2025-12-03 04:23:26
It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and gave it form so we can hear it with our eyes and see with our minds, making shapes for sounds and meaning from the shapes.
We take it for granted now, this makeshift miracle permeating every substrate of our lives, and go on tasking these tiny concrete things with conveying our most immense and abstract ideas. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth’s largest living organism, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archeological artifact, touches more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters carry the history of our species and of our world, their shapes shaped by a conversation between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped.
Kelli Anderson, maker of material magic, brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape — a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter.
Through a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelli shines a dazzling light on how we went from ink to lead to pixel, drawing on everything from Plato’s Cratylus to an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom to (which sparked the concept of the first computer code in the fertile mind of the the young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to conjure up the digital universe.
In one of the wonderful short essays accompanying each letter, she writes:
For many cultures over time, the A’s triangular form has represented strength and stability. This association likely originated in the physical world. The triangle is is the most stable load-bearing shape because it distributes force and tension to either side of its wide base. In terms of physics, the majority of simple machines utilize the triangle’s intrinsic morphological power: the wedge, inclined plane, and lever all work thanks to their triangular forms.
Long before physics provided a cogent explanation, early human civilizations had observed and utilized the structural strength of the triangle in their architecture and simple machines. By extension, for hundreds of years across the Hellenic world, the A was thought to have the power to curse and to heal, and regularly appeared in religious and medicinal rituals. The letter A neatly connected symbolic mysticism with the demonstrable power of the built world. (There exists a symmetry between “to spell” and “a spell.”)
Observing that “every letter has a long history,” Kelli traces the lineage of A:
The A we recognize today is the result of various cultures’ remapping of this shape to sights and concepts of local environments.
The A’s triangular form begins in Egypt in 3100 BCE as a pictogram of a perched eagle, a bird central to ancient Egyptian religion.
The more agrarian-minded Phoenicians transformed the eagle into aleph (from the Hebrew word for “ox”). Now rotated, this bovine appears in profile with its horns pointing to the right, its nose to the left. A vertical line defines the back of the ox’s head, which introduces the A’s horizontal crossbar.
One of the great blind spots of our cultural hindsight is the continuity of ideas — we look back and gasp at what appears as a breakthrough, failing to see its combinatorial nature, the way everything builds on what came before. Kelli writes:
The word “text” comes from the Latin verb texere, which means “to weave” (hence the origin of an expression like “to spin a yarn”). Computers, which were first used for typesetting and are direct technological descendants of weaving, seem to perfectly bridge texere’s dual meanings. Weaving is a binary technology: Its vertical warp and horizontal weft (and the way those two components, together, render a yarn visible/invisible) are a precursor to how the 1s and 0s of today’s computers work. Woven binary code memory served as the rudimentary computer navigation system onboard the Apollo 11 mission.
Alongside the paper playground of ideas is a rigorously researched magazine chronicling the history of technology and the evolution of typography. What emerges is something thoroughly unexampled: part pop-up exploratorium, part encyclopedia, part wunderkammer with twenty-six compartments of wonder, part homage to the unsung heroes who, working in the shadow of their time and place, shaped the modern world.
Alphabet in Motion, the tactile delight of which is thoroughly untranslatable onto a digital screen, lives in that rare place where imagination and illumination meet to become a portal of wonder — the gift of a lifetime.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2025-11-30 02:10:13
We walk this earth as bewildered animals trying to recover the divinity within — descendants of the great apes who invented gods to mirror back to us the best in ourselves and bridle the worst, but we are still and always have been our own only shepherds.
In times of crisis for humanity, amid the genocides and the wars and the burning forests and the firing squads of self-righteousness, the only true remedy is to remember what it means to be human — the complexity of it, the contradictions, the panoply of capacities from which get to choose in becoming who we are, as persons and as peoples.
Every crisis of and for humanity is evidence that we have forgotten what we are — what Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931), writing in the interlude between two world wars, calls a “divinity which walks among the nations and speaks of love, pointing toward the paths of life, while the people laugh and mock its words and teachings.” In The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (public library) — the wonderful collection of meditations, essays, and poems drawn from Gibran’s Arabic writings about the spiritual life — he writes:
We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble.
We were a faint spark buried in the ash, but have become a fire blazing above the sheltered ravine.
An epoch before Maya Angelou reckoned with our multitudes in her breathtaking spaceborne poem, insisting that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Gibran considers what it would take for us, “scions of the apes,” to attain spiritual perfection as a species:
Humankind will proceed toward perfection when it feels that humanity is: A limitless sky and a shoreless ocean, an ever-blazing flame, an eternally gleaming light, a wind when it gusts and when it is calm, a cloud when it thunders and lightnings and rains, a stream when it sings or roars, a tree when it blossoms in the spring and disrobes in the autumn, a mountain when it towers, a valley when it descends, and a field when it is fertile or barren.
When humankind has felt all these things, it will have reached the midpoint in its path toward perfection. If it wishes to arrive at the road to perfection, it must, if it perceives its own essence, feel that humanity is: An infant relying on its mother, a mature man responsible for his dependents, a youth lost among his desires and passions, an elderly man whose past and future wrestle with one another, a worshipper in his hermitage, a criminal in his cell, a scholar amidst his books and papers, a fool between the black of night and the dark of his day, a nun among the flowers of her faith and the thorns of her loneliness, a prostitute between the talons of her weakness and the claws of her neediness, the indigent between his bitterness and complaisance, the rich man between his ambitions and his submission, the poet between the fog of his evenings and the rays of his dawns.
Should humankind prove able to experience and know all these things, it will arrive at perfection and become one shadow among the shadows of Gods.
If you could use some kindling for the fire of your faith in humanity, warm yourself with the story of how humanity saved the ginkgo and with E.B. White’s magnificent response to a man who had lost faith in humanity, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, and how to weather the uncertainties of 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.
2025-11-27 00:00:15
It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.
My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert’s almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life.
THANKS
by W.S. MerwinListen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directionsback from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank youover telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank youwith the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
Couple with Billy Collins’s ode to gratitude, then revisit Albert Camus, writing in the middle of a world war, on how to live whole in a broken world, and Oliver Sacks, writing at the event horizon of death, on the deepest measure of gratitude.
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.
2025-11-25 01:58:19
You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink, and your eye that took 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the continental plates beneath are drifting apart, and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf the length of the continent, carrying the weight of consciousness, and consciousness, how it windows this tenement of breath and bone with wonder, how it hovers over everything, gigantic and unnecessary, like love.
It is all so improbable, this wild and wondrous world, against all we know about the universe. And yet here it is, and here we are, set on it to know that we are dying and live anyway, and love anyway.
Our most beautiful, most transformative, most vivifying experiences and encounters are like that — they enter our lives through the back door of expectation, shattering the laws of probability with the golden gavel of the possible.
In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship (public library), poet and philosopher David Whyte captures the terror and transcendence we are hurled into as we encounter, without looking for it, “a degree of mutually encoded knowledge” with another person that touches the center of our being and discomposes the superstructure of life as we know it.
Whyte considers the insuperable force of truth pulsating beneath our resistance to such experiences:
Something inside the protective walls of… our established sense of our self may be preparing us, willingly or unwillingly, for an emancipation, a life beyond it which if intuited too early might be frightening to us, beyond our ability to reach.
Trying to navigate the situation, we tend to rely on the intellect to “to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and weigh things in the balance,” forgetting its immense blind spots and, still victims of Descartes all those epochs later, forgetting that the most alive parts of life are often profoundly unreasonable. Whyte writes:
Beneath [our intellectual assessments], untiring but seldom listened to, we have…. a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and what is bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being.
It is not easy, this reconstitution of the self, this uncharted exploration of the possible in the improbable. But if the universe can do it, so can the living fractals of it that we are.
Couple with David Whyte’s staggering poem about reaching beyond our self-limiting stories about love, then revisit paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley on the first and final truth of 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.
2025-11-22 06:18:32
Long ago, we traded the trees for tools, trying to bend the world to our will. We rose to our feet, ambling under the weight of an oversized brain that grew the opposable thumb we call thinking and made with it more tools — language to name what we saw, organizing principles for what we named, theories to explain it explain it all.
Among all of our technologies of thought, none has been more useful, more dangerous, more double-edged than the category — a living fossil of our hunter-gatherer days, impelling us to put things into little baskets of similitude, compulsively analyzing reality in order to classify and contain it.
The price we paid for our extraordinary cognitive capacity is a docile faith in the analytical mind as the most effective tool to wield at the problem of reality. This yearning for order amid the chaos of the universe, for something to allay the fundamental bewilderment of being alive, may be what makes us human; it may also be the root of our alienation from the rest of nature, for it is inherently antinatural: A century after Descartes severed the body from the mind, Linnaeus severed the organism from the ecosystem, dividing nature into discrete categories, dismembering the interdependence that makes this rocky planet a living world. Over and over we discover that the most resilient organisms in nature traverse the borders between kingdoms and blur the boundary between selves, just as the richest loves defy labels, and yet we continue living under Linnaeus’s spell. But as my astrophysicist friend Natalie Batalha observes in her wonderful Where Shall We Meet interview, “we humans like to put things in jars, we like to classify things, but what we’ve learned is that nature is quite continuous — you can’t neatly put things in jars.”
English novelist John Fowles (March 31, 1926–November 5, 2005) makes an impassioned case for the unjarring of life in his altogether wonderful 1979 arboreal memoir The Tree (public library). He writes:
I am a heretic about Linnaeus, and find nothing less strange, or more poetically just, than that he should have gone mad at the end of his life. I do not dispute the value of the tool he gave to natural science — which was in itself no more than a shrewd extension of the Aristotelian system and which someone else would soon have elaborated, if he had not; but I have doubts about the lasting change it has effected in ordinary human consciousness.
Evolution has turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but singly, mirroring the way we like to think of our private selves. Almost all our art before the Impressionists — or their St John the Baptist, William Turner — betrays our love of clearly defined boundaries, unique identities, of the individual thing released from the confusion of background. This power of detaching an object from its surroundings and making us concentrate on it is an implicit criterion in all our judgements on the more realistic side of visual art; and very similar, if not identical, to what we require of optical instruments like microscopes and telescopes — which is to magnify, to focus sharper, to distinguish better, to single from the ruck. A great deal of science is devoted to this same end: to providing specific labels, explaining specific mechanisms and ecologies, in short for sorting and tidying what seems in the mass indistinguishable one from the other. Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism; that is, it acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera view-finder. Already it destroys or curtails certain possibilities of seeing, apprehending and experiencing. And that is the bitter fruit from the tree of Uppsalan knowledge.
A century after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology and a decade before trailblazing Candian forester Suzanne Simard began her revelatory isotope research into the rhizomatic communication of trees, Fowles adds:
It also begs very considerable questions as to the realities of the boundaries we impose on what we see. In a wood the actual visual “frontier” of any one tree is usually impossible to distinguish, at least in summer. We feel, or think we feel, nearest to a tree’s “essence” (or that of its species) when it chances to stand like us, in isolation; but evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or a hermit. Their society in turn creates or supports other societies of plants, insects, birds, mammals, micro-organisms; all of which we may choose to isolate and section off, but which remain no less the ideal entity, or whole experience, of the wood — and indeed are still so seen by most of primitive mankind.
Scientists restrict the word symbiotic to those relationships between species that bring some detectable mutual benefit; but the true wood, the true place of any kind, is the sum of all its phenomena. They are all in some sense symbiotic, being together in a togetherness of beings. It is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond science’s calculation (a scientist might say, beyond useful function, even if calculable) that we so habitually ignore it, and treat the flight of the bird and the branch it flies from, the leaf in the wind and its shadow on the ground, as separate events, or riddles — what bird? which branch? what leaf? which shadow? These question-boundaries (where do I file that?) are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision. Long before the glass lens and the movie-camera were invented, they existed in our eyes and minds, both in our mode of perception and in our mode of analysing the perceived: endless short sequence and jump-cut, endless need to edit and range this raw material.
Wincing at his early life as “a pseudo-scientist, treating nature as some sort of intellectual puzzle, or game, in which being able to name names and explain behaviourisms — to identify and to understand machinery — constituted all the pleasures and the prizes,” Fowles laments how this orientation distracted him from “the total meaning and total experience of nature,” and adds:
The particular cost of understanding the mechanism of nature, of having so successfully itemized and pigeon-holed it, lies most of all in the ordinary person’s perception of it, in his or her ability to live with and care for it — and not to see it as challenge, defiance, enemy. Selection from total reality is no less necessary in science than it is in art; but outside those domains (in both of which the final test of selection is utility, or yield, to our own species) it seriously distorts and limits any worthwhile relationship.
We know this, not in the mind but in the marrow of our being — our own richest, profoundest, most transformative experiences elude classification, their essence unreachable by analysis, for it is a synthesis of myriad forces and phenomena only a fraction of which we are conscious of. To analyze such experiences is not to understand them more deeply but to grow alienated from them and from the part of ourselves that did the experiencing, the part wild with aliveness. Fowles writes:
Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history… quintessentially “wild” in the sense [of] unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. In fact it corresponds very closely — despite our endless efforts to “garden,” to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems — with wild nature. Almost all the richness of our personal existence derives from this synthetic and eternally present “confused” consciousness of both internal and external reality, and not least because we know it is beyond the analytical.
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.
2025-11-20 02:33:47
Love is a fire that takes two to keep burning, but one to extinguish — if the hearth of either heart is too damp with doubt, both wake up one day to find their hands cupping ashes. And yet when two people have loved each other and parted, the fire is forever embering between them, however great the distance in space, in time, in thought. The wind of a single word and the gust of the smallest gesture can rekindle it in a flash, often to the surprise of both. All true love is a smoking spell against forgetting.
That is the aspect of love I feel burning through “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) — a breakup poem and a poem of unbreaking, one that begins as an ode, twists into an ultimatum, and finally reveals itself to be a lamentation, a hymn of longing, a bittersweet acknowledgement that once a person has entered another’s heart, they always have a place in it, but also a recognition of how they ought to show up in order to honor that place.
That, at least, is how I receive this poem, at this particular point in my life — for, as the teenage Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, “once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” It is read here by two dear friends a generation apart — Karen Maldonado in Spanish and Rose Hanzlik in English, as translated by Donald Devenish Walsh in the bilingual pocket-sized collection of immensities Love Poems (public library). It is a poem that warrants as accompaniment nothing less than Bach’s transcendent Cello Suite No. 1, performed by none other than the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals.
IF YOU FORGET ME
by Pablo NerudaI want you to know
one thing.You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.If suddenly you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
SI TÚ ME OLVIDAS
Pablo NerudaQuiero que sepas
una cosa.Tú sabes cómo es esto:
si miro
la luna de cristal, la rama roja
del lento otoño en mi ventana,
si toco
junto al fuego
la impalpable ceniza
o el arrugado cuerpo de la leña,
todo me lleva a ti,
como si todo lo que existe,
aromas, luz, metales,
fueran pequeños barcos que navegan
hacia las islas tuyas que me aguardan.Ahora bien,
si poco a poco dejas de quererme
dejaré de quererte poco a poco.Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado.Si consideras largo y loco
el viento de banderas
que pasa por mi vida
y te decides
a dejarme a la orilla
del corazón en que tengo raíces,
piensa
que en ese día,
a esa hora
levantaré los brazos
y saldrán mis raíces
a buscar otra tierra.Pero
si cada día,
cada hora
sientes que a mí estás destinada
con dulzura implacable.
Si cada día sube
una flor a tus labios a buscarme,
ay amor mío, ay mía,
en mí todo ese fuego se repite,
en mí nada se apaga ni se olvida,
mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada,
y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos
sin salir de los míos.
For a kindred counterpart from a very different kind of poet, savor David Whyte’s “The Truelove,” then revisit Neruda’s love letter to language, his ode to silence, and his moving Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
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.