even the wisdom, we have gained through grieving. We must learn to restore a meaningful life.

The greatest challenge, of course, is the perennial challenge of the human mind — how to integrate seemingly contradictory needs or ideas in such a way that they coexist harmoniously, perhaps even magnify each other, rather than cancel each other out. Without such integration, any new relationship can feel like a threat to this ongoing inner bond with the dead, undamming a flood of grief at the notion of emotional erasure: grief for the grief itself, for that outstretched hand holding on to the gone and to ourselves at the same time, to the map as it used to be. This is a fear so understandable as to cusp on the universal. It is also — and this might be the most assuring part of O’Connor’s research — a neurophysiologically misplaced fear. Within the brain, every person we love leaves a tangible, structural imprint, encoded in synapses that can never be vanquished or replaced by new and different love. Because that bond — like every bond, like every idea, like the universe itself — was “only ever conjured up in the mind,” it is there too that it always lives, unassailable by other minds and other events.

O’Connor writes:

Gaining a new relationship is simply not going to fill the hole that exists. Here is the key — the point of new roles and new relationships is not to fill the hole. Expecting that they will can only lead to disappointment.

The point is that if we are living in the present, we need to have someone who loves us and cares for us, and we need someone to love and care for as well. The only way to enjoy a fulfilling relationship in the future, however, is to start one in the present. If we can imagine a future in which we are loved, then we must start a relationship that eventually will become important to us in a way that is different from our previous relationship, but rewarding and sustaining.

Understood this way, then, the ongoing relationship with the gone is a lavishment to other loves, for it has made us exactly who we are — the person doing the loving, the person being loved, the mapmaker of present and possible worlds. O’Connor offers neural affirmation for this poetic aspiration:

After a loved one dies, they are clearly no longer with us in the physical world, which each day proves to us. On the other hand, they are not gone, because they are with us in our brain and in our mind. The physical makeup of our brain — the structure of our neurons — has been changed by them. In this sense, you could say that a piece of them physically lives on. That piece is the neural connections protected within our skull, and these neural connections survive in physical form even after a loved one’s death. So, they are not entirely “out there,” and they are not entirely “in here,” either. You are not one, not two. That is because the love between two people, that unmistakable but usually indescribable property, occurs between two people. Once we have known love, we can bring it into our awareness, we can feel it emerge and emanate from us. This experience reaches beyond the love for the flesh and bones of the person we once knew on this earthly plane. Now loving is an attribute of us, regardless of who we share it with, regardless of what is given to us in return. This is a transcendent experience, a felt sense of being loving without needing anything in return. In the very best moments together, we learned to love and to be loved. Because of our bonded experience, that loved one and that loving are a part of us now, to call up and act on as we see fit in the present and the future.

Complement The Grieving Brain with a mathematician’s geometric model for living with grief and this soulful animated film of “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay — the most beautiful homily on the emotional paradox of loss I know — then revisit Nick Cave’s life-honed wisdom on grief as a portal to greater aliveness.

donating = loving

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

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The third volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries has been on heavy rotation in recent weeks, yielding Nin’s thoughtful and timeless meditations on life, mass movements, Paris vs. New York, what makes a great city, and the joy of handicraft.

The subsequent installment, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) is an equally rich treasure trove of wisdom on everything from life to love to the art of writing. In fact, Nin’s gift shines most powerfully when she addresses all of these subjects and more in just a few ripe sentences.

Such is the case with the following exquisite letter of advice she sent to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W., whom she had taken under her wing as creative mentor. Nin writes:

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4 is brimming with such poetic yet practical sagacity on the creative life and is a beautiful addition to other famous advice on writing like Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-nonsense tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.

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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Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.

On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

[…]

Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.

Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

Only such raw receptivity to the reality of the universe without saves us from losing sight of the universe within. Consciousness may be the instrument the universe invented to look inside itself, but it is a flawed instrument that keeps inverting the lens — the price of consciousness is self-consciousness. Like the tragic flaw that haunts the Greek hero, our greatest strength is also the source of our greatest suffering. With an eye to this tragic flaw of the human animal, Pessoa observes:

To stop trying to understand, to stop analyzing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field — that is true wisdom.

Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.

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 vast majority of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. As we dust ourselves off amid the rubble, bruised and indignant, we further pain ourselves with the exertion of staggering emotional energy on outrage at how reality dared defy what we demanded of it.

The remedy, of course, is not to bend the reality of an impartial universe to our will. The remedy is to calibrate our expectations — a remedy that might feel far too pragmatic to be within reach in the heat of the collision-moment, but also one with profound poetic undertones once put into practice.

Walt Whitman understood this when, felled by a paralytic stroke, he considered what makes life worth living and instructed himself: “Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.” He spared himself the additional self-inflicted suffering of outrage at how his body failed him — perhaps because, having proclaimed himself the poet of the Body and the poet of the Soul, he understood the two to be one. He squandered no emotional energy on the expectation that his suddenly disabled body perform a counterpossible feat against reality to let him enjoy his beloved tree workouts and daily excursions to the river. He simply edited his expectations to accord with his new reality and sought to find his joy there, within these new parameters of being.

What is true of the poetics of our own body-soul is as true of the poetics of relationship, that beautiful and terrifying interchange between separate body-souls. Little syphons the joy of life more surely than the wasted energy of indignation at how others have failed to behave in accordance with what we expected of them.

Two millennia before the outrage culture of the Internet, the lovesick queer teenager turned Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) addressed this curious self-mauling tendency of the human mind with his characteristic precision of insight and unsentimental problem-solving in the notebooks that became his Meditations (public library) — a timeless book, newly translated and annotated by the British classics scholar Robin Waterfield, which Marcus Aurelius wrote largely for and to himself, like Tolstoy wrote his Calendar of Wisdom and Bruce Lee calibrated his core values, yet a book that went on to stake the pillars of the philosophical system of Stoicism, equipping countless generations with tools for navigating the elemental existential challenges of being human and inspiring others to fill the gaps of its unaddressed questions with exquisite answers of their own.

Epochs before the birth of probability theory, Marcus Aurelius begins with a probabilistic-statistical consolation:

Whenever a person’s lack of shame offends you, you should immediately ask yourself, “So is it possible for there to be no shameless people in the world?” It isn’t, and you should therefore stop demanding the impossible. He’s just one of those shameless people who must necessarily exist in the world. You should keep the same thought readily available for when you’re faced with devious and untrustworthy people, and people who are flawed in any way. As soon as you remind yourself that it’s impossible for such people not to exist, you’ll be kinder to each and every one of them. It’s also helpful immediately to consider what virtue nature has granted us human beings to deal with any given offense — gentleness, for instance, to counter discourteous people…

Millennia before William James lit the dawn of modern psychology with the radical assertion that our experience is what we “agree to attend to,” millennia before neuroscience came to locate the seat of consciousness in the qualia of subjective experience, Marcus Aurelius serves that classic Stoic cocktail of simply worded obvious truths that are difficult truths to live up to, earned by a thousand complexities of conduct to be practiced daily:

The things of the world cannot affect the soul; they lie inert outside it, and only internal beliefs disturb it.

From this follows a curious, infuriating fundament of our humanity: that no matter what another person does — to us or at us or near the self-membraned bubble of our being — our inner response to it lives in the realm of feeling, that sovereign source of light over which we alone have agency and dominion. Even more infuriatingly, Marcus Aurelius reminds us, our outrage at some entirely predictable misbehavior by a person known to misbehave is a failure not of the other but of our own powers of reason:

You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there’s nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you… After all, you even had the resources, in the form of your ability to think rationally, to appreciate that he was likely to commit that fault, yet you forgot it and are now surprised that he did exactly that.

Observing that to explode with rage at the offender would make no positive difference to their conduct and would only further perturb your own soul, he instead offers a two-step process for dealing with the situation, telescoping into the broad existential perspective and then microscoping into your own innermost values:

First, don’t be upset. Nothing happens that isn’t in accord with universal nature, and before long you won’t exist at all, just like [your heroes]… Second, fix your gaze on the matter at hand and see it for what it is, and then, keeping in your mind your obligation to be a good man and the demands of your humanity, go right ahead and do it, in the way that seems to you to be most just. But do it with kindness and modesty, and without dissembling.

This is but one manifestation of the central preoccupation of the Meditations — the lifelong project of learning to see clearly as the greatest self-defense against mental anguish. So much of our disappointment and rage, after all, stem from the clash between our misperceptions of things and the reality of things — they are the pain of disillusionment, inflamed in those moments when the veil of illusion is lifted or violently pierced to let us, finally, see reality.

Reaching across space and time, across cultures and civilizations, Marcus Aurelius prescribes the antidote:

Always define or describe to yourself every impression that occurs to your mind, so that you can clearly see what the thing is like in its entirety, stripped to its essence, and tell yourself its proper name and the names of the elements of which it consists and into which it will be resolved. Nothing is more conducive to objectivity than the ability methodically and honestly to test everything that you come across in life, and always to look at things in such a way that you consider what kind of part each of them plays in what kind of universe, and what value it has for the universe as a whole.

Clarity of vision, he reminds us, is the basis of rightful action, and while our own rightful action may not be a guarantee of our contentment — or what the Romans shorthanded as “the good life” — it is our only assurance toward it:

If you carry out every present task by following right reason assiduously, resolutely, and with kindness; if rather than getting distracted by irrelevancies, you keep your guardian spirit unspoiled and steady, as though you had to surrender it at any moment; if you engage with the task not with expectations or evasions, but satisfied if your current performance is in accord with nature and if what you say and express is spoken with true Roman honesty, you’ll be living the good life. And there’s no one who can stop you doing so!

Complement with Seneca, another apostle of Stoicism, on the antidote to anxiety and Marcus Aurelius himself, in a different translation of his Meditations, on the key to living with presence, the most potent motivation for work, and how to begin each day, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent more-than-translation of another ancient classic from the wisdom tradition of a different civilization, the Tao Te Ching. (One thing that has always troubled me about modern translations of ancient classics is that they present an opportunity to calibrate the inclusiveness of these teachings to our present hard-earned sphere of dignity without changing their message — an opportunity very few translators take, for it requires a formidably delicate balance between the rigors of scholarship and the responsibilities of a social conscience. Count on Le Guin, whose meditation on being “a man” remains the finest thing I have ever read on the history of gender in language, to leap at that opportunity and make something soaring.)

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.

“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly paradoxical about such an appeal to reason in the notion that we can exercise prudence in matters of love — to have loved is to have known the straitjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.

How to heed Augustine’s caution, not by subjugating but by better understanding our experience of love, is what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in her least known but in many ways most beautiful work, Love and Saint Augustine (public library) — Arendt’s first book-length manuscript and the last to be published in English, posthumously salvaged from her papers by political scientist Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosopher Judith Chelius Stark.

For half a century after she wrote it as her doctoral thesis in 1929 — a time when this apostle of reason, who would become one of the twentieth century’s keenest and most coolly analytical minds, was composing her fiery love letters to Martin Heidegger — Arendt obsessively revised and annotated the manuscript. Against Augustine’s whetstone, she came to hone her core philosophical ideas — chiefly the troublesome disconnect she saw between philosophy and politics as evidenced by the rise of ideologies like totalitarianism, the origins of which she so memorably and incisively examined. It was from Augustine that she borrowed the phrase amor mundi — “love of the world” — which would become a defining feature of her philosophy. Occupied by questions of why we succumb to and normalize evil, Arendt identified as the root of tyranny the act of making other human beings irrelevant. Again and again, she returned to Augustine for the antidote: love.

But while this ancient notion of neighborly love, which would come to inspire Martin Luther King, Jr., was central to Arendt’s philosophical concern and her interest in Augustine, its political significance is inseparable from the deepest wellspring of love: the personal. For all of the political and philosophical wisdom she draws from it, Augustine’s Confessions is animated by his experience of personal love — that eternal force that governs the Sun and the Moon and the stars of our interior lives, reflected and codified in our cultural and social structures.

With an eye to Augustine’s conception of love as “a kind of craving” — the Latin appetitus, from which the word appetite is derived — and his assertion that “to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” Arendt considers this directional desire propelling love:

Every craving is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves. For, as Augustine writes, love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” What determines the motion of desire is always previously given. Our craving aims at a world we know; it does not discover anything new. The thing we know and desire is a “good,” otherwise we would not seek it for its own sake. All the goods we desire in our questing love are independent objects, unrelated to other objects. Each of them represents nothing but its isolated goodness. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing. As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of “aiming at” and “referring back to.” It refers back to the individual who knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires. Craving, or love, is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy, that is, of gaining possession of what is most his own.

That is why a generous and unpossessive love — a love undiminished by the failure to attain the good for which it craves — can seem like a feat nothing short of superhuman. (“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me,” Arendt’s good friend and great admirer W.H. Auden wrote in his sublime ode to that superhuman triumph of the heart.) But a love predicated on possession, Arendt cautions, inevitably turns into fear — the fear of losing what was gained. Two millennia after Epictetus offered his cure for heartbreak in the acceptance that all things are perishable and therefore even love ought to be held with the loose fingers of nonattachment, Arendt — who notes Augustine’s debt to the Stoics — writes:

So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.

Half a century after Tolstoy admonished that “future love does not exist [for] love is a present activity only,” Arendt adds:

The present is not determined by the future as such… but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future, and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good, and even more in being sure of not losing it. Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss. However, for Augustine the happiness of having is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing. The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.

Death, of course, is the ultimate loss — of love as well as life — and therefore the ultimate object of our future-oriented dread. And yet this escape from presence via the portal of anxiety — perhaps the commonest malady to which human beings are susceptible — is itself a living death. Arendt writes:

In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains.

Against this background of negative space, Arendt casts the shape of love’s ultimate object according to Augustine:

Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear.

In a sentiment that illuminates the central mechanism by which frustration fuels (temporary) satisfaction in romantic love, she adds:

A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.

If presence — the removal of expectancy — is a prerequisite for a true experience of love, then time is the elemental infrastructure of love. Nearly half a century later, in becoming the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures in the 85-year history of the series, Arendt would make this notion of time as the locus of our thinking ego a centerpiece of her landmark lecture, The Life of the Mind. Now, quoting from Augustine’s writings, she considers the paradox of love beyond time for creatures as temporal as we are:

Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?

Time exists only insofar as it can be measured, and the yardstick by which we measure it is space.

For Augustine, she notes, memory is the space in which time is measured and cached:

Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.

One of the major themes I explore in Figuring is this question of the temporality of even our lushest experiences. “The union of two natures for a time is so great,” Margaret Fuller — one of my key figures — wrote. Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity. Fuller’s exclamation upon seeing the paintings of Correggio for the first time, overcome with beauty she had not known before, radiates a larger truth about the human heart: “Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.”

Arendt locates this fundamental fact of the heart in Augustine’s writings. A century after Kierkegaard asserted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” she observes:

The Now is what measures time backwards and forwards, because the Now, strictly speaking, is not time but outside time. In the Now, past and future meet. For a fleeting moment they are simultaneous so that they can be stored up by memory, which remembers things past and holds the expectation of things to come. For a fleeting moment (the temporal Now) it is as though time stands still, and it is this Now that becomes Augustine’s model of eternity.

Augustine himself captures this transcendent temporality:

Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable… but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.

Arendt hones in on the heart of the paradox:

What prevents man from “living” in the timeless present is life itself, which never “stands still.” The good for which love craves lies beyond all mere desires. If it were merely a question of desiring, all desires would end in fear. And since whatever confronts life from the outside as the object of its craving is sought for life’s sake (a life we are going to lose), the ultimate object of all desires is life itself. Life is the good we ought to seek, namely true life.

She returns to desire, which simultaneously takes us out of life and plunges us into it:

Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it… Since man is not self-sufficient and therefore always desires something outside himself, the question of who he is can only be resolved by the object of his desire and not, as the Stoics thought, by the suppression of the impulse of desire itself: “Such is each as is his love” [Augustine wrote]. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody.

[…]

Man as such, his essence, cannot be defined because he always desires to belong to something outside himself and changes accordingly… If he could be said to have an essential nature at all, it would be lack of self-sufficiency. Hence, he is driven to break out of his isolation by means of love… for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging. Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being.

It is stunning to trace the line of these ideas across the life of Arendt’s mind. Decades after her doctoral days, she would compose her influential treatise on how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression — totalitarianism, in other words, is not only the denial of love but an assault on the essence of human beings.

In the remainder of Love and Saint Augustine, Arendt goes on to examine Augustine’s hierarchy of love, the psychological structure of craving, the perils of anticipation, and the building blocks of that “love of the world” so vital to a harmonious life and a harmonious society. Couple it with Elizabeth Barrett Browning on happiness as a moral obligation, then revisit Arendt on action and the pursuit of happiness, lying in politics, the power of being an outsider, and the difference between how art and science illuminate the human condition.

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One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely simultaneity of absolute presence and absolute peace. I didn’t yet know the word for transcendence.

Not long after that, I began swimming competitively in a chlorinated Olympic pool, investing long hours in perfecting my stroke and bettering my lap times. Those four years became a hard initiation into a culture that prizes productivity above presence. At eleven, I was beginning to see how the moment we incline action toward achievement, we drain the activity of joy; how anything we approach transactionally will never yield transcendence. I stopped swimming abruptly, disaffected and worn out. It would take me a quarter century to return to the water — it was only when I was drowning in the 800-page manuscript of my first book that I began swimming daily in the open ocean to think through the edits, to feel myself in the womb of the world while trying to birth something bigger than myself.

This spiritual dimension of swimming in wild nature comes vividly alive in Roger Deakin’s delicious book Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (public library).

“Such indelible swims are like dreams, and have the same profound effect on the mind and spirit,” he writes of the transcendences he discovered when, suffused with sadness at the end of a long love, he began swimming in rivers, scribbling in his notebook:

All water, river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think.

Our profound response to water appears to be our evolutionary inheritance — we came out of the ocean, of course, but never fully. Drawing on marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s aquatic theory of human evolution, later deepened by evolutionary historian Elaine Morgan in her classic The Descent of Woman, Deakin writes:

We spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. We went through a sea change to become what we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent, short-lived affair. Apart from the proboscis monkey of Borneo, we are the only primate that regularly takes to the water for the sheer joy of it. We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water.

Hardy had arrived as his theory by way of a single, startling insight — that the vestigial hairs on our bodies are arranged in a pattern completely unique among apes; that when a human swims through a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines representing the trajectory of water flow map exactly onto the lines drawn by the pattern of body hairs. In consonance with Rachel Carson’s recognition that because “our origins are of the earth… there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Swimming appears to be our most direct way of contacting our creaturely belonging with the world. Deakin writes:

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is — water — and it begins to move with the water around it… The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born. So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim… You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.