2025-08-23 09:31:50
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of raw material to feed the “combinatory play” Einstein considered the crux of creativity.
The first comes from experience — intuition is what we call the pattern recognition unconsciously honed in the act of living. The third also comes from experience — everything we have ever read and seen, everyone we have ever loved, everything we have suffered becomes a building block for the combinatorial alchemy of creation. The second is the fault line between genius and madness — a creative revelation, be it the heliocentric model of the universe or the Goldberg Variations, is seeing something no one else has seen, which has acute relevance to the world as we know it, touches it, transforms it; a hallucination is seeing something no one else can see without the ability to evaluate its irrelevance to the real world.
A quarter millennium after Lovelace, we face the question of whether AI can achieve all three, and therefore originate truly new ideas, or remain in the straitjacket of binary logic — a disembodied intellect without the lived experience, in all its embodied and ambiguous wildness, on which true creativity draws. Out of this arises the far more disquieting question of whether we, as a species, are being trained by this “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation to mistake the simulacrum of life for life itself, to reduce our aliveness to algorithms. Given that creativity is a hallmark of our species, questions about the nature of creativity in human and non-human minds are ultimately questions about what it means to be — and remain — human.
Few have reckoned with these questions more deeply, or more durationally, than British philosopher Margaret Boden (November 26, 1936–July 18, 2025), who composed her revelatory book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (public library) when the Internet was just a few years old and computational models still in their infancy. At its heart is an investigation of how the human mind can surpass itself, how our intuition works, and how it is possible for us to think new thoughts, anchored in the insight that “a computational approach gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypotheses about the rich subtleties of the human mind,” that AI-concepts are valuable not because they can (which they very well could) originate new ideas but because they can help us do so, because “both their failures and their successes help us think more clearly about our own creative powers.”
All of this requires a clear definition of those powers — not the ancient cop-out of divine inspiration, not the Romantic conceit of the chosen few gifted with special talents, but a model that accounts for both the immense range of creativity and the wide variations across that range, for its fundamentally mysterious nature and for the possibility of comprehending the mystery without reducing it to code.
An epoch after Einstein observed that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious” because there is always “something deeply hidden… behind things,” after Carl Sagan insisted that “bathing in mystery… will always be our destiny [because] the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it,” Boden considers the mystery of the universe within:
If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.
[…]
A science of creativity need not be dehumanizing. It does not threaten our self-respect by showing us to be mere machines, for some machines are much less “mere” than others. It can allow that creativity is a marvel, despite denying that it is a mystery.
Defining creativity as “the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable,” Boden argues that it permeates every aspect of human life, is not a special “faculty” of the mind but “grounded in everyday abilities such as conceptual thinking, perception, memory, and reflective self-criticism,” and is not binary — the question that should be asked is not whether an idea is creative but how creative it is, which allows us to assess both the subtleties of the idea itself and the “subtle interpretative processes and complex mental structures” through which it arose in the mind.
Drawing on everything from Euclid’s revolutionary geometry to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” she distinguishes between two types of creativity — personal creativity, which “involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it” no matter how many other people have come up with it, and historical creativity, in which the idea is completely new in the whole of human history. Both are axoned in a substrate of surprise — “the astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible idea. It just couldn’t have entered anyone’s head, you feel — and yet it did.”
Boden identifies three aspects of creativity: First there is tessellating familiar ideas into unfamiliar combinations. Arthur Koestler, who greatly influenced Boden, termed this “bisociation” in his pioneering model of creativity. Gianni Rodari echoed in his notion of “the fantastic binomial” key to great storytelling. For such a combination to be truly novel, Boden observes, it requires “a rich store of knowledge in the person’s mind, and many different ways of moving around within it.”
The other two aspects of creativity both involve the conceptual spaces in people’s minds — those structured styles of thought we absorb unconsciously from our peers, our parents, our culture, the fashions and fictions of our time and place: styles of writing and dress, social mores and manners, existing theories about the nature of reality, ideological movements. One creative approach to conceptual space is exploration. Boden writes:
Within a given conceptual space many thoughts are possible, only some of which may actually have been thought… Exploratory creativity is valuable because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn’t glimpsed before.
Exploratory creativity discovers novel ideas within an existing conceptual space and, in the process, invites others to consider the limits and potential of the space. But one can go even further, beyond exploring and toward transforming the conceptual space:
A given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible — which is to say, unthinkable… The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn’t have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.
This, of course, is the paradox of all transformation, best illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — because our imagination is the combinatorial product of past experience, we are fundamentally unable to imagine a truly altered future state and deem such states impossible, chronically mistaking the limits of our imagination (which transformative experience expands) for the limits of the possible.
Boden picks up where Koestler left off to explore what it takes for an idea to be truly transformative. “Bisociation” alone, she argues, is not enough to originate such ideas:
Combining ideas creatively is not like shaking marbles in a bag. The marbles have to come together because there is some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them which we value because it is interesting — illuminating, thought-provoking, humorous — in some way… We don’t only form links; we evaluate them.
This question of value is where the central paradox of creativity resides, because our values are largely inherited conceptual spaces, making it difficult to assess or even recognize the value of a transformative idea whose originality overflows and overwhelms the conceptual space. In consonance with Bob Dylan’s observation that “people have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” Boden writes:
Our aesthetic values are difficult to recognize, more difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to state really clearly. (For a computer model, of course, they have to be stated really, really clearly.) Moreover, they change… They vary across cultures. And even within a given “culture,” they are often disputed: different subcultures or peer groups value different types of dress, jewellery or music. And where transformational creativity is concerned, the shock of the new may be so great that even fellow artists find it difficult to see value in the novel idea.
She returns to the most crucial element of creativity — surprise so intense it has an edge of shock: Something previously unthinkable has entered your mind. To be surprised is to watch your calculus of probability crumble in the face of the possible, to find the locus of your expectations too small to encompass what you have just encountered. (This is why societies and epochs, such as ours, that prioritize certainty and self-righteousness over exploration and surprise are shackling their own creativity.) Boden writes:
A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar, ideas. A radically original, or creative, idea is one which cannot.
[…]
To be fundamentally creative, it is not enough for an idea to be unusual — not even if it is valuable, too. Nor is it enough for it to be a mere novelty, something which has never happened before. Fundamentally creative ideas are surprising in a deeper way. Where this type of creativity is concerned, we have to do with expectations not about probabilities, but about possibilities. In such cases, our surprise at the creative idea recognizes that the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could.
We are animated by this creative urge to bridge the actual and the possible because it matters to us what world we live in — it matters because we are made of matter, because while a computer’s generative flow is, as Boden puts it, “implemented rather than embodied,” ours streams in through through the sensorium of our bodily aliveness. A quarter century after the publication of Boden’s seminal book, months after the emergence of transformer-based large language models, Cambridge University endowed a lecture series in her honor. In her inaugural address, she reflected:
Homo sapiens is an intensely social species. Our needs for what Maslow called “love and belonging” (which includes collaboration and conversation) and “esteem” (which includes respect and dignity) are not mere trivialities, or optional extras. They matter. They must be satisfied if we are to thrive. Their degree of satisfaction will influence the individual’s subjective experience of happiness (and others’ measurements of it).Computers have no such needs.
It is out of this mattering, out of our creaturely neediness, that we originate anything of substance, value, and surprise. It is because things matter to us that we suffer, and it is because we suffer that we are impelled to transmute our suffering into art.
In the remainder of The Creative Mind, Boden goes on to explore the complementary role of chaos and constraint in creativity and how, despite their limitations, AI models can help us better understand the mystery of human intuition. Complement it with Oliver Sacks, writing three decades before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning, then revisit his own take on the three essential elements of creativity.
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.
2025-08-22 05:18:31
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.
2025-08-21 07:29:59
The prisons we choose to live inside hardly ever look like prisons while we are living in them.
If the twentieth century was the age of dictatorships — I grew up in one — reducing human beings to a herd, the twenty-first century, with its self-appointed moral despots, is the age of the tyranny of the herd itself. Having invented a merciless weapon of individual destruction — the pitchfork of the cancel mob — we are now doing to human nature what we have already done to nature, turning a biodiverse wilderness into a monoculture of a single crop deemed correct, forgetting there are infinitely many valid ways of being alive, that they can and must be complementary rather than contradictory if the ecosystem is to thrive.
It takes courage to resist this moral colonialism, to rewild the human spirit with the insistence that life, allowed its full aliveness, is not a symposium of self-righteousness but a festival of wonder, not a military parade of masses marching behind generals uniformed in the moral fashions of the day but a carnival of felicitous participancy on equal terms — people of all kinds, each costumed in some choice expression of their light, together constellating a collaborative cosmos of belonging to something both transient and transcendent.
This model of life calls to mind a long-ago essay by pioneering musician Brian Eno, originally published in The Utne Reader in 2002, contemplating the qualities of a good carnival. They are, he argues, also the qualities of a good culture — a natural parallel given carnival is the consecration of aliveness through play and play is the lever by which humankind lifted itself from survival to civilization.
Looking back on his many years of taking part in London’s Notting Hill Carnival — the world’s second-largest carnival after Rio’s — he writes:
Carnival is good when the number of participants isn’t grossly outweighed by the number of spectators. Carnival is good when many of the `spectators’ are actually also joining in (dancing and singing along). Carnival is good when the participants exhibit a range of skills from the absolutely minimal to the absolutely astonishing (the first being an invitation not to be intimidated — “Hey! I could do that!” — and the second an invitation to be amazed). Carnival is good when people of all ages, sexes, races, shapes, sizes, beauties, inclinations, and professions are involved. Carnival is good when there’s too much to look at and everything’s mixed up and you have to sort it all out for yourself.
Culture, in the modern sense, is the container we have created for human nature. But before a small clan of rebel anthropologists in the early twentieth century began using it to describe the customs of human societies, “culture” was a term of the natural sciences: in botany, the cultivation of plants; in biochemistry, the cultivation of cells in a nutrient-rich solution. It strikes me that effective conservation — the safekeeping of living systems — also shares the features Eno identifies in a good carnival. In a passage that reads like a perfect description of biodiversity in a thriving ecosystem and of the evolutionary processes of competition, collaboration, elaboration, and adaptation by which life came to occupy such different niches, he writes:
Carnival is good when it dignifies and rewards all sorts of abilities — singing, jumping, laughing infectiously, dressing weirdly, writing the hit song of the carnival, wiggling your backside, standing on a soapbox praising Jesus or the local hardware store, frying salt fish over an oil drum in public, inventing symphonic arrangements for steel bands, designing and building fabulously impossible things. Carnival is good when people try to outdo each other, and then applaud with delight those who in turn outdo them. Carnival is good when it gives people an alibi to become someone different.
At its heart, a carnival is — as a healthy culture should be — an affirmation of our aliveness, in all its blessed improbability. Eno concludes:
Carnival is good when it lets people present the best part of themselves, and be, for a little while, as they’d like to be all the time. Carnival is good when it gives people the feeling that they’re really lucky to be alive right here and now. Carnival is good when it leaves people with the feeling that life in all its bizarre manifestations is unbeatably lovely and touching and funny and worthwhile.
Complement with Leonard Cohen on what makes a saint and Walter Lippmann on what makes a hero — those twin pylons of a culture — then revisit Brian Eno’s reading list of 20 books essential for civilization.
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.
2025-08-14 12:28:45
“You have found an intermediate space… where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his transcendent portrait of the transition from sleep to wakefulness. The experience of waking — that phase transition between the liquid phantasmagoria of the unconscious and the solidity of conscious life — reveals the mind to itself. “All the world is mind,” the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. To watch the world come awake is to contact the essence of its worldness, to begin apprehending the majesty and mystery of what makes this third-rate rock an irreplaceable wonder.
Marc Martin conjures up the magic of this liminality in Dawn (public library) — a lush watercolor serenade to life coming alive on the threshold between night and day, this primeval conversation between our living planet and its dying star.
Half a century after artist Uri Shulevitz’s watercolor masterpiece of the same title, Martin tessellates morning’s mosaic of wonder — the dragonfly shimmering in the reeds, the dandelion haloed by the golden light, the trees swaying against the glowing sky, the songbird sounding its first note of day.
Couple Dawn with Italian artist Alessandro Sanna’s watercolor serenade to the seasons, then revisit Martin’s painted love letter to starling murmurations.
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.
2025-08-12 06:40:21
We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.
Wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery — is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of deep play and play, unlike games, is inherently open-ended, without purpose or end goal, governed not by the will to win a point but by the willingness to surrender to a locus of experience and be transformed by it.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer celebrates this lens-widening, life-deepening property of wonder in her incantation of a poem “Intention”:
INTENTION
by Rosemerry Wahtola TrommerTo wonder. To wonder with no plan
for where it might lead. No strategy
for arrival. No finish line. No pot
of gold. No perfect score. No striving for.
To wonder. To wonder the way a small child
might wonder when seeing a roly poly for the first time —
oh, look at all those legs. Look at how
it curls! Look how it moves again. Feel
how light it is in the palm. Feel how
it tickles as it moves. Imagine
an awareness that new meeting a life form that old.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?
To wonder not just with my mind
but with my belly. To let every neuron
spark. To notice where there is a channel
and imagine the great wing of life
is scraping it clean so the stream might flow
in new ways. To wonder beyond the edge
of the known, and in that spaciousness, play.
Couple with Mario Benedetti’s enlivening poem “A Defense of Joy,” then revisit Johan Huizinga’s classic century-old meditation on how play became the fulcrum of civilization and Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living.
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.
2025-08-09 13:17:35
Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worlds of possibility rise in its shadow. Every step remaps the psychogeography of the walker. Every step in space is also a step in time, slicing through the twilight between the half-fathomed past and the unfathomed future — a verse in the poetry of prospection. We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves.
Craig Mod was nineteen when he moved from small-town America to Japan’s majestic Kii Peninsula and began walking, only to find himself face to face with the questions he had tried to leave behind — what it means to forgive, what it takes to constellate a family beyond biology, how to live with the ghosts that haunt the history of the heart and the history of the world. These questions quiver alive in Things Become Other Things (public library) — part memoir of the search for belonging, part love letter to his childhood best friend, who “bled out on a dirt yard under the stars” when the boys were teenagers, part record of alchemizing loss into a largeness of being by learning “to walk, and walk well, and witness the people along the way.”
Craig considers the primal nature of “this simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what’s known to us,” the strangeness of being impelled “to walk and walk alone and do so for days and weeks and months at a time”:
I’ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It’s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world.
In a sentiment evocative of Nabokov’s insistence that “an active and creative reader is a rereader,” he adds:
I’ve come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn’t enough. That’s why I’m back. Back on the Peninsula. Walking these roads I’ve walked before. It’s only through time and distance and effort — concerted, present effort, controlled attention, a gentle and steady gaze upon it all — that you begin to understand old connections, old wounds. That the shape of once-dark paths becomes clear.
Over and over he confronts the old wound of his origins — carried by “someone nameless, faceless, someone pregnant at thirteen,” raised by a mother whose husband left her shortly after the adoption to become a halfway father flitting in and out of Craig’s childhood, too absent to be a parent, too present to be a stranger. Looking back on the longing to break free from his addiction to anger and blame, Craig writes:
How could I be sure I was free? So I walked. I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and feel the air of our town leave my cells and be replaced by the air and ideas of a different time and place. The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness — forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball — a freakish pang, a dull ache in the skull. I almost fell into a bush. I was hyperventilating — realizing my heart had expanded in some immeasurable, beyond-physics way that hearts can expand, and in that expansion I had new space. There’s a word in Japanese that sums up this feeling better than anything in English: yoyū. A word that somehow means: the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance. It can be applied to hearts, wallets, Sunday afternoons, and more… This extra space, this yoyū, this abundance… carried with it patience and — gasp — maybe even… love?
Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes. As he walks, Craig encounters “moss lush enough to lie down on naked and wilt in reverence”; he watches mountain crabs move like Claymation as they emerge from the wet forest at sunrise “as if birthed by the light of day”; he comes face to face with the unblinking kamoshika — the Japanese goat-like antelope, exuding “an aura of magic in how fast and sure-footed it is,” this most alien and holiest of forest animals; he feels the primal consolation of his own animal nature, this biped whose peripatetic balance has been honed by myriad exquisite evolutionary adaptations, tiny structures shaped over eons to do one thing perfectly, elaborate chemistries mixed in the cauldron of time to translate the laws of physics into flesh:
I think about how a walk begins, with balance, in the ear, vestibular, a few feet above the earth… Endolymph, a potassium-heavy fluid, oozes inside the so-called bony and membranous labyrinthine canals of the inner ear…. inside [which] gelatinous bulbs called cupula, attached to stereocilia, detect the sloshing of our endolymph. The body moves, the endolymph splashes, heeds the laws of gravity. The stereocilia bend and transmit details of the bend — how far, how quickly, which orientation — to the cerebellum, the brain-nugget secreted at the back of the noggin. The cerebellum decodes the signals, translates, makes a follow-up microsecond game plan.
The great reward is that each step can be such a cosmos of complexity and at the same time lead to such simple, elemental truths. Having distilled the core tenet of a good walk to “real-time observation of unfiltered life,” having observed the core tenet of life in the Kii Peninsula — “a pervasive care throughout generations, a sense of knowing your happiness and health are intertwingled with those of your neighbor” — Craig captures an evanescent moment shimmering with the eternal:
Silent morning, abundant sunlight, abundant life. Thinking about this care. Water in the fields rippling in the wind. Mountains of Kii all around, a silent sloshing in my head, keeping the sky up and the ground down.
Traversing these enchanted landscapes via historic routes and backroads, passing through small towns vanishing before his eyes with depopulation, staying in thousand-year-old temples, he meets and walks with people who end up becoming family — father-figures, brother-figures, elderly innkeepers who put the hardest truths in simple words annealed in the hearth of living. One tells him of the young woman who wandered in years earlier looking for work and turned into a daughter. “Time passes, life moves, and that’s what happens,” the old man tells him. “Things become… other things.” Looking back on half a lifetime of walking his own way to belonging, Craig reflects:
Somehow as an adult I’ve managed to attract and surround myself with these people, these beacons of good… I love them so much that my bones ache — ache because I know I’ll lose them someday. I will follow them anywhere. Together we walk in the near-frozen morning air and the sun rises. Light works its way across the rippling peaks of the Peninsula. Feeling returns to hands, to feet, to hearts. The mind moves once again. We carry our lives on our backs and traverse the spine of the world, no humans for miles, no routes down, just forward or back, the beast below always shifting, always ready to heave us off.
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.