2026-02-14 19:56:57
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal.
I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits across the sky of my mind:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
This, of course, is what life evolved to be — an aria of affirmation rising like luminous steam from the cold dark silence of an indifferent cosmos that will one day swallow all of it. Every living thing is its singer and its steward — something the poetic paleontologist Loren Eiseley captures with uncommon poignancy in his 1957 essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” found in his altogether magnificent posthumous collection The Star Thrower (public library).
Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:
Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death. And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.
Couple with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, then revisit Loren Eiseley on the warblers and the wonder of being.
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.
2026-02-14 19:55:00
“If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance,” Alan Watts wrote in his 1951 meditation on how we wrest meaning from reality. But if to dance or not to dance is the central question of existence, are both choices endowed with equal validity, dignity, and moral courage?
Not so, argued Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) a decade earlier in The Myth of Sisyphus (public library), which begins with what has become one of the most famous opening sentences in literature and one of the most profound accomplishments of philosophy.
A decade and a half before becoming the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for the “clear-sighted earnestness” with which he “illuminates the problems of the human conscience,” 28-year-old Camus writes:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
Camus, whose entire sensibility was predicated on the notion that our search for meaning and happiness is a moral obligation, argues that this elemental question — a question, to be clear, posed as a philosophical thought experiment and not in the context of mental health in a medical sense — must be judged “by the actions it entails.” He writes:
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
In a sentiment that Carl Sagan would come to echo nearly half a century later in his increasingly necessary case for mastering the vital balance of skepticism and openness, Camus considers how we might go about answering that ultimate question:
On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.
That the answer should necessitate such contradictory orientations of mind and spirit, Camus argues, is simply a reflection of the fact that contradiction — or, rather, complementarity — is the essence of the question itself:
A priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer “no” act as if they thought “yes.” As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think “yes” in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have never been so keen as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable.
In a testament to his lifelong conviction that we have in us the ability to overcome even the most difficult conditions, Camus considers our irrepressible creaturely will to live:
In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
In this sense, he argues, the act of choosing nonexistence over existence requires a willingness for absurdity:
One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth — yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide — this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an “objective” mind can always introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion. It calls simply for an unjust — in other words, logical — thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
[…]
At that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself.
Camus examines the layered emotional realities out of which these considerations arise in the first place:
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying… Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe — in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.
[…]
A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume.
In a sentiment of piercing relevance to our golden age of productivity, where we vacate our own lives under the spell of busyness, Camus considers how the sense of meaninglessness sets in as we find ourselves in an existential hamster wheel of our own making:
One day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins” — this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.
Echoing his previous assertion that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Camus writes:
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: “What would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.” Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
He turns to the ultimate answer to this ultimate question
I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death — and I refuse suicide… Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so.
[…]
But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.
Complement the indispensable The Myth of Sisyphus with Camus on strength of character, the art of awareness, what it means to be a rebel, happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, and his moving correspondence with Boris Pasternak, then revisit Galway Kinnell’s beautiful and life-giving poem for a young friend contemplating suicide.
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.
2026-02-14 19:54:32
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly paradoxical about such an appeal to reason in the notion that we can exercise prudence in matters of love — to have loved is to have known the straitjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.
How to heed Augustine’s caution, not by subjugating but by better understanding our experience of love, is what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in her least known but in many ways most beautiful work, Love and Saint Augustine (public library) — Arendt’s first book-length manuscript and the last to be published in English, posthumously salvaged from her papers by political scientist Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosopher Judith Chelius Stark.
For half a century after she wrote it as her doctoral thesis in 1929 — a time when this apostle of reason, who would become one of the twentieth century’s keenest and most coolly analytical minds, was composing her fiery love letters to Martin Heidegger — Arendt obsessively revised and annotated the manuscript. Against Augustine’s whetstone, she came to hone her core philosophical ideas — chiefly the troublesome disconnect she saw between philosophy and politics as evidenced by the rise of ideologies like totalitarianism, the origins of which she so memorably and incisively examined. It was from Augustine that she borrowed the phrase amor mundi — “love of the world” — which would become a defining feature of her philosophy. Occupied by questions of why we succumb to and normalize evil, Arendt identified as the root of tyranny the act of making other human beings irrelevant. Again and again, she returned to Augustine for the antidote: love.
But while this ancient notion of neighborly love, which would come to inspire Martin Luther King, Jr., was central to Arendt’s philosophical concern and her interest in Augustine, its political significance is inseparable from the deepest wellspring of love: the personal. For all of the political and philosophical wisdom she draws from it, Augustine’s Confessions is animated by his experience of personal love — that eternal force that governs the Sun and the Moon and the stars of our interior lives, reflected and codified in our cultural and social structures.
With an eye to Augustine’s conception of love as “a kind of craving” — the Latin appetitus, from which the word appetite is derived — and his assertion that “to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” Arendt considers this directional desire propelling love:
Every craving is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves. For, as Augustine writes, love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” What determines the motion of desire is always previously given. Our craving aims at a world we know; it does not discover anything new. The thing we know and desire is a “good,” otherwise we would not seek it for its own sake. All the goods we desire in our questing love are independent objects, unrelated to other objects. Each of them represents nothing but its isolated goodness. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing. As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of “aiming at” and “referring back to.” It refers back to the individual who knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires. Craving, or love, is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy, that is, of gaining possession of what is most his own.
That is why a generous and unpossessive love — a love undiminished by the failure to attain the good for which it craves — can seem like a feat nothing short of superhuman. (“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me,” Arendt’s good friend and great admirer W.H. Auden wrote in his sublime ode to that superhuman triumph of the heart.) But a love predicated on possession, Arendt cautions, inevitably turns into fear — the fear of losing what was gained. Two millennia after Epictetus offered his cure for heartbreak in the acceptance that all things are perishable and therefore even love ought to be held with the loose fingers of nonattachment, Arendt — who notes Augustine’s debt to the Stoics — writes:
So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.
Half a century after Tolstoy admonished that “future love does not exist [for] love is a present activity only,” Arendt adds:
The present is not determined by the future as such… but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future, and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good, and even more in being sure of not losing it. Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss. However, for Augustine the happiness of having is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing. The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.
Death, of course, is the ultimate loss — of love as well as life — and therefore the ultimate object of our future-oriented dread. And yet this escape from presence via the portal of anxiety — perhaps the commonest malady to which human beings are susceptible — is itself a living death. Arendt writes:
In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains.
Against this background of negative space, Arendt casts the shape of love’s ultimate object according to Augustine:
Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear.
In a sentiment that illuminates the central mechanism by which frustration fuels (temporary) satisfaction in romantic love, she adds:
A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.
If presence — the removal of expectancy — is a prerequisite for a true experience of love, then time is the elemental infrastructure of love. Nearly half a century later, in becoming the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures in the 85-year history of the series, Arendt would make this notion of time as the locus of our thinking ego a centerpiece of her landmark lecture, The Life of the Mind. Now, quoting from Augustine’s writings, she considers the paradox of love beyond time for creatures as temporal as we are:
Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?
Time exists only insofar as it can be measured, and the yardstick by which we measure it is space.
For Augustine, she notes, memory is the space in which time is measured and cached:
Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
One of the major themes I explore in Figuring is this question of the temporality of even our lushest experiences. “The union of two natures for a time is so great,” Margaret Fuller — one of my key figures — wrote. Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity. Fuller’s exclamation upon seeing the paintings of Correggio for the first time, overcome with beauty she had not known before, radiates a larger truth about the human heart: “Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.”
Arendt locates this fundamental fact of the heart in Augustine’s writings. A century after Kierkegaard asserted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” she observes:
The Now is what measures time backwards and forwards, because the Now, strictly speaking, is not time but outside time. In the Now, past and future meet. For a fleeting moment they are simultaneous so that they can be stored up by memory, which remembers things past and holds the expectation of things to come. For a fleeting moment (the temporal Now) it is as though time stands still, and it is this Now that becomes Augustine’s model of eternity.
Augustine himself captures this transcendent temporality:
Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable… but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.
Arendt hones in on the heart of the paradox:
What prevents man from “living” in the timeless present is life itself, which never “stands still.” The good for which love craves lies beyond all mere desires. If it were merely a question of desiring, all desires would end in fear. And since whatever confronts life from the outside as the object of its craving is sought for life’s sake (a life we are going to lose), the ultimate object of all desires is life itself. Life is the good we ought to seek, namely true life.
She returns to desire, which simultaneously takes us out of life and plunges us into it:
Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it… Since man is not self-sufficient and therefore always desires something outside himself, the question of who he is can only be resolved by the object of his desire and not, as the Stoics thought, by the suppression of the impulse of desire itself: “Such is each as is his love” [Augustine wrote]. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody.
[…]
Man as such, his essence, cannot be defined because he always desires to belong to something outside himself and changes accordingly… If he could be said to have an essential nature at all, it would be lack of self-sufficiency. Hence, he is driven to break out of his isolation by means of love… for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging. Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being.
It is stunning to trace the line of these ideas across the life of Arendt’s mind. Decades after her doctoral days, she would compose her influential treatise on how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression — totalitarianism, in other words, is not only the denial of love but an assault on the essence of human beings.
In the remainder of Love and Saint Augustine, Arendt goes on to examine Augustine’s hierarchy of love, the psychological structure of craving, the perils of anticipation, and the building blocks of that “love of the world” so vital to a harmonious life and a harmonious society. Couple it with Elizabeth Barrett Browning on happiness as a moral obligation, then revisit Arendt on action and the pursuit of happiness, lying in politics, the power of being an outsider, and the difference between how art and science illuminate the human condition.
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.
2026-02-14 07:38:17
We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).
“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”
Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age (public library).
Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:
Old age is not a necessary end to human life.
[…]
A particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals — women in ancient China, for instance — it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it… The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.
And indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, she cautions, is not a project — not something one can endeavor to do industriously, to ace. It is a fact — something to be met on its own terms, something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control for surrender.
She writes:
Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope and the artist’s task to liberate the present from the past.
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.
2026-02-14 06:30:33
A version of this essay appears in the final chapters of Figuring.
As if classifying platonic relationships weren’t complex enough a task — one that requires a taxonomy of friendship types — what happens when the platonic and the romantic begin to blur? In an exquisite love letter, Sartre spoke of “turning abruptly from friendship to love.” And yet what if friendship and love weren’t opposite points between which to pivot but loci that overlap in varying degrees? Under the Romantic ideal of love, we have come to expect that every great romance should also contain within itself, in addition to erotic passion, a robust friendship. But we hold with deep suspicion the opposite — a platonic friendship colored with the emotional hues of romantic love, never given physical form but always aglow with an intensity artificially dimmed by the label of plain friendship. Perhaps we need not label these kaleidoscopic emotional universes after all; perhaps resisting the urge to classify and contain is the only way to do justice to their iridescent richness of sentiment and feeling.
A heartening testament to that possibility comes from the life of the pathbreaking marine biologist, conservationist, naturalist, and wonder-wielder Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964), who has contributed more than any other person to awakening the modern environmental consciousness — her 1962 book Silent Spring, published eighteen months before her life was cut short, led to the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and sparked the environmental movement as we know it today.
But beneath Carson’s blazing intellect and her protective affection for the natural world lay an interior world as rich and passionate, animated by the same intensity of intelligent love.
In late 1952, just before Carson moved to Maine’s Southport Island with her mother, a local housewife named Dorothy Freeman wrote her a warm letter welcoming her to the close-knit island community. (Carson was already a famous author — her 1951 book The Sea Around Us had broken records by remaining on best-seller lists for eighteen months.) Their correspondence blossomed into a fast friendship aglow with anticipation of their first in-person meeting.
On December 30, 1953, Rachel visited the Freemans’ home and stayed for a night. “Reality can so easily fall short of hopes and expectations, especially where they have been high,” she wrote to Dorothy as soon as she returned home. “My dear one, there is not a single thing about you that I would change if I could!” She enclosed a Keats verse — “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: / its loveliness increases; it will never / pass into nothingness; but still will keep / a bower quiet for us, and a sleep / full of sweet dreams.” — and added:
I am certain, my dearest, that it will be forever a joy, of increasing loveliness with the years, and that in the intervals when being separated, we cannot have all the happiness of Wednesday, there will be, in each of our hearts, a little oasis of peace and ‘sweet dreams’ where the other is.
Dorothy was married and devoted to her husband, but she soon took on unparalleled centrality in Rachel’s life. Although their relationship was mostly epistolary, it grew replete with such intense tenderness and was articulated in such romantic language that the label “friendship” fails to contain it — Rachel addressed Dorothy as “darling,” often “my very own darling.” The closing sentiment of a letter penned in February of 1954 — “Darling — always and always — I love you so dearly” — was typical of their mutual tenderness. In another letter planning their first visit since that initial meeting, Rachel exhales: “But, oh darling, I want to be with you so terribly that it hurts!”
And yet their relationship was never a secret. Dorothy shared their letters with her husband, to which Rachel responded with sincere gladness:
How dear of him to say what he did. Perhaps this is the final little touch of the perfection in the whole episode… It means so very much to me to know that you have such an understanding, loving and wonderful husband… I want him to know what you mean to me.
For the remaining twelve years of Rachel Carson’s life, it was Dorothy’s love and daily devotion that warded off the scientist’s aching loneliness and her struggles with depression, fomented her creative and intellectual imagination, and nourished her visionary spirit as she gave form to some of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century in her writing. In early February of 1954, she articulated Dorothy’s centrality in her world in an immeasurably beautiful letter, found in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952–1964 (public library):
I don’t suppose anyone really knows how a creative writer works (he or she least of all, perhaps!) or what sort of nourishment his spirit must have. All I am certain of is this; that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort, recognizing the heartache, the great weariness of mind and body, the occasional black despair it may involve — someone who cherishes me and what I am trying to create… The few who understood the creative problem were not people to whom I felt emotionally close; those who loved the non-writer part of me did not, by some strange paradox, understand the writer at all! And then, my dear one, you came into my life! … I knew when I first saw you that I wanted to see much more of you — I loved you before you left Southport — and very early in our correspondence last fall I began to sense that capacity to enter so fully into the intellectual and creative parts of my life as well as to be a dearly loved friend. And day by day all that I sensed in you has been fulfilled, but even more wonderfully than I could have dreamed…
I feel such a joyous surge of wonder every time I stop to think how in such a dark time and when I least expected it, something so lovely and richly satisfying came into my life.
This letter was intended as an answer to one penned a few days earlier, in which Dorothy had contemplated their relationship and asked Rachel in transcendent astonishment: “Don’t you ever marvel at yourself, finding yourself in such an overpowering emotional experience?” A week later, Rachel revisited the question and offered an even more direct answer:
I have wondered since … whether I may have forgotten to make it clear that — besides all the intellectual satisfaction I perhaps dwelt on at great length — it truly is for me, as for you, “an overpowering emotional experience.” If I didn’t, I think I can now trust that your heart knows it. I was thinking today, with what depth of gratitude I hope you know, how wonderfully sustaining is the assurance of your constant, day-and-night devotion and concern. Without it, I truly don’t know what I would be doing now, when there are a good many otherwise dark days.
Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of their relationship was its deep mutuality and the enormous generosity of spirit with which each beheld the other. With a grateful eye to the immensity of what Freeman is contributing to her life, Rachel wonders what she is contributing to Dorothy’s in turn:
Since one of the things about you that impressed me from the beginning was the lovely quality of your family life, I knew … that it was not lack of love. No one could be with you and Stan even a short time without realizing how devoted and congenial you are. And I wonder whether the very fact that you have experienced, and have yourself poured out, so much love, has not made you all the more receptive to the devotion offered by this newcomer in your life. You wrote so beautifully, weeks ago, of how one’s capacity to give love grows with the exercise of it, so perhaps the more love we have received, the more we are able to absorb and in that sense no one ever has enough. And I do know that the facts that we are, to an incredible degree “kindred spirits,” and that for many reasons we need all that we mean to each other, probably lie at the heart of our love. But the more I think about all we both have said, the more I feel that there is something that perhaps will always remain elusive and intangible — that the whole is something more than the sum of the various “reasons.” Henry Beston [one of Carson’s favorite authors and heroes, who had recently reviewed her book Under the Sea-Wind] says in the review I’m sending you today: “the sun — is always more than a gigantic mass of ions, it is a splendor and a mystery, a force and a divinity, it is life and the symbol of life.” Our analysis has been beautiful and comforting and satisfying, but probably it will never be quite complete — never encompass the whole “splendor and mystery.”
This “splendor and mystery” continued to unfold and expand between them, growing only richer with time. Two years later, Rachel writes to Dorothy:
My own darling,
For your birthday, this is to tell you — as if you didn’t know — how dearly and tenderly I love you. You have come to occupy a place in my life that no one else could fill, and it is strange now to contemplate all the empty years when you weren’t there. But perhaps we shouldn’t regret those years — perhaps instead we should just give ourselves over to wonder and gratitude that a friendship so satisfying and so full of joy and beauty could come to each of us in the middle years — when, perhaps, we needed it most!
[…]
Darling, do you know how wonderful it is to have you? I hope you do.
I love you.
Rachel
In the spring of 1960, just as she was finishing the draft of the two chapters in Silent Spring dealing with the carcinogenic effects of chemicals, Rachel Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer. By December, despite surgery, it had metastasized. She continued to work tirelessly on the book and other projects through increasingly debilitating illness.
In September of 1963, shortly after her testimony before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee became instrumental in the first regulatory policies on pesticides, she wrote a stunning letter to Dorothy. It contained a contemplation of her own mortality so profound, so poignant, so tenderhearted and transcendent that it could only be articulated to the person who knew her heart most intimately. She writes:
Dear One,
This is a postscript to our morning at Newagen, something I think I can write better than say. For me it was one of the loveliest of the summer’s hours, and all the details will remain in my memory: that blue September sky, the sounds of the wind in the spruces and surf on the rocks, the gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace, the distant views of Griffiths Head and Todd Point, today so clearly etched, though once half seen in swirling fog. But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.
But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly — for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.
For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.
That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it — so I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning.
Rachel
In another letter written three months before her death but delivered posthumously, she revisits the subject of her mortality from the perspective of her relationship with Dorothy, the great gift of her life:
Darling,
[…]
When I think back to the many farewells that have marked the decade (almost) of our friendship, I realize they have almost been inarticulate. I remember chiefly the great welling up of thoughts that somehow didn’t get put into words — the silences heavy with things unsaid. But then, we knew or hoped, there was always another chance — and always the letters to fill the gaps.
With a lucid and almost shockingly serene awareness of her imminent mortality, she adds:
I have had a rich life, full of rewards and satisfactions that come to few and if it must end now, I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wished to do. That wouldn’t have been true two years ago, when I first realized my time was short, and I am so grateful to have had this extra time.
My regrets, darling, are for your sadness, for leaving Roger [the eleven-year-old orphan son of Carson’s niece, whom she had adopted], when I so wanted to see him through manhood, for dear Jeffie [Carson’s cat] whose life is linked to mine.
[…]
But enough of that. What I want to write of is the joy and fun and gladness we have shared — for these are the things I want you to remember — I want to live on in your memories of happiness. I shall write more of those things. But tonight I’m weary and must put out the light. Meanwhile, there is this word — and my love will always live.
Rachel
In her final letter, written as Freeman was en route to a deathbed visit but only delivered two weeks after Rachel Carson’s death, she writes:
My darling,
You are starting on your way to me in the morning, but I have such a strange feeling that I may not be here when you come — so this is just an extra little note of farewell, should that happen. There have been many pains (heart) in the past few days, and I’m weary in every bone. And tonight there is something strange about my vision, which may mean nothing. But of course I thought, what if I can’t write — can’t see to write — tomorrow? So, a word before I turn out the light.
[…]
Darling — if the heart does take me off suddenly, just know how much easier it would be for me that way. But I do grieve to leave my dear ones. As for me, however, it is quite all right. Not long ago I sat late in my study and played Beethoven, and achieved a feeling of real peace and even happiness.
Never forget, dear one, how deeply I have loved you all these years.
Rachel
Always, Rachel is an achingly transcendent read in its entirety. Complement this particularly poignant portion with Oliver Sacks on the measure of living and the dignity of dying, then revisit Carson on why it is more important to feel than to know.
UPDATE: Carson — her epoch-making cultural contribution as a scientist, and the courage to love outside society’s predetermined boxes that sprang from the same unusual source as her visionary science — is the crowning and closing figure in my book Figuring.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2026-02-13 23:37:42
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Bertrand Russell counseled in his timeless advice on how to grow old. There is a lovely symmetry between this orientation to the winter of life and the natural state of its springtime — in youth, curiosity unfurls centripetally from the self to the world, touching more and more facets of it with that electric jolt of discovery when everything is new and interesting and dazzling with delight.
How to harness youth’s centripetal curiosity as a creative force for bettering the world is what Nick Cave — himself an insightful reckoner with the art of growing older — explores in answering a 13-year-old boy’s question about how to live a full, creative, actualized, spiritually rich life in “a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect.”
In consonance with W.E.B. Du Bois’s advice to his teenage daughter and with David Bowie’s idea of perfect happiness, Cave writes:
Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.
This openhearted curiosity, this aura of astonishment, becomes an antidote to the spiritual poison most corrosive to the world — cynicism, that supreme enemy of hope. At any stage of life, the refusal to succumb to cynicism is among our greatest triumphs of the spirit. It is certainly our mightiest force of courage and resistance to the cowardly denouncements of possibility that pock the countenance of humanity.
Cave’s urgent words to the boy speak to the tender, hopeful, openhearted child in each of us — for, in the plainest existential sense, we are daily beginners at life:
Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world.
Complement with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s advice on life and Rebecca Solnit’s lovely letter to children about the value of reading, then revisit Nick Cave on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, 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.