“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”

Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.

That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.

A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning.

As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame — these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered — as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past — they are now published in English for the first time as Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library).

Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes:

We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this.

Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision:

Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.

Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims:

Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!

How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?

[…]

Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity.

Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:

What remained was the individual person, the human being — and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds:

Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.

Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless — the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:

Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.

He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:

I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked — and behold,
duty was joy.

In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation — an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity — Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point:

So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.

In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself:

At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.

Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance — triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization:

The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?

What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms — terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:

One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.

With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death — a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:

The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

[…]

Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.

In the remainder of the slender and splendid Yes to Life, Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival.

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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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Like Alice James — the brilliant diarist who lived and wrote in the shadow of her brothers, Henry and William James — Jane Welsh Carlyle (January 14, 1801–April 21, 1866), unpublished and shadowed by her famous husband, was a literary genius whose private letters stand as masterpieces of prose in their own right. Virginia Woolf admired her as “so brilliant, so deeply versed in life and scornful of its humbugs… the most caustic, the most concrete, the most clear-sighted of women.” Charles Dickens considered her a greater storyteller, with a superior talent for observation and character development, than any of the published women novelists of her day. For a time, she was rumored to have authored the pseudonymously published Jane Eyre.

What lent her letters their shimmering intensity of insight was Jane’s uncommon openness to and insight into the complex, often confusing inner workings of the human heart and is maddening contradictions.

Shortly after her twentieth birthday, Jane Welsh met Thomas Carlyle — the essayist, mathematician, historian, and philosopher, who was then a struggling young writer of lower social stature, with no stable income and no intellectual achievement to his name, but would later become Scotland’s most esteemed polymath. At first, she spurned his courtship with the adamant insistence — perhaps out of self-knowledge, perhaps out of self-protection and fear — that she is constitutionally incapable of romantic love, uninterested in marriage at the expense of her intellectual ambitions, and would only hurt him if she consented to a relationship. In a letter from early 1823, found in the devastatingly titled I Too Am Here: Selections from the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle (public library), she pushes him away with equal parts magnanimity toward his needs and uncompromising clarity about hers:

To cause unhappiness to others, above all to those I esteem, and would do anything within my duties and abilities to serve, is the cruelest pain I know — but positively I can not fall in love — and to sacrifice myself out of pity is a degree of generosity of which I am not capable — besides matrimony under any circumstances would interfere shockingly with my plans.

Carlyle, conflicted in his own right at the prospect of getting hurt but besotted nonetheless, plays into this game of push and pull, charging that it is “useless and dangerous” for him to love her and that she has made his “happiness wrecked” by letting him fall in love with her and then rejecting him. Jane responds by insisting that her love for him is true, but not the kind he yearns for. In the last week of summer, she grows even more resolute in her dual pledge that she will never leave him as a friend but will never be with him as a romantic partner:

My Friend I love you — I repeat it tho’ the expression a rash one — all the best feelings of my nature are concerned in loving you — But were you my Brother I would love you the same, were I married to another I would love you the same — and is this sentiment so calm, so delightful — but so unimpassioned enough to recompense the freedom of my heart, enough to reconcile me to the existence of a married woman the hopes and wishes and ambitions of which are all different from mine, the cares and occupations of which are my disgust — Oh no! Your Friend I will be, your truest most devoted friend, while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife! never never!

But then, having issued this most vehement of self-protective disclaimers, she adds:

Write to me and reassure me — for God’s sake reassure me if you can! Your Friendship at this time is almost necessary to my existence. Yet I will resign it cost what it may — will, will resign it if it can only be enjoyed at the risk of your future peace — …

They continued this conflicted dance for more than a year, until it became clear they had to make a choice. In a letter penned in the first days of 1825, a week before Jane’s twenty-fourth birthday, she confronts the abiding question of how you know whether you are in love, as opposed to merely infatuated:

I love you — I have told you so a hundred times; and I should be the most ungrateful, and injudicious of mortals if I did not — but I am not in love with you — that is to say — my love for you is not a passion which overclouds my judgement; and absorbs all my regards for myself and others — it is a simple, honest, serene affection, made up of admiration and sympathy, and better perhaps, to found domestic enjoyment on than any other — In short it is a love which influences, does not make the destiny of a life.

Jane had two primary reservations about marrying Carlyle: that their differences — of class, of means, of ambitions — were too vast, and that a life of domesticity would keep her from actualizing herself as a writer. Asserting that “the idea of a sacrifice should have no place in a voluntary union,” she suggests that marrying him would be a self-sacrifice — a form of settling for a life smaller than the life she wants. And yet she also acknowledges that her choice is not between marrying him and marrying someone else, but between marrying him and not marrying at all. She writes:

I should have goodsense enough to abate something of my romantic ideal, and to content myself with stopping short on this side idolatry — At all events I will marry no one else — This is all the promise I can or will make. A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth: it is either altogether useless or altogether miserable; if the parties continue faithfully attached to each other it is a mere ceremony — if otherwise it comes a galling fetter riveting them to wretchedness and only to be broken with disgrace.

She presents him with her take-it-or-leave-it proposition: If their love is to endure, it must not be rushed into marriage but allowed to grow organically, its rightness and resilience tested in the garden of time:

Such is the result of my deliberations on this very serious subject. You may approve of it or not; but you cannot either persuade me or convince me out of it — My decisions — when I do decide — are unalterable as the laws of the Medes & Persians — Write instantly and tell me that you are content to leave the event to time and destiny and in the meanwhile to continue my Friend and Guardian which you have so long and so faithfully been — and nothing more —

Jane struggles with the choice between her heart’s desire, with its conflicted factions of deep love and vibrating doubt, and what she believes is best for her beloved. Unwilling to err on the side of selfishness, she fears that in asking him to go on with their relationship while she wades through her own uncertainties would keep him from pursuing a relationship with someone else better suited for him and would thus stand between him and his happiness. She articulates her ambivalence with exquisite self-awareness:

It would be more agreeable to etiquette, and perhaps also to prudence, that I should adopt no middle course in an affair such as this — that I should not for another instant encourage an affection I may never reward and a hope I may never fulfill; but cast your heart away from me at once since I cannot embrace the resolution which would give me a right to it for ever. This I would assuredly do if youwere like the generality of lovers, or if it were still in my power to be happy independent of your affection but as it [is] neither etiquette nor prudence can obtain this for me.

Unsure whether she can give him the kind of love and kind of life he wants, Jane places the difficult decision — the choice of whether to part ways or carry forth toward an alluring but uncertain future — into her beloved’s hands. After “a sleepless night, with an aching head, and an aching anxious heart,” she writes:

If there is any change to be made in the terms on which we have so long lived with one another; it must be made by you not me — I cannot make any.

When a hurt and angry Carlyle, no doubt himself sundered by the intensity of love and the fear of its loss, accuses her of insensitively causing him unhappiness by framing the choice before them as so binary, she defends its validity as rooted in the respective realities of their two hearts:

I have refused my immediate, positive assent to your wishes; because our mutual happiness seemed to require that I should refuse it; but for the rest I have not slighted your wishes, on the contrary, I have expressed my willingness to fulfill them, at the expense of every thing but what I deem to be essential to our happiness: and so far from undervaluing you, I have shown you, in declaring I would marry no one else, not only that I esteem you above all the men I have ever seen; but also that I am persuaded I should esteem you above all the men I may ever see — What, then, have you to be hurt or angry at?

Returning to the fear that in choosing to be together, either of them might be settling for a lesser life than their ideal, Jane elects to be a realist rather than a romantic in steering love’s course:

My heart is capable (I feel it is) of a love to which no deprivation would be a sacrifice — a love which would… carry every thought and feeling of my being along with it — But the all-perfect Mortal, who could inspire me with a love so extravagant, is nowhere to be found — exists nowhere but in the Romance of my own imagination! Perhaps it is better for me as it is — A passion, like the torrent in the violence of its course, might perhaps too, like the torrent, leave ruin and desolation behind. In the mean time, I should be very mad, were I to act as if from the influence of such a passion, while my affections are in a state of perfect tranquility. I have already explained to you the nature of my love for you; that it is deep and calm, more like the quiet river, which refreshes and beautifies where it flows, than the torrent which bears down and destroys.

Two years into their relationship, she reminds him how much her feelings have evolved from the initial insistence that she is too closed down to love — strong evidence, though not a perfect guarantee, that they might evolve further still. She writes:

From the change which my sentiments towards you have already undergone, during the period our acquaintance; I have little doubt but, that, in time, I shall be perfectly satisfied with them. One loves you…. in proportion to the ideas and sentiments which are in oneself; according[ly,] as my mind enlarges, and my heart improves, I become capable of comprehending the goodness and greatness which are in you, and my affection for you increases. Not many months ago, I would have said it was impossible that I should ever be your wife; at present I consider this the most probable destiny for me; and in a year or so, perhaps, I shall consider it the only one. “Die Zeit ist noch nicht da!” [“The time is not yet here!”]

With an eye to these sentiments, she maps out the only responsible course forward — they must each endeavor to heal, grow, and refine their separate selves before they can unite their lives:

From what I have said, it is plain (to me, at least), what ought to be the line of our future conduct. Do you what you can to better you external circumstances; always, however, subordinately to your own principles, which I do not ask you to give up, which I should despise you for giving up, whether I approved them or no — While I on the other hand do what I can, subordinately to nothing, to better myself which I am persuaded is the surest way of bringing my wishes to accord with yours. (And let us leave the rest to Fate, satisfied that we have both of us done what lies with [us] for our mutual happiness.)

Jane takes issue with one particular passage of Carlyle’s accusatory letter, in which he narrowed the choices before them as marrying immediately or parting for good. Recognizing in it an insincere and defensive ultimatum based not on his true wishes but on fear and a desire for control in the face of uncertainty, she challenges him:

I will not believe that you have seriously thought of parting from me, of throwing off a heart, which you have taught to lean upon you, till it is no longer sufficient for itself! You could never be so ungenerous! you, who for years have shown and professed for me the most [selfless], most noble affection! How could I part from the only living soul that understands me? I would marry you tomorrow rather! but then,– our parting would indeed need to be brought about by death or some dispensation of uncontrollable Providence — were you to will it, to part would no longer be bitter, the bitterness would be in thinking you unworthy.

If Carlyle were to break things off with her because she stands in the way of his happiness, Jane concedes with “the weight of a millstone” at her heart that she could never begrudge his decision. But she reminds him that he had entered into this courtship willingly, in full awareness of her initial reservations, which she had transparently and repeatedly offered. And so if he has found himself hurt and unhappy, it is on account of unprocessed pain that predates her. In an astute sentiment which the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh would echo nearly two centuries later in his assertion that “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” Jane writes:

If indeed your happiness was to suffer from your intercourse with me in our present relation, I would not blame you for discontinuing it; tho’ I should blame you, perhaps, for not examining yourself better before you entered into it — But how can that be? Your present situation is miserable; it must be altered; but is it with reference to me that it must be altered? Is it I who have made it miserable? No! you were as unhappy before we met as ever you have been since: the cause of your unhappiness then must lie in other circumstances of your destiny, which I have no connection with — no real connection, however much I may seem to have, from being frequently associated with them in your mind. It is an alteration in these circumstances which your duty and happiness require from you; and not an alteration in your relation with me.

Jane and Thomas did not part ways. Having voiced, faced, and surmounted their respective fears and reservations, they moved closer and closer toward each other in the coming months. They told each other difficult truths. Jane confesses that she had been minimizing her feelings for another man — her engaged former tutor, with whom she knew she could never be but whom she had indeed loved, “once passionately,” even. Imploring Carlyle for forgiveness, she writes:

Woe to me then if your reason be my judge! … Never were you so dear as at this moment when I am in danger of losing your affection or what is still more precious to me your respect.

Jane finds herself “the forlornest, most dispirited of creatures” as she awaits his response. Awash in gladness and relief when an assuring letter from Carlyle finally arrives, she exults:

What is love if it can not make all rough places smooth!

Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle were married on October 17, 1826. Only four people attended the wedding — three of her family and one of his. Although shortly after the ceremony she wrote to a relative that her new husband possessed all the qualities she deemed essential in a mate — “a warm true heart to love me, a towering intellect to command me, and a spirit of fire to be the guiding star-light of my life” — the romantic fantasy soon gave way to the reality of their contrasting natures. For the remaining forty years of Jane’s life — she died considering herself an unrealized woman — they proceeded to have a tortured relationship that syphoned her creative aspiration and relegated her increasingly to the role of her husband’s helpmate. They had no children. Carlyle’s official biographer argued that the relationship was never consummated. Both Thomas and Jane went on to have romantic, though by all evidence not sexual, entanglements with other people — most notably, Jane’s intense relationship with the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. Jane met Geraldine, as Virginia Woolf would write a century later, with “that uneasy sense that old relationships had shifted and that new ones were forming themselves,” and she became her most significant intimate attachment for the last quarter century of her life.

Complement with the Carlyles’ contemporary Stendhal, writing in the year Jane and Thomas met, on the seven stages of falling in and out of love and the poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran, writing a century later, on the courage to weather love’s uncertainties.

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.

“When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in one of his least known, most beautiful essays, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

To be ourselves is rooted in the recognition that, rather than a tree, a self is a forest; to be at home in the world is rooted in the recognition that a forest is a self. While indigenous cultures have known this since the dawn of knowledge, we are only just beginning to unlearn everything we have been taught by the erasure of our creaturely belonging that we call civilization in order to remember what we were born knowing: Life and its right are not something we can claim for ourselves unless we accord them to everything else that exists, bound to us by the mesh of mutuality that makes this drifting rock a living world.

In 2021, Ecuador led the way in this great unlearning by granting the Los Cedros Cloud Forest legal rights of personhood: the right to exist and flourish in the future.

Five years later, four pioneers of the rippling rights-of-nature movement have joined forces with the forest itself to celebrate the landmark decision, as Copernican in the history of our civilization as the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness: Robert Macfarlane (who has asked the urgent, self-answering question “Is a river alive?” and who remains the closest thing to a Rachel Carson of our time), Giuliana Furci (who has changed not only how we think about nature with her Fungi Foundation work but the very container of our thoughts, language, coining the word funga, now inducted into the Cambridge Dictionary, to stand alongside flora and fauna in our classification of the living world), César Rodríguez-Garavito (whose legal scholarship and activism have anchored the rights-of-nature movement), and Cosmo Sheldrake (who has devoted his life to turning the soundscapes of the living world into music). That they have named the Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself as co-author is both a radical gesture — a first in the history of literature — and a kind of homecoming to an elemental reality our sciences are only just beginning to confirm: that we think not with the brain but with the world, that place and personhood are indelibly entwined, that life is a song singing us back to ourselves so that when we die we may be sung across the threshold into the rhizomatic everythingness of everything.

Illustrated by Ecuadorian artist Paula Terán Ospina, Song of the Cedars is a painted serenade to what the cloud forest can teach us about the song of life: about the time of stones, about the wisdom of rivers, about the creative tenacity of fungi.

It is a project breathtakingly beautiful in spirit and in matter, the song sung along the river that carries the ecosystem and unfolds like a paper harmonica to carry the words that break the civilizational spell of indifference with enchantment.

Trees speak in your leaves please
And streams tell me your dreams

Birds sing me your rhymes please
And stones teach me your times

Earth cover my limbs now
And mold thrive on my skin

Clouds deepen my sight please
And storms lend me your light

The back matter, following five short essays by the different contributors, is a painted encounter with the cloud forest’s wonderland of flora, fauna, and funga — 81 creatures each identified by their common and Linnaean names, occupying every niche and scale of existence, from the fierce ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) to the tender rosy flannel moth (Trosia neigropunetigera), from the air plant hovering ethereal midway between the canopy and the ground to the lichen clinging to the rocks more tenaciously than gravity itself.

Beholding this loving song of life, I am struck by what a rare achievement it is in this culture to teach without preaching, to protest not with militancy but with tenacious tenderness, to remember that care is a stronger and longer lever of change than complaint, that how we show up for the summons of conscience, as individuals and as a civilization, is the deepest measure of who and what we are.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her lyrical love letter to her native Highlands, echoing an ancient intuition about how our formative physical landscapes shape our landscapes of thought and feeling. The word “genius” in the modern sense, after all, originates in the Latin phrase genius loci — “the spirit of a place.”

I find myself thinking about Shepherd as I return to the Bulgarian mountains of my own childhood, trekking the same paths with my mother that I once trudged with tiny feet beside her, astonished at the flood of long-ago feelings rushing in with each step, astonished too at how effortlessly I navigate these routes I have not walked in decades.

The psychological, neurocognitive, and geophysical underpinnings of these astonishments are what M.R. O’Connor explores in Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (public library) — a layered inquiry into the science and cultural poetics of how we orient in space and selfhood, illuminating the stunning interpenetration of the two.

In a passage evocative of Rebecca Solnit’s memorable observation that “never to get lost is not to live,” O’Connor takes the telescopic perspective of evolutionary time to consider the cognitive handicap beneath this existential gift:

Life on earth has created millions of Ulyssean species undertaking epic journeys at scales both large and small. Getting lost is a uniquely human problem. Many animals are incredible navigators, capable of undertaking journeys that far eclipse our individual abilities. The greatest migration on earth belongs to the Arctic tern, a four-ounce argonaut that travels each year from Greenland to Antarctica and back again, a distance of some forty-four thousand miles. Flying with the wind, the tern’s return itinerary is a globe-trotter’s fantasy, circumnavigating Africa and South America.

[…]

One of the devices that an animal needs to navigate is a “clock” — an internal mechanism for measuring or keeping time. The daily mass migration of zooplankton in the world’s oceans requires them to know when dawn and dusk are approaching. It would seem this is a simple response to light stimuli, but deep-sea zooplankton, which live at depths below where light penetrates, also migrate in accordance with the length of day at different latitudes. Even slightly more complex migrations can demand multiple clocks.

Perhaps the most astonishing internal clock belongs to the bioluminescent Bermuda fireworm, which swarms the tropical waters precisely fifty-seven minutes after sunset on each third evening after the full Moon in the summer. Such a feat suggests that this tiny marine organism, with a fraction of a fraction of the cognitive capacity of a human, is internally equipped with three different timekeeping devises: a regular twenty-four-hour diurnal clock, a lunar clock with a 27.3-day cycle, and an interval timer to tick out the exact minutes past sunset.

O’Connor marvels at the staggering evolutionary array of timekeeping devices that allows migratory species to keep partaking of the dance of life:

Animals that complete annual migrations or multiyear migrations have to possess a yearly clock, one that is finely attuned to the lengths of days and nights and their changes across each season. In all, evolution seems to have produced annual clocks, lunar clocks, tidal clocks, circadian clocks, and, perhaps for those that migrate under cover of darkness, a sidereal clock — which measures the time it takes a star to appear to travel around the earth.

Besides their intricate internal timekeeping mechanisms, many nonhuman animals are endowed with equally intricate space-mapping mechanisms. Each migration season, humpback whales travel more than ten thousand miles far from land to return to the precise place where they were born. There are bird species — European pied flycatchers, blackcaps, and indigo buntings among them — that appear to orient by the pole star in their nocturnal flight; there are insect species — ants and bees among them — that perform triumphs of trigonometry with their light-sensitive photoreceptors, calculating spatial distances by polarized light to find the most direct route home after a winding pathway of foraging. With their mere milligram-brains of one million neurons — a grain of sand to the Mont Blanc of our eighty-six billion — and 20/2000 vision that renders them blind by human standards, honeybees make hundreds of foraging trips per day, meandering many miles from home, then compute the “beeline” back. African ball-rolling dung beetles, Namibian desert spiders, and southern cricket frogs use the stars of the Milky Way as their compass, just like some of the most courageous members of our own species once used the constellations to find their way to freedom from the moral cowardice of tyranny: To ensure they were moving northward, migrants on the Underground Railroad were instructed to keep the river on one side and “follow The Drinking Gourd” — an African name for Ursa Major, or The Big Dipper.

Like all reality-radicalizing discoveries that defy the limiting creaturely intuitions we call common sense, the notion that animals might use magnetism for navigation was long derided as something more akin to spiritualism than to science. Humphry Davy — the greatest chemist of the Golden Age of chemistry, charismatic pioneer of the scientific lecture as popular entertainment — was keenly interested in the mystery of animal magnetism. A century after him, Nikola Tesla — a dazzling mind epochs ahead of his time in myriad ways, whose legacy shapes so much of our daily lives and whose name is now the measuring unit of magnetic fields — stood a chance of cracking the mystery, given with his twin passions for pigeons and magnetism, but the opprobrium of the scientific establishment was too impenetrable and the technology was not yet there. It wasn’t until 1958 that a young German graduate student — Wolfgang Wiltschko — was tasked with disproving animal magnetic navigation once and for all. Instead, he ended up proving it: In the then-dubious experiment he was asked to replicate, the birds he let loose in a space with no light source could, just like in the original experiment performed by a fellow student, still orient effortlessly.

O’Connor writes:

The notion that animals have a bio-compass that can “read” the earth’s geomagnetic field has now emerged as the most promising explanation of animal navigation. In addition to those marathon migratory species, nearly every animal that has been tested thus far demonstrates a capacity to orient to the geomagnetic field. Carp floating in tubs at fish markets in Prague spontaneously align themselves in a north-south axis. So do newts at rest, and dogs when they crouch to relieve themselves. Horses, cattle, and deer orient their bodies north-south while grazing, but not if they are under power lines, which disrupt the magnetic field. Red foxes almost always pounce on mice from the northeast. These organisms must all have some kind of organelle that functions as a magneto-receptor, the same way an ear receives sound and an eye receives space.

We human animals navigate the world not only by orienting in space, but by orienting in time. Mental time travel — the ability to rememeber and reflect, to imagine and plan for the future — is what made us human. It is also the pillar of our personal identity — the narrative string that links our childhood selves to our present selves to make us, across a lifetime of physical and psychological changes, one person.

That string is known as autonoeic consciousness, from the Greek noéō: “I perceive,” “I fathom” — our capacity for mental self-representation as entities in time that can reflect on our own lives as continuous and coherent phenomena of being. In the blink of evolutionary time since the dawn of neuroscience in the 1930s, one area of the brain has emerged as the crucible of both our autoneoic consciousness and our spatial navigation: the hippocampus. O’Connor writes:

The hippocampus has sometimes been described as the human GPS, but this metaphor is reductive compared to what this remarkable, plastic part of our minds accomplishes. While a GPS identifies fixed positions or coordinates in space that never change, neuroscientists think what the hippocampus does is unique to us as individuals — it builds representations of places based on our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. It provides the infrastructure for our selfhood.

Because a self is a pattern of experiences, memories, and impressions, constellated according to an organizing principle, and because sleep is when the hippocampus consolidates memories to draw from them those organizing patterns, sleep is essential to our sense of self. O’Connor quotes MIT neuroscientist Matt Wilson:

During sleep you try to make sense of things you already learned… You go into a vast database of experience and try to figure out new connections and then build a model to explain new experiences. Wisdom is the rules, based on experience, that allows us to make good decisions in novel situations in the future.

The hippocampus is a hard-won glory of evolution, but it is not singular to us — rudiments of it and variations on it are found in some of our fellow animals across the rungs of neural complexity:

Even birds, which last shared an ancestor with humans 250 million years ago, as well as amphibians, lungfish, and reptiles, have what is called a medial pallium. Similar to the mammalian hippocampal formation in vertebrates, the medial pallium is also involved in spatial tasks in these species, raising the possibility that certain properties of spatial cognition were conserved as organisms diversified and split, while other properties adapted to particular ecologies or selective forces. But despite the profound evolutionary commonalities between humans and other vertebrates and the way the hippocampus relates to cognitive functions of memory and navigation, the question remains: why did we make such a leap in terms of hippocampi’s size and role in our lives? Or as psychologist Daniel Casasanto puts it, “How did foragers become physicists in the eye blink of evolutionary time?”

Part of the answer might lie in the remarkable plasticity of the hippocampus. After the now-iconic 2000 study of the brains of London taxi drivers — which found that their elaborate qualification exam, requiring the memorization of thousands of city landmarks and 25,000 streets, resulted in significant increase in synapses and gray matter in the hippocampus — scientists have been studying what we can do to protect and even bolster our primary instrument for navigating space and selfhood.

O’Connor points to the work of McGill University neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot, who has devised a hippocampal health regimen of recollection and navigation exercises of incrementally increasing difficulty that deliver marked structural growth of gray matter. VeboLife — the neurocognitive fitness training program she has devised — teaches people to navigate the familiar environment in deliberately novel ways, challenging trainees to reconfigure their default routes by taking new paths that require them to attend to new details and make new mental maps in the process.

Optimal hippocampal health appears to be — like the optimal experience of life itself — a matter of paying active and mindful attention, interrupting the “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” our brain has evolved to be, savoring the specifics of each unrepeatable moment.

With an eye to how our hippocampal acuity determines the quality of our lives, O’Connor wonders:

Maybe wayfinding is an activity that confronts us with the marvelous fact of being in the world, requiring us to look up and take notice, to cognitively and emotionally interact with our surroundings whether we are in the wilderness or a city, even calling us to renew our species’ love affair with freedom, exploration, and place.

And yet as much as we throb with wanderlust, we are animated by an intense connection to the landscapes and topographies of our formative years. An emotion known as topophilia, which I experienced while revisiting those mountain trails of my childhood, furnishes this affective-spatial memory that renders childhood as much a time as a place.

O’Connor writes:

Often the places we grow up in have outsized influence on us. They influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us — they are our source of subjectivity as well as a commonality by which we can relate to and identify with others. Maybe it’s because of the vividness of their sensory impressions, their genius for establishing deep relationships to their early environments, that children have a strong capacity for the human emotion called topophilia.

[…]

Across cultures, navigation is influenced by particular environmental conditions — snow, sand, water, wind — and topographies — mountain, valley, river, ocean, and desert. But in all of them, it is also a means by which individuals develop a sense of attachment and feeling for places. Navigating becomes a way of knowing, familiarity, and fondness. It is how you can fall in love with a mountain or a forest. Wayfinding is how we accumulate treasure maps of exquisite memories.

In the remainder of the thoroughly fascinating Wayfinding, O’Connor maps the most thrilling shorelines of our evolving territories of understanding: astounding findings indicating that people from migratory populations have measurably longer alleles of the dopamine receptor gene associated with exploratory behavior than people from sedentary communities; ancient feats of navigation passed down the generations in native cultures to challenge the Western social theory of culture; music as a metaphor for the relationship between organisms and their environment. For a lyrical counterpart, complement it with Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the green ends and the reddish-brown of the barren rock begins, wondering how the trees and shrubs know when to stop, how far to keep pushing, where the point is past which the conditions become too inhospitable for growth, for flourishing, for survival.

This may be the hardest equation to balance in all of existence: when to keep trying and when to stop. Nowhere is it more confounding, because nowhere is the calculus of reason more haunted by emotion, than in our intimate relationships. There, all the variables are too charged with feeling to be weighed accurately; there, the most vulnerable part of the ego keeps factoring itself into the arithmetic. Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) was twenty-two and just home from his wartime duty in Europe, where he had been held as a prisoner of war in Dresden and barely survived the Allied bombing of the city, when he married his college classmate Jane Marie Cox — two young people not yet having become themselves, unformed and unhealed, trying to be together.

They loved each other, but as they grew up, they grew apart, grew askance. And yet, dragged by the momentum of culture, they had a son, then a daughter, then another as Vonnegut struggled to make a living as a writer.

When his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident, he adopted their three young sons. In that way life has of denying us any alternative experimental condition but our lived experience, no one knows what might have become of the couple in an experimental design other than a small house pattered by six hungry children. They fought more and more, until even the most mundane conversation couldn’t but become an argument.

Vonnegut tried to take refuge in writing, but his twin peaks of bills and rejection slips came to tower over his dream. Middle-aged and penniless, he was about to give up when he received an unexpected offer to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, procured through the kindness of a single reader touched by the work of this obscure unhappy writer. It was a lifeline both professional and personal. Vonnegut packed his bags and headed to Iowa, knowing in his heart, though he was not yet ready to allow the thought, that this was the end of his life with Jane.

Two years into teaching, as his writing was finally beginning to receive recognition, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and used the prize money to travel back to Dresden, only to find much of the city still in ruins. I wonder if he thought about love then, how it too is a world that can be left in ruins beyond repair if the warfare is too brutal or too long.

Suddenly catapulted into public success — after five novels and countless short stories, Vonnegut was lauded as an overnight success with Slaughterhouse-Five — he remained lodged in the pit of personal failure. He and Jane had been together for a quarter century, happy for only a fraction of it. Torn between his emotional inability to hold on to the relationship and his cerebral unwillingness to give up, he began drowning his discontent in drink.

In the last year of his forties, he moved out and headed for New York, but couldn’t bring himself to end the marriage. Taking solace in Margaret Mead’s assurance that “a couple which has had children has an irreversible and undissolvable relationship,” he wrote to Jane:

We hurt each other back and forth so much, almost absent-mindedly, that it was common sense for us to separate, if only to break the rhythm.

He shaded in this stark contour in a letter to a friend, painting a haunting portrait of a dead relationship:

I myself am living alone in two rooms and a garden in New York, attempting to draw useful electricity from the millions of milling strangers around me. I am no longer living with Jane for this reason, as nearly as I can tell: We are no longer capable of conducting amiable conversations. When we try to talk, to amuse each other and pass the time, our words are wooden, stilted, queer, distant, and — finally — quietly bitter. That is too bad, and many people regard me as heartless for leaving her. But the hours and days and years dragged so. I am happier now, though far from hilarious and proud. I have achieved a sort of Limbo, which is a distinct improvement over what I had before. I am beginning to write again. That had stopped for a while. I do not wish to marry again. I’m not in love with anybody else.

Writing remained his one oasis of sanity amid the limbo of his Middle Passage. Some part of him — that wise part that lives in each of us, whispering what we don’t want to but need to hear — knew that he had to reimagine his life if he were not to squander it. But he was not ready. So he reimagined his writing, taking the skeleton of a play he had written fifteen years earlier and enfleshing it anew. Happy Birthday, Wanda June ran for five months to mixed reviews, but the world was finally paying attention.

Having documented Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic speech during the March on Washington and worked as a war photographer in Vietnam, Jill Krementz was unperturbed by the cantankerous writer whose process she was hired to capture for a magazine profile. She immediately felt both Vonnegut’s brilliance and his brokenness, felt the sharp edge on which his own heart was breaking, saw to the roiling core of his wounded tenderness. He immediately decided he didn’t like her. (“There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson shuddered at the discomposing intimacy that bloomed between him and Margaret Fuller.)

Within months, they were living together.

Just before he moved in with Jill, Vonnegut wrote to his seventeen-year-old daughter Nanette:

Dear old Nanny —

You certainly deserve a letter from me. A hundred letters would be more like it, I love you so.

I will be home from time to time to see you. But I will not stay for long. I still love your mother, but we can’t be together much without fighting. We have tried to do things about this, but nothing helps, and each fight hurts more than the last one.

I wasn’t stolen away by another woman. I don’t think people can steal other people. I simply went away because the fighting was making everybody so unhappy. I’ve done that several times before. Going to Iowa was an example. Every time I went away I simply went to aloneness. There was never any other woman beckoning me to come.

This time, for instance, I couldn’t make myself come home after the play opened, and I was alone. I hardly knew Jill at all, and I didn’t like her much, and whatever happened between us happened long after I’d decided home was too uncomfortable for me.

Eighteen years his junior but in many ways his spiritual elder, Jill enveloped him in a kindness so entirely new he didn’t know what to do with it, a love he hadn’t thought possible. He tried to fight with her, out of reflex, but she simply loved him, and so he slowly unbraced the oppositional stance that had become his default, slowly stopped self-medicating. He grew healthy, grew happy, grew himself.

Still, it took him six years to meet the emotional truth of his failed marriage with the hard fact of divorce. When he finally decided to do it, he wrote to Nan:

As for the divorce: I will always love your mother, as must have been evident on Sunday. But we could never live together again. Our conversations go so badly. Also: I want to be fair to Jill, who saved me from knocking myself off or turning into an alcoholic. I will not marry Jill, but I will stop asking that she live with a married man. And Jane, who is fond of marriage, should have the chance to marry again. I am not pursuing happiness through divorce. I am permanently damaged by the break-up of marriage. Those wounds will never heal. I am simply trying to make the best of an unpleasant situation. Let me say again, too, that Jill did not break the marriage. It was broken long before that — about the time I went to Iowa. There was no other woman beckoning me to Iowa. Later on, there was no woman beckoning me to New York City. I arrived both places in total solitude, and feeling simply awful.

There will be no acrimonious argle-bargle about divorce this time. We will not make the mistake of hiring two strangers to fight each other on our behalf. Jane and I will arrive at some sort of division of property, and some scheme for my sending her money regularly. She already owns the Cape house and some stocks and a large savings account in cash. I will add to that treasure, so she won’t have much to worry about as long as I’m popular and productive. Then Don Farber will draw up a simple agreement, and that will be that. The legal steps will be brief formalities, without any arguments to be made before a judge.

It took him another two years to formalize his relationship with Jill. By the time they decided to marry, he was fifty-seven and one of the most beloved authors in America. His daughter was the first person he told:

Dearest Nanny —

I want you to be the first person in our family to find this out: That Jill and I have decided to marry each other in November, probably a couple of days after Thanksgiving. Jill will then be three months shy of being forty, and we will have lived together about nine years. The first years of the relationship were tempestuous. Much of the tempest was my fault, surely. I was in a frenzied state of mourning and dismay over the failure of my once good marriage to Jane. Jill had nothing to do with that failure, but she was handy to blame. Be that as it may, Jill and I behave most affectionately and reasonably toward each other now, and unselfishly. We are in love. Our heads are clear. We are working and playing most cheerfully.

I do not endorse serial marriage for anyone. I myself have always wished to be as monogamous as a swan. I was monogamous with your mother until the very end, and will be so with Jill.

After a rough sketch of the wedding (“It will be very private. We don’t want our pictures in the paper.”), he added:

I sympathize fully with the mixed loyalties you and all the rest of my children would feel on such an occasion. So I of course invite you all, and hope you all will come. If the ceremony and party are going to cause you pain, you should not subject yourself to that pain. Your coming or staying away will not be a vote for or against anything.

Mostly, dear Nanny, I want you to know how happy I am just now, and that I have every reason to look forward to some very good years ahead.

Kurt and Jill remained together until his death, thirty-six years after they met. It was there, in the safety and sweetness of their love, that he discovered the simple secret of happiness.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gravity, could have never compacted those first few atoms into a common center to bud the first star, could have never bloomed with billions of them. But here we are, circling a middling star in a modest solar system on a rocky planet replete with mountains and music, lichen and love, and on it the mirror the universe invented to contemplate itself: this shimmering consciousness.

It can be hard to bear, the weight of wonder, hard to hold all this bright improbability, hard to do laundry and email while reckoning with how the cosmos forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb.

Luckily, a species of mind has evolved to be the weight-bearer of wonder: the poet.

In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:

P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].

I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”

What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:

How can any system
observe itself?

And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.

Long available only as a lucky find in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (public library) is now resurrected under Marginalian Editions. To celebrate its second life, I asked Diane, now approaching eighty, what has most surprised her about the universe, and the microcosm of the universe that is this life, since she wrote those dazzling poems in her twenties — a span of time in which we sequenced the human genome, invented the Internet, discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson and the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star, and then ten thousand more as the horizon of the observable universe spilled 93 billion light-years away from the awed eye that took 500 million years to go from trilobite to telescope.

Diane’s answer is nothing less than a prose poem:

Once, I thought the universe’s greatest gift was scale — those vaulting immensities of gas and dust, planets flaring like thoughts inside a skull of stars. But time, that sly astronomer, has shown me something subtler: how much of the same splendor hums within us and all of nature. The pulse of a leaf opening to sun, the quiet veer of a child’s attention, my own heartbeat a small percussion in ancient starlight — all are galaxies folded inward, universes in miniature.

What surprises me now is not just the infinite, but the intimate. That carbon dust became breath and laughter. That our cells remember ancient oceans. That every discovery, no matter how remote, begins with the same feral impulse: our roving curiosity reaching outward, hoping to belong to a larger story of life seeding itself throughout the universe. The Cosmos expands and so does our vertiginous curiosity,  an old companion still sending sparks of wonder through the brief ribs of our lives.

In the author’s note to our new edition, Diane reflects on what had animated her when she wrote these eternal poems a lifetime ago:

I hoped that when readers closed the book they would feel a blend of rapture and responsibility — the sense that our little lives and the vast lives of other worlds are made of the same dust, bound by the same laws, and therefore implicated in one another’s fate. I hoped for a lingering awareness that the “cosmic” is not elsewhere: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the mold on bread, the storms on Jupiter, and the quiet in deep space are all chapters of a single ancestral story, and once you feel that kinship it becomes harder to treat other lives or other landscapes as expendable scenery.

I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

donating = loving

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

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“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time.

“Fearlessness is what love seeks [which] exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in another of them, “hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

But upon closer inspection, now — this elementary particle of eternity, this tiny and total locus of the living moment, this constant that is never the same — turns out to be more elusive than a neutrino, passing through us ghostly and ungraspable, yet leaving in its wake the purest sum of what we are.

Like love, now is an entirely subjective experience built on a meaningful interaction between systems. Like love, it is not a state but a process — a dynamic creation that enlists all of our past experience and the entire pattern of predictive perceptions we call reality. Like love, it is more like music than like mathematics.

Jo Marchant takes up this elemental mystery in her excellent investigation In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment (public library), weaving together physics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural anthropology to expose the warp and weft of our aliveness, locating in the living now “the origins of both life and mind, the driving force that powers behaviours, perceptions, choices and decisions, that ultimately carves out self and time.”

She writes:

It isn’t a location within time at all, but what makes time possible. Now is nature itself: the experienced, evolving universe within which all time, and all life, is held.

Two centuries after the vitalism debate sundered science into warring camps over the search for a “vital spark” that makes matter alive, we are finding that conscious minds — that crowning achievement of matter — are made of time and bodies undone by it, that it is the fundamental substrate of our aliveness. If the moment is the vital spark of time, the science of now — divisive, thrilling, inconclusive — is the vitalism debate of our time.

It began when Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate. Relativity rendered the flow of time, and the immediacy of the moment nested within it, not a given of physical reality but a function of the vantage you take. “The baggage of consciousness,” Einstein himself called our sense of time in a letter to his best friend. Like all radical ideas, relativity sent the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction and the ancients’ notion of eternalism — the idea that time is absolute, the same in all directions, and all existence simply is, without dynamic being that flows from past to present to future — was revived in the modern model of the block universe, configuring spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional block. Marchant describes the implications of that model:

Our lives aren’t unfurling plots or stories; they are intricate paths already mapped out in four dimensions… Every cell within your body — your neurons, muscle cells, the blood cells pulsing through your arteries, capillaries and veins — has its own intricate, interconnecting life path carved out through the block. And not just every cell, but every atom. Each of us is made up of trillions of strands in space-time, all with their own complex trajectory. Your whole life might look like a sort of tree carved into the block, with disparate strands coming together at one end, representing your conception and birth; gradually thickening into a trunk; and then at the other end splaying out into finer and finer branches before disintegrating completely at the point of your death and decomposition… There is no room for movement, flow or happening. Reality doesn’t become. It just is.

If the physicists are right, our attachment to the specialness of the present moment is just another example of how our limited perception deceives us, like thinking the sky turns or the Earth is flat.

Causality, this model implies, is simply an interpretation based on our limited perception: “The flow from past to future… rather than being a fundamental feature of the universe… emerges as a secondary consequence of our inability to see the full picture.”

Then there is the predictive coding model, under which “what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’… a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.”

It is worth remembering here that what gives science its loveliness and potency, and what distinguishes it from philosophy, is the passion for building models of how nature works calibrated by the rigor of testing them against reality. And yet time may be the only region where the models are truly and fundamentally untestable because the modeler is a captive of time. Einstein’s equations gave us the mathematical foundation for the Big Bang, but not even Einstein could travel back to the beginning of time to see if the model was true. This may be why, to me, the most compelling — as well as the most poetic — portion of Merchant’s investigation is the most empirical: an fMRI study that analyzed the patterns of brain activity in people watching a movie, which has a built-in timeline, or simply resting, capturing one image per second and comparing how these images — these portraits of the moment — differ from one another in order to render the experience of time’s passage. Marchant details the astonishing revelation:

There isn’t a simple progression from one brain state to the next as time passes, with each moment most similar to its nearest neighbour. Our “brain patterns are not simply counting off the seconds,” says [study author Dan] Lloyd. Hidden within the sequences was an organised temporal structure, with regular patterns in the way that subjects’ brains moved back and forth between a small number of states. In fact, the structure he found is very like that of music. Lloyd identified short, repeating motifs, or themes: sequences of states, between 4 and 11 seconds long, that look similar to each other. Often these themes recurred at constant time intervals: he called that “rhythm.” These rhythms appeared at a range of different timescales, and sometimes these frequencies were related to each other, so that they nested within one another perfectly. Lloyd called this structure “harmony” because it is analogous to the harmonic vibrations that give musical instruments, from violins to saxophones, their rich, resonant sound.

What this “harmony” means is that at any single moment, our spontaneous brain activity is made up of multiple, overlaid patterns and rhythms, which are related yet change over different timescales: just like our experience of Now. Each moment of neural activity is influenced by what’s happened in both the near and further past, and in turn influences what will happen in the near and further future. The results “suggest a human capacity to spread out from the immediate present tense of sensation, towards an overall temporal landscape,” Lloyd concludes. This explains how we can navigate fast-changing events yet at the same time hold on to stable threads of where we’re going and who we are.

An epoch before neuroimaging, Virginia Woolf intuited this truth when she considered the “moments of being” that make us who we are, intuited the musicality of being alive: “The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art,” she wrote in her breathtaking epiphany in the middle of the garden, “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

Looking through the kaleidoscope of the various models, Marchant considers the essence of the light:

It seems our perception of Now is a combination of two crucial factors: the ability to bind a hierarchy of different timescales together within each moment; and the inexorable progression from one moment to the next. This highly ordered temporal composition underpins our flowing stream of consciousness. Passing time is not just a characteristic we perceive: it is the underlying frame or structure through which we experience reality.

And yet it may be more important even than that, underpinning not just our world but who we are.

Our lives, Marchant argues, are only really alive, only ever real, as the moment lives itself through us:

The perceptions and sensations themselves — the call and response, the meeting or thwarting of predictions — these are reality. These are what existence is made of… Our perceptions or experiences — the melancholy of raindrops on a window, the exhilaration of diving into an icy pool — are real in themselves. There is no separate, enduring landscape beyond that they’re based on, no solid reference point against which our sensations can be judged.

[…]

Now has objective meaning as the expanding boundary at which reality is continually created. What’s coming into being includes not just the contents of the universe but its very structure. As new events occur, new universe — new space-time — is being born.

With an eye to all the different models of physics she examines in the book — relativity, the block universe, enactivism, and predictive coding among them — she ends where we ought to always begin: the discipline of not mistaking the model for the thing itself:

Do we exist as frozen snapshots or mathematical braids? Are we logic-bound computers or dynamic hurricanes? Are we living in a mental realm of shadows, separated from true reality by impenetrable, iron-like walls? Or are our perceptions real, while the familiar things of our world — even time and space themselves — are mere statistical structures, predictions that help us to manage our flow of sensations and stay alive?… Perhaps with all these possibilities there’s no way even to approach what lies beyond us, beyond our senses, beyond this point in time… All any of us can ever really know is that this moment exists. Maybe that’s enough. What we’re sensing and feeling, right here, right now, is real and undeniable, precisely because we are experiencing it.

Because there is no commons of now, the moment is the measure of our loneliness in time, but also the only region of space where we flower into being fully ourselves in a constant bloom of becoming.

Marchant writes:

What we perceive or experience in any moment is so personal, so utterly bound up in our individual history and biology, that it doesn’t make sense to speak of any “true,” definitive way of things outside that process… Our inner worlds — from feeling ownership of our bodies to experiencing emotions or recalling our life stories — are complex webs of probabilistic inferences, ever-changing depending on our circumstances, and recreated in each moment. There are no separate, enduring “selves” sitting behind… [We] exist as dynamic, living patterns of personal experiences, not stand-alone things. There’s no external stage on which we’re acting, no pre-existing terrain into which we’ve been parachuted. And, on the other side of the coin, there’s no pre-existing “us” either: no floating essences or souls ready to cast their gaze on the world.

This is not a negation of our being but an affirmation of it — a liberation from the tyranny and tedium of selfing we mistake for being:

What if instead of enduring entities — you and me, Earth and Sun — there are only the instants, the interactions? Only the burgeoning, interconnected, multilayered meshwork of creative sparks? From those sparks emerge selves and worlds — our private worlds of perception but also shared frameworks and structures: social, cultural, historical, scientific. Each instant, all of it is born and reborn.

[…]

Our experience of Now, I’m convinced, is not a hallucination. With every detail we choose to attend to, to breathe life into, we’re helping to write into existence both ourselves and the world… What if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but, as Wheeler put it, “in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us”? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.

Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .

Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.

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.

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.

And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

Not knowing what to do with the time we have been given, not knowing how to hold time in our personal and political lives, is at bottom an act of forgetting how time hold us. Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) casts a spell against forgetting in the fourth canto of his long poem “Morning,”:

You will remember that whimsical ravine
where the vibrant aromas rose,
and from time to time a bird dressed
in water and languor: winter’s garment.

You will remember those gifts from the earth:
piquing fragrance, gold clay,
thickets of herbs, wild roots,
bewitching thorns like swords.

You will remember the bouquet you brought,
a bouquet of shadow and silent water,
a bouquet like foam-covered stone.

And that time was like never and always:
We go where nothing is expected
and find everything waiting there.

If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry.

In his poem “The Enigmas,” composed during WWII, he writes:

You’ve asked me what the crustacean spins
between its gold claws
and I reply: the sea knows.

You wonder what the sea squirt waits for in its transparent bell?
     What does it wait for?

I’ll tell you: it’s waiting for time like you.

A decade later, in one of his “Elemental Odes,” Neruda laid out his most explicit instruction for how to hold time:

Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.

Couple with three poems for trusting time, then revisit Kahlil Gibran on how to befriend time.

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.

Bigger than Manhattan, Earth’s largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia: Posidonia australis — a species of seagrass that, unable to flower, clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it has been cloning itself since before the pyramids were built — a kind of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the fresh-cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it goes on cloning itself as we go on dying and passing between our lips the heat of our mortality.

An organism is a mortal unit of matter distinct from other organisms by its genome — the possibilities encoded in its particular genetic makeup — and its phenotype — the set of traits expressed, the actualities summoned by adaptation and chance from its possibilities. Human beings are organisms encased in the hardest yet most vulnerable exoskeleton in nature: a self. A self includes but surpasses the organism to encompass its environment and its social context, the psychological terrain of memory and desire, the fingerprints left on it by the touch of other selves. An organism ends at the physical boundary of its body, but a self does not — we spend our lives negotiating where we end and the world begins.

Humans are the only animals, save perhaps the bowerbird, who can alter their phenotype by means of their own making — grow, cut, and dye their hair, tattoo and tan their skin, increase and decrease the size of various body parts with scalpel and silicone. We are also the only animal who can radically alter both its environment and its social context, building elaborate homes on faraway landmasses, reconstituting our families and friend groups, changing the labors by which we put food on our table. Our selves are not like our cells, replacing themselves with clones in the course of living, but like Russian nesting dolls, each prior self outgrown but contained by the next. (“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion wrote.) Our lives a relay race, running from the selves we have outgrown or wish to outgrow towards the selves we try to become to or are unconsciously becoming, the baton of personhood passed from one to the next along the arrow of time, the track of our mortality.

This puts us in a peculiar predicament: Each human lifetime is lived by a single organism that contains a multitude of selves, genetically continuous and psychologically discontinuous, making it impossible to define where and what the person is. What, then, makes you yourself across all those replaced cells and reconfigured selves?

Organisms like Posidonia australis, which both conceal and reveal the nature of the self, may give us the best hint at an answer — one which evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper articulates beautifully in his book Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations (public library). Considering Earth’s largest living tree, he writes:

The Pando aspen grove in Utah comprises 47,000 trees, all genetically identical, connected by a vast root system. Language immediately becomes limiting when trying to describe Pando. Do we call the forest an organism? An entity? It has been estimated to weigh nearly 6 million kilograms, or 6,000 tonnes. If it helps, that’s about thirty-five blue whales or 1,000 elephants. It is one of the oldest organisms on Earth. Its cells are living and dying over time, but the DNA remains pretty much unchanged. That is, the entity lives on, even as its parts die.

With an eye to the Ship of Theseus — Plutarch’s timeless thought experiment about the nature of the self — he reflects:

Pando is biology’s Ship of Theseus — is it the same tree as when it first sprouted? I think not. It’s more like a continuation of the idea of Pando… The 47,000 stems of Pando start off genetically the same, but grow phenotypically different; a forest, but also a mass of individuals.

“The word for world is forest,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her subtle insistence that symbiosis — the ultimate unselfing of the organism — is what made this rocky planet a living world. Rustling through the canopy of the Pando is the whisper of an answer to the unnerving question of what makes a body a person: You are not your roots, not the stem of your circumstance, not your branching choices. You are the idea of you, the forest of your selves in constant conviviality with other selves, called again and again to unself into who you really are.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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

In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.” Echoing poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” Dr. Batalha added: “It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to create the portal to the universe which is my physical self. So in that statement is this idea, or the fluidity of time and space. And I kind of see it all at once. And I don’t know what ‘me’ is. I just feel part of everything. And I feel such deep gratitude for being able to take this conscious look at the universe — at myself as being part of the universe.”

The sentiment reminded me of a beautiful interview Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) gave shortly after the premiere of his epoch-making documentary Cosmos, later included in Conversations with Carl Sagan (public library).

In late August of 1980 — two years after he conducted Susan Sontag’s most dimensional interview and nine years before his magnificent conversation with Leonard Bernstein — interlocutor extraordinaire Jonathan Cott visited Sagan’s home in Los Angeles to interview him for Rolling Stone. In the soaring the conversation that followed, Sagan stepped into his native nexus of the scientific and the poetic to contemplate our understanding of the universe and of ourselves, the nature of reality and of human knowledge, and how to live with the unknown.

Sagan tells Cott:

It’s a critical moment in the history of the world… We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. And we resonate to these questions. We start with the origin of every human being, and then the origin of our community, our nation, the human species, who our ancestors were and then the riddle of the origin of life. And the questions: where did the Earth and Solar System come from? Where did the galaxies come from?

Every one of those questions is deep and significant. They are the subject of folklore, myth, superstition, and religion in every human culture. But for the first time we are on the verge of answering many of them. I don’t mean to suggest that we have the final answers; we are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.

To be sure, understanding the whole of the universe seems like too grandiose an aspiration when we are continually struggling to understand the tiny subset of the universe that is ourselves. Three summers before this interview, Sagan had spearheaded The Golden Record — a poetic attempt at such self-comprehension, mirroring humanity back to itself. Now, with an eye to another landmark triumph of self-reflection made possible by scientific progress — the iconic Earthrise photograph taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8 in 1968 — Sagan considers the immense and paradoxical gift of cosmic perspective:

You saw [Earth] for the first time as a tiny blue ball floating in space. You realized that there were other, similar worlds far away, of different size, different color and constitution. You got the idea that our planet was just one in a multitude. I think there are two apparently contradictory and still very powerful benefits of that cosmic perspective — the sense of our planet as one in a vast number and the sense of our planet as a place whose destiny depends upon us.

In this awareness resides a humbling and disquieting reminder of our creaturely limitations. We navigate the world by our common-sense perception, but that perception has blinded us to reality again and again. We have mistaken our sensorial intuitions for facts of the universe — for millennia, we held wrong beliefs about Earth’s shape, motion, and position, because it feels flat and static beneath our feet, and central to the order of the cosmos. We have mistrusted processes and phenomena beyond the boundaries of what we can touch and feel with our limited senses — from evolution, which unfolds on scales of time too vast to be visible within a human lifetime, to quantum mechanics, which operates on subatomic scales imperceptible and almost inconceivable to the human observer. Long before Sagan equipped us with an antidote to the “common pitfalls of common sense” in his timeless Baloney Detection Kit for critical thinking, he tells Cott:

Common sense works fine for the universe we’re used to, for time scales of decades, for a space between a tenth of a millimeter and a few thousand kilometers, and for speeds much less than the speed of light. Once we leave those domains of human experience, there’s no reason to expect the laws of nature to continue to obey our expectations, since our expectations are dependent on a limited set of experiences.

[…]

We have to be very careful not to impose our hopes and desires on the cosmos, but instead, in the scientific tradition and with the most open mind possible, see what the cosmos is saying to us.

Sagan points to one particularly blatant obfuscation of reality driven by our self-centered hopes, desires, and delusions — astrology:

[Astrology is] like racism or sexism: you have twelve little pigeonholes, and as soon as you type someone as a member of that particular group, as long as someone is an Aquarius, Virgo or Scorpio, you know his characteristics. It saves you the effort of getting to know him individually.

Sagan ends by considering the nature of human knowledge itself. Drawing on its past, he projects its future:

Human knowledge is a set of successive approximations… There are all sorts of things that we’ve gotten wrong, and all sorts of mind-boggling things that we can’t even glimpse that will be the established fact in a century or two.

[…]

There are two extremes to worry about. One is the extreme in which everything is known and there’s nothing left to do. The other is where everything is so complicated you can never begin to do anything. We are lucky to live in a universe were there are laws of nature and things to discover, but they’re not impossibly difficult, so we can understand them to some extent. But they’re also difficult enough so that we’re nowhere near understanding them all. There are exhilarating discoveries yet to be made. It’s the best possible world.

Complement with Diane Ackerman — a favorite poet of Sagan’s, who was her doctoral advisor — on our longing to know the universe beyond ourselves and Primo Levi on the spiritual value of space exploration, then revisit Sagan on the value of uncertainty, the enchantment of chemistry, and the most important perspective in the human world.

donating = loving

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

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When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even when the slender thread of grace between them is severed, by death or disenchantment. “No one you love is ever dead,” Hemingway wrote in his moving meditation on death and the meaning of life disguised as a letter of consolation to a bereaved friend.

Death, of course, is only one species of loss, one way our loved ones can leave us. We can also be left in life, left behind, left wondering where love goes when it goes. At its most discomposing, abandonment can feel like a living death.

All deep loss has one thing in common: It opens an absence so acutely felt it kidnaps us from presence, takes us away from our own lives and their insistent, inconvenient, sacred ongoingness. In memory or in fantasy, we end up refugees from reality, ceding the only thing that is ever ours for the keeping: the living moment. In all missing, we miss life.

That is what the achingly missed Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934–August 31, 2026) explores in this gasp of a poem, originally published in the November 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker:

THE LOVED ONES
by Wendell Berry

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

Couple with physicist Richard Feynman’s extraordinary love letter to his wife written long after her untimely death, then revisit Wendell Berry on creativity and love and his timeless antidote to despair.

donating = loving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear — :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

donating = loving

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

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

“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds,” Viktor Frankl wrote in recalling the role of humor as a lifeline to sanity and survival in the Holocaust.

Humor is a fundamental human freedom: To laugh is to protect ourselves from all that dehumanizes us — tyranny and transactionalism, captivity and commodification. Humor is also fundamental to free societies, to freedom of thought, to democracy: To laugh together is to harmonize our deepest humanity.

Because humor is the art of surprise, it exists beyond the reach of — and is an antidote to — the artifices of predictive computation we mistake for intelligence.

In her altogether fantastic manifesto for breaking free from the prison of predictive technologies, Carissa Véliz argues that humor thrives in the same “spaces of indeterminacy” where creativity and innovation also thrive. (“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech.) With an eye to the emotional attunement of sharing laughter, Véliz considers the relationship between humor, democracy, and AI:

Our sense of humor is a dialogue, and when we delegate the conversation to AI, we lose the personal relationship with another human being. Democracy itself is a conversation. If we give up our seat at that table and give it to an AI, we will lose our voice.

Comedy is not inconsequential for democracy. Comedy sets the tone for freedom. It gives us courage. A documentary about comedy clubs in war-torn Ukraine reminds me that humor is not a luxury; it’s indispensable. “When I went to Sarajevo to a film festival,” Cleese says, “people were talking about the early ’90s, when Yugoslavia was falling apart. Sarajevo is down in a valley, and the Serbs were up in the hills throwing shells down, and telescopic snipers were shooting people crossing the street. And they told me that they had found an underground car park, had turned it into a cinema, and they would show comedies, including Monty Python, and they would laugh. When they came out, an hour and a half later, they felt better. Nothing had improved. But they were better able to deal with their situation.” Comedy can be an ally in our challenge to defy the odds.

Humor, like creativity, works by defying expectation. It is a felicitous violation of the norm. Societies thrive and progress by continually challenging the norm, the given, the status quo. Every revolution, every change in regime, is the story of turning the old order from terrible to laughable.

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.

Our lives are defined not by what we have but what we give — on what and whom we spend our energy and time, how we share our material possessions and our mental powers, what we do with our gifts. “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in contemplating the nature of creativity. “You open your safe and find ashes.”

Paradoxically, the ability to give hinges on the ability to receive: You must be rested in order to labor, taking the repose it takes to recharge your vital energies; you must be interested in order to be interesting, taking the world in with a greedy curiosity that absorbs its beauty and strangeness in order to metabolize it into meaning.

C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) offers a wonderfully counterintuitive perspective on our notions of generosity and our ideas about what it means to be interesting in his memoir Surprised by Joy (public library).

With an eye to the ideal structure of the creative life, he writes:

It is a life almost entirely selfish. Selfish, not self-centred: for in such a life my mind would be directed towards a thousand things, not one of which is myself. The distinction is not unimportant. One of the happiest men and most pleasing companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindnesses are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude, and admiration.

This is also why, Lewis intimates, the “thrill” of our greatest creative breakthroughs — those revelations that give us back to ourselves, out of which we give our best work to the world — is rooted in “self-forgetfulness”:

Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else — whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard — does the “thrill” arise.

[…]

Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there.

Couple with John Steinbeck on the art of receiving, then revisit C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing.

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.

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”

Here was “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul — that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain why we make art, why we fall in love, why we yearn to converse with reality in prayers and postulates.

It is daring enough to ask what a soul actually is. Carl Jung knew that it defies the substance we are made of: “The soul is partly in eternity and partly in time.” Virginia Woolf knew that it defies our best technology of thought: “One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.” It is doubly daring to question the age-old dogma that the soul is the province of the human animal alone. Even as we have incrementally and reluctantly admitted other creatures into the temple of consciousness, we have denied them souls — denied them, because our tools of communication and computation have failed to probe it, an inner life capable of imagination and play, of love and grief, of dreams and wonder. And yet our very language defies our denial: the word animal comes from the Latin for soul.

In 1991, long before we came to consider the soul of an octopus, long before fMRI and EEG studies revealed not only that birds dream but what they dream about, Gary Kowalski took up this daring question in The Souls of Animals (public library) — an inquiry into the “spiritual lives” (and into what that means) of whooping cranes, elephants, jackdaws, gorillas, songbirds, horses, dogs, and cats. At its center is the idea that spirituality — which he defines as “the development of a moral sense, the appreciation of beauty, the capacity for creativity, and the awareness of one’s self within a larger universe as well as a sense of mystery and wonder about it all” — is a natural byproduct of “the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life.” (There are in this view echoes of Kepler, who believed that the Earth itself is an ensouled body, and of myriad native cosmogonies that regard other animals as sources of more-than-human wisdom and emissaries of the numinous.)

Kowalski — a parish minister by vocation, who spends his days praying with the dying, blessing bonds of love, and helping people navigate moral quandaries — celebrates the soul as “the magic of life,” as that which “gives life its sublimity and grandeur,” and reflects:

For ancient peoples, the soul was located in the breath or the blood. For me, soul resides at the point where our lives intersect with the timeless, in our love of goodness, our passion for beauty, our quest for meaning and truth. In asking whether animals have souls, we are inquiring whether they share in the qualities that make life more than a mere struggle for survival, endowing existence with dignity and élan.

[…]

Many people think of soul as the element of personality that survives bodily death, but for me it refers to something much more down-to-earth. Soul is the marrow of our existence as sentient, sensitive beings. It’s soul that’s revealed in great works of art, and soul that’s lifted up in awe when we stand in silence under a night sky burning with billions of stars. When we speak of a soulful piece of music, we mean one that comes out of infinite depths of feeling. When we speak of the soul of a nation, we mean its capacity for valor and visionary change… Soul is present wherever our lives intersect the dimension of the holy: in moments of intimacy, in flights of fancy, and in rituals that hallow the evanescent events of our lives with enduring significance. Soul is what makes each of our lives a microcosm — not merely a meaningless fragment of the universe, but at some level a reflection of the whole.

Half a century after Henry Beston insisted that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” for they are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Kowalski writes:

Without anthropomorphizing our nonhuman relations we can acknowledge that animals share many human characteristics. They have individual likes and dislikes, moods and mannerisms, and possess their own integrity, which suffers when not respected. They play and are curious about their world. They develop friendships and sometimes risk their own lives to help others. They have “animal faith,” a spontaneity and directness that can be most refreshing… all the traits indicative of soul. For soul is not something we can see or measure. We can observe only its outward manifestations: in tears and laughter, in courage and heroism, in generosity and forgiveness. Soul is what’s behind-the-scenes in the tough and tender moments when we are most intensely and grippingly alive.

By investigating the inner lives of other creatures, Kowalski argues, we are invariably deepening our own:

As [modern] shamans, we are allowed to examine enigmas like “What makes us human?” and “What makes life sacred?” We can ask not only about the mating behavior and survival strategies of other animals but whether they have souls and spirits like our own. The danger here is that we are often in over our heads. But at least we are swimming in deep water and out of the shallows. In searching for answers to such queries, I have found, we not only enrich our understanding of other creatures, we also gain insight into ourselves.

[…]

There is an inwardness in other living beings that awakens what is innermost in ourselves. I have often marveled, for instance, watching a flock of shore birds. On an invisible cue, they simultaneously rise off the beach and into the air, then turn and bank seawards in tight formation. They are so finely coordinated and attuned in their aeronautics it is as though they share a common thought, or even a group mind, guiding their ascent. At such moments, I feel there are depths of “inner space” in nature that can never be sounded. And it is out of those same depths, in me, that awe arises as I contemplate the synchronicity of their flight. To contain such depths is to participate in the realm of spirit.

We have invented no greater expression of our inwardness than music — the language of the soul, with its eternal translation between mathematics and mystery. We know that other animals partake of that language — each spring birds sing the world back to life, each summer cicadas serenade the sun with their living mandolin, and when we set out to tell the cosmos who we are, a whale song joined Bulgarian folk music and Bach on The Golden Record.

Birds, Kowalski observes, sing for reasons beyond the pragmatic — their song is “far from a mechanical performance” and “much more complex than a simple cry of self-assertion.” It is music, which is distinguished from noise by an organizing principle of creative intent, and creativity may be the purest evidence of soul. Kowalski writes:

Surprisingly, many birds are relatively insensitive to pitch. But the best singers employ all the elements of tone, interval, rhythm, theme, and variation in complex and highly pleasing combinations. And what is music if not the deliberate arrangement of sound in aesthetic patterns?

Greatly influenced by philosopher Martin Buber’s I-Thou model of relating, Kowalski admonishes against relying on our own frames of reference in assaying what other creatures are expressing and how it is being expressed:

The tempo of life is faster-paced for birds than for people. This is one of the reasons the individual notes in bird song are so short, sometimes distinguishable only with a spectrograph, and why the compositions of birds last a few seconds at most, compared to an hour or more for a human symphony. It is also why birds sing in the upper registers (just as the pitch on a phonograph record rises when played at high speed). To the birds, with a metabolism continually in allegro, human beings must appear to be lazy and dim-brained creatures indeed. Just as our music reflects the rhythm and intensity of our inner life, the music of birds expresses the flash and flutter of their nervous and high-strung existence.

Examining another subset of the creative impulse — visual art — Kowalski cites Desmond Morris’s famous 1950s studies, which found that non-human primates given pens and paints not only became adept at using them with “a distinct feel for symmetry and balance,” but developed individual styles of drawing. He considers what that indicates:

Art arises from a spiritual longing that all people share: to make our mark on the world and to spend our life energy in a work that rises above the mundane, adding grace to existence. We respond to the light of the world around us by giving expression to our own inner light, and when the two are on the same wavelength, the world seems more brilliant and finely focused.

Insisting that such spiritual longings do not belong to human beings alone, he cites an astonishing case study:

In 1982 Jerome Witkin, a professor of art at Syracuse University and a respected authority on abstract expressionism, was invited to view a collection of drawings by a “mystery artist.” The professor was busy at the time, preparing for a traveling exhibition. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently intrigued to accept the invitation.

“These drawings are very lyrical, very, very beautiful,” the professor said when he saw the portfolio. “They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it’s just incredible.”

“This piece is so graceful, so delicate,” he said of one drawing. “I can’t get most of my students to fill a page like this.”

Only after he had finished his professional evaluation did Witkin learn the identity of the artist: a fourteen-year-old, 8,400-pound Asian elephant named Siri who lived in Syracuse’s Burnet Park Zoo. Siri’s keeper, David Gucwa, had seen her tracing lines with sticks and stones in the dust of her cage. Against the wishes of the zoo’s superintendent, who scoffed at the notion of an artistic elephant, Gucwa had given her pads of paper and charcoal, permitting her to express herself more freely.

When Witkin showed Siri’s drawings to a colleague without context — an expert on children’s drawings charing the university’s art education department — she firmly concluded that they were not done by a child. Witkin himself readily likened them to the work of Willem de Kooning, wishing the painter himself could see Siri’s art.

It was this report of Siri that inspired May Sarton — one of my favorite poets and favorite thinkers — to reimagine these reckonings in a poem. (The footnote of credit in Sarton’s collection is how I discovered Kowalski’s book.)

THE ARTIST
by May Sarton

The drawings were abstract,
Delicate,
Like Japanese calligraphy.
When the painter de Kooning
Was shown them, he said,
“Interesting.
Not done by a child, I think,
Or if so, an extraordinary child.”
“The artist is an elephant, Sir,
Named Siri.”

It had once come about
That the keeper noticed
Her sensitive trunk
Drawing designs in the dust.
After an argument
With the head of the zoo
Who laughed at him,
The keeper himself
Brought large sheets of paper
And boxes of charcoal
And laid them at Siri’s feet.
For an hour at a time
In happy concentration
The elephant created designs.
Like Japanese calligraphy.
What artist’s hand
As skillful
As that sensuous, sensitive trunk?

Two decades after Iris Murdoch found psychological symmetry between art and morality, locating in both “an occasion for unselfing,” Kowlaski turns to the acts of selflessness and compassion that evince a moral faculty — that fundament of a soul. Pelicans and crows, he notes, have been known to care for blind comrades. Darwin himself reported of a band of monkeys coming to the aid of member seized by an eagle, at the risk of their own lives. But nothing renders such morally tinted actions more vivid and more moving than one nineteenth-century naturalist’s account of a misfire.

Working in an era when “collecting specimens” meant killing creatures, he aimed at a tern but only wounded the bird, which fell helplessly into the sea. Immediately, other terns began circling above “manifesting much apparent solicitude,” until two of them dove down toward their wounded comrade. They lifted him up, one at each wing, carried him several yards, and gently put him down before another two picked him up, and so the group took turns carrying him the entire distance to the shore. The naturalist was so moved by this display of compassion and solidarity that, although he was within shot of the rock on which the wounded tern had been rested, he couldn’t bring himself to finish what he had set out to do.

To witness such a scene is to be stilled with wonder and with humility — which, as Rachel Carson so poignantly wrote, “are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.” A generation after her, and well ahead of our still dawning awakening to the ecological and ethical dignity of other species, Kowalaski reflects:

If we are to keep our family homestead — third stone from the sun — safe for coming generations, we must awaken to a new respect for the family of life.

[…]

We are kin to, and must be kind to, all creation. Overcoming speciesism — the illusion of human superiority — will be the next step in our moral and spiritual evolution.

To behold such a display of moral feeling with our own eyes is stirring enough, but to be witnessed back by another creature’s eyes is nothing short of a spiritual experience. In a passage that calls to mind Alan Lightman’s transcendent account of looking into the eyes of an osprey, Kowalski writes:

It is difficult to probe the inward awareness of another being. The realm of what one mystic called “the interior castle” is wholly private and wrapped in solitude. But when we look into another’s eyes — even into the eyes of an animal — we may find a small window into that inner sanctum, a window through which our souls can hail and greet one another.

[…]

The act of making eye contact with another being presupposes a conscious self behind either pair of peepers: I see you seeing me, and I am aware that you are aware that we are looking at each other.

Perhaps in the end it is not we who have the power to acknowledge or deny the souls of other creatures but other creatures who confer soul-ness upon us. Kowalski writes:

If by soul we mean our sense of self, our identity as particular persons, then our souls are interwoven with those of other living beings… We know ourselves as human, in part, through our relationships with the nonhuman world.

[…]

We are rather unsure of ourselves. What distinguishes our species may be this inward anxiety. While other animals may be endowed with special gifts—acute hearing, keen eyesight, incredible speed — human beings are nothing special. This is both a biological and a moral judgment. Lack of specialization makes us highly adaptable, but it also means we have no fixed form or definite identity. Without many inborn instincts to guide us, we as human beings need models for how to live. We need a sense of our own possibilities and limits, and we find them not only in the artificial rules and restraints imposed by human society but in the lessons for living suggested by biology and the earth itself. We are the younger siblings in life’s family — the perpetual neonates of the animal world. In a fundamental way we need other creatures to tell us who we are.

Out of this arises an urgency more than ethical, more than ecological, but existential — nothing less than examining what we are and why we are here at all:

What profit do we have if we gain the whole world and lose or forfeit our own souls? The human race may survive without the chimpanzees, orangutans, and other wild creatures who share the planet. But we will have attenuated the conditions that are necessary for our own “ensoulment”… And when we look into the mirror there will be less and less to love.

[…]

There is a glimmering of eternity about our lives. In the vastness of time and space, our lives are indeed small and ephemeral, yet not utterly insignificant. Our lives do matter. Because we care for one another and have feelings, because we can dream and imagine, because we are the kinds of creatures who make music and create art, we are not merely disconnected fragments of the universe but at some level reflect the beauty and splendor of the whole. And because all life shares in One Spirit, we can recognize this indwelling beauty in other creatures.

Animals, like us, are microcosms.

Couple The Souls of Animals with John James Audubon — who was both a visionary ahead of his time and, like the tern-shooting naturalist, a product of its blind spots — on other minds and the secret knowledge of animals, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the wonder of being alive lensed through a bouquet of warblers and a reflection on signs vs. omens and our search for meaning lensed through a great blue heron.

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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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“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”

Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same life-stage in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year and later published in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (public library).

Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:

The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Portraits from Memory and Other Essays is an uncommonly potent packet of wisdom in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with Nobel laureate André Gide on how happiness increases with age, Ursula K. Le Guin on aging and what beauty really means, and Grace Paley on the art of growing older — the loveliest thing I’ve ever read on the subject — then revisit Russell on critical thinking, power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation.

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.

He christened it Megalosaurus — the first named dinosaur — and set out to compose a complete account of the ancient beast.

Because nobody knew what dinosaurs looked like, he needed an exceptional scientific illustrator whose unbridled imagination and disciplined draughtsmanship could enflesh the bones of the mysterious creature. Taken by a particularly excellent drawing of the jaw of an extinct hyena, he obtained a letter of introduction to the artist, tucked it into his coat pocket, and boarded a coach across Devonshire, hoping to be received.

William took one book to accompany him on the long ride — a weighty new volume by paleontology founding father Georges Couvier, summarizing his pioneering research on the fossil bones of quadrupeds. With gaping disbelief, he watched another passenger take out that same book and begin paging through it. The conversation was inevitable and the realization quick: She was the artist he was traveling to meet. Cuvier himself had sent her the book in gratitude for her contribution.

Perhaps because she had lost her mother while still an infant, Mary Morland had grown up fascinated by deep time, by the slow-burning beauty of minerals, by the way fossils immortalized the ephemerality of the flesh. After devouring Couvier’s books as a teenager, she taught herself draughtsmanship and unlearned what her culture had told her she could be: Determined to become an artist of science, she sent her specimen illustrations to Couvier himself.

The venerable scientist was so taken with the young woman’s work that he published it alongside his studies. Word spread across the scientific community and soon she was illustrating other books and modeling rare specimens in leather.

Unlike most women of her time, whose standard path to subsistence was marriage, Mary could now make a living by her own work. If she married, it would only be for love. Her love was the science of time: She kept drawing paleontological specimens, grew an impressive mineral collection, became a fossil geologist herself.

By the time she met William that day on the coach, she was an old maid in her late twenties and one of the era’s most esteemed scientific illustrators. They started on the dinosaur work immediately.

Within a year, Mary Morland was Mary Buckland. Their home became a miniature Alexandria of science books, light pouring in from candle-holders made of ichthyosaurus vertebrae, fossils lining every sideboard. Their dining room housed a menagerie of frogs and snakes. Guinea pigs ran regularly across the table. A pony occasionally rode past, a laughing child on its back.

One of their surviving children would later recount that Mary not only illustrated William’s studies but, with her “great mental powers, habits of perseverance and order, tempered by excellent judgment,” she “gave to them a polish which added not a little to their merit.”

Despite their fourteen-year age difference, she outlived him by just over a year, channeling her bereavement in studying marine bryozoans — coral-like saltwater creatures — with her daughter. Hours before her death, Mary was still bent over her microscope, entranced by a new specimen.

Mary and William were buried alongside one another, their entwined fossils to be discovered by some paleontologist of the far future: What is love if not the mutual belonging of our passions and our bones.

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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To celebrate twenty years of The Marginalian, composer extraordinaire Paola Prestini set six of her favorite bird divinations to music, which the Young People’s Chorus of New York City brought to life with their commanding innocence and their tender power. Paola’s perfect title for the piece, drawn from one of the cards, captures what every child is when this world is worth of its children: “Meteor of Joy.”

Couple with another choir of young people accompanying David Byrne’s anthem of faith in life, “One Fine Day,” then revisit the story and process behind these bird divinations.

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.

For courage, says Bulgarian folk wisdom instructs, keep a horse chestnut in your pocket.

Even as a child, I was mistrustful of superstition. But every autumn, I would pick up dozens of them from the sidewalks of Sofia and fill my pockets — not as a spell against fear but as an ode to joy. Conkers, as the English call them, spun me up in delight — shiny as mahogany, smooth as river stones, tiny planets from some other universe, the wonder-smitten eyes of some prehistoric creature.

I didn’t know then that they are emblems of life’s irrepressible insistence on itself — miniature monuments to the stubborn creativity of survival.

Three million years ago, as the Ice Age was beginning to sink its cool blue fangs into the warm body of Earth, the widespread horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) began dying off, until only a small population remained, most of it sheltered in the gorges of Bulgaria’s mountains. There, in their sanctum of stone, the trees found themselves unable to attract pollinators during the slender three-week window of their flowering.

This is the story of life — innovate or die: The horse chestnut evolved enormous white flower spikes with pink tips and a chemical hack to block the oxidation of polyphenols in the petal, which turns each flower brown and sheds it after pollination. For three whole weeks, the horse chestnut remains a bride in a gown of amazement, its crown an aria of perfect white blossoms that no bee can resist, all because there was a safe place in which to experiment with the possible.

That place, I learn from my poet friend Hannah Fries’s absolutely wonderful book A Forest Language, is called refugium. Hannah writes:

When glaciers last crept down from the Arctic, 20,000 years ago, there were places where the icy fingers didn’t reach — mountaintops, hot springs, lowlands beyond the ice. There were pockets of green where things crawled and slithered and ate and mated, protected places where life went on, and from which life set forth again as the ice receded. Refugia.

[…]

The gift of a refugium is time. It holds in its small cup of safety a promise for a new world to come. And it lends out to the living all the years, centuries, millennia it might take to finally find that world.

Even in easier times, it is wise to tend the refuge. What is Earth, after all, but a momentary refugium in the inhospitable blackness of space? From a vantage point far beyond our grasping glows the blue-green dot, a brief and luminous memory in the mind of the universe.

It is the memory of a place where a simple cell had the ambition to harness the energy of a star, and from it, the green wonder of leaves, the trunks rising up, bursting and blooming into the sky — all of life in the sweet, cool shade below.

We too need them, these refugia that shelter us, that save us in the ice ages of life. Whatever your refugium may be — a place, a person, a practice, a poem — it is worth tending to with all the might and all the means you have.

donating = loving

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

newsletter

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