An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days
I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously underappreciated, is coming to love someone who loves it. As we enter each other’s worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of being, magnify our sense of wonder, and wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply.
When the wonder of birds entered my world, I came awake to the notation of starlings on the street wires, to the house wrens bathing in the dusty parking lot, to the robin serenading dawn in its clear and lovely voice, each trill as perfect as a Bach measure. One rainy afternoon, I watched two night herons sleep and wondered whether they were dreaming, went down a rabbit hole of research, wrote a The New York Times piece about how the evolution of REM in the avian brain shaped our human dreams.
Birds began populating my own dreams. A great blue heron glided across the sky of my mind, slow and prehistoric, carrying the world on her back. A million sandhill cranes unspooled from the horizon, turned into the Milky Way, turned into music, turned into time itself. A magpie spoke to me in my mother’s voice.
Around the same time, I was discovering that multiple people I love and respect were fond of tarot — something I had always regarded as an embarrassing echo of medieval superstition, antiscientific and intellectually unsound, devised in a world where Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. But as I replaced contempt with curiosity, I came to see it simply as a coping mechanism for the difficulty of living with all this uncertainty, the difficulty of being so opaque to ourselves — a language for interpreting our intentions and experiences, the way the primary purpose of prayer is to clarify our hopes and fears.
I am not impervious to such practices myself — each year on my birthday, I perform a “Whitman divination”: I conjure up the most restless question on my mind, open Leaves of Grass with my eyes closed, and let my blind finger fall on a verse; without fail, Whitman opens some profound side door to my question that becomes its own answer, one inaccessible to the analytical mind.
In that strange combinatorial way the creative impulse has of collaging existing inspirations and passions into something entirely new, I awoke one day with the surprising idea of creating my own card deck of divinations from the birds — forty decks of forty cards each, to give away to forty people I love for my fortieth birthday.
I turned to my favorite nineteenth-century ornithological books, digitized by the wonderful Biodiversity Heritage Library — the many volumes of John James Audubon’s Birds of America, illustrated by Audubon himself, and John Gould’s Birds of Europe and Birds of Australia, illustrated by his gifted wife Elizabeth and by Edward Lear, who helped cultivate Elizabeth’s talent; a couple of volumes of Henry Leonard Meyer’s Colored Illustrations of British Birds and Their Eggs; and the ornithological portions of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, the specimens from which Elizabeth Gould illustrated.
Each night before going to sleep, I would let a painted bird call out to me from the yellowed pages, then read the ornithological description of the species, taking down a handful of words and phrases speaking to something on my mind that day. Then, with the slanted reckoning of REM, the unconscious would do its mysterious work in night. Upon waking, I would reread the ornithological text and a kind of message would come to enflesh the skeleton of the noted words — a divination from the bird, partway between koan and poem. I would spend the rest of the day cutting the words and rearranging them onto the illustration, correcting only lightly for the corruptions of the centuries, but mostly embracing the blurry and uneven scans, the stains and smudges, the faded colors — embracing the price of time.
The words of long dead writers rose from the yellowed pages to transform into the voice of my own unconscious, speaking its secret knowledge — about love and friendship, about uncertainty and possibility, about fear and resistance and the capacity for change. The divinations were telling me what I needed to hear. (A part of us always knows what we need to hear and can always tell us where we need to go. The great challenge of life is not to silence that voice with fear or with hope, with indifference or compulsion or the tyranny of should.)
I started with the great blue heron — the closest thing I have to a spirit animal.
Birds I already knew and loved called out to me first: the bowerbird, the nightingale, the osprey. Then I began discovering strange and wondrous creatures I had never seen: the fierce frigate, the tender linnet, the Dr. Seussian snake-bird.
I sorrowed for birds I would never see, like the extinct passenger pigeon and the ivory-billed woodpecker cusping on extinction.
I delighted in birds I had not seen since I left Bulgaria in my late teens, the same age Audubon was when he left his native France for America — birds like the white stork and the magpie.
Each bird surprised me with the divination it brought. I didn’t feel like I was writing these — they were writing me.
A kind of almanac was emerging — guidance for uncertain days.
I made a divination a day, in a state of what Octavia Butler called “a sweet and powerful positive obsession.” When I had forty, I sent them off to the printer to make the forty decks.
But I couldn’t stop.
The practice had become a metronome of my days.
The birds kept coming, kept speaking.
Then, at the eleventh hour of my thirties, life dealt a great difficulty.
The daily divinations became an unexpected consolation, helped compost the suffering into fertile ground for growth, held up mirrors I needed to look at. (Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.)
At the time of this writing, I have more than 80 divinations. Someday, they may become a public deck, or a book. For now, gathered here are some of my favorites, available as prints and stationery cards benefitting the Audubon Society in gratitude for their noble conservation work and for John James’s beautiful birds — but, even more so, for his beautiful words: While I find Elizabeth Gould the superior artist, her husband’s writing is spare and sterile — no more than a page per bird, sometimes just a paragraph, destitute of adjectives and imaginative words; Audubon, on the other hand, was a passionate and lyrical writer, despite the fact that English was not his native language.
John James Audubon was the 18-year-old illegitimate son of a French plantation owner when he arrived in America in the first years of the nineteenth century with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon’s army. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a difficult childhood now became his primary obsession. He set out “to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person” — the first comprehensive guide to the continent’s birds, many of them never before described. He later recounted:
Prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring.
The minimal lessons in portraiture he had received as a boy in France had taught him nothing about drawing nature. So he decided to teach himself. “My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples,” he winced at his first attempts. “So maimed were most of them that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle compared with the integrity of living men.” To improve his skills, he made an annual ritual of burning entire batches of drawings, resolving to redo those birds in the coming year. “After a few years of patience,” he wrote, “some of my attempts began almost to please me and I have continued the same style ever since.”
He fell in love with an American girl born in England who made him at home in the new language, so that he could describe the birds he was drawing. He become increasingly lyrical in his writing. He changed his name — he was born Jean-Jacques Rabin — to sound American. He would soon be naming American birds new to the ornithological literature. (When he came upon an unusually small three-toed woodpecker never before described, Audubon named it Maria’s Woodpecker, after his friend Maria Martin — the botanical artist who drew most of the trees, flowers, and reeds on which his birds perch.)
Over the next three decades of his life, Audubon went on to paint and write about 435 birds, including several now extinct. He lavishes each bird with multiple pages of detailed description and anecdotes from his personal encounters, using vocabulary so beautiful that working with it felt like a cheat. I savored his unselfconscious use of words like “astonishment” and “bewildered” in the middle of ornithological description, rued that such lovely words as “betake” and “depredation” have fallen out of fashion since his time, delighted in seeing “ossified” — one of my favorite words, which I learned from Emily Dickinson’s love letters to Sue — recur so frequently in the context of avian anatomy, delighted in using it in an entirely different context.
Beyond its spiritual rewards, beyond its quiet consolation, this daily practice became a tremendous source of creative vitality — a mighty antidote to the burnout I had started to feel nearly two decades into my primary writing practice. I know no greater catalyst of creativity — in art or in life — than constraint. It is the boundaries, chosen or imposed, that give shape to our lives; it is within them that we become truly creative about the kind of life we want to live. Without the constraint of bones, there would be no wings.
And what of the very notion of divination?
I don’t believe in signs — I don’t believe that this immense impartial universe concerns itself with the fate of any one of us motes of stardust, that it is giving us personalized clues as to how to live our tiny transient lives. But I do believe in omens. Omens are the conversation between consciousness and reality, between the self and the unconscious. We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 27 Jul 2024 | 8:35 am(NZT)
Beyond Either/Or: Kierkegaard on the Passion for Possibility and the Key to Resetting Relationships
“Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.”
Some of the most difficult moments in life are moments of having to choose between two paths leading in opposite directions — to tell or not to tell, to leap or not to leap, to leave of not to leave — each rife with losses (even if they are necessary losses) the pain of which you will feel acutely and with gains which you are constitutionally unable to imagine.
You could do it rationally, applying Benjamin Franklin’s framework of weighing the pros and cons. You could do it emotionally, polling the people you trust, despite the fact you alone know what is best for you since you alone know what it’s like to be you. You could concede the futility of free will and flip a coin. Still, that bifurcation of the soul remains because life, in all its irreducible complexity, is not something you can optimize the way you optimize a route for minimal traffic or maximal scenery. What makes those moments so difficult is the knowledge that there will never be a way of testing where the other path would have led — you only have the one life, lived.
But perhaps there is a third way — one based not on renunciation, which is at the heart of all binary choices, but of integration, which is the pulse-beat of possibility. A way to stop trudging the ground of forking paths and lift off into the sky of the possible.
That is what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explores in his 1843 masterwork Either/Or (public library). Long before Alan Watts admonished against the trap of thinking in terms of gain and loss, before George Saunders offered his lovely lens for living an unregretting life, Kierkegaard writes:
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This… is the sum of all practical wisdom.
[…]
Many people think [they are in the mode of eternity] when, having done the one or the other, they combine or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it.
Kierkegaard considers the frame of mind necessary for living beyond either/or:
Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.
In no region of life is this passion for possibility more vital than in our closest relationships, which at their strongest and most nourishing must transcend the either/or confines of labels and categories, but must retain deep friendship at the core. There are times in life when an important relationship collides with the confines of practical reality and must shape-shift in order to survive — a collision that can be incredibly painful yet incredibly fertile in the change it precipitates within both persons involved and in the third person that is the dynamic between them.
A century before Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote so beautifully about embracing the mutability of intimate relationships, Kierkegaard considers what it takes to let a relationship change organically in order to feed the soul in a new way:
The same relationship can acquire significance again in another way… The experienced farmer now and then lets his land lie fallow; the theory of social prudence recommends the same. All things, no doubt, will return, but in another way; what has once been taken into rotation remains there but is varied through the mode of cultivation.
What a way to remember that everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 26 Jul 2024 | 11:45 pm(NZT)
Is Your Life a Fairy Tale, a Novel, or a Poem?
When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We question our own sanity, assuming the outside world coherent and our response a form of madness; or we assume ourselves sane and accuse the external — the other person, the situation, the world — of madness. Both are stories we tell ourselves about what is true, how things are, and how things should be. Like all storytelling, both are works of the imagination.
It always takes imagination to understand what is real, for in the human sphere reality is a collaborative condition. It takes imagination to understand what it is like to be anybody else, what the other’s reality might be in the situation we share, and it takes imagination to consider what may live in our blind spots.
G.K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936), who thought deeply and originally about the meaning of life, frames these two storytelling responses to reality and the problem of sanity as the fairy tale and the novel. In a fragment from his essay collection Tremendous Trifles (public library | free ebook), he writes:
Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is — what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is — what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.
But while it always takes imagination to understand what is real, it also takes imagination to see beyond the models of reality handed down to us by the world as we know it. (“Everything is in an attitude of mind,” Chesterton conceded.) Perhaps there is a third way beyond this dualism, one that recognizes consciousness as something beyond sanity and madness, one in which being a hero of one’s own life is not a battle between reality and sanity, between self and other, but a matter of peaceful accord with the cosmos, a cosmos capable of consciousness.
Perhaps that is the way of the poem. Perhaps the best way to face reality — especially when it betrays our hopes and expectations — is by being a living poem. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life, “and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” A poem is not a captive of narrative, has no need for resolution, is not a message but an opening. A poem makes its own meaning.
Complement with Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 24 Jul 2024 | 3:38 am(NZT)
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.
We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.
Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.
In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.
Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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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.
Source: The Marginalian | 19 Jul 2024 | 4:44 am(NZT)
200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”
Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and spiritual rewards, its primal sanities.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) was in his late thirties when he began answering the eager letters of the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul. Shortly after Rilke’s death of leukemia, Kappus published the correspondence. Letters to a Young Poet came to stand as one of the finest books of the past century. In a wonderful new translation by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows, Rilke writes:
What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.
MAY SARTON
A lifetime after she composed her stunning ode to solitude as a young poet, after she contemplated solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery upon entering her sixties, May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) moved to Maine to spend the last chapter of her life living alone in a house with a garden on the edge of the sea. Friends came to visit, as did strangers who admired her poetry and had found her address in the phone book — those were the days — but she cherished her solitude above even the most welcome company.
In a passage from her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea (public library) — which gave us her meditations on the relationship between gardening and writing, how to cultivate your talent, and the art of living alone — Sarton considers the tilting balance of her life. Reflecting on her approach to visitors, she writes:
I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson [Sarton’s prior home] focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his account of the months he spent at Walden Pond, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Although Thoreau’s solitude was not in actuality as total as he recounted it, it was deep and transformative. In a long meditation on solitude and the meaning of life, he writes in Walden (public library | public domain):
It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
[…]
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go [out among others] than when we stay in our chambers.
For Thoreau, who suffered bouts of debilitating depression and black grief, solitude was not a way of caving in on himself, as one does in loneliness, but a way of unselfing, of stepping beyond his small human turmoils and into the wider universe that holds:
The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL
In the last years of the nineteenth century, shortly after he originated an entire new field we now call neuroscience and a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neuron as the basic unit of the nervous system, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934) composed a short, passionate book titled Advice for a Young Investigator (public library), predating Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by three decades. In it, he outlined the six psychological flaws that keep the talented from reaching greatness and pointed to solitude as the supreme incubator of true originality. He writes:
Our major commitment … is to discover ourselves before discovering scientific truth, to mold ourselves before molding nature. To fashion a strong brain, an original mind that is ours alone — this is the preliminary work that is absolutely essential.
[…]
Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought! How satisfying and rewarding are the long winter evenings spent in the private laboratory, at the very time when educational centers are closed to their workers! Such evenings free us from poorly thought out improvisations, strengthen our patience, and refine our powers of observation.
WENDELL BERRY
In his splendid poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” poet and farmer Wendell Berry located the remedy for despair in learning to “rest in the grace of the world,” which is most readily found amid wild solitude. He deepens the sentiment in one of the essays from his altogether wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection What Are People For? (public library). Reflecting on the antidote to the two great enemies of creativity, Berry writes:
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
ROSE MACAULAY
Often, it is only when something is taken away that we fully appreciate its value; in being famished for it, we remember how deeply it nourishes us. In a delightful reckoning with the pleasure of being left alone after entertaining visitors, found in her 1935 collection Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library), Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) writes:
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
[…]
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom… It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again.
STEPHEN BATCHELOR
Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor echoes Berry’s sentiment in his thorough reckoning with solitude as contemplative practice, and writes:
By withdrawing from the world into solitude, you separate yourself from others. By isolating yourself, you can see more clearly what distinguishes you from other people. Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]). Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice.
[…]
Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back. Sustained aloneness brings you to a tipping point where the pendulum of life returns you to others.
MICHAEL LEUNIG
A century after Virginia Woolf made her epochal case for the importance of having a room of one’s own in which to create — that womb of “fertile solitude
from which works of art are born — Australian cartoonist, poet, and philosopher Michael Leunig offers a singsong echo of Woolf’s timeless insistence:
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
Terry Tempest Williams has devoted her life to giving voice to the dialogue between human nature and the rest of nature, whether we call it wilderness or landscape or environment. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (public library) — which also gave us Williams on change and denial — she writes:
Solitude… is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.
HERMANN HESSE
In the wake of WWI, a quarter century before he won the Nobel Prize, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) composed an impassioned letter to the disaffected young. In it, an epoch before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed man as the universal pronoun, he writes:
Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.
Learning to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it, Hesse argues, is a prerequisite for taking charge of our destiny:
Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves… It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity.
[…]
Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.
Complement with Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness — that archnemesis of solitude — then revisit poet Elizabeth Bishop on why everyone ought to experience at least one long period of solitude in life and artist Rockwell Kent on the relationship between wilderness, solitude, and creativity.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 17 Jul 2024 | 9:06 am(NZT)
An Illustrated Field Guide to the Science and Wonder of the Clouds
Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought.
To me, a cloud will always be a spell against indifference — a little bloom of wonder to remind us that everything changes yet everything holds.
Two centuries after the amateur meteorologist Luke Howard classified the clouds with Goethe’s aid and two generations after Rachel Carson composed her lyrical serenade to the science of the sky, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of Cloud Appreciation Society (of which I am a pin-wearing member), and artist William Grill bring us Cloudspotting for Beginners (public library) — an illustrated field guide to the science and splendor of the sky, and an ode to the human longing for pattern, for order, for an organizing principle that gives coherence to the chaos of life.
It can be hard to give an artistic interpretation of something so naturally beguiling, so replete with raw wonder, but under Grill’s color pencil, clouds take on an even more whimsical quality, gentle as a child’s song, unhurried as a daydream.
With the plain-worded playfulness of a children’s book and the concise authority of an encyclopedia, the book covers the ten main cloud types — from the rough-hewn patchwork of Stratocumulus, commonest because it forms over the oceans that cover most of our planet’s surface, to Cirrocumulus, the rarest cloud of all and the most ephemeral.
Beyond the main ten, there is the subgroup of special cloud types, from the aerial waves of Undulatus to the spaceship of Lenticularis.
Among them is a touching triumph of citizen science — Asperitas, a cloud species identified and named by members of the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2009 and, with Pretor-Pinney’s advocacy, officially affirmed by the World Meteorological Organization in 2017.
Opening beyond the cloud types is a cabinet of atmospheric curiosities — cloud iridescence, sundogs (which inspired Hilma af Klint), glories (which were central to the discovery of cosmic rays), clouds on other planets, thunder and lightning on our own, crepuscular rays.
Pretor-Pinney details one of the great dramas of this world, which Coleridge saw as a singular portal to the soul:
Inside a storm cloud, the ice crystals bump into one another as they are blown around by violent air currents. Each time hail and ice crystals collide, the larger pieces of ice pick up negative electric charge from smaller ones, which instead become positively charged. This electric charge is like the one you feel when you rub a balloon.
The larger, heavier pieces of ice fall through the cloud’s rising air currents toward its base while the smaller, lighter ice crystals are wafted up toward the top. This is how separate parts of the Cumulonimbus become negatively and positively charged. Eventually, a massive current of electricity in the form of a lightning bolt can shoot through the sky to even out the charge again. Each bolt makes the air much hotter than the surface of the Sun, causing it to expand explosively, which we hear as the crash and boom of thunder.
Like all processes and phenomena of nature, clouds are rife with metaphors for human life. (Coleridge himself used to frequent London’s science lectures, including Luke Howard’s, hunting for metaphors to backbone his poems.) With an eye to the astonishing fact that the average Cumulus weighs as much as eighty elephants, Pretor-Pinney considers how a cloud, composed of myriad small particles known as cloudlets, stays afloat: “A cloud stays up because it’s not one big thing but a group of tiny, tiny things,” he writes, which strikes me as an apt metaphor for how diversity and multiplicity ensure the buoyancy of any society.
Couple Cloudspotting for Beginners with 19th-century Norwegian artist Kund Baade’s haunting cloudscapes, then revisit poet Mark Strand’s love letter to the clouds and the story of how they 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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Source: The Marginalian | 14 Jul 2024 | 10:17 am(NZT)
Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine
“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.”
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.
The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Art in the Light of Conscience (public library) — the wonderful essay collection that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to ideas.
Living in a political atmosphere that banished the divine from human life — the same state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria — Tsvetaeva writes with an eye to the prayerful poems of her beloved Rilke:
What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays (except Rilke’s… I know of none), it is not because we don’t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to — there is something and there is someone — but because we haven’t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we’ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.
A century later, in the atmosphere of Western consumer capitalism with its cult of the self, it is even more countercultural to speak about the soul — perhaps the last human holdout against commodification, too private and furtive to be turned into a marketable data point. And yet if art is what we make to save ourselves, to cotton the shock of living, then the soul is the only studio we have.
Tsvetaeva, who considered art a physical manifestation of the spiritual and a spiritual manifestation of the physical, knew this and articulated it beautifully:
Poetry — which I never take my eyes off when I say “art,” the whole event of poetry, from the poet’s visitation to the reader’s reception — takes place entirely within the soul.
Complement with Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being, Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, and this soulful read on how poetry saves lives, then revisit Richard Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 11 Jul 2024 | 8:26 am(NZT)
The Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Love and the Meaning of Respect
“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.”
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote as he charted the art of interbeing. Few things wound more deeply and syphon love more swiftly than the feeling of not being fully seen, of being exiled from your own totality by a simulacrum of love that showers adoration upon fragments deemed desirable, to the exclusion or grudging toleration of the rest of you. Any relationship worthy of the word “love” unfolds between two wholenesses and is resinous with respect — respect for the entirety of the person and everything that makes them themselves.
The humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) takes up the question of what respect really means and what it looks like in his 1947 book Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics.
Fromm writes:
Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness… To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person’s individuality.
But mutual knowledge — “the mask slipped from the face,” in Tom Stoppard’s lovely phrase — takes time, takes constancy, takes a passionate curiosity undimmed by the fading of novelty. Respect, then, is a durational practice rooted in the commitment to know one another more deeply and accept more fully what is discovered in the depths.
A decade later, Fromm deepened the inquiry into the nature of respect in his timelessly rewarding book The Art of Loving:
Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
Complement with Adrienne Rich on what makes an honorable human relationship, then revisit Fromm on the six rules of listening, spontaneity and our search for meaning, and what self-love really means.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 9 Jul 2024 | 6:42 pm(NZT)
Let the Last Thing Be Song
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.”
A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality, harmonious and symphonic with meaning.
And yet this musicality is more than a metaphor — it is part of our material nature, our creaturely inheritance. “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” wrote the poet Ronald Johnson. Music thrusts our neurobiology into transcendence. The poetic physicist Alan Lightman saw it as a language for the exhilaration of being alive. But it is also the language of mortality. “The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,” Richard Powers wrote.
Poet, French horn player, and choral singer Hannah Fries (who is also the visionary editor behind the Universe in Verse book) celebrates this enlivening relationship between music, meaning, and mortality in her stunning poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” inspired by Radiolab’s episode Memory and Forgetting and read here by Hannah herself to the sound of her young son improvising on the piano:
LET THE LAST THING BE SONG
by Hannah Friesi.
Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.
Behind locked doors
glow the unmarred pieces—
musical notes humming
in a jumble, only
waiting to be
arranged.ii.
What is left in one
who does not remember?
Love and music.Not a name but the fullness.
Not the sequence of events
but order of rhythm and pitch,a piece of time in which to exist.
iii.
A tone traveling through space has no referent,
and yet we infer, and yet it
finds its way between our cells
and shakes us.Aren’t we all still quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?iv.
When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, still
unspool its symphony?Sing to me — please —
and I will sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues past the final beat
of the stutter inside your chest.Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,
with the black hole’s
fathomless B-flat.
Couple with Marie Howe’s breathtaking “Hymn,” then revisit Nick Cave on music and transcendence in the age of AI and his reading of “But We Had Music.”
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 5 Jul 2024 | 9:54 pm(NZT)
What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep
“It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real… It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.”
This essay originally appeared in The New York Times
I once dreamed a kiss that hadn’t yet happened. I dreamed the angle at which our heads tilted, the fit of my fingers behind her ear, the exact pressure exerted on the lips by this transfer of trust and tenderness.
Freud, who catalyzed the study of dreams with his foundational 1899 treatise, would have discounted this as a mere chimera of the wishful unconscious. But what we have since discovered about the mind — particularly about the dream-rich sleep state of rapid-eye movement, or REM, unknown in Freud’s day — suggests another possibility for the adaptive function of these parallel lives in the night.
One cold morning not long after the kiss dream, I watched a young night heron sleep on a naked branch over the pond in Brooklyn Bridge Park, head folded into chest, and found myself wondering whether birds dream.
The recognition that nonhuman animals dream dates at least as far back as the days of Aristotle, who watched a sleeping dog bark and deemed it unambiguous evidence of mental life. But by the time Descartes catalyzed the Enlightenment in the 17th century, he had reduced other animals to mere automatons, tainting centuries of science with the assumption that anything unlike us is inherently inferior.
In the 19th century, when the German naturalist Ludwig Edinger performed the first anatomical studies of the bird brain and discovered the absence of a neocortex — the more evolutionarily nascent outer layer of the brain, responsible for complex cognition and creative problem-solving — he dismissed birds as little more than Cartesian puppets of reflex. This view was reinforced in the 20th century by the deviation, led by B.F. Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response.
In 1861, just two years after Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, a fossil was discovered in Germany with the tail and jaws of a reptile and the wings and wishbone of a bird, sparking the revelation that birds had evolved from dinosaurs. We have since learned that, although birds and humans haven’t shared a common ancestor in more than 300 million years, a bird’s brain is much more similar to ours than to a reptile’s. The neuron density of its forebrain — the region engaged with planning, sensory processing, and emotional responses, and on which REM sleep is largely dependent — is comparable to that of primates. At the cellular level, a songbird’s brain has a structure, the dorsal ventricular ridge, similar to the mammalian neocortex in function if not shape. (In pigeons and barn owls, the DVR is structured like the human neocortex, with both horizontal and vertical neural circuitry.)
Still, avian brains are also profoundly other, capable of feats unimaginable to us, especially during sleep: Many birds sleep with one eye open, even during flight. Migrating species that traverse immense distances at night, like the bar-tailed godwit, which covers the 7,000 miles between Alaska and New Zealand in eight days of continuous flight, engage in unihemispheric sleep, blurring the line between our standard categories of sleep and wakefulness.
But while sleep is an outwardly observable physical behavior, dreaming is an invisible interior experience as mysterious as love — a mystery to which science has brought brain imaging technology to illuminate the inner landscape of the sleeping bird’s mind.
The first electroencephalogram of electrical activity in the human brain was recorded in 1924, but EEG was not applied to the study of avian sleep until the 21st century, aided by the even more nascent functional magnetic resonance imaging, developed in the 1990s. The two technologies complement each other. In recording the electrical activity of large populations of neurons near the cortical surface, EEG tracks what neurons do more directly. But fMRI. can pinpoint the location of brain activity more precisely through oxygen levels in the blood. Scientists have used these technologies together to study the firing patterns of cells during REM sleep in an effort to deduce the content of dreams.
A study of zebra finches — songbirds whose repertoire is learned, not hard-wired — mapped particular notes of melodies sung in the daytime to neurons firing in the forebrain. Then, during REM, the neurons fired in a similar order: The birds appeared to be rehearsing the songs in their dreams.
An fMRI study of pigeons found that brain regions tasked with visual processing and spatial navigation were active during REM, as were regions responsible for wing action, even though the birds were stilled with sleep: They appeared to be dreaming of flying. The amygdala — a cluster of nuclei responsible for emotional regulation — was also active during REM, hinting at dreams laced with feeling. My night heron was probably dreaming, too — the folded neck is a classic marker of atonia, the loss of muscle tone characteristic of the REM state.
But the most haunting intimation of the research on avian sleep is that without the dreams of birds, we too might be dreamless. No heron, no kiss.
There are two primary groups of living birds: the flightless Palaeognathae, including the ostrich and the kiwi, which have retained certain ancestral reptilian traits, and Neognathae, comprising all other birds. EEG studies of sleeping ostriches have found REM-like activity in the brainstem — a more ancient part of the brain — while in modern birds, as in mammals, this REM-like activity takes place primarily in the more recently developed forebrain.
Several studies of sleeping monotremes — egg-laying mammals like the platypus and the echidna, the evolutionary link between us and birds — also reveal REM-like activity in the brainstem, suggesting that this was the ancestral crucible of REM before it slowly migrated toward the forebrain.
If so, the bird brain might be where evolution designed dreams — that secret chamber adjacent to our waking consciousness where we continue to work on the problems that occupy our days. Dmitri Mendeleev, after puzzling long and hard over the arrangement of atomic weights in his waking state, arrived at his periodic table in a dream. “All the elements fell into place as required,” he recounted in his diary. “Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” Cosmologist Stephon Alexander dreamed his way to a groundbreaking insight about the role of symmetry in cosmic inflation that earned him a national award from the American Physics Society. For Einstein, the central revelation of relativity took shape in a dream of cows simultaneously jumping up and moving in wavelike motion.
As with the mind, so with the body. Studies have shown that people learning new motor tasks “practice” them in sleep, then perform better while awake. This line of research has also shown how mental visualization helps athletes improve performance. Renata Adler touches on this in her novel Speedboat: “That was a dream,” she writes, “but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love — you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over. You’ve caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night.”
It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. It may be that the kiss in my dream was not nocturnal fantasy but, like the heron’s dreams of flying, the practice of possibility. It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 3 Jul 2024 | 8:23 am(NZT)
The Sunflower and the Soul: Wendell Berry on the Collaborative Nature of the Universe and the Cure for Conflict
“We are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another.”
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Walt Whitman wrote an epoch before the Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger examined the quantum conditions of existence to ask that urgent, discomposing question: “What justifies you in obstinately discovering… the difference between you and someone else… when objectively what is there is the same?”
It is not simply that we are here, made of the same matter, sharing the same improbable planet; it is that the sharing makes us what we are, each of us a fractal of this immense and indivisible ecosystem of relationship, a golden strand in a tapestry whose only meaning is in the interweaving of its threads.
That despite this elemental interdependence we remain riven by conflict and division is the great paradox and the great tragedy and great opportunity for redemption.
In his agrarian essay collection The Art of the Commonplace (public library), poet, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry dismantles the paradox to the building blocks of the tragedy and reconfigures them into a cathedral of redemption.
In what is nothing less than an act of countercultural courage and resistance, Berry indicts the Western capitalist mythos of “self-fulfillment” as the root of this artificial and often violent erasure of our interconnectedness and considers its fundamental logical flaw:
The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly, or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.
To illustrate how erroneous this notion of an individual separate from relationships is, Berry recounts visiting the experimental plots at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and being pointed to a huge Maximilian sunflower growing alone and apart from other plants. The man who had planted it proudly held it up as an example of a plant that has “realized its full potential as an individual.” Berry counters:
Clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many long branches heavily laden with blossoms — and the branches had broken off, for they had grown too long and too heavy. The plant had indeed realized its full potential as an individual, but it had failed as a Maximilian sunflower. We could say that its full potential as an individual was this failure. It had failed because it had lived outside an important part of its definition, which consists of both its individuality and its community. A part of its properly realizable potential lay in its community, not in itself.
In a sentiment springing from the same defiant recognition that led Albert Camus to refuse the choice of right side and wrong side in conflict, Berry adds:
To make conflict — the so-called “jungle law” — the basis of social or economic doctrine is extremely dangerous. A part of our definition is our common ground, and a part of it is sharing and mutually enjoying our common ground. Undoubtedly, also, since we are humans, a part of our definition is a recurring contest over the common ground: Who shall describe its boundaries, occupy it, use it, or own it? But such contests obviously can be carried too far, so that they become destructive both of the commonality of the common ground and of the ground itself.
Echoing Schrödinger’s quantum-lensed koan-like insight 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,” Berry writes:
The business of humanity is undoubtedly survival in this complex sense — a necessary, difficult, and entirely fascinating job of work. We have in us deeply planted instructions — personal, cultural, and natural — to survive, and we do not need much experience to inform us that we cannot survive alone. The smallest possible “survival unit,” indeed, appears to be the universe… Inside it, everything happens in concert; not a breath is drawn but by the grace of an inconceivable series of vital connections joining an inconceivable multiplicity of created things in an inconceivable unity. But of course it is preposterous for a mere individual human to espouse the universe — a possibility that is purely mental, and productive of nothing but talk. On the other hand, it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… They give the word “love” its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and a place. Only in such ways can love become flesh and do its worldly work.
In consonance with the Nobel-winning poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore’s insistence that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world,” Berry adds:
It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known.
Couple with Rachel Carson on wonder — that ultimate gasp at the interrelations of things — as the antidote to our human folly, then revisit Berry on the key to mirth under hardship, the peace of wild things, and 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.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 1 Jul 2024 | 10:53 pm(NZT)
Nobel-Winning Poet Joseph Brodsky on the Remedy for Existential Boredom
“Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath.”
Time is the most private place, and the loneliest — an interior chamber entirely inaccessible to another consciousness, no matter how proximate in space. In time, we are always alone — for time is the substance we are made of, but each of us is a sealed vial.
Our first great encounter with the interiority of time is the childhood experience of boredom — an experience that never leaves us, though we come to mask it with our adult addiction to productivity, with the strobe light of pleasure.
Boredom is time laid bare, hollowed of meaning, blank as death. It is there, in this restlessness to do, in this urgency to live, that we first understand mortality. It is there we first begin to realize, in Annie Dillard’s immortal words, that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Boredom is the menacing sense that we are not spending our lives — our lives are spending us.
The other day I watched an immense queue at the airport security line, people of every kind and every age, uniformly anod at their smartphones. In this age of ready relief from practical boredom, it is easy to forget the existential boredom pulsating beneath our lives. But, paradoxically, it is that other, deeper boredom that fires us with the yearning for meaning, for filling our sliver of allotted time with aliveness — this is why some of humanity’s greatest minds have stood in defense of boredom.
In the summer of 1989, two years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two decades after he fled the Soviet dictatorship with the help of W.H. Auden, the great Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) addressed the graduating class of Dartmouth College with a magnificent speech later adapted into an essay and published in the posthumous collection On Grief and Reason: Essays (public library) under the title “In Praise of Boredom.”
Boredom haunts the basic structure of human life: Although our habits and patterns, which hinge on repetition, give shape to our days, they can also become a prison as the vitalizing rhythm of repetition ossifies into monotonous repetitiveness. Brodsky observes:
Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom.
[…]
You’ll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways to escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets… you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate… You may lump all these together; and for a while, that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate… yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring in through your window. You’ll put on your loafers only to discover they’re lacking bootstraps to lift yourself out of what your recognize. Depending on your temperament or the age you are at, you will either panic or resign yourself to the familiarity of the sensation; or else you’ll go through the rigmarole of change once more.
Drawing on Robert Frost’s famous line “the best way out is always through,” Brodsky offers the only true remedy for boredom:
When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
This total surrender to boredom opens a portal of perspective. Out of its blankness surges a sudden fount of meaning. Brodsky writes:
Boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.
[…]
Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small.
In consonance with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s insight that “a creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger” — for what is boredom if not the howl of need, the need for significance — Brodsky adds:
You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much. Because your boredom is the boredom of infinity.
[…]
So try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath… When you hurt, you know that at least you haven’t been deceived (by your body or by your psyche). By the same token, what’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception.
[…]
Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you’ll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don’t think you’ve goofed somewhere along the line, don’t try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, “Believe your pain.” This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won’t finally unclasp.
With an eye to this inevitability of change, brutal and sanctifying, rife with ambivalence, he adds:
What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doesn’t stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck — not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past… receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck. So… look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past.
Complement with Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, Susan Sontag on the creative purpose of boredom, and Bertrand Russell on the vital role of “fruitful monotony” in a full life, then revisit Brodsky on the greatest antidote to evil and the six rules of a good life.
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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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Source: The Marginalian | 29 Jun 2024 | 1:16 am(NZT)
There Was a Shadow: A Lyrical Illustrated Celebration of the Changing Light, in the World and in the Inner World
“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in the 1933 Japanese classic In Praise of Shadows. As a physical phenomenon, shadows are one of the most beguiling phenomena of nature, emissaries of the entwined history of light and consciousness; as a metaphor, they are one of the most illuminating perspectives on human nature. The lower our level of conscious awareness, the longer the shadow our past casts on the present. But even under the noonday sun of our highest consciousness, we are still rooted in our shadows and must befriend them in order to fully inhabit our lives. “Learn to look when the sun of destiny plays with your shadows,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his passionate field guide to being yourself.
The world of shadows, physical and psychic, comes alive with uncommon tenderness in There Was a Shadow (public library) by writer Bruce Handy and artist Lisk Feng — the story, unfolding with a lovely rhythm partway between lullaby and villanelle, of a girl who ventures outside to discover that everything casts a shadow.
She encounters the “tall, wide shadow” of a hill and the “tiny, look-closely shadow” of a beetle, the shadows of her friends and the shadows of the birds, the soft blue shadow of moonlight and the warm yellow shadow of the kitchen lamp, the shadow of a feeling and the shadow of a dream.
Along the way, as the day’s shadows grow longer and melt into dusk to become the “delicate shadows, hard-to-see shadows” of the night, she also discovers that no shadow is fixed, that the loveliness of life is largely a matter of attending to the ever-changing light — the play of light on the water, the play of light on a face, the play of light in the mind.
There was a shadow.
It was a thinking shadow,
a shadow you could feel but not see,It was a worry.
But like a bird’s shadow,
the worry shadow darted,
flickered, and was gone.
Couple There Was a Shadow with The Shadow Elephant — a tender illustrated fable about what it takes to unblue our sorrows and lighten the load of our heaviest emotions — then revisit this lyrical illustrated invitation to find the light in the dark.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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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Source: The Marginalian | 28 Jun 2024 | 2:12 am(NZT)
Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World
Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years earlier, he had become the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for writing that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience” — problems like art as resistance, happiness as our moral obligation, and the measure of strength through difficult times.
During WWII, Camus stood passionately on the side of justice; during the Cold War, he sliced through the Iron Curtain with all the humanistic force of simple kindness. But as he watched the world burn its own future in the fiery pit of politics, he understood that time, which has no right side and no wrong side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
Camus addresses this with poetic poignancy in an essay titled “The Wrong Side and the Right Side,” found in his altogether superb posthumous collection Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library).
In a prescient admonition against our modern cult of productivity, which plunders our capacity for presence, Camus writes:
Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?
Echoing the young Dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed (“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart,” Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”), Camus adds:
What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.
These reflections led Camus to conclude that “there is no love of life without despair of life”; out of them he drew his three antidotes to the absurdity of life and the crucial question at its center.
Couple with George Saunders — who may be the closest we have to Camus in our time — on how to love the world more, then revisit Wendell Berry’s poetic antidote to despair.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Source: The Marginalian | 23 Jun 2024 | 2:51 am(NZT)
The Birth of the Byline: How a Bronze Age Woman Became the World’s First Named Author and Used the Moon to Unify the World’s First Empire
Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not yet knowing I too was to become a writer, I found myself wandering the vast cool halls of the Penn Museum. There among the thousands of ancient artifacts was one to which I would owe my future life — an alabaster disk from Bronze Age Mesopotamia, inscribed in Cuneiform with the name of the world’s first known author: Enheduanna.
Born in present-day Iraq with a Semitic name lost to history, the daughter of the Sumerian king Sargon of Akkad named herself en (“high priestess”) hedu (“ornament”) an (the Sumerian sky god) na: high priestess of the ornament of the sky, our Moon. Her father — himself the son of a priestess single mother, who had borne him in secret, then cast the infant on the Euphrates river in a straw basket into a life as an orphan — had conquered the major Sumerian city of Ur in 2334 B.C.E. and set out to unify the tessellation of warring city-states that was then Mesopotamia, creating the world’s first multinational empire.
He did all the practical things that help people cohere into a people — fostered a common language, standardized weights and measures, introduced taxes to support soldiers and artists — but he came to see what all leaders eventually see: that nothing binds human beings more powerfully than ideas. His citizens had to believe in one thing to become one people.
Sargon hired the best man for the job: his daughter; she anchored her strategy in what Margaret Fuller called “that best fact, the Moon.”
Enheduanna, whose story is woven into Rebecca Boyle’s altogether fascinating book Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (public library), took it upon herself to unify the Akkadian and Sumerian religions, using the Moon as the unifying force and poetry partway between prayer and propaganda as the fulcrum.
Over the course of her forty-year reign, Enheduanna composed hundreds, perhaps thousands of poems, passionate and playful, unafraid of the sensuous that is the human in the divine and the divine in the human — poems through which, as Boyle writes, “humanity tried to make connections between heaven and Earth for the first time”; poems that, in bringing the gods down to Earth, made them equally interested in all human life, Akkadian or Sumerian. Her crowning achievement of unification were her forty-two verses about different holy places across the empire, known as the Sumerian Temple Hymns and inscribed with the world’s first byline:
The compiler of the tablets was Enheduanna. My King, something has been created here that no one has ever created before.
Enheduanna has been called the Shakespeare of the ancient Middle East. Like Shakespeare’s, her authorship is disputed. But, like Shakespeare, without counterproof she remains the greatest poet of her time and place — doubly so for turning even her pain and loneliness into sacred art: When Sargon’s grandson became king and a rebellion broke out, Enheduanna was exiled to the desert; there, as civil unrest was rupturing the empire, she wrote in verse about her suffering, which was the suffering of many. I am reminded of James Baldwin’s definition of a great poet: “The greatest poet in the English language,” he wrote of Shakespeare, “found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”
Complement with the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, which helped humanity bridge immortality and impermanence — those old concerns of religion — through a young science.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 21 Jun 2024 | 4:36 am(NZT)
On Change and Denial
“It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm.”
Central to our ambivalence about change is the fundamental difficulty of letting go. I am not sure what is more difficult — the heartache of enduring a change made against your will and without your consent, which is the foundation of all loss, or the inner turmoil of having to make a necessary change yourself, breaking the momentum of patterns propelled by a lifetime’s motive force, which in turn presupposes the loss of a familiar way of being, the letting go of a habitual self.
Often, we feel the tectonic tremors of change long before it erupts to alter the landscape of life; often, we tune them out or invent a thousand alternative explanations for them. But we know, we know, deep in the marrow of the soul, when something must change — and when it is about to.
Terry Tempest Williams speaks to this beautifully in a passage from her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (public library). Two decades before she came to reckon with the paradox of transformation, she writes:
It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm. We go about our business with the usual alacrity, while in the pit of our stomach there is a sense of something tenuous. These moments of peripheral perceptions are short, sharp flashes of insight we tend to discount like seeing the movement of an animal from the corner of our eye. We turn and there is nothing there. They are the strong and subtle impressions we allow to slip away.
What keeps us from heeding those intuitions is denial, that most precarious of the mind’s acrobatics, most prone to self-injury — denial that the change is necessary, denial that we are capable of it, denial that the world will hold us even if we fall apart in the process.
Williams writes:
Denial stops us from listening… But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs walls around us to keep us safe.
Couple with philosopher Amélie Rorty on the antidote to our self-defeating delusions, then revisit Williams on how to live with uncertainty.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 19 Jun 2024 | 2:11 am(NZT)
Befriending a Blackbird
Friendship is a lifeline twined of truth and tenderness. That we extend it to each other is benediction enough. To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.
Born in England in the final year of the nineteenth century, Hockley Clarke grew up loving nature. When he was sent to France with the British infantry during WWI, still a teenager, he looked for birds whenever he was out of the trenches or had a day’s rest, listening for them through the blaze of the machine guns, once hearing the song of the nightingale clear and bright over a heap of dead bodies. “Although I am not a religious man,” he would later write, “I have always regarded birds and all wild life as the manifestations of God.”
Having narrowly survived, he founded a bird magazine he went on to edit single-handedly for forty years, writing numerous books about birds along the way. He continued birding into his nineties.
In Blackie & Co. (public library), Clarke tells the story a blackbird family who took up residence in his wildly overgrown garden and his own family’s tender friendship with the birds. Emanating from it is a moving meditation on our capacity for connection with other creatures, kindred to the story of Beatrice Harrison and the nightingales.
In the savage winter of 1962 — the coldest weather to strike Europe in eighty years (which didn’t stop Dervla Murphy from mounting her bicycle in Ireland headed for India) — a blackbird began roosting in Clarke’s elderberry. He named him Blackie and began bringing him food first thing every morning and again in the evening as the snow and ice lasted for weeks and weeks.
Soon, Blackie was flying out of the tree at meal time, greeting Clarke with “a few glad chuckles.” Something began growing between man and bird, some unbroken thread of trust and tenderness. Clarke writes:
Blackie and I had an understanding on those cold mornings. I spoke to him; he knew my voice and I am sure that he answered in his own language, of which I thought I had some understanding. There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him. Perhaps birds understand more than we think.
Throughout the book, Clarke details the building blocks of that understanding over the course of the decade Blackie stayed in his garden — the small gestures of sympathy and sensitivity to another’s reality, affirming the Zen tenet that “understanding is the essence of love.” In the final chapter, titled “Valediction,” Clarke reflects on the challenge of comprehending another consciousness by applying to it the frames of reference shaped by our own — including our understanding of what an emotion is, so inseparable from our creaturely biology. He writes:
The relationship between ourselves and these birds threw up a finer feeling, something that cannot be described, and they responded to it without, possibly, being conscious of it at all. It would be rash to think birds are emotional. It would never do for them to be so, seeing the suffering and fatalities that take place, but they are capable of developing a finer feeling if they are allowed and encouraged to do so. This is made up of qualities such as confidence in the person with whom they come into close contact regularly, which motivates a feeling of trust in them and they respond. To put all their actions down to “cupboard love,” or self-interest, would be to rob the relationship of a glow and purpose.
Couple with J.A. Baker’s decade-long communion with a peregrine, then revisit naturalist Sy Montgomery on what befriending thirteen animals taught her about being more fully human.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 17 Jun 2024 | 10:58 am(NZT)
The Beach and the Soul: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the Benedictions of the Sea
“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient… Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach.”
“Without a body there’s no soul and without the latter there’s no way to speak about the sea,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote in her superb meditation on the sea and the soul. “No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry,” Rachel Carson insisted. Because the beach is where the body meets the sea, it is a place of encounter with the native poetry of the soul — a place to be “washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances,” as Anaïs Nin observed in contemplating the beach as training ground for presence. It was on the beach alone at night that Walt Whitman touched eternity.
One summer in the early 1950s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (June 22, 1906–February 7, 2001) left her husband and five children home in the suburbs of New York City and headed for beach in search of communion with her own soul. In Gift from the Sea (public library), in lovely prose winged with the poetic, she channels what she found through the patient work of surrender and shimmering receptivity.
Lindbergh writes:
The beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think… Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit… The books remain unread, the pencils break their points and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky. No reading, no writing, no thoughts even—at least, not at first.
At first, the tired body takes over completely… One is forced against one’s mind, against all tidy resolutions, back into the primeval rhythms of the seashore. Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.
But this elemental surrender does not come easily, or quickly, to the captive of civilization and all its deadening compulsions of productivity — it takes time to surrender. For Lindbergh, in an era when airplanes were young and the Internet unborn, that time was two weeks. I wonder what the technology-induced inflation would be today.
She writes:
And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense — no — but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channelled whelk, a moon shell or even an argonaut.
In a caveat central to every meditation practice and every true unbidden love, she adds:
But it must not be sought for or — heaven forbid! — dug for. No, no dredging of the sea bottom here. That would defeat one’s purpose. The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.
Complement with Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit Lindbergh on embracing change in relationships.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 14 Jun 2024 | 3:44 pm(NZT)
The Pleasure of Being Left Alone
“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls… A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.”
There is a form of being together that feels as easy and spacious as being alone, when your experience is not crowded out or eclipsed by the presence of the other but deepened and magnified. Such companionship is extremely rare and extremely precious. All other company, no matter how dear, inevitably reaches a saturation point and begins to suffocate. If one is an introvert, that point comes sooner and more violently. A return to solitude then becomes nothing less than a rapture.
Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) channels this ecstatic relief with great charm and poetic passion in a piece from Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library) — her 1935 collection of reflections kindred to, and a century ahead of, poet Ross Gay’s wonderful Book of Delights.
Despite publishing twenty-two books in twenty years, alongside numerous essays, poems, and newspaper columns — prolificacy only possible through the deepest and most undistracted solitude, haunted by Susan Sontag’s lament that “one can never be alone enough to write” — Macaulay was no hermit. She gave talks, attended events, threw parties, and appeared frequently on public radio to offer incisive commentary on the state of the world. During WWI, she worked as a nurse and a civil servant. During WWII, like Marie Curie a war earlier, she became a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of sixty. She regularly wrote to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary — her favorite book — with suggestions, corrections, and improvements. (“To amend so great a work gives me pleasure,” she writes in one of these essays on life’s littlest and deepest joys.) When her flat was demolished in the Blitz, all her books destroyed, it was the dictionary volumes she most mourned. When she rebuilt her home, she continued hosting friends for salons and soirees.
But despite her surface sociality, Macaulay embodied the true test of an introvert — not whether one engages in social activity, but whether one is charged or drained by it. In an essay titled “Departure of Visitors,” she exults in the pleasure of being at last left alone:
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
[…]
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.
What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.
Paradoxically, even Macaulay’s muse was a visitor from whom she eventually needed a break. In another essay, she offers a strikingly similar inner response to finishing a book — that moment when, upon setting down the last word on the last page, the mind becomes uncrowded again. She writes:
Leisure spreads before my dazzled eyes, a halcyon sea, too soon to be cumbered with the flotsam and jetsam of purposes long neglected, which will, I know it, drift quickly into view again once I am embarked upon that treacherous, enticing ocean. Leisure now is but a brief business, and past return are the days when it seemed to stretch, blue and unencumbered, between one occupation and the next. There are always arrears, always things undone, doubtless never to be done, putting up teasing, reproachful heads, so that, although I slug, I slug among the wretched souls whom care doth seek to kill. But now, just emerged as I am from the tangled and laborious thicket which has so long embosked me, I will contemplate a sweet and unencumbered slugging, a leisure and a liberty as of lotus eaters or gods.
Couple with May Sarton’s stunning ode to the art of being alone from the era of Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures, then revisit Olivia Laing on the modern art of being alone amid the crowd and Stephen Batchelor’s field guide to glad solitude.
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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Source: The Marginalian | 14 Jun 2024 | 7:12 am(NZT)
A Glow in the Consciousness: The Continuous Creative Act of Seeing Clearly
“Simply to look on anything… with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.”
There is no pure perception — of a flower, of a mountain, of a person. In everything we look at, we see partly a reflection of ourselves — a projection of an internal model seeking to approximate the actuality. If we are conscious enough and unafraid enough of being surprised, we will keep testing the model against reality, incrementally ceding the imagined to the actual. One measure of love — perhaps the deepest measure — is the willingness to remove the projection in order to perceive what is truly there. There is both sorrow and consolation in knowing that although we can only ever glimpse parts of the totality beyond us, we can keep trying to see more clearly in order to love more deeply.
I am reminded of a passage from The Living Mountain (public library) — that uncommon masterpiece of attention and affection by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd (February 11, 1893–February 23, 1981) — illustrating this paradox of perception.
Up in the Scottish Highlands, Shepherd discovers how the illusions of perception depend on one’s position, physical as much as psychic. She writes:
A scatter of white flowers in grass, looked at through half-closed eyes, blaze out with a sharp clarity as though they had actually risen up out of their background. Such illusions, depending on how the eye is placed and used, drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies us again.
This overwhelming infinity of possible perceptions is what attention evolved to protect us from — that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator,” selecting a handful of parts out of the totality in order to construct the projected image.
Without a conscious clearing of the lens, the eye sees what the mind has already imagined.
As her vision encounters the myriad tessellated realities of the mountain, Shepherd considers what it takes to “look creatively” in order to see more clearly:
How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? — the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle — as beauty… A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won’t do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.
Meanwhile on another landmass, Frida Kahlo was confronting the challenge of fully knowing another, writing to the complicated love of her life that “only one mountain can know the core of another mountain” — a poetic reminder that getting to know one another’s depths may be the supreme “continuous creative act,” the great triumph of perception over projection.
Complement with Oliver Sacks on the necessity of our illusions and Iain McGilchrist on how we render reality with attention as an instrument of love, then revisit the young Charles Darwin’s encounter with God in the mountains and the surrealist French poet and philosopher René Daumal on the mountain and the meaning of 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.
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.
Source: The Marginalian | 12 Jun 2024 | 10:56 am(NZT)