2025-05-08 04:20:06
“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.” And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are. The transmutation of suffering into love — the transmutation of the wear and tear and helplessness of living, of the rage it can induce, into compassion and care — is what we call art. Anyone who performs that alchemy within and then gives another the means to it — whether with a poem or a painting or an act of kindness — is what I would call an artist.
I know of no one who has articulated this task of transmutation more beautifully than the poet (in the largest Baldwinian sense) Ocean Vuong.
In a deeply felt New York Times interview — a public reckoning, really — Vuong recounts his improbable beginnings as a writer: how he went from wanting to borrow a friend’s gun at fifteen and, despite his Buddhist upbringing, kill a man (the local drug dealer who had stolen his bicycle and kept him from making his shift on the tobacco farm where he was laboring for $9.50 an hour alongside other refugees and migrants) to reading James Baldwin and Annie Dillard at the community college until he came to see writing as “a medium for understanding suffering” — for understanding what hurts us and why we hurt each other and how to stop. He reflects:
I was in a world where anger, rage, and violence was a way to control the environment, and it was a way to control the environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded… Because so much was close to me, I always had to look at it. And it behooved me to understand it in order to survive. So when I see cruelty, I look closer, and I say: “Where is this coming from?” And a lot of times, it comes from fear and vulnerability — you’re too scared, and you have to strike first… I have great compassion to that, because the doorway through to violence has always been suffering…
It’s interesting: You see the doorway in front of you and it feels so immense — it feels like the only path — but when you step back… it’s almost like the doorway is in the middle of a field. And you’re like, “Oh my goodness — I can step back, and I can just take one step to the side and go around, and the whole world is in front of me.”
[…]
In a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back and stepping aside from that door.
A couple of years earlier, speaking at San Francisco’s endlessly wonderful City Arts & Lectures, Vuong considered the place of anger — that handmaiden of suffering — in art, and in his own work animated by the belief that the poet’s task is to look more closely at this world, a task resinous with the consolations of causality: the more we see, the more we understand; the more we understand — ourselves and each other — the less we suffer; the less we suffer, the less we lash the world with our suffering and the more we can transmute the anger of helplessness into something more tender and tenacious. Vuong reflects:
When you feel the somatic experience of anger, you throw things, you shout (perhaps at the people you love), you’re on the floor (metaphorically, physically). And then, after a while, you have to get up. You have to feed your dog, answer emails, meet a student — in other words, you have to move towards care… For me, care is anger improved. It’s part of the same ecosystem. And I’m interested in dismantling the border between these two things, because we’re told that they’re two opposite sides of a spectrum, but I think they’re actually very close together. They inform each other.
Because language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents, the care we take with language is care for the world. Vuong reflects on the ministrations of words:
Writers have produced incredible amounts of work with the energy of rage and anger. But, for me, that care that I have to give the sentence is then the medic — it almost calms me down. It’s hard to be rageful when you’re working with something that needs your care. If each word is a citizen in this world of the text, they are so dependent on me to think clearly and with restraint and with a sense of compassion and dignity to them. And I would lose their confidence in me, in a way, if I were to approach it with too much of myself.
Vuong’s most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening — a handle on the door to compassion:
If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I’m not proud of many things… but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.
An essential part of the artist’s task is also this — to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.
Couple with the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent meditation on the uses and misuses of anger in an imperfect world.
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.
2025-05-05 02:57:18
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring.
In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.
Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously? Generations of biographers have filled pages with conjectures of varying persuasiveness — a death, some unrecorded heartbreak in her volcanic relationship with Susan, the first attack of epilepsy — but the most intriguing theory came nearly a century after the poet encrypted these words.
In 1951, after years of research and travel to various archives, the scholar Rebecca Patterson proposed a wholly novel candidate for the “terror” of 1861: Kate Scott Anthon — a newly widowed young woman Susan had befriended during their studies at the Utica Female Academy and then introduced to Emily, who fell into an intense romantic and possibly physical affair with the enticing newcomer before Kate severed the relationship without explanation, dealing a blow Emily would experience as deathly and furnishing the raw material for much of her mournful poetry.
Their story is a mosaic assembled from various surviving documents, as direct as Emily’s letters and as oblique as the marginalia in Kate’s favorite books.
In the late winter of 1859, Kate descended a sleigh in her fashionable black hat and widow’s veil in front of her former classmate’s home in Amherst. Almost immediately, Susan introduced her to the beloved auburn-haired friend who lived across the hedge in the brick house painted deep red and who had been hearing of her for nearly a decade. When Emily, wrapped in a merino shawl, met the tall, handsome woman with the penetrating dark eyes, musical voice, and lively passion for literature and astronomy, she was instantly entranced.
During the three weeks of Kate’s first stay in Amherst, the two women, both twenty-eight, became inseparable. They took long walks with Emily’s dog, Carlo, read Aurora Leigh aloud to each other, and spent evenings at the piano as Emily improvised — “weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration,” Kate would remember. As Emily played, Kate towered behind her — “Goliath,” the petite poet would call her.
When Kate left to go home, Emily beckoned her for another visit to Amherst:
I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don’t wait till I land, for I’m going ashore on the other side.
Emily’s early letters to Kate pulsate with electricity. Writing weeks after they first met, she tries to disguise with playfulness the push-and-pull of irrepressible, frustrated longing in the code language of botany that was her first poetic tongue:
I never missed a Kate before. . . . Sweet at my door this March night another Candidate — Go Home! We don’t like Katies here! — Stay! My heart votes for you, and what am I indeed to dispute her ballot –? What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the Sun? — When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute?… Will you still come?… Kate gathered in March! It is a small bouquet, dear — but what it lacks in size, it gains in fadelessness, — Many can boast a hollyhock, but few can bear a rose! … So I rise, wearing her — so I sleep, holding, — Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower. —
In the late winter of 1860, they spent a night together in Emily’s bedroom — unrecorded, inarticulable, except perhaps in verse:
Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night
Had scarcely deigned to lie —
When, stirring, for Belief’s delight,
My Bride had slipped away —If ’twas a Dream — made solid — just
The Heaven to confirm —
Or if Myself were dreamed of Her —
The power to presume —
Several weeks after that momentous night, Emily would channel this precious perishability in a letter to Kate:
Finding is slow, facilities for losing so frequent, in a world like this, I hold with extreme caution. A prudence so astute may seem unnecessary, but plenty moves those most, dear, who have been in want… Were you ever poor? I have been a Beggar.
Whatever took place between them, they never addressed it overtly — it is always impossible to articulate the possibility between two people, but especially in a time and place that confined the possible to such narrow parameters for permissible love. Feeling the impossibility of it all, Emily shuddered with anticipatory loss:
Kate, Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phantom niche — I touch your hand — my cheek your cheek — I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred?… There is a subject, dear, on which we never touch.
Little is known of Kate’s side of the experience. None of her letters to Emily survive. (The poet had instructed her sister that all letters be burned after her death — a request which Lavinia Dickinson promptly obliged before discovering the trove of poems that made her realize her sister’s correspondence might have immense literary value.) But Kate — who signed many of her surviving letters to other correspondents “Thomas” or “Tommy” — did have an unambiguous and lifelong proclivity for romantic attachment to women, culminating later in life with a longtime relationship with a young Englishwoman.
Perhaps at twenty-eight, she was simply not ready to so radically dismantle the superstructure of her life as she knew it. In April 1861, she severed the relationship with Emily. There is no record of what was said, but the devastation was complete and lifelong. Many years later, Emily would write to Higginson:
If ever you lost a friend… you remember you could not begin again because there was no world —
A breathless Death is not so cold as a Death that breathes.
In the immediacy of the loss, she interpolated between hope and despair, as we all do when discomposed by a sudden abandonment. A month after her “terror,” which might just be her painful acceptance that Kate was gone, her friend Samuel Bowles — whose newspaper had printed one of the only four poems published in her lifetime — came to Amherst. She refused to see him. Most of her letters from that period were burned, but Samuel was one of her most intimate friends — it is likely that she had confided in him the intensity of her heartbreak, if not its source. “We tell a Hurt to cool it,” she would write in a poem. Among his own letters is one from that summer to a recipient whose name has been scrubbed — an extraordinary letter of consolation to somebody anguishing with unrequited love, somebody who may well have been Emily:
My dear — :
… You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give — what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with… One will not give us what we give them — others will more than we can or do give them — and so the accounts will balance themselves. It is so with my loves and friendships — it is so with everybody’s.
Emily was not ready to let go of the love she had given, of the hope that it might one day be returned, though alchemised and transmuted into a different form. She wrote to Kate plaintively:
How many years, I wonder, will sow the moss upon them, before we bind again, a little altered, it may be, elder a little it will be, and yet the same, as suns which shine between our lives and loss, and violets.
That season, she composed her most famous poem — read here by twenty-first-century children who are yet to have their loves and losses, and animated by artist Olga Ptashnik:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —
And sore must be the storm —
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm —I’ve heard it in the chillest land —
And on the strangest Sea —
Yet — never — in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of me.
“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.
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.
2025-05-04 05:12:54
We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis. Despite our culture’s bias for the drama of cataclysm — the violent heartbreaks, the very notion of falling in love, implying a sudden tripping along the path of life — the most profound of these motions of the soul are the work of gradualism, their pace geologic, their velocity that of continents, so incremental as to be imperceptible, until one day two people find themselves a sum greater than its parts: infinity, or zero.
This elemental tendency comes to life with great levity and charm in Drew Beckmeyer’s picture-book Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave (public library). The tale is big because its theme is the largest of feelings, but also because tucked into the love story is the evolutionary history of how our rocky planet became a living world — something I especially appreciate as a kindred practitioner of Trojan-horsing science into life through love.
Just like those who have lived a long love become each other’s memory-keepers, Stalactite and Stalagmite pass the time by recounting their shared memories of bygone eras and extinct creatures: their first visitor, a trilobite — one of the earliest arthropods, who told them tales of life at the bottom of the deep sea; the thirsty giant ground sloth who licked them for every precious drop and casually informed them about the evolution of fur; the immense triceratops who made the whole cave tremble with the echo of his roar; the meteors that turned the sky black and lashed the Earth with acid rain so that for a long while nothing could grow and thrive.
Stalactite bonds with the bat over having the same vantage on the cave, and Stalagmite snuggles with the ichthyostega — one of the first walkers of the land, who tells the story of how fish grew legs.
Stalactite and Stalagmite were there, inching closer still together, when we came onto the scene to draw our dreams and myths and fears on the cave wall, to invent fire and language and science, so that one day tour guides could shine flashlights onto the cavernous darkness and tell children how stalactites and stalagmites form.
The formation of that “something new” is what Adrienne Rich meant when she wrote of love as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved.” What terrifies us most is the fear that the new formation might be a merging so total and irrevocable that we lose ourselves in the other, lose every last boundary of where one ends and the other begins, fall prey to the self-abandonment many mistake for love.
Overhearing the tour guide, Stalactite and Stalagmite reflect on their destiny, facing that fundamental fear but regarding the new formation with the awareness, honed on eons of observing change, that we never really know what lies on the other side of a transformation — we can only envision what we lose of the past we know, but not the future we stand to gain.
The key, in love as in evolution, is not to mistake the limits of the imaginable for the limits of the possible.
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.
2025-05-03 03:29:49
There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized your soul from the outside. But when you look back on them once they have had their way with you, if you are awake enough to your own life and conscious enough of your unconscious, you come to realize that they were not a possession by some external force but dispossessed parts of you yearning for integration. This is why our states of possession are some of the most profound experiences we can have as human beings — they are both revelations and transformations of the self, those eruptions of the psyche that raise new summits of possibility for our creativity and our vitality.
The Jewish German analytical psychologist Erich Neumann (January 23, 1905–November 5, 1960) devoted his life to investigating these invisible processes, finally formulating his ideas in four essays published under the title Art and the Creative Unconscious (public library) just before his death.
Almost entirely forgotten today, Neumann influenced some of the great modern shamans of the psyche — particularly Carl Jung, who was once his teacher and in whose own writings on creativity I first came upon the passing mention that led me to Neumann’s work. He was especially interested in the relationship between creativity and the archetypal undercurrents of the psyche, the complexes pulsating beneath our conscious experience, the psychic transformations possible when we fully own our creative energy — transformations that often begin with an experience of possession. He writes:
Every transformative or creative process comprises stages of possession. To be moved, captivated, spellbound, signify to be possessed by something; and without such a fascination and the emotional tension connected with it no concentration, no lasting interest, no creative process, are possible. Every possession can justifiably be interpreted either as a one-sided narrowing or as an intensification and deepening. The exclusivity and radicality of such “possession” represent both an opportunity and a danger. But no great achievement is possible if one does not accept this risk.
Remember: “You are here to risk your heart.” And if love and work are the twin strands of meaning in our lives, the two great creative endeavors of being alive, it is there that we are most prone to possession, there that we risk the most. What we risk, of course, is ourselves — the transformation of the self by the force of what the possession reveals in us: the abandoned and alienated parts of us longing for inclusion in our conscious experience.
Neumann writes:
[States of possession] presuppose a disunity of the psyche, whose integration is an endless process. The world and the collective unconscious in which the individual lives are fundamentally beyond his mastery; the most he can do is to experience and integrate more and more parts of them. But the unintegrated factors are not only a cause for alarm; they are also the source of transformation.
Transformation, however, is one of the great human paradoxes and one of the starkest illustrations of the limits of our imagination — we can never fully imagine who we are and what life is like on the other side of a total transformation, and so we either dread it or dismiss it. (See the excellent Vampire Problem thought experiment.) This, Neumann observes, is because our only reference points are partial transformations:
The word transformation… embraces every change, every strengthening and slackening, every broadening and narrowing, every development, every change of attitude, and every conversion. Every sickness and every recovery are related to the term transformation; the reorientation of consciousness and the mystical loss of consciousness in ecstasy are a transformation.
[…]
Most striking are those transformations which violently assail an ego-centered and seemingly airtight consciousness, i.e., transformations characterized by more or less sudden “irruptions” of the unconscious into consciousness. The irruptive character is experienced with particular force in a culture based on ego stability and a systematized consciousness; for in a primitive culture, open to the unconscious, or in a culture whose rituals provide a bond with the archetypal powers, men are prepared for the irruption. And the irruption is less violent because the tension between consciousness and the unconscious is not so great.
We have all experienced such “irruptions” that feel like alien invasions whenever the physiological foundation of the psyche is dysregulated — in illness and pain, in extreme hunger and thirst, in states of exhaustion or intoxication. In such moments, the unconscious begins to bubble up through the cracks and produces moments of epiphany, conversion, sudden illumination. (Virginia Woolf experienced it in the context of illness and physicist Freeman Dyson contacted it by “going into a sort of semistupor after forty-eight hours of bus riding.”) And yet these personal transformations, as sudden and strange and all-consuming as they may feel, can only ever be partial because, Neumann observes, they “apply only to the affected ego and consciousness, not to the total personality,” that fractal of the universal. Drawing on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, he writes:
What we encounter most often are partial changes, partial transformations of the personality… Unless changes in consciousness go hand in hand with a change in the unconscious components of the personality, they do not amount to much… Possession by a personal complex, an emotional content, leads only to a partial transformation that overpowers consciousness and its center, the ego… Whereas partial changes in the personal unconscious, in the “complexes,” always influence consciousness at the same time, and changes effected through the archetypes of the collective unconscious almost always seize upon the whole personality.
An absorbing creative process — one characterized by what later psychologists have termed “flow,” or what Octavia Butler called “a sweet and powerful positive obsession” — can begin as such an “irruption.” (That is what I experienced with my bird divinations, which arrived as a kind of possession that took hold of me daily for months.) And yet, Neumann observes, while all creative work requires some element of possession, what distinguishes great art is that the possession is not the end point of the creative process but a stepping stone to a higher-order motive force serving not self-realization but universal revelation. With an eye to philosopher Martin Buber’s concept of the I-Thou relation, he writes:
The individual who stops in his possession and whose productivity is based on a monomania, an idée fixe, occupies only a low rank in the hierarchy of creative men, though his achievement may still be significant for the collectivity.
Creative transformation, on the other hand, represents a total process in which the creative principle is manifested, not as an irruptive possession, but as a power related to the self, the center of the whole personality. For partial possession by a single content can be overcome only where the centroversion that makes for wholeness of the personality remains the guiding factor. In this event the law of psychic compensation leads to an unremitting dialectical exchange between the assimilating consciousness and the contents that are continuously being newly constellated. Then begins the continuous process characteristic of creative transformation — new constellations of the unconscious and of consciousness interact with new productions and new transformative phases of the personality. The creative principle thus seizes upon and transforms consciousness as well as the unconscious, the ego-self relation as well as the ego-thou relation. For in a creative transformation of the total personality, a modified relation to the thou and the world indicates a new relation to the unconscious and the self, and the clearest, though not the only, indication of psychic transformation is a change in the relation to extrapsychic reality.
Although the creative process, in all its gripping possession, feels so profoundly personal, in its highest form it is inseparable from the universal, from the immensity of the one reality we share, the one experience we share — the fundamental unity which sparked quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like pronouncement that “the over-all number of minds is just one.” We habitually lose sight of that oneness as the mind splits into consciousness and the unconscious. Creativity is what we call the process of integrating the two so that we may feel more fully and see more deeply into the nature of reality. Neumann observes:
When we consider the totality of the human psyche, in which consciousness and the unconscious are interdependent both in their development and in their functions, we see that consciousness can develop only where it preserves a living bond with the creative powers of the unconscious… It must not be forgotten that the outside world that we apprehend with our differentiated consciousness is only a segment of reality, and that our consciousness has developed and differentiated itself as a specialized organ for apprehending this particular segment of reality… We pay a heavy price for the sharpness of our conscious knowledge, which is based on the separation of the psychic systems and which breaks down the one world into the polarity of psyche and world. This price is a drastic curtailment of the reality that we experience.
The triumphs of creative work invite a return to that unified reality:
In [great works of art] a fragment of the unitary reality is apprehended — a deeper, more primordial, and at the same time more complete reality that we are fundamentally unable to grasp with our differentiated conscious functions, because their development is oriented toward a sharper perception of sections of polarized reality. In the differentiation of consciousness we seem to be doing the same thing as when we close our eyes in order to enhance our hearing, in order that we may be “all ears.” Unquestionably this exclusion sharpens and intensifies our hearing. But in thus excluding the other senses we perceive only a segment of the total sensory reality, which we experience more adequately and fully if we not only hear it but also see, smell, taste, and touch it.
[…]
In the rapture and beauty of the creative moment… consciousness and the unconscious momentarily become a creative unity and a third term, a part of the one reality.
And so Neumann locates creativity at the crossing point of possession and openness — the place where the intrapsychic forces impelling us in a certain direction meet the willingness to look outward in all directions, to open the self to the universe and the oneness of reality, the world in its completeness and its infinity. With an eye to what he calls the essential “receptive component” of creative work, he observes:
Always and everywhere [the creative person] is driven to rediscover, to reawaken, to give form to this world. But he does not find this world as though seeking something outside him; rather, he knows that this encounter with full reality, the one world, in which everything is still “whole,” is bound up with his own transformation toward wholeness. For this reason he must, in every situation, in every constellation, refresh the openness into which alone the open world can enter.
All four essays in Art and the Creative Unconscious are a revelation. Couple these fragments with Carl Jung on creativity, then step inside the processes and possessions of some of the most creative people alive.
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.
2025-04-30 07:06:46
Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those same sparse stars made everything we know and are.
The most life-shaping choices we can make are those of our mindset — we can choose the best orientation toward the world, we can choose the best orientation toward each other, but where we seem to struggle the most is orienting with clarity and compassion toward our own lives, toward the choice we have in the dialogue between our inner world and our circumstances.
The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) took up these questions in a moving letter to his closest friend, Cynthia Asquith, found in the out-of-print treasure The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (public library).
The two had met as young writers both searching for their voice, both hungering to be heard — he was working as a kind of literary assistant to titans like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and she as a secretary to Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie. Their friendship was quick and deep and largely epistolary, their letters a sandbox for playing out the life of the mind that becomes literature, a found of mutual encouragement for the twin arts of writing and living. On these pages addressed to the other, they each became themselves.
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a year into the world’s first global war, he sent her what he called a “parting letter” — he was about to make one of the most courageous, disorienting, transformative choices a human being could make: to leave everything one knows and loves, to dismantle the superstructure of daily life that houses the life of the spirit, and begin again someplace new. He didn’t just choose another city, or another country — he chose another continent, another culture of young and untested idealism. He tells his friend:
I feel I must leave this side, this phase of life, for ever. The living part is overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it. So that life which is still fertile must take its departure, like seeds from a dead plant. I want to transplant my life. I think there is hope of a future, in America. I want if possible to grow toward that future.
He knew that Cynthia did not have this kind of freedom. He knew that, despite her talent and her passion, she felt trapped in her circumstances — a marriage too small for her, to which she felt tethered by her children, in a country still too corseted by Victorian mores to allow a woman the full freedom to claim her life. But he also knew the power of personal choice in any given set of circumstances. A generation before Viktor Frankl in his stirring memoir of surviving the concentration camps that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” Lawrence urges his friend in that way we have of giving others the pointed advice we most urgently need ourselves:
You must get the intrinsic reality clear within your soul — even if you betray it in reality, yet know it: that is everything. And know that in the end, always you keep the ultimate choice of your destiny: to abide by the intrinsic reality, or by the extrinsic: the choice is yours, do not let it slide from you, keep it always secure, reserved… Keep the choice of the right always in your own hands. Never admit that it is taken from you… Keep the choice of life… always in your hands: don’t ever relinquish it.
Couple with A Life of One’s Own — psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s pseudonymous masterpiece published just after Lawrence’s untimely death — then revisit Lawrence himself (lensed through Anaïs Nin) on the key to living fully, the strength of sensitivity, the balance of intimacy and independence in love, and how to live whole with the parts we carry.
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.
2025-04-26 01:14:07
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life.
Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.
You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. “The gardener,” Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, “digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”
This is why Debbie Millman (yes) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything.
A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity — a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself.
Page after painted page, Debbie’s lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree.
Seeds and flowers come to punctuate the story of her life — chapters ending, chapters beginning, the maelstroms of uncertainty, the discomposure of loss, the discomposure of love. They appear at auspicious moments, illustrating the vital difference between signs and omens:
Walking by a few days later, she halts mid-stride upon seeing the peonies blooming once more — only to realize that another mourner had placed a posy of plastic flowers where the real ones had thrived. In the artifice, connection; in the simulacrum, a prayerful bow before the deepest reality we share — time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss.
Half a lifetime later, living in a brownstone of her own, Debbie nurses herself back from heartbreak by making a small hopeful flower garden with a birdbath and tending to it daily with blind devotion.
She falls in love again, marries her soul mate, moves to California for a season and begins growing vegetables.
She navigates the terror and uncertainty of the pandemic by watching the smallest things grow.
And when the world finally regains its precarious balance, she travels its jungles and gardens, orchards and forests, to kneel on the woolly moss of Ireland, to bow before Japan’s sacred lotus, to savor Morocco’s Sanguine oranges and Tuscany’s Pesca Regina di Londa peaches, to run her hands over the elephantine trunks of Cambodia’s banyan trees and her fingers along the fibonacci spines of Mexico’s agave.
Over and over, she returns to her own garden for consolation and calibration. She learns patience. She learns perspective. Watching things come alive after a long germination, she begins to befriend time — the time it takes for a heart to heal, for a world to heal, for an ending to end so that a beginning may begin. Watching things die despite her best efforts, she confronts her lifelong fear of doing anything she isn’t good at — that is, she faces the abyss between the ego and the universe, the will and the world, the abyss in which we live.
What emerges from her Love Letter to a Garden (public library) is a tender reminder that we are here to plant a garden in the abyss, and to trust time.
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.