2026-04-19 14:25:54
Attention is less a lens on the world than a mirror for the mind. “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James wrote in his foundational treatise on attention in the final years of the nineteenth century. In the epoch since, we have discovered just what an “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” attention is, just how much it shapes our entire experience of reality. But we are only just beginning to discover that, far from a passive observer of the outside world, our attention is an active creator of it as the brain makes constant conscious and unconscious predictions of what it expects to find when it looks, then finds just that; we are only beginning to understand how right Thoreau was when, in James’s epoch, he observed that “we hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
That is what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark explores in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (public library) — an illuminating investigation of the human brain as a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, replete with implications for neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health, neurodiversity, the relationship between the body and the self, and the way we live our lives.
Clark writes:
Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person’s facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.
Nothing we do or experience — if the theory is on track — is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.
Because these predictions are informed by our past experience, reality is not how the present self parses the world but how the Russian nesting doll of selves we carry — all the people we have ever been, with all the experiences we have ever had — constructs the world before its eyes. Our sensorium is a simulation we ourselves are constantly running. Clark traces this predictive process as it unfolds at the meeting point of stimulus and expectation:
Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction — the brain’s best expectations rooted in our own past histories.
[…]
When the brain strongly predicts a certain sight, a sound, or a feeling, that prediction plays a role in shaping what we seem to see, hear, or feel.
Emotion, mood, and even planning are all based in predictions too. Depression, anxiety, and fatigue all reflect alterations to the hidden predictions that shape our experience. Alter those predictions (for example, by “reframing” a situation using different words) and our experience itself alters.
At the heart of this equivalence is the recognition that changing our expectations changes our experience — not in a New Age way, but in a neurocognitive way. With an eye to the opportunity to “hack our own predictive minds,” which Bruce Lee intuited in his insistence that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Clark observes:
Since experience is always shaped by our own expectations, there is an opportunity to improve our lives by altering some of those expectations, and the confidence with which they are held.
Both the nature of our expectations and the confidence with which we hold them are shaped by a constellation of biological and psychological factors, from brain structure and neurochemistry to environment and personal history. Leaning on a large body of research, Clark examines how the brain’s unconscious compulsion for informed prediction shapes everything from our most basic sensations of heat and pain to our most complex experiences of selfhood and transcendence, revealing our brains to be not passive receptors of reality but “buzzing proactive systems that constantly anticipate signals from the body and from the world.” He writes:
To perceive is to find the predictions that best fit the sensory evidence. To act is to alter the world to bring it into line with some of those predictions… It is this deep reciprocity between prediction and action that positions predictive brains as the perfect internal organs for the creation of extended minds — minds enhanced and augmented by the use of tools, technologies, and the complex social worlds in which we live and work. Extended minds are possible because predictive brains automatically seek out actions that will improve our states of information, reducing uncertainty as we approach our goals (highly predicted future states). When such actions become parts of habit systems that call upon resources that are robustly available, trusted, and fully woven into our daily ways of dealing with the world, we become creatures whose effective cognitive apparatus exceeds that of the biological brain alone.
Emanating from the mind’s powerful predictive faculty is the haunting inevitability of personal responsibility for shaping our own experience. Centuries after Milton admonished in Paradise Lost that “the mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Clark writes in a sentiment of especial poignancy in the context of our present reckoning with consciousness and artificial intelligence:
Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.
In the remainder of The Experience Machine, Clark goes on to explore how conscious expectations and unconscious predictions impact human experiences as varied as chronic pain and psychosis, and what we can do to hack this cognitive compulsion in order to ameliorate our suffering and magnify our vitality. Complement it with the fascinating science of the extended mind, then revisit Mary Oliver on what attention really means and Iris Murdoch on how it unmasks the universe.
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.
2026-04-19 04:15:12
“Every advance of intellect beyond the ordinary measure,” Schopenhauer wrote in examining the relationship between genius and insanity, “disposes to madness.” But could what is true of the individual also be true of society — could it be that the more so-called progress polishes our collective pride and the more intellectually advanced human civilization becomes, the more it risks madness? And, if so, what is the proper corrective to restore our collective sanity?
That’s what the great German humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in his timely 1956 treatise The Sane Society (public library).
Fifteen years after his inquiry into why totalitarian regimes rise in Escape from Freedom, Fromm examines the promise and foibles of modern democracy, focusing on its central pitfall of alienation and the means to attaining its full potential — the idea that “progress can only occur when changes are made simultaneously in the economic, socio-political and cultural spheres; that any progress restricted to one sphere is destructive to progress in all spheres.”
Two decades before his elegant case for setting ourselves free from the chains of our culture, Fromm weighs the validity of our core assumption about our collective state:
Nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western world of the twentieth century, are eminently sane. Even the fact that a great number of individuals in our midst suffer from more or less severe forms of mental illness produces little doubt with respect to the general standard of our mental health. We are sure that by introducing better methods of mental hygiene we shall improve still further the state of our mental health, and as far as individual mental disturbances are concerned, we look at them as strictly individual incidents, perhaps with some amazement that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture which is supposedly so sane.
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself.
Fromm notes that while modernity has increased the material wealth and comfort of the human race, it has also wrought major wars that killed millions, during which “every participant firmly believed that he was fighting in his self-defense, for his honor, or that he was backed up by God.” In a sentiment of chilling pertinence today, after more than half a century of alleged progress has drowned us in mind-numbing commercial media and left us to helplessly watch military budgets swell at the expense of funding for the arts and humanities, Fromm writes:
We have a literacy above 90 per cent of the population. We have radio, television, movies, a newspaper a day for everybody. But instead of giving us the best of past and present literature and music, these media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lacking in any sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain even once in a while. But while the mind of everybody, young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to see to it that no “immorality” occurs on the screen. Any suggestion that the government should finance the production of movies and radio programs which would enlighten and improve the minds of our people would be met again with indignation and accusations in the name of freedom and idealism.
Less than a decade after the German philosopher Josef Pieper made his beautiful case for why leisure is the basis of culture, Fromm adds:
We have reduced the average working hours to about half what they were one hundred years ago. We today have more free time available than our forefathers dared to dream of. But what has happened? We do not know how to use the newly gained free time; we try to kill the time we have saved, and are glad when another day is over… Society as a whole may be lacking in sanity.
Fromm points out that we can only speak of a “sane” society if we acknowledge that a society can be not sane, which in turn requires a departure from previous theories of sociological relativism postulating that “each society is normal inasmuch as it functions, and that pathology can be defined only in terms of the individual’s lack of adjustment to the ways of life in his society.” Instead, Fromm proposes a model of normative humanism — a redemptive notion that relieves some of our self-blame for feeling like we are going crazy, by acknowledging that society itself, when bedeviled by certain pathologies, can be crazy-making for the individual.
One key source of that tension between sanity and insanity, Fromm argues, is our misconception of “human nature” as a single, static monolith, when in fact the nature of the human experience is varied and dynamic. In a sentiment which Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert would echo half a century later in his famous aphorism that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” Fromm writes:
Just as man* transforms the world around him, so he transforms himself in the process of history. He is his own creation, as it were. But just as he can only transform and modify the natural materials around him according to their nature, so he can only transform and modify himself according to his own nature. What man does in the process of history is to develop this potential, and to transform it according to its own possibilities. The point of view taken here is neither a “biological” nor a “sociological” one if that would mean separating these two aspects from each other. It is rather one transcending such dichotomy by the assumption that the main passions and drives in man result from the total existence of man, that they are definite and ascertainable, some of them conducive to health and happiness, others to sickness and unhappiness. Any given social order does not create these fundamental strivings but it determines which of the limited number of potential passions are to become manifest or dominant. Man as he appears in any given culture is always a manifestation of human nature, a manifestation, however, which in its specific outcome is determined by the social arrangements under which he lives. Just as the infant is born with all human potentialities which are to develop under favorable social and cultural conditions, so the human race, in the process of history, develops into what it potentially is.
The most pernicious effect of any given social order, Fromm suggests, is that it breeds a culture of truth by consensus rather than truth by evidence, truth relative to collective opinion rather than absolute truth — the sort of relativism which Karl Popper memorably admonished is “a betrayal of reason and of humanity.” In another passage of astounding pertinence today, as we witness a global groupthink elect destructive ideas to the status of truth and therefore power, Fromm observes something as true of religious delusions as it is of ruinous political ideologies:
What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the “consensual validation” of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health… The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
More than a century after Kierkegaard contemplated the individual vs. society, why we conform, and the power of the minority, Fromm writes:
For a minority, the pattern provided by the culture does not work… There are also those whose character structure, and hence whose conflicts, differ from those of the majority, so that the remedies which are effective for most of their fellow men are of no help to them. Among this group we sometimes find people of greater integrity and sensitivity than the majority, who for this very reason are incapable of accepting the cultural opiate, while at the same time they are not strong and healthy enough to live soundly “against the stream.”
He considers what a sane society actually means:
A sane society is that which corresponds to the needs of man — not necessarily to what he feels to be his needs, because even the most pathological aims can be felt subjectively as that which the person wants most; but to what his needs are objectively, as they can be ascertained by the study of man. It is our first task then, to ascertain what is the nature of man, and what are the needs which stem from this nature.
A decade after Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization atop his foundational hierarchy of needs, Fromm illustrates our ultimate need as analogous to the development of children:
Physical birth, if we think of the individual, is by no means as decisive and singular an act as it appears to be… In many respects the infant after birth is not different from the infant before birth; it cannot perceive things outside, cannot feed itself; it is completely dependent on the mother, and would perish without her help. Actually, the process of birth continues. The child begins to recognize outside objects, to react affectively, to grasp things and to co-ordinate his movements, to walk. But birth continues. The child learns to speak, it learns to know the use and function of things, it learns to relate itself to others, to avoid punishment and gain praise and liking. Slowly, the growing person learns to love, to develop reason, to look at the world objectively. He begins to develop his powers; to acquire a sense of identity, to overcome the seduction of his senses for the sake of an integrated life. Birth then, in the conventional meaning of the word, is only the beginning of birth in the broader sense. The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die — although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
A sane society, Fromm suggests, is one which helps the individual continually give birth to herself, whereas a society which is not sane stymies that ongoing rebirth and renders the individual in a state of alienation. He outlines the consequences:
The psychological results of alienation are [that] man regresses to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that he loses his sense of self, becomes dependent on approval, hence tends to conform and yet to feel insecure; he is dissatisfied, bored, and anxious, and spends most of his energy in the attempt to compensate for or just to cover up this anxiety. His intelligence is excellent, his reason deteriorates and in view of his technical powers he is seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race.
[…]
Reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it. This alienation and automatization leads to an ever-increasing insanity. Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality.
Throughout history, Fromm observes, various thinkers have attempted to identify the root of alienation and to propose alternatives — while Marxists pointed to economic factors, thinkers like Tolstoy pointed to the spiritual and moral impoverishment of humanity. Fromm himself points to “robotism” — the mindless automation of our lives — as the seedbed of modern alienation, and proposes what he calls “humanistic democratic socialism” as the antidote. He writes:
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Noting that the gravest dangers of his time — which are equally the dangers of our time — are war and robotism, Fromm offers his best recipe for a sane society:
[The alternative is] to get out of the rut in which we are moving, and to take the next step in the birth and self-realization of humanity. The first condition is the abolishment of the war threat hanging over all of us now and paralyzing faith and initiative. We must take the responsibility for the life of all men, and develop on an international scale what all great countries have developed internally, a relative sharing of wealth and a new and more just division of economic resources. This must lead eventually to forms of international economic co-operation and planning, to forms of world government and to complete disarmament. We must retain the industrial method. But we must decentralize work and state so as to give it human proportions, and permit centralization only to an optimal point which is necessary because of the requirements of industry. In the economic sphere we need co-management of all who work in an enterprise, to permit their active and responsible participation. The new forms for such participation can be found. In the political sphere, return to the town meetings, by creating thousands of small face-to-face groups, which are well informed, which discuss, and whose decisions are integrated in a new “lower house.” A cultural renaissance must combine work education for the young, adult education and a new system of popular art and secular ritual…
Holding up what he calls “humanistic communitarianism” as our only hope for protecting ourselves from the alienation of robotism, Fromm writes:
Man can protect himself from the consequences of his own madness only by creating a sane society which conforms with the needs of man, needs which are rooted in the very conditions of his existence. A society in which man relates to man lovingly, in which he is rooted in bonds of brotherliness and solidarity, rather than in the ties of blood and soil; a society which gives him the possibility of transcending nature by creating rather than by destroying, in which everyone gains a sense of self by experiencing himself as the subject of his powers rather than by conformity, in which a system of orientation and devotion exists without man’s needing to distort reality and to worship idols.
[…]
Man today is confronted with the most fundamental choice; not that between Capitalism or Communism, but that between robotism (of both the capitalist and the communist variety), or Humanistic Communitarian Socialism. Most facts seem to indicate that he is choosing robotism, and that means, in the long run, insanity and destruction. But all these facts are not strong enough to destroy faith in man’s reason, good will and sanity. As long as we can think of other alternatives, we are not lost; as long as we can consult together and plan together, we can hope. But, indeed, the shadows are lengthening; the voices of insanity are becoming louder. We are in reach of achieving a state of humanity which corresponds to the vision of our great teachers; yet we are in danger of the destruction of all civilization, or of robotization. A small tribe was told thousands of years ago: “I put before you life and death, blessing and curse — and you chose life.” This is our choice too.
Complement Fromm’s stimulatingly sane-making The Sane Society with H.L. Mencken on reclaiming democracy from the mob mentality that masquerades for it and Hannah Arendt on our only effective antidote to the normalization of evil, then revisit Fromm on the art of living, the art of loving, and how to transcend the common laziness of optimism and pessimism.
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.
2026-04-18 12:26:07
Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child.
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriend Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one of their sons fell ill, but it was their other son, Baoth, who died after a savage struggle with meningitis.
Upon receiving the news, the thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part consolation for and part consecration of a loss for which there is no salve, found in Shaun Usher’s moving compilation Letters of Note: Grief (public library).
On March 19, 1935, Hemingway writes:
Dear Sara and Dear Gerald:
You know there is nothing we can ever say or write… Yesterday I tried to write you and I couldn’t.
It is not as bad for Baoth because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something now that we all must do. He has just gotten it over with…
About him having to die so young — Remember that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better. And he is spared from learning what sort of a place the world is.
It is your loss: more than it is his, so it is something that you can, legitimately, be brave about. But I can’t be brave about it and in all my heart I am sick for you both.
Absolutely truly and coldly in the head, though, I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one ever made a happier childhood than you made for your children, has won a great victory. We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do, while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact and the death only by accident.
In a breathtaking sentiment evocative of Anaïs Nin’s admonition against the stupor of near-living, and of poet Meghan O’Rourke’s grief-honed conviction that “the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created,” Hemingway adds:
Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.
With this, echoing Auden’s insistence that “we must love one another or die,” he comes the closest he ever came to formulating the meaning of life. Like David Foster Wallace, who addressed the meaning of life with such exquisite lucidity shortly before he was slain by depression, Hemingway too would lose hold of that meaning in the throes of the agony that would take his life a quarter century later. Now, from the fortunate platform of the prime of life, he writes:
We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other. It seems as though we were all on a boat together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other. We are fortunate we have good people on the boat.
Complement with the young Dostoyevsky’s exultation about the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed, Emily Dickinson on love and loss, Thoreau on living through loss, and Nick Cave — who lived, twice, the unimaginable tragedy of the Murphys — on grief as a portal to aliveness, then revisit the fascinating neuroscience of your brain on grief and your heart on healing.
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.
2026-04-18 12:25:38
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write. At eleven, he entered the labor force as an office boy for two lawyers, one of whom took the boy’s intellectual development under his wing and introduced him to the splendors of literature with a gift of a circulating library subscription. Within a year, he was apprenticing with the Quaker editor of a Democratic newspaper.
His parents — a twenty-one-year-old woman descended from a lineage of Dutch Quakers and a twenty-seven-year-old man whose ancestors arrived from England in 1640 on a ship named True Love — married the summer of the Year Without a Summer. The rosy-cheeked boy was the second of their eight children. Conceived the year Frankenstein was born, born months after the landmark legislation that proposed the abolition of slavery in Missouri and sparked the tensions that would eventually erupt into the Civil War, this Brooklyn boy would soon be shaking his young country awake from the slumber of complacency — not with preachings, not with politics, but with poems: poems that would effect more spiritual elevation, kindle more moral courage, seed more ideas of the basic humanity we call social justice, and thumb them deeper into the soil of culture than all the preachings and politics of his era combined.
“I would compose a wonderful and ponderous book,” he would resolve, not yet out of adolescence, his gray-blue eyes already drooping with a weary wisdom. “Yes: I would write a book!” And so he would — his life would become this book, then the book would become his life. He would revise it obsessively until his dying hour, expanding and republishing this swelling book, hoping it would beckon to “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.”
The newspaper he himself had founded as a teenager would scoff and call it “a repulsive and nasty book.” On its pages, he would declare himself “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul,” inviting again and again the difficult, daring understanding that the two are one and the same, that we are ensouled as much as we are enskulled; on its pages, he would emerge as a composite creature — a creature capable of sinking to unfathomed darknesses and soaring to transcendent heights; a celebrator and elevator of the patriotic spirit, but an artist who would always place nature over nation; a poet of immense talent and immense ego, but never grudging, never ungenerous, never small. The most erudite man in America would describe him as “a compound of New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy,” melding the traits of an Emerson or a Thoreau with those of a fireman. “Do I contradict myself?” the poet himself would write on those lush pages. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” He would come to think of himself as a “chanter of pains and of joys, uniter of here and hereafter.” He would see his job, the poet’s job, as a joiner — of body and soul, of past and future, of the cosmic and the earthly, of races and genders and classes, of the disjointed parts in the body politic of the world—joining the myriad multitudes comprising personhood into an integrated, symphonic being. Against the starched proprieties of his time and place, he would kiss everyone he considered a friend — man or woman — in greeting and goodbye. He would make it his task to “show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results.” His book would live up to his own description as “the song of a great composite democratic individual, male or female,” foundation for “an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, vast, composite, electric democratic nationality.” He would tease out of his poems a single running thread: “that time and events are compact, and that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.” He would resolve:
I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to
all days.
In the most eternal of these poems, written under the title “Sun-Down Poem” and later retitled to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he would peer across the epochs straight into your eye and straight into mine:
It avails not, time nor place — distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.
[…]
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
On Independence Day 1855, a strange book appeared in a handful of Brooklyn bookstores — a thin, capacious volume bound in green cloth, with delicate golden roots, branches, and leaves sprouting from the letters of the gilded title: Leaves of Grass. After the silence of the first blank page, a whispered shock: a portrait of the author, engraved from a photograph, thoroughly unlike the expected likeness of a poet. He is not a New England poet-as-scholar, a buttoned and collared Emerson gazing with intense intellect at you, demanding a commensurate gaze back. He is not a Romantic poet-as-spirit, a windswept, full-lipped Byron gazing into space with the distraction of inspiration, beckoning your gaze to that invisible place. In this new nobody is the poet-as-everybody. Bearded beneath his wide-brimmed hat, with his rough-hewn linen shirt parted at his chest, with one hand casually rested on his tilted hip and the other tucked into his pocket, he seems to have just risen from hulling corn, looking at you the way one looks at a mirror when one has finished dressing for a date.
There is no name on the book. Only, midway through the sixty-five-page opening miracle he would later title “Song of Myself,” this self-introduction:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly fleshy and sensual… eating drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist… no stander above men and women or apart from them
Immanuel Kant had proclaimed in his Critique of Judgment that there shall never be a Newton for a blade of grass. On the strange and wondrous pages of this book—one of the farthest-seeing and deepest-reaching works of literature ever composed — Walt Whitman emerges not as the Napoleon of poetry — a grandiosity of Byron had aspired to, commissioning for himself a replica of Napoleon’s carriage — but as the Newton for a blade of grass; not as a plundering conqueror and colonizer, recompensed with riches and living glory, but as a semaphore of elemental truth, born to be posthumous and glad for it, glad and ready to take his position as a grain of sand in the geologic layer of a present upon which the unwitnessed future would be built, glad to look at ordinary grass and see “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” to see himself in a grassy grave feeding other lives, to see the “the similitudes of the past and those of the future,” the continuities and consanguinities of life across the varied scales of existence and experience.
“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” he writes. This overarching belief in the unity of everything, the interconnectedness and interbelonging of everything, colors his entire cosmogony. It would also render him wildly controversial, for he channeled this belief by writing about science and sex and the equality of the sexes and the races and the classes — ideas thoroughly countercultural in his day, in the most literal sense, for they are drawn not from culture but from nature. Verse after verse, detail after detail patiently recorded in his notebook, absorbed and distilled into some essential truth, he writes of the natural way of things, before society and civilization have disfigured them into biases and borders, into the hubrises and hierarchies of which the rickety scaffolding we call society is built.
At the same time, he recognizes that these hubrises and biases spring from the selfsame source as our noblest and most generous impulses, and in this recognition, he gives room for our own multitudes to unfold in his vast heart — the beautiful and the terrible equally welcome as particles of our humanity, for he knows that they are particles of his. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he writes in an era when atoms were still an exotic notion to the common citizen, an incomprehensible abstraction. Only by being porous to the whole of the universe, to every expression of existence, can he harmonize those particles — the cosmic and the earthly, the temporal and the timeless, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman — particles charged, always, by the reality of the present.
Because of his time and place and particular predilections, perhaps more so than any other poet’s in the history of our civilization, Whitman’s poetic development took place in the fragile, fertile ground between the personal and the political. Another titanic poet, Audre Lorde, would capture this fertility a century later: “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word I.” Walt Whitman was the great absorptive and adhesive I of his era. “The book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853,” he would later recall of Leaves of Grass, “absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”
In the 1840s, the New York Democratic Party had begun fissuring along the line of slavery, eventually splitting into two continents — one against slavery, known as the Barnburners, and one for it, known as the Hunkers. The owner of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where Whitman was hired as editor in 1846, was among the Hunkers. Whitman was not. That year the American invasion of Mexico and the resultant war aggravated the rift, leading the Barnburners to split off and form the Free Soil Party, predicated on preventing Western territories from becoming slave states. Until then, Whitman’s editorials had been primarily about concerts; without music, he would later reflect, he could not have written Leaves of Grass. But when a proviso was proposed to ban slavery from the newly conquered Mexican territory despite its adjacency to the South, Whitman put his impassioned pen behind it, urging those in support of it to turn up and vote for its proponent-candidate in the November election. “One vote may turn the election,” he exhorted on the typeset pages of the paper as his longhand unspooled on the pages of his private notebook trial lines for what would become “Song of Myself”:
I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves…
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.
And so it is that Whitman’s most famous lines came abloom in the seedbed of his antiracist outrage, trellised by the yearning — so solipsistic, so human — for his own personhood to be understood.
By January, Whitman was fired from the Eagle
The following month, never having left New York, the twenty-eight- year-old unpublished poet left New York for New Orleans in search of freer journalism. Having met a Southern newspaper owner, who hired him on the spot to help establish an upstart paper, he traversed 2,400 miles via a Rube Goldberg machine of stage, train, and boat, accompanied by his fifteen-year-old brother Jeff. He left partly to pursue his journalistic career, yes — as Whitman himself later recounted, at the peak of the Mexican War, New Orleans was the “channel and entrepot for everything, going and returning,” the city with “the best news and war correspondents” and “the most to say.” But he left mostly, I suspect, to affirm with his own eyes the rightness of the outrage that had gotten him fired — the incomprehensible wrongness of slavery, which remained an abstraction, a party line, a moral and moralistic bargaining chip in the Northern bubble. He went from a city in which Black people comprised a mere 3 percent of the population to one in which they accounted for tenfold that — a proportion that had been even higher until the recent influx of immigrants; a city in which he witnessed the trade of goods and of ensouled bodies as goods. He saw persons treated as creatures or as commodities on the basis of their bodies, women sold into sexual slavery and priced out by the proportion of Blackness in their complexion. He pulled down a slave auction advertisement from a wall in the French Quarter, which he would keep for the next four decades — as a “warning,” he said — transmuting it into one of his steeliest, most indicting poems.
It was in New Orleans that his entire life-plan crumbled, and out of the rubble arose the realization that poetry was far more powerful an instrument for the propagation of ideas and ideals than journalism.
But something else happened in New Orleans, too — something profound and private that struck to the marrow of his own being.
New Orleans was not just a different city — it was a different world. In England, which remained the cultural and legislative model for the rest of America, the press frequently carried news of death sentences and executions for same-sex relations — barbarisms Whitman surely encountered as he sifted through the foreign papers at his newsroom desk. New Orleans, founded by French colonists a century before Whitman’s birth and eventually sold to the infant United States, was still legislated by a version of the Napoleonic Code, which had decriminalized sexual relations between consenting men. With its large rotating population of sailors and its permissive social mores, New Orleans was as close to an out gay life as nineteenth-century America could get.
Whatever happened to Whitman there, it was as much an experience of the body as it was of the soul, deep and beautiful and unsettling. He would allude to it only once, forty years later, obfuscating the details under a generality, deforming the reality of his heartbreak by inventing an ornate fiction about a romance with some mysterious Creole woman of higher social rank than his, invoked in his New Orleans poem “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City”:
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
In the original draft of the poem, inscribed into Whitman’s private notebook, “the man I casually met” appears in place of the printed “a woman I casually met.” A poem that first appeared in 1860 hints at what quaked and quickened his heart that spring:
Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn’d love;
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love — the pay is certain, one way or another;
Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe, or written one of my poems, if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love.
Two decades after his time in New Orleans, Whitman would alter the ending to render it what might just be the central animating fact of all of Leaves of Grass and most of the art humanity has ever made:
Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for fear I effuse unreturn’d love;
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love — the pay is certain, one way or another;
(I loved a certain person ardently, and my love was not return’d;
Yet out of that, I have written these songs.)
After all the years, all the love, all the life poured into it, Leaves of Grass entered a world of indifference spiked here and there with derision and hostility. The tastemakers of literature hardly noticed the book at all. Even the handful of positive reviews punctuated their praise with caveats and cautions. Any artist — any person who has placed a piece of themselves in the lap of the world in the hope of enlarging its store of beauty and aliveness — knows intimately that awful physics of psychology by which the mind glides over the positive and latches onto the negative, however negligible, proving again and again that reading reviews at all is a peculiar form of willful self-assault with no victors.
One of America’s most prominent critics — Charles Eliot Norton, who would go on to endow Harvard’s esteemed series of lectures on “poetry in the broadest sense” — commended Leaves of Grass for entwining intellectual tradition and street culture with a thoroughly original style in which the two “fuse and combine with the most perfect harmony.” But he hastened to disclaim that Whitman’s free use of slang often “renders an otherwise striking passage altogether laughable.” Of the negative reviews, some were unabashedly vicious, saturated with that saccharine pleasure that small spirits and lesser talents take in denouncing what they don’t understand, can’t crush into conventional categories, or simply resent for the bold reach of a vision far exceeding anything they themselves could have conceived. A critic whose name rings hollow to anyone alive today and who left little in the world besides the hubris of his outrages, indicted the book — this life’s work, this personal record of becoming — as “a mess of stupid filth” and hurled the first major public grenade of homophobia at the poet for “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.” Another saw the book as an occasion for the author’s suicide. From Boston — America’s intellectual capital — came the diagnosis that Whitman “must be some escaped lunatic, raving in pitiable delirium,” for “there is neither wit nor method in his disjointed babbling.” Even the otherwise broad-minded Thomas Wentworth Higginson — the only editor Emily Dickinson ever had, a man who recognized the singular poetics of Negro spirituals and transcribed them for the world, a man who loved men — quipped that “it is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Across the Atlantic, a royal we managed to insult both the poet and his young nation in one fell scoff: “We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce,” the anonymous reviewer wrote, until Leaves of Grass arrived to show that this laughable country published poets “as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.”
These spare shrieks interrupted the cruelest verdict — that awful silence.
In his notebook, under the heading “Depressions,” Whitman scribbled:
Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious. — I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I supposed them, are not shallow — and people will most likely laugh at me. — My pride is impotent, my love gets no response. — the complacency of nature is hateful—I am filled with restlessness. — I am incomplete.
All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.
Within a year, Whitman would transmute this private passage of despair into a vessel of empathy in a new poem — one of twenty new poems in a second edition of Leaves of Grass he stubbornly published, determined to change the book’s course in the world; one of humanity’s masterworks of perspective and unselfing: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Whitman might never have shifted his suffering into the past tense, into a poem, into renewed resolve to continue growing his leaves in an inhospitable world, were it not for a single kindness that changed everything — a kindness soon to be emblazoned in gilded letters on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass to carry it into the canon of literature and to carry its author into his legacy as America’s first great poet.
Seventeen days after the first edition unspooled into the hostile void, Whitman was staggered to receive a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson — America’s reigning philosopher-king of intellectual life and literary sensibility — to whom he had mailed a copy, hoping for everything and expecting nothing. Emerson’s long 1844 essay The Poet — a manifesto for poetry as an instrument of culture-building, which can “penetrate into that region where the air is music” to compose “the songs of nations,” exhorting American poets to find an original voice in which to sing their young nation’s singular truths “yet unsung” — had emboldened Whitman to sing the body electric, the body of his being and the body of his country. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” he later recalled. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
In The Poet, Emerson had urged American poets to persist in the break with tradition, in the search for an authentic voice, and to be unafraid to “stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted” as that voice is denounced by the bastions of convention. Now, awestruck by the bold defiance of convention emanating from Leaves of Grass, the Sage of Concord wielded his words to nurture the daring young poet. Having introduced America to Eastern philosophy in his pioneering Transcendentalist journal The Dial, which Margaret Fuller had edited before leaving their frustrated love behind for New York to become the first female editor of a major newspaper at the Herald, Emerson found Leaves of Grass to be “the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald combined.” He knew the life of the mind and the half-life of ideas well enough to recognize that the debut of so unexampled a work must have had a long invisible incubation. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote to the young man in Brooklyn, “which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be… I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.
So profound was Emerson’s gratitude for the existence of this improbable fruition of his vision that he ended the letter by offering to travel to meet Whitman—his “benefactor,” he called him.
And so he did, making the arduous traversal from Concord to Brooklyn across snow and ice in the vicious winter of 1855 — one of the coldest winters since Tambora. Two weeks before Christmas, with the Erie Canal frozen and the roof of the Brooklyn sugar refinery blown off two hundred feet and the steeple of St. Mary’s Church blasted to pieces by the storm that had raged the night before, Emerson boarded a coach, then a train, then a ferry to Whitman’s home on Classon Avenue—a house I passed daily on my bicycle my first five years in Brooklyn.
There is no record of what was said between these two men with such overlapping ideals and such wildly divergent life paths. I picture Emerson, with his starched dignity and his combed reserve, sizing up the brushy-haired poet in the half-unbuttoned shirt—part Shelley, part sailor, entirely himself.
When Whitman’s father died seven days after Leaves of Grass was published — his father, a large-nosed, full-lipped, hollow-cheeked man of democratic sympathies and brutal moods who had known Thomas Paine in his youth and had failed at just about everything he’d ever undertaken except the drink, and whom Walt loved — there was still Emerson’s letter.
For Whitman, Emerson’s attention and encouragement were nothing less than a lifeline. For months, he carried the letter in his breast pocket, folded and unfolded it, read it to his mother, read it to his lover, read it to himself in the bleak small hours, the hours James Baldwin saw as the time when the unconscious self tries to “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error,” Baldwin who would emblazon his semi-autobiographical novel Giovanni’s Room, published exactly one hundred years after Leaves of Grass, with an epigraph from Whitman: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”
Nine months after Emerson’s visit to Brooklyn prompted by the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman published a second, with Emerson’s private praise gilded on the spine as public endorsement, haphazardly capitalized like a subtitle:
I Greet You at the Beginning of A Great Career
R.W. Emerson
Piqued, no longer sure what to make of the young poet who had so impressed him with his unbuttoned sincerity but who had so savvily appropriated his words of encouragement, Emerson dispatched one of his closest and most discerning friends to Brooklyn, to see for himself. And so, in the autumn of 1856, Whitman received another New England luminary in his Classon Avenue home: the utopian Transcendentalist and devout vegetarian Bronson Alcott, whose teenage daughter Louisa May was absorbing the ideas and experiences that would one day become Little Women.
The record Alcott left in his journal that October afternoon remains the most vivid direct portrait of Whitman — a portrait that is itself a poetic image of immense graphic power, crosshatched with admiration for the poet’s genius and warm amusement at his self-regard, sensitive and sentient of both the costumed performance of personhood and the naked soul beneath the performance:
To Brooklyn, to see Walt Whitman. I pass a couple of hours, and find him to be an extraordinary person, full of brute power, certainly of genius and audacity, and likely to make his mark on Young America — he affirming himself to be its representative man and poet…
A nondescript, he is not so easily described, nor seen to be described. Broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr, and rank, he wears his man-Bloomer in defiance of everybody, having these as everything else after his own fashion, and for example to all men hereafter. Red flannel undershirt, open-breasted, exposing his brawny neck; striped calico jacket over this, the collar Byroneal, with coarse cloth overalls buttoned to it; cowhide boots; a heavy round-about, with huge outside pockets and buttons to match; and a slouched hat, for house and street alike. Eyes gray, unimaginative, cautious yet sagacious; his voice deep, sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting. When talking will recline upon the couch at length, pillowing his head upon his bended arm, and informing you naively how lazy he is, and slow. Listens well; asks you to repeat what he has failed to catch at once, yet hesitates in speaking often, or gives over as if fearing to come short of the sharp, full, concrete meaning of his thought. Inquisitive, very; over-curious even; inviting criticism on himself, on his poems — pronouncing it “pomes.” — In fine, an egotist, incapable of omitting, or suffering any one long to omit, noting Walt Whitman in discourse. Swaggy in his walk, burying both his hands in outside pockets. Has never been sick, he says, not taken medicine, nor sinned; and so is quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall. A bachelor, he professes great respect for women.
Much is striking about Alcott’s portrait, but two things especially: It radiates the author’s bewilderment at how such daring, arresting, supra- ordinary poems could have sprung from so sub-ordinary a maker, and it captures his warmhearted suspicion that Whitman was deliberately styling himself that way, art-directing his own image for this emissary of New England’s intellectual aesthetes, the portal to America’s literary consciousness. The irreconcilable tension ensnared Alcott. Wary of the hazards of first impressions and hasty assessments — especially on so grand a proposition as America’s first original poet — Alcott added with a scientist’s insistence on testing hypotheses with repeat observation: “I must meet him again, and more than once, to mete his merits and place in this Pantheon of the West.” This confusion, this inability to pin Whitman down—it was an echo of an intuition that Alcott could not name. Some haunting sense that beneath the poet’s posture of simplicity, beneath his monotone bravado, there was a real guardedness. Some roiling complexity, some trembling insecurity he did not want revealed. Perhaps even to himself.
Because Whitman saw his poetry as a proxy for his totality of being and a record of the ongoingness of his own development, he saw Leaves of Grass not as an isolated art object but as a living ethos, a creation in every aspect of which he wanted to be involved, immersed. Morning after morning, week after week, month after month, he had made his way to the print shop to oversee the production, typesetting some of the pages himself — a redemptive echo of his days as an apprentice printer, setting other writers’ work into the world; of his days as a bookshop proprietor, transacting other writers’ work into readers’ hands. I picture him in 1855, the age I am as I write this, crossing what is now Cadman Plaza, the promenade I too crossed daily for years when I first moved to New York, with the manuscript under his arm. He wanted that, of course. He wanted us — “men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” — to project ourselves onto him as he projected himself onto us. “I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.” He may have opened with “Song of Myself,” but you is the most common word in Leaves of Grass.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem…
I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you,
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.
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.
2026-04-18 05:34:09
“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too,” the irreplaceable Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) reflected in her lovely autobiographical essay on how literature saved her life. But what does it take to write such buoyant literature — be it poetry or prose — that lends itself as a lifeboat to those far from the shore of being?
A decade after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and three years after receiving the National Book Award, Oliver distilled her wisdom on writing into a short prose poem titled “Sand Dabs, One,” found in her 1995 book Blue Pastures (public library) — just a few lines, largehearted and limber, each saturated with meaning and illustrating the principle it espouses in a clever meta-manifestation of that principle embedded in the language itself.
Oliver writes:
Lists, and verbs, will carry you many a dry mile.
To imitate or not to imitate — the question is easily satisfied. The perils of not imitating are greater than the perils of imitating.
Always remember — the speaker doesn’t do it. The words do it.
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
The idea must drive the words. When the words drive the idea, it’s all floss and gloss, elaboration, air bubbles, dross, pomp, frump, strumpeting.
Don’t close the poem as you opened it, unless your name is Blake and you have written a poem about a Tyger.
Complement with this extensive collection of advice on writing from some of the finest writers in the English language, then revisit Oliver on love, the two building blocks of creativity, what attention really means, and how to live with maximal aliveness.
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.
2026-04-17 12:24:31
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca.
The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony.
Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from what Rachel Carson called “those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss,” through the growling din of the engines that conduct consumerism between continents, orcas are communicating in their sonic hieroglyphics, speaking to each other in haunting and melodious voices that summon the most coordinated hunting strategy known in the animal kingdom.
Traveling in matrilineal groups, they search for seals across the frozen expanse, moving effortlessly through pack ice that sinks immense ships. As soon as they identify the prey, they swim together under the ice to shatter it with a sub-surface shock wave, then begin blowing bubbles beneath to push the broken pieces apart. Once the cracks are wide enough, they turn on their sides to create a synchronized surface wave so large its crest crashes onto the ice, pushing seals into the water, where the pod divides the bounty according to a complex calculus of social bonds.
All the while, they are teaching their young how to perform this collaborative symphony of physics and predation — a further testament to social learning as a key substrate of intelligence — and it is the females, particularly post-menopausal matriarchs, who are doing the teaching. Orcas have such strong maternal bonds that sons stay with their mothers for life — a phenomenon so well documented that the researchers behind one longitudinal study dubbed male orcas “mamma’s boys.”
But while these bonds are the orcas’ great strength, they are also their great vulnerability.
In 2018, while secluded on a small mossy island in Puget Sound to finish my first book, I watched the world turn with shattering tenderness toward an unfolding local event — for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean, an orca mother carried her dead calf draped over her head, hardly eating, barely keeping up with her pod. NPR called it her “tour of grief.” When she lost another calf in early 2025 — two thirds of orca pregnancies result in either miscarriage or infant death — she did the same, this time seventeen days.
Such sights so chill us because they are emblems of the miracle and tragedy of consciousness. Orcas would not be capable of such staggering success as predators if they were not also capable of such shattering grief, both a function of their intricate bonds, their collaborative interdependence, their complex consciousness that differentiates and bridges the difference between self and other. In the human realm, we call this love — the aspect of consciousness subject to the cruelest evolutionary equation: As Hannah Arendt so poignantly articulated, loss is the price we pay for love. It seems almost unbearable as we watch the mother orca carry her dead calf, and yet we too must bear it, and do bear it, however long and however far we may have to carry the dead weight of our grief — because we must, if we are worthy of our own aliveness, love anyway. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” wrote Rumi. Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth any price, any price at all.
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.