2026-08-04 14:02:10
“Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe,” Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) wrote to his boyhood friend, rallying his own resilience as he began losing his hearing. A year later, shortly after completing his Second Symphony, he sent his brothers a stunning letter about the joy of suffering overcome, in which he resolved:
Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?
That year, he began — though he did not yet know it, as we never do — the long gestation of what would become not only his greatest creative and spiritual triumph, not only a turning point in the history of music that revolutionized the symphony and planted the seed of the pop song, but an eternal masterwork of the supreme human art: making meaning out of chaos, beauty out of sorrow.
Across the epochs, “Ode to Joy” rises vast and eternal, transcending all of spacetime and at the same time compacting it into something so intimate, so immediate, that nothing seems to exist outside this singularity of all-pervading possibility. Inside its total drama, a total tranquility; inside its revolt, an oasis of refuge. The story of its making is as vitalizing as the masterpiece itself — or, rather, its story is the very reason for its vitality.
As a teenager, while auditing Kant’s lectures at the University of Bonn, Beethoven had fallen under the spell of transcendental idealism and the ideas of the Enlightenment — ideas permeating the poetry of Friedrich Schiller. A volume of it became the young Beethoven’s most cherished book and so began the dream of setting it to music. (There is singular magic in a timeless poem set to music.)
One particular poem especially entranced him: Written when Beethoven was fifteen and the electric spirit of revolution saturated Europe’s atmosphere, Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” was at heart an ode to freedom — a blazing manifesto for the Enlightenment ethos that if freedom, justice, and human happiness are placed at the center of life and made its primary devotion, politically and personally, then peace and kindness would envelop humankind as an inevitable consequence. A “kiss for the whole world,” Schiller had written, and the teenage Beethoven longed to be lips of the possible.
This Elysian dream ended not even a decade later as the Reign of Terror dropped the blade of the guillotine upon Marie Antoinette, then upon ten thousand other heads and the dreams they carried. Schiller died considering his “Ode to Joy” a failure — an idealist’s fantasy unmoored from reality, a work of art that might have been of service perhaps for him, perhaps for a handful of others, “but not for the world.”
The young Beethoven was among those few it touched, and this was enough, more than enough — he took Schiller’s bright beam of possibility and magnified it through the lens of his own genius to illuminate all of humanity for all of time. Epochs later, in the savage century of the World Wars and the Holocaust, Rebecca West — another uncommon visionary, who understood that “art is not a plaything, but a necessity” — would contemplate how those rare few help the rest of humanity endure, observing that “if during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe.”
While Schiller’s poem was ripening in Beethoven’s imagination, the decade-long Napoleonic Wars stripped and bludgeoned Europe. When Napoleon’s armies invaded and occupied Vienna — where Beethoven had moved at twenty-one to study with his great musical hero, Haydn — most of the wealthy fled to the country. He took refuge with his brother, sister-in-law, and young nephew in the city. Thirty-nine and almost entirely deaf, Beethoven found himself “suffering misery in a most concentrated form” — misery that “affected both body and soul” so profoundly that he produced “very little coherent work.” From inside the vortex of uncertainty and suffering, he wrote:
The existence I had built up only a short time ago rests on shaky foundations. What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me: nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery in every form.
That spring, Haydn’s death only deepened his despair at life. The next six years were an unremitting heartache. His love went unreturned. He grew estranged from one of his brothers, who married a woman Beethoven disliked. His other brother died. He entered an endless legal combat over guardianship of his young nephew. He spent a year bedridden with a mysterious illness he called “an inflammatory fever,” riddled with skull-splitting headaches. His hearing almost completely deteriorated. He grew repulsed by the trendy mysticism of new musical developments, which made no room for the raw human emotion that was to him both the truest material and truest product of art.
Somehow, he kept composing, the act itself becoming the fulcrum by which Beethoven lifted himself out of the black hole to perch on the event horizon of a new period of great creative fertility. While Blake — his twin in the tragic genius of outsiderdom — was painting the music of the heavens, Beethoven was grounding a possible heaven onto a disillusioned earth with music.
And then he ended up in jail.
One autumn day in 1822, the fifty-two-year-old composer put on his moth-eaten coat and set out for what he intended as a short morning walk in the city, his mind a tempest of ideas. Walking had always been his primary laboratory for creative problem-solving, so the morning stroll unspooled into a long half-conscious walk along the Danube. In a classic manifestation of the self-forgetting that marks the intense creative state now known as “flow,” Beethoven lost track of time, of distance, of the demands of his own body.
He walked and walked, hatless and absorbed, not realizing how famished and fatigued he was growing, until the afternoon found him wandering disheveled and disoriented in a river basin far into the countryside. There, he was arrested by local police for “behaving in a suspicious manner,” taken to jail as “a tramp” with no identity papers, and mocked for claiming that he was the great Beethoven — by then a national icon, with a corpus of celebrated concertos and sonatas to his name, and eight whole symphonies.
The tramp raged and raged, until eventually, close to midnight, the police dispatched a nervous officer to wake up a local musical director, who Beethoven demanded could identify him. Instant recognition. Righteous rage. Apologies. Immediate release. More rage. More apologies. Beethoven spent the night at his liberator’s house. In the morning, the town’s apologetic mayor collected him and drove him back to Vienna in the mayoral carriage.
What had so distracted Beethoven from space and time and self was that, twenty-seven years after falling under the spell of Schiller’s poem, he was at last ferocious with ideas for bringing it to life in music. He had been thinking about it incessantly for months. “Ode to Joy” would become the crowning achievement of his crowning achievement — the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony. It would distill the transcendent torment of his creative life: how to integrate rage and redemption, the solace of poetry with the drama of music; how to channel his own poetic fury as a force of beauty, of vitality, of meaning; how to turn the human darkness he had witnessed and suffered into something incandescent, something superhuman.
It had to be in a symphony, although he had not composed one in a decade and no composer — not Bach, not Mozart, not his hero Haydn — had ever woven lyric poetry or any words at all into a symphony before; the word “lyrics” was yet to enter the lexicon in its musical sense. It had to be the crowning choral finale of the symphony, although he had not written much choral music before. But the light of the idea beamed bright and irrefutable as spring. This was no time for old laurels, no time for catering to proven populisms — this was the time for creation. A decade earlier, Beethoven had written back to a young girl aspiring to become a great pianist, offering his advice on the central urgency of the creative calling:
The true artist is not proud… Though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.
So often, in advising others, we are advising ourselves — the most innocent, vulnerable, and visionary parts of us, those parts from which the spontaneity and daring central to creative work spring. I wonder whether Beethoven remembered his own advice to Emilie as he faced the blank page that spring in 1822 when the first radiant contours of his “Ode to Joy” filled his mind and his footfall.
By summer, he was actively seeking out commissions to live on as he labored. He managed to procure a meager £50 from London’s Harmony Society, but that was enough subsistence and assurance to get to work. For more than a year, he labored unremittingly, stumbling over creative challenge after creative challenge — the price of making anything unexampled. His greatest puzzle was how to introduce the words into the final movement and how to choose the voices that would best carry them.
Meanwhile, word was spreading in Vienna that its most beloved composer was working on something wildly ambitious — his first symphony in a decade, and no ordinary symphony. But just as theater managers began vying for the premiere, Beethoven stunned everyone with the announcement that it was going to premiere in Berlin. He gave no reason. Viennese musicians took it as an affront — did he think they were too traditional to appreciate something so bold? He had been born in Germany, yes, but he had become himself in Austria. Surely, he owed the seedbed of his creative blossoming some measure of faith.
At the harsh peak of winter, Karoline Unger — the nineteen-year-old contralto Beethoven had already chosen to voice the deepest feeling-tones of his “Ode to Joy” — exhorted him to premiere his masterwork in Vienna. Writing in his Conversation Books — the notebooks through which the deaf composer communicated with the hearing world — she told him he had “too little self-confidence” in the Viennese public’s reception of his masterwork, urged him to go forward with the concert, then exclaimed: “O Obstinacy!”
Within a month, thirty of his most esteemed Austrian admirers — musicians and poets, composers and chamberlains — had co-written and signed an impassioned open letter to Beethoven, laced with patriotism and flattery, telling him that while his “name and creations belong to all contemporaneous humanity and every country which opens a susceptible bosom to art,” it is his artistic duty to complete the Austrian triad of Mozart and Haydn; imploring him not to entrust “the appreciation for the pure and eternally beautiful” to unworthy “foreign power” and to establish instead “a new sovereignty of the True and the Beautiful” in Vienna. The letter was hand-delivered to him by a court secretary who tutored the royal family.
Not even the most stubborn and single-minded artist is impervious to the sway of adulation. “It’s very beautiful, it makes me very happy!” The Viennese concert was on.
But Beethoven bent under the weight of his own expectations in a crippling combination of micro-managing and indecision. Eager to control every littlest detail to perfection, he committed to one theater, then changed his mind and committed to another, then it all became too much to bear — he cancelled the concert altogether.
After a monthlong tailspin, the finitude of time — concert season was almost over — pinned him to the still point of decision. He uncancelled the concert and, once again confounding everyone, signed with one of the underbidding imperial court theaters he had at first rejected.
The date was set for early May. He hand-picked the four soloists who would anchor the choir and assembled an orchestra dwarfing all convention: two dozen violins, two dozen wind instruments, a dozen cellos and basses, ten violas, and all that percussion.
It was to be not only a performance, not only a premiere, but something more — the emblem of a credo, musical and humanistic. The reception of the symphony would make or break the reception of the ideals behind it. Against this backdrop, it is slightly less shocking — but only slightly — that, in an astonishing final bid for total control of his creation, Beethoven demanded that he conduct the symphony himself.
Everyone knew he was deaf. Now they feared he was demented.
The theater, having won the coveted premiere, reluctantly conceded, fearing Beethoven might change his mind again if his demand went unmet, but persuaded him to have the original conductor onstage with him, with every assurance that he would only be there for backup. The conductor, meanwhile, instructed the choir and orchestra to follow only his motions and “pay no attention whatever to Beethoven’s beating of the time.” The best assurance even one of Beethoven’s closest friends — who later became his biographer — could muster was that the theater would be too dim for anyone to notice that Beethoven was conducting in his old green frock and not in the fashionable black coat a conductor was supposed to wear.
After two catastrophic rehearsals — the only two the enormous ensemble could manage in the brief time before the performance — the soloists railed that their parts were simply impossible to sing. Karoline Unger called him a “tyrant over all the vocal organs.” One of the two male soloists quit altogether and had to be replaced by a member of the choir who had memorized the part.
Somehow, the show went on.
On the early evening of May 7, 1824, the Viennese crowded into the concert hall — but they were not the usual patrons. Looking up to the royal box, Beethoven was crushed to see it empty. He had journeyed to the palace to personally invite the Emperor and Empress but, like most of the aristocracy, they had vanished into their country estate as soon as spring broke the harsh Austrian winter. He was going to be playing for the people. But it was the people, after all, that Schiller had yearned to vitalize with his poem.
Beethoven walked onto the grand stage, faced the orchestra, and raised his arms. Despite the natural imperfections of a performance built on such tensions, something shifted as soon as the music — exalted, sublime, total — rose above the individual lives and their individual strife, subsuming every body and every soul in a single harmonious transcendence.
After the final chord of “Ode to Joy” resounded, the gasping silence broke into a scream of applause. People leapt to their feet, waving their handkerchiefs and chanting his name. Beethoven, still facing the orchestra and still waving his arms to the delayed internal time of music only he could hear, noticed none of it, until Karoline Unger stood up, took his arm, and gently turned him around.
With the birth of photography still fifteen years of trial and triumph away, it is only in the mind’s eye that one can picture the cascade of confusion, disbelief, and elation that must have washed over Beethoven’s face in that sublime moment when his guiding sun seemed suddenly so proximate, almost blinding with triumph.
As soon as he faced the audience, the entire human mass erupted with not one, not two, not three, but four volcanic bursts of applause, until the Police Commissioner managed to yell “Silence!” over the fifth. These were still revolutionary times, after all, and art that roused so fierce a response in the human soul — even if that response was exultant joy — was dangerous art. Here, in the unassailable message of “Ode to Joy,” was a clarion call to humanity to discard all the false gods that had fueled a century of unremitting wars and millennia of inequality — the divisions of nation and rank, the oppressions of dogma and tradition — and band together in universal sympathy and solidarity.
The sound of Beethoven’s call resounded long after its creator was gone. Whitman celebrated it as the profoundest expression of nature and human nature. Helen Keller “heard” it with her hand pressed against the radio speaker and suddenly understood the meaning of music. Chilean protesters sang it as they took down the Pinochet dictatorship. Japanese musicians performed it after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Chinese students blasted it in Tiananmen Square. Leonard Bernstein, patron saint of music as an instrument of humanism, conducted a group of musicians who had lived on both sides of the Berlin Wall in a Christmas Day concert after its fall. Ukrainian composer Victoria Poleva reimagined it for an international concert commemorating the fiftieth anniversary. A decade later, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine performed her reimagining not long before a twenty-first century tyrant with a Napoleonic complex and a soul deaf to the music of life bludgeoned the small country with his lust for power.
But this, I suspect, was Beethoven’s stubborn, sacred point — the reason he never gave up on Schiller’s dream, even as he lived through nightmares: this unassailable insistence that although the Napoleons and Putins of the world will rise to power again and again over the centuries, they will also fall, because there is something in us more powerful as long as we continue placing freedom, justice, and universal happiness at the center of our commitment to life, even as we live through nightmares. Two centuries after Beethoven, Zadie Smith affirmed this elemental reality in her own life-honed conviction that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”
In the winter of my thirteenth year, two centuries after Beethoven’s day and a few fragile years after the fall of Bulgaria’s communist dictatorship, I stood in the holiday-bedazzled National Symphony Hall alongside a dozen classmates from the Sofia Mathematics Gymnasium, our choir about to perform Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” recently adopted as the anthem of Europe by the European Union, of which the newly liberated Bulgaria longed to be a part.
We sang the lyrics in Bulgarian, but “joy” has no direct translation. “Felicity” might come the closest, or “mirth” — those wing-clipped cousins of joy, bearing the same bright feeling-tone, but lacking its elation, its all-pervading exhale — a diminishment reflecting the spirit of a people just emerging from five centuries of Ottoman occupation closely followed by a half-century Communist dictatorship.
And yet we stood there in our best clothes, in the spring of life, singing together, our teenage minds abloom with quadratic equations and a lust for life, our teenage bodies reverberating with the redemptive dream of a visionary who had died epochs before any of our lives was but a glimmer in a great-great-grandparent’s eye, our teenage spirits longing to kiss the whole world with possibility.
Today, “Ode to Joy” — a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic from the year I was born — streams into my wireless headphones as I cross the Brooklyn Bridge on my bicycle, riding into a life undreamt in that teenage girl’s wildest dreams, into a world unimaginable to Beethoven, a world where suffering remains our constant companion but life is infinitely more possible for infinitely more people, and more kinds of people, than even the farthest seer of 1822 could have envisioned.
I ride into the spring night, singing. This, in the end, might be the truest translation of “joy” — this ecstatic fusion of presence and possibility.
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.
2026-08-04 04:27:30
To face the question of what makes us who we are with courage, lucidity, and fulness of feeling is to face, with all the restlessness and helplessness this stirs in the meaning-hungry soul, the elemental fact of our choicelessness in the conditions that lead to our existence.
That is what the Nobel-winning founding father of quantum mechanics Erwin Schrödinger (August 12, 1887–January 4, 1961) addresses in some exquisite passages from My View of the World (public library) — the slender, daring deathbed book containing two long essays penned on either side of his Nobel Prize, thirty-five years apart yet united by the unbroken thread of his uncommon mind unafraid of its own capacity for feeling, that vital capacity for living fully into the grandest open questions of existence.
Schrödinger opens with one swift, awe-striking defense of what scientists dismiss as metaphysics — a realm of knowledge that lies beyond the current scientific tools and modes of truth-extraction, which history attests always reveals more about the limitations of the tools than about the limits of nature’s truths. (Lest we forget, even so pure a form of physics as the hummingbird’s flight was long considered a metaphysical phenomenon — that is, a yet-unsolved phenomenon explained as magic — until science fermented the technology of photography to capture the mechanics of the process.) Echoing Hannah Arendt’s daring indictment that ceasing to ask unanswerable question would mean relinquishing “not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded,” Schrödinger writes:
It is relatively easy to sweep away the whole of metaphysics, as Kant did. The slightest puff in its direction blows it away, and what was needed was not so much a powerful pair of lungs to provide the blast, as a powerful dose of courage to turn it against so timelessly venerable a house of cards.
But you must not think that what has then been achieved is the actual elimination of metaphysics from the empirical content of human knowledge. In fact, if we cut out all metaphysics it will be found to be vastly more difficult, indeed probably quite impossible, to give any intelligible account of even the most circumscribed area of specialisation within any specialised science you please. Metaphysics includes, amongst other things — to take just one quite crude example — the unquestioning acceptance of a more-than-physical — that is, transcendental — significance in a large number of thin sheets of wood-pulp covered with black marks such as are now before you… A real elimination of metaphysics means taking the soul out of both art and science, turning them into skeletons incapable of any further development.
Even as he made his reality-reconfiguring contributions to science and its search for fundamental truth, Schrödinger never relinquished his passionate curiosity about philosophy and the ongoing questions of meaning that kernel every truth in the flesh of consciousness. He was as drawn to Spinoza and Schopenhauer as he was to the ancient Eastern traditions, and especially in their untrammeled common ground of panpsychism — one of the oldest and most notoriously misunderstood theoretical models of consciousness in relation to the universe.
A century after the pioneering Canadian philosopher, psychiatrist, and nature-explorer Richard Maurice Bucke drew inspiration from Whitman to develop his theory of cosmic consciousness, and a century before the emerging science of counterfactuals threw its gauntlet at our fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe, Schrödinger takes up the parallels between the discoveries of quantum physics and the core ideas of the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. In what might best be described as an existentialist prose-poem, he invites you to imagine yourself seated on a mountain bench at sunset, beholding a transcendent display of nature:
Facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-colour by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvellously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.
According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while — not long — you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you?
In a passage evocative of Whitman’s timeless lines from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” — “Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore… Others will see the islands large and small… A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them… I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence … Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt… Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd… What is it then between us?” — Schrödinger answers:
The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father… thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference — the difference between you and someone else — when objectively what is there is the same?
[…]
Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.
Once we fathom this fundamental reality of interbeing, Schrödinger observes, it becomes impossible to wish anything for ourselves that we do not wish for everyone else or to harm anyone else without harming ourselves:
It is the vision of this truth (of which the individual is seldom conscious in his actions) which underlies all morally valuable activity.
A decade later, in a lovely testament to Schrödinger’s insistence on the indivisibility of science and art in addressing those grandest unanswered question, Iris Murdoch — one of the vastest minds and finest literary artists of her time, and of all time — captured this elemental truth in her case for art as “an occasion for unselfing,” observing:
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.
Complement this fragment of Schrödinger’s My View of the World — a superb read in its slim totality — with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on selfhood, mortality, and what makes life worth living, then revisit Alan Watts — who introduced the Western mind to Vedanta and its consonance with “the new physics” of the quantum world — on the self, the universe, and becoming who we really are.
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.
2026-08-03 23:50:02
I lost my darling friend Emily Levine (October 23, 1944–February 3, 2019) just as Figuring, in which she rightly occupies the first line of the acknowledgements, was being released. The book would not have existed without her, nor would The Universe in Verse — several years earlier, Emily had swung open for me the doorway to the world of poetry in an incident of comical profundity emblematic of her singular and irreplaceable spirit, which I recounted with ample affection and no small dose of embarrassment about fifty minutes into the inaugural Universe in Verse.
After her terminal diagnosis in 2016, I began taking Emily on periodic getaways in nature. We called them poetry retreats — weekends of soaring, meandering conversation, inventive cooking (one instance involving a thallus of kelp collected at low tide, which we had used as a dog leash before dining on it), and delicious poetry-reading, which we recorded on a phone as tender mementos from these precious hours, not fully realizing in the moment the bittersweetness of the act.
This poem, originally published in The Sun in 2010, is the last poem Emily read at the last poetry retreat three weeks before she returned her stardust to the universe.
COLD SOLACE
by Anna Belle KaufmanWhen my mother died,
one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.
I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,
so it waited, pardoned,
in its ice cave behind the metal trays
for two more years.On my forty-first birthday
I chipped it out,
a rectangular resurrection,
hefted the dead weight in my palm.Before it thawed,
I sawed, with serrated knife,
the thinnest of slices —
Jewish Eucharist.The amber squares
with their translucent panes of walnuts
tasted — even toasted — of freezer,
of frost,
a raisined delicacy delivered up
from a deli in the underworld.I yearned to recall life, not death —
the still body in her pink nightgown on the bed,
how I lay in the shallow cradle of the scattered sheets
after they took it away,
inhaling her scent one last time.I close my eyes, savor a wafer of
sacred cake on my tongue and
try to taste my mother, to discern
the message she baked in these loaves
when she was too ill to eat them:I love you.
It will end.
Leave something of sweetness
and substance
in the mouth of the world.
Taste a little more of the raisined delicacy of Emily’s voice with her bittersweet reading of “You Can’t Have It All” — a buoy of a poem by Barbara Ras — then savor her extraordinary TED talk about learning to die.
Portrait by John Keatley
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.
2026-08-03 06:46:31
On a recent flight, I watched a mother across the aisle play peek-a-boo with her small son while next to me a grown man in a VR headset spent six hours ascending the levels of a video game. It occurred to me that what I was doing between them — reading — was also a game: a peek-a-boo of ideas advancing across levels of meaning. I thought of Newton, who reflected on his deathbed: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore.”
We play games with the mind and call them science, play games with the spirit and call them art, play games with the heart and mistake them for love. Life itself may be, in the end, a game — not a closed game, the goal of which is winning (for the goal of life is death), but an open game, the goal of which is playing.
So argues philosopher Bernard Suits (November 25, 1925–February 05, 2007) in his uncommonly original and intellectually daring 1978 book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (public library), exploring the elemental question of what makes a good life through a parable, that ancient form infinitely more effective than polemics, for parables, as Suits observes “ought to come at the end, not at the beginning, of serious inquiry; that is, only at the point where arguments fail.”
Drawing on Aesop’s famous parable about the price of improvidence, Suits subverts the premise to depict the Grasshopper not as a fool but as “a working Utopian whose time has not yet come” and who exemplifies “the life most worth living.” The Grasshopper’s vision of Utopia is the supreme antidote to the cult of achievement — a way of experiencing life not as striving but as a game, of exposing workaholism as “no more than a ruse for avoiding living up to your ideals.” Suits writes:
Prudential actions (e.g., those actions we ordinarily call work) are self-defeating in principle. For prudence may be defined as the disposition 1) to sacrifice something good (e.g., leisure) if and only if such sacrifice is necessary for obtaining something better (e.g., survival), and 2) to reduce the number of good things requiring sacrifice — ideally, at least — to zero. The ideal of prudence, therefore, like the ideal of preventive medicine, is its own extinction. For if it were the case that no sacrifices of goods needed ever to be made, then prudential actions would be pointless, indeed impossible. This principle, knowledge of which I regard as an indispensable first step on the path to wisdom, the ants seem never even to have entertained. The true Grasshopper sees that work is not self-justifying, and that his way of life is the final justification of any work whatever.
At the heart of Suits’s investigation of games is “the attempt to discover and formulate a definition, and to follow the implications of that discovery even when they lead in surprising, and sometimes disconcerting, directions,” and within it “the attempt to define games as illustrating par excellence the futility of attempting to define anything whatever.”
Against the definition of work as a “technical activity… in which an agent seeks to employ the most efficient available means for reaching a desired goal” Suits pits the defining characteristic of games:
Games are goal-directed activities in which inefficient means are intentionally chosen.
[…]
While it is possible in a technical action to break a rule without destroying the original end of the action, in games the reverse appears to be the case. If the rules are broken the original end becomes impossible of attainment, since one cannot (really) win the game unless one plays it, and one cannot (really) play the game unless one obeys the rules of the game. In a game I cannot disjoin the end, winning, from the rules in terms of which winning possesses its meaning. I can, of course, decide to cheat in order to gain the pot, but then I have changed my end from winning a game to gaining money.
The rules of a game, Suits observes, are accepted for the sake of the play they make possible — we choose to act within the limitations they impose in order to partake of the game. He offers a definition:
To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.
A game has four elements: the goal, the means of achieving the goal, the rules, and — crucially — what Suits calls the “lusory attitude”: the psychological orientation necessary for entering into the play, at the heart of which is an acceptance of the arbitrary rules the game imposes. He writes:
The attitude of the game player must be an element in game playing because there has to be an explanation of that curious state of affairs wherein one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end… In anything but a game the gratuitous introduction of unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end is regarded as a decidedly irrational thing to do, whereas in games it appears to be an absolutely essential thing to do.
He simplifies the definition further:
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Because the goal always precedes the attempt to pursue it, it is inherently “prelusory” and at the same time inherently related not only to the game but to life itself. Suits writes:
The prelusory goal of a game… can be described before, or independently of, any game of which it may be, or come to be, a part. In contrast, winning can be described only in terms of the game in which it figures, and winning may accordingly be called the lusory goal of a game. Finally, the goal of participating in the game is not, strictly speaking, a part of the game at all. It is simply one of the goals that people have, such as wealth, glory, or security. As such it may be called a lusory goal, but a lusory goal of life rather than of games.
Suits identifies three types of pseudo-players who can ruin the game for others: triflers, who recognize rules but not goals; cheats, who recognize goals but not rules, and spoilsports who recognize neither rules nor goals. The true player is one who recognizes both goals and rules — that is, one who enters the game with the lusory attitude and whose reward is not winning but playing.
And so we return to the Grasshopper and his choice, deadly in Aesop’s parable but existentially triumphant in Suits’s, of play over work as the means to the good life. Structured as a Socratic dialogue, the parable pits the Grasshopper against his critical disciple Skepticus, who counters the core argument by pointing out that “people are not, and do not want to be, wholly grasshoppers or wholly ants, but a combination of the two,” seeing that “labour is valuable because it permits us to play.” To this the Grasshopper responds:
The only argument against living the life of the Grasshopper arises from the contingent fact that at present one dies if one does not work. The answer to that argument is that my death is inevitable in any case. For if I am improvident in summer, then I will die in winter. And if I am provident in summer, then I will cease to be the Grasshopper, by definition. But I will be either provident or improvident in summer; there is no third alternative. Therefore, either I die or I cease to be the Grasshopper. But since I am just the Grasshopper, no more and no less, dying and ceasing to be the Grasshopper are one and the same thing for me. I cannot escape that logic or that fate… Everyone alive is really a Grasshopper… Everyone alive is in fact engaged in playing elaborate games, while at the same time believing themselves to be going about their ordinary affairs. Carpenters, believing themselves to be merely pursuing their trade, are really playing a game, and similarly with politicians, philosophers, lovers, murderers, thieves, and saints. Whatever occupation or activity you can think of, it is in reality a game.
Couple with how play made us and keeps us human, then revisit this almost unbearably wonderful poetic reimagining of Aesop’s famous fable.
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.
2026-08-03 03:39:46
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary in her seventy-seventh year as she looked back on a long and lush life to consider the central role of solitude in creativity.
A generation before her, recognizing that “works of art arise from an infinite aloneness,” Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) explored the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity in his stunning correspondence with the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul.
Posthumously published in German, these letters of uncommonly penetrating insight into the essence of art and love — that is, the essence of life — now come alive afresh as Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary (public library) by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows: two women who have lived into the far reaches of life — Macy was ninety-one at the time of the translation and Barrows seventy-three — and who have spent a quarter century thinking deeply about what makes life worth living in translating together the works of a long-ago man who barely survived to fifty and who was still in his twenties when he composed these letters of tender and timeless lucidity.
Anticipating the illuminations of twentieth-century psychology about why a childhood capacity for “fertile solitude” is essential for creativity, self-esteem, and healthy relationships later in life, Rilke writes to his young correspondent in the short, dark, lonesome days just before the winter holidays:
What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.
Echoing Kierkegaard’s ever-timely insistence that “of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems… to be busy” and Emerson’s observation that “our hurry & embarrassment look ridiculous” the moment we pause the headlong rush of sociality through which we try to escape from ourselves, Rilke adds:
If one day one grasps that their busyness is pathetic, their occupations frozen and disconnected from life, why then not continue to see like a child, see it as strange, see it out of the depth of one’s own world, the vastness of one’s own solitude, which is, in itself, work and status and vocation?
And yet the crucial, exquisite creative tension that Rilke so singularly harmonizes is the essential interplay between solitude and love — each enriching the other, each magnifying the totality of the spirit from which all art springs. In another letter penned the following spring, he writes:
Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.
To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.
Two decades before Kahlil Gibran offered his abiding poetic wisdom on the difficult balance of intimacy and independence in true love, Rilke calls for shedding the ideological shackles of our culture’s conception of love as a melding of entities. “No human experience is so rife with conventions as this,” he observes with an eye to those who have not yet befriended their sovereign solitude and instead “act from mutual helplessness” to “simply surrender to love as an escape from loneliness.” He offers the liberating alternative that still requires as much countercultural courage in our day as it did in his:
To love is not about merging. It is a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. It is a great, immodest call that singles out a person and summons them beyond all boundaries. Only in this sense may we use the love that has been given us. This is humanity’s task, for which we are still barely ready.
[…]
This more human love (endlessly considerate and light and good and clear, consummated by holding close and letting go) will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare — the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.
In another letter, Rilke adds the complexity of physical intimacy to this realm of transcendent difficulty, formulating his advice on how to best harness eros as a creative force:
Yes, sex is hard. But anything expected of us is hard. Almost everything that matters is hard, and everything matters… Come to your own relationship to sex, free of custom and convention. Then you need not fear to lose yourself and become unworthy of your better nature.
Sexual pleasure is a sensory experience, no different from pure seeing or pure touch, like the taste of a fruit. It is a great, endless experience given to us, a natural part of knowing our world, of the fullness and brilliance of every knowing. And nothing we receive is wrong. What’s wrong is to misuse and spoil this experience and to use it to excite the exhausted aspects of our lives, to dissipate rather than connect.
Long before scientists shed light on how the sexuality of early flora and fauna gave our planet its beauty, Rilke adds:
Seeing the beauty in animals and plants is a form of love and longing; and we can see the animal, as we see the plant, patient and willing to come together and increase — not out of physical lust, not out of suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than lust and suffering and more powerful than will and resistance.
Oh that humans might humbly receive and earnestly bear this mystery that fills the earth down to the smallest thing, and feel it as part of life’s travail, instead of taking it lightly. If they could only be respectful of this fertility, which is undivided, whether in spiritual or physical form. For this spiritual creativity stems from the physical, derives from that erotic essence, and is but an airier, more delightful, more eternal iteration of its lush sensuality.
So too with the role of the erotic in creative work:
The art of creating is nothing without the vast ongoing participation and collaboration of the real world, nothing without the thousandfold harmonizing of things and beings; and the creator’s pleasure is thereby inexpressibly rich because it contains memories of the begetting and bearing of millions. In a single creative thought dwell a thousand forgotten nights of love, which infuse it with immensity. And those who come together in the night, locked in thrusting desire, are gathering nectar, generating power and sweetness for some future poetic utterance that will sing the rapture.
For more of and about this ravishing new translation of Letters to a Young Poet — one which embodies the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s notion of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original,” and the finest such miracle performed on a classic since Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist translation of the Tao Te Ching — savor this On Being conversation with Macy and Barrows about the wider resonances of Rilke’s work in our world, then revisit Rilke’s contemporary Hermann Hesse on solitude and the courage to find yourself, physicist Brian Greene’s Rilkean reflection on how to live with our human vulnerabilities, and Rilke himself on what it takes to be an artist.
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.
2026-08-03 00:35:00
In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying reality — it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where joy and hope are equally valid ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted with the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the frightful stories we tell ourselves and are told about it.
Having lost his mother to suicide, having lived through two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) devoted his life and his art to creating such a parallel world of enchantment.
In a 1947 interview included in his Selected Writings (public library) — the first release of Magritte’s manifestos, interviews, and other prose in English, thanks to the heroic efforts of scholar Kathleen Rooney — he reflects:
Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy for the eyes and the mind. It is much easier to terrorize than to charm… I live in a very unpleasant world because of its routine ugliness. That’s why my painting is a battle, or rather a counter-offensive.
Magritte revisits the subject in his manifesto Surrealism in the Sunshine, indicting the cultural tyranny of pessimism and fear-mongering — a worldview we have been sold under the toxic premise that if we focus on the worst of reality, we are seeing it more clearly and would be prepared to protect ourselves from its devastations. A quarter century before the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm insisted that “pessimism [is] an alienated form of despair,” Magritte writes:
We think that if life is seen in a tragic light it is seen more clearly, and that we are then in touch with the mystery of existence. We even believe that we can reach objectivity thanks to this revelation. The greater the terror, the greater the objectivity.
This notion is the result of philosophies (materialist or idealist), that claim that the real world is knowable, that matter is of the same essence as mind, since the perfect mind would no longer be distinct from the matter it explains and would thus deny it. The man on the street is unknowingly in harmony with this idea: he thinks there is a mystery, he thinks he must live and suffer and that the very meaning of life is that it is a dream-nightmare.
In his art and the worldview from which it springs, Magritte presents an antidote to this warped thinking — a backdoor out of our elective suffering. An epoch before we began to understand the neurophysiology of enchantment, he echoes his contemporary Egon Schiele’s exhortation to “envy those who see beauty in everything in the world,” and writes:
Our mental universe (which contains all we know, feel or are afraid of in the real world we live in) may be enchanting, happy, tragic, comic, etc.
We are capable of transforming it and giving it a charm which makes life more valuable. More valuable since life becomes more joyful, thanks to the extraordinary effort needed to create this charm.
Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is “the truth”, that this terror is knowledge of the “extra-mental” world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.
Creating enchantment is an effective means of counteracting this depressing, banal habit.
[…]
We must go in search of enchantment.
Complement with Viktor Frankl on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Walt Whitman on optimism as a force of resistance, then revisit Rebecca Solnit on hope in dark times.
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.