2026-10-11 09:04:35
“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched,” Seneca told his mother in his extraordinary letter on resilience in the face of loss. One need not be a dry materialist to bow before the recognition that no heart goes through life unplundered by loss — all love presupposes it, be it in death or in heartbreak. Whether what is lost are feelings or atoms, grief comes, unforgiving and unpredictable in its myriad manifestations. Joan Didion observed this disorienting fact in her classic memoir of loss: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” And when it does come, it unweaves the very fabric of our being. When love is lost, we lose the part of ourselves that did the loving — a part that, depending on the magnitude of the love, can come to approximate the whole of who we are. We lose what artist Anne Truitt so poetically termed “the lovely entire confidence that comes only from innumerable mutual confidences entrusted and examined… woven by four hands, now trembling, now intent, over and under into a pattern that can surprise both [partners].”
But we also gain something — out of the burning embers of the loss arises an ashen humility, true to its shared Latin root with the word humus. We are made “of the earth” — we bow down low, we become crust, and each breath seems to draw from the magmatic center of the planet that is our being. It is only when we give ourselves over to it completely that we can begin to take ourselves back, to rise, to live again.
How to move through this barely survivable experience is what author and altogether glorious human being Elizabeth Gilbert examines with uncommon insight and tenderness of heart in her conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the inaugural episode of the TED Interviews podcast.
Gilbert reflects on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias — her longtime best friend, whose sudden terminal cancer diagnosis unlatched a trapdoor, as Gilbert put it, into the realization that Rayya was the love of her life:
Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.
With an eye to the intimate biological connection between the body and the mind (which is, of course, the seedbed of feeling), Gilbert adds:
There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.
Gilbert goes on to read a short, stunning reflection on love and loss she had originally published on Instagram:
People keep asking me how I’m doing, and I’m not always sure how to answer that. It depends on the day. It depends on the minute. Right this moment, I’m OK. Yesterday, not so good. Tomorrow, we’ll see.
Here is what I have learned about Grief, though.
I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.
The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.
When Grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, “Oh my god, this is happening RIGHT NOW,” and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of Grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.
The conversation of Grief, then, is one of prayer-and-response.
Grief says to me: “You will never love anyone the way you loved Rayya.” And I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “She’s gone, and she’s never coming back.” I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “You will never hear that laugh again.” I say: “I am willing.” Grief says, “You will never smell her skin again.” I get down on the floor on my fucking knees, and — and through my sheets of tears — I say, “I AM WILLING.” This is the job of the living — to be willing to bow down before EVERYTHING that is bigger than you. And nearly everything in this world is bigger than you.
I don’t know where Rayya is now. It’s not mine to know. I only know that I will love her forever. And that I am willing.
Onward.
Gilbert adds in the interview:
It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.
Complement with life-earned wisdom on how to live with loss from other great artists, writers, and scientists — including Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Johannes Brahms, and Charles Dickens — and the Stoic cure for heartbreak from Epictetus, then revisit Gilbert on creative bravery and the art of living in a state of uninterrupted marvel.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-10-10 10:36:12
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”)
In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart.
That is what Jeff Foster celebrates in one of the poems in his altogether wonderful collection of reckonings The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love (public library) — a prayerful invitation to “find a space in your heart for the unwanted, the unloved, the rejected aspects of experience” and to honor the sanctity of your doubts.
INDECISION
by Jeff FosterFriend, please,
do not try to decide now.
Do not shut any possibility out of your heart. Honor this place of not knowing.Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity.
Slow down. Breathe.
Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you stand.
Any decision will make itself, in time.
Any choice will happen when your defenses are down.
Answers will appear only when they are ready.
When the questions have been fully honored and loved.Do not label this place “indecision.”
It is more alive than that.
It is a place where possibilities grow.
It is a place where uncertainty is sacred.
There is courage in staying close.
There is strength in not knowing.
There is power in doubt.Friend, please know,
there is simply no choice now.
Except to breathe, and breathe again,
and trust this Intelligence beyond mind.A decision will grow, but for today, nourish the ground.
In the introduction to The Way of Rest, Foster observes: “Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it’s not death we’re afraid of but too much life.” And perhaps this is why we are so eager to foreclose our conclusions — deciding is a way of containing what will otherwise spill into the unbearable infinity of possibility, which is in consequence a way of being less alive. But isn’t the whole point to be more alive, to stop waiting and start living in order not to waste your 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.
2026-10-10 10:35:29
It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind — a stage on which, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed in his landmark work on consciousness, we often “use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.”
We do this on the personal level — out of such selective memory and by such exquisite exclusion, we compose the narrative that is the psychological pillar of our identity. We do it on the cultural level — what we call history is a collective selective memory that excludes far more of the past’s realities than it includes. Borges captured this with his characteristic poetic-philosophical precision when he observed that “we are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” To be aware of memory’s chimera is to recognize the slippery, shape-shifting nature of even those truths we think we are grasping most firmly.
Nearly a century after Nietzsche admonished that what we call truth is “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms… a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished,” the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910–September 6, 1998) created an exquisite cinematic metaphor for the slippery memory-mediated nature of truth in his 1950 film Rashomon, based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove” — a psychological-philosophical thriller about the murder of a samurai and its four witnesses, who each recount a radically different reality, each equally believable, thus undermining our most elemental trust in truth.
As researchers in the second half of the twentieth century came to shed light on the foibles of memory, Kurosawa’s masterpiece lent its name to the amply documented unreliability of eyewitness accounts. The Rashomon effect, detailed in this wonderful animated primer from TED-Ed, casts a haunting broader nimbus of doubt over our basic grasp of reality — we only exist, after all, as eyewitnesses of our own lives.
All of these psychological perplexities arise from the basic neurophysiological infrastructure of how memories form and falter in the brain — something the great neurologist Oliver Sacks explored in his classic medical poetics of memory disorders, and something South African biomedical scientist Catharine Young explores in another TED-Ed episode, animated by the prolific Patrick Smith:
Complement with Neurocomic — a graphic novel about how the mind works — and the animated science of how playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity, then revisit Virginia Woolf on how memory seams our lives, Sally Mann on how photographs can unseam memory, and neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin on how medicine’s most famous amnesiac illuminates the wonders of consciousness.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-10-09 11:21:41
Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may be long dead. The great wonder is that its light can traverse immense expanses of space and time to gladden the darkness of today, to cast wonder upon this lonely planet.
An idea is a signal that may travel across immense expanses of space and time before it touches the world. Transformative ideas can and often do fall on the closed eyes of their epoch. But, over and over, history hands us the glad assurance that it can take just one person awake enough to receive the signal so that others can then see it, to interpret it so that others can appreciate its singularity, its significance, its beauty. (See, for instance, Fanny Wright and atomism, Girolamo Mercuriale and fitness.)
Like a star, a good idea has a gravitational pull that attracts other bodies into its obit. Unlike a star, which invariably runs out of hydrogen fuel and dies, an idea cannot be unthought — once it exists, it is forever lodged in the collective conscience, however deep the recess. Some of humanity’s best ideas come from galaxies of thought so remote from the status quo that their light can take generations or civilizations to touch the world, the faint signal magnified and reflected by a handful of believers like a relay of mirrors across the dark sky of time until it becomes a beacon.
That is what David Byrne chronicles in Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up (public library) — a book masted with passion and ruddered with rigor, celebrating the lost history of creativity through the stories of the forgotten, neglected, and erased visionaries who from the margins of their time wrote the history of the future.
David — one of the most indiscriminately and ardently curious people I know, whose contagious enthusiasms will enchant you with everything from the geometry of trees to the dream culture of Malaysian tribal groups to the mating habits of eels — selects discoveries, inventions, and creations that traverse the vast spectrum of human ingenuity: from painting to astronomy, from music to microbiology, from literature to civil engineering. Some have only recently bubbled to public awareness (Vera Rubin and dark matter, Lynn Margulis and symbiotic life), some are unknown to most, perhaps precisely because they have become so plainly embedded in our model of the world, the model they helped build (Marie Tharp and plate tectonics, Peter Kropotkin and mutualism, the invention of hand-washing), some have transformed our lives in a very practical way (cement, perspective, inoculation), some in a spiritual way (the paintings of Caravaggio and Beauford Delaney, the writings of Melville, the music of Bach), and some have simply dusted our lives with delight (the wonders of lichen).
Reflecting on how such transformative ideas can go dormant for decades (solar panels), centuries (irrigation systems in South India), or millennia (the atom), David observes:
We’ve evolved to rely on whatever assumptions, models, and perception work for us — or at least work most of the time. If it’s right most of the time, or for the time being, then that’s held as proof that our assumptions must be valid and true, and we will be successful. Our faith in our assumptions often temporarily increases our odds of survival and success, until it doesn’t, until the curtain is pulled away and our assumptions are revealed to be just that, assumptions, not grounded in fact or reality.
One of our most reflexive and most limiting assumptions is that we are the pinnacle of creative and intellectual development, the past too distant and dumb to offer any ideas better than our own:
Our tendency as humans is often to imagine that the “story” of history leads us to where we are right now. We like to imagine ourselves as some sort of inevitable culmination — it all led to us. What we see, and what we judge as important and significant, viewed in the rearview mirror is determined by how we see ourselves at present.
Undermining the hubris of our own inevitability is the ease with which anything could dislodge us from our chosen course in a blink. An accident is simply our term for a moment in which chance intercedes into our lives to remind us that we are not in control, to remind us that all of our plans and predictions are just provisional models of the possible, which will always exceed our imagination because we ourselves are the possible’s wild bet against probability. Both in their generation and in their rediscovery, revolutionary ideas are often the product of lucky accidents. Observing that such serendipities happen to those who are both prepared and receptive, David offers a taxonomy:
Accidents come in different forms. Something was rediscovered when someone was actually looking for something else, someone realizes that forgotten past research covers similar or even identical ground to their own, or an unpredictable random event makes a discarded idea come into view. But for lucky accidents to be meaningful, the heart, mind, and eyes have to be open.
Looking over this orrery of good ideas, David considers what it takes to make a “sleeping beauty” — a term coined in a 2004 paper on the history of science — come awake: reaching beyond the bounds of your own discipline, welcoming the counterintuitive, using associative rather than analytical thinking, and resisting to the last “the hubris of modernity” by looking to the dusky recesses of the past for neglected ideas that might light up tomorrow.
What emerges from these stories is a reminder that history is not a record of the facts but of the feelings the dominant culture had about the happenings of its time; not a ledger of events but an impressionistic portrait of our collective selective memory, and it is those in power who do the selecting, those least interested in ideas that might change the status quo. Hovering above it all like the shadow of cloud is the awareness that history is happening right now, that we too may be putting good ideas to sleep — but by continually examining our blind spots and biases, we have a chance to keep them awake long enough for their light to blaze the way to the world we want to live in.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-10-09 04:31:29
Few things in life are more vivifying than a shimmering reminder that we can still surprise ourselves — those rare moments when the urn of the self cracks and out pours something more fully alive: truer than any narrative, more authentic than any performative personhood, unfettered from identity and expectation and all the other scripts we live by.
It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so reminded that we know ourselves only incompletely and the future not at all; that inside us dwell parts so unexplored as to be capable of surprising the conscious totality — parts drawing on some subterranean river of lore to make instantaneous decisions we never could have planned and did not anticipate.
Lurking in it all is the haunting intimation of the illusion of choice, gnawing at the fundament of the self: Who exactly is doing the deciding that surprises the decided-for?
And yet out of such confusion, such delight. We call these delightful and disorienting deviations from the script improvisation. Nowhere are they more impressive, or more illustrative of the broader paradoxes of the self, than in music.
That is what violinist Natalie Hodges explores in one of the most enchanting parts of Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (public library) — her altogether fascinating inquiry into the poetic science of sound and feeling.
She writes:
In improvisation, the generation of material is spontaneous, but it’s never random. This in itself constitutes a paradox: If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing — on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it — except chance? In other words, how can the spontaneous be anything but random; how can music made in a jolt of instinct, on a bolt out of the now, be endowed with a form that makes sense in time, as though it had been written and rewritten and practiced and memorized beforehand? And how, in making that first, most instinctive, most desperate decision, do we choose — if it really can be called “choosing,” if we really choose at all?
For all this perplexity, there is something incredibly liberating in improvisation — a sort of “unselfing,” to borrow Iris Murdoch’s perennially lovely term; something that provides, as Hodges puts it, “the feeling of easy self-suspension that in the best moments can accompany deep focus, the way that when you have to throw yourself into a task it becomes almost a way to abandon the self, almost a relief to leave the self behind.”
She takes these questions to a Radcliffe lecture titled “What Choice Do I Have?” by the virtuosic Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, who has stunned millions with her astonishing improvisations on musical prompts given to her by the audience. Out of a tiny seed handed by a stranger, a striking original composition comes abloom in real time, with no premeditation and no practice — a skill so natural to Montero yet so seemingly otherworldly that her brain became the subject of an fMRI study, the findings of which affirm physicist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander’s insistence that “it is less about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical.”
To discern the neural correlates of improvisation, scientists observed Montero’s brain under three conditions: playing scales, the most prescriptive of all musical structures; playing a memorized Bach piece; and improvising from an initial Bach prompt.
They found that the Default Mode Network — the same brain region which time in nature unlooses to make us more creative and which psychedelics shake up — lit up in an entirely different way when she improvised rather than playing from memory.
Improvisation, in other words, is our built-in remix rotor of consciousness.
Hodges writes:
[The Default Mode Network is] a sprawling system of functional connectivity between regions of the brain that, loosely put, modulates the many facets of the self. These include, to name a few, the medial prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making, self-perception, and autobiographical memory; the hippocampus, which forms new memories; the angular gyrus, a center of perception and spatial cognition, a sense of oneself in the physical world; and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, responsible for thoughts about others and their relation to the self. During the scale and memory trials, these areas of Montero’s brain lit up with interconnectivity, as though her senses of time and space and memory were all talking to one another, working together to re-create these tasks that, together, they had been preprogrammed to execute. But each time the researchers asked Montero to switch to improvisation, the light of that interconnectivity was suddenly, substantially dimmed. (In more technical terms, the interactions between those various regions were significantly and quantifiably reduced.) If the regions of the DMN, working together, represent a unified sense of self, upon which Montero draws when she is playing music she has learned in the past, the act of improvisation somehow disbands that cohesion, requires her to draw on something else.
[…]
The improvisation task in Montero’s trial, the researchers found, resulted in decreased connectivity between the regions of the DMN overall — a momentary fracturing of the self, a temporary dissolving of its margins consistent with Montero’s assertion that she “gets out of the way” when she improvises, that she loses herself in the present, that she turns on the tap and lets the music flow.
What shines through these fractures in the conscious self is a different sort of memory — not the conscious kind for which the DMN is ordinarily responsible, tasked with recalling the past and anticipating the future, but a mental process that is both unconscious and conscious of itself, self-referential for the duration of the improvisation, a kind of time-out-of-time that, on the miniature timescale of the improvisational period, seems to remember the future: The researchers found that while Montero was improvising on the piano, her musical stream of consciousness remained “structured and cohesive,” referencing patterns and building on motifs that had poured out of her unconscious mind earlier in the timeline of the improvisation — patterns and motifs laid down in anticipation of their future reference.
The implication is profound: Since consciousness is the experience of “existing with a body over time,” improvisation quite literally opens up a different mode of consciousness that bends the arrow of time and taunts the second law of thermodynamics. The researchers called it “a form of embodied creativity,” revealing the unconscious dialogue between the body and the mind whispered beneath the conscious mind’s narrative about what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen.
With an eye to Saint Augustine’s long-ago meditations on the secret chambers of memory, Hodges reflects:
Montero’s, then, is a transcendent kind of muscle memory — not one to which her musicality is bound, but, rather, which she bends to her whim and will, memory that opens up an infinity of possibilities in the present… Improvisation, then, can be seen as an uncanny manifestation of deep memory itself: the creation of order out of disorder, a deep up-pouring from some dormant part of the soul; a confirmation that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows.”
Hodges finds an analogue to improvisation’s peculiar future-memory in the quantum physics concept of the path integral, derived in the 1940s by the polymathic physicist Richard Feynman — a musician himself, who understood uniquely that we are simply and dazzlingly “atoms with consciousness.”
She writes:
The path integral calculates the probability that a given particle, occupying one position at a particular time, will end up at another position at a later time. The question seems simple enough, but it is complicated by the fact that quantum particles act as waves, and so their position, and the paths they take between positions, can only be described in terms of probability and not of fixity. Feynman’s great insight? That a wave-particle intuits all the possible paths it could take through space and time, given the basic constraints on its movement — the time and position from which it starts, and that at which it ends — and then chooses one that is based on the sum of all those paths… an infinite number of journeys across the universe… These infinite paths add up, through the superposition of their amplitudes (some of which constructively add, others of which cancel one another in whole or in part), to yield the path of least action — kinetic minus potential energy, the energy of the particle’s motion minus the energy it possesses due to its position — which is the actual path that the particle traverses. Thus it is as though the particle, in the singular instant when it commences its motion, intuits every path it could take and then sets off along the one it is destined to take.
[…]
Similarly, when Montero improvises, it seems almost as though she is remembering the future, entraining to something that doesn’t yet exist. She intuits all the possibilities contained within a single theme, between its notes, inside its silences… and then picks one path to follow, plucks one shimmering thread from the tangle of possibilities and follows where it leads… She doesn’t think or resist; she just does, leaning into the predestiny of form.
The body plays the score.
Complement with the fascinating science of how the interplay of spontaneity and self-control mediates our capacity for presence, then revisit physicist Paul Davies on why we can’t remember the future with our default consciousness and Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of artificial intelligence.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-10-09 03:56:59
“I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) wrote to his law partner three weeks before his thirty-third birthday. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”
Pensive, sensitive, and compassionate by nature, Lincoln felt life deeply. As a child, he told his stepsister that an ant’s life is as sweet to the ant as ours is to us and ardently chided the other boys for setting sea turtles on fire with that unthinking cruelty children at play can have. As a teenager, he defied his family’s tradition of considering basic literacy sufficient education for their line of work, sneaking away from his farm duties to read and study, so that a cousin would later remember him as “very lazy… always reading — scribbling — writing — ciphering — writing poetry &c. &c.” As a young adult, he came to see himself as cursed with the “peculiar misfortune” of dreaming dreams too large not to explode with disappointment.
Five years after leaving his father’s farm, the first detonation of depression shook the young man’s world. His legal studies strained him beyond capacity. Reading day and night, he grew emaciated. Meanwhile, a typhoid epidemic swept the land with a tidal wave of death, taking with it the life of Ann Rutledge — a young woman who uniquely understood Lincoln’s sensitivity and about whom he had come to care deeply — so deeply that no one around them quite understood the nature of their bond, though generations have taken the liberty of qualifying it, manufacturing an entire romantic mythos around a brittle skeleton of spare facts.
Whatever the private reality of the relationship, it was in this period of strife and loss, surrounded by widespread death and stretched beyond his own creaturely limits, that Lincoln came to think seriously of suicide. The idea grew so intrusive, so actionable, that he no longer trusted himself to carry a pocket knife. Friends and neighbors watched his mental unraveling with growing concern, so alarmed to see him wander the woods aimlessly with his gun that they set up a suicide watch.
Lincoln lived. But from that point on, like Keats, like Tchaikovsky, he suffered frequent visitations of deadly despair, the character-shaping power of which Joshua Wolf Shenk explores in Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (public library).
After that first rather public episode of suicidal depression, Lincoln learned to hide his heavy heart behind his famous humor, behind a facade of such cheerful levity that even those working most closely with him would never see him despondent or ill-tempered. But it spilled out obliquely, through the cracks of compassion: Reaching out to salve a friend’s savaging depression with his great gift of consolation, he wrote with a poignant familiarity of “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”
Unbeknownst to anyone, in the summer of his thirtieth year, Lincoln penned an intensely sorrowful poem titled “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” printed anonymously in a small Whig paper in Illinois alongside advertisements for whale oil and French cologne. It would take scholars 139 years to identify his authorship. With its haunting story-framing epigraph and its dramatic narration by a fictional character, it was Lincoln’s way of safely rehearsing in the darkest recesses of his imagination what it might be like to enact the central pull of suicide — the tempting illusion that total self-erasure is the only way to terminate the mental anguish nothing else has allayed.
THE SUICIDE’S SOLILOQUY
The following lines were said to have been found near the bones of a man supposed to have committed suicide, in a deep forest, on the flat branch of the Sangamon, some time ago.
Here, where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl,
Or buzzards pick my bones.No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens’ cry.Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
Though I in hell should rue it!Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never knew;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?To ease me of this power to think,
That through my bosom raves,
I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink,
And wallow in its waves.Though devils yell, and burning chains
May waken long regret;
Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,
Will help me to forget.Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night,
To take that fiery berth!
Think not with tales of hell to fright
Me, who am damn’d on earth!Sweet steel! come forth from your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last — my only friend!
This blackest despair was more than a poetic image for Lincoln. Three years later, when another acute episode of depression subsumed him and he came to see himself as the most miserable man on Earth, he arrived at the ultimate equation:
To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.
He did get better. He did remember what we so frequently and dangerously forget when pressed under the leaden lid of depression — that the light of being returns. Like any great artist of life, Lincoln learned to transmute his suffering into fuel for building a more beautiful and light-filled world, turning the private anguish of his suicidal depression into a powerful political metaphor to mobilize his nation’s spirit. “If destruction be our lot,” he declaimed in one of his most powerful speeches, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” (Whitman — who reverenced Lincoln as “the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality” — echoed the sentiment with redoubled conviction across the epoch-stride of the Civil War in his prescient essay Democratic Vistas: “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.”)
Living with his own depression, Lincoln understood intimately that what is true of the spirit of a person is true of the spirit of a people — our undoing always serves an invitation to learn new modes of making: making beauty, making meaning, making the life we want to live and the world we want to live it in.
Couple with two centuries of great writers — including Keats, Whitman, Thoreau, Carson, and Hansberry — on the surest salve for depression, then revisit Tim Ferriss on how he survived suicidal depression, Mary Oliver’s spare and splendid antidote to melancholy, William Styron’s classic interior tour of what depression is really like, and this tender illustrated meditation on what it takes to unblue our sadnesses.
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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