2025-02-27 02:26:56
One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the bloody, sweaty flesh of another; the knowledge that your own flesh is made of someone else’s cells and genes, the fact of you a fractal.
While mothering can take many forms and can be done by many different kinds of people, the process of one organism generating another from the raw materials of its own being — a process known as matrescence — is as invariable as breathing, as inevitable to life as death. In blurring the biological boundary between the creature imparted and the one doing the imparting, matrescence is the ultimate refutation of the self, the ultimate affirmation that individuality is an illusion — a cocoon of ego to keep us from apprehending the plurality we are. The science behind it is so intricate and so defiant of our commonsense intuitions about the possible that it seems to partake of the miraculous. Nested within it are questions of profound and sweeping implications, questions relevant and deliriously fascinating even to those of us without the psychological impulse or biological ability to bear children, questions that touch on some of the most elemental experiences of being human: change, vulnerability, reciprocity, resilience, belonging.
English journalist Lucy Jones takes up these questions in Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood (public library), braiding together her own experience of originating new life, some revelatory scientific studies that undermine our basic assumptions about personhood and our most unquestioned political priorities, and some astonishing counterpoints to the illusion of individuality in the nonhuman world, from the maternity colonies of vampire bats to a species of tiny marine larvae that digest their own tail, brain, and nerve cord to become an unrecognizably different adult organism.
Recalling how her first pregnancy gave her a taste of this simultaneous dissolution and exponentiation of the self — the substance of which, as Borges so memorably observed, is time — Jones considers the infinities nested in any one life:
Time started to bend. I was carrying the future inside me. I would learn that I was also carrying the eggs, already within my baby’s womb, that could go on to partly form my potential grandchildren. My future grandchildren were in some way inside me, just as part of me spent time in the womb of my grandmother. I was carrying inside me a pool of amniotic fluid, which was once rivers, lakes and rain. I was carrying a third more blood, which was once soil and stars and lichen.[2] The baby was formed of the atoms of the earth, of the past and the future. Every atom in her body existed when the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.
Time brings space along with it, bending the universe itself toward the cosmic nativity story that is a human being. Jones recounts the postpartum awakening to a reality larger than herself, larger than her new baby, encompassing everything that ever was and ever will be, consonant with the deepest meaning of love as the act of unselfing:
Back at home with our daughter, just one day old, I found that our flat felt different, as if I’d stepped through a portal into a parallel universe, or onto the set of a film.
In my arms, a collection of trillions of atoms that had cycled through generations of ancient supernova explosions.
We were both so old, made from stars born billions of years ago.
We were both so new, she, breathing, outside me; I being made again in matrescence.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t sleep for the beauty of her. Little pink mouth. Doughball cheeks. Plant-stalk soft bones. Her astral holiness.
Body of my body, flesh of my flesh.
I heard the contraction and expansion of the universe bouncing into existence, new galaxies, axons, dendrites; cells and love, cells and love.
This altered state is not merely a psychological experience — it is a profoundly physiological one. Jones cites a series of landmark studies of the cellular exchange between mother and baby via the placenta, which found that maternal cells, actual entire cells, remain in the child’s body throughout life, while fetal cells can dwell in the mother’s brain decades after giving birth. The medical geneticist and neonatologist Diana Bianchi, who spearheaded the research, termed this phenomenon microchimerism, after the chimera from Greek mythology — creatures composed of different parts from multiple animals. Microchimerism is possible because humans have one of the most invasive placentas among animals, colonizing one hundred uterine vessels and arteries with thirty-two miles of capillaries that would span the whole of London if laid out along the Thames — an enmeshment impossible to extract without a trace.
Because matrescence is such a system-wide neurobiological reconfiguration, impacting everything from metabolism to memory, research has found the pregnant brain to be as plastic as the adolescent — a time in which “dynamic structural and functional changes take place that accompany fundamental behavioural adaptations.”
These processes are so powerful that alter the neural basis of the self, so powerful that they reach beyond the biological boundaries of the mother and into the behavioral adaptations of anyone involved in post-birth childcare, which is also part of matrescence — fathers, grandparents, caretakers of any kind for whom the newborn becomes a primary focus of attention. Drawing on a body of research, Jones writes:
Caregiving neural circuitry exists in both male and female brains. Early neuroscientific research on humans is now showing that caregiver brains experience significant plasticity, even without the experience of pregnancy. Hands-on caring shapes brain circuitry and causes other biological changes. In 2020, a groundbreaking study showed that having a baby changes a father’s brain anatomy.
This caretaking is essential for our survival, as infant individuals and as an adolescent species, in a way that it is not for most other creatures, for out of it arise the hallmarks of our humanity. Unlike the newborn giraffe calf, who can rise to her feet and walk within hours of birth, or the newly hatched turtle, who can take to the woods or the waves immediately, human are born utterly helpless, to be fed and bathed and gurgled at, remaining dependent for years as the 400 grams of rosy flesh grow in their bone cave to become a three-pound miracle coruscating with one hundred trillion synapses, ablaze with the capacities for the guillotine and the Goldberg Variations.
Jones writes:
To be a smart species — to be able to learn and read and write and draw and solve and build and invent and empathize and imagine — humans have to be born vulnerable. Few other species of animal on earth are as helpless and immature as human babies. The brains of other primates are much more developed at birth. Humans are one of the only mammals with brains that grow so significantly outside the womb. The benefit of this early helplessness is that it means the brain can adapt and rewire as the infant grows.
Given how fundamental matrescence is to the flourishing of the human species and the human animal, to systemically deprioritize and marginalize pregnancy and motherhood, as our society does, seems like plain self-sabotage. With an eye to the disproportionate precedence of mental illness in new mothers and the consistent findings that social support is the single most effective means of inoculating them against it, Jones quotes those unforgettable lines by Gwendolyn Brooks — we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business / we are each other’s magnitude and bond — and writes:
Increasingly, social isolation and loneliness are recognized as risk factors for mental and physical health problems and early mortality. Loneliness is as damaging for health as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Although we know that it can increase during transitional periods of life — for example, during adolescence, illness, bereavement, retirement — researchers have only recently started studying loneliness in the perinatal period. In the last decade or so, the first work has been published recognizing that women experiencing loneliness in pregnancy and new motherhood are more likely to suffer from mental illness. Studies suggest that loneliness also exacerbates symptoms of depression in fathers. The findings suggest serious fault lines in our society. It is striking that we’ve so forgotten our interdependence that we need scientists to prove to us that we need other people to survive.
This is precisely why matrescence, in all its plasticity and its revelation of interdependence, in being “a crucible in which the dross can be burned off and the wilder, more authentic self remains,” can serve as a recalibration of our collective priorities far beyond the mother’s experience of motherhood. Jones writes:
Times of transformation, whatever they might be, are opportunities to find new connectedness; to choose and consolidate the things that matter; to bring repressed selves out of the shadows into the light; to forgive; to grow layers of nacre, of resilience, of acceptance.
Emanating from the book is a reminder of what we so readily forget and are so steadily conditioned to forget: that we don’t have to accept the choices handed down to us by our culture as givens. Noting that “a culture can choose what it diminishes and what it grow,” Jones envisions a different choice:
We have to see the structures we’ve inherited in order to tear them down. So many women believe their struggles with matrescence are the result of their own weakness and moral failing. This is a lie and it inhibits honest talk and social change. The difficulties of modern matrescence in neoliberal Western societies are structural and systematic. Seeing the oppressive nature of the institution of motherhood for what it is, and acknowledging the failure of society to support care work, allows us to think critically. Talking makes the structures of discrimination more visible. It allows us to identify what must change.
From pregnancy, women need health professionals who will give them full and accurate information without ideology or misinformation. We want the facts about birth and postnatal recovery, about breastfeeding, about what happens to the brain and our psychological lives. We need to improve maternal mental healthcare by introducing screening for issues in pregnancy and far more investment so mothers can get specialist treatment quickly. We need a meaningful focus on tackling systemic inequalities in maternal health outcomes. We need new birth rituals that acknowledge the gravity of childbirth without obscuring the reality and risks.
The government must urgently invest in midwives, mental health practitioners and wider postpartum care to fix the maternity crisis. Not investing in maternal health is a political decision.
These choices are the placenta permeating the body politic, its tendrils touching every aspect of life — not just the life of mother and baby, not even the life of the society in which they exist, but life itself as a planetary phenomenon. Bridging matrescence and ecology into what she terms matroecology, Jones writes:
The experience — one we have all had — of being part of another has much to teach us about our relations with the earth, the psychic and corporeal reality of our interdependence and interconnectedness with other species.
We have all experienced this becoming-within-another who is both known and unknown, an “otherness-in-proximity.”
[…]
What kind of world could we imagine and create if, instead of pretending we were thrown into existence, as though by magic, we truly considered our vulnerable, intimate, tactile, entangled, animal origins?
These are not merely political or philosophical questions — they are profoundly personal. (“The shortest statement of philosophy I have,” Audre Lorde wrote from the center of a politically invigorated life, “is my living, or the word ‘I.’”) Jones is not merely theorizing matroecology — walking home hand in hand with her small child, she is feeling it in the marrow of her being:
Seeds break through pods around us; buds break open with the leaves they have been holding folded, grown by the sunlight of the previous summer; green beads flecking the hedgerows break open; red beads in the maple trees above break open. The moon is up, and it pulls the ocean back and forth: a spring tide, the biggest tide, transforming the coasts of this island, breaking apart shell and stone, fish and bone. Beneath us, the trees are talking, making plans, breaking through soil and sediment. Above us, stars are being born and others are dying. We walk through the cemetery where organisms are being born and others are dying and creatures are being eaten and others are eating. The continent we are on is moving (at the speed of a fingernail growing), and the round rock we are on is moving (tilted on its axis, spinning). Farther below, plates are crushing and stretching, magma is cooling and heating and leaking, rock is forming and changing. The ebb and flow, the ebb and the glow. The lilting earth, and we lilting, too, in our one flicker of consciousness in this incessant motion. We sit underneath the canopy of a beech tree, a mother tree, and rake the earth, the soft brown soil, and the broken beech mast casings, and the hard brown seeds, and the chunks of soft white chalk made from the skeletons of ancient creatures from the sea, lit by a tender light, and we breathe.
Couple Matrescence with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on how to be animal, then revisit Florida Scott Maxwell on the most important thing to remember about your mother and Lincoln Steffens’s playful, profound 1925 meditation on fatherhood.
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.
2025-02-23 02:07:11
It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it — its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow — is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a “wave in the mind” — the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable.
Many writers have contemplated the mystery of creativity — take, for instance, David Bowie, Octavia Butler, John Lennon, May Sarton, Lewis Hyde, and Nick Cave — but none more articulately than the poet, anthropologist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who in his long life published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, influenced two generations of writers and activists, and inspired the main character in the most famous novel by Jack Kerouac (with whom he roomed for a while).
In a passage from Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of journal entries and poem fragments from his twenties and thirties — Snyder writes:
Poems that spring out fully armed; and those that are the result of artisan care. The contrived poem, workmanship; a sense of achievement and pride of craft; but the pure inspiration flow leaves one with a sense of gratitude and wonder, and no sense of “I did it” — only the Muse. That level of mind — the cool water — not intellect and not — (as romantics and after have confusingly thought) fantasy-dream world or unconscious. This is just the clear spring — it reflects all things and feeds all things but is of itself transparent. Hitting on it, one could try to trace it to the source; but that writes no poems and is in a sense ingratitude. Or one can see where it goes: to all things and in all things. The hidden water underground. Anyhow — one shouts for the moon in always insisting on it; and safer-minded poets settle for any muddy flow and refine it as best they can.
In another entry, he considers the fork in the channel an artist must face — to go toward tradition or toward the unexampled, toward order or toward chaos:
Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing.
But as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:
The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times… I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging — which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical — things.
In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature (public library):
HOW POETRY COMES TO ME
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
Complement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-02-20 03:01:27
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by reason of demobilization of men.” When he received the discharge papers, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed “communist initiated.”
Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland), thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing Desert Solitaire, which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.
Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries, selections from which were posthumously published as Confessions of a Barbarian (public library). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life:
HOW TO DIE — but first, how not to:
Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.
Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.
Not in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.
Not the legal murder either — too grim and ugly such a martyrdom — down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial — not to be murdered so, no never.
But how to:
Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below — before the crash, before…
With none to say no, none.
Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.
When he did die a lifetime later, alone in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: “No Comment.” He requested that his useless body be used “to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.” Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry’s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, “lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,” and no formal speeches — “though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.” When the wake was held at Arches National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge.
Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:
It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.
Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman’s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.
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.
2025-02-18 03:51:03
We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can’t control — the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of — how we choose to play the hand makes us who we are.
A lifetime before she looked back to contemplate how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, the teenage Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) began considering the choices before her in creating herself out of the raw material of her givens — the limiting horizons of her time and place, the vast vista of her mind. (“She thinks like a man,” her father boasted in a haunting testament to both.)
At seventeen, she had passed her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, then gone on to study math at the Catholic University in Paris before crossing over to the Sorbonne for a degree in philosophy. She would become only the eighth woman to ever pass the agrégation — the most rigorous exam in the French education system — narrowly losing first place in her class to Sartre.
It was at the Sorbonne where, still in her teens, she began bending her tensile and penetrating mind toward the kind of life she wanted to live and the kind of person she wanted to be. In her journal of that time, later published as the altogether magnificent Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library), she approaches these questions with the oscillation between determination and self-doubt inherent to any great endeavor — for there is no greater creative act than the making of a life.
Punctuating the diary are touching reminders that even exceptional people are not spared the ordinary perturbations of being human — she is in some ways a typical teenager (“My winter was occupied almost uniquely with love and suffering.”) and a typical person (“Unendingly I make resolutions that I never keep.”), and yet what she makes out of all that suffering, all that restlessness, all that yearning is what makes her — what makes anyone — extraordinary.
Finding herself “neither able to accept nor to refuse life,” she peers into her near and faraway future:
I will be twenty years old in a few months. My education will be almost finished. I will have learned, read, seen everything essential and well beyond. I will have lived with my intelligence and my heart and known a rather wide world. I will even have begun to think by myself; there will be no wasted time. But then it will be advisable to put myself to work. If I live, I must fully accept the game; I must have the most beautiful life. I don’t know why I am here, but since I remain here, I will construct a beautiful edifice.
Then she reaches for the building blocks. Deeming her suffering “useless,” she resolves to rise above it and aim her life toward “a written work that would say everything, that would analyze souls in minute detail while breathing life into each body.” Aware that this dream would demand of her absolute devotion and absolute discipline, she sets down a series of instructions to herself:
Take risks… Force myself to think for two pages per day… Don’t scatter myself… Don’t hurry, but work two hours per day, genius or not, even if I believe that it will come to nothing, and confide in someone who will criticize me and take me seriously.
[…]
I must… clarify my desire and proceed by trial and error in order to prepare what would eventually be a great written work… Analyze, understand, and descend more deeply into myself… It is imperative to begin. The questions that interest me must be studied in great depth… It would be necessary… to bring it together with the problems of the personality that love formulates so exactly — the problem of the act of faith that so closely touches the first two problems… It would be necessary to have the courage to write, not to expound ideas but to discover them, not to clothe them artistically but to animate them. The courage to believe in them.
Because there can never be great achievement without great despair, because demanding everything and more of yourself is always wormed with doubt that you might not have it to give, the pendulum keeps swinging between determination and despair. Just after deciding to devote her summer vacation to exploring “the subject of love” as a philosophical problem in “at least thirty condensed and coherent pages,” she plummets again:
What emptiness, what boredom! I hang on to some likable faces, but the too well loved face unendingly smiles at me with sorrow. For what indefinite crossing have I embarked at this precise point in time and space as though in the middle of an immense sea? A crossing whose goal is unknown.
First she uses the lever of her formidable intellect to lift the heavy emotion:
I do not have the right to despair. [If] despair was justified… it demands to be demonstrated — to say, “nothing is worth it,” and to sit idly by with your arms crossed, to have the certainty that no certainty is possible; this is still dogmatism… I too am setting forth a postulate: it is first necessary to seek what is, then, I will see if I must still despair.
But one can never reason one’s way out of a powerful feeling-state — it simply has to be felt, suffered, endured “for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it.” All despair of life is at bottom despair of oneself — something Beauvoir channels with the heightened intensity of adolescent feeling and the lashing censure of ambition:
I have examined my conscience, and here is what I have found: prideful, selfish, and not very good… I often have disgust for myself… I have closed myself in my ivory tower, saying, “Who is worthy of entering here?” I would sometimes open the door and that is all, but there are some people profoundly better than me, and this haughty attitude is stupid. Egoist — I love others only inasmuch as they are me; I easily scorn, and scornful, I no longer try to do my best… How severely I judge and with what right?
In a momentary flash of self-compassion immediately clouded by the same sharp self-excoriation, she adds:
I should suffer with gentleness. I am hard, hard and proud. Become conscious of your own poverty, my girl, and of all of your cowardice!… I have covered my own cowardice with sophisms — oh!
She considers the steps to the courage of creating — a great work, or a great life:
Systematize my thoughts and believe in the value of thought. Read… Delve more deeply. Take all of this seriously. Be more pitiless towards myself and less skeptical with regards to others… Stop only in front of the evidence. Write conclusions once they are acquired… And above all: think for myself.
And yet she locates the key to a fulfilling life not in the mind alone but in the largeness, the fulness, the unabashed openness of the heart:
Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!
Half a century later — having proven these postulates with her life, having written not just one great work but several — she would approach the art of growing old with the same depth of thought and feeling.
Complement with her contemporary Albert Camus on the three antidotes to the absurdity of life and Walt Whitman’s timeless recipe for a vibrant and rewarding life, then revisit this omnibus of resolutions for a life worth living borrowed from some extraordinary lives.
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.
2025-02-13 02:07:51
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of my favorite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his classic on anxiety that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity… the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.”
Given that nearly every cell in your body has changed since the time you were a child, given that nearly all of your values, desires, and social ties are now different, given that you are, biologically and psychologically, a different person from one moment to the next, what makes you and the child you were the same person — what makes a self — is nothing more than the thread of selective memory and internal narrative stringing together the most meaningful beads of experience into the rosary of meaning that is your personhood.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) called these beads “moments of being” — the “scaffolding in the background” of life, “invisible and silent” yet shaping the foreground of experience: our relationship to other people, our response to events, the things we make with our hands and our minds in our daily living. The most intensely felt of these moments, she believed, “have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence”; we don’t call them to memory — they call us into being. They are the antipode of what she called “non-being” — the lull of habit and mindless routine that drags us through our days in a state of near-living.
In Moments of Being (public library) — the posthumous collection of her autobiographical writings — she writes:
A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.
In her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway — part love letter to these moments of being, part lamentation about the proportion of non-being we choose without knowing we are choosing — she locates the key to righting the ratio in “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” Placing one of the characters in one such vivid moment of being — “coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand” — she writes him thinking:
Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
This question of life’s fullness — what fills it, what syphons it, how to live when it overflows beyond what we can hold — animates Woolf’s entire body of work. In the spring of 1928, while working on her trailblazing novel Orlando (“which is wretched,” she told her sister Vanessa in a letter, then wrote the relationship between creativity and self-doubt into the novel itself) — she reflected in her diary:
A bitter windy rainy day… Life is either too empty or too full. Happily, I never cease to transmit these curious damaging shocks. At 46 I am not callous; suffer considerably; make good resolutions — still feel as experimental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever… And I find myself again in the driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it?
In a sense, to live in the moment is always to live against time. Woolf captured his with uncommon splendor in another autobiographical fragment:
The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it is pressed so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of house moving — causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters.
As Woolf was thinking these beautiful thoughts and writing these beautiful sentences, she was enduring regular visitations the acute depression that would eventually lead her to fill her coat-pockets with stones and wade into the river, never to return. She had come to the brink once before, in her twenties. That she lived to fifty-nine despite such suffering, that she wrote the flashes of eternity she did, is an astonishing achievement of the spirit — a testament to her own power “of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”
It is through her protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway that Woolf best captures these luminous building blocks of personhood:
Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there — the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.
These moments, Woolf knew and devoted her life to having us know, are our best listening device for hearing the soul beneath the self — the soul that is little more than the quality of attention we pay to being alive.
It was one such almost painfully acute moment of being while walking through her garden that lifted what Woolf called “the cotton wool of daily life” and sparked her epiphany about why she became a writer — a lens on a larger truth about what it means to be an artist, a person of creative fire in the river of time — prompting her to exult in the revelation:
I reach… the idea… that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2025-02-10 03:22:14
“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”
It is a beautiful sentiment, beautiful and incomplete. Art is but one way of contacting that deeper reality. Science is another, with its revelations of truths so beyond sight that they seem inconceivable, from the billions of neutrinos passing through your body this very second to the hummingbird’s flight to the quantum bewilderment of the subatomic world.
But more than art, more than science, we have invented one implement to cut through the curtain of habit and render the world new. Love alone blues the sky and greens the grass and brightens all the light we see. It is the last irreducible reality, whose mystery no painting or poem can fully capture and no fMRI can fully explain.
In 1965, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) moved from Los Angeles, where he had just finished a graduate program at UCLA, to New York, where he was offered a post at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He found the city a place of “fantastic creative furor,” but his painful introversion and sense of difference left him feeling friendless.
That summer, just before beginning his new job, he traveled home to London. While in Europe, he met Jenö Vincze — a charismatic Hungarian theater director living in Berlin. Oliver had been planning to go to a neurology conference in Vienna. Instead, he found himself in Paris, in Amsterdam, in love with Jenö. Here was a rigorous and original scientist, who would devote his life to illuminating the neurological underpinnings of our strangest mental states, suddenly subsumed in the strangest and most mysterious of them all. He would later look back on this time as one of “an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.”
When he reluctantly returned to New York, Oliver set about trying to bridge the abyss of physical absence by rendering his world alive in words, composing some of the greatest love letters I have read. In one of the treasures collected in his posthumously published Letters (public library), he writes:
My dearest Jenö:
I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is seven o’clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And soon there’ll be a billion lights.
He isn’t, of course, describing the city as it is but as he is. This, in the end, may be what love is — the billion lights inside that make the whole world luminous, an inner sun to render every dull surface and every dark space radiant:
I don’t feel the distance either, only the nearness. We’re together all the while. I feel your breath on the side of my neck… My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile.
[…]
I want to share my joys with you. To see the green crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg cases hung from seaweed. A little octopus, just hatched, jetting for joy in the salty water. Sea anemones. The soft sweet pressure if you touch their center. The chalky hands of barnacles. And polychaetes in their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), moving with insensate grace. And dive with me under the ocean, Jenö. Through fish, like birds, which accept your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the freedom, the complete and utter freedom of motion, second only to that of space itself.
Oliver yearned to transport Jenö not only to the world he walked through but to the world within, the world he would always best access and best channel in writing. “The act of writing,” he would reflect a lifetime later, “is a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.” Now, he tells his beloved:
I read Psalms in profanity, for the joy they contain, and the trust and the love, and the pure morning language… I write so much. I want to catch everything and share it with you. You will be deprived of all your social life, your sleep, your food, condemned to read interminable letters. Poor Jenö, committed to a lover who’s never silent, who talks all day, and talks all night, and talks in company, and talks to himself. Words are the medium into which I must translate reality. I live in words, in images, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can’t help it.
Again and again, he keeps returning to this new quality of light suddenly revealed by love:
The weather has been of supernal beauty. The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love… I never saw that golden light before we met in Paris.
Perhaps it was this brush with the irreducible immensity of love that would later lead Oliver to write so presciently about the limits of artificial intelligence and so poignantly about the meaning of our human lives.
Two days later, he writes again:
I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through ten layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known… I believe we are both infinite, Jenö. I see the future as an endless expansion of the present, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves.
Like all people in love, Oliver was envisioning a life with Jenö, not once imagining that they would never see each other again, that he would spend the next thirty-five years celibate and afraid of love, afraid of himself in love.
But love would find him in the end — a beautiful and bright love that would hold him through dying with dignity.
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.