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Is It Not Wonderful to Be Alive: Edward Lear’s Parrots

In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization.

Edward Lear (May 12, 1812–January 29, 1888), barely out of his teens, had been working on his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots for two years. Moved by the young man’s talent and passion, one of William Turner’s patrons — a wealthy woman with a deep feeling for nature and art — had procured for him an introduction to the newly opened London Zoo, which had denied other artists access. Lear spent endless hours at the parrot house. When the zoo closed, he dashed across Regent’s Park to the museum of the London Zoological Society and continued drawing.

*Macrocercus Aracanga*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Plyctolophus Leadbeateri*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

In a letter to a friend penned at the feverish outset of the project, he is already becoming himself — passionate and playful, part Humboldt, part Lewis Carroll, entirely original, prototyping the nonsense verse he would be remembered for:

For all day I’ve been away at the West End,
Painting the best end
Of some vast Parrots
As red as new carrots

Birds had always been Lear’s great enchantment, the bellows to stoke the fire of his love of life. Parrots were special — “live emeralds,” he wrote in his diary, emissaries of “the sense of freshness and freedom” he found in wild nature and craved ferociously in London’s gilded cage. To render them true to life was to contact his own wildness. He couldn’t bear to draw from “skins” and “specimens” — dead husks explorers brought back from expeditions for scientists to study life — so he spent small eternities waiting for the living birds at the zoo to perch at the perfect angle and hold the pose long enough for him to begin sketching.

*Macrocercus Ararauna*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Plyctolophus Sulphureus*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

Jenny Uglow — one of my favorite custodians of cultural hindsight — describes his process in her magnificent biography Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (public library):

At the zoo, he measured wingspan, length and legs while the young keeper Goss held the birds still. He chose their most striking, defining pose (and in his paintings they do seem to pose), then he sketched them — perched on branches, preening, nodding and blinking at the artist before them — in countless rough drawings, surrounded by jotted notes. He caught the arc of movement and the tilt of heads and drew their graduated feathers and soft down with painstaking accuracy, noting the smallest gradations of colour and texture. He made test sheets of colour, dabbing the tints around the sketches as a guide. But he also gave the birds character: the green and red Kuhl’s parakeets seem to talk to each other; the salmon-crested cockatoo appears blushingly vain; the great red and yellow macaw turns its head with a wary, arrogant glance and the blue and yellow macaw leans forward, its feathers ruffled and high. It is hard to tell who is the observer, artist or bird.

*Psittacara Leptorhyncha*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

Parrots saturated what Lear most relished in nature. Color poured from his brush, alive with the same feeling-tone he found during his long walks in the forests of the Lake District, marveling in his journal at “the emerald blue deep beneath, the pale blue beyond.” He envisioned making a ravishing book of his birds, emanating all the vastness and vibrancy of life itself.

*Macrocercus Hyacinthinus*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Platycercus Palliceps*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

But the processes for reproducing such bright colors and printing such large folios were cumbersome and expensive. No publisher would take the risk. So, a century after William Blake pioneered the artist-entrepreneur model of self-publishing, Lear decided to crowdfund and self-publish his labor of love: He would produce 175 copies for subscribers at ten shillings each, then use the proceeds to publish a bound book for the public. He began offering subscriptions to old friends and neighbors, parents of his former students, dukes and duchesses, eminent naturalists, and even the president of the Linnaean Society, hoping they would become seed investors in his vision.

The lavish large-format art he envisioned was modeled on Audubon’s pioneering “elephant folio” of Birds of America, published five years earlier after fourteen years of struggle. Lear — who was around the age of Audubon’s sons — had befriended the American artist during his European lecture tour and had become especially close with one of his sons. When Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots was finally published as a bound book, Audubon bought a copy and wrote admiringly about it in his journal.

*Platycercus Erythropterus*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Platycercus Tabuensis*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Platycercus Barnardi*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Platycercus Brownii*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

But the unexampled is always at odds with the commonplace, the visionary always at odds with the commodity: Commercially, the book was a dismal failure. Creatively, it changed the course of natural history illustration and paved the way for the future of book art; it changed the course of Lear’s life — the unknown young man was soon tutoring the young Queen Victoria in painting and working for the eminent taxidermist turned ornithological writer John Gould, whose gifted wife Elizabeth also trained with Lear to become one of the world’s greatest ornithological artists herself. (Her birds were even more joyous to work with than Audubon’s in my divinations project.)

Perhaps Lear’s parrots are so striking, so alive, because he was always in an I-Thou relationship with the birds. The drawings that filled his room spoke to him: “A huge Maccaw is now looking me in the face as much as to say — ‘finish me,’” he wrote to a friend; they spoke the language of his soul:

The whole of my exalted & delightful upper tenement in fact overflows with them, and for the last 12 months I have so moved — looked at, — & existed among Parrots — that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.

*Palaeornis Rosaceus*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Palaeornis Novae-Holandiae*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Lorius Domicella*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

*Palaeornis Columboides*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for being alive. The parrots were not just an aesthetic passion for Lear. “A deep black bitter melancholy destroys me,” he wrote in his journal. Just as Marianne North turned loneliness and loss into wonder with her pioneering paintings of exotic plants and Ernst Haeckel turned the deepest heartbreak into enchantment with his breathtaking drawings of jellyfish, Lear painted what he saw in order to keep looking out. All melancholy is a stranglehold of selfing. All joy is a surrender to something larger than oneself. In nature, in wildness, Lear came unselved, so that he could gasp in his journal after a day of walking in the forest and sketching: “Is it not wonderful to be alive?”

*Palaeornis Torquatus*. (Available as a print, a greeting card, and a notebook.)

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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.

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

Source: The Marginalian | 14 Jul 2025 | 2:19 am(NZT)

Why Bats Shouldn’t Exist: The Limits of Knowledge, the Pitfalls of Prediction, and the Triumph of the Possible Over the Probable

Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again and again they have withheld entire regions of reality from us as we have continually mistaken the known for the knowable, our ways of knowing for the path to truth.

The shape of the Earth.

The organizing principle of the Solar System.

The bat.

Art by Tove Jansson from her Moomins series. (Brooklyn Public Library)

If we fed what we know about mammalian anatomy and the physics of avian flight into a predictive algorithm, it would fail to produce a flying mammal. In theory, which is how we model reality in the mind, bats should not exist. And yet every evening, all over the world, winged improbabilities scribble across the gloaming sky their stenography of the possible.

Metabolism is what makes all life possible and the metabolic engine of animals hinges on breathing — hemoglobin carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the bloodstream, where it reacts with sugar from food to produce energy. Our mammalian lungs resemble a bagpipe that inflates with each inhale of oxygen and deflates with each exhale of carbon dioxide. Birds have an entirely different respiratory system — air sacs acting as bellows move oxygen through the pipe-like lungs during both inhalation and exhalation. This unidirectional air flow allows birds to fly across great distances at high altitudes where the oxygen concentration is low.

Bat by Paul Sougy. (Available as a print.)

Bats have mammalian lungs. They should not be able to fly. And yet they do, their flight more metabolically efficient than that of hummingbirds. Ranging in size from the lightest known mammal — the tiny Craseonycteris thonglongyai, weighing a mere 2 grams — to the Asian flying fox with its 2-meter wingspan, they have adapted to extreme environments thanks to their virtuosic oxygen and carbon dioxide regulation.

A study of Chile’s eight species of bats found that they have a respiratory area sixfold that of other mammals and lung volumes 72% greater. Their heart — the transport system for oxygen in the blood — is larger than that of any other mammal relative to body size. At rest, their breathing rate is similar to ours. But as soon as they take flight, it increases up to seventeen-fold, reaching as many as 400 breaths per minute synchronized with their wing beat frequency to minimizing energy expenditure by combining muscle contractions. These almost supernatural lungs are sheathed in a blood-gas barrier much thinner than that of other animals, allowing oxygen to enter the bloodstream rapidly, disposing of carbon dioxide just as rapidly.

Javan slit-faced bat (*Nycteris javanica*) and reddish-brown lip bat (*Noctilis rufus*) from *Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals* by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a postcard.)

This respiratory and cardiovascular ingenuity allows bats to conserve energy during cold periods, not paying the metabolic cost of generating body heat that other mammals would — they are among Earth’s few true hibernators, capable of dropping their heartbeat sixteen-fold and their temperature to that of the cave walls that encastle them in their kingdom of darkness.

Greater false vampire bat (*Megaderma lyra*) from *Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals* by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a postcard.)

These astonishing adaptations are the sum total of myriad small defiances of prediction — chances taken on the improbable and the untested, wild guesses at the shape of the possible — without which bats would not exist. But they do, and we need them. We need bats — “swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together,” D.H. Lawrence called them — for the same reason we need apricots and lichen and the great blue heron: to remind us that the universe could have remained one homogenous sea of matter swimming in light, for nothing in the laws of physics demands that the world be beautiful or could predict the dazzling diversity of forms that makes it so. The bat is just as defiant of prediction as the Big Bang — small winged evidence that the possible is always vaster than the probable and the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

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Source: The Marginalian | 12 Jul 2025 | 2:32 pm(NZT)

Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and What Makes Us Human

I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.

An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.

Illustration by Olivier Tallec from *Big Wolf & Little Wolf*

We call this suffering.

Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.

We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.

*Falling Star* by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884. (Available as a print.)

In his exquisite reckoning with what makes life worth living, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captures this in a diary entry from the late spring of 1942. Under the headline “very necessary qualifications for a good Persian storyteller,” he copies out a passage from an unidentified book he is reading:

In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.

A generation before Canetti, the philosopher-poet Rainer Maria Rilke articulated the same essential condition for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but speaking to what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance, anything drawn from one life to touch another:

For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.

Art from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Couple with Carl Jung on the relationship between suffering and creativity, then revisit Annie Dillard on creativity and what it takes to be a great writer and Oliver Sacks, writing thirty years before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning.

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Source: The Marginalian | 8 Jul 2025 | 6:05 am(NZT)

A Defense of Joy

One of the most important things to have learned in life is that choosing joy in a world rife with reasons for despair is a countercultural act of courage and resistance, choosing it not despite the abounding sorrow we barely survive but because of it, because joy — like music, like love — is one of those entirely unnecessary miracles of consciousness that give meaning to survival with its bright allegiance to the most alive part of us.

Card from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, also available as a stand-alone print and stationery cards.

“We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” Nick Cave sings in one of my favorite songs, and yet in a world trembling with fear and cynicism (which is the most cowardly species of fear), joy — the choice of it, the right to it — is in need of constant defense.

I know none mightier or more delightful than the one Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) mounts in his poem “Defensa de la alegría” (“A Defense of Joy”), read here by the polymathic Chilean primatologist Isabel Behncke (who introduced me to this benediction of a poem) followed by my English translation and reading to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major.

DEFENSA DE LA ALEGRÍA
Mario Benedetti

Defender la alegría como una trinchera
defenderla del escándalo y la rutina
de la miseria y los miserables
de las ausencias transitorias
y las definitivas

defender la alegría como un principio
defenderla del pasmo y las pesadillas
de los neutrales y de los neutrones
de las dulces infamias
y los graves diagnósticos

defender la alegría como una bandera
defenderla del rayo y la melancolía
de los ingenuos y de los canallas
de la retórica y los paros cardiacos
de las endemias y las academias

defender la alegría como un destino
defenderla del fuego y de los bomberos
de los suicidas y los homicidas
de las vacaciones y del agobio
de la obligación de estar alegres

defender la alegría como una certeza
defenderla del óxido y la roña
de la famosa pátina del tiempo
del relente y del oportunismo
de los proxenetas de la risa

defender la alegría como un derecho
defenderla de dios y del invierno
de las mayúsculas y de la muerte
de los apellidos y las lástimas
del azar
y también de la alegría.

A DEFENSE OF JOY
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria Popova

Defend joy like a trench
defend it from scandal and routine
from misery and misers
from truancies passing
and permanent

defend joy as a principle
defend it from bewilderments and bad dreams
from the neutral and the neutron
from sweet infamies
and grave diagnoses

defend joy like a flag
defend it from lightning and melancholy
from the fools and the frauds
from rhetoric and ruptures of the heart
from the endemic and the academic

defend joy as a destiny
defend it from fire and firefighters
from suicides and homicides
from vacations and ruts
from the obligation to be joyful

defend joy as a certainty
defend it from rust and smut
from the famous patina of time
from dew and exploitation
by the pimps of laughter

defend joy as a right
defend it from God and winter
from uppercase and the casket
from surnames and the pity
of chance
and of joy too.

Couple with the story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” then revisit Benedetti’s wakeup call of a poem “Do Not Spare Yourself” (“No te salves”).

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

Source: The Marginalian | 5 Jul 2025 | 4:18 am(NZT)

Vision of the Womb and Vision of the Brain: H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind Consciousness

“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience — moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean’s edge, a lover’s kiss — to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible.

It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, that how we look at the world — what we choose to bring into consciousness — shapes what we see, which in turn shapes the world we make in the image of our vision. This is why we call visionaries the people who see sides and paths others do not, who catch in the prism of their consciousness the light of the world invisible to the rest and cast it back magnified, more luminous, iridescent with possibility.

The pioneering modernist poet H.D. (September 10, 1886–September 27, 1961) was such a person, and one who saw deeply into the nature of the prism itself, who located the seer’s vision not in the mind but in what she called the “over-mind.”

Born in Pennsylvania as Hilda Doolittle, the daughter of an astronomer who liked to say that “his one girl was worth all his five boys put together,” she grew up watching her father magnify stars through his telescope and her grandfather — a marine biologist — magnify cells under his microscope. Here were layers of reality, bright and dazzling, beyond what was visible to the eye, lavishing with wonder those who have the right instruments. Such an experience at so formative an age can’t but reveal the mind itself as an instrument for gaging reality, its lens polished by our experience, its focus the making and unmaking of our lives, and all of it, all of it, not above the body but of it. H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason.

In 1919, catatonic with grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and a world war that had slain both her father and her brother, having barely survived the Spanish Flu herself, H.D. took refuge on the Scilly Islands on her way to Greece with her newborn baby and the woman who would become her partner for the remainder of her life — the novelist, poet, and magazine editor Bryher. There amid the lapping blue waves and lush subtropical gardens of a natural world so breathtaking it seems almost supernatural, enveloped in her lover’s intellectual kinship and passionate devotion, she started coming back to life. And, as such resuscitations of élan vital tend to do, some inner veil lifted one day to leave her feeling a profound participancy in the streaming life of the universe. At the center of it was a revelation about the nature of vision, which H.D. recorded in a series of shamanic diary fragments published long after her death as Notes on Thought and Vision (public library).

She identifies three “states or manifestations of life” — the body, the mind, and the “over-mind,” bearing echoes of Emerson’s notion of the “Oversoul,” that faculty for contacting what the transcendentalists’ hero Goethe called “the All.” The highest achievement of human development, she observes, is “equilibrium, balance, growth of the three at once” — a brain without embodiment is “a disease comparable to cancerous growth or tumor” (what a prophetic indictment of AI), a body without a mind is “an empty fibrous bundle of glands,” and an over-mind without the other two is madness. A healthy body, therefore, is not a conglomeration of certain parts, abilities, and attributes, but a harmonious integration with the mind, just as a healthy mind is not a checklist of cognitive capacities but a harmonious integration with the body, and out of these twin harmonies arises the vision of the over-mind.

Swimming in the cerulean womb of the world, she finds a metaphor — or a metaphor finds her — for the essence of the over-mind:

That over-mind seems a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jellyfish, or anemone.

Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.

The over-mind is the superorganism of the psyche, pulsating with “super-feelings”:

These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jellyfish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jellyfish feelers are the jellyfish itself, elongated in fine threads.

One of Ernst Haeckel’s stunning drawings of jellyfish. (Available as a print.)

This over-mind is capable of two kinds of vision, which must also be in equilibrium for us to reach our existential potential. A decade before Virginia Woolf insisted that the highest form of mind is “the androgynous mind… resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided,” H.D. writes:

Vision is of two kinds — vision of the womb and vision of the brain. In vision of the brain, the region of consciousness is above and about the head; when the centre of consciousness shifts and the jellyfish is in the body… we have vision of the womb or love-vision.

The majority of dream and of ordinary vision is of the womb.

The brain and the womb are both centers of consciousness, equally important.

Lamenting that the creative culture of her time was already suffering from the debilitating brain bias that only metastasized in our own era, she shines an optimistic gleam into the future:

I believe there are artists coming in the next generation, some of whom will have the secret of using their over-minds.

But nothing feeds the over-mind more, nothing reveals it and anneals it more, than love. The world deepens and broadens and begins to shimmer when we are in love precisely because the experience embodies us and enminds us at the same time, touching the total person with its light. Surely drawing on her experience of falling in love with Bryher, which had come unbidden like a rainbow after a summer storm, H.D. considers how this happens:

We begin with sympathy of thought.

The minds of the two lovers merge, interact in sympathy of thought.

The brain, inflamed and excited by this interchange of ideas, takes on its character of over-mind, becomes… a jellyfish, placed over and about the brain.

The love-region is excited by the appearance or beauty of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain… a jellyfish in the body.

The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision… The over-mind is like a lens of an opera-glass. When we are able to use this over-mind lens, the whole world of vision is open to us… The love-mind and the over-mind are two lenses. When these lenses are properly adjusted, focused, they bring the world of vision into consciousness. The two work separately, perceive separately, yet make one picture.

There are many portals into “the world of over-mind consciousness” and we must each find our own. Echoing Whitman’s insistence that “no one can acquire for another… grow for another” and Nietzsche’s admonition that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” H.D. writes:

My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.

But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.

All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:

Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.

Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.

Couple H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision with Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing and Iris Murdoch — whose over-mind was deeply kindred to H.D.’s — on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent living metaphor for unselfing drawn from the enchanted symbiosis of a jellyfish and a sea slug.

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

Source: The Marginalian | 3 Jul 2025 | 6:41 am(NZT)

Uncaging the Bird in the Mind: William Henry Hudson and the Gift of the Ruin of Your Best Laid Plans

“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” wrote Milton in Paradise Lost. Because the mind (which may in the end be a full-body phenomenon) is the cup that lifts the world to our lips to be tasted — a taste we call reality — it is difficult to examine the cup itself, to observe the inner workings of the mind as it sips questions and turns them over with the tongue of thought to form ideas, to render a world. We can’t will it, because the will is a handmaiden of the mind; we can only surrender to it, and never willingly, when something unexpected — a grave illness, a great loss, a great love — vanquishes the tranquilizing effect of habit, jolts us awake from the trance of near-living, and makes us see reality afresh, purified and magnified.

No one, to my mind, has articulated those vivifying interruptions more powerfully — or more delightfully — than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922).

Born in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, he lost his mother when he was only a teenager. Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species. The disconsolate boy devoured it immediately — it must have been a salve, this beautiful and brutal model of nature in which the survival of the species is perfected by the deaths of individuals. Like the young John James Audubon, who turned to birds in the wake of losing his own mother, Hudson — who would eventually become the Audubon of the pampas — grew passionately interested in ornithology. He resented the way science was done, killing living birds to make “skins” for study; he resented the way civilization was done, destroying wildlife habitats for human needs. He felt the urgency and ecstasy of a calling — to enchant the world with the wondrous birds of Patagonia he had spent his youth observing, taking meticulous notes about their morphology, habits, and migration patterns, thinking constantly about what it is like to be a creature so profoundly other.

In his early thirties, Hudson sailed for England, eager to share what he knew of a feathered universe entirely alien to the European mind.

He reached out to John Gould — the Old World’s preeminent ornithologist, a disaffected taxidermist who had risen to fame largely thanks to his wife’s extraordinary ornithological art — and received a curt rejection.

Unable to find work, he folded his gaunt six-foot frame into a giant origami bird to sleep on the benches of Hyde Park.

It took him two years to get a paying job as a writer — for a women’s magazine, under the pseudonym Maud Merryweather. He wrote the way he felt the living world — passionately, rigorously, his tender curiosity shimmering with awe.

Doors began to crack open and he was soon writing for other small journals. For fifteen years, he trojan-horsed birds into popular interest stories, until he finally published his first book of ornithology, about the birds of Argentina. He was forty-seven.

Many-colored knight by Henrik Grønvold from *Birds of La Plata* by William Henry Hudson, 1920. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

Then the floodgates opened and out came pouring some of the most breathtaking nature writing our civilization has produced. Hemingway cited Hudson in his novels. Joseph Conrad marveled that his prose was “like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there you could not tell how it came.” By the end of Hudson’s life, his collected works — dozens of ornithological books and natural history essays, novels and travelogues, written with a philosopher’s quickening of mind and poet’s sensitivity to the light of the world — amounted to twenty-four volumes.

Shortly after his death, he was honored with a bird sanctuary memorial in his name in Hyde Park, not far from the bench that had held his dreams as a homeless young writer.

What shaped Hudson’s gift for channeling the beating heart of nature, for rendering the living world in such exultant and exacting detail, was the ruin of his best laid plans — an accident that befell him in Patagonia just before he left Argentina for good. Pulsating through it is the reminder that every loss of control is an invitation to surrender, and it is only in surrender that we break out of our stories to contact a deeper truth — about ourselves, about the world, about the interchange between the two that we call reality.

White-banded mockingbird by Henrik Grønvold from *Birds of La Plata* by William Henry Hudson, 1920. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

Not long after turning thirty, determined to make a name for himself as an ornithologist, Hudson set out on a yearlong observing expedition from the pampas to Tierra del Fuego, across the austere scrub and cold canyons of the Patagonian desert. Recounting the experience a lifetime later in his altogether magnificent 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), he reflects on the spirit in which he entered upon the adventure:

To my mind there is nothing in life so delightful as that feeling of relief, of escape, and absolute freedom which one experiences in a vast solitude, where man has perhaps never been, and has, at any rate, left no trace of his existence.

But things did not go as planned from the outset. The southbound steamer he boarded in Buenos Aires ran aground in the middle of the second night. Hudson awoke to find himself beached on the Patagonian coast. Too restless to wait for rescue, he decided to trek inland in search of human habitation, which the octogenarian captain had assured him was near.

After two days of walking, without provisions or a map, he came upon a gasp of a vista — the Rio Negro river snaking across the desert, “broader than the Thames at Westminster, and extending away on either hand until it melted and was lost in the blue horizon, its low shores clothed in all the glory of groves and fruit orchards and vineyards and fields of ripening maize.”

He eventually made it to a farmhouse laden with fruit that “glowed like burning coals in the deep green foliage.” After replenishing his energies, he set out on the first leg of the expedition proper — an eighty-mile ride along the river — accompanied by a young Englishman.

Patagonia’s Upsala Glacier seen from the International Space Station. (Photograph: NASA)

They stopped midway at a “rude little cabin,” in “a dreary and desolate spot, with a few old gaunt and half-dead red willows for only trees.” One hot afternoon, bored and birdless, Hudson picked up his companion’s revolver to examine it. It went off immediately, sending a bullet through his left knee. Blood came streaming, more blood than he had ever seen.

The young man, afraid that Hudson would die without medical care, decided to ride out in search of rescue. He left Hudson a jug of water, locked him in the windowless cabin “to prevent the intrusion of unwelcome prowlers,” and promised to return before nightfall. He didn’t. When darkness came, it was total — Hudson had no candle. Shivering with pain under his blood-soaked poncho, finding that he could “neither doze nor think,” all he could do was listen. And yet he did think, a lovely thought about the importance of hearing to unsighted people and animals dwelling in the dark — one of those sudden flashes of empathy for otherness that our own suffering can spark.

Suddenly he registered a strange sound, as if someone were dragging a rope across the clay floor. He lit one of his few matches and looked around, but saw nothing, and so he passed the “black anxious hours” with his mind’s ear pressed to the world outside the cabin, until he could hear the emissaries of dawn — the scissor-tail tyrant birds twittering in the willow, the red-billed finches singing in the reeds, a song that sounded like crying.

Black-headed siskin by Henrik Grønvold from *Birds of La Plata* by William Henry Hudson, 1920. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

Red-faced rock martin by Henrik Grønvold from *Birds of La Plata* by William Henry Hudson, 1920. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

But none was more assuring, more life-affirming than “the dreamy, softly rising and falling, throaty warblings of the white-rumped swallow”:

A loved and beautiful bird is this, that utters his early song circling round and round in the dusky air, when the stars begin to pale; and his song, perhaps, seems sweeter than all others, because it corresponds in time to that rise in the temperature and swifter flow of the blood — the inward resurrection experienced on each morning of our individual life.

As day at last began to break, an enormous venomous snake slithered out from under his poncho — it had slept beside him all night.

The young Englishman returned in the morning with an oxcart that took Hudson, over two delirious days along a hot dusty road, to the headquarters of the South American Missionary Society. There he remained bedridden for months, his dreams crushed, his expedition foreclosed before it had begun. With no birds to observe, Hudson began examining the very instrument of observation.

A generation before Virginia Woolf wrote so movingly about illness as a portal to self-understanding, Hudson found in his incapacitation, in the devastation of his plans, what we always find when we are forced to halt our ordinary methods of avoiding ourselves — an unbidden opening into the nature of the mind, into that glowing space between the mechanics of cognition and the mystery of consciousness, articulated in the language of his heart: birds.

He writes:

Lying helpless on my back through the long sultry mid-summer days, with the white-washed walls of my room for landscape and horizon, and a score or two of buzzing house-flies, perpetually engaged in their intricate airy dance, for only company, I was forced to think on a great variety of subjects, and to occupy my mind with other problems than that of migration. These other problems, too, were in many ways like the flies that shared my apartment, and yet always remained strangers to me, as I to them, since between their minds and mine a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles of the earth; flitting, sylph-like things, that began life as abstractions, and developed, like imago from maggot, into entities: I always flitted among them, as they performed their mazy dance, whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised motionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for an instant, mocking my power to grasp them, and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive fly I would soon turn towards them again; perhaps to see them all wheeling in a closer order, describing new fantastic figures, with swifter motions, their forms turned to thin black lines, crossing and recrossing in every direction, as if they had all combined to write a series of strange characters in the air, all forming a strange sentence — the secret of secrets! Happily for the progress of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating elusive insects of the brain can appear before us at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight of pigeons or a countless army of small field finches; of a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture, or even regarded, more than one at a time.

Hudson sometimes hobbled out of his room with a stick to talk to people, but although he listened earnestly “to the story of their small un-avian affairs,” he had never found it easy to connect with humans:

I could always quit them without regret to lie on the green sward, to gaze up into the trees or the blue sky, and speculate on all imaginable things.

Red oven-bird by Henrik Grønvold from *Birds of La Plata* by William Henry Hudson, 1920. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified:

Our waking life is sometimes like a dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.

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Source: The Marginalian | 30 Jun 2025 | 12:23 pm(NZT)

Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds

“All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.”

Every day at sundown I would hear him, the invisible shepherd singing on the other side of the ridge, his song filling the gloaming with the sound of the centuries — the same song his father had sung on that same mountain, and his father’s father, and the generations of shepherds before him, their lives wool on the loom of time weaving the story of a place that is a scale model of the world.

The Bulgaria I grew up in was the poorest country in Europe and the most biodiverse per square kilometer. I spent much of my childhood in its remotest mountains, where my grandparents worked as government-deployed elementary school teachers in largely illiterate villages. My grandmother, now ninety, had grown up in those mountains herself, sharing a single straw bed with her three siblings and a three-room house with her trigenerational family of twelve. There were always animals around — pigs and chickens and goat and cows and oh so many sheep — their rhythms, their needs, their moods intertwined with our own. I feel their absence today and in it a reminder that the world we live in — a world of skyscrapers and screens, sterilized of the nonhuman — is unnatural, impoverished, lonely.

After coming of age in New Zealand and living in Scotland, poet and novelist Kapka Kassabova returned to Bulgaria, where she was born a decade before me, to live in its mountains with the nomadic Karakachan shepherds and their ancient breed of dogs in a remote village brought back from the brink of oblivion by a small retinue of young idealists. The modest life of physical toil and privation recompenses her with a new understanding of the tessellated meanings of loyalty, courage, and love, of what it means to be human and how, once we strip the constellation of complexities and artifices that is the modern self, we can begin to see the world as a whole simpler than its parts, unfinished yet complete. Pouring from the pages of Anima: A Wild Pastoral (public library) — one of those books that leave you taking fuller breaths of life — is an elixir to lift the spell that has us entranced by the cult of more, languishing with the loneliness of not enough in a civilization obsessed with scaling business models, having forgotten that the only thing worth scaling is a mountain. It is a love letter to the Karakachan way of being — to the shepherds who in a lifetime of walking with the animals circumambulate the world more than once with their combined footfall, and to their guard dogs who look part wolf and part teddy bear, their growl a volcano erupting in space, their eyes earnest and knowing; it is a love letter to life itself, to the soul of the world coursing through us, the soul beneath the self.

Kassabova writes:

This job requires three things: liking your own company, liking the animals and liking the outdoors, plus not being afraid of anything.

[…]

We have forgotten that this too is something we can do… walk with animals, live with animals, care for animals and be cared for by them. Even make a living from it. Today, it is just as difficult to make a living from pastoral farming as it is from making noncommercial art, music or literature. You must be fuelled by a devotion that can’t be dampened by rain or burned up by fire.

Those who are willing to live such a life are rewarded with a singular sense of purpose, more transcendence than teleology — a kind of repatriation into the family of things, a benediction of time and a consecration of presence:

It was a soothing monastic monotony, a balm for troubled souls, to know your purpose, follow an itinerary and bring the gang back, tired and satisfied after another day of fulfilling your mission. The days were beads in a rosary that passed through your fingers and you felt their texture and shape. The same, but different.

Morning prayer: milk the sheep and take the flock to pasture. Midday prayer: pladnina. Evening vespers: bring the flock home, feed the dogs. Have a humble supper, lie on your hard bed, then rise early and morning prayer.

Drink your coffee, lace up your shoes, strap on your rucksack, take your stick and in sickness and in health, in rain and sunshine, go. The dogs are waiting. The flock is waiting. The hills are waiting. You are needed.

She comes to contact the life-force of water in Black River and the consolation of stone in Thunder Peak. In that way we have of calling love the longing for our own missing pieces — those parts of ourselves we have repressed or abandoned that another embodies — she falls in love with one of the young shepherds, only to discover alongside his extraordinary vitality the self-abandonment of addiction. She wanders the last indigenous pine forests of the Balkans, slakes her soul on a river so icy blue and clean it feels “like the dawn of the earth,” eats with elders who know the real meaning of might: “There are hundred-year-old trees,” say the Karakachans, “but there is no hundred-year-old power.”

All the while, the life of the mountain whispers its invitation to aliveness. In a passage evocative of the French surrealist poet, philosopher, and novelist René Daumal’s alpine metaphor for the meaning of life, she writes:

You go up, always up. There is something higher, brighter, more saturated in colour, more perfect in shape, different from yesterday, although it’s the same mountain every day. The dogs are by your side, they too are astonished by this moving picture and sometimes when you walk, you feel so light that your feet barely touch the ground, and you realise that these are some of the happiest days of your life.

One of the hardest things to learn in this life — in this epoch, in this civilization — is that all true happiness is the work of unselfing, the kind of surrender to the will of being that some find in a monastery and some in a mountain. Two centuries after Margaret Fuller’s encountered transcendence on a hilltop, Kassabova recounts a moment of pure presence pulsating with the essence of anima — the Latin root of “animal,” meaning “soul,” which the Karakachans believe is embodied by the wind, the breath of life:

I have no face or body when I lie like this on the boundless bed of the hills, I have nothing at all. I am a vessel through which passes the breath of the world.

[…]

The wind is a messenger travelling from afar and I try to catch the message. Like a word that’s not a word, it is a continuous movement of grass and light, of animals and the sun’s orbit. The wind is alive like a being. The wind is the world’s soul passing over me and its message is this, the world’s soul. Anima.

It passes over us when we lie down with the animals. It touches us and moves on. I don’t know where it goes but one day, I will go with it and not wake up anymore.

Such glimpses of the fathomless totality beyond this boundary of skin and story that we call a self wake us up from the illusion we live with. There are infinitely many peepholes into that grander reality, the smallest flower as good as the largest telescope, a hare as good as a hummingbird. Kassabova reflects on hers:

To keep up with the goats required surrender and a suspension of self, at least self in the modern sense, the self that demands to be at the centre of things and not a companion to a bunch of other animals. But maybe the modern self is not quite real. Maybe its understanding of centre and periphery is an illusion. Maybe it wouldn’t be that difficult to give it up. It might be a relief.

She finds this unselfing to be an exponential surrender — to the mountain, to its time and its timefulness:

The higher you went, the harder physical survival became, the more equal you felt to everything. Personas disappeared and essence remained. There is just one essence in all of life. Anima.

[…]

All our lives, we try to arrive somewhere. Where are my ambitions now? I can’t find them. They were never real. How can something unreal take up so much of my time on earth when the only thing that’s real is this mountain? I can’t fathom it. Pirin was named after the old divinity of thunder and fertility, Perun, who is covered in dragon scales. I can see why humans worshipped mountains when they wandered over nine mountains with their flocks. Thunder Peak is the original cathedral. When Notre Dame burns, Thunder Peak is here every morning.

In the end, she discovers what we all do if we live long enough and deep enough — that it is not what we search for but what finds us, what comes unbidden through the side door of our expectations, through the cracks in our plans, that most rewilds our lives with meaning. And that meaning is always inarticulable, something glowing in the abyss between one consciousness and another, something on which language can only shine a sidewise gleam.

I open my laptop and my fingers struggle to type. They are too thick and have almost forgotten their way around the keyboard. Must I squeeze my experiences into such a small space when they are so much larger? As large and layered as the mountain. I look the same as ever, but I feel like a giant. Something has expanded. I don’t know how to explain this. Between the lower world and the upper world there is a problem of language.

And all the time, the earth is trying to make contact.

[…]

The milk, the blood, the rain. All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.

[…]

Now… I understand what it’s like to have seen something so true and beautiful, you want everyone to be touched by it. Saved, even.

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Source: The Marginalian | 28 Jun 2025 | 1:21 am(NZT)

Divinations of the First Light: A Cosmic Poem for the Vera Rubin Observatory

At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science with her famous comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one of her Vassar students that she would rather have authored a great poem than discovered a comet.

A century later, a little girl named Vera had a flash of illumination while reading a children’s book about Maria Mitchell: her nightly pastime of gazing wondersmitten at the stars outside her bedroom window could become a life’s work, work that would culminate in one of the greatest revelations in the history of science.

Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter by studying the rotation of galaxies. “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” she reflected in her most personal interview — a playful echo of Keats’s poignant postulate that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

A decade after Vera Rubin returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, the observatory named in her honor opens its oracle eye to the cosmos and blinks back at us the mysteries of ten million bright galaxies. Atop one of the first images captured by the VRO’s 8.4-meter telescope — 678 exposures of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae taken over the course of seven hours, two trillion pixels of cosmic truth combined into a single gasp of beauty — I have remixed the text of the National Science Foundation press release into a poem using my bird divination process:

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Source: The Marginalian | 25 Jun 2025 | 2:22 pm(NZT)

How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone.

Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock.

Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain.

Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge.

Art by Sophie Blackall from *Things to Look Forward to*

Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.

A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”

Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.

OH, LOVELY ROCK
by Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

A generation later, another great poet displaced from the bedrock of belonging by another world war tried to make sense of being human by turning to stone:

STONE
by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill —
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.

And although we are “creatures shaped by the planet’s rocky logic,” we are also creatures shaped by the myriad mercies of time, saved over and over by the leap beyond logic that is trusting time.

FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova

May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.

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Source: The Marginalian | 22 Jun 2025 | 10:49 am(NZT)

Against Death: Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti on Grieving a Parent, Grieving the World, and What Makes Life Worth Living

The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect).

Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti, aged thirty-two, decides to write a book “against” death, defying it without denying it, this shadow of life that is also its spark, the very thing that makes it shimmer with aliveness. He would work on it for the next half century until his own death, filling two thousand pages with reflections and aphorisms posthumously distilled into The Book Against Death (public library).

Art by Salvador Dalí for a rare 1946 edition of the essays of Montaigne

Perhaps Canetti’s reckoning with death is so virtuosic in articulating the potency and poignancy of life because it keeps inverting the lens from the microscopic to the telescopic and back again as he mourns his mother and mourns the world. Everything is suddenly personal, his suffering a fractal of the suffering and everyone else’s suffering a mirror image of his own.

Coming to feel that “with every destroyed city a piece of his own life falls away,” he searches for the borders of compassion and finds none:

Am I Nuremberg? Am I Munich? I am every building in which children sleep. I am every open square across which feet scurry.

And yet alongside this overwhelming brokenness, so universal and therefore so intimate, is also a greater wholeness that he is, as all visionaries are, able to glimpse through the ruins:

Above the shattered world there stretches a pure blue heaven, which continues to hold it together.

It is this blue, this color of longing for life, that saturates the meaning of life amid the darkness of death. Three years into the war, he vows:

Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death.

Not everyone, not even the great minds, had Canetti’s defiance. “We must love one another or die,” W.H. Auden had entreated humanity in one of the greatest poems ever written as the war was breaking out, and then, in what may be the most poignant one-word revision in the history of literature and one of the saddest in the history of the human spirit, he had rewritten that epitaphic last line in the wake of the war: “We must love one another and die.” While Auden was ceding his optimism, Muriel Rukeyser — as great a poet and a greater spirit — was celebrating a different vision of life beyond notions of triumph and defeat in one of the greatest books ever written: “All the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”

Canetti shares her lens on the political, but for him it is polished with the most deeply personal. In an entry from June 1942, he writes:

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true.

[…]

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

Echoing Ernest Hemingway (“No one you love is ever dead,” he had written in a stirring letter of consolation to a bereaved friend) and echoing Emily Dickinson (“Each that we lose takes part of us / A crescent still abides / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides,” she had written in her reckoning with love and loss upon her own mother’s death), Canetti contemplates the immortality of love in the living:

The souls of the dead are in others, namely those left behind… Only the dead have lost one another completely.

The final card from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, available as stand-alone print benefitting the Audubon Society.

In the prime of his life, he is already facing the losses that loom over anyone who loves:

I want anything to do with fewer and fewer people, mainly so that I can never get over the pain of losing them.

Not knowing that in the decades ahead he would lose the love of his life, marry again and lose her too, lose his younger brother, lose a retinue of friends — some to mass murder, some to suicide, some to the entropy that will take us all if we are lucky enough to grow old — he writes from the fortunate platform of his healthy thirties:

We carry the most important thing around inside ourselves for forty or fifty years before we risk articulating it. Therefore there is no way to measure all that is lost with those who die too early. Everyone dies early.

Art by Charlotte Pardi from *Cry, Heart, But Never Break* by Glenn Ringtved — a soulful Danish illustrated meditation on love and loss

And yet his mother’s death is precisely what awakened Canetti to life — his own life and the life of the world. (“Death is our friend,” Rilke had written when Canetti was a teenager, “precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”) Beneath it all pulsates his unflinching intimacy with the elemental reality of living:

We do not die of sadness — out of sadness we live on.

At the crux of Canetti’s disquisition on the menace and meaning of death is a passionate inquiry into what it means to be alive. A decade before Edward Abbey contemplated how to live and how (not) to die and a decade after Simone de Beauvoir composed her resolutions for a life worth living, Canetti itemizes the priorities of a good life:

To live at least long enough to know all human customs and events; to retrieve all of life that has passed, since we are denied that which will come; to pull yourself together before you disappear; to be worthy of your own birth; to think of the sacrifices made at the expense of others’ every breath; to not glorify suffering, even though you are alive because of it; to only keep for yourself that which cannot be given away until it is ripe for others and hands itself on; to hate every person’s death as if it were your own, and to at last be at peace with everything, but never with death.

Complement these passages from The Book Against Death with a heron’s antidote to death, then revisit Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness, Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, and Alan Lightman on what happens when we die.

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Source: The Marginalian | 20 Jun 2025 | 4:10 am(NZT)

The Whole of It

Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates our losses of perspective, nothing consecrates these transient lives bookended by not yet and never again, more than broadening our time horizon until the vista of our own lives becomes not a discrete point but part of a great continuity — one that comes alive in this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:

THE WHOLE OF IT
by Hannah Fries

If you step back, you can see it all
on the horizon: your mother’s death, the children
grown, their smooth eyelids crossed with veins
like saffron filaments. Further still, and see
your smiling grandmother treading the cold ocean,
tiny lakes in her collarbones, your great-
great grandchildren drawing their names
in the sand with sticks. The seas
rising and falling, ice scraping the earth,
and pockets of life surviving — lee sides, hot springs,
protected places. First light on the first day
of your life, and first light of first stars.
And in this way, every death, each apparent ending,
might, in the mind of spacetime, be woven
into one memory, so that always is
this tree, and the long days of falling in love
over the intricate pattern of bark and leaf,
and the first green cell learning to swallow sun.

Couple with Hannah’s magnificent poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on befriending time.

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

Source: The Marginalian | 18 Jun 2025 | 1:21 am(NZT)

Silence, Solitude, and the Art of Surrender: Pico Iyer on Finding the World in a Benedictine Monastery

“Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.”

The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love.

It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme.

We need silence.

We need solitude.

The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls.

Art by Anna Read from *The Wanting Monster* by Martine Murray

Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee “red-cheeked and glowing with life” and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that “keeps shining, like a candle in the fog.”

He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality:

The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I’ve never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.

*Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach*, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)

To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an “occasion for unselfing,” in Iris Murdoch’s lovely term, is no small gift — one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson’s lovely term, “active surrender.” We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery — which is “not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop” but “active and thrumming, almost palpable” — and it comes to him redoubled:

Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.

[…]

Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.

Card from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*

And then the world intrudes — his mother is felled by stroke, a fire consumes his home, a pandemic engulfs the globe. But what silence and solitude end up teaching him, end up teaching anyone who enters them, is that what seems like an assault on our best laid plans, an obstacle along the way of life, is the way itself: experiences that wake us up from “sleepwalking through life” and bring us closer not only to ourselves but to each other. Iyer writes:

In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them.

[…]

As the days mount in silence, I’m quickly freed of most of my preconceptions. A monk, I see, is not someone who wishes to live peacefully and alone; in truth, he exists in a communal web of obligations as unyielding as in any workplace, and continuing till his final breath.

Art by Ofra Amit for *The Universe in Verse*

In the fathoming of silence, he learns that “the best in us lies deeper than our words.” In the austerity of the monastic life, he learns that “luxury is defined by all you don’t need to long for,” that retreat “is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection.” He reflects:

One kind of asceticism comes in the letting go of certainties, and of any notion that you know more than life does.

There is but one possible action out of that realization: surrender, which he discovers it the only point of being there — “simply, systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.”

In the end, we are reminded that to be in silence, to be in solitude, to be in surrender amid a fragile world is not defeatism but an act of courage and resistance, not escapism but the widest-eyed realism we have:

Some nights, of course, I still wake up in the dark, unable to sleep… Chaos and suffering seem endless. Then I recall the sun burning on the water far below and feel part of something larger in which nothing is absolute or final.

[…]

I watch the golden light of early morning irradiate the hills, while valleys remain in deepest shadow. I turn to see the sun scintillant on the ocean in the distance, the sky so sharp and blue I can make out the ridges in the islands far beyond.

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Source: The Marginalian | 13 Jun 2025 | 11:11 am(NZT)

The Arguers: A Charming Illustrated Parable about the Absurdity of Self-righteousness

Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of the situation, the complexity of the wider context, what it’s like to be the other person) with the will to be right. Our duels of self-righteousness can be fought over whose turn it is to take out the trash or who should govern the country, they can take place on the scale of the planet in the language of nuclear weapons or on the scale of the kitchen table in the code language of lovers, but they are always a betrayal of our deepest humanity — the capacity to understand, the longing to be understood, the knowledge that everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they’ve got and the cards they’ve been dealt.

Corinna Luyken, maker of tender and thoughtful illustrated aids for living, animates the absurdity of these duels with playfulness and charm in The Arguers (public library).

The story begins as a bickering over whether a brush or a comb would better detangle the king’s beard and ends up, in the wildfire way of righteousness, as an argument about everything and a national sport.

Soon they argued all the time,
until no one could remember
when the arguing had started
or over what,
or by whom.

They argue with each other and with the flowers and the stones.

They grow so skilled at it — “they could argue forward and backward, right side up and upside down… in fog and sun and sleet and snow” — that the king and queen decide to hold a contest for their nation or arguers.

On the day of the contest, things take an unintended turn.

The story ends with a wink, but is at heart a warning: arguing is counterfeit problem-solving, an argument is a barricade against understanding, and self-righteousness is a fist you open to find your kindness crushed.

Couple The Arguers with philosopher Daniel Dennett on how to criticize with kindness, then revisit Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality.

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Source: The Marginalian | 12 Jun 2025 | 7:31 am(NZT)

Against the Pleasurable Luxury of Despair and the Aridity of Self-pity: Doris Lessing on the Artist’s Task in Trying Times

Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.”

In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale composed her short, superb insistence on the possibility of peace — Lessing examined the responsibility of the writer in a precarious and fragile world menaced by dark forces, a world in eternal need of those lighthouses we call artists.

In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes:

Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul…

But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.

In a passage speaking of her time and speaking to ours, evocative of what James Baldwin so astutely observed in his magnificent essay on Shakespeare (“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.”), she adds:

We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us… We are living at one of the great turning points in history… Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.

Card from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

She distills the essence of our task in troubled times:

The choice before us… is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat evil.

[…]

There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion — and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.

Although the looming apocalypse of Lessing’s time was nuclear and that of ours is ecological, the experience she describes is familiar to anyone alive today and awake enough to the world we live in:

Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror… We look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, trees, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, trees, flowers, soil… and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.

Noting that history has rendered not only plausible but real “the possibility of a madman in a position of power,” she holds up a clarifying mirror:

We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living, “Oh for God’s sake, press down the button, turn down the switch, we’ve all had enough.” Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him.

Observing that we will never be safe until we bridge the gap between public and private conscience, she returns to the role of the artist in a world haunted by the madman’s hand on the button:

The nature of that gap… is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.

Art by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Indicting as cowardice our reflexive ways of confronting the gap — by indulging in “the pleasurable luxury of despair,” or with hollow manifestos and platitudes that “produce art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy” — Lessing locates between them the still point of courage:

Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgments or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer’s recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgments before every act of submission.

[…]

We are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.

Noting that the artist — unlike the propagandist, unlike the journalist, unlike the politician — is always communicating “as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice,” she prophecies the age of Substack:

People may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.

If you are here at all, reading this, you are feeding the confidence of this one small personal voice while also feeding that part of you refusing the conformity and commodified despair of the stories sold by those who make themselves rich by impoverishing our imagination of the possible.

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Source: The Marginalian | 8 Jun 2025 | 2:32 pm(NZT)

The Grammar of Fantasy and the Fantastic Binomial: Beloved Italian Children’s Book Author Gianni Rodari on Creativity and the Key to Great Storytelling

I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. “The Air Vendor” was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing.

Just a few years earlier, young idealists high on the dream of democracy — my parents among them — had finally torn down Bulgaria’s forty-year dictatorship, only to watch the tyranny of capitalism replace the tyranny of communism, one kind of propaganda supplanting another with a sudden explosion of storefronts selling every imaginable commodity, bottling water and branding bread, packaging things in shiny tinfoil emblazoned with words like “happiness,” “health,” and “love.”

I read “The Air Vendor” over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari (October 23, 1920–April 14, 1980).

I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician.

But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis (“books written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one’s studies than a hundred years of school,” he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower.

Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak’s insight that great stories have “the shape of music.”

Having worked as an elementary school teacher since was only a teenager, having watched his country’s spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking.

One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers — a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis:

If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.

Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas.

Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy (public library), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe.

Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living.

Noting that he is making no “attempt to establish a fully fledged ‘theory of the fantastic,’ with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry,” that he is not seeking “a complete theory of the imagination and invention,” Rodari offers:

I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. “All possible uses of words for all people” — this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.

Not unlike the “grammar of animacy” needed for rewilding our relationship to the natural world, a grammar of fantasy allows us to animate our inner world with the natural wildness of the imagination. And, like all grammar, it is built of words and the reactions between them in the laboratory of the mind. Rodari considers the process:

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on the water lilies and the reeds, the paper boats and the fishermen’s buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another. Other invisible reverberations spread into the water’s depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, frightens the fish, and continually causes new molecular agitations. When it finally touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud, hits the objects that had been resting there, forgotten, some of which are now dislodged, while others are covered once again by sand.

The word stone itself dislodges fragments of his own past, and he is suddenly transported to a stony sanctuary on the cliffs of an Alpine lake he used to bike to with his violin and his friend Amadeo, who always wore a long blue coat through which the outline of his own violin could be seen. They would “sit in a cool portico, drinking white wine and talking about Kant” — and already we have a story sparked by a single word.

Observing that he has invented many stories starting with just a single word, Rodari writes:

Any randomly chosen word can function as a magic word to unearth those fields of memory that had been resting under the dust of time… The fantastic arises when unusual combinations are created, when in the complex movements of images and their capricious overlappings, an unpredictable affinity is illuminated between words that belong to different lexical fields.

At the center of his grammar of fantasy, however, are not individual words but an embodiment of the combinatorial nature of creativity he calls the fantastic binomial — the felicitous combination of two contextually distant words that becomes a prompt for storytelling by requiring you to invent a shared context and a conversation between. “Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf half-whispers in the only surviving recording of her voice. Through the fantastic binomial, we become the authors of that belonging and make language not a vehicle of information but an instrument of the imagination. Rodari describes the fertility of these fantastical word-pairings:

One electrical pole is not enough to cause a spark; it takes two. The single word “acts” only when it encounters a second that provokes it out of its usual tracks to discover new possibilities of meaning. Where there is no struggle, there is no life.

This is due to the fact that the imagination is not some hypothetical faculty separate from the mind: it is the mind itself in its totality, which, applied to this or that activity, always makes use of the same procedures. And the mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility.

[…]

A certain distance between the two words is necessary. One must be sufficiently strange or different from the other, and their coupling must be fairly unusual, for the imagination to be compelled to set itself in motion to establish a relationship between them and construct a (fantastic) whole in which the two elements can coexist.

The fantastic binomial creates a kind of riddle — to figure out how these two words can belong together — and riddles are a classic element of the fairy tale. Rodari considers why they are so compelling to children:

[Riddles] represent the concentrated, almost emblematic form of their experience of conquering reality. For a child, the world is full of mysterious objects, incomprehensible events, and indecipherable figures. Their own presence in the world is a mystery to be clarified, a riddle to be solved, and they circle around it with direct or indirect questions. Knowledge often occurs in the form of surprise.

It may be that the most deadening effect of growing up is our incremental preference for certainty over surprise, which ends up keeping us a safe distance from alive — life, after all, is an experiment that continually confounds our hypotheses, and it is on the hubris that we know more than life does that we most regularly break our own hearts.

Art from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, also available as a stand-alone print

Noting that an active imagination is just as essential for making art as it is for making scientific discoveries and making daily decisions in even the most mundane regions of life, Rodari insists that “the creative function” belongs equally to all of us, that all human beings “have the same aptitude for creativity, with whatever differences exist between humans in this domain revealing themselves to be largely a product of social and cultural factors.” He considers the defining features of the creative mindset:

“Creativity” is… thinking that is capable of continuously breaking the patterns of experience. A “creative” mind is one that is always on the move; always asking questions; always discovering problems where others find satisfactory answers; completely comfortable in fluid situations where others sense danger; capable of making autonomous and independent judgements (even independent from parents, teachers, and society); and one that rejects everything that is codified, preferring to reshape objects and concepts without allowing itself to be hindered and inhibited by conformism. All of these qualities manifest themselves in the creative process. And this process — listen up! listen up! — always has a playful character, even if we are dealing with “strict mathematics.”

Echoing Einstein — “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” he reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” — Rodari adds:

The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions.

[…]

Fairy tales are useful to mathematics, just as mathematics are useful to fairy tales. They are also useful for poetry, music, political engagement — in sum, they are useful for everyone, and not just for the dreamer… They’re in service of the complete human being. If a society based on the myth of productivity (and on the reality of profit) needs only half-formed human beings — loyal executors, diligent imitators, and docile instruments without a will of their own — that means there is something wrong with this society and it needs to be changed posthaste. To change it, creative human beings are needed, people who know how to make full use of the imagination.

In the remainder of the book, Rodari goes on to explore the importance of turning mistakes into catalysts for invention and pathways toward deeper truths, of telling stories that break taboos in order to liberate us from the social hypocrisies of conditioned shame, of “deforming” existing words into fantastical new ones in order to “make words more productive” by bending and broadening the possibilities within them so that we may bend and broaden the possibilities within ourselves — something of which the word marginalian is an example, and something children do naturally as a form of play, but which has the serious consequence of encouraging nonconformity in them.

Complement The Grammar of Fantasy with Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga on play and the making of civilization and Maurice Sendak on storytelling and creativity, then revisit Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear and J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fantasy.

Illustrations by Matthew Forsythe courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books

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Source: The Marginalian | 8 Jun 2025 | 11:05 am(NZT)

The Majesty of Mountains and the Mountains of the Mind

Mountains are some of our best metaphors for the mind and for the spirit, but they are also living entities, sovereign and staggering. I remember the first time I saw a mountain from an airplane — forests miniaturized to moss, rivers to capillaries, the Earth crumpled like a first draft. It is a sublime sight in the proper sense of the word — transcendent yet strangely terrifying in its vantage so unnatural to an earthbound biped, so deliriously and disquietingly godly.

*Mountains of the Mind*. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)

Even from ground level, mountains overwhelm our creaturely frames of reference, confuse our intuitions of scale and perspective, belie the illusion of stability with which we walk through the world. Mary and Percy Shelley, crossing Europe on foot and on mule in their runaway love, one of them with a sprained ankle and the other pregnant, could barely comprehend the Alps when they first emerged from the horizon. “This immensity staggers the imagination,” they wrote in their joint journal, “and so far surpasses all conception that it requires an effort of the understanding to believe that they are indeed mountains.”

A generation later and a landmass over, the explorer John Charles Frémont (January 21, 1813–July 13, 1890) set out for the American West, fabled land of peril and promise, his eye most keenly fixed on the continent’s most majestic mountain: the Rockies, “of which so much had been said that was doubtful and contradictory.”

In the last year of his twenties, a decade after he was expelled from college for skipping class to roam the marshy forests of Charleston and a decade before he narrowly lost the presidential election by being too overtly feminist and abolitionist, Frémont traveled hundreds of river miles and traversed a thousand miles of prairie to bow at the foot of the Rockies. He gasped:

Though these snow mountains are not the Alps, they have their own character of grandeur and magnificence, and doubtless will find pens and pencils to do them justice.

And so he did. Frémont spent a decade recounting the fourteen-month adventure in his Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California (public domain), replete with lyrical renderings of nature and its feeling-tones that no photograph could ever capture. (This is why Instagram will never make poets obsolete.)

“View of Nature in Ascending Regions” by Levi Walter Yaggy from *Geographical Portfolio*, 1893. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In an exultant entry from the 10th of August, after a night so cold his water froze, Frémont writes:

The air at sunrise is clear and pure, and the morning extremely cold, but beautiful. A lofty snowy peak of the mountain is glittering in the first rays of the sun, which have not yet reached us. The long mountain wall to the east, rising two thousand feet abruptly from the plain, behind which we see the peaks, is still dark, and cuts clear against the glowing sky. A fog, just risen from the river, lies along the base of the mountain… The scenery becomes hourly more interesting and grand, and the view here is truly magnificent; but, indeed, it needs something to repay the long prairie journey of a thousand miles. The sun has shot above the wall, and makes a magical change. The whole valley is glowing and bright, and all the mountain peaks are gleaming like silver.

Yet over and over the beauty keeps exceeding itself in a living reminder that nature’s imagination is always greater than our own, for we are part of the imagined:

Winding our way up a long ravine, we came unexpectedly in view of a most beautiful lake, set like a gem in the mountains. The sheet of water lay transversely across the direction we had been pursuing; and, descending the steep, rocky ridge, where it was necessary to lead our horses, we followed its banks to the southern extremity. Here a view of the utmost magnificence and grandeur burst upon our eyes. With nothing between us and their feet to lessen the effect of the whole height, a grand bed of snow-capped mountains rose before us, pile upon pile, glowing in the bright light of an August day. Immediately below them lay the lake, between two ridges, covered with dark pines, which swept down from the main chain to the spot where we stood. Here, where the lake glittered in the open sunlight, its banks of yellow sand and the light foliage of aspen groves contrasted well with the gloomy pines… Proceeding a little further, we came suddenly upon the outlet of the lake, where it found its way through a narrow passage between low hills. Dark pines which overhung the stream, and masses of rock, where the water foamed along, gave it much romantic beauty.

Having so rendered the romance of the mountain with a poet’s sensibility, Frémont returns abruptly to science — our other language for reverencing reality — when his most valuable instrument shatters during the outlet crossing:

The current was very swift, and the water cold, and of a crystal purity. In crossing this stream, I met with a great misfortune in having my barometer broken. It was the only one. A great part of the interest of the journey for me was in the exploration of these mountains, of which so much had been said that was doubtful and contradictory; and now their snowy peaks rose majestically before me, and the only means of giving them authentically to science, the object of my anxious solicitude by night and day, was destroyed. We had brought this barometer in safety a thousand miles, and broke it almost among the snow of the mountains. The loss was felt by the whole camp — all had seen my anxiety, and aided me in preserving it. The height of these mountains, considered by many hunters and traders the highest in the whole range, had been a theme of constant discussion among them; and all had looked forward with pleasure to the moment when the instrument, which they believed to be as true as the sun, should stand upon the summits, and decide their disputes. Their grief was only inferior to my own.

But in that singular way nature has of lifting the spirits by quieting the self, Frémont soon transcended the all-consuming smallness of his personal disappointment by returning to the grandeur around him, of which he too was a part. He began seeing not just the variousness of the mountain’s beauties but their interdependence. A century after Alexander van Humboldt observed while roaming another mountain that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” thus formulating the modern conception of nature half a century before the word ecology was coined, Frémont writes:

We heard the roar, and had a glimpse of a waterfall as we rode along, and, crossing in our way two fine streams, tributary to the Colorado, in about two hours’ ride we reached the top of the first row or range of the mountains. Here, again, a view of the most romantic beauty met our eyes. It seemed as if, from the vast expanse of uninteresting prairie we had passed over, Nature had collected all her beauties together in one chosen place. We were overlooking a deep valley, which was entirely occupied by three lakes, and from the brink to the surrounding ridges rose precipitously five hundred and a thousand feet, covered with the dark green of the balsam pine, relieved on the border of the lake with the light foliage of the aspen. They all communicated with each other.

Art by Icinori from *Thank You, Everything*

Couple with Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s classic meditation on mountains, then revisit Darwin’s exultant account of his spiritual experience atop a mountain and pioneering plant ecologist Edith Clements’s drawings of Rocky Mountain flowers.

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Source: The Marginalian | 4 Jun 2025 | 12:16 pm(NZT)

Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine.

“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.

Art by Ofra Amit from *The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry*

An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.

Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields — Earth’s largest living organism.

Without fungi, we would never know Earth’s most beautiful flowers — orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.” A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it “almost supernatural,” for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.

These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.

Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading “Darwin Among the Machines.” It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two “artificial intelligence,” Butler prophesied the birth of a new “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation… daily giving them greater power… self-acting power.” With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?” More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been “moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”

Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?

* * *

For more inspiration and illumination at the intersection of nature and culture, science and spirit, the ecological and the existential, give yourself the gift of a lifetime that is a subscription to Orion.

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Source: The Marginalian | 4 Jun 2025 | 6:43 am(NZT)

The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now. The astonishing thing is that even though we all have more or less the same perceptual apparatus, you and I can walk the same city block together and perceive entirely different pictures of reality, because what is salient to each of us is singular to each particular consciousness — a function of who we are and what we want, of the sum total of reference points that is our lived experience, beyond the locus of which we cannot reach. (This is what makes the Mary’s Room thought experiment so compelling and unnerving, and why the best we can do to understand each other is not explanation but translation.)

Perception, then, is not a door but a mirror, not an automated computation of raw input data but a creative act that marshals all that we are and reflects us back to ourselves. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of being alive together is that none of us will ever know what another perceives.

René Magritte. *The False Mirror*. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

That is what Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) explores with his signature gift for bridging matter and meaning in the title essay of his altogether revelatory posthumous collection The River of Consciousness (public library), fusing his decades of medical practice as a neurologist studying how the brain works with a philosopher’s inquiry into what a mind is and a poet’s gift for rendering what it means to be alive.

Drawing on case studies of patients with peculiar neurological disorders and brain lesions that hurl them into “standstills” of consciousness — states in which time seems to freeze for them even though events and processes continue to unfold within and around them — he considers the temporal dimension of consciousness, most evident in our perception of motion — the change in spatial position over time.

Eadweard Muybridge: Animal Locomotion, Plate 62 — Eadweard Muybridge: Running full speed (*Animal Locomotion*, Plate 62)

Drawing on Francis Crick and Christof Koch’s landmark work on qualia — those wholly subjective and deeply interior experiences of what it is like to be oneself — he writes:

We do not merely calculate movement as a robot might; we perceive it. We perceive motion, just as we perceive color or depth, as a unique qualitative experience that is vital to our visual awareness and consciousness. Something beyond our understanding occurs in the genesis of qualia, the transformation of an objective cerebral computation to a subjective experience. Philosophers argue endlessly over how these transformations occur and whether we will ever be capable of understanding them.

[…]

While the perception of a particular motion (for example) may be represented by neurons firing at a particular rate in the motion centers of the visual cortex, this is only the beginning of an elaborate process. To reach consciousness, this neuronal firing, or some higher representation of it, must cross a certain threshold of intensity and be maintained above it… To do that, this group of neurons must engage other parts of the brain (usually in the frontal lobes) and ally itself with millions of other neurons to form a “coalition.”

Such coalitions… can form and dissolve in a fraction of a second and involve reciprocal connections between the visual cortex and many other areas of the brain. These neural coalitions in different parts of the brain talk to one another in a continuous back-and-forth interaction. A single conscious visual percept may thus entail the parallel and mutually influencing activities of billions of nerve cells.

Finally, the activity of a coalition, or coalition of coalitions, if it is to reach consciousness, must not only cross a threshold of intensity but also be held there for a certain time — roughly a hundred milliseconds. This is the duration of a “perceptual moment.”

And yet it is because something immeasurable happens in those hundred milliseconds that we perceive the world not as it is but as we are.

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

Into the fourth wall he breaks a door to his qualia:

As I write, I am sitting at a café on Seventh Avenue, watching the world go by. My attention and focus dart to and fro: a girl in a red dress goes by, a man walking a funny dog, the sun (at last!) emerging from the clouds. But there are also other sensations that seem to come by themselves: the noise of a car backfiring, the smell of cigarette smoke as an upwind neighbor lights up. These are all events which catch my attention for a moment as they happen. Why, out of a thousand possible perceptions, are these the ones I seize upon? Reflections, memories, associations, lie behind them. For consciousness is always active and selective — charged with feelings and meanings uniquely our own, informing our choices and interfusing our perceptions. So it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see but my Seventh Avenue, marked by my own selfhood and identity.

To know this is to relinquish our habitual delusion of objective perception:

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity?

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated the “moments of being” that make us who we are, he deepens the question and ventures an answer:

Our passing thoughts, as William James says (in an image that smacks of cowboy life in the 1880s), do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’s words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.” So it is not just perceptual moments, simple physiological moments — though these underlie everything else — but moments of an essentially personal kind that seem to constitute our very being… We consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.

Card from *An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days*, also available as a stand-alone print.

Complement with psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on attention as an instrument of love and cognitive philosopher Andy Clarke on the power of expectation in how the mind renders reality, then revisit Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, the healing power of gardens, and the three essential elements of creativity.

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Source: The Marginalian | 2 Jun 2025 | 4:04 pm(NZT)

Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and the Meaning of Aliveness

“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.

A river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood.

This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? (public library) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive.

Extending an invitation to “imagine water otherwise” — and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise — he writes:

For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.

With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s vivifying notion of a “grammar of animacy,” he adds:

A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.

Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from *What Is a River?*

As he travels the world to meet various rivers, he encounters and learns from their various defenders — an Indian teenage runaway from an abusive home turned steward and healer of all life, animated by a sense of equal kinship with millipede and mongoose and banyan tree; a “Chilean-Italian-British biologist-campaigner-filmmaker” covered in tattoos who is a kind of medium of mycology, sensing fungi by seemingly superhuman powers; an Innu poet and activist of slight build, decisive gestures, and oracular observations; an old friend with “a steel-trap intellect and a frankly supernatural memory,” capable of reciting a 400-line poem read in a newspaper twenty years earlier, “Leibniz in a hoodie, Pliny in sneakers.” They are all people who have chosen to give more the more they have lost, each of them fiercely devoted to their work of public service while navigating profound private sorrows and violations — the untimely death of a sister, the unjust death of a father, the plundering of a heritage, a room in the heart filled with clay where a beloved friend once lived.

With each encounter and experience, new questions quicken, deepen, ferment in Robert’s mind:

Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure.

These are serious questions, hard questions, but they rise from the page haloed with tenderness, with spaciousness, with humor. Recounting his conversation with the young man in Chennai about death, lensed through the opening line of The Epic of Gilgamesh, he writes:

Yuvan is silent for a while. Then he says: ‘There has been, I think, a narrowing of relatedness.’

I cannot tell if he is speaking of his sister’s death, or some vaster attenuation, or both.

‘To be is to be related,’ he says. ‘We must hugely widen the space of relations.’

He points skywards, out over the ocean. ‘The Pleiades. They’re my favourite constellation. It’s an open system, you see. Usually when stars form they do so in a globular cluster – there’s a main centre, and then smaller stars around. That’s how gravity works. But the Pleiades, well, the cluster has seven sisters and a weak centre, so it’s not concentrated around one point. It’s a differently political star system.’

I laugh. ‘An anti-hierarchical feminist assemblage?’

‘Exactly!’

This growing, glowing sense of relatedness builds upon itself, so that eventually everything comes to mirror everything else, to elucidate and illuminate the glimmering threads of consanguinity and kinship that hold the web of life together.

Art by Meredith Nemirov from her series *Rivers Feed the Trees*

And then there are the rivers themselves, rendered in prose so incandescent it leaves you lit up for the inside, the world shimmering in the golden beam of this vast and generous mind.

Kayaking down Quebec’s Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, and into the lake it feeds, he casts the enchantment cast upon him:

Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. House-sized boulders on the banks; time-falls from the rock faces above. Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls. Seen from above, from this height, the river appears static, and has the texture of impasto, gouache, as if smeared into place by a palette knife.

[…]

The vastness of scale is defeating to my English imagination, though. None of the metrics make sense. This lake’s length is the same distance as that between my home in Cambridge and central London. It holds a billion litres. It would take a year to drain. It holds a water-year.

[…]

We paddle all afternoon. As dusk approaches, we are all tiring. It is one of the tougher days I have known, physically speaking: a 4 a.m. start, then some twenty miles over flat water. Yet we seem barely to have moved within the vastness of the lake and its self-repeating patterns.

The high sky steadily fades to milk at its edges, blue in its arches, soot at its summit. The air close to us greys, then charcoals.

Life, in all its fragility and tenacity, comes fully alive as Robert finds himself a body in the body of a world both beautiful and brutal, insentient to the fate of any individual yet animated by a vast sentience that excludes nothing and holds in its broad open palm the destiny of everything:

The precipitous west coast of the lake, along which we are skirting, offers little hospitality. Vast scree-slopes fan beneath shattered cliffs, their run-outs rubbled with giant blocks that tumble down to the shoreline and into the lake… We paddle on.

Dark is falling. Wayne is far behind me now, invisible in the shadows. He is struggling. My own arms feel numb with use. I don’t know if I can make the next few miles… Then we round a promontory of rock and enter a new world.

Here, three-hundred-foot-high cliffs rise vertically from the water. They are thylacine-striped in rust and black, and lightning-struck by quartzite.

The wind suddenly drops to utter stillness. Water is sleek and calm as oil. Air is shocking in its silence after the day-long roar of the gale. The dusk is huge.

I follow the line of the cliffs, keeping thirty feet or so out into the lake in case of rockfall. The water now seems molasses-thick and black as treacle. My paddle stirs it into spirals. The water-whispers of my blade echo back at me from the cliff walls.

I feel the uncanny tranquillity that comes from a tired body and a tired mind. I feel I could paddle on into this never-ending dusk for ever.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from *The River*

It is often when the mind tires that it loosens its grip on those habitual ways of perceiving that keep us from truly seeing, that make us mistak the parts attention sieves as salient for the whole. Through extreme pain and fatigue, through a near-death experience amid the rapids, Robert is ejected from the cerebral into the creaturely and through it thrust into the transcendent:

Fifty yards ahead of me, the water is gold, and it is gold for as far as I can see down the lake. Just the light, surely? No, it can’t be the light, for the band of gold doesn’t correspond to the morning sun’s border with shadow.

I reach the band, pass into it and understand.

The gold is pollen. Billions and billions of pollen grains which have been knocked from the trees by the big southerly overnight and then blown out onto the water to form this gold-dust surface. Not light, then, but life.

[…]

Far above, the ongoing helical collision of the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies, which began 4.5 billion years ago, spreads across the dark sky like pollen on water.

*Milky Way Starry Night* by native artist Margaret Nazon from her series of celestial beadwork

He finds himself spun into the vortex of the question:

It’s the crux that needs solving… Not “Who speaks for the river?” but “What does the river say?” These are two distinct questions. And while it’s relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.

To this I would add a third: Who is listening to the river speak? To speak is to sound a personhood through to another. There is always a gorge between what is said and what is heard, because there is always an abyss between one person and another. The listener is implicated in the spoken, but can only explicate what is heard filtered through their particular consciousness, their singular experience of being alive. It is therefore no small task to be a skilled listener, which always means being a loving listener. Here is a virtuosic listener channeling what the river says to him so that we too may hear the song of life more clearly:

This is a place where ghost-realms of times past and future overlap with one another, each transparent to the other, and I try to peer right and left into these laminar worlds but the river-mouth and its river-voices hold me in this one here and the river’s tongue now is the tongue of tongues, and the river’s song is the song of songs, slipshifting and shapesliding and veering, sung in spirals and stars and roars and other notes beyond hearing, and the voice sings what I cannot understand, however much I long to, and my heart is full of flow and I sit because I can no longer stand and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense at the shatter-belt of my awareness of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels but not bears and angels, something that is always transforming, and in that moment it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river-being… the question of life, which is not a question at all but a world.

Couple Is a River Alive? with a kindred case for the life of a mountain by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd, whose forgotten and fiercely beautiful writing Robert Macfarlane resurrected, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.

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Source: The Marginalian | 31 May 2025 | 1:57 pm(NZT)

The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against the Curse of Not Enough

Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.

An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.

The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.

And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.

This inflicts no small identity crisis:

What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.

But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.

Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.

A little note of misery sounded in his mind.

What could possibly be wrong?

It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.

Suddenly, he wants the stream itself, shimmering so seductively in the sunlight that it has to be had.

As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with the stream’s water, Mr. Bishop perches to peek over the fence and begins “to twitch and prickle and hop around” with the restless desire for a pool of his own.

So goes the cascade of envy, that handmaiden of wanting, until pool by pool the streams begins to run dry.

Soon it was only a trickle.

The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped away, and the reeds withered and died.

Triumphant and drunk on its own power, the Wanting Monster now wonders how much more damage it can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who is gathering flowers in the field for her dear friend Maria, and whispers into her ear.

Mrs. Walton began to frown and fret.

She was irritated. Why was she picking flowers for Maria when it was really she herself who deserved them?

She should fill her own house with flowers.

Yes, she should have the most fragrant, the most colorful, the most stylish house in the whole village.

Everyone would admire it. Everyone would envy her.

The other women watch Mrs. Walton pick all the flowers she can carry, and suddenly they too are aflame with the mania for owning the flowers. Soon, no flowers are left and the bees are bereft of pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and finches have nowhere to nest.

The Wanting Monster stomps across the flowerless fields, gloating.

That night, it visits Mr. Newton — the town’s most passionate stargazer — and whispers into Mr. Newton’s ear.

Suddenly possessed with the desire to own the stars, he heads to the forest and cuts down a great old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes a star.

I am reminded here of this miniature etching by William Blake, which I suspect might have inspired Read’s art:

*I Want! I Want!* by William Blake, 1793. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Ms. Grimehart watches Mr. Newton and, unable to bear possessing no stars herself, she cuts down not one tree but two to make an even bigger ladder and snatches not one star but five.

More and more ladders rise up and the sky soon grows starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, with the birds silent and the bees still, this tranquil little world finds itself unworlded.

The village was quiet and colorless and gloomy. The children wept. They had loved their forest and their little stream. They missed the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.

People, unable to console the children, begin to leave. The Wanting Monster roars with self-congratulation.

This time, everyone hears the roar and begins to wonder about the menacing presence. It is Billie Ray who first sees it and, pointing, tells the townsfolk that there is a monster in their midst. Naming a hurt has a way of opening up the space for healing — as soon as the little girl names the menace, everyone sees it clear as daylight. Suddenly, the Wanting Monster grows “no bigger than a beetle.” It is only those things of which we are not fully conscious that have the power to possess us.

But when the grownups lurch to stomp the tiny monster, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the suddenly helpless creature if it needs a cuddle.

The Wanting Monster climbed into the palm of her hand. It was tired, after all, and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray cupped her other hand to make a roof, and then she wandered toward the dry river bed, where she sat on its banks and began to rock her hand and sing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her.

No one had ever sung to the Wanting Monster before. Nor had it ever been cared for. And the Wanting Monster didn’t know quite how those things felt — not really.

Listening to the lullaby, the Wanting Monster begins to weep. “There, there,” Billie Ray comforts it, “Oh, dearest heart.” The Wanting Monster doesn’t know how to bear all this tenderness — how many of us really do — and so it goes on weeping “sorrowful, endless tears” that begin replenishing the stream.

Everyone else, listening and watching, begins to weep too.

A great mournful lament filled the valley.

Tears swelled the little stream, and it rushed like a river…

What had been withheld was released; what had dried up, flowed.

What had hardened was becoming soft again.

People unpack their suitcases, take the stars out of their pockets, and set about collecting seeds, tilling the ground, and filling watering cans to replant the trees and flowers.

As the birds return and the night reconstellates, the Wanting Monster finally stops weeping and, looking up wonder-smitten at the stars lavishing the world with all that abundant beauty, feels, finally, slaked of want.

Couple The Wanting Monster with The Fate of Fausto — Oliver Jeffers’s kindred fable inspired by Vonnegut’s poem — then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

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Source: The Marginalian | 29 May 2025 | 4:42 pm(NZT)

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