2025-05-31 09:57:06
“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.
A river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood.
This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? (public library) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive.
Extending an invitation to “imagine water otherwise” — and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise — he writes:
For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.
With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s vivifying notion of a “grammar of animacy,” he adds:
A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.
As he travels the world to meet various rivers, he encounters and learns from their various defenders — an Indian teenage runaway from an abusive home turned steward and healer of all life, animated by a sense of equal kinship with millipede and mongoose and banyan tree; a “Chilean-Italian-British biologist-campaigner-filmmaker” covered in tattoos who is a kind of medium of mycology, sensing fungi by seemingly superhuman powers; an Innu poet and activist of slight build, decisive gestures, and oracular observations; an old friend with “a steel-trap intellect and a frankly supernatural memory,” capable of reciting a 400-line poem read in a newspaper twenty years earlier, “Leibniz in a hoodie, Pliny in sneakers.” They are all people who have chosen to give more the more they have lost, each of them fiercely devoted to their work of public service while navigating profound private sorrows and violations — the untimely death of a sister, the unjust death of a father, the plundering of a heritage, a room in the heart filled with clay where a beloved friend once lived.
With each encounter and experience, new questions quicken, deepen, ferment in Robert’s mind:
Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure.
These are serious questions, hard questions, but they rise from the page haloed with tenderness, with spaciousness, with humor. Recounting his conversation with the young man in Chennai about death, lensed through the opening line of The Epic of Gilgamesh, he writes:
Yuvan is silent for a while. Then he says: ‘There has been, I think, a narrowing of relatedness.’
I cannot tell if he is speaking of his sister’s death, or some vaster attenuation, or both.
‘To be is to be related,’ he says. ‘We must hugely widen the space of relations.’
He points skywards, out over the ocean. ‘The Pleiades. They’re my favourite constellation. It’s an open system, you see. Usually when stars form they do so in a globular cluster – there’s a main centre, and then smaller stars around. That’s how gravity works. But the Pleiades, well, the cluster has seven sisters and a weak centre, so it’s not concentrated around one point. It’s a differently political star system.’
I laugh. ‘An anti-hierarchical feminist assemblage?’
‘Exactly!’
This growing, glowing sense of relatedness builds upon itself, so that eventually everything comes to mirror everything else, to elucidate and illuminate the glimmering threads of consanguinity and kinship that hold the web of life together.
And then there are the rivers themselves, rendered in prose so incandescent it leaves you lit up for the inside, the world shimmering in the golden beam of this vast and generous mind.
Kayaking down Quebec’s Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, and into the lake it feeds, he casts the enchantment cast upon him:
Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. House-sized boulders on the banks; time-falls from the rock faces above. Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls. Seen from above, from this height, the river appears static, and has the texture of impasto, gouache, as if smeared into place by a palette knife.
[…]
The vastness of scale is defeating to my English imagination, though. None of the metrics make sense. This lake’s length is the same distance as that between my home in Cambridge and central London. It holds a billion litres. It would take a year to drain. It holds a water-year.
[…]
We paddle all afternoon. As dusk approaches, we are all tiring. It is one of the tougher days I have known, physically speaking: a 4 a.m. start, then some twenty miles over flat water. Yet we seem barely to have moved within the vastness of the lake and its self-repeating patterns.
The high sky steadily fades to milk at its edges, blue in its arches, soot at its summit. The air close to us greys, then charcoals.
Life, in all its fragility and tenacity, comes fully alive as Robert finds himself a body in the body of a world both beautiful and brutal, insentient to the fate of any individual yet animated by a vast sentience that excludes nothing and holds in its broad open palm the destiny of everything:
The precipitous west coast of the lake, along which we are skirting, offers little hospitality. Vast scree-slopes fan beneath shattered cliffs, their run-outs rubbled with giant blocks that tumble down to the shoreline and into the lake… We paddle on.
Dark is falling. Wayne is far behind me now, invisible in the shadows. He is struggling. My own arms feel numb with use. I don’t know if I can make the next few miles… Then we round a promontory of rock and enter a new world.
Here, three-hundred-foot-high cliffs rise vertically from the water. They are thylacine-striped in rust and black, and lightning-struck by quartzite.
The wind suddenly drops to utter stillness. Water is sleek and calm as oil. Air is shocking in its silence after the day-long roar of the gale. The dusk is huge.
I follow the line of the cliffs, keeping thirty feet or so out into the lake in case of rockfall. The water now seems molasses-thick and black as treacle. My paddle stirs it into spirals. The water-whispers of my blade echo back at me from the cliff walls.
I feel the uncanny tranquillity that comes from a tired body and a tired mind. I feel I could paddle on into this never-ending dusk for ever.
It is often when the mind tires that it loosens its grip on those habitual ways of perceiving that keep us from truly seeing, that make us mistak the parts attention sieves as salient for the whole. Through extreme pain and fatigue, through a near-death experience amid the rapids, Robert is ejected from the cerebral into the creaturely and through it thrust into the transcendent:
Fifty yards ahead of me, the water is gold, and it is gold for as far as I can see down the lake. Just the light, surely? No, it can’t be the light, for the band of gold doesn’t correspond to the morning sun’s border with shadow.
I reach the band, pass into it and understand.
The gold is pollen. Billions and billions of pollen grains which have been knocked from the trees by the big southerly overnight and then blown out onto the water to form this gold-dust surface. Not light, then, but life.
[…]
Far above, the ongoing helical collision of the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies, which began 4.5 billion years ago, spreads across the dark sky like pollen on water.
He finds himself spun into the vortex of the question:
It’s the crux that needs solving… Not “Who speaks for the river?” but “What does the river say?” These are two distinct questions. And while it’s relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.
To this I would add a third: Who is listening to the river speak? To speak is to sound a personhood through to another. There is always a gorge between what is said and what is heard, because there is always an abyss between one person and another. The listener is implicated in the spoken, but can only explicate what is heard filtered through their particular consciousness, their singular experience of being alive. It is therefore no small task to be a skilled listener, which always means being a loving listener. Here is a virtuosic listener channeling what the river says to him so that we too may hear the song of life more clearly:
This is a place where ghost-realms of times past and future overlap with one another, each transparent to the other, and I try to peer right and left into these laminar worlds but the river-mouth and its river-voices hold me in this one here and the river’s tongue now is the tongue of tongues, and the river’s song is the song of songs, slipshifting and shapesliding and veering, sung in spirals and stars and roars and other notes beyond hearing, and the voice sings what I cannot understand, however much I long to, and my heart is full of flow and I sit because I can no longer stand and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense at the shatter-belt of my awareness of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels but not bears and angels, something that is always transforming, and in that moment it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river-being… the question of life, which is not a question at all but a world.
Couple Is a River Alive? with a kindred case for the life of a mountain by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd, whose forgotten and fiercely beautiful writing Robert Macfarlane resurrected, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.
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.
2025-05-29 12:42:48
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.
An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.
The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.
And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.
This inflicts no small identity crisis:
What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.
But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.
Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.
A little note of misery sounded in his mind.
What could possibly be wrong?
It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.
Suddenly, he wants the stream itself, shimmering so seductively in the sunlight that it has to be had.
As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with the stream’s water, Mr. Bishop perches to peek over the fence and begins “to twitch and prickle and hop around” with the restless desire for a pool of his own.
So goes the cascade of envy, that handmaiden of wanting, until pool by pool the streams begins to run dry.
Soon it was only a trickle.
The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped away, and the reeds withered and died.
Triumphant and drunk on its own power, the Wanting Monster now wonders how much more damage it can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who is gathering flowers in the field for her dear friend Maria, and whispers into her ear.
Mrs. Walton began to frown and fret.
She was irritated. Why was she picking flowers for Maria when it was really she herself who deserved them?
She should fill her own house with flowers.
Yes, she should have the most fragrant, the most colorful, the most stylish house in the whole village.
Everyone would admire it. Everyone would envy her.
The other women watch Mrs. Walton pick all the flowers she can carry, and suddenly they too are aflame with the mania for owning the flowers. Soon, no flowers are left and the bees are bereft of pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and finches have nowhere to nest.
The Wanting Monster stomps across the flowerless fields, gloating.
That night, it visits Mr. Newton — the town’s most passionate stargazer — and whispers into Mr. Newton’s ear.
Suddenly possessed with the desire to own the stars, he heads to the forest and cuts down a great old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes a star.
I am reminded here of this miniature etching by William Blake, which I suspect might have inspired Read’s art:
Ms. Grimehart watches Mr. Newton and, unable to bear possessing no stars herself, she cuts down not one tree but two to make an even bigger ladder and snatches not one star but five.
More and more ladders rise up and the sky soon grows starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, with the birds silent and the bees still, this tranquil little world finds itself unworlded.
The village was quiet and colorless and gloomy. The children wept. They had loved their forest and their little stream. They missed the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.
People, unable to console the children, begin to leave. The Wanting Monster roars with self-congratulation.
This time, everyone hears the roar and begins to wonder about the menacing presence. It is Billie Ray who first sees it and, pointing, tells the townsfolk that there is a monster in their midst. Naming a hurt has a way of opening up the space for healing — as soon as the little girl names the menace, everyone sees it clear as daylight. Suddenly, the Wanting Monster grows “no bigger than a beetle.” It is only those things of which we are not fully conscious that have the power to possess us.
But when the grownups lurch to stomp the tiny monster, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the suddenly helpless creature if it needs a cuddle.
The Wanting Monster climbed into the palm of her hand. It was tired, after all, and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray cupped her other hand to make a roof, and then she wandered toward the dry river bed, where she sat on its banks and began to rock her hand and sing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her.
No one had ever sung to the Wanting Monster before. Nor had it ever been cared for. And the Wanting Monster didn’t know quite how those things felt — not really.
Listening to the lullaby, the Wanting Monster begins to weep. “There, there,” Billie Ray comforts it, “Oh, dearest heart.” The Wanting Monster doesn’t know how to bear all this tenderness — how many of us really do — and so it goes on weeping “sorrowful, endless tears” that begin replenishing the stream.
Everyone else, listening and watching, begins to weep too.
A great mournful lament filled the valley.
Tears swelled the little stream, and it rushed like a river…
What had been withheld was released; what had dried up, flowed.
What had hardened was becoming soft again.
People unpack their suitcases, take the stars out of their pockets, and set about collecting seeds, tilling the ground, and filling watering cans to replant the trees and flowers.
As the birds return and the night reconstellates, the Wanting Monster finally stops weeping and, looking up wonder-smitten at the stars lavishing the world with all that abundant beauty, feels, finally, slaked of want.
Couple The Wanting Monster with The Fate of Fausto — Oliver Jeffers’s kindred fable inspired by Vonnegut’s poem — then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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.
2025-05-28 12:23:30
Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes love. Come to see anything or anyone this clearly — a falcon, or a mountain, or a patch of moss — and you will find yourself loving the world more deeply.
One winter day, walking through the placid English countryside while on pandemic-forced sabbatical from her roiling job as a foreign policy political advisor in London, Chloe Dalton stopped mid-stride at the sight of a small still creature haloed by the sunlight — a baby hare no bigger than her palm, right there in the middle of the path, about to change the course of her life, though she did not yet know it. In her moving memoir Raising Hare (public library), she recounts that catalytic encounter:
The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard-packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.
The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.
Unlike rabbits, so populous and docile that we have tamed them into pets and children’s book characters, hares are rare and furtive to begin with — wild creatures glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye as they vanish into the thicket of their secret lives. Dalton had never seen a leveret before. She didn’t know what to do — if she left it there, stranded and helpless as any newborn, it would be vulnerable to becoming prey or roadkill; if she touched it to move it into the tall grass, its mother, if alive at all, might not find it or might reject it, as wild animals are apt to do when the smell of their young has been tainted.
One of life’s great cruelties is that quick decisions we make at a certain hour on a certain day, decisions we could have and would have made otherwise on a different day in a different state of mind, end up shaping the years and decades ahead, shaping our very self. One of life’s great mercies is that we never realize this at the crossing point of seemingly inconsequential choices — or else we would be paralyzed to take even the littlest step on the path of our becoming.
Unable to reason her way out of the paradox, Dalton follows her own animal instinct and carefully swaddles the leveret in dry grass to avoid touching it, then tucks it into her coat, thinking she was taking it home for the night. She ends up raising it, and in a sense being raised by it toward her full humanity — shaken awake from the trance of workaholism, freed from the conditionings and compulsions we mistake for needs, resensitized to the wonder of life. She chronicles the experience — one rife with biological, ecological, and existential revelations — with the tenderness of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of his three weeks cohabitating with a bunny, the respectful observational rigor of Thoreau’s overnight fosterage of a little owl, and the searching intellect of Helen Macdonald’s life with a goshawk, beginning with a lyrical prologue that imagines how the leveret entered the world before entering her world:
One February night the hare formed a nest in an overhang of tall grass at the edge of a field. There she gave birth silently under the moonlight to a leveret as dark as the night itself, save for a star-shaped white mark on its forehead. She licked it clean and then fed it, shielding it with her body until it had found use of its limbs, before nudging it anxiously out of its birthplace with her muzzle into a new hiding place within a dense tussock of dormant grass that created a snug tent around the little leveret.
Having concealed it to her satisfaction, the mother hare went back over her tracks, using the tips of her paws to obliterate her traces, racing to beat the dawn light breaking on the horizon. She moved with graceful, springing steps, as if to avoid turning a single blade. Once finished, she sprang away with a thrust of her powerful back legs, putting clear ground between her and her young. With no burrow in which to hide her leveret, the best she could do was to leave it, drawing off predators until nightfall, when she would return again under cover of darkness.
Once she has taken the leveret home, examined it for injuries, and attempted to feed it, Dalton calibrates her choice with conscientious awareness of its creaturely reality:
As adorable as it was, I could not forget that it was a wild creature, born into a landscape of ice and snow and lashing winds. It was not an animal moulded by centuries of selective breeding in human hands, in the way that pet rabbits, dogs, horses or even chickens have been bred for their appearance, size, strength, temperament, or other qualities deemed desirable. I disliked the idea of it being held to be played with, against its own nature, simply because it was too small to offer much resistance.
She refuses to give the leveret a name, or impose on it the identity implied by a gender pronoun, or otherwise anthropomorphize it. Devoted to meeting its creaturely needs on its creaturely terms, disheartened by the paucity of scientific literature on hares, she is stunned to find the most useful guidance in a suite of 250-year-old poems by a man who had been given a leveret by a neighbor’s pitying children while suffering with “dejection of spirits” (depression only entered the lexicon as a mental health term in the past century) in the wake of heartbreak; the hare so salved his soul that he acquired two more, then immortalized them all in poems full of details about their habits, rhythms, and favorite foods.
In the long tradition of filling with speculative fiction the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the realities of nature — creation myths and weather gods, alchemy and astrology — hares were once thought to be witches in disguise fleeing from persecution, with phrases prescribed to chant upon seeing one in order to ward off bad luck. Perhaps confused by the lack of sexual dimorphism in hares — unlike humans, cardinals, and lions, the male and female are indistinguishable visually — the Romans saw the hare as the Orlando of the wild world, believing that males give birth and change sex.
Dalton counters that very human impulse toward speculation with the discipline of observation. “To domesticate,” she writes, “is to alter the nature of an animal in order to fit it into our way of life as humans. For innately wild animals such as the hare, a better way is to coexist.” In the course of that mostly felicitous, sometimes frustrating, endlessly surprising coexistence, she meets the leveret’s otherness with a tender, wonder-smitten curiosity:
[The leveret] made no equivalent of a cat’s mewing or a dog’s bark to prompt me, but there was no mistaking its eagerness. If I overslept, it simply sat on the edge of the runner, waiting patiently for as long as was necessary for me to arrive. The chit-chit noise of its younger days was no longer a constant accompaniment as it explored the house. But it would often produce a strange musical call as it ran away from me after feeding. Louder than a puff, sharper than a sigh, softer than a grunt and more musical than a snort, the sound eluded description. It was like the faintest note the gentlest breath on a harmonica could produce: a short, sharp exhalation compressed over I did not know what, since I’d read that hares lack vocal cords.
There is no mightier antidote to our pathological self-reference, to the inherent narcissism of even our Golden Rule, than the discovery that we share the world with lives unrecognizably unlike ours, governed by profoundly different needs and imperatives. A hare’s whiskers, Dalton discovers, may look like hairs to us but are in fact organs known as vibrissae, pitted into the flesh and encircled by nerve endings continually decoding signals from the environment. The peculiar pattern of its fur — white belly, dark back — is not an aesthetic adornment but an evolutionary concealment strategy known as counter-shading: a kind of optical illusion distorting the shadow to deceive the predator. By far the otherest of the hare’s biological endowments is its ability to carry two litters at once — a process known as superfetation, in which a second ovum is fertilized shortly after the start of a pregnancy, producing two different fetuses in two different stages of maturity within the same uterus.
Acutely aware of the creature’s wildness from the outset, acutely resistant to any notion of domesticating it or turning it into a pet, Dalton finds herself questioning the concepts themselves:
I pondered the concept of “owning” a living creature in any context. Interaction with animals nurtures the loving, empathetic, compassionate aspects of human nature. It taps into a primordial reverence towards the living world and a sense of the commonality and connectedness across species. It is a gateway, as I was discovering, into a state of greater respect for nature and the environment as a whole. But at the same time, there is an immense power imbalance. We all too easily subordinate animals to our will, constraining or confining them to suit our purposes, needs and lifestyles.
[…]
Now I had come to appreciate that affection for an animal is of a different kind entirely: untinged by the regret, complexities and compromises of human relationships. It has an innocence and purity all its own. In the absence of verbal communication, we extend ourselves to comprehend and meet their needs and, in return, derive companionship and interest from their presence, while also steeling ourselves for inevitable hurt, since their lives are for the most part much shorter than ours.
In consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s insistence that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Dalton’s affectionate attention to the hare ends up magnifying her attention to the world itself, deepening her love for it, changing how she relates to any one thing constellating the dazzling wholeness of everything. One warm night, as she finds herself yearning to experience the hare’s nocturnal world, she realizes just how much one’s reality doubles and deepens by paying close and compassionate attention to another’s:
The night closed in around me. A flock of migrating geese passed overhead, their familiar cries uncanny in the dark — as, to me, was their ability to navigate at night. The clouds hid the stars from sight, including the constellation named Lepus by early astrologers because it lies at the feet of Orion, the celestial hunter. I recalled reading about a Germanic goddess who was said to be accompanied by a train of torch-bearing hares, and thought how handy such a retinue would have been in this moment. Around me — unseen — stalked, loped, hopped, flitted, crawled and swooped a nocturnal society of creatures whose ranks I could not join. I could no more see with a hare’s eyes than I could shapeshift into a hare’s body. Perhaps the witch-hare’s true magic, I thought, is the wish she inspires, just for a moment, to step out of the human form. To race across the ground with the speed and power of a hare, without tiring; to inhabit its senses and revel in a world of sound, scent and sensation far greater than our own; and to move through the night as effortlessly as if through sunlight.
Couple Raising Hare — an attention-annealing, life-deepening read in its entirety — with onetime soldier turned backyard naturalist Hockley Clarke’s moving memoir of coexisting with a family of blackbirds in the English countryside in the 1950s, then revisit a parish minister’s passionate reckoning with the souls of animals.
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.
2025-05-24 04:30:47
That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate corrective for our self-righteousness, the reason we invented language and science and art. If there weren’t such an abyss between us and all that is not us, we never would have tried to bridge it with our microscopes and telescopes and equations seeking to know the vaster realities of nature beyond us; with our poems and our paintings and our songs seeking to be known, to convey to another what it is like to be alive in this particular arrangement of sinew and spirit.
Not long after the philosopher Thomas Nagel fathomed the abyss between one creaturely consciousness and another with his classic paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and long before science revealed the strangest aspect of what it is like to be an owl, the Japanese artist and storyteller Keizaburō Tejima beckoned the human imagination to enter the world of humanity’s most beloved bird with his 1982 book Owl Lake (public library).
As “the sky darkens from gold to blue and a gentle stillness settles upon the land,” we see the owls awake into the gloaming “hungry after a day of sleep” and set out to hunt.
We see the great wings sweep the sky, the great eyes mirror the moonlight, casting yellow shadows over the still black water.
All night the mother and father owls take turns hunting to feed their baby, bringing silver fish to the nest.
As dawn cracks the day open like a hatching egg, we see the owl family recede into the landscape, merge with mountain and lake, and we are returned to the wider world, reminded that every creature in all its dazzling complexity is ultimately part of a greater whole — a whole simpler than its parts.
Nestled deep in the mountain there lies a lake that shimmers in the morning starlight.
As the stars fade away, the sky brightens from black to blue and a gentle awakening settles upon the land.
It is then that the owls go to sleep.
Complement with the strange and wondrous science of how owls see with sound and Mary Oliver’s poetic meditation on the meaning of life lensed through an owl, then revisit Tejima’s bittersweet parable Swan Sky.
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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2025-05-22 00:32:47
Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages.
How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No — to live a life of science is to live so wonder-smitten by reality, by the majesty and mystery of nature, that the willful destruction of any fragment of it becomes unconscionable. It is impossible to study the building blocks of life without reverence for life itself, impossible to devote one’s days to the enigma of a single element or elementary particle without venerating the inviolable cohesion of the universe. There is a kind of innocent exhilaration to this sense of wonder, and a quiet ethic. It may well be our greatest antidote to self-destruction.
This exuberance drove Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971) to regularly run the last few yards to her laboratory, to puzzle over differential equations throughout her pregnancies and take her calculations into the maternity ward.
The tenth child in a Quaker household without electricity, she was born in Ireland the year the Wright brothers built and flew humanity’s first successful flying machine heavier than air. Her home was still lit by gas when she first began studying science — in a school for boys, because no such subjects figured into the curriculum of the local girls’ school. By the time she was a teenager, living outside London, she watched gas-filled zeppelins rain bombs and death from the air. She watched them plummet in flames, shot down by British weapons. She watched her mother cry with the knowledge that piloting them were German boys not much older than Kathleen.
After attaining a higher score in physics than any London University student ever had, she joined the Cambridge laboratory of J. D. Bernal — the first scientist to apply X-ray crystallography to the molecules of life. He came to see how beneath her quiet, unassuming manner lay “such an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place.” Soon, she was pioneering uses of X-ray crystallography that would fuel the chemistry of the century to come: still in her twenties, Lonsdale illuminated the shape, dimensions, and atomic structure of the benzene ring that had mystified chemists since Michael Faraday discovered benzene a century earlier.
The first woman tenured at London’s most venerated research university and the first female president of both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Union of Crystallography, Lonsdale was also one of the twentieth century’s most lucid, impassioned, and indefatigable activists against our civilizational cult of war and the military industrial complex’s funding its planet-sized house of worship. By the time the next World War broke out, Lonsdale — by then one of the world’s preeminent scientists — was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to military conscription. She went on to become one of Europe’s most influential prison reformers, recognizing that the prison industrial complex is the price societies governed by the military industrial complex pay for the inequalities and injustices stemming from that foundational cult.
Lonsdale wrote Is Peace Possible? in 1957 as part of a Penguin series that invited some of the era’s most lucid and luminous minds to reckon with some of the era’s most urgent questions. It is perspectival and prophetic. “History teaches us that time can bring about reconciliations that seemed at another time impossible, but only when violence has ceased, whether by agreement or through exhaustion,” Lonsdale writes in the middle of the Cold War that never erupted into the nuclear holocaust it could have been, largely thanks to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament, in which she was involved and which reached agreements thought unimaginable. It is difficult today to imagine how real the doom felt to the children ducking under school desks, how improbable its aversion given the geopolitical forces at play — and yet here we are, survivors of an abated apocalypse, here to tell its story: the story of the triumph of the possible over the probable, the triumph of peace.
Bridging the spiritual ethos of her upbringing with the scientific worldview of her calling and training, Lonsdale challenges the misconception of pacifism as the simplistic idea that a perfect and peaceful world is merely a matter of individuals refusing to fight. “Truisms based on Utopias are poor arguments,” she observes, instead invoking the style of pacifism native to the Quaker tradition and its original formulation in 1660 as the refusal to partake of “all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatever.” Peace, she argues, is the product of the recognition “that war is spiritually degrading, that it is the wrong way to settle disputes between classes or nations, the wrong way to meet aggression or oppression, the wrong way to preserve national or personal ideals.” It is wrong not merely in a philosophical sense but in a practical sense, for we are far too interdependent to harm another without harming ourselves. To illustrate the interleaving of lives across the artificial pickets of national borders, she looks back on the 1947 cholera epidemic that quickly came to claim five hundred lives per day in Egypt but was also quickly curbed after twenty nations cooperated on a supply line for vaccines. In a sentiment of staggering timeliness in the wake of the twenty-first century’s deadliest pandemic, Lonsdale observes that “plagues are no respecters of sovereignty,” nor are the far-reaching economic, moral, spiritual, and radioactive consequences of war.
Ultimately, Lonsdale indicts the underlying reason for the existence of war lurking beneath all surface conflicts: Military alliances and international treaties only gauze the open wound of widespread inequality and injustice that colonialism and capitalism have inflicted on our world. “Real security can only be found, if at all, in a world without the injustices that now exist, and without arms,” she insists. At the heart of her slender masterwork of moral courage is a vision for how such a world might be possible:
There are two ways in which such changes might come. One is the way of the compulsion of experience, the whip and spur of historical inevitability, the coercion of facts. That is the hard and bitter way. The other is the way of foresight, of preparation, of imagination. It is also the way of moral compulsion. It may be no less hard but it is not bitter.
Lonsdale’s words abide, indict, incite:
Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.
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.
2025-05-19 06:10:07
When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels or songs) — a question fundamentally about what it means to be human.
I asked an elder poet friend why she thought chatGPT rang hollow where Whitman could compact infinities of feeling in a single image, could unseat the soul in a word.
She paused, then said: “Because AI hasn’t suffered.”
On the one hand, this echoes a dangerous myth: the archetype of the tortured genius handed down to us by the Romantics, who, cornered in their time and place, in a century of bloody revolutions, deadly epidemics, and punitive Puritanical norms, must have needed to believe that their suffering — those lives of poverty and privation, those ill-fated exercises in projection mistaken for love, all those premature deaths — was a fair price to pay for such creative volcanicity.
On the other hand, this is reality: Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without. It is these painful convolutions of the psyche — which used to be termed neurosis at the dawn of modern psychotherapy, and which we may simply call suffering — that reveal us to ourselves, and it is out of these revelations that we create anything capable of touching other lives, that contact we call art.
Our power and our freedom lie in learning to neither negate our suffering nor romanticize it but to harness its catalytic power as a current passing through us to jolt us alive, then passing on and down into the ground of being.
No one has refuted the myth of the tortured genius without negating the fact and fertility of suffering more pointedly than Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961), who thought deeply about the nature of creativity.
In 1943, a scholar of Kierkegaard asked Jung’s opinion of the relationship between “psychological problems” and creative genius. With an eye to Kierkegaard’s gift for letting his anxiety fuel rather than hinder his creativity, Jung declares him a “whole” person and not “a jangling hither and dither of displeasing fragmentary souls,” and writes:
True creative genius does not let itself be spoilt by analysis, but is freed from the impediments and distortions of a neurosis. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth — part of the general lunacy of our time.
It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. Nietzsche’s syphilitic infection undoubtedly exerted a strongly neuroticizing influence on his life. But one could imagine a sound Nietzsche possessed of creative power without hypertension — something like Goethe. He would have written much the same as he did, but less strident, less shrill — i.e., less German — more restrained, more responsible, more reasonable and reverent.
A century before Alain de Botton offered his assuring perspective on the importance of breakdowns, Jung weighs what makes suffering generative or degenerative:
Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase — a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use.
Jung considers the advice he would have given Kierkegaard about how to orient to his suffering, which was the raw material of his philosophical writings:
It doesn’t matter what you say, but what it says in you. To it you must address your answers. God is straightaway with you and is the voice within you. You have to have it out with that voice.
Couple with a forgotten young poet’s extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson about how to bear your suffering, then revisit Kierkegaard himself on the value of despair.
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.