“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects. “One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going,” the artist Ann Hamilton wrote a generation later in her magnificent meditation on the generative power of not-knowing. “In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know.”

What is true of art is even truer of life, for a human life is the greatest work of art there is. (In my own life, looking back on my ten most important learnings from the first ten years of The Marginalian [formerly Brain Pickings], I placed the practice of the small, mighty phrase “I don’t know” at the very top.) But to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement — a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate.”

That difficult feat of insurgency is what the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) explored in 1996 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for capturing the transcendent fragility of the human experience in masterpieces like “Life-While-You-Wait” and “Possibilities.”

In her acceptance speech, later included in Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006 (public library) — which also gave us the spectacular speech on the power of language Toni Morrison delivered after becoming the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize — Szymborska considers why artists are so reluctant to answer questions about what inspiration is and where it comes from:

It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself.

Noting that she, too, tends to be rattled by the question, she offers her wieldiest answer:

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

In a sentiment of chilling prescience today, as we witness tyrants drunk on certainty drain the world of its essential inspiration, Szymborska considers the destructive counterpoint to this generative not-knowing:

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Such surrender to not-knowing, Szymborska argues as she steps out into the cosmic perspective, is the seedbed of our capacity for astonishment, which in turn gives meaning to our existence:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Twenty years before she received the Nobel Prize, Szymborska explored how our contracting compulsion for knowing can lead us astray in her sublime 1976 poem “Utopia,” found in her Map: Collected and Last Poems (public library):

UTOPIA

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

Purely for the fun of it, I found myself drawing Szymborska’s poetic island in a map inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia:

Complement with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in the age of knowledge, then revisit Szymborska on why we read, our cosmic solitude, how artists humanize our history, and the importance of being scared.

donating = loving

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

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“I function only by falling in love: with French and France; with the 15th Century; with microbiology, cosmology, sleep research,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her daybook, capturing the necessary passion that makes writing akin to falling in love. But reading is where the parallel begins. Some of us read in order to write — one must first read about the fifteenth century and microbiology and sleep research before writing about it — and some read purely for the private joy of a world enlarged. Reading is the real fulcrum that lifts us up into new realms of thought and feeling, new atmospheres of reality, from which we free-fall into a deeper love of life itself. And whenever we read, we read the way we love — with our whole being, bringing to the book every experience we’ve ever had, every vestige of half-remembered impressions and half-survived heartbreaks, the imprint every other book we’ve ever read has left on our conscience.

From Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923–September 19, 1985) comes an uncommonly insightful, tender, and sensual celebration of this parallel between reading and love — the making of it, the falling into it — in a wonderful passage from 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler (public library). From the frame narrative about a reader trying to read a book to the novel’s very title, deliberately styled like a sentence and not like a caption of capitalized words, this book is the ultimate meta-homage to reading — a book by and for the unabashed, obsessive lover of books; a book that exemplifies all of Calvino’s fourteen criteria for a classic, but especially the fourth: “a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.”

Drawing a central parallel between a story in literature and a love story in life, Calvino writes:

How to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest — for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both — must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.)

He considers how reading, like physical intimacy, is an act of total immersion that at its best requires a delicate osmotic balance of total surrender and unassailable sovereignty — one of the mind, the other of the body:

Now, since your bodies are trying to find, skin to skin, the adhesion most generous in sensations, to transmit and receive vibrations and waves, to compenetrate the fullnesses and the voids, since in mental activity you have also agreed on the maximum agreement, you can be addressed with an articulated speech that includes you both in a sole, two-headed person. First of all the field of action, or of existence, must be established for this double entity you form. Where is the reciprocal identification leading? What is the central theme that recurs in your variations and modulations? A tension concentrated on not losing anything of its own potential, on prolonging a state of reactivity, on exploiting the accumulation of the other’s desire in order to multiply one’s own charge? Or is it the most submissive abandonment, the exploration of the immensity of strokable and reciprocally stroking spaces, the dissolving of one’s being in a lake whose surface is infinitely tactile?

In a sentiment evocative of Rilke’s poignant observation that “even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist” and that a healthy love is one of spacious union between two neighboring solitudes, Calvino concludes of this necessary negotiation between separateness and unity:

In both situations you certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn’t change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu’s, more separate and circumscribed than before.

In what may be the most sensuous passage ever composed on the subject, he likens the act of reading to the act of making love, addressing the reader-lover:

Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being… The Other Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index, and at some moments she consults it as if gripped by sudden and specific curiosities, then she lingers, questioning it and waiting till a silent answer reaches her, as if every partial inspection interested her only in the light of a wider spatial reconnaissance. Now she dwells on negligible details, perhaps tiny stylistic faults… and she exploits them to establish a margin of detachment, critical reserve, or joking intimacy; now instead the accidentally discovered detail is excessively cherished — for example, the shape of your chin or a special nip you take at her shoulder — and from this start she gains impetus, covers (you cover together) pages and pages from top to bottom without skipping a comma.

But then Calvino anchors the analogy in a crucial difference within the similarity of the two experiences:

Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Complement this fragment of the thoroughly delicious If on a winter’s night a traveler with Jeanette Winterson on reading as self-liberation, Anne Lamott on reading as healing, Alain de Botton on reading as a portal to empathy, and Rebecca Solnit on reading as an existential toolkit for transformation, then revisit Calvino on the unbearable lightness of language, literature, and life and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on what reading Proust reveals about the litmus test for true love.

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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“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth.

Fairy tales are above all in service of life’s most difficult, most unfinishable task — knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don’t always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don’t immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.

That is what Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) explores in her excellent posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (public library).

Observing that many fairy tales “end like a ring right where they began,” she writes:

In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star — or a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, or the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. Or the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty.

Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:

Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you’ve reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?

[…]

No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler… Or it hovers behind him… In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another’s arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.

It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time — time, after all, is the substance we are made of.

In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo — the daughter of a musician and a composer — writes:

The geometry of time and space is abolished as if by magic. You walk for hours in a circle, or conversely, you reach the edge of the infinite in a few quick steps. It isn’t our state of heightened vigilance that casts a spell on the world around us; it is a much more recondite correspondence between discovering and letting ourselves be discovered — between giving shape and taking shape. Everything already was, but today it truly is. Today any peasant, pointing in any direction, will sound like a gnome or a fairy, will gesture at the path you nearly took a thousand times without suspecting it. The path that leads to four indescribably white springs suspended on the hillside, protected, for a hundred paces or a thousand miles, by fields of tall fragrant grasses; or to the royal tomb hidden by the Etruscans in a cave now covered with brambles, out of which white hounds and a man the size of an ifrit, carrying a shotgun, emerge; or down below the ridge secretly lighted by the sun, at a bend in the riverbank so deep it casts the whole hanging tangle of pink roots into shadow. Velvet water that looks motionless and yet moves. Water that runs off into the beyond without flowing, so that it would be enough just to follow it, for that beyond which is always forbidden, always intimated in our dreams, is transpiring here and now.

I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt’s magnificent meditation on love: “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” she wrote. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales, why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality, why both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. “In each of us there is another whom we do not know,” Carl Jung wrote, “[who] speaks to us in dreams.”

There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:

Quick glances direct our steps, hands point beyond the thresholds. Behind windowpanes so clear they blind us move the figures of the ones we loved, the ones we’ve lost, who, behold, stand up from the piano bench or arrange fruit on a table. It all unfolds like a scroll from a mouth known yet unknown, a dark and luminous sentence, an irrefutable commentary set down between past and future.

In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature by guiding us toward the deepest truths of who we are and helping us apply them to the mystery of being alive — a nonlinear process the fruits of which we call maturity. Campo writes:

Maturity is not the result of persuasion, much less an intellectual epiphany. It is a sudden, I would almost like to say biological, collapse. It is a point that must be reached by all the senses at once if truth is going to be turned into nature.

Complement with Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and Anaïs Nin on the meaning of maturity, then revisit the greatest illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

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 current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind.

Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its healthy and potent form, protest is both a natural stage of grief and a motive force for new beginnings, we live in a culture that chronically mistakes outcry for protest, a culture yet to learn that what lifts anything or anyone out of despair is not fist-shaking but a helping hand.

The irreplaceable Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934–August 31, 2026) calibrates our modern misuse of protest in one of the essays in his altogether wonderful collection What Are People For? (public library).

Contemplating the challenge and urgency of creating in times when hope is difficult, times of darkness all the more needful of the lighthouse that is art, he observes that the very notion of protest art places us “directly in the presence of one of the bewilderments of our history and one of the mysteries of our nature,” and writes:

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others… deplore the whole list and its causes. Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

The very need for protest, Berry notes, illuminates “the part that suffering plays in the economy of the spirit.” Half a century after Carl Jung detailed the relationship between suffering and creativity, he writes:

The voice of our despair defines our hope exactly… We cannot know of hope without knowing of despair, just as we know joy precisely to the extent that we know sorrow.

A generation before him, the visionary artist René Magritte had championed the courage of joy by insisting that “life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.”

For Berry, effective protest asks the same thing of us as making art does: to preserve our “wholeness of heart in the face of despair.”

Couple with Audre Lorde’s antidote to despair, then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough, delight as a force of resistance, 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.

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“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more.

Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature — that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light.

To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough.

The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”

In the preface, Berry considers how nature calibrates expectation — even in the creative act itself, where inspiration is not a reach for more but a letting be of what is, a surrender to reality, which is miracle enough:

On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams… In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations — other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.

In how it thrives on the freedom from expectation, in how it demands a total surrender and breaks the moment it is demanded of, creativity has a lot in common with love. It may be that nature invented love to teach us the art of enoughness — to learn how to open the heart to another without condition or expectation, to be fully welcomed in another heart in order to learn the hardest axiom of being: that we are, and always were, enough.

Love’s salutary alchemy of enoughness comes alive in the second part of Berry’s eight-part sabbath poem of 1994:

Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shapes of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shapes of flesh, ever-changing
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of the body for body,
unending light. You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.

Couple with John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — a lovely vintage illustrated fable about the meaning and measure of enough — then revisit this soulful animated adaptation of Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and his prose meditation on the nature of the universe lensed through a sunflower.

HT Cloud Appreciation Society

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.

If the ancient Arab world had closed its gates to foreign travelers, we would have no medicine, no astronomy, and no mathematics — at least not as we know them today.

Central to humanity’s quest to grasp the nature of the universe and make sense of our own existence is zero, which began in Mesopotamia and spurred one of the most significant paradigm shifts in human consciousness — a concept first invented (or perhaps discovered) in pre-Arab Sumer, modern-day Iraq, and later given symbolic form in ancient India. This twining of meaning and symbol not only shaped mathematics, which underlies our best models of reality, but became woven into the very fabric of human life, from the works of Shakespeare, who famously winked at zero in King Lear by calling it “an O without a figure,” to the invention of the bit that gave us the 1s and 0s underpinning my ability to type these words and your ability to read them on this screen.

Mathematician Robert Kaplan chronicles nought’s revolutionary journey in The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (public library). It is, in a sense, an archetypal story of scientific discovery, wherein an abstract concept derived from the observed laws of nature is named and given symbolic form. But it is also a kind of cross-cultural fairy tale that romances reason across time and space

Kaplan writes:

If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world. For zero brings into focus the great, organic sprawl of mathematics, and mathematics in turn the complex nature of things. From counting to calculating, from estimating the odds to knowing exactly when the tides in our affairs will crest, the shining tools of mathematics let us follow the tacking course everything takes through everything else – and all of their parts swing on the smallest of pivots, zero

With these mental devices we make visible the hidden laws controlling the objects around us in their cycles and swerves. Even the mind itself is mirrored in mathematics, its endless reflections now confusing, now clarifying insight.

[…]

As we follow the meanderings of zero’s symbols and meanings we’ll see along with it the making and doing of mathematics — by humans, for humans. No god gave it to us. Its muse speaks only to those who ardently pursue her.

With an eye to the eternal question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented — a question famously debated by Kurt Gödel and the Vienna Circle — Kaplan observes:

The disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things, hence the yet deeper issue of where we are in the hierarchy. Are we creatures or creators, less than – or only a little less than — the angels in our power to appraise?

Like all transformative inventions, zero began with necessity — the necessity for counting without getting bemired in the inelegance of increasingly large numbers. Kaplan writes:

Zero began its career as two wedges pressed into a wet lump of clay, in the days when a superb piece of mental engineering gave us the art of counting.

[…]

The story begins some 5,000 years ago with the Sumerians, those lively people who settled in Mesopotamia (part of what is now Iraq). When you read, on one of their clay tablets, this exchange between father and son: “Where did you go?” “Nowhere.” “Then why are you late?”, you realize that 5,000 years are like an evening gone.

The Sumerians counted by 1s and 10s but also by 60s. This may seem bizarre until you recall that we do too, using 60 for minutes in an hour (and 6 × 60 = 360 for degrees in a circle). Worse, we also count by 12 when it comes to months in a year, 7 for days in a week, 24 for hours in a day and 16 for ounces in a pound or a pint. Up until 1971 the British counted their pennies in heaps of 12 to a shilling but heaps of 20 shillings to a pound.

Tug on each of these different systems and you’ll unravel a history of customs and compromises, showing what you thought was quirky to be the most natural thing in the world. In the case of the Sumerians, a 60-base (sexagesimal) system most likely sprang from their dealings with another culture whose system of weights — and hence of monetary value — differed from their own.

Having to reconcile the decimal and sexagesimal counting systems was a source of growing confusion for the Sumerians, who wrote by pressing the tip of a hollow reed to create circles and semi-circles onto wet clay tablets solidified by baking. The reed eventually became a three-sided stylus, which made triangular cuneiform marks at varying angles to designate different numbers, amounts, and concepts. Kaplan demonstrates what the Sumerian numerical system looked like by 2000 BCE:

This cumbersome system lasted for thousands of years, until someone at some point between the sixth and third centuries BCE came up with a way to wedge accounting columns apart, effectively symbolizing “nothing in this column” — and so the concept of, if not the symbol for, zero was born. Kaplan writes:

In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating from perhaps as far back as 700 BC), the scribe wrote his zeroes with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges, as if they were thirties; and another scribe at about the same time made his with only one, so that they are indistinguishable from his tens. Carelessness? Or does this variety tell us that we are very near the earliest uses of the separation sign as zero, its meaning and form having yet to settle in?

But zero almost perished with the civilization that first imagined it. The story follows history’s arrow from Mesopotamia to ancient Greece, where the necessity of zero awakens anew. Kaplan turns to Archimedes and his system for naming large numbers, “myriad” being the largest of the Greek names for numbers, connoting 10,000. With his notion of orders of large numbers, the great Greek polymath came within inches of inventing the concept of powers, but he gave us something even more important — as Kaplan puts it, he showed us “how to think as concretely as we can about the very large, giving us a way of building up to it in stages rather than letting our thoughts diffuse in the face of immensity, so that we will be able to distinguish even such magnitudes as these from the infinite.”

This concept of the infinite in a sense contoured the need for naming its mirror-image counterpart: nothingness. (Negative numbers were still a long way away.) And yet the Greeks had no word for zero, though they clearly recognized its spectral presence. Kaplan writes:

Haven’t we all an ancient sense that for something to exist it must have a name? Many a child refuses to accept the argument that the numbers go on forever (just add one to any candidate for the last) because names run out. For them a googol — 1 with 100 zeroes after it — is a large and living friend, as is a googolplex (10 to the googol power, in an Archimedean spirit).

[…]

By not using zero, but naming instead his myriad myriads, orders and periods, Archimedes has given a constructive vitality to this vastness — putting it just that much nearer our reach, if not our grasp.

Ordinarily, we know that naming is what gives meaning to existence. But names are given to things, and zero is not a thing — it is, in fact, a no-thing. Kaplan contemplates the paradox:

Names belong to things, but zero belongs to nothing. It counts the totality of what isn’t there. By this reasoning it must be everywhere with regard to this and that: with regard, for instance, to the number of humming-birds in that bowl with seven — or now six — apples. Then what does zero name? It looks like a smaller version of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, having no there there.

Zero, still an unnamed figment of the mathematical imagination, continued its odyssey around the ancient world before it was given a name. After Babylon and Greece, it landed in India. The first surviving written appearance of zero as a symbol appeared there on a stone tablet dated 876 AD, inscribed with the measurements of a garden: 270 by 50, written as “27°” and “5°.” Kaplan notes that the same tiny zero appears on copper plates dating back to three centuries earlier, but because forgeries ran rampant in the eleventh century, their authenticity can’t be ascertained. He writes:

We can try pushing back the beginnings of zero in India before 876, if you are willing to strain your eyes to make out dim figures in a bright haze. Why trouble to do this? Because every story, like every dream, has a deep point, where all that is said sounds oracular, all that is seen, an omen. Interpretations seethe around these images like froth in a cauldron. This deep point for us is the cleft between the ancient world around the Mediterranean and the ancient world of India.

But if zero were to have a high priest in ancient India, it would undoubtedly be the mathematician and astronomer Āryabhata, whose identity is shrouded in as much mystery as Shakespeare’s. Nonetheless, his legacy — whether he was indeed one person or many — is an indelible part of zero’s story.

Kaplan writes:

Āryabhata wanted a concise way to store (not calculate with) large numbers, and hit on a strange scheme. If we hadn’t yet our positional notation, where the 8 in 9,871 means 800 because it stands in the hundreds place, we might have come up with writing it this way: 9T8H7Te1, where T stands for ‘thousand’, H for “hundred” and Te for “ten” (in fact, this is how we usually pronounce our numbers, and how monetary amounts have been expressed: £3.4s.2d). Āryabhata did something of this sort, only one degree more abstract.

He made up nonsense words whose syllables stood for digits in places, the digits being given by consonants, the places by the nine vowels in Sanskrit. Since the first three vowels are a, i and u, if you wanted to write 386 in his system (he wrote this as 6, then 8, then 3) you would want the sixth consonant, c, followed by a (showing that c was in the units place), the eighth consonant, j, followed by i, then the third consonant, g, followed by u: CAJIGU. The problem is that this system gives only 9 possible places, and being an astronomer, he had need of many more. His baroque solution was to double his system to 18 places by using the same nine vowels twice each: a, a, i, i, u, u and so on; and breaking the consonants up into two groups, using those from the first for the odd numbered places, those from the second for the even. So he would actually have written 386 this way: CASAGI (c being the sixth consonant of the first group, s in effect the eighth of the second group, g the third of the first group)…

There is clearly no zero in this system — but interestingly enough, in explaining it Āryabhata says: “The nine vowels are to be used in two nines of places” — and his word for “place” is “kha”. This kha later becomes one of the commonest Indian words for zero. It is as if we had here a slow-motion picture of an idea evolving: the shift from a “named” to a purely positional notation, from an empty place where a digit can lodge to “the empty number”: a number in its own right, that nudged other numbers along into their places.

Kaplan reflects on the multicultural intellectual heritage encircling the concept of zero:

While having a symbol for zero matters, having the notion matters more, and whether this came from the Babylonians directly or through the Greeks, what is hanging in the balance here in India is the character this notion will take: will it be the idea of the absence of any number — or the idea of a number for such absence? Is it to be the mark of the empty, or the empty mark? The first keeps it estranged from numbers, merely part of the landscape through which they move; the second puts it on a par with them.

In the remainder of the fascinating and lyrical The Nothing That Is, Kaplan goes on to explore how various other cultures, from the Mayans to the Romans, contributed to the trans-civilizational mosaic that is zero as it made its way to modern mathematics, and examines its profound impact on everything from philosophy to literature to his own domain of mathematics. Complement it with this Victorian love letter to mathematics and the illustrated story of how the Persian polymath Ibn Sina revolutionized modern 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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Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names — Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet” and Portuguese has the lovely word saudade: the vague, constant longing for something or someone beyond the horizon of reality — but we recognize it in our marrow, in the strata of the soul beyond the reach of words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

donating = loving

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

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“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.”

We know that loving anything or anyone is a contract with loss, and yet we love anyway, our lives a ceaseless osmosis of holding on and letting go, an endless apprenticeship in the art of losing.

What we keep of our losses scaffolds who we become. What we let die within us — the tortured patterns, the ill-serving habits, the limiting beliefs — makes it possible to be reborn. And yet it is not easy, letting go of something we have lived with — a love, a dream, an idea of who we are. It can never be willed, only surrendered to, and not without the thrashes of denial, dissociation, and the thousand little lies we tell ourselves in order to hold on. To finally let go is to discover that life holds, that we can be held in something larger than fear, larger than grief, larger than ourselves.

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934–December 23, 2021) offers a spare, stirring field guide to doing that in the final pages of The Year of Magical Thinking (public library) — her classic reckoning with grief following the death of her husband of four decades, John Gregory Dunne.

Loosening the grip begins with the recognition that there is nothing solid enough in this world to hold on to, that transience is not a defect of things but their fundamental nature. Drawing on how plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of life, Didion writes:

As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house… I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress… A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure… [The island] Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge, is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific.

When she took her husband’s ashes to St. John the Divine, Didion brought along a lei — the traditional flower garland of the South Pacific, made to be worn around the neck, often given to loved ones arriving or departing. Looking back on her life with John in the idyll of their young love in the Brentwood Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, looking back on her time living and writing in Hawaii, she leans on a poetic native ritual for letting go:

During the years when people still left Honolulu on the Matson Lines the custom at the moment of departure was to throw leis on the water, a promise that the traveler would return. The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone bruised and brown.

The other morning when I woke I tried to remember the arrangement of the rooms in the house in Brentwood Park. I imagined myself walking through the rooms, first on the ground floor and then on the second. Later in the day I realized that I had forgotten one.

The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by now.

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.

The daily deaths of hopes and plans, the failed projects and failed relationships, are our training ground for letting go, a scale model of life’s most difficult losses — the death of a parent, the death of a child, the death of a soul mate. Because the way we meet any death is the way we meet every death, Didion’s reckoning with losing the love of her life maps the disorienting terrain of navigating any loss, letting go of anything that has died, or must die, within us so we may go on living a deeper, truer life. In a poignant counterpoint to Hemingway’s insistence that “no one you love is ever dead,” she writes:

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.

Couple with poet Jane Kenyon on the art of letting go, then revisit Carl Jung on death and how to be more alive.

donating = loving

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

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One fact that never fails to astound me: Despite the immense cultural changes and leaps in knowledge over the epochs, the human brain — that crucible of consciousness, roiling with the psychologies that govern the behaviors we call human nature — has remained virtually unchanged for the past hundred thousand years. How humbling to consider that what is cognitively true of our ancestors — who, lacking a knowledge of astronomy as the correct frame of reference for planetary motion, explained eclipses as acts of god and comets as omens of ill fortune — is as true of us.

The explanatory contexts in which this tendency manifests today may be different, but it manifests just the same — especially in our interpersonal relationships, where so much of the correct frame of reference that is the other person’s inner reality is invisible to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the external world that causes the ripples of consciousness we call feelings — any difficult situation, any painful event, any hurtful action of another — there lie myriad possible causal explanations.

One fact I have learned about life through the empiricism of living: When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.

And so, sensemaking and storytelling creatures that we are, we move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what is true — stories at best incomplete and at worst injuriously incorrect, stories about what we do and don’t deserve, stories the cost of which is connection, trust, love. This is why without charity of interpretation and without candor — the vulnerability of it, the courage of it, the kindness of it — all relationships become a ricochet of unspoken resentments based mostly on misapprehended motives, and crumble.

The great Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) offers a three-step remedy for this elemental human tendency in a portion of his slender, potent book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (public library), which also gave us his warm wisdom on the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love.

He writes:

Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.

Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them — not only out of the vain self-referential transactionalism masquerading as the Golden Rule, in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, but because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves:

When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes.

Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception in relationship conflict and emerging victorious with deeper love:

The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge internally that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed.

The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. Instead of coming to the other person or people with an accusation, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain, to help us understand why they have said or done those things.

There is a third thing we need to do, if we can. The third thing is very hard, perhaps the hardest. We need to listen very carefully to the other person’s response to truly understand and try to correct our perception. With this, we may find that we have been the victim of our wrong perceptions. Most likely the other person has also been a victim of wrong perceptions.

Part of why this is so challenging to the Western mind, with its individualistic ideal of self-reliance that too readily metastasizes into self-righteousness, is that we grow incredibly insecure at the prospect of being wrong and feel incredibly unmoored by the fact of having been wrong. In a culture conflating who we are with what we know and what we stand for, the Eastern contemplative traditions can be so salutary with their gentle, steady practice of releasing the clutch of selfing and unclenching the fist of righteousness into an open palm of receptivity.

Drawing on two powerful Buddhist practices that effect this release — deep listening and loving speech — Hanh writes:

If we are sincere in wanting to learn the truth, and if we know how to use gentle speech and deep listening, we are much more likely to be able to hear others’ honest perceptions and feelings. In that process, we may discover that they too have wrong perceptions. After listening to them fully, we have an opportunity to help them correct their wrong perceptions. If we approach our hurts that way, we have the chance to turn our fear and anger into opportunities for deeper, more honest relationships.

This, he observes, applies to romantic relationships, to politics, to family and workplace dynamics — in other words, to all possible configurations of one consciousness embarking on the touching, terrifying endeavor of being known and understood by another.

With an eye to the ultimate aim of this process, he adds:

The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation.

[…]

We are all capable of recognizing that we’re not the only ones who suffer when there is a hard situation. The other person in that situation suffers as well, and we are partly responsible for his or her suffering. When we realize this, we can look at the other person with the eyes of compassion and let understanding bloom. With the arrival of understanding, the situation changes and communication is possible.

Any real peace process has to begin with ourselves… We have to practice peace to help the other side make peace.

Shortly after he wrote Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, Hanh placed this insight at the center of his now-classic teachings about how to love — an insight that also animates Alain de Botton’s soulful wisdom on what makes a good communicator. Perhaps Walt Whitman, writing with ecstatic immediacy, best captured this in his intimation that the secret of Being is “to do nothing but listen,” so that the song of life — which is the song of love — may be heard.

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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“Live as if you were living already for the second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 masterwork on the human search for meaning, “and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise — a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us, in the sublime words of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “ill-prepared for the privilege of living.” All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become. “Our lived lives,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his magnificent manifesto for missing out, “might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.” We perform this existential dance of yeses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to want?

Czech-French writer Milan Kundera (March 31, 1929–July 11, 2023) examines our ambivalent amble through life with unparalleled grace and poetic precision in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library) — one of the most beloved and enduringly rewarding books of the past century.

Because love heightens all of our senses and amplifies our existing preoccupations, it is perhaps in love that life’s central ambivalences grow most disorienting — something the novel’s protagonist, Tomáš, tussles with as he finds himself consumed with the idea of a lover he barely knows:

He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger.

[…]

But was it love? … Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? … Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

The woman eventually becomes Tomáš’s wife, which only further affirms that even the rightest choice can present itself to us shrouded in uncertainty and doubt at the outset, its rightness only crystallized in the clarity of hindsight. Kundera captures the universal predicament undergirding Tomáš’s particular perplexity:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

[…]

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it bears repeating, is one of the most life-magnifying books one could ever read. Complement this particular point of inflection with Donald Barthelme on the art of not-knowing and Adam Phillips on the rewards of the unlived life.

donating = loving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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“Give me solitude,” Whitman demanded in his ode to the eternal tension between city and soul, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” In those primal sanities, we come to discover that “there is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” as May Sarton wrote in her stunning 1938 ode to solitude — her hard-earned testimony to solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery, for it is in that intimate place that we see most clearly what our animating spirit is made of. Solitude, Kahlil Gibran knew, summons of us the courage to know ourselves. Elizabeth Bishop believed — a belief I can attest to with my own life — that everyone must experience at least one long period of solitude in life in order to know what we are made of and what we can make of our gifts. “There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear,” Rilke wrote in contemplating the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity, “but… we must hold ourselves to the difficult.”

The visionary poets knew — as do the visionaries of scientist, as do all persons engaged in lives of creativity or contemplation, which are often one life — how this solitary self-discovery becomes the wellspring of all the meaning-making that makes life worth living, whether we call it art or love. From solitude’s promontory, we peer out into the expanse of existence and train our eyes to look with wide-eyed wonder at the improbable fact of it all. Solitude, so conceived, is not merely the state of being alone but the art of becoming fully ourselves — an art acquired, like every art, by apprenticeship and painstaking devotion to dwelling in the often lonesome inner light of our singular and sovereign being.

Its mastery, delicate and difficult, is what the Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor explores in The Art of Solitude (public library). Celebrating solitude — not the escapist privilege of it but the practice of it against the real world’s pressures — as “a site of autonomy, wonder, contemplation, imagination, inspiration, and care,” he writes:

True solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated. You cannot switch it on or off at will. Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it. When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.

Nearly forty years after he first began bridging Western phenomenology and existentialism with Buddhist precepts in his 1983 book Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism, Batchelor draws on a lifetime of solitude-mastery — directly, through his own contemplative practice and multiple silent retreats, and indirectly, through his immersion in the lives and works of centuries of solitude-virtuosi ranging from Montaigne to Nietzsche to Ingmar Bergman — to formulate the essence of the inquiry, at once elemental and embodied, at the heart of the art of solitude:

Don’t expect anything to happen. Just wait. This waiting is a deep acceptance of the moment as such. Nietzsche called it amor fati — unquestioning love of whatever has fated you to be here. You reach a point where you’re just sitting there, asking, “What is this?” — but with no interest in an answer. The longing for an answer compromises the potency of the question. Can you be satisfied to rest in this puzzlement, this perplexity, in a deeply focused and embodied way? Just waiting without any expectations?

Ask “What is this?,” then open yourself completely to what you “hear” in the silence that follows. Be open to this question in the same way as you would listen to a piece of music. Pay total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on a window. Listen carefully, and notice how listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love.

Echoing Rachel Carson’s trust in the loneliness of creative work — a byproduct of the solitude necessary for creative work, natural and needed, often terrifying and always clarifying — Batchelor adds:

To be alone at your desk or in your studio is not enough. You have to free yourself from the phantoms and inner critics who pursue you wherever you go. “When you start working,” said the composer John Cage, “everybody is in your studio — the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas — all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

[…]

Having shut the door, you find yourself alone before a canvas, a sheet of paper, a lump of clay, a computer screen. Other tools and materials lie around, close at hand, waiting to be used. You resume your silent conversation with the work. This is a two-way process: you create the work and then you respond to it. The work can inspire, surprise, and shock you… The solitary act of making art involves intense, wordless dialogue.

Drawing a link between the Buddhist notion of nirvana and Keats’s notion of “negative capability” — that spacious willingness to negate the pull of attachments, reactivities, and fixities, to live with mystery and embrace uncertainty — Batchelor observes that contemplative practice trains the ability to see each moment as a chance to start anew, to savor life as ongoing, unfixed, ever-changing and ever capable of being changed. He considers the essential building blocks and ultimate rewards of contemplative practice:

To integrate contemplative practice into life requires more than becoming proficient in techniques of meditation. It entails the cultivation and refinement of a sensibility about the totality of your existence—from intimate moments of personal anguish to the endless suffering of the world. This sensibility encompasses a range of skills: mindfulness, curiosity, understanding, collectedness, compassion, equanimity, care. Each of these can be cultivated and refined in solitude but has little value if it cannot survive the fraught encounter with others. Never be complacent about contemplative practice; it is always a work in progress. The world is here to surprise us. My most lasting insights have occurred off the cushion, not on it.

In consonance with poet and philosopher Wendell Berry’s life-tested belief that “true solitude is found in the wild places,” where one is without human obligation,” where “one’s inner voices become audible [and,] in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives,” Batchelor adds:

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.

Complement The Art of Solitude with Hermann Hesse on solitude, hardship, and destiny, then savor Batchelor’s spacious On Being conversation with Krista Tippett.

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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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As soon as I settled into the house where I was going to be living, I headed out for a walk along the dirt road so dry it felt like a lunar landscape. Cars swarmed me in cloud after cloud of gas and dust. I closed my eyes to let them pass, picturing the Pillars of Creation — that famous Hubble photograph of the Eagle Nebula, whose gas and dust are always in the process of creating new stars while at the same time being consumed by the light of nearby newborn stars.

I hadn’t been walking an hour when the sky turned to steel. Without a flash of warning, the clouds opened their mute mouths and out poured rain so cold that time seemed to have reversed course, hurling the hemisphere back into winter.

It rained all night and all through the next day. Eventually, unable to stand my indoor captivity, I donned all the clothes I had packed on top of each other, squeezed myself into the raincoat now two sizes too small, and ventured out again. But when I stepped onto the street, I found it completely transformed, all the dust washed away to reveal a carpet of stones so shiny they were almost luminous.

Suddenly, my eye fell upon a striking stone unlike all the rest — swirling shades of green, resembling the skin of some exotic serpent.

That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.

As soon as I returned to the house, I turned to the geological database to learn that it is a type of stone called serpentine, special not only in its aesthetics but in its origin: Serpentine forms at the bottom of the ocean, in the hydrothermal vents along mid-oceanic ridges, where life on Earth most probably began. Under the extreme temperature and pressure, water compacts four minerals into metamorphic rock that combine to give it this striking green color.

There I was, atop this massive mountain, holding a tiny fragment from the bottom of the world — a beautiful souvenir from the beginning of life, a bright reminder that time makes and remakes worlds.

I started seeing serpentine everywhere.

About a week in, I came home to astonishing news: For about a decade, NASA had been studying the asteroid Bennu, which orbits the Sun a hundred million miles away from it, between Jupiter and Mars, and passes close to Earth every six years. One of the first asteroids to have dust and rock samples collected and returned to Earth, Bennu’s mineral composition turned out to be dominated by serpentine, containing not only all amino acids essential for DNA and RNA but water-soluble phosphates — fundaments of biochemistry for all known life on Earth.

The most astonishing part is that because an asteroid has no atmosphere, no liquid water can cling to its surface, but serpentine requires water to form — Bennu must be a fragment of a water world that formed in the outer reaches of the Solar System in the infant universe, when the building blocks of life as we know it were being forged. A giant piece of serpentine encoding the entire evolutionary history of the universe.

Suddenly, against this immense backdrop of the majesty and mystery of the universe, I was no longer in the wound — I was in wonder. It is the self that suffers by the story that cinches the moment. Every act of unselfing — of contacting the interconnectedness of everything that ever was and ever will be, the wondrous totality held in time — is a salve for suffering, a way of being reborn.

Somehow, I found myself thinking about the cosmic egg concept present in many indigenous origin myths — the idea that the universe was hatched into being by a giant bird — and pictured the egg made of serpentine, a newborn world made of time and trust in life.

And so, enlisting a rock tumbler and my ceramics practice, I made it — a translucent sphere of serpentine with a small yellow ceramic bird perched atop it, winged with the words TRUST and TIME.

Because a daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time, I began making one serpentine birdworld each day for forty-two days, with the intention of giving them away on my forty-second birthday this summer by the same impartial hand of chance that made this world, to people who have made my life more livable — some to pillars of my private world, and the rest to you: Support from readers makes my life literally livable by putting food on my table and books on my shelves, yes, but also contributes to what makes it worth living — that lifeline of connection that punctures the isolation of our personal suffering.

To enter the raffle, make a donation by the astronomical end of summer in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .42, whether it is $1.42 or $1,000.42. (This will help me separate the serpentine raffle from the regular donations.) Let us favor morality over mathematics — no manipulation of probability by making multiple entries: just one per person, so we may remember that we are all equals as children of chance.

As to my daily practice of learning to trust time, somewhere along the way of making these serpentine birdworlds, I crossed the threshold between wound and wonder, and my heart began healing. We don’t choose our wounds. But we can choose to let go of the story and wing ourselves with wonder. It is what makes this rocky planet a world and this existence a life.

donating = loving

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

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Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown.

How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (public library) — an investigation of how “the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it,” and what a richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and more felicitous communion with reality. At its heart is the recognition that “the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’” and that “there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.”

Punctuating his ambitious 3,000-page effort to braid neuropsychology (the way our brains shape our impression of reality), epistemology (the way we come to know anything at all), and metaphysics (our yearning to wrest meaning from fundamental truth as we try to discern the nature of the universe) is an ongoing inquiry into our way of looking at the world — the lens of consciousness we call attention. He writes:

The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent… What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it — if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.

This property of reality is what Iris Murdoch had in view when she observed that “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” and what the poet J.D. McClatchy captured in his insistence that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”

McGilchrist considers the way our attention constructs our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:

The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.

Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he writes:

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.

A century-some after William James insisted that our experience is what we agree to attend to, and two generations after Simone Weil asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” McGilchrist adds:

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being.

[…]

Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.

In the vast remainder of The Matter With Things, McGilchrist goes on to explore how “the type, and extent, of attention we pay changes the nature of the world that we experience,” shaped largely by the difference between the way the brain’s two hemispheres pay attention — “narrow-beam, highly focussed attention” in the left, “broad, sustained vigilance” in the right. Complement this tiny fragment of it with Mary Oliver on attention and love, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz’s wonderful field guide to eleven ways of paying attention to the everyday wonderland 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.

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In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and us, half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the polymathic French philosopher Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859–January 4, 1941) aimed his uncommon mind at “the threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation” in what became Matter and Memory (public library | public domain) — a pleasingly disorienting, because revelatory, investigation of the interplay between perception and memory in how we construct the cathedral of interpretation we call reality.

Echoing Thoreau’s observation that “we hear and apprehend only what we already half know,” Bergson writes:

There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images. The convenience and the rapidity of perception are bought at this price; but hence also springs every kind of illusion.

[…]

Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and inversely, a memory… only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis.

Just as biological endosmosis moves fluid into and out of a cell through a permeable membrane, psychological endososis moves memory and perception across the permeable membrane of consciousness, the flux so fluid we cease being able to distinguish which is which. Bergson observes:

Memory… covering as it does with a cloak of recollections a core of immediate perception, and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in perception, the subjective side of the knowledge of thing.

[…]

We imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion. Build up the universe with atoms each of them is subject to the action, variable in quantity and quality according to the distance, exerted on it by all material atoms. Bring in Faraday’s centres of force: the lines of force emitted in every direction from every centre bring, to bear upon each the influences of the whole material world. Call up the Leibnizian monads: each is the mirror of the universe.

A century later, cognitive science has shown us just how powerfully expectation shapes experience. But it is as radical today as it was in Bergson’s time to consider how memory — the mirror-image of expectation, just as selectively choosing events but in hindsight rather than foresight — shapes what we perceive, shapes the attention-painted image that is the basis of all experience. Bergson writes:

Every attentive perception truly involves a reflexion, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mould itself… We are constantly creating or reconstructing. Our distinct perception is really comparable to a closed circle in which the perception-image, going towards the mind, and the memoryimage, launched into space, career the one behind the other.

We tend to think that dogma curtains truth with prescribed ideas about what is true, while experiment — the rigorous testing of our theoretical models against reality — is what parts the veil to bring us closer and closer to the true nature of things. But, Bergson cautions, our experiments are devised by a mind that is itself a veil, a mind that still suffers, in its understanding of itself, from the Cartesian dualism that has scarred our species with a cruel severance from the totality of things. He throws a gauntlet at this congenital blind spot of Western science:

Empiricism and dogmatism… differ only in that dogmatism attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter. Empiricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience, that experience which arises from the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticulated and therefore, most probably, disfigured, at any rate arranged for the greater facility of action and of language. Just because this parcelling of the real has been effected in view of the exigencies of practical life, it has not followed the internal lines of the structure of things: for that very reason empiricism cannot satisfy the mind in regard to any of the great problems and, indeed, whenever it becomes fully conscious of its own principle, it refrains from putting them. Dogmatism discovers and disengages the difficulties to which empiricism is blind; but it really seeks the solution along the very road that empiricism has marked out. It accepts, at the hands of empiricism, phenomena that are separate and discontinuous, and simply endeavours to effect a synthesis of them which, not having been given by intuition, cannot but be arbitrary.

There is but one solution to this double blind:

To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when w e have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the passage from tile immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them… The final effort… is a true work of integration.

It is precisely such integration with what physicist David Bohm calls “the implicate order” that finally gives us a glimpse of pure perception, a way of looking at reality and actually seeing. Long before modern science revealed how we think not with the brain but with the world, Bergson observes:

Our perception is supposed to translate or to picture the states of our nervous system. But is it possible to conceive the nervous system as living apart from the organism which nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves? More generally, does not the fiction of an isolated material object imply a kind of absurdity, since this object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others, and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole? Let us no longer say, then, that our perceptions depend simply upon the molecular movements of the cerebral mass. We must say rather that they vary with them, but that these movements themselves remain inseparably bound up with the rest of the material world.

Couple with Virginia Woolf on how we pattern reality, then revisit Iain McGilchrist on attention as an instrument of love.

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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Half a century before Walt Whitman considered what makes life worth living when a paralytic stroke boughed him to the ground of being, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) placed that question at the beating heart of The Last Man (free ebook | public library) — the 1826 novel she wrote in the bleakest period of her life: after the deaths of three of her children, two by widespread infectious diseases that science has since contained; after the love of her life, Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in a boating accident.

From that fathomless pit of sorrow, on the pages of a novel about a pandemic that begins erasing the human species one by one until a sole survivor — Shelley’s autobiographical protagonist — remains, she raised the vital question: Why live? By her answer, she raised herself from the pit to go on living, becoming the endling of her own artistic species — Mary Shelley outlived all the Romantics, composing prose of staggering poetic beauty and singlehandedly turning her then-obscure husband into the icon he now is by her tireless lifelong devotion to the posthumous editing, publishing, and glorifying of his poetry.

Shelley had set her far-seeing Frankenstein, written a decade earlier, a century into her past; she sets The Last Man a quarter millennium into her future, in the final decade of the twenty-first century, culminating in the year 2092 — the tricentennial of her beloved’s birth.

The novel’s narrator, Lionel Verney — an idealistic young man, more porous than most to both the deepest suffering of living and the most transcendent beauty of life — is the closest Mary Shelley, stoical and guarded, came to painting a psychological self-portrait. As the pandemic sweeps the world and vanquishes his loved ones one by one, Shelley’s protagonist returns home to seek safety “as the storm-driven bird does [to] the nest in which it may fold its wings in tranquillity.” There, in the strange stillness, stripped of the habitual busynesses and distractions of social existence, he finds himself contemplating the essence of life:

How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted [the nest’s] shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call “life,” — that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms… sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days… Who that knows what “life” is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes…: now — shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts.

In consonance with Whitman — “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?” the American poet would ask across space and time, then answer: “Nature remains.” — Shelley’s protagonist finds the meaning of life not in the whirlwind of the human-made world with its simulacra of living but in the simple creaturely presence with nature’s ongoing symphony of life:

Let us… seek peace… near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave “life,” that we may live.

At the height of the deadly pandemic, nature seems all the more quietly determined to affirm the resilience of life — spring arrives with its irrepressible bursts of beauty, untrammeled by human suffering and a supreme salve for it. It is by observing nature’s unbidden delirium in its littlest expression, by surrendering to its sweep, that Lionel regains his faith not only in survival but in the beauty, the worthiness of life.

A generation before the young Emily Dickinson delighted in the poetry of spring, Shelley writes:

Winter passed away; and spring, led by the months, awakened life in all nature. The forest was dressed in green; the young calves frisked on the new-sprung grass; the wind-winged shadows of light clouds sped over the green cornfields; the hermit cuckoo repeated his monotonous all-hail to the season; the nightingale, bird of love and minion of the evening star, filled the woods with song; while Venus lingered in the warm sunset, and the young green of the trees lay in gentle relief along the clear horizon.

From this open presence with the non-human world, Shelley’s protagonist extracts the essence of what it means to be human:

There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.

Complement with Rebecca Elson’s stunning poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” Shelley’s contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning — a trailblazing poet who was dealt an inordinate share of suffering and who made of it inordinate beauty — on what makes life worth living, and the story of how young Isaac Newton’s plague quarantine fomented humanity’s greatest leap in science, then revisit the gorgeous advice on life Shelley’s mother, the trailblazing political philosopher and founding feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, never lived to give her daughter, having died in giving her birth.

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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“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she reflected on the relationship between nature and human nature. But what we call place — that unalloyed presence with a here and now, with the unfolding of time in a locus of space — penetrates more than the mind: it permeates body and spirit and the entire constellation of being. There is a reason why the original Latin use of the word genius was in the phrase genius loci — the spirit of a place. We become who we are in the crucible of where we are.

Our minds, however, are born wanderers — perpetual refugees from presence, perpetually paying for their flight with loneliness. We go on forgetting that we are not only embodied creatures, but embodied in the body of the world; we go on forgetting that the here and now — that locus of intimacy with everything and everyone else inhabiting this island of spacetime, intimacy with the pulsating totality of our own being — is our only refuge from the existential loneliness that is the price of being alive.

That is what Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020) explores in “Invitation” — one of the twenty-six exquisite essays in his posthumous collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (public library).

Drawing on his longtime immersion in indigenous cultures and his lifelong travel with native companions, Lopez counters the hollow stereotype that indigenous people’s connection to place is a sort of “primitive” sensitivity to be contrasted with “advanced” civilization:

Such a dismissive view, as I have come to understand it, ignores the great intangible value that achieving physical intimacy with a place might provide. I’m inclined to point out to someone who condescends to such a desire for intimacy, although it might seem rude, that it is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

This longing to belong with the world is the fulcrum of our yearning for meaning. Whitman knew it when, after his paralytic stroke, he arrived at what makes life worth living; Mary Shelley knew it when, in the wake of her staggering bereavement, she reckoned with what gives meaning to a broken life; Lopez knows it, locating the cure for our existential loneliness in our intimate relationship to place:

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

This question of how our relationship to place deepens our relationship to life permeates the entire book. In another essay from it, titled “An Intimate Geography,” he writes:

Intimacy with the physical Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes. Based on my own inquiries, my impression is that we experience this primal connection regularly as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, experience it as the easing of a particular kind of longing.

Lopez is the ultimate modern anti-Cartesian, reminding us again and again of our creaturely nature, interconnected and indivisible — the life of the mind indivisible from the life of the body, our portable totalities interleaved with the whole of the world. He offers a succinct prescription for remedying the elemental longing pulsating beneath our restlessness and our loneliness:

Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.

Complement these fragments from the wholly magnificent Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World with C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing and this lovely illustrated antidote to our elemental loneliness, then revisit Lopez on the key to great storytelling and the three steps to becoming a writer.

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

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” Virginia Woolf wrote some years before she filled her coat-pockets with stones, waded into the River Ouse near her house, and, unwilling to endure what she had barely survived in the past, slid beneath the smooth surface of life.

One midsummer morning seven decades after Woolf was swallowed by the Ouse, Olivia Laing set out to walk the river’s banks from source to sea while navigating her own upheaval of the soul in the wake of heartbreak. She recorded her forty-two-mile existential expedition in To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (public library) — one of those stunning, unclassifiable, uncommonly poetic books that seep into crevices of your psyche you didn’t know existed and settle into the groundwater of your being.

Laing writes:

I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. “When it hurts,” wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, “we return to the banks of certain rivers,” and I take comfort in his words, for there’s a river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy.

Laing examines the particular pull of the Ouse and its riverine stretch across “233 square miles of land the shape of a collapsed lung,” haunted by Woolf yet animated by some singular spirit of its own:

For a while I used to swim with a group of friends at South-ease, near where her body was found. I’d enter the swift water in trepidation that gave way to ecstasy, tugged by a current that threatened to tumble me beneath the surface and bowl me clean to the sea. The river passed in that region through a chalk valley ridged by the Downs, and the chalk seeped into the water and turned it the milky green of sea glass, full of little shafts of imprisoned light. You couldn’t see the bottom; you could barely make out your own limbs, and perhaps it was this opacity which made it seem as though the river was the bearer of secrets: that beneath its surface something lay concealed.

It wasn’t morbidity that drew me to that dangerous place but rather the pleasure of abandoning myself to something vastly beyond my control. I was pulled to the Ouse as a magnet is pulled to metal, returning on summer nights and during the short winter days to repeat some walks, some swims through turning seasons until they amassed the weight of ritual.

Reflecting on the cataclysm that thrust her toward this riverine journey — “one of those minor crises that periodically afflict a life, when the scaffolding that sustains us seems destined to collapse” — and the aim of her unusual experiment, Laing writes:

I wanted somehow to get beneath the surface of the daily world, as a sleeper shrugs off the ordinary air and crests towards dreams.

Rivers may be among our richest existential metaphors — “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges proclaimed in his timeless meditation on time; “I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow,” Frida Kahlo wrote in celebrating her unconventional relationship with Diego Rivera — but they are also the raw material of our existence, the seedbed of civilization. Laing writes:

A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads, and there’s hardly an age I can think of that’s not associated with its own great waterway. The lands of the Middle East have dried to tinder now, but once they were fertile, fed by the fruitful Euphrates and the Tigris, from which rose flowering Sumer and Babylonia. The riches of Ancient Egypt stemmed from the Nile, which was believed to mark the causeway between life and death, and which was twinned in the heavens by the spill of stars we now call the Milky Way. The Indus Valley, the Yellow River: these are the places where civilisations began, fed by sweet waters that in their flooding enriched the land. The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water.

But whatever rivers may nurture with their physical presence, Laing argues, they also foment some essential metaphysical part of our humanity:

There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today. Unlike a lake or sea, a river has a destination and there is something about the certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who’ve lost faith with where they’re headed.

[…]

A river moves through time as well as space. Rivers have shaped our world; they carry with them, as Joseph Conrad had it, “the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.” Their presence has always lured people, and so they bear like litter the cast-off relics of the past.

Echoing Woolf’s metaphor of the river as the permeable boundary between the present and the past, Laing writes:

At times, it feels as if the past is very near. On certain evenings, when the sun has dropped and the air is turning blue, when barn owls float above the meadow grass and a pared-down moon breaches the treeline, a mist will sometimes lift from the surface of the river. It is then that the strangeness of water becomes apparent. The earth hoards its treasures and what is buried there remains until it’s disinterred by spade or plough, but a river is more shifty, relinquishing its possessions haphazardly and without regard to the landlocked chronology historians hold so dear. A history compiled by way of water is by its nature quick and fluid, full of submerged life and capable, as I would discover, of flooding unexpectedly into the present.

The supreme allure of rivers may be the intoxicating interplay between what they reveal and what they conceal, and that may also be what makes the river such a wellspring of metaphors — for, as Nietzsche well knew, this duality is at the heart of every potent metaphor. In consonance with astrophysicist Janna Levin’s beautiful and disquieting intimation that truth may be something you can see “only out of the corner of your eye,” Laing writes:

There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them… We talk of drinking in a sight, but what of the excess that cannot be caught? So much goes by unseen… No matter how long I stayed outdoors, there was a world that would remain invisible to me, just at the cusp of perception, glimpsable only in fragments, as when the delphinium at dusk breathes back its unearthly, ultraviolet blue.

And yet the journey itself seems to train in Laing this essential receptivity to beauty — or, rather, to untrain the imperviousness to it that so-called civilization seeds in us, affirming Terry Tempest Williams’s assertion that beauty is our natural inheritance.

A century and a half after Laing’s compatriot Richard Jefferies insisted that “the hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live,” she records one such sublime moment of surrender to beauty on the meadowy banks of the Ouse not far from the English Channel:

What a multitude of mirrors there are in the world! Each blade of grass seemed to catch the sun and toss it back to the sky.

[…]

The wheat was preoccupying me. It had here reached another stage, the long greenish hairs unfurling and turning it into an ocean of grass, in which the wind moved as it will across water, folding the pile first back, now forth. The wind worked across it and so did the light, and I could not at first piece together how the trick was mastered. The stalks here, on this sloped field, were almost blue, a blue that increased from the boot upward like a flush, though later in the month they would grow gilded and then bleach daily until they were almost drained of colour, becoming the common straw that was once used to roof most of England and is still required by law for repairing the thatch of some listed buildings. The heads of the wheat were golden; the hairs that are known as the beard a watery greenish gold that became bronze towards the tip. When the wind flattened the heads — ah, that was it! — they caught the light, which rippled and rushed down the hill in little ebbs and flurries.

And yet, even as these internal transformations come abloom, Laing carries with her and continually revisits the heartache that set her off on the journey. In one of those cyclical thrusts into bleakness that are the hallmark of every grief, she writes:

It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams; that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not, by the attritions of time if not by the failings of those we hold dear… It would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I’d seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be.

Still, the most remarkable aspect of the human heart may be just how elastic our range of experience is — how, even at its most contracted by loss and turmoil, the heart can be seized with delight and surprised by visitations of acute joy. Laing is swallowed by one such moment when, delirious and almost euphoric with hunger and fatigue, she finally reaches the Ouse’s homecoming to the sea:

What a bay! What a day! I turned full circle, treading water, liking the way the land seemed to hold out two chalky arms to fend off or embrace the waves. I could see all the way to Seaford Head in the east, and in the west there were the two lighthouses that marked the mouth of the Ouse, gushing out into the Channel at a thousand tonnes a minute. There must have been the odd molecule drifting in these crashing waters that had travelled south beside me, working its way from the oak-shadowed source down the deep gulleys of Sheffield Park, across the gravel beds of Sharpsbridge, over the fish ladders at Barcombe Mills, past the wharves of Lewes and out through the maze-ways of the Brooks… I kicked out my legs and wallowed there in joy.

This cyclical interplay of joy and despair parallels the fate of the physical world. Beholding a dry riverbed where the Ouse meets the sea — the remains of Tide Mills Creek — Laing draws on her riverine journey to contemplate the largest questions of existence and its counterpoint:

It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all. But we all have an inkling of what lies ahead, for against the ruins of the ages it is apparent that our time is nothing more than the passing of a shadow and that our lives… run like sparks through the stubble.

The tenacity of our physical remains, their unwillingness to fully disappear, is at odds with whatever spark provides our animation, for the whereabouts of that after death is a mystery yet to be unpicked. What is this world, really? We’re told we have infinite choice and yet there’s so much that occurs beyond the perimeters of our command. We do not know why we’re set down here and though we may choose the moment when we leave, not a single one of us can shift the position we’ve been assigned in time, nor bring back those we love once they have ceased to breathe.

In a sentiment evocative of poet Jane Hirshfield’s ode to the raw optimism of the natural world, Laing adds as she stands at the seashore where the Ouse ends:

These sound like cheerless thoughts, but they filled me with a strange exhilaration… Down in the riverbed, in this territory of vanishings, I might have been at loose in any time. The things that survived here did so against all odds, blooming into the teeth of the wind, amid the shifting beds of shingle. The plants rose from the stones like a conjurer’s trick, working roots down into hidden pockets of sabulous soil: white and gold stonecrops with their flowers like stars; the spiked leaves and overblown petals of yellow horned poppy; great outcrops of sea kelp, the leaves whittled into extraordinary shapes by the relentless churnings of the air… [I was] as purely happy as I’ve ever been right then, in that open passageway beneath the blue vault of sky, walking the measure allotted me, with winter on each side… I had the sense I’d fallen into some other world, adjacent to our own, and though I would at any moment be pitched back, I thought I might have grasped the knack of slipping to and fro.

It is not an accident but some elemental part of our humanity that the sea should catalyze such existential revelations at the borderline of the tragic and the transcendent. “Against this cosmic background,” Rachel Carson wrote when she invited the human imagination into the life of the sea decades before Laing walked the Ouse and shortly before Virginia Woolf drowned in it, “the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.”

At this shoreside endpoint of her journey, Laing offers a poetic denouement:

Outside the Downs had disappeared, obliterated by a swelling wall of thunderheads. The cloud was growing as I watched, banking up into headwalls and cornices and deep ice-blue gullies. It looked like the aftermath of an explosion, like the world beyond the hills had been bombed to smithereens. But that’s how we go, is it not, between nothing and nothing, along this strip of life, where the ragworts nod in the repeating breeze? Like a little strip of pavement above an abyss, Virginia Woolf once said. And if she’s right, then the only home we’ll ever have is here. This is it, this spoiled earth. We crossed the river then and pulled away, and in the empty fields the lark still spilled its praise.

To the River is an immensely beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with Laing’s subsequent existential experiment in the art of being alone, then revisit Virginia Woolf on the shock-receiving capacity necessary for being an artist.

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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.

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