2026-07-11 05:03:22
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denial of the end, until the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of helplessness and humiliation, that we may discover the greater dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride — the dignity of opening the heart fully and offering it completely, even as it is being flayed by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the blunt edge of an unrequited passion for the possible. (Though, of course, a heart is never broken.)
It is this kind of dignity, the kind found beyond despair, that emanates from Frida Kahlo’s letters to the lover who took her most famous photograph — the Hungarian refugee Miklós Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray upon landing at Ellis Island in the final year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of four dozen words and the unassailable determination to be an artist. He would go on to become a pilot, a pioneer of color photography, and a fencing champion, photographing some of the twentieth century’s greatest luminaries and competing twice for the U.S. Olympic team.
She was in her early twenties when she met him while traveling through the United States with Diego in the first years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained epistolary friends, but as he spent more and more time in Mexico throughout the 1930s, they became lovers.
Although the love letter was her first great art, Frida’s letters to Nick are the most playful and most passionate of all her letters, and also the tenderest. She signed them Xóchitl — “flower” in the indigenous Náhuatl language — and it was at the peak of their love that she began painting her electrically erotic Flower of Life.
In a fierce and winking letter penned from Paris, where she had just been introduced to André Breton and his coterie (“you have no idea what kind of bitches these people are”) trying to get her paintings exhibited, she writes to Nick in the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as “kid” despite his being twenty-five years her senior:
Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.
He did.
By the end of spring, Nick was engaged to the other woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Shattered, she wrote to him, first thanking him “a million times” for sending what would become her most iconic photograph, encoded with the bittersweet memory of a morning in the spring of their love, then pouring out her devastation without pride or pretense:
When I received your letter, few days ago, I didn’t know what to do. I must tell you that I couldn’t help weeping. I felt that something was in my throat, just as if I had swallowed the whole world. I don’t know yet if I was sad, jealous or angry, but the sensation I felt was in first place of a great despair. I have read your letter many times, too many, I think, and now I realize things that I couldn’t see at first. Now, I understand everything perfectly clearly, and the only thing I want, is to tell you with my best words, that you deserve in life the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts… No matter what happens to us in life, you will always be, for myself, the same Nick I met one morning in New York in 18th E. 48th St.
And then she adds a list of requests for how to honor her broken heart, touchingly human and almost childlike in its underlying wish for an undo button:
I want to ask from you a great favour, please, send by mail the little cushion, I don’t want anybody else to have it. I promise to make another one for you, but I want that one you have now on the couch downstairs, near the window… Take down the photo of myself which was on the fireplace, and put it in Mam’s room in the shop, I’m sure she still likes me as much as she did before. Besides, it is not so nice for the other lady to see my portrait in your house. I wish I could tell you many many things but I think it is no use to bother you. I hope you will understand without words all my wishes.
[…]
About my letters to you, if they are on the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don’t want to be a trouble in your life in any case. Please forgive me for acting just like an old-fashioned sweetheart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don’t have any interest in having those papers with you.
As she was writing this very letter, she was interrupted by a phone call from a mutual friend informing her that Nick had just gotten married. Frida acknowledges this plainly and adds:
I have nothing to say about what I felt. I hope you will be happy, very happy… Thanks for the magnificent photo, again and again. Thanks for your last letter, and for all the treasures you gave me.
Love,
Frida
By that autumn, Nick was already having troubles in his new marriage as Frida’s relationship with Diego was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce process began as Diego pummeled her with “the worst things you can imagine and the dirtiest insults,” she wrote to Nick:
I have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering… I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems to me that nobody in the world has suffer the way I do, but of course it will be different, I hope, in a few months.
Still addressing him as “darling” and “baby,” she adds:
Thanks Nickolasito for all your kindness, for the dreams about me, for your sweet thoughts, for everything. Please forgive me for not writing as soon as I received your letters, but let me tell you kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one can live thru it… Don’t forget me and be a good boy.
I love you,
Frida
He never did forget her. She never stopped wishing the world for him, which may be the deepest measure of love — continuing to desire the other’s greatest happiness, their best possible life, even if it excludes you. It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Frida and Nick remained lifelong friends, on tender terms until the end.
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.
2026-07-11 02:57:10
We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both. Forged of the dust of dying stars, we move through a universe of impartial laws with our dreams and desires, passionate pawns in the hands of grand-master chance, daily watching the world spin counter to our wishes, daily watching ourselves bend against our own will.
How, against the backdrop of this cosmic helplessness, can we muster the sense of agency necessary for conducting our human lives, much less fill them with the majesty of meaning?
That is what Nick Cave addresses in answering a fan’s lament about the devastating feeling of existential helplessness and impotence.
Unpacking the central creative image one of his songs, he writes:
The everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous — [remember] that ultimately we make things happen through our actions, way beyond our understanding or intention; that our seemingly small ordinary human acts have untold consequences; that what we do in this world means something; that we are not nothing; and that our most quotidian human actions by their nature burst the seams of our intent and spill meaningfully and radically through time and space, changing everything… Our deeds, no matter how insignificant they may feel, are replete with meaning, and of vast consequence, and… they constantly impact upon the unfolding story of the world, whether we know it or not.
Turning directly to the man who had lost the sense of personal significance and power, he adds:
Rather than feel impotent and useless, you must come to terms with the fact that as a human being you are infinitely powerful, and take responsibility for this tremendous power. Even our smallest actions have potential for great change, positively or negatively, and the way in which we all conduct ourselves within the world means something. You are anything but impotent, you are, in fact, exquisitely and frighteningly dynamic, as are we all, and with all respect you have an obligation to stand up and take responsibility for that potential. It is your most ordinary and urgent duty.
In Faith, Hope and Carnage — one of my favorite books of 2022 — Cave illustrates this potency of the subtle acts with one such “small but monumental gesture” extended by a near-stranger with seemingly very small locus of power in the world, yet one who made an immense difference in his life in the wake of grieving his son:
There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange, because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money… As she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully.
It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me… because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe. She wished the best for me, in that moment. There was something truly moving to me about that simple, wordless act of compassion… I’ll never forget that. In difficult times I often go back to that feeling she gave me. Human beings are remarkable, really. Such nuanced, subtle creatures.
Complement with E.B. White’s wonderful answer to a man who had lost faith in humanity, Erich Fromm’s antidote to helplessness and disorientation, and Adrienne Rich’s magnificent poem “Power,” then revisit Nick Cave on creative work as living amends, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the real meaning and muscle of hope.
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.
2026-07-10 12:22:51
How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives?
Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet.
The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder of reality through science and poetry — occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive.
BUT WE HAD MUSIC
by Maria PopovaRight this minute
across time zones and opinions
people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poemswhile
at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of
four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
of oblivion.Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.I know this.
And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is enoughto stand here
for an irrevocable minute
agape with wonder.It is eternity.
Couple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from a previous season of The Universe in Verse, then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
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.
2026-07-09 21:40:50
“I work like a gardener,” the great painter Joan Miró wrote in his meditation on the proper pace for creative work. It is hardly a coincidence that Virginia Woolf had her electrifying epiphany about what it means to be an artist while walking amid the flower beds in the garden at St. Ives. Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being, in which, as the great naturalist John Muir observed long ago, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”; a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. There is something deeply humanizing in listening to the rustle of a newly leaved tree, in watching a bumblebee romance a blossom, in kneeling onto the carpet of soil to make a hole for a sapling, gently moving a startled earthworm or two out of the way. Walt Whitman knew this when he weighed what makes life worth living as he convalesced from a paralytic stroke: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
Those unmatched rewards, both psychological and physiological, are what beloved neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) explores in a lovely short essay titled “Why We Need Gardens,” found in Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales (public library) — the wondrous posthumous collection that gave us Sacks on the life-altering power of libraries. He writes:
As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
Having lived and worked in New York City for half a century — a city “sometimes made bearable… only by its gardens” — Sacks recounts witnessing nature’s tonic effects on his neurologically impaired patients: A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed. Sacks reflects:
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
More than half a century after the great marine biologist and environmental pioneer Rachel Carson asserted that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Sacks adds:
Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage, and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools, or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.
Complement this particular fragment of the altogether delicious Everything in Its Place with naturalist Michael McCarthy on nature and joy, pioneering conservationist and Wilderness Act co-composer Mardy Murie on nature and human nature, and bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer on gardening and the secret of happiness, then revisit Oliver Sacks on nature and the interconnectedness of the universe, the building blocks of identity, the three essential elements of creativity, and his stunning memoir of a life fully lived.
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.
2026-07-09 21:01:02
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.
But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.
The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.
The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.
The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.
The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.
The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.
The loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.
In his 2008 psychology classic Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (public library), Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all the possible lonelinesses into the three core kinds that pulsate beneath our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls “the profound loneliness of being close to God.” This I take to mean the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity that dwells at the intersection of time, chance, and love; God is just what some call their dream of a crosswalk when they face that intersection.
The first two lonelinesses are rooted in time, which is itself fractal — there are many kinds of time we live with. The third kind of loneliness deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time — like music, like wonder, like love. It is an existential loneliness, a creative loneliness, made not from the atoms of now that compose the other two lonelinesses but from the atoms of forever.
Because we, creatures made of time, cannot comprehend forever, it is easy to call it God — that catchall for everything immense and incomprehensible we face in ourselves. But this is an illusion — forever too is fractal, with myriad visitations of it in our daily lives. In a testament to James Baldwin’s timeless insistence that “the poets… are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” it is not the psychologists or the philosophers but the poets who part the veil of illusion to reveal the truth:
SOME KINDS OF FOREVER VISIT YOU
by Brenda HillmanThe unknowns are up early;
they browse through the bronze
porch bells. Crows
call & late
apples blaze
toward western emptiness.
In your illness,
the edges hesitate;
like the revolt
of workers, they
will take a while…Here comes the fond
mild winter; other
realms are noisy
& unanimous. You tap
the screen & dream
while waiting; four
kinds of forever
visit you today:
something, nothing,
everything & art,
greater than you are
& of your making —
Poem courtesy of the Academy of American Poets
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.
2026-07-08 23:18:30
Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The boundary is so difficult to discern because, when all the stories fall away, there is no boundary — only a fluid, permeable membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and where we belong. Lynn Margulis captured this in ecological and evolutionary terms when she observed that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.” Dr. King captured the sociological equivalent in his insistence that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Whitman captured its most elemental and most existential dimensions in that immortal line: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.
How to unblind ourselves to this cosmos of connection and its attendant forcefield of consequence is what Jenn Shapland explores in her essay collection Thin Skin (public library) — “a corporeal account of how thin the membrane is between each of us and one another, between each of us and the world outside,” fomented by the medical reality of her epidermis missing a layer: a diagnosis of literally thin skin.
With an eye to the embodied metaphor of her condition, Shapland writes:
There is no “outside”… The world is a part of our cellular makeup… we impact it with every tiny choice we make.
[…]
I began to see what I now think of as literalized metaphors for my entanglement, my complicity, all over my life: in my dermatological diagnosis of “thin skin,” in my friends’ having babies as the world burned, in the crystals cropping up everywhere to heal us of something, in my own sense of vulnerability and my desire to feel safe. I began to question the idea of myself as a being in need of protection, indeed as something that could be protected. Nothing can protect us… It struck me as I wrote that I was utterly vulnerable to every other person, every other creature on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me… I began to seek other ways of understanding the self that might be more useful than this shivering, weak thing we must shore up against the world.
And yet out of that singular vulnerability comes a singular strength — liberated from the standard boundaries between self and world, which serve as culture’s safety valve constricting what is possible and permissible, one is free to imagine “alternatives to our limited narratives about family, love, labor, longing, pleasure, safety, and legacy.” A century after D.H. Lawrence reverenced the strength of sensitivity, Shapland writes:
To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.
What she notices above all are the connections between things, the Rube Goldberg machine of consequences that binds past and future, self and other, here and everywhere else. She writes about Los Alamos and Rachel Carson, about the traps of parenthood and the paradoxes of self-compassion, about mending clothes and mending hearts. Emerging from the essays is a reminder, both haunting and assuring, that in this increasingly fractured and fragmented world, life remains defiantly indivisible.
There is power in such porousness — a heightened ability to question the structures that make for fragmentation, perhaps none more tyrannical than the idea that the nuclear family is the optimal unit of belonging and connection, an idea rooted in our touching yearning for immortality despite our creaturely finitude: passing on our genes and values as a way of perpetuating ourselves beyond our mortal limits. Watching her friends freeze their eggs and go through rounds of IVF, Shapland reflects:
If we extend our idea of family beyond the individual to the wider world of creatures and ecosystems, we can begin to ask what we want for them. From them. We can begin to see ourselves in relation. Acknowledging and reckoning with death — with the limit on our existence, with the fact that we are temporary — can reframe what it means to live. What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to support, maintain, in the limited time we are here?
A beautiful answer comes from Shapland’s conversation with Marian Naranjo — a Native antinuclear activist from Santa Clara Pueblo, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of the atomic bomb. With an eye to the ancestral knowledge of how to live in peace and harmony — knowledge that has suffered the erasures of colonialism and capitalism — Naranjo envisions a new epoch of remembering what we have forgotten: how to be caretakers of connection. Sitting across from Shapland in the embodied space of mutuality, she echoes Ursula K. Le Guin’s passionate case for the transformative power of real human conversation and reflects:
That’s the next circle, that circle of balance. Where we do put back our heaven and earth, our heaven back on earth. Get it back. How do we do that? It’s this, it’s talking face-to-face. It’s doing more of this.
But somewhere along the arc of so-called progress, we forgot what indigenous cultures have known for millennia: that truth is a tapestry, no single thread of which can survive the wear and tear of reality in isolation, the reality against which truth must be continually tested in order to be true. This damaging isolationism haunts even the history of our understanding of the basic building blocks of life — the chemical elements that compose it, or discompose it.
With an eye to the discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie’s epochal work on radium, Shapland writes:
Soon after its discovery, radium became a multimillion-dollar business. For four decades, you could buy rejuvenating radium skin cream, lipstick, tea, bath salts, hair growth tonic, “a bag containing radium worn near the scrotum” that “was said to restore virility.” There was radium toothpaste to boost whitening. Radium therapy, called Curietherapy in France, began to be used to treat cancer. It was first inserted by fifty needles into breast tissue, or by radon “seeds” that caused serious reactions. There existed a “vaginal radium bomb consisting of a lead sphere supported by a rod for insertion” for cancer treatment. Marie and her daughter Irene took a radiological car to the front in World War I to X-ray soldiers. Later, she supplied radium bulbs to the French health service to treat the military and civilian wounded and sick with radium therapy.
The discovery of radioactivity is a story of willful ignorance, of knowing but longing not to know, pretending not to know, how powerful and damaging it was. Scientists and salespeople alike believed in its power to cure, to heal. Radium was damaging enough to kill cancer, to burn Pierre’s skin through the glass vial in his vest pocket, but somehow not thought to be damaging enough to kill the scientists handling it all day, the people brushing their teeth with it. Marie kept a vial on her nightstand to bask in its glow as she slept. She called it her child.
[…]
This scientific refusal to believe what is obvious because it cannot be proven, because it is technically uncertain, accompanies our understanding of toxic substances to this day.
This blindness to connection, causality, and the consequences of radioactivity is hardly surprising: To achieve what she achieved, against the odds of her time and place, Marie Curie had to be thick-skinned. Perhaps a thinner skin, with its attendant power of seeing the permeability and interdependence of things, would have saved her life, would have spared her the tragedy Adrienne Rich captured so poignantly in the final words of her magnificent tribute to Curie:
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Complement with Marie Howe’s poem “Singularity” — a stunning antidote to our illusion of separateness — and the young poet Marissa Davis’s inspired echo of it, serenading our elemental bond with nature and each other.
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.