2025-10-28 11:42:09
The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing in an encounter with the majesty and mystery of what is not ourselves — birds migrating at midnight, the magic of autumn, the grandeur of Machu Picchu; almost always, in consonance with William James’s criteria for transcendent experiences, they are ineffable. Still, we are here to tell each other what it is like to be alive and language remains the best technology we have invented for bridging the abyss between one aliveness and another.
Few encounters with the wildness and wonder of this world can be more powerful than that with an orca, and no one has painted a more moving word-portrait of that encounter than Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager
Seventeen centuries after the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described the largest member of the dolphin family as “an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth” in a small passage of his thirty-seven-volume natural history encyclopedia, Carl Linnaeus named it Orcinus orca — “the demon from the underworld.” But while this striking marbled creature is nature’s most successful and creative predator, it is also the tenderest, paying the same high price of consciousness that we pay. To encounter an orca is to both to face something almost incomprehensibly other and to face the depths of ourselves. Strager channels that transcendent duality throughout The Killer Whale Journals (public library) — the riveting record of how she escaped the cage of theory that was her landlocked biology degree and Trojan-horsed her way into an expedition to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, breaking in through the cracks of the patriarchy to study Earth’s most powerful matriarchal society by volunteering to cook on a small research vessel.
She writes:
Killer whales are unconcerned with our attitudes. They don’t need our love or our hatred. How we understand and interact with a big predator like the killer whale is instead a reflection of ourselves and how we want to live with the complexity of other animals around us.
To come close to an orca is no easy endeavor, even for those who have ventured to the remotest and most undisturbed reaches of the oceanic wilderness. Strager recounts the thrill of trailing two elusive male orcas in the setting sun, the hint of their presence turning the sea into “a piece of heavy silk… gently moved by invisible hands.” But even when they vanish beneath the still surface, other senses can reveal their presence. Recounting her first experience of eavesdropping on the sea’s undersound with a hydrophone connected to an amplifier, she writes:
Through the headphones, I could clearly hear the splash and gurgling from the hydrophone as it sunk, and then the quietness of the big sea, with a low thrumming in the background, which I would later learn was the sound of boat traffic in the distance. But through the muffled noises of engines and water, I also heard the most incredible sounds, eerie and melodious at the same time. Like a tropical bird singing a mournful song or people whistling from far away across a deep valley.
[…]
Somewhere, in the vast ocean below me, in the great darkness under the leaden surface of the sea, animals were calling and responding to each other.
Understanding — which is a thing of the mind — that these majestic animals are dwelling below the surface is one thing, encountering them with the full creaturely sensorium of bodies meeting in space is something else entirely. Strager reflects on the inner transformation sparked by her first direct encounter with an orca:
A large male came up right next to the boat, so close that I could see water running down his gleaming skin. A pearly black eye just in front of the white eyepatch stared right at me. It was just a quick moment, but it stayed with me after the whale was gone. I realized that this huge killer whale had been checking us out — just as we were checking them out. To sense the awareness and curiosity of another being, and perhaps even its desire to connect, shatters an invisible barrier. It perforates the solitude of being human in a wild world where we are surrounded by creatures we don’t understand and can’t reach.
Immense and indifferent, the orcas have no sense of or concern with the myths and legends we have woven them into, the Instagram sensations and the scientists’ journals. And yet we share the kinship of curiosity, that yearning to apprehend what it is to be another — the only thing that saves us from the existential loneliness of being ourselves.
Couple with the fascinating science of what it’s like to be an owl, then revisit what orcas can teach us about love and loss.
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.
2025-10-26 07:55:31
We are the only animal captive in a cage of its own making. Its bars can look like many things — the screen, the self, the scintillation of being right — but it is from within it that we look out and call our little view the world, forgetting that to recover our wildness is to recover our humanity, to waste it is to waste our aliveness.
Few have offered a more powerful key to the cage than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — the Audubon of the pampas, who discovered his gift for channeling the beating heart of nature amid the ruin of his best laid plans and went on to influence generations of writers, from Henry James and Ernest Hemingway to Barry Lopez and Robert Macfarlane.
All visionaries, even the farthest seers, are still a product of their time and place. In an era when hunting was the most popular sport and science studied living species as dead specimens, Hudson recounts how he first approached nature as “a sportsman and collector, always killing things.” But he was haunted by the uneasy sense that he was paying a high price for this violent negation of his kinship with other creatures, relinquishing some essential part of his own creatureliness.
Eventually, he traded the gun for the binoculars and the field notebook, determined to understand living beings on their own terms, collecting not bodies but observations, hunting not for game but for the play of ideas in a mind restless to apprehend the world.
Although he called himself a field-naturalist, Hudson wrote about what he observed with a scientist’s thirst for truth, a philosopher’s hunger for meaning, and a poet’s tenderness for the complicated miracle of being alive. In his moving 1919 memoir The Book of a Naturalist (public domain), he looks back on what he gained by giving up his era’s givens:
Abstention from killing had made me a better observer and a happier being, on account of the new or different feeling towards animal life which it had engendered. And what was this new feeling — wherein did it differ from the old of my shooting and collecting days, seeing that since childhood I had always had the same intense interest in all wild life? The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years!
These echoes of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” are echoes of Hudson’s childhood — he had devoured On the Origin of Species as a boy in the wake of his mother’s death and had been deeply moved by its revelation of life as a ceaseless conversation between organisms and their environment, of the human animal as part of a vast and complex system, a part neither central and nor inevitable. Like most adults, he had unlearned the elemental truths we touch for a moment as children before culture and civilization slap our hand. Unlike most adults, he devoted his life to remembering what he had been bamboozled into forgetting — the wild wonder of life, the lavish otherness of its “endless forms,” so unbidden in their variousness: The world didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t owe us three hundred species of hummingbirds, the needless blue extravagance of the bowerbird, the Fibonacci perfection of the argonaut.
Reflecting on this awakening to the wonder of wildness and how it consecrates the world, Hudson writes:
The main thing was the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human. Nay, the very fact that the forms were unhuman but served to heighten the interest; — the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.
Couple with Seamus Heaney’s magnificent poem “Death of a Naturalist,” then revisit Hudson on how to be a happier creature and Darwin on the spirituality of nature.
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.
2025-10-23 23:45:17
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006 as a kind of field notebook on my expedition through the wilderness of life, searching for signposts. We live in a decimal world that loves the round anniversaries, the numbers that polish the perfect rim of zero. But to me, 19 is a much more meaningful number than 20.
I was 19 when I left Bulgaria, at that point the poorest country in Europe and the most biodiverse per square kilometer. I left by myself, with $800 my family had cobbled together, to begin a new life from scratch on another continent, in an unrecognizably different culture, amid ecosystems full of life-forms I had never seen, all on the promise that a liberal arts education would teach me how to live. Instead, I found myself in an industrial model of learning that trains the mind to be machine for excelling at standardized testing while sidestepping the spirit altogether. Working four jobs to pay for it, too exhausted and disoriented to make friends, I was lonely and lost and sank into a profound depression.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin (of whom I had never heard) observed in looking back on his life.
And so I read.
I read Aristotle (whom my grandmother had quoted since I was a child) and Susan Sontag (of whom I had also never heard), discovered Maurice Sendak and Ruth Krauss (forging my conviction that great children’s books are philosophies for living in disguise), lost myself and found myself in Leaves of Grass.
My mind became itself in the margins of what I read. I began writing about it, then around it, then beyond, and that became The Marginalian.
To mark nineteen years of it, I have done something different from the usual annual inventory of life-learnings and combined two animating forces of my present life — sentences and ceramics — casting in clay thoughts I have had over the years that have stayed with me, truths I have learned the hard way and still habitually forget, still relearn afresh. Some of these sentences come from my published books, some from Marginalian essays, some from my bird divinations, some from the private pages of my journal. All of them are things I wish someone had told me at the outset of so-called adulthood.
Ceramics seemed a fitting medium — the clay teaches so much about the art of holding on and letting go, the kiln teaches so much about the quantum of relationships. I experimented with various letterforms, from children’s rubber stamps to vintage letterpress type, until finally settling on a century-old brass alphabet for leather carving that seemed to make the clay the happiest.
Each bowl is different, each imperfect, each — like life itself — the work of time and love, of the intentional and the unpredictable, of chemistry and chance. None but one turned out exactly as intended.
While every human life makes its own singular meaning in the act of living, beneath it course the same core hopes and fears, the same shy yearnings and screaming passions — we are all always learning the same lessons, in different guises and through different teachers.
To honor this kinship, I am giving the bowls away to you — the readers who have made it possible for this labor of love to remain free, ad-free, AI-free, and fully human for nineteen years. As with the urns for living, I will let chance solve the disparity of scale — so many people, so few bowls — by raffling them off. To enter, make a donation in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .19, whether it is $1.19 or $1,000.19. (This will help me separate the urn raffle from the regular donations.) On November 23, those upon whom chance has smiled will receive a private note from me and we will turn the fragile atoms over to the postal service. (And if they don’t survive, a lovely reminder that all sentences break.)
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.
2025-10-22 03:09:28
“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul,” Seneca wrote in considering true and false friendship two millennia before we commodified the word “friend” in the marketplace of loneliness we call social media.
It is easy to forget now how hard-earned that entry into the heart and soul is, and how precious. “Old friends cannot be created out of hand,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in the wake of losing a friend, mourning “the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.” Pulsating beneath his bittersweet lament is the knowledge that the treasure is not found but created — or, rather, co-created. It is more precious and more total than the romantic love our culture fetishizes, for a deep friendship courses through every true love, and it is always more enduring — true friends are the other significant others, often outlasting spouses, often outpacing siblings in running to the rescue of the heart. Such friendships are the hard work of truth and tenderness, sustained by an unfaltering commitment to showing up, a promise of absolute sincerity, and a quality of presence that leaves each aglow with the sense of being treasured.
How to do that work, how to attain the skills required for it and bear the vulnerabilities inherent to it, is what Alain de Botton takes up in the School of Life primer Secrets of Successful Friendships (public library) — a pointed, poignant field guide to cultivating meaningful connection in a world where loneliness looms oceanic as night.
At the heart of the book is the insistence that friendship — something “tender, fundamental, and emotionally sustaining” — is “as significant and as rare” as romantic love (a case Andrew Sullivan made exquisitely two decades earlier), yet our culture gives us no education in it while drowning us in narrow models of romantic love as the pinnacle of emotional achievement.
This commodification and devaluation of deep friendship is the turbine of our modern loneliness. A century and a half after Thoreau, brilliant and lonely, rued that “we feel a yearning to which no breast answers” and ultimately “walk alone,” De Botton observes that many of us “return home from parties dissatisfied and confused.” Defining friendship as “a sense that in the company of a very special person, we will at last be able to share the most vulnerable and fragile sides of ourselves and be witnessed in our true, unadorned state,” he celebrates it as an antidote to the loneliness and isolation of feeling those sides unwitnessed:
Loneliness can coexist alongside an outwardly highly cheerful and easy manner and even — paradoxically — alongside the possession of many so-called “friends”… The lonely may hold their own brilliantly at a party; they might be married, have children and more often than not be out in the evenings.
[…]
We are lonely because we are refusing to accept as genuine those cheap, counterfeit images of friendship promoted by a sentimental world keen to disguise the challenges of real connection. Those who feel a lack of friendship most deeply may simply be those who cleave most intensely and sincerely to its genuine promises.
More than a salve for the existential loneliness we are born into, the essential purpose of friendship is emotional growth:
In the company of a real friend, we should aspire to become wiser, more sensitive, more able to cope with the complexity of existence, more resilient and more generous.
Friendship, however, is not a unitary phenomenon — there are as many species of it as there are species of loneliness. He writes:
We tend to think of friendship as a unitary category, but, in reality, there are a number of different kinds of friendship, each of which is specifically adapted to addressing a particular kind of loneliness. We might say that there are as many kinds of friend as there are ways of feeling isolated.
He offers a taxonomy that includes such species as the emotional confidante, the thinking partner, and the counterpoint. (It is the luck of a lifetime to find a friend who can play many of these roles, and the work of a lifetime to nurture that friendship.)
The deepest friendships offer us a “true and fulfilling togetherness” that can help us “feel reconciled to our own company,” for they are often the twining of two parallel solitudes. Such friendships are not a matter of luck — just as chance and choice converge to make us who we are, chance may place someone wonderful in our path, but it is by choice — a daily choice — that we endeavor to walk together in the same direction and grow along the way.
De Botton writes:
True friendship is a skill, not a piece of divine inspiration. Those who find it are not simply lucky: they understand certain crucial ideas; they are guided by specific insights into themselves and other people. And these ideas and insights can be explained and described in precise ways. We don’t have to be born with innate talents for being, or making, a good friend; the capacities can be acquired via the right kind of education.
In the remainder of Secrets of Successful Friendships, De Botton offers the rudiments of such an education, from the enemies of friendship (overcommitment, envy, “the absence of shared challenges”) to its pillars (deep listening, acts of service, horizontal conversations) to its fate in the age of AI. Couple it with this excellent Where Shall We Meet conversation with Alain de Botton about the subtleties and varieties of friendship, then revisit this introvert’s guide to friendship from Thoreau and Alain de Botton on romantic love.
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.
2025-10-20 02:04:16
We aren’t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the turbine of our suffering. The most difficult decisions in life are difficult precisely because we are unsummed, too divided to reconcile the desires of one part with those of another. We watch ourselves undergo overnight phase transitions of feeling as a different part seizes the dials of pleasure and pain that govern all human behavior, then pull the quilt of time and thinking over our head to maintain the illusion of coherence, disavowing entire regions of our own experience as if someone else lived them. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.),” wrote Whitman, knowing that we are each “of one phase and of all phases,” that within us each live the slaveholder and the slave, the woman being burned at the stake and the man striking the match.
Perhaps “god” is just how we name our yearning for a single truth, for an integrating voice to conciliate the contradictions, for something large and total to hold what we cannot hold.
Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics — those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul — channeled that voice in “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation “appears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,” writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (public library).
In “The Heart Thunder,” spoken word artist Kim Rosen brings this immortal abacus of the soul to life in a breathtaking performance, fusing the Gnostic gospel with the concluding mantra of the Buddhist Heart Sutra to the pulse-beat of a multi-instrumental orchestra — cello, percussion, piano, guitar, and vocals by musicians Jami Sieber, Wayne P. Sheehy, and Chloe Goodchild:
from THE THUNDER: PERFECT MIND
translated by Jane HirshfieldSent from the Power,
I have come
to those who reflect upon me.
Look upon me,
you who meditate,
and hearers, hear.
Whoever is waiting for me,
take me into yourselves.
Do not drive me
out of your eyes,
or out of your voice,
or our of your ears.
Observe: Do not forget who I am.For I am the first, and the last
I am the honored one, and the scorned,
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother, the daughter,
and every part of both.
I am the barren one who has borne many sons.
I am she whose wedding is great
and I have not accepted a husband.
I am the midwife and the childless one,
the easing of my own labor.
I am the bride and the bridegroom
and my husband is my father.
I am the mother of my father,
the sister of my husband;
my husband is my child.
My offspring are my own birth,
the source of my power,
what happens to me is their wish.I am the incomprehensible silence
And the memory that will not be forgotten.
I am the voice whose sound is everywhere
I am the speech that appears in many forms.
I am the utterance of my own name.Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who tell the truth about me, lie,
and you who have lied, now tell the truth.
You who know me, be ignorant,
and you who have not known me, know.For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am modesty and boldness.
I am shameless, and I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and I am peace.Give heed to me,
the one who has been everywhere hated
and the one who is everywhere loved.
I am the one they call Life,
the one you call Death.
I am the one they call Law,
the one you call Lawless.
I am the one you have scattered,
and you have gathered me together.
I am godless, and I am the one
whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon
and the one you have scorned.
I am unlearned,
and from me all people learn.
I am the one to whom you reveal yourself,
Yet wherever you think I hide, I appear,
And wherever you reveal yourself,
there I will vanish.Those who are close to me,
have failed to know me,
and those who are far from me know me.
On the day when I am close to you,
that day you are far from me;
on the day when I am far from you,
that day I am close.I am the joining and the dissolving.
I am what lasts, and what goes,
I am the one going down,
and the one toward whom they ascend.
I am the condemnation and the acquittal.
For myself, I am sinless,
and the roots of sin grow in my being.
I am the desire of the outer,
and control of the inner.
I am the hearing in everyone’s ears,
I am the speech which cannot be heard,
I am the mute who is speechless,
great are the multitudes of my words.Hear me in softness,
and learn me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am called truth.You praise me and you whisper against me.
You who have been defeated,Judge before you are judged:
the judge and all judging exist inside you,
and the one who formed you on the outside
is the one who shaped you within.And what you see outside you, you see within.
It is visible and it is your garment.Give heed then, you hearers,
and you also, angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits risen now from the dead.
I am the one who alone exists,
there is no one to judge me.
For though there is much sweetness
in passionate life, in transient pleasure,
finally soberness comes
and people flee to their place of rest.
There they will find me,
and live, and not die again.
Couple with “To Be a Person” — Jane Hirshfield’s magnificent poem about how to bear our human condition — then revisit Margaret Fuller’s account of touching “The All,” the Transcendentalists’ term for the totality of being the Gnostics eulogized in their gospel.
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.
2025-10-18 04:13:37
How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human experience that binds us. Suffering is the common record of our unreturned messages to hope, and because we are the hoping species, it is inseparable from what makes us human. More than a cerebral operation, it is an experience of the total organism, entwining synapse and sinew, engaging the entire orchestra of hormones and neurotransmitters and enzymes that plays the symphony of aliveness. This is why AIs — those disembodied cerebrators — will never know suffering and, not knowing the transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art, will never be able to write a truly great poem. (About suffering they will always be wrong, the new masters.)
Nick Cave — who has known more grief than most, having lost his young son and lost his own father at a young age, but has remained an unrelenting guardian of joy — takes up the question of that transmutation on the pages of his altogether magnificent book Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library).
An epoch after Carl Jung examined the relationship between suffering and creativity, he considers “these terrible, devastating opportunities that bring amelioration and transformation”:
Perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain — you are taken to the very limits of suffering. As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering. We are essentially altered or remade by it. Now, this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. Everything seems so fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem so endangered, and yet so beautiful.
In a passage that calls to mind the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s insistence that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he adds:
Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change… It somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better… This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.
Reflecting on how his son’s death left him feeling unbearably alone and at the same time “swept up in a kind of commonality of human suffering,” he recounts the lifeline of kindness that strangers extended to him and his wife — “points of light” lit up by that silent understanding of suffering we all carry in our marrow, illuminating the deepest truth of human nature that we have been bamboozled into disbelieving:
We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naïve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all — in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared. I think Susie and I instinctively understood that we needed to move towards this loving force, or perish.
Pulsating beneath The Red Hand Files — Nick’s soulful almanac of wisdom prompted by questions from fans — is this ongoing yearning to make use of our suffering. He addresses it directly in one issue:
What do we do with suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices — we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold on to it, and eventually pass it on.
In order to transform our pain, we must acknowledge that all people suffer. By understanding that suffering is the universal unifying force, we can see people more compassionately, and this goes some way toward helping us forgive the world and ourselves. By acting compassionately we reduce the world’s net suffering, and defiantly rehabilitate the world. It is an alchemical act that transforms pain into beauty. This is good. This is beautiful.
To not transform our suffering and instead transmit our pain to others, in the form of abuse, torture, hatred, misanthropy, cynicism, blaming and victimhood, compounds the world’s suffering. Most sin is simply one person’s suffering passed on to another. This is not good. This is not beautiful.
The utility of suffering, then, is the opportunity it affords us to become better human beings. It is the engine of our redemption.
Complement with Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering and the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich on how to bear your suffering in an extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson — neither of whom got to be an old poet — then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the two pillars of a meaningful life.
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.