“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his uncommonly insightful model of human relationships a generation after Borges insisted that time is the substance we are made of. It is the elementary particle of presence and the fundamental unit of attention — the two most precious resources we have, out of which every meaningful experiences is welded. To give a practice your time is an act of devotion. To give a person your time is a supreme act of love — for, as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”

It is no wonder, then, that in a culture of accelerating urgency and suffocating time-anxiety, we feel syphoned of the substance of our lives.

How to break free from that cultural tyranny and reconnect with this deepest metaphysical dimension of aliveness is what philosopher Jacob Needleman (October 6, 1934–November 28, 2022) explores in his timelessly wonderful 1998 book Time and the Soul (public library).

With an eye to Wordsworth’s immortal indictment of our compulsive haste — “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” — Needleman frames the basic paradox of our relationship to time:

The question of our relationship to time is both a mystery and a problem. It calls to us from the deepest recesses of the human heart. And it bedevils us on all the surfaces of our everyday life. At the deeper levels, in front of the mystery of time, we are mortal beings solemnly aware of our finitude — longing, perhaps, for that in ourselves which partakes of the eternal. But at the surface levels of ourselves, in front of the problem of time, we are like frantic puppets trying to manage the influences of the past, the threats and promises of the future and the tense demands of the ever-diminishing present moment. The mystery of time has the power to call us quietly back to ourselves and toward our essential freedom and humanness. The problem of time, on the other hand, agitates us and “lays waste our powers.”

Writing in 1997, he diagnoses a new epidemic of “time-poverty” that has only deepened in the decades since:

We began to realize, dimly at first, that we were no longer living our lives. We began to see that our lives were living us. And we began to suspect that our relationship to time had become so toxic precisely because we had forgotten how to bring to our day-to-day lives the essential question of who and what a human being is and is meant to be.

Needleman — who went on to probe the mystery of what makes us who we are in his final book — considers “what it means to allow the mystery of time to irrigate our parched and driven lives” and offers a path to liberation from the problem of time, a portal into its mystery:

The pathology of our relationship to time can be healed only as we allow ourselves to be penetrated by the mystery of what we are beneath the surface of ourselves — by striving, that is, to remember our Selves.

[…]

The ego, the false self, [is] the root of all the evil that enters the earth and destroys human life, and with it, of course, the reality of time, the reality of lived presence. The ego lives only in the future and the past; it has no present moment; it is always hurrying or dreaming.

In consonance with the neuropsychological fact that attention is our only lens on reality, he weighs this fundament of our humanity against the absent-minded mechanization of our lives:

The essential element to recognize is how much of what we call “progress” is accompanied by and measured by the fact that human beings need less and less conscious attention to perform their activities and lead their lives. The real power of the faculty of attention… is one of the indispensable and most central measures of humanness.

[…]

In the world as in oneself, everything depends of the presence of humanness — in oneself it depends on the presence, even if only to a relative degree, of the Self, the real I am — and in the life of the world it depends on the presence of people who have and can manifest this capacity to be, or even only who wish for it and who come together to learn from each other and to help each other for that purpose.

This attrition of presence, he observes, is maiming not only our individual inner lives but the inner life of humanity as we have come to mistake the right away of immediacy for the now of presence. Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have invented innumerable tools and technologies to save time but find ourselves wasting it more helplessly than ever. We can only save ourselves, Needleman intimates, by recalibrating our relationship to time, which is fundamentally our relationship to the self and to the meaning of human life. He writes:

The real significance of our problem with time… is a crisis of meaning… The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychological. It is metaphysical. It is a question of the meaning of human life itself.

At the center of our self-defeating challenge is an unexamined premise: We have framed time as a problem — the problem of how to structure and manage our lives — when it is best regarded as a question. (A problem is a judgment and all judgment is a straitjacket of understanding; a question is an invitation to wonder, which is the antipode of judgment.)

Needleman writes:

Such great questions cannot be answered with the part of the mind that solves problems. They need to be deeply felt and experienced long, long before they can begin to be answered. We need to feel the question of time much more deeply and simply than we do. We agitate about the problem of time, but we seldom feel what it means.

This is largely due to the general sublimation of feeling — the disconnect from our creaturely sensorium — in an age of disembodied technos. A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler cautioned against our enslavement by intelligent machines, Needleman writes:

The time of machines is not our own time. Human time is always… the time of a being or of beings who can in truth say I. In other cultures, perhaps less alienated from the teachings of wisdom, mankind lived in closer relationship to biological time, the pulses and rhythms of nature, the sun and the moon, the tides, the seasons, the light and darkness, all the measures and meters of the music of the earth and the skies. But even this time, this more natural time, is not in itself human time. Human time is always the time of the consciousness that says and means I, I am… To live in accordance with nature’s time is to allow the nature that is within us to beat with more synchronous rhythms — the body’s tempo, the tempos of organic love and fear and tenderness and anger; and the tempos and rhythms of the mind that searches, that needs to guide and receive the action of the senses, to plan and manage and to remember the gods, the greater forces… To live with these tempos and times more in harmony is to live in the time of earth and nature and to be a more ready receptacle for the consciousness that can truly say I am.

While biological time is still not entirely human time — it still unfolds on the material level of existence and not on the level of meaning — it is infinitely closer to human time than mechanical time, meted out by the hollow pulse-beat of the tools to which we have relinquished the management of meaning. An epoch before AI came to mediate and menace our reach for meaning, Needlman adds:

By governing our own inner world through mechanical, computer time, we are running one part of our nature with a time and a tempo so far removed from the time of our body and our feeling that there is less and less possibility of these central parts of ourselves coming into relationship. And only in the relationship, the actual harmonic contact, between the main sources of perception and energy in ourselves can there be a medium through which the authentic self can appear and act in us.

In the remainder of Time and the Soul, Needlman sets out “to uncover the link between our pathology of time and the eternal mystery of what a human being is meant to be in the universal scheme of things.” Complement it with Oliver Burkeman, writing an epoch of technology later, on escaping the time-anxious trap of efficiency and Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovely “Hymn to Time,” then revisit Einstein’s Dreams — physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic exploration of time and the antidote to our existential anxiety.

donating = loving

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

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One morning out on a run while traveling for a poetry workshop, I stopped mid-stride at the sight of a tiny tree shooting up from the center of a trunk twice as wide as me — a regenerative growth known as coppicing. I must have walked past dozens, hundreds of such stubborn second lives over the years. But for some reason, this one — at that moment in my life, at that moment in the world — became a mirror, a portal, a miniature of a larger truth about what made us and what we have made of ourselves.

By sundown, it had become a poem — read here to the sound of Zoë Keating’s “Optimist” from her breathtaking album Into the Trees.

HOW TO MAKE A WORLD
by Maria Popova

What are you, little tree
rising from the center
of the old slain stump?
You are no requiem,
no prophet,
no metaphor for how
life goes on asserting itself
over death.

No — you seem to be
just a fractal branch
of the same dumb resilience
by which we rose from the oceans
to compose the Benedictus
and to build the bomb.

Couple with another found metaphor in the shape of a poem about the stubbornness of hope, then savor Pattiann Rogers’s stunning “Homo Sapiens: Creating Themselves.”

donating = loving

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

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It is strange how, in a universe governed by relentless change, human beings hunger for constancy — our bodies wired for homeostasis, our minds hooked on habit, our hearts yearning for everlasting love. We live as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves, our aching resistance to change reflected in the routines and rituals and relationship formulae out of which we build the superstructure of belief that houses all of our actions, reactions, and choices.

It is not easy, reconfiguring this superstructure to fit something new — a new practice, a new person, a new way of being. The more transformative the new element, the more challenging it is to figure it into the pattern of life as we know it — a pattern shaped by what we believe about love, that deepest sinew of the self.

This delicate, difficult, wildly rewarding reconfiguration is what Terry Tempest Williams explores in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (public library) — a soaring meditation on life, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, sparked by an unexpected revelation: When Williams opened the journals her mother had bequeathed her, she was staggered to find them all blank — a kind of “second death” that catalyzed a profound reckoning with the meaning of voice, of words, of how we write the story of who we are and how we revise it, lensed through the love of birds she shared with her mother.

Two decades later, at the exact age her mother was when she died, Williams writes:

Love is to life what life is to death. And so we risk everything trying to touch the ineffable by touching each other. Over and over. Again and again… Patterned behavior alternates like shadow and light… We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing.

Because we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation — a blindness brilliantly illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — it is often chance, not choice, that brings about the profoundest change. Life sweeps us off course — a terrible diagnosis arrives, an unimagined opportunity emerges, an unexpected person enters the heart — and suddenly we must begin again, rebuilding the superstructure of being on this new terrain. (“It could happen any time…”)

Williams finds improbable consolation for the challenge of change in her encounter with a bird out of place. The painted bunting — the most exuberantly colored bird north of Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its exotic plumage that he falsely classified it as native to India; a species now thought to orient by the pole star during migration — “had flown in on the tail of a blizzard, been blown off course, and stayed,” making a new life in Maine, a new pattern of being: Each day just before dawn, the painted bunting alighted to a neighbor’s bird feeder like clockwork.

Watching the bird one snowy morning, Williams writes:

At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the crease of shadow and light. His silhouette grew toward color for the seven short minutes he stayed. And when dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue, and green.

[…]

The bunting got caught in a storm and stayed. I have been seized in a storm of my own making. Whirlwind. World-wind. Distracted and displaced. In the wounding of becoming lost, I can correct myself.

Echoing Emerson’s indictment that “people wish to be settled [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Williams adds:

We can take flight from our lives in a form other than denial and return to our authentic selves… Accidental sightings, whether witnessed in a brain or on a winter dawn, remind us there is no such thing as certainty.

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated finding beauty in the uncertainty of being in the interlude between two world wars, Williams adds:

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.

Complement these fragments of the entirely wonderful When Women Were Birds with Milan Kundera on life’s central ambivalence of knowing what we really want, Rebecca Solnit on how we find ourselves by getting lost, and George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, then revisit Williams on our responsibility to awe.

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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“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

This is a story many believe to be true — a story about human nature, written into the scripture of original sin, ensuring that we will go on perpetrating evil for as long as we keep telling and believing that story.

We — as individuals, as a culture, as a species — rise and fall to the expectations placed upon us, most of all to the expectations we place upon ourselves. After all, our very minds are model-fulfillment machines. Bruce Lee understood this: “You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” he wrote to himself. All expectation is a story — a story about what is true and what is possible — and a story is a model of reality. But the history of our species is the history of mistaking our models for reality, only to find them unmasoned by the sudden revelation of another region of reality, another possibility — our mathematical models of how the universe works (Einstein’s relativity upends Newton’s clockwork cosmos, and suddenly space and time are new, are one), our political models of how the world works (the French Revolution upends the feudal system, and suddenly a constellation of people’s republics lights up the possibility of liberal democracy), our personal models of how the self works (you fall in love with the most improbable person, and suddenly your entire story of who you are and what you want is rewritten).

All models of reality are drawn by an imagination filtered through our fears and our hopes in a proportion mediated by our conditioning, which is always the function of story. It is the stories we believe that shape what we become, shape what the world is. In an age when commercial media have become the great conditioning engine of society, selling models of reality because they are profitable and not because they are true, it matters all the more what stories we believe, and what we resist.

That is what George Saunders explores throughout his prophetic 2007 essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (public library), composed in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq and in the infancy of social media. He writes:

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act.

Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world.

Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

He considers the antidote to the sensationalist, manipulative, and altogether reality-warping stories comprising the basic business model of modern media — a model built on marketable antagonism and othering:

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them — if the storytelling is good enough — we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible.

The challenge of telling better stories about the possibilities between us and within us is all the more urgent under the realities of war, when the aperture of compassion and understanding so dangerously narrows. All war, Saunders observes, requires “awareness of the law of unintended consequences” and “familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect” — nuanced complexities absent from the sensationalist headlines of mass media and the fanged soundbites of social media.

With an eye to the murderous models of reality that incite the energies of war, he envisions an alternative for our culture’s story of itself:

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its own girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well-prepared it is — no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny — the place it is headed for is going to be very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.

In another essay, Saunders finds himself rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five — a book written decades earlier in the middle of another war — and contemplating the power of storytelling, with all its capacity for nuance and complexity absent from the media model, as our best mechanism for bridging reality and possibility. An epoch after Steinbeck lamented that the evil of war will never go away, Saunders celebrates Vonnegut’s enduring gift to the world:

It is a comfort [to] be reminded that just because something keeps happening, doesn’t mean we get to stop regretting it… It’s good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It’s good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary, someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

[…]

The book didn’t stop the current war, and won’t stop the next one, or the one after that. But something in me rose to the truth in it, and I was put in proper relation to the war going on now. I was, if you will, forbidden to misunderstand it. It is what it is: massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It is the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of a handful of men. When someone says war is inevitable, or unavoidable, or unfortunate but necessary, they may be right. Vonnegut’s war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be. There’s something sacred about reading a book like Slaughterhouse Five, even if nothing changes but what’s going on inside our minds. We leave such a book restored, if only briefly, to a proper relation with the truth, reminded of what is what, temporarily undeluded, our better nature set back on its feet.

Although a novel and a news story may deal with the same subject matter drawn from the same facts of life, there is a universe of difference between the stories of reality and possibility each seeds into the world. It is within our power, Saunders reminds us, to resist the media manipulation machine — the “braindead megaphone” telling us that the world is broken, war inevitable, and human beings doomed by their own nature. Urging us to “insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible,” he writes:

Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote… We still have the ability to rise up… keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself.

Couple with Saunders on how to love the world more, then revisit Richard Powers on rewriting the history of our future, May Sarton on how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and Maya Angelou’s cosmos-bound poem about rising to our human potential.

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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When a recent bout of illness sent me sulking with indignant disappointment at the ruin of long laid plans, I had to remind myself that we were never promised any of this; that it is hubris and self-importance and almost touching delusion to expect an indifferent cosmos to bend to our will, our wishes, and our plans; that meeting the universe on its own terms is the end of suffering.

Through the haze of what Virginia Woolf called the “wastes and deserts of the soul” exposed by being ill, I remembered a lovely calibration of perspective by the poet and peace activist William Stafford (January 17, 1914–August 28, 1993), found in the posthumous collection The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (public library).

YES
by William Stafford

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

Stafford had a late start as a poet — his first major collection was published when he was 48. And then the poems that had been writing themselves in him all his life came pouring out, spare and stunning. Within eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United Staes.

The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Complement with Viktor Frankl, writing shortly after his release from the concentration camps, on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Barbara Ras’s kindred poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Hannah Emerson’s cosmic howl of yes yes yes.

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 morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective. Months shy of 100, Helen had been born into a world war, survived the Holocaust, and fled from Poland to America without speaking a word of English before becoming a professor of English literature for half a century.

I asked her what to do, where the hope lies.

Her response was simple, profound.

“The most hideous crime against humanity,” she reminded me, began with a legal election. It is not, therefore, purely on the level of politics that we avert the unconscionable. It begins deeper, she said: in the moral foundation of the people, which is laid early in life; it begins with the impulses we nurture in our young.

Half a century earlier, the pioneering scientist and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale had arrived at the same conclusion in her superb manifesto for what makes peace possible. But it was another woman of uncommon brilliance and moral courage, writing amid the bloodiest revolution the world had yet seen, that first articulated the urgency of planting the seeds of compassion, out of which all social harmony blooms, in the fallow hearts of children.

Born in an era when women were barred from formal education and all institutions of political, intellectual, and creative life, Sophie de Grouchy (April 8, 1764–September 8, 1822) was still a girl when she learned English, Latin, Italian, and German by sitting in on her brothers’s studies, not being allowed to have a tutor of her own; soon, she was teaching the boys herself. By the time she was a teenager, her bedtime reading was Marcus Aurelius, whose teachings on kindness left a deep impression.

Determined to grow both intellectually and morally, Sophie made frequent visits to the local poor with her mother and her sister to offer compassion and comfort. In this living laboratory of sympathy, she came to see how entwined the wellbeing of others is with one’s own, how enmeshed we are in what Martin Luther King, Jr. would call “an inescapable network of mutuality a quarter millennium later.

After discovering philosophy — Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau — she grew disenchanted with the unprovable promises of religion. Upon announcing her atheism, her mother burned all of Sophie’s books.

She was twenty-two when she met the philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet, twice her age. He was as taken with Sophie’s intellect as he was with her moral courage — in one of their first encounters, he watched her throw herself between a rabid dog and a boy she was tutoring. Within weeks, they were married. After helping Condorcet set up a new lyceum where celebrated philosophers and scholars taught, she devoured the curriculum herself, studying mathematics, botany, history. She started taking painting lessons. She joined one of the first anti-slavery clubs.

And then she began writing.

While most of her writing is now lost, one masterwork survives — her translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Published to earn money when her husband was killed in the Reign of Terror and she lost all her property, it embodies what the poet Wisława Szymborska would call “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes…. a second original.” Appended to it is her entirely original Letters on Sympathy (public library) — Sophie de Grouchy’s leap from the springboard of Smith’s theories into her own singular moral cosmogony.

Although it appeared as an afterword to her translation of Smith in 1798, Sophie had been working on Letters on Sympathy for seven years, beginning when she was only twenty-seven and the French Revolution was raging around her. Rising from its pages are ideas epochs ahead of their time: Not long after Descartes declared nonhuman animals mere automatons, and very long before Jane Goodall lit the dawn of understanding animal consciousness, she insisted that animals are “sensitive beings” capable of empathy; two centuries before the discovery of mirror neurons, she wrote of how our sympathy is activated “when we see a sensible being suffer.” At the heart of her theory is the recognition that we are endowed with “a secret impulse to understand the troubles of others as soon as we suspect their existence,” but that this impulse atrophies if we fail to nourish it from the start and exercise it regularly.

Anchoring her argument is an impassioned appeal to parents and educators — one just as urgent today, and perhaps even more so in our age of competitive parenting that scars children’s souls with the tyranny of achievement and trains them to measure themselves by the trappings of outward success rather than by the scope of their sympathy. She writes:

It seems clear that the more we exercise our sensitivity, the stronger it becomes… When it is not exercised, sensitivity tends to weaken… How important it must be, therefore, to exercise children’s sensitivity to the point where it will continue to develop as much as it is capable of — so that it can no longer be dulled by those things in life that tend to lead sensitivity astray. These things lead us far from nature and ourselves by focusing our sensitivity on vain and selfish passions, leading us away from simple tastes, and from those natural leanings in which the happiness of each person resides, the kind of happiness that does not require the sacrifice of others and that benefits all. Fathers, mothers, teachers — you nearly have in your hands the destiny of the next generation! How guilty you are if you allow your children to abort these precious germs of sensitivity which require, for their development, nothing more than the sight of suffering, the example of compassion, the tears of gratefulness, and an enlightened hand leading and moving them! How guilty you are if you care more about your children’s success than about their virtue, if you are more impatient to see them gain popularity in their circle than to see their heart brim with indignation for an injustice, their faces turn pale at the sight of suffering, their hearts treat all men as brothers!

She offers a timeless recipe for cultivating that vital sensitivity in children:

Teach them to be easily remorseful, delicately proud, and honest; let them not see suffering without being tormented by the need to bring relief. No less is needed in the midst of these oppressive barriers, raised between man and man from need, strength, and vanity, but that they should fear at each step to hurt rights or to neglect to repair some ancient wrong! That the sweet habit of doing good should teach them that it is through the heart that they will find happiness, and not through titles, luxury, dignities, or riches!

Complement with Kahlil Gibran’s poignant advice on parenting and the great cellist Pablo Casals on how to make this world worthy of its children, then — because books are the finest instrument we have invented for magnifying empathy — revisit Mary Shelley’s philosopher-father William Godwin, writing in Sophie de Grouchy’s day, on how to raise a reader.

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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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Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we call our own. The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will take place between them and other seeds in the dark underground of consciousness where we become who we are.

Rilke understood this when he contemplated the combinatorial nature of inspiration. Ada Lovelace understood it when she wrote of creativity as the work of an alert imagination that “seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition” — something she embodied when she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom with her gift for mathematics to compose the world’s first computer program in a 65-page footnote.

Most artists understand this if they are honest about the building blocks of their originality.

As he dismantles the myth of originality in the altogether fantastic Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave looks back on his body of work as “primarily narrative songs using vivid imagery” and traces this sensibility to one particularly fertile seed planted when he was five — a 1961 Czech book of fairy tales he read and reread for years, into his teens when he first began making music.

(I am reminded of Einstein’s impassioned insistence that fairy tales are the mightiest fuel for the creative imagination.)

Full of brightly illustrated stories from around the world, The Fairy Tale Tree (public library) by Vladislav Stanovsky and Jan Vladislav dazzles with its vivid primary-color illustrations by the great Czech artist and sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal.

The first page of the book casts its promise as part poem and part magic spell — something strange and transcendent that reads like a Nick Cave song:

Beyond endless mountains, beyond endless rivers,
at the very remotest end of the earth
and whither no bird has ever yet flown,
there is a deep blue sea,
and in this sea there is a small green island,
and on this island is a stately tree,
all of gold with shapely branches, twelve in all,
and on each branch there is a nest,
and in each nest a nestful of eggs
— a nestful of eggs of clear crystal.

You’ve only to break the crystal shell,
And each has a fairy tale to tell.

From there, each chapter proceeds as an egg on a branch of the storytelling tree — a concept Cave realized only in hindsight anchors “Spinning Song” on his record Ghosteen. He used an illustration of a red devil from the book in the artwork of another record, and it was the image of a red devil that came to him one day a lifetime later that sparked an entirely new and unexpected creative practice — his series of bizarre and beautiful ceramic figurines.

Wild and wondrous, partway between a child’s drawing and a modernist painting, Kolíbal’s illustrations emanate his own early influences of Egyptian and Cycladic art yet rise from the page entirely original, full of uncommon vitality and vim — a pig with a cane, a mouse waltzing with a lobster, a wolf diving down a chimney, strange and joyful like the best of childhood.

Complement with J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fairy tales, the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on how fairy tales strengthen our capacity for powerful emotions, and these stunning century-old illustrations of Tibetan fairy tales by the artist who created Bambi, then revisit Nick Cave on creativity, its relationship to self-trust and faith, and the two pillars of a meaningful life.

donating = loving

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

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How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyond why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the reason you love one and not another. The feeling trembling beneath the fact — the brutal knowledge that everything we love is irreplaceable yet will be lost: to dissolution and death, to rejection and indifference, to our own return to stardust — is the hardest thing to bear, the thing for which we have devised our most elaborate theaters of denial.

Among those coping mechanisms is the invention of sentimentality. “Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” Carl Jung wrote. Its strange psychological machinery is what the poet Mark Doty explores with uncommon insight and sensitivity in a passage from his wonderful memoir Dog Years (public library).

He writes:

The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world — our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other — how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love — they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt — these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace. They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm. It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable. In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable. (Why don’t you just get another dog?) The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness. But it is, I supposed, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable.

Of course, our fury at entropy is the great motive force of our creativity — we make art to make meaning out of our mortality, to counteract its brutality with beauty. Every creative act is an act of consolation for our transience, for our despair about our transience. A century after Albert Camus insisted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Doty contemplates this fundamental equivalence of existence:

Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation. Perhaps it’s less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will? The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it. Fine, says the world, don’t accept it. The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away. To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish — does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

Complement with Annie Dillard on how to bear your mortality and D.H. Lawrence on the best lifelong preparation for death, then revisit Doty’s magnificent Whitman-lensed reflection on the courage to love despite the certitude of loss.

donating = loving

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

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I held one up to the sun and gasped deeper.

For millennia — since long before cobalt became the blood diamond of the digital age, pillaged from the Earth by child labor for its extraordinary usefulness in storing energy and stabilizing the conductors in every laptop and smartphone — cobalt glass has been answering the soul’s cry of the great uselessness that makes life not just livable but worth living: beauty.

Cobalt blue is almost as old as the written word, also forged in Mesopotamia four millennia ago. Within five centuries of its invention, Egyptian pottery was making ample and dazzling use of cobalt glass. And then, after the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age, it suddenly vanished — after 1250 BC, both cobalt and glass almost completely disappear from the archeological record. It took more than a millennium for it to recast its enchantment in Chinese porcelain, slowly migrating west toward the Victorian craze for blue glass.

The mystery of its disappearance has never been solved — a harrowing reminder that ideas, even magnificent ideas, can fall into oblivion for epochs: just look at Democritus and the atom.

And yet the birth of an idea in a mind — the conception of something improbable and lovely out of the cold clay of the ordinary — is one of the great miracles of existence. Looking through the sunlit blue on a Brooklyn sidewalk, I can’t help but think of cobalt glass a supreme emblem of human ingenuity and the blessed conspiracy of chance and choice behind all creativity: Who was it, the first ancient person to unearth a piece of meteoric iron, throw it into the fire pit to see what happens, watch it release a dazzling silvery metal, compact that metal to the point of liquefaction, and then watch it bleed that loveliest of colors, cobalt blue? What elemental hunger for beauty drove them then to add this strange creation to that supreme triumph of human genius, glass?

How they too must have gasped when the sun first shone through it.

Cupping this blue marvel in my hand, I feel instantly connected to that anonymous ancestor, connected to the entire lineage of human curiosity and creativity that made so improbable and lovely a thing consecrate an ordinary afternoon with wonder. And none of it had to exist — not this dazzling blue, not the consciousness that dreamt it up: all of it a miracle of chemistry and chance, a great cosmic gasp at these slender sunlit odds against nothingness and eternal night.

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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Called anthotype, from the Greek anthos (“flower”) and typos (“imprint”), the process is kindred to cyanotype, but instead of using a solution of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate sensitive to the blue portion of the solar spectrum spilling into ultraviolet, it trades the laboratory for the garden, using the same photosensitive pigment compounds involved in how leaves change color and the entire spectrum.

To create an anthotype, a flat object is placed on paper coated with an emulsion made not of chemicals but of plant extracts — crushed petals, tinctures of roots — and then exposed to direct sunlight for a long period: days, weeks, even months, depending on the plant, season, and intensity of the light. Eventually, the sun bleaches out the parts of the paper not covered, leaving an imprint of the photopositive object in the color of the pigment used in the coating — a ghostly beauty with the chromatic quality of a watercolor and the feeling-tone of a poem.

On the first of January the following year, Somerville’s results were published as On the Action of the Rays of the Spectrum on Vegetable Juices in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society — not under her own name, since women could not publish in scientific journals, but under Herschel’s, who gave her full credit.

Condensing the solar spectrum through a lens of flint glass and projecting it through a pinhole onto thick white letter paper washed with various pigments and compounds — from “the velvety petals of a scarlet geranium” to the juice of the beet-root — Somerville discovered that the juices of the same plant produce different colors depending on what portion of the spectrum they are exposed to and whether they are extracted with water or alcohol. Some of the results were entirely counterintuitive, rendering colors very different from those of the flower — the dark orange nasturtium, for instance, turned the paper Prussian blue when exposed to light. Somerville marveled at how “the action of the different parts of the spectrum seems very capricious” — a delightful unpredictability that recurred across all of her experiments. She wrote of one:

The juice of the petals of pale blue Plumbago auriculata in distilled water imparted its tint to writing-paper, which, after exposure to the action of diffused light, acquired a pale yellowish green hue. The part under the lavender and violet rays of the spectrum, repeatedly washed with the juice, assumed a pale brown colour: the indigo rays seemed to have no effect, although from their lowest edge to the distance of half the length of the spectrum below the red rays, a lavender blue image was formed. Under the orange rays a minute indigo-coloured spot appeared, and also a larger spot of the same colour under the yellow, which were soon blended into one, forming a single oblong figure of maximum intensity, surrounded by a halo of paler indigo

This was entirely new insight into the interaction of photons and organic molecules, into the materiality of beauty, into how nature works. Mary Somerville had chipped another fragment of knowledge from the monolith of mystery — the task and measure of the true scientist.

But as commerce interceded with creativity and the seeds of our insta-culture were planted, the much faster — and much more toxic — chemical imaging processes like daguerreotype and tintype became favored over the slow, gentle work of sunlit flowers.

Expelled from the realm of science and commercial technology, anthotypes became the province of artists.

Meanwhile in New England, around the time she sat for the daguerreotype that remains her sole surviving photograph, the teenage Emily Dickinson was discovering a kindred way of immortalizing flowers.

Not long after botany gave women a foothold in Victorian science, the young poet began pressing and arranging hundreds of wildflowers into her remarkable herbarium, on the pages of which she honed the art of composition and incubated her ecological poetry.

Two centuries later, photographers Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey pay an anthotype homage to Dickinson in their lovely collaboration This Earthen Door, titled after a line from her poem “We can but follow to the Sun.”

Painstakingly recreating all 66 pages of Dickinson’s herbarium in large-scale anthotypes made with juices from 66 species of plants the poet grew in her garden, they offer something uncommonly lyrical — part color study and part time travel, harmonizing the ephemeral and the eternal, radiating the quiet consolation of the dialogue between nature and human nature.

But there is also an elegiac undertone to the project: The evolution of flowering plants is what made mammals possible — creatures capable of photography and poetry — and yet flowers are now evolving to bloom less. Metabolically costly since the start, producing blossoms to attract pollinators is now becoming prodigal as pollinator populations are rapidly declining. Instead of relying on pollinators, many bisexual species — the botanical term for which is perfect flowers — are evolving to fertilize their own seeds with their own pollen: a process known as selfing. Its haunting downside is that, because diversity is nature’s fulcrum of resilience, flowers pollinated by selfing replicate their own genes in the next generation of seeds, amplifying their existing vulnerabilities to disease and drought — something cross-pollination prevents by mixing the DNA of different plants into new, adaptive combinations of genes. (I am reminded of Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion that beauty and art grant us an opportunity for unselfing, disrupting the ruminative replication of our beliefs and mental states with something magnificently other — and what is psychological resilience if not the ability to see beyond our suffering, and what is compassion if not the ability to step outside the self and take in the other with a gasp of tenderness.)

The less flowers bloom, the less nectar they are providing for the already endangered pollinators, foreboding a vicious cycle for the entire planetary ecosystem. Against this ecological backdrop, the ghostly loveliness of these anthotypes may one day read as a requiem for life — an echo of a time on Earth when flowers flourished and poetry was possible.

But amid a world increasingly famished for beauty as it careens into brutality, they are also a tender reminder that the human species is as capable of making art as it is of making war, that each day the Sun rises to shine its spectrum upon this lush wonderland of chemistry and chance, we begin again and get to choose afresh how to spend our light.

Complement with contemporary artist Rosalind Hobley’s stunning cyanotypes of flowers, created two centuries after Anna Atkins became the first person to illustrate a book with photographic images — her hauntingly beautiful cyanotypes of algae — and the story of the Victorian algae herbarium that brought the submarine wilderness to Earth, then delve into this excellent field guide to making your own anthotypes.

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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Coursing through every civilization are the myths that shape what its people come to believe about reality and possibility. Some of them are healing and some damaging. Some are easy to recognize for what they are — almost all isms are damaging myths. But some are more subtle, more pernicious, permeating the substratum of culture and the marrow of the psyche.

One of Western culture’s most damaging myths, largely inherited from the Romantics, is that of the tortured genius — the suffering artist who needs to have suffered and must go on suffering in order to create works of beauty and poignancy, portals to the sacred. The truth, of course, is far more nuanced — artists are simply people who feel life deeply in all of its dimensions, who are awake and alive to both its tragedy and its transcendence, who put their heightened sensitivity in the service of wakefulness and aliveness for others.

Virginia Woolf knew this when she wrote of the shock-receiving capacity necessary for being an artist. In his diary, Walt Whitman contemplated the superior porousness of the creative spirit to both life’s “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights” and its “bare spots and darknesses,” believing that “no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them.”

These, of course, are the polarities we all live with, the polarities that live in us, which Maya Angelou channeled in her stunning poem “A Brave and Startling Truth.” The artist is humanity’s magnifying lens for the inherent dualities of human nature — something James Baldwin captured in his insistence that an artist’s role is “to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” The measure of our creative vitality lies in how intimately we contact both the doom and the glory of being, what we make of the restless tension between our own poles, how we harmonize them into something beautiful.

In the interlude between two world wars, as humanity hungered for beauty to controvert its own brutality, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the inner life of the creative spirit in a poignant passage from his 1927 novel Steppenwolf (public library), painting the artist as a divided creature that yearns for wholeness and turns that yearning into the creative act:

Many artists… have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man.

For Hesse’s artist, riven by these inner tensions, “life has no repose.” And yet out of that restlessness comes the artist’s gift to the world:

[Artists] live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.

Complement with other excellent reflections on what it means to be an artist from e.e. cummings, M.C. Richards, Egon Schiele, and Marina Abramović, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to be more alive.

donating = loving

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

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Some of these collective nouns, often called company terms, are based on observable characteristics of the species — “a fall of woodcock” references the bewildering air dance of the courting birds, “a watch of nightingales” pays homage to the nocturnal wakefulness of Earth’s most musical bird, and “a gaggle of geese” turns their migratory cries into delicious onomatopoeia. Some stem from myths and folk beliefs about birds dating back centuries, to a time when Satan was realer than gravity in the human mind, Kepler’s mother could be tried for witchcraft, and superstition was the primary sensemaking tool for causality — an organizing principle for life, reflected in language: “a murder of crows” alludes to various superstitions about crows as emissaries of death, believed capable of killing their own kind in punishment for transgression; “a parliament of owls” draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena — the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world.

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

Like Sor Juana two centuries later, Juliana had suffered some great unnamed heartbreak that led her to retreat to a cloister, where she immersed herself in study — convents were often the only way women could access books in an era when formal education was entirely closed to them. Like Montaigne, she became a prolific diarist. Having refined herself as a writer on these private pages, she began writing for the public — an act of tremendous courage and confidence for a woman in the fifteenth century to begin with, and doubly so given she chose to write about masculine endeavors: hunting, fishing, hawking.

Tucked into the middle of her book is a long list of company terms under the heading “THE COMPAYNYS OF BEESTYS AND FOWLYS.” Discernible through the confounding Old English, through the bastarda blackletter script barely legible to modern eyes, are the charming “exaltation of larks” (Exaltyng of Larkis), “murmuration of starlings” (Murmuration of Stares), “watch of nightingales” (Wache of Nyghtingalis), “sedge of herons” (Sege of heronnys), “gaggle of geese” (Gagle of gees), and “unkindness of ravens” (unkyndenes of Ravenes), all still in use today.

Half a millennium after Juliana Barnes died an unknown nun in an English convent on a planet without clocks, calculus, or democracy that thought itself the center of the universe, the English painter and children’s book illustrator Brian Wildsmith (January 22, 1930–August 31, 2016) brought to life the loveliest of these company terms in the 1967 gem Birds by Brian Wildsmith (public library).

Not all of these terms have remained the same across space and time — different eras and different regions have devised their own strange and wondrous lexicon for the same bird groupings. Juliana Barnes’s “sedge of herons” gave way to the “siege of herons” more popular today, shifting focus from the silent silhouettes of these dignified birds rising from the edge of the pond like tall grass to the inelegant and rather violent-sounding vocalizations they make during flight; in Wildsmith’s painted aviary owls are not a “parliament” but a “stare,” the term now brinking on the obsolete, having peaked in use the year before the book was published.

Emerging from these changing terms is a testament to Toni Morrison’s insistence that language is best understood “partly as a system, partly as a living thing” — evidence that language is but a microcosm of life, subject to its own evolutionary forces of adaptation to context akin to those that transformed the dinosaurs into birds. Lest we forget, words too face the peril of extinction.

Complement with the fascinating science of the owl sensorium and some stunning centuries-old illustrations of birds of paradise — which, if they moved in groups, deserve the company term “constellation” — then revisit the story of how the clouds, those eternal companions of the birds, got their names.

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.