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Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing

Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to look at a lichen is a devotional act. We bless our own lives by recognizing and reverencing the details, the miniature marvels that make this improbable world what it is. And yet consciousness evolved to filter them out, to blur them into more abstract pictures we can parse, to sieves relevance from reality in order to save us from being too wonder-smitten by the flickering morning light on the edge of the kitchen sink and the iridescent eye of the house fly to move through our days. Cognitive scientists know this necessary ailment of consciousness: “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” Alexandra Horowitz wrote in one of my favorite books, examining the “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” that is attention. Poets know the remedy: “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote, “is only a report.”

Paying conscious attention, then, is our primary instrument of loving the world, abiding by Iris Murdoch’s splendid definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” But because nothing abstract is real except mathematics, because love is made of the particular and the specific, to love anything — a person, a planet, your life — is at bottom a practice of noticing, which is always a devotional practice.

Art by Ofra Amit from *The Universe in Verse*

In The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (public library), Margaret Renkl chronicles her own reverence of reality across the seasons through the small acts of attention to wind and wren, to hemlock and hawk, which together reveal the grandeur of life. Partway between Henry Beston’s The Outermost House and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, what emerges is an invitation to override the mindless inertia that gets us through our days and pause to notice the details as a kind of mindfulness practice that magnifies the world.

She opens with a guided reverie under the tenderly commanding heading “Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing”:

Stop and look at the tangled rootlets of the poison ivy vine climbing the locust tree. Notice the way they twist around each other like plaits in a golden braid, like tendrils of seaweed washed to shore…

Stop and ponder the skeleton of the snakeroot plant, each twig covered in tiny brown stars. The white petals, once embraced by bees, have dried to powder and now dust the forest floor, but here are the star-shaped sepals that held those fluffs of botanical celebration…

Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.

Stop and consider the deep hollows of the persimmon’s bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection. See how the lacy lichens have found purchase in the channels, sharing space in the hollows…

Stop and peer at the hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the whir of hummingbird wings. Remember the green flash of hummingbird light.

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

In a sentiment evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare and haunting poem “Kinship,” Renkl adds:

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship. The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away. We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.

It may be that pausing to look is indeed our moral obligation to the universe — the ultimate affirmation of being alive, repaying our debt of gratitude for the supremely statistically improbable miracle of having been born at all, which makes the practice of noticing our mightiest antidote to the fear of death.

For Renkl, this suddenly becomes more than a philosophical disposition — in the final weeks of her yearlong chronicle, as autumn is lulling the living world into a state of suspended animation, a routine medical screening fissures the denial of death by which we survive our lives. When the biopsy comes back negative, Renkl readily recognizes that “such news is only ever a reprieve.” She writes:

Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be. The misty rain unstiffens deadwood, making places for nesting woodpeckers to excavate next spring. I can stop to count the rings of shelf fungi on a dead tree and know how long they have been growing, how long the death of the tree has been feeding the life of the forest.

So much life springs from all this death that to spend time in the woods is also to contemplate immortality. On the way out of the park I passed a red-tailed hawk lying at the base of a power pole, apparently electrocuted, its perfect wing extended in death. The vultures were already beginning to circle as I passed. I drove on, knowing what would come next, what always comes next: death to life, earth to air, wing to wing.

Death has always been the blood in the veins of life, coursing through it at every scale and in every season, but winter renders it especially palpable with its skeletal branches encoding the Braille promise of spring in the tiny dormant buds already preparing for the next emerald incarnation. Renkl writes:

[Winter] reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection.

Complement The Comfort of Crows, a vivifying read in its entirety, with The Paradise Notebooks — a poet and a geographer’s love letter to life lensed through a 90-mile passage through the Sierra Nevada — and Katherine May on what wintering trees teach us about self-renewal through difficult times, then revisit philosopher Iain McGlilchrist on attention as an instrument of love.

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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 | 5 Jan 2025 | 12:27 pm(NZT)

Some Blessings to Begin with

It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of consecrating our days with the blessed fact that we weren’t promised any of this — that the universe didn’t owe us mountains and music, that we didn’t have to be born, and yet here we are with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever-broadening hearts.

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

Bless the last aspen leaf, waving at the tip of the skeletal branch like a bright yellow flag of resistance to gravity and time, beckoning an allegiance to life.

Bless gravity for how indiscriminately it gives itself to a mote of dust and to a mountain, for how it keeps every single celestial body in orbit for this perfect cosmos to cohere, for how it presses your lover’s body against you to gladden the skin of the soul.

Bless the person who broke your heart to keep their own from breaking on the hard edge of the courage called love.

Bless paper for the way it can kindle a campfire and a revolution, for the delicious confusion of cedar and velvet at the tip of your finger each time you turn the page, for its whispered promise that when all the empires of silicon and bit go the way of Babylon and Rome, it will remain the keeper of our stories.

Bless table tennis for its absurd delight, for the boyish smile on the wrinkled face of the man at the rec center as he props his cane against the wall to pick up the paddle.

Bless blue, for making the bluebird and the sky it flies through what they are.

Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.

Bless mathematics for giving a ballot its weight and Bach his Goldberg Variations.

Bless the clouds, the way they drift across the sky like the thought bubbles of birds, the way they cast a spell against indifference each time they awn the setting sun.

Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.

Bless time, for how despite all its blessed and blessing indifference, it gave the aspen leaf that little extra bit to blaze and gave us, each and every one of us alive, this symphonic interlude between the eternal silence of not yet and never again.

Bless the stranger at the bookstore who suddenly smiles the smile, the exact smile, of my dead friend, as if to remind me that nothing we love is ever dead, that love is the smile that saves life from mere existence.

Bless every grain of sand that made the glass that made binoculars to reveal the cormorant’s dazzling rimmed eye the color of Uranus and telescopes to reveal the nebula three thousand lightyears away looking back at us like a giant cosmic iris with its secret knowledge of what we are.

Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.

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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 | 1 Jan 2025 | 4:46 am(NZT)

The Promethean Power of Burnout

“Burnout fully realised is also the decisive, exhausted moment in which we realise we cannot go on in the same way. Not being able to go on, is always in the end, a creative act, the threshold moment of our transformation.”

In every creative life, in every life of passion and purpose, there comes a time when the animating spark grows dim and the muscle of motivation slackens, when you come to feel benumbed to beauty and abandoned by your numen, suffocating in the exhaust fume of your own exertion, ossified with the tedium of being yourself.

We call those moments burnout, and we feel them most acutely as we approach the final horizon of a project, a year, a chapter of life. And yet, just as breakdowns can deepen our self-knowledge and despair can invite the sacred pause preceding regeneration, burnout can become the hearth of change — that urgent and necessary change without which the lulling inertia of our lives would always keep us a short distance from alive.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s *Leaves of Grass*. (Available as a print.)

This secret Promethean power of burnout is what poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in one of the short, searching essays collected in his Consolations II — the continuation of his earlier emotional dictionary defining the deeper and often ineffable meanings of everyday words, which was among my favorite books of the year.

In the entry for the word burnout, he writes:

Burnout feels like a living central absence, not only of a centre, but the sources that used to rise from that centre.

The exhaustion of burnout always recalls a previously felt internal fire, one from which our unquenchable energies once emerged. Burnout denotes a kind of amnesia: not only in the forgetting of our very personal priorities but the inability to locate a source inside us that previously seemed to run through all the seasons of our life. This loss of a fiery essential centre is also experienced as a loss of faith: a form of forgetting, not only that the source actually existed inside me in the first place but that I might not now ever remember how to drink from it again.

Not unlike existential boredom, of which it is the mirror image, burnout is a misapprehension of time, a failure to trust its ever-undulating flow toward the ever-shifting horizon of the possible. Because we are temporal creatures who only have four thousand weeks to spend our two billion allotted heartbeats, mistrusting time is mistrusting life itself. In a sentiment evocative of Wendell Berry’s celebration of the sabbath as a radical act of resistance, David writes:

Burnout always involves a loss of the timeless and therefore of the ability to rest. Burnout, in a very profound way, is a loss of friendship with time itself… the experience of feeling continually out of season… In the loss of faith in existence itself, we refuse, in a kind of symmetrical sympathy, to fully exist ourselves. Being out of season with the outside world means we also miss our own inner, creative, tidal comings and goings.

Because burnout often results from the invisible wear-and-tear of gliding along the vector of exertion toward a dream we have long outgrown, at its heart is a beckoning to conjure up that most difficult, most rewarding kind of courage — the courage to change our minds and change our lives, to break down the structure of the self in order to imagine it afresh — a process so discomposing, given our paradoxical resistance to transformation, that we may only be able to enter it through the attic of the unconscious. David writes:

Burnout calls for creative breakdown, either in submitting to unconscious self-sabotage, the way that disasters large and small seem to track our exhausted burned-out self on a daily basis, the way we actually create those disasters unknowingly ourselves, trying to make a break for freedom or to create a conscious creative breakdown. Burnout is often as much the resistance to making these changes as being worn down by what we cannot seem to change: all the ways I find it impossible to leave the job, or leave the relationship; all the ways I find it impossible to change my approach to work, or all the ways I need to simply learn to love again must be looked at and allowed to break down and fall away.

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

Observing that burnout is “a loss of friendship with a very personal sense of the unknown” — that lovely capacity for self-surprise which makes life worth living and allows us to reinvent ourselves — he adds:

Burnout fully realised is also the decisive, exhausted moment in which we realise we cannot go on in the same way.

Not being able to go on, is always in the end, a creative act, the threshold moment of our transformation away from physical exhaustion. Not being able to go on is the beginning of a proper relationship with the timeless and the healing possibilities of timelessness: healing ourselves from burnout always involves a reacquaintance with the eternal: my ability to experience the timeless is a parallel to my ability to rest.

Ultimately, burnout is the pathology of doing in the psyche of being, the only remedy for which is to rest into the primal knowledge that there was never anything to prove with all that exertion, never anything to redeem with all that punitive pursuit of your culture’s or your parents’ or your idols’ ideas about what makes a life worth living.

Echoing Willa Cather’s spare and timeless definition of happiness, David writes:

The foundation from which we transform the experience of burnout is always the realisation that we have been measuring all the wrong things in all the wrong ways and that we have for too long, mis-measured our sense of self in the same way; that we have allowed the shallow rewards of false goals or false people to mesmerise, bedazzle and entrain us: to hide from us an ancient and abiding human dynamic — that we belong to something greater and even better for us than the realm of the measured.

Art by Ofra Amit for *The Universe in Verse*

Complement these fragments of the wholly revivifying Consolations II with Alain de Botton on the importance of breakdowns, Katherine May’s potent salve for burnout, and John Gardner on the art of self-renewal, then revisit David Whyte on the relationship between anxiety and intimacy and this superb Where Shall We Meet conversation with him about language and life.

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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 | 31 Dec 2024 | 2:03 pm(NZT)

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 | 26 Dec 2024 | 4:48 am(NZT)

The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration

Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle — there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth.

In such times, the most courageous thing we can do is surrender to the process that is the pause, trust the still dark place to kindle the torchlight for a new path and vitalize our forward motion toward a new system of being. The poet May Sarton knew this when she observed in her poignant reckoning with despair that “sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.” James Baldwin knew it when he contemplated how to live through your darkest hour, insisting that such times can “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error,” on the other side of which is a life more alive.

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

This shift from suffering to surrender can never be willed — it can only be achieved through the willingness we call humility. That is what the influential British ethnologist and cultural anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (June 13, 1866–February 18, 1943) — a pioneer in the study of the evolutionary origins of religion — addressed in his inaugural Oxford University lecture, delivered on October 27, 1910 under the title The Birth of Humility (public domain).

Marett considers the spiritual value of such periods of suffering:

There is at work in every phase of [life] a spiritual force of alternating current; the energy flowing not only from the positive pole, but likewise from the negative pole in turn… At times, however, a vital spurt dies out, and the outlook is flat and dreary. It is at such times that there is apt to occur a counter-movement, which begins, paradoxically, in a sort of artificial prolongation and intensification of the natural despondency. Somehow the despondency thus treated becomes pregnant with an access to new vitality.

Echoing William James’s insistence that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” — a radical refutation of Cartesian dualism, which science has since confirmed by revealing psychological trauma as physiological trauma and illuminating how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma — Marett observes that every such crisis of the spirit is a “psycho-physical crisis,” marked by “heart-sinking” and “loss of tone” in body and mind alike, and rooted in an evolutionary adaptation of our biology:

The organism needs to lie dormant whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover, to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh plane is likewise a higher plane. Regeneration, in fact, typically spells advance, the pauses in the rhythm of life helping successively to swell its harmony.

Marett notes that both the sacred rituals of tribal cultures and the theological doctrines of so-called civilized societies invite that painful yet regenerative pause between the poles of the spirit as a way of redirecting the current from the negative to the positive — a pause riven by fear, for the paradox of transformation is that we are always terrified of even the most propitious change, yet a pause capable of turning fear into a “spiritual lever” for reaching the next stage of spiritual development.

With an eye to the “widespread human capacity to profit by the pauses in secular life which Religion seems to have sanctioned and even enforced in all periods of its history,” Marett writes:

Pause is the necessary condition of the development of all those higher purposes which make up the rational being.

[…]

Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have been painfully accomplished can he emerge a new and glorified creature, who, by spiritual transformation, is invested alike with the dignities and the duties of [being human].

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain and Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, then revisit Alexis de Tocqueville on stillness as a form of action and cataclysm as a catalyst for growth.

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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 | 25 Dec 2024 | 5:49 pm(NZT)

A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality

“A persona is a portal we are not aware of passing through,” my beloved editor Dan Frank wrote in an unpublished poem shortly before the insentient atoms that composed him, this singular and unrepeatable person, disbanded to return to the universe. And yet despite everything we know about what happens to those atoms when we die, the question of how they cohered into a person — the question of what makes a person, of how the myriad personae within constellate the total personality that moves through the world — is still mired in mystery. It is perhaps the greatest mystery of being alive.

These are the questions that animated the English poet and philosopher Richard Lewis Nettleship (December 17, 1846–August 25, 1892), who believed that “the individuality of anything is an ultimate fact, behind which we cannot go,” but through which we must look in order to understand the sum total of human experience.

Personality, Nettleship cautioned an epoch before pop psychology flooded us with platitudes and simplistic personality type tests, “is probably the hardest of all subjects, and yet it is one upon which we are all ready to pronounce in the most easy-going way” — pronouncements “extraordinarily vague, confused, or inadequate” to the task of fathoming the dimensions of a person. He writes:

We generally assume [the personality] to be a definite, self-contained, unchanging thing, round and about which all sorts of more or less separable and changing appendages confusedly float.

Or it is something “inward,” the most inward of all things, that to which we think we should come if we stripped off all the coats of circumstances, custom, education.

But we soon realize, on thinking, that there is no circle to be drawn round any one, within which all is “personal,” and without which all is “impersonal.” We realize what may be called the continuity of things. What, for instance, is a triangle? A space bounded by three straight lines. Where does “it” stop ? At the lines, of course. But these lines are merely its contact with surrounding space, and the “personality” of the triangle is one thing if the surrounding space be limited to the page of a book, another thing if it be extended to the room where the book is, another thing if it be carried on to include the solar system, and so on. And though for particular purposes it is necessary to define the triangle in particular ways, it is, strictly speaking, quite true that it is continuously one with the spatial universe.

A recognition of this continuity undermines the commonsense definition of a person as “a body occupying a certain place, keeping out and otherwise acting on other bodies.” Nettleship writes:

Everybody is “continuous” with a good deal more than (say) the space six feet round him and the time an hour on each side of him. The simplest memories, hopes, associations, imaginations, inferences, are extensions of personality far greater than we can easily realize. Every “here” and every “now” is the centre of practically innumerable “theres” and “thens,” and the centres are absolutely inseparable from their circumferences.

Loss, separation, death, is failure of continuity. A being which was (so to say) always closing up with everything would change but would not die.

This, too, is why abandonment — the sudden rupture of continuity in a relationship of trust — is one of the most physiologically and psychologically devastating experiences a human being can have, for we love with everything we are. Perhaps the most psychologically complex human experience, love harmonizes the cacophony of parts we live with into a total experience. Its loss, its failure of continuity, therefore discomposes the total self — a stark reminder that we can never fully compartmentalize ourselves. Nettleship considers this fragmentary but indivisible totality:

The self, I, personality, or whatever we like to call that which experiences things, is one in all that it experiences: one in seeing, hearing, smelling, and in every modification of these, one in every combination of these, and in all more complex experiences as well; it is this oneness which makes the unanalyzable self-hood of any and every experience. On the other hand, the self in all its experience is one of or in many, an experience of distinctness in innumerable senses. In a word, it is always and everywhere a whole of parts, a combining and dividing activity, able to detach any part from any other part, and yet to be in them all.

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.” Maurice Sendak’s little-known 1960 illustrations for *The Velveteen Rabbit*.

This paradox of parts parallels the nature of reality itself — to surrender to it is to contact, as physicist David Bohm observed in investigating the implicate order of the universe, “a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.” The self then becomes a portal for passing through to something else, something larger and truer. A generation before Iris Murdoch observed that the triumph of the personality is the act of unselfing, Nettleship writes:

The times when one feels one is most truly oneself are just those in which one feels that the consciousness of one’s own individuality is most absolutely swallowed up, whether in sympathy with nature or in the bringing to birth of truth, or in enthusiasm for other men. Thus, the secret of life is self-giving.

And so we arrive at the two great instruments of unselfing — death, the pinnacle of continuity that returns our borrowed stardust to the universe; and love, which is at bottom “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Not long before he died of exposure while attempting a climb of Mont Blanc, Nettleship observes:

Death is self-surrender… Love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender.

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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 | 23 Dec 2024 | 3:29 am(NZT)

How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree

Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” how we relate to anything is how we relate to everything. There is always a choice in the way we orient to any object of attention — a person, a practice, a song, a stone: the choice to consecrate or commodify the object, to routinize or ritualize the relationship.

Take the Christmas tree. Rooted in pagan solstice rituals that made the evergreen a symbol and a celebration of resilience and eternal life, the modern Christmas tree originated in present-day Germany, around the time Kepler was formulating the laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial — that liminal epoch between the age of superstition and the age of science, which, like all transitional times, confused humanity’s ability to understand itself and its place in the universe. In such times, the ready-made answers fall apart and reality itself becomes an arena for power struggles. The Catholic church began splintering along the fault lines of conflicting ideologies, hurling the Western world into endless religious wars. With the need to reaffirm the foundational biblical myths, the naked Christmas tree emerged as an analogue of the tree anchoring Adam and Eve’s story.

One of William Blake’s engravings for *Paradise Lost*.

It was Martin Luther who, with his genius for selling salvation that powered the Protestant Reformation, dressed the tree in the symbology of the immortal soul — legend has it that a walk through a starlit forest inspired him to adorn the Christmas tree with lights to symbolize the stars, thought to be immortal. (We would eventually lean on Kepler’s science to realize that we are only alive because stars die.)

Suddenly, here was something people could take into their homes to keep their faith and light up their harsh winter nights with the warmth of belonging, their war-torn lives with the promise of immortality.

But it took another quarter millennium and the birth of mass media for the Christmas tree to leave the religious realm and colonize secular life: In 1848, an engraving of the young Queen Victoria and her German cousband Albert appeared in The Illustrated London News — the world’s first illustrated weekly magazine — depicting the royal couple delighting in a lavishly decorated Christmas tree.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the royal Christmas tree. (*The Illustrated London News*, 1848.)

The image went, as it were, viral — papers across the British Empire reprinted it, sparking a craze for the bedazzled conifer, making it an emblem of the two things human nature most yearns for: love and power. Within a century, capitalism — the religion of our epoch, predicated on packaging our yearnings and selling them back to us at the price of the product — had made of the Christmas tree a commodity, grown like industrial corn and disposed of as garbage.

So here we find ourselves facing that choice of how to relate to the Christmas tree, nested within which is the choice of how to relate to our lives in this world we have not chosen for ourselves but must live in — the choice in which lie our power and our freedom. To find in this commodity the vestige of something ancient and true is to reclaim love as the counterweight to consumerism and the meaning of our mortality.

That is what Brian Doyle — who wrote so movingly about how to live a miraculous life just before death took him at the peak of his powers — invites in a short, splendid piece titled “Muttered Prayer in Thanks for the Under-Genius of Christmas,” part of his altogether wonderful Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary (public library). He writes:

Putting up ye old fir tree last night, and pondering why again we slay a perfectly healthy tree ten years of age, not even a teenager yet, and prop up the body, and drape it with frippery… I saw the quiet pleasure of ritual, the actual no-kidding no-fooling urge to pause and think about other people and their joy, the anticipation of days spent laughing and shouldering in the kitchen, with no agenda and no press of duty. I saw the flash of peace and love under all the shrill selling and tinny theater; and I was thrilled and moved. And then I remembered too that the ostensible reason for it all was the Love being bold and brave enough to assume a form that would bleed and break and despair and die; and I was again moved, and abashed; and I finished untangling the epic knot of lights, shivering yet again with happiness that we were given such a sweet terrible knot of a world to untangle, as best we can, with bumbling love. And so: amen.

*Christmas Tree* by Frances Hodgkins, New Zealand, 1940s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

This “bumbling love” that consecrates the commodified ritual is, in the end, what consecrates any relation, what returns us to the original responsibility of being alive — something Doyle addresses in another of his “uncommon prayers,” aimed at the Catholic Church and its “thirst for control and rules and power and money rather than the one simple thing the founder insisted on.” Centuries and civilizations after Rumi versed the art of choosing love over not-love, Doyle writes:

Granted, it’s a tough assignment, the original assignment. I get that. Love — Lord help us, could we not have been assigned something easier, like astrophysics or quantum mechanics? But no — love those you cannot love. Love those who are poor and broken and fouled and dirty and sick with sores. Love those who wish to strike you on both cheeks. Love the blowhard, the pompous ass, the arrogant liar. Find the Christ in each heart, even those. Preach the Gospel and only if necessary talk about it. Be the Word. It is easy to advise and pronounce and counsel and suggest and lecture; it is not so easy to do what must be done without sometimes shrieking. Bring love like a bright weapon against the dark… And so: amen.

Here is a taste.

THE MESSAGE

THE ART OF CRYING

Here is a taste.

THE DICTIONARY STORY

Here is a taste.

(AND ONE I MADE)

Peek inside here.

(AND ONE COMING NEXT YEAR)

Peek inside here.

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Source: The Marginalian | 18 Dec 2024 | 3:50 am(NZT)

How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love

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

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

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

Art from *The Fate of Fausto* by Oliver Jeffers — a modern fable about the existential triumph of enoughness, inspired by Vonnegut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HT Cloud Appreciation Society

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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 | 15 Dec 2024 | 9:36 am(NZT)

Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World

We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily tasks punctuating the unbidden wonder of our lives. But it is good, every once in a while, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to cast upon ourselves a spell against indifference by moving through the world with an inner bow at every littlest thing that prevailed over the odds of otherwise in order to exist.

Artist couple Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller, who work together under the pen name Icinori, offer a vibrant invitation to this countercultural way of seeing in Thank You, Everything (public library) — a meditative yet exuberant journey through the world within and the world without, inspired by the Japanese notion of tsuumogami: the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to acquire after being of service in the world for a hundred years.

Out of what begins as an impressionistic portrait of gladness — “thank you, blue”; “thank you, morning”; “thank you, glass” — emerges a story syncopating the abstract and the concrete.

Day breaks with gratitude, breaks into a mysterious adventure, each step of which is a bow — we see the protagonist move through cities and landscapes, thanking every large and little thing along the way: bicycle and bus and airplane, sky and clouds and streams, night and fog, binoculars and birds, caterpillar and leaf, spring and silence.

The destination, rather than a place, is a state of being — the recompense of paying everything in our path the gratitude and reverence it is due for merely existing. For we forget, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — is not something we can ever have for ourselves unless we accord it to everything and everyone else.

Couple Thank You, Everything with Oliver Sacks on gratitude and the measure of living at the horizon of death, then revisit poet Marissa Davis’s love letter to everything alive.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

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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 | 13 Dec 2024 | 12:15 pm(NZT)

Something in You Hungers for Clarity: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and the Power of Words to Remake the World

“Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Mary Shelley wrote in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars that laid the template for the colonialist power structure of the modern world, in an era when her chromosomes denied her the authority of her natural powers.

Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered — that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them — the range between chocolate and racism, between the Benedictus and the bomb — is the measure of what James Baldwin called “the doom and glory” of what we are, metered by the words that tell the story of our self-creation.

Drawing by David Byrne from *A History of the World (in Dingbats)*

“What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas,” Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects in The Message (public library) — his soulful and sobering reckoning with the power of words and the power structures roiling beneath the landscape of permission for making the images and ideas we call art. What emerges is a manifesto for reexamining who gets to word the world’s story and render human the worlds within the world, pulsating with the urgency of the writer’s job to clarify in order to galvanize — for “you cannot act upon what you cannot see.”

Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt,” to dismantle the myths told by the wardens of the status quo and tell a different story about the world and its horizons of possibility. An epoch after John Steinbeck insisted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that a writer ought to bear the torchlight of clarity in humanity’s “gray and desolate time of confusion,” Coates considers what it takes to do that, in all its ecstasy and power:

There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

Art by Beatrice Alemagna from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*.

Permeating the book is Coates’s countercultural courage not to mistake for reality what he so aptly terms “the haze” of his own experience — a needed reminder that we lens everything before us through everything behind us and bow to the image in the lens, calling it the world. And yet what the visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote of the nature of reality — “this is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information” — is true of the nature of writing. Coates reflects:

There are dimensions in your words — rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve… But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness — in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.

Just as the writer writes with all of themselves, the reader reads with all of themselves, adding another layer of subjectivity in the act of interpretation. Sylvia Plath understood this when she was only a teenager: “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” So too with all creative work, much as a child enters the world to become their own person. “Your children are not your children,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in one of his most poignant poems. “They come through you but not from you.” Echoing Plath and Gibran, Coates reflects on his own writing:

I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world… It helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.

Art by Ofra Amit from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*. (Available as a print.)

This is not, however, a recusal from responsibility — over and over, Coates celebrates, demands even, the power of the written word to change the life of the world and the course of what will one day be history by changing the present landscape of possibility and permission we call politics. He writes:

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order… A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.

[…]

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics… Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.

Half a century after Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her forgotten poem “Book Power” that “books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” that they are “flame and flight and flower,” Coates considers the singular power of writing among the other tendrils of the creative spirit — the power of revelation and self-revelation:

Film, music, the theater — all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it.

Complement these fragments of The Message with James Baldwin’s advice on writing and some excellent tips from Mary Oliver, then revisit May Sarton on how to cultivate your talent.

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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 | 12 Dec 2024 | 6:53 am(NZT)

A Heron’s Antidote to Fear of Death

They didn’t imagine it, the dying dinosaurs, that they would grow wings and become birds, become the laboratory in which evolution invented dreams and the cathedral in which it invented faith.

“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin consoled himself as his beloved daughter was dying, for he knew that death is the engine of life, that across the history of natural selection the death of the individual is what ensured the adaptation and survival of the species. And yet against this natural grandeur, we suffer the smallness of our imagination about death, as about the myriad small deaths punctuating life — the losses, the endings, the falterings of hope — forgetting somehow that every ending is a beginning in retrograde, that what may seem like a terminus may be a transformation.

Great white heron, Holbox Island. (Available as a print.)

These are the thoughts thinking themselves through me as I watch a great white heron rising from the water’s edge, from this boundary line between worlds, this lapping memory of how life emerged from non-life.

Because my bird divinations began with its great blue cousin, I cannot help but ask the majestic white bird for a message.

Combing the eleven pages of Audubon’s ornithological text about the species, I follow the usual process and let the words rearrange themselves into this koan from the unconscious:

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

Working on this divination, I was reminded of a long-ago counterpart — one of Mary Oliver’s least known poems, found in her 2003 collection What Do We Know (public library) and read here by 19-year-old poet, artist, and heron-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy’s “Reverie.”

HERON RISES FROM THE DARK, SUMMER POND
by Mary Oliver

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself —
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

Complement with the poetic science of what happens when we die and astronomer Rebecca Elson’s magnificent poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” then revisit the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning.

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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 | 7 Dec 2024 | 5:55 am(NZT)

The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy

It takes a long time to know a person — to unbutton the costume of personality and unlace the corset of coping mechanisms in order to touch the naked soul. It is a process delicate and difficult, riven by anxiety and absolutely terrifying to both, requiring therefore great courage and great vulnerability — a process the hard-won product of which we call intimacy. “There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson anguished in his journal while trying to navigate his deep and complicated relationship with Margaret Fuller. It is a wise terror, for it knows that there is no greater pain than the pain of intimacy severed — by betrayal, by distance, by death. To triumph over that terror in order to know and be known on the level of the naked soul is an act of faith — perhaps the greatest act of faith there is. Because all faith requires a surrender to something we cannot control, all faith begins with the anguishing anxiety that prefaces the leap.

Poet and philosopher David Whyte explores the terrifying and transcendent work of intimacy in Consolations II — the second volume of his short, splendid essays, each reckoning with the deeper meaning of some ordinary and overused word to reveal its unexamined emotional etymology. In “Intimacy,” he writes:

Intimacy is presence magnified by our vulnerability, magnified by increasing proximity to the fear that underlies that vulnerability. Intimacy and the vulnerabilities of intimacy are our constant, invisible companions, yet companions who are always wishing to make themselves visible and touchable to us, always emerging from some deep interior, to ruffle and disturb the calm surface of our well apportioned lives. Intimacy is a living force, inviting me simultaneously from the inside as much as the outside. Something calling from within that wants to meet something calling in recognition from without. Intimacy is the art and practise of living from the inside out.

[…]

Our need and our fear of intimacy is felt through an ever present almost volcanic force emerging from some unknown origin inside us, exhibiting to all and sundry, our previously hidden unspoken desires, flowing out against all efforts to the contrary, through our unconscious and conscious behaviours.

Art from *An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days*.

And yet intimacy is haunted by a central paradox:

To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.

This is the paradox of longing: Because longing can be an addiction, because no active addict ever wants to give up their addiction — or can without a great deal of suffering — it can be terrifying and almost unbearably vulnerable to surrender to an intimacy so amply fulfilling that it leaves nothing to long for. And yet in that vulnerability lies our power and our freedom to transform a relationship from a tether of dependency into a slender cord of grace.

David writes:

Intimacy cannot occur without a robust sense of vulnerability, and is tied to the sense of being pulled along in the gravitational field of any newly felt openness. In that new openness we feel as if we are pulled through the very doorway of our needs for something we desire deeply but cannot fully identify, partly because what we are about to identify is intimately connected with our own ability or inability to love.

Ultimately, he observes, intimacy is an instrument of discovery and self-discovery — a way of turning the walls between us and within us into sunlit windows through which to see and be seen:

Intimacy always carries the sense of something hidden about to be felt and known in surprising ways; something brought out and made visible, that previously could not be seen or understood. In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both giver and receiver.

[…]

To become human is to become visible, while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

Because what is visible is vulnerable, because what can be seen can be touched and what can be touched can be wounded, he adds:

Intimacy is intimately related to our sense of having been wounded, and the startling intuition that my way forward into life, or into another person’s life will be through the very doorway of the wound itself. Intimacy invites me to learn to trust the way being wounded has actually made me more available, more compassionate and possibly more intimate with the world, by being opened in ways I never realised it was possible to be open… Intimacy is always calibrated by the letting go of or the taking on of fear. Almost always our fear is experienced as an intimate invitation to understand and feel fully our particular form of wounded-ness.

[…]

Intimacy finds its ultimate expression in all the forms of surrender human beings find difficult to embrace.

The difficulty of that surrender almost always takes shape as anxiety — a word to which David devotes another of the book’s essays. Anxiety, he observes, is often an avoidance mechanism and a dissociation device — “a protection against real intimacy, real friendship and real engagement with our work,” a way not to feel “the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.” In anxiety, we disallow ourselves “the ability to stop and rest and the spacious silence needed for… a new understanding” — and all true intimacy opens into a new understanding of ourselves, so that “we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering… that who we thought we were is not who we are now.”

By allowing true intimacy on the smallest scale of personal love — the bond between one and one — we open into the largest scale of belonging, into cohesion with what Margaret Fuller, inspired by Goethe, called the All. David writes:

The need for intimacy in a human life and in a human social life is as foundational as our daily hunger and our never ending thirst, and needs to be met in just the same practical way, every day, just as necessarily and just as frequently: in touch, in conversation, in listening and in seeing, in the back and forth of ideas; intimate exchanges that say I am here and you are here and that by touching our bodies, our minds or our shared work in the world, we make a world together… Intimacy is our evolutionary inheritance, the internal force that has us returning to another and to the world from our insulated aloneness again and again, no matter our difficulties and no matter our wounds.

Couple these fragments of the thoroughly soul-slaking Consolations II — other essays in which explore such overused, underexamined words as shame, time, love, burnout, and end — with a wonderful read on lichens as a lens on intimacy, Kahlil Gibran on love’s difficult balance of intimacy and independence, and Eric Berne on the key to true intimacy, then savor this excellent interview with David by one of my oldest friends.

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Source: The Marginalian | 4 Dec 2024 | 4:20 am(NZT)

A Cosmic Nativity Story of the Cosmos You Are

We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular soul across billions and billions of blind steps each one of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.

Azita Ardakani offers a lyrical antidote to this self-expatriation from our cosmic inheritance in this breathtaking piece she has kindly let me publish on The Marginalian — part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.

Azita writes:

Once upon a time,

In a place far far away,

The darkness drifted.

The darkness knew no time.

Reaching for infinity, only knowing beyond.

One day in the web of inky forever, it asked itself, can I see you?

It waited, and waited, and then, answered, a star.

And then another, and another, and, another.

Another was where it began,

and as the star beings asked to be born to meet the darkness from which they came, one particular planet created water so it too could reflect the stars back to themselves.

The stars seeing their reflection were filled with joy and delight.

Curiosity was born in their light millions of years away.

One by one they made their way down, to touch the ocean, to see themselves.

The soil darkness watched with awe as the stars arrived,

A heart’s desire asked: Can I see you closer?

The water stars stretched onto the soil, and mixed into the clay, and became,

everything.

Yes you too, coyote who hears this, wise owl, mouse and rabbit, you too sleeping fawn, you too tree and root and seed, you too nested flight, and you too, sitting two legged.

Mixed from clay and star, flesh and life, a hollow canal opened so breath too could reach back to the darkness.

Missing the beginning, it exhaled a bridge, home.

The star water became everything we know, and you? The story of us?

Well, to experience the closest thing to the very beginning of star meeting water, we learned to create a small ocean inside of us, where it could all be felt, all over again.

Once upon a time, in a place far far away, the darkness drifted, and you drifted inside it.

You were the wish you once wished for.

Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from *Song of Two Worlds* by physicist Alan Lightman

Complement with Pattiann Rogers’s stunning poem about how stardust became sapiens and the wondrous science of how stars begot souls, then revisit N.J. Berrill’s forgotten 1958 masterpiece You and the Universe and Hannah Emerson’s poem “Center of the Universe” — perhaps the best instruction I know on how to be alive.

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Source: The Marginalian | 2 Dec 2024 | 3:59 am(NZT)

How to Love Yourself and How to Love Another: A Playful and Poignant Vintage Fable about Cherishing the Particular

The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences. This is why the Golden Rule, a version of which is appears in all major spiritual and ethical traditions, may be the most narcissistic of our moral codes, with its assumption that others want done unto them the same things we ourselves want. One measure of love — perhaps the greatest measure — may be the understanding that another’s needs, as incomprehensible as they may appear to us and as orthogonal to our own, are a fundamental part of who they are; that to love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.

In 1963, two years before she composed her iconic ode to friendship, the prolific children’s book author, theologian, and novelist Sandol Stoddard (December 16, 1927–January 4, 2018) took up this fundamental challenge of connection in her playful and poignant book My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat (public library).

The story, illustrated with great vivacity and typographic virtuosity by artist, dancer, choreographer, and theater director Remy Charlip (January 10, 1929–August 14, 2012), begins with a boy declaring ownership of his cat, in that classic “MINE!” way that children have of feeling out the boundary between where they end and the rest of the world begins — a boundary we spend our lives trying to locate as ever-changing selves moving through an ever-changing world, trying to discern the contours of belonging.

“Come up on my lap and have a little nap,” the boy commands the cat, who looks in no mood for a nap on a lap. Page after page, we see the boy treat the cat as his plaything — dressing the cat in a sweater, putting the cat in a stroller, tucking the cat into a crib — until the forbearing cat finally has it and claws out the sweater, leaps from under the blanket, breaks out of the bed, breaking the bed.

With the fury of a dispossessed tyrant that so readily comes to children (and to the petulant child nested in every maturity), the boy roars an indignant declaration of ownership at the cat, who gently sings back the fundamental dignity of personhood.

In consonance with Alan Watt’s prescription for how to become who you truly are, in which he insisted that “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” the cat’s outpouring of self-possession undams the boy’s own.

In the end, the boy discovers what we all must eventually, if we are to grow into the full bigness of the heart: that in every relationship of trust and tenderness, each is the guardian of the other’s particularity; that to love someone not for the comfort or compliance they can give you but for exactly who they are, the special and particular person, is the greatest, the only kind of love; that it is impossible to achieve this without first learning to love yourself for exactly who you are, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires — for, as e.e. cummings so memorably wrote, “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” Or any cat can fight. The story ends with the companionable quietude of boy and cat coming to rest in their parallel particularities — that supreme measure of a healthy bond.

And, as another excellent writer wrote in another cat-story of what it means to be human: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

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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 | 30 Nov 2024 | 1:55 am(NZT)

Delight Between Science and Magic: Euler’s Disk and the Sound of the Singularity

One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik found himself so bored that he took a coin out of his pocket and began spinning it atop the table. In a testament to the eternal paradox of boredom and wonder as two sides of the same coin — the currency of life that is attention — he was suddenly wonder-smitten by the exquisite elegance of the physics making the coin seem to levitate, spinning faster and faster rather than slower and slower before shuddering to a stop.

Here was a demonstration of laws undergirding everything from the motions of planets to the photosynthesis of plants — the conservation of angular momentum and the conservation of energy — a demonstration made not in equations but in sheer delight.

Bendik realized that if he toyed with a few variables — the smoothness of the surface, the mass of the spinning disk, the width of its edge — he could magnify the delight and make the science border on magic. And so he turned the mathematics — that most splendid plaything of the mind — into a toy: a heavy disk spinning into near-infinity atop a mirror surface.

He named it Euler’s Disk for Leonhard Euler, who had died two centuries earlier to be remembered by many as the greatest mathematician to ever live.

Along with a copy of The Universe in Verse and a baby lemon tree planted from a seed, Euler’s Disk may be my favorite gift to give, and the one most certain to bring unalloyed delight. Here is a gleeful demonstration of it by my former partner turned best friend upon receiving it:

This is how it works: Holding the disk upright on the mirror, you give it a hard manual spin that adds kinetic energy to its potential energy. Once in motion, the disk relies on its angular momentum to try to remain upright as gravity pulls it downward and the mirrored base exerts an upward counterforce. These opposing tugs make it spin faster and faster, appearing to levitate, its sound whirring at a higher and higher frequency as the disk’s points of contact with the mirror make a circle oscillating with a constant angular velocity.

If there were no friction, this motion would continue forever — the product of a power law modeling what is known as finite-time singularity. But the mirror, smooth though it is, still provides some friction. Coupled with resistance from the air — the same air drag central to the physics of how birds fly — it eventually causes the whirring disk to sigh to a sudden stop: the sound of the singularity.

Couple with the story of how Emmy Noether illuminated the conservation of energy (a story crowned with an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem), then revisit the poetic science of how cicadas sing — the sound of a living singularity.

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Source: The Marginalian | 27 Nov 2024 | 7:24 am(NZT)

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of entropy or another, culminating with life itself. Suppose we agree that, as Rilke so passionately insisted, “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

This, then, is the agreement: Learning to live is learning to love, and learning to love is learning to die — the imperative in the inevitable that renders our transience meaningful and holy. The price of this holiness is absolute humility: There is no pact to be made with the universe — we die, whether or not we agree to it, whether or not we have learned how to love in the bright interlude between atom and dust. We may or may not be lucky enough to live out the two billion heartbeats our creaturely inheritance has allotted us. But no matter how many we actually get, it matters how we spend them and what we spend them on. It may be the only thing that matters.

Art from *An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days*. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Not long before his untimely death by an aggressive brain tumor, Brian Doyle — who described himself as “a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is” — took up these immense and eternal questions in what became his posthumous essay collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder (public library).

Because the harshest realities of our own lives are often easiest to see and easiest to bear lensed through the lives of other creatures cushioned in symbol and metaphor — this is why we have fables and fairy tales — Doyle finds himself reckoning with mortality and the meaning of life as he examines the dead body of a Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townsendii) in his garden. Curious about the animal, he turns to the scientific literature and is suddenly disquieted by reading about the species as a lump-sum of data points. Overcome with tenderness for “this particular individual, and the flavor and tenor and yearning of this one life,” he writes:

This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.

Art by Charlie Mackesy from *The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse* — a tender illustrated fable about what it means to love

Over and over, through the different winding paths of the different essays, Doyle returns to his animating ethos that “love is our greatest and hardest work” — nowhere more poignantly articulated than in an essay about the people seen leaping out of the Twin Towers hand in hand, their hands “nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.” He reflects on this harrowing and holy emblem of our deepest humanity:

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe… that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

The trick, of course, is learning how to be here — how to remain fully present and filled with that ferocious love — knowing we will one day be gone, knowing it might be tomorrow. In what may be the most soulful and sensible advice on how to live an actualized life since Whitman’s, Doyle offers an anchor to that holy here:

You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.

Paradoxically, this active and conscious effort is a heart that can only beat in the chest of surrender. Doyle adds the ultimate disclaimer:

You cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.

At the center of this recognition is that most difficult triumph of unselfing for us creatures of self-importance: humility. In Doyle’s definition, humility is not a lowering down to the ground, as the word’s Latin root (humus) suggests, but a rising up and a reaching toward something we can never quite touch yet must trust is there. Some call this faith — faith that the world holds together, that our tiny and transient lives are nonetheless an essential part of the whole, that the choices we make within them change the shape of the whole, that love is the mightiest choice we could ever make and the highest form of faith.

Doyle writes:

Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

[…]

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

Complement with Seamus Heaney’s kindred advice on life and W.H. Auden’s kindred poem “The More Loving One,” then revisit Christian Wiman on love and the sacred and Oliver Sacks on finding meaning without religious faith

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Source: The Marginalian | 25 Nov 2024 | 2:10 pm(NZT)

Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why They Flock in a V Formation

“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”

I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my airborne cage of metal and glass, I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly — really fly, the way birds do; if we were born not just seeing “the world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns,” as Georgia did out of that small round window, but feeling it. And yet you and I shall never know the open sky as a way of being — never know the touch of a thermal or the taste of a thundercloud, never see our naked shadow on a mountain or slice a cirrus with a wing. What cruel cosmic fate to live on this Pale Blue Dot without ever knowing its blueness. And yet we are recompensed by a consciousness capable of wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery.

It is wonder that led us to invent science — that quickening of curiosity driving every discovery — so that science may repay us with magnified wonder as it reveals the weft and warp of nature — the tapestry of forces and phenomena, of subtleties and complexities, woven on the enchanted loom of reality. To look at any single thread more closely, in all its hidden wonder, is to see more clearly how the entire tapestry holds together, to strengthen how we ourselves hold together across the arc of life. For, as Rachel Carson so memorably wrote, the greatest gift you could give a child — or the eternal child in you — is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments… the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Art by Nikki McClure from *Something About the Sky* — Rachel Carson’s serenade to the wonder of the clouds

Take the wonder of a bird — this living poem of feather and physics, of barometric wizardry and hollow bone, in whose profoundly other brain evolution invented dreams. That so tiny a creature should defy the gravitational pull of an entire planet seems impossible, miraculous. And yet beneath this defiance is an active surrender to the same immutable laws that make the whole miracle of the universe possible.

In one of the three dozen fascinating essays collected in The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature (public library), the poetic physicist and novelist Alan Lightman illuminates the lawful wonder of avian flight, from evolution to aerodynamics, from molecules to mathematics, beginning with the fundamental wonderment of how a bird creates strong enough an upward force to counter gravity’s pull on its weight:

[The force] is created by a net upward air pressure, which in turn is created by the bird’s forward motion and the shape of its wings. The topside of an avian wing is curved, while the bottom side is rather flat. This difference in shape, together with the angle and some smaller adjustments of the wing, cause the air to flow over the top of the wing at higher speed than on the bottom. The higher speed on top reduces the air pressure above the wing compared to the air pressure below the wing. With more pressure pushing up from below than pressure pushing down from above, the wing gets an upward lift.

Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

It may seem counterintuitive that a higher air speed above the wing would produce a lower pressure, but our creaturely intuitions have often been poor reflections of reality — it took us eons to discern that the flat surface beneath our feet is a sphere, that the sphere is not at the center of the universe, and that there is an invisible force acting on objects without touching them to make the universe cohere — a force which a bored twenty-something sitting in his mother’s apple orchard called gravity.

Alan explains the reality of chemistry and physics that makes flight possible as air molecules strike against the underside of the wing to lift the bird up:

Air consists of little molecules that push against whatever they strike, causing pressure. Molecules of air are constantly whizzing about in all directions. If no energy is added, the total speed of the molecules must be constant, by the law of the conservation of energy. But that speed is composed of two parts: a horizontal speed, parallel to the wing, and a vertical speed, perpendicular to the wing. Increase the horizontal speed of air molecules above the wing, and the vertical speed of those molecules must decrease. Lower speed of molecules striking the wing from above means less pressure, or less push. The molecules on the bottom of the wing, moving slower in the horizontal direction but faster in the vertical direction (with greater upward pressure), lift the wing upward.

The lift is greater the larger the wing area and the faster the speed of air past the wing. There’s a convenient trade-off here. The necessary lift force to counterbalance the bird’s weight can be had with less wing area if the animal increases its forward speed, and vice versa. Birds capitalize on this option according to their individual needs. The great blue heron, for example, has long, slender legs for wading and must fly slowly so as not to break them on landing. Consequently, herons have relatively large wingspan. Pheasants, on the other hand, maneuver in underbrush and would find large wings cumbersome. To remain airborne with their relatively short and stubby wings, pheasants must fly fast.

There are, however, limits to this factorial conversation between surface and speed. Alan considers why there are no birds the size of elephants:

As you scale up the size of a bird or any material thing, unless you drastically change its shape, its weight increases faster than its area. Weight is proportional to volume, or length times length times length, while area is proportional to length times length. Double the length, and the weight is eight times larger, while the area is only four times larger. For example, if you have a cube of 1 inch on a side, its volume is 1 cubic inch, while its total area is 6 (sides) × 1 square inch, or 6 square inches. If you double the side of the cube to 2 inches, its volume goes up to 8 cubic inches, or 800 percent (with a similar increase in weight), while its area goes up to 24 square inches, or 400 percent. Since the lift force is proportional to the wing area while the opposing weight force is proportional to the bird’s volume, as you continue scaling up, eventually you reach a point where the bird’s wing area is not enough to keep it aloft. Although birds have been experimenting with flight for 100 million years, the heaviest true flying bird, the great bustard, rarely exceeds 42 pounds. The larger gliding birds, such as vultures, are lifted by rising hot air columns and don’t carry their full weight.

But all this elaborate molecular and mathematical aerodynamics of upward motion is not enough to make flight possible — birds must also propel themselves forward without propellers. For a long time, how they do this was a mystery. (The mystery was even deeper for the singular flight of the hummingbird, hovering between science and magic.) It was the birth of modern aviation that finally shed light on it. In the early nineteenth century, watching how birds glide, the pioneering engineer and aerial investigator George Cayley became the first human being to discern the mechanics of flight, identifying the three forces acting on the weight of any flying body: lift, drag, and thrust.

Alan details the physics of drag and thrust that allow birds to move forward:

Birds do in fact have propellers, in the form of specially designed feathers in the outer halves of their wings. These feathers, called primaries, change their shape and position during a wingbeat. Forward thrust is obtained by pushing air backward with each flap. In a similar manner, we are able to move forward in a swimming pool by vigorously moving our arms backward against the water.

All of this helps explain why larger birds often fly in a V formation — each bird benefits from the uplifting air pockets produced by the bird in front of it, conserving 20 to 30 percent of the calories needed for flight compared to flying solo. Because the lead bird takes most of the aerodynamic and caloric brunt shielding the rest from the wind, the flock takes turns in the frontmost position.

This, too, is the physics of any healthy community, any healthy relationship — the physics of vulnerability and trust. Because life always exerts different pressures on each person at different times, internal or external, thriving together is not a matter of always pulling equal weight but of accommodating the ebb and flow of one another’s vulnerability, each trusting the other to shield them in times of depletion, then doing the shielding when replenished. One measure of love may be the willingness to be the lead bird shielding someone dear in their time of struggle, lifting up their wings with your stubborn presence.

Couple this fragment of The Miraculous from the Material — the rest of which explores the science behind wonders like fireflies and eclipses, hummingbirds and Saturn’s rings — with the peregrine falcon as a way of seeing and a state of being, the enchanting otherness of what it’s like to be an owl, and the science of what birds dream about.

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Source: The Marginalian | 23 Nov 2024 | 3:05 am(NZT)

There’s a Ghost in the Garden: A Subtle and Soulful Illustrated Fable about Memory and Mystery

One of the things no one tells us as we grow up is that we will be living in a world rife with ghosts — all of our disappointed hopes and our outgrown dreams, all the abandoned novels and unproven theorems, all the people we used to love, all the people we used to be. A ghost is a palpable presence of an absence charged with feeling, the contour of something half-known, half-remembered, half-forgotten — a halfway house between what we understand and what we cannot, between what we have let go and what we cannot.

Children are especially prone to perceiving ghosts because childhood itself is such a halfway house between imagination and reality, because what they know is so small against the vastness of what there is yet to know and what may never be known that they invent their own answers to the immense open question of life, answers wild and wondrous and often true.

Writer Kyo Maclear and artist Katty Maurey conjure up this primal reckoning with the unknowns of love and loss in There’s a Ghost in the Garden (public library) — the subtle and soulful story of a little boy who believes a ghost haunts his grandfather’s garden.

In the course of trying to discern the source and nature of the ghostly presence — a ghost mischievous but friendly, knocking down flower pots, leaving “little presents” in the bird nest and tracks on the path that “was once a cool, dark stream” — the boy discovers that his grandfather also had a childhood, that inside the old man lives the ghost of a long-ago boy who also had fantasies and fears, who also used to play in the flickering sunlight, who once swam in the stream that is now a dry path.

As the two converse, shadows flit across the gloaming garden — a hare, a fox, a deer, a bird — never fully revealing themselves, there and then gone, as the stars, clear and constant, rise in the night.

There is no grandmother in the picture — only a young boy and an old man talking about ghosts, about what is remembered, about the seen and the unseen.

What emerges from the story is the intimation that forgetting — those who have left us, and the parts of ourselves we have left behind — is a kind of death, but we can come back from it through memory and love, which twine the lifeline tethering us to everything that is beautiful and enduring.

Complement There’s a Ghost in the Garden with a different lens on the garden and the spirit and a different lens on the living ghost in each of us — the mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person, despite a lifetime of physical and psychological change.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

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Source: The Marginalian | 22 Nov 2024 | 1:00 pm(NZT)

The Avenging Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create

“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering — their own and the world’s — then make of it a found of hope and fulcrum of strength for others. Heroes are transmutation agents — people who alchemize suffering and restlessness and rage into love, who compost disappointment into fertilizer for growth, who break down cynicism to its building blocks of helplessness and hubris, then metabolize the toxin out of the system we call society.

There are myriad kinds of heroes capable of myriad heroisms — the epochal heroisms of speaking truth to power that mobilize the consciousness of a civilization and the small daily heroisms of the invisible labor that makes the world cohere, the heroism of planting a tree and the heroism of abolishing a plantation, the heroism of keeping faith in a friend through a hard time and the heroism of leaving a false love.

It helps to remember this diversity of heroisms, because it saves us from imprisoning our heroes in the expectation that everyone contribute to the shared cause — the great project of human flourishing — in the same way. The protest marcher and the poet are very different kinds of heroes, and it is an act of oppression against the gift of each to measure them on the register of the other. Only when we cease doing that can we begin to recognize the heroes who across the history of every civilization have kept the lighthouse blazing through the dark times — the heroes we call artists.

*The Star-Lighter* by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

These are the heroes John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) celebrates in one of the essays in his 1991 collection Keeping a Rendezvous (public library) — the heroes we need in times “when the just cause is defeated… when our past is dishonoured and its promises and sacrifices shrugged off with ignorant and evil smiles, when whole families come to suspect that those who wield power are deaf to reason and every plea, and that there is no appeal anywhere, when gradually you realize… that They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home and, wherever possible, your bones too.” Of such times, Berger writes:

The avenging heroes are now being dreamt up and awaited. They are already feared by the pitiless and blessed by me and maybe by you.

I would shield any such hero to my fullest capacity. Yet if, during the time I was sheltering him, he told me he liked drawing, or… she told me she’d always wanted to paint, and had never had the chance or the time to do so, if this happened, then I think I’d say: Look, if you want to, it’s possible you may achieve what you are setting out to do in another way, a way less likely to fall out on your comrades and less open to confusion.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from *Before I Grew Up* — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within

Echoing Iris Murdoch’s abiding observation that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify” and Auden’s insistence that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,” Berger adds:

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.

Complement with Leonard Cohen on what makes a modern saint, James Baldwin on the artist’s role in society, Toni Morrison on the artist’s task in troubled times, and Ernst Becker on heroism and our search for meaning, then revisit Berger on the power of music.

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Source: The Marginalian | 20 Nov 2024 | 8:43 am(NZT)

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“Burnout fully realised is also the decisive, exhausted moment in which we realise we cannot go on in the same way. Not being able to go on, is always in the end, a creative act, the threshold moment of our transformation.”

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MARIE HOWE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

SOMETHING IN THE WOODS LOVES YOU

THANK YOU, EVERYTHING

OLIVER SACKS: LETTERS

WEATHERING

JUNG VS. BORG

THE OTHER SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

CONSOLATIONS II

THE WORK OF ART

WE ARE FREE TO CHANGE THE WORLD

SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY

FLOWERS FOR THINGS I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY

ON GIVING UP

THE LIGHT EATERS

KAMAU & ZUZU FIND A WAY

LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT

THERE’S A GHOST IN THE GARDEN

CLOUDSPOTTING FOR BEGINNERS

WE GO TO THE PARK

THE MIRACULOUS FROM THE MATERIAL

THE MESSAGE

THE ART OF CRYING

THE DICTIONARY STORY

(AND ONE I MADE)

(AND ONE COMING NEXT YEAR)

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