2026-03-14 08:19:47
We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.
In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathizer George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) for what became his most extensive interview about life — reflections ranging from science to spirituality to the elemental questions of existence. It was published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 29, 1929 — a quarter century after Einstein’s theory of relativity reconfigured our basic understanding of reality with its revelation that space and time are the warp and weft threads of a single fabric, along the curvature of which everything we are and everything we know is gliding.
Considering the helplessness individual human beings feel before the immense geopolitical forces that had hurled the world into its first global war and the decisions individual political leaders were making — decisions already inclining the world toward a second — Einstein aims in his sensitive intellect at the fundamental reality of existence:
I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
When asked about any personal responsibility for his own staggering achievements, he points a steadfast finger at the nonexistence of free will:
I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.
For Einstein, the most alive part of the mystery we live with — the mystery we are — is the imagination, that supreme redemption of human life from the prison of determinism. With an eye to his discovery of relativity, he reflects:
I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, funded by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would totally tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.
[…]
I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Complement with Robinson Jeffers’s superb science-laced poem “The Beginning and the End,” Simone Weil on the relationship between our rights and our responsibilities, and neuroscientist Sam Harris on our primary misconception about free will, then revisit Einstein on the interconnectedness of our fates.
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.
2026-03-14 05:30:05
In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then?
“In art,” Kafka assured his teenage walking companion, “one must throw one’s life away in order to gain it.” As in art, so in life — so suggests the American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön. In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library), she draws on her own confrontation with personal crisis and on the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to offer gentle and incisive guidance to the enormity we stand to gain during those times when all seems to be lost. Half a century after Albert Camus asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Chödrön reframes those moments of acute despair as opportunities for befriending life by befriending ourselves in the deepest sense.
Writing in that Buddhist way of wrapping in simple language the difficult and beautiful truths of existence, Chödrön examines the most elemental human response to the uncharted territory that comes with loss or any other species of unforeseen change:
Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
This clarity, Chödrön argues, is a matter of becoming intimate with fear and rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, using it as a tool with which to dismantle all of our familiar structures of being, “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.” Noting that bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear, she writes:
When we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.
In essence, this is the hard work of befriending ourselves, which is our only mechanism for befriending life in its completeness. Out of that, Chödrön argues, arises our deepest strength:
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
[…]
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
Decades after Rollo May made his case for the constructiveness of despair, Chödrön considers the fundamental choice we have in facing our unsettlement — whether with aggressive aversion or with generative openness to possibility:
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation — harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.
Half a century after Alan Watts began introducing Eastern teachings into the West with his clarion call for presence as the antidote to anxiety, Chödrön points to the present moment — however uncertain, however difficult — as the sole seedbed of wakefulness to all of life:
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us.
[…]
We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
Remaining present and intimate with the moment, she argues, requires mastering maitri — the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness toward oneself, that most difficult art of self-compassion. She contrasts maitri with the typical Western therapy and self-help method of handling crises:
What makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.
[…]
In the midst of all the heavy dialogue with ourselves, open space is always there.
Another Buddhist concept at odds with our Western coping mechanisms is the Tibetan expression ye tang che. Chödrön explains its connotations, evocative of Camus’s insistence on the vitalizing power of despair:
The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.” Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope — that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be — we will never relax with where we are or who we are.
[…]
Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.
Decades after Simone de Beauvoir’s proclamation about atheism and the ultimate frontier of hope, Chödrön points out that at the heart of Buddhism’s approach is not the escapism of religion but the realism of secular philosophy. And yet these crude demarcations fail to capture the subtlety of these teachings. She clarifies:
The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
[…]
Hopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we’re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security… Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.
[…]
When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself… In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things.
Only through such active self-compassion to our own darkness, Chödrön suggests, can we begin to offer authentic light to anybody else, to become a force of radiance in the world. She writes:
We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.
Complement the immensely grounding and elevating When Things Fall Apart with Camus on strength of character in times of trouble, Erich Fromm on what self-love really means, and Nietzsche on why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, then revisit Chödrön on the art of letting go.
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.
2026-03-14 01:36:26
“There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the young May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) wrote in her stunning ode to solitude — the solitude she came to know, over the course of her long and prolific life, as the seedbed of creativity.
Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. It is not for everyone. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It is only for the whole.
In her elder years, living alone on the coast of Maine and savoring a renaissance of creative energy after a long depression, Sarton returns to the subject of what solitude is and is not on the pages of her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea (public library).
Looking back on her life, she writes:
Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time.
But what solitude brings to a person is shaped by what the person brings to solitude. One August day, life brings Sarton a prompt to consider the art of living alone and the necessary preconditions for making of solitude not a resignation but a rapture:
Yesterday I had a letter from a young woman who is living alone, a film maker of some reputation. She wants to do a film on people who live alone, and will come next week to talk about her plans. I gather she has some doubts about the solitary life. I told her that I feel it is not for the young (she is only thirty-three). I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. The people we love are built into us. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago — or just yesterday — of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.
Complement with the Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor on the art of solitude, Emerson on what solitude really means, and a contemporary field guide to how to be alone, then revisit Sarton on gardening and creativity, how to cultivate your talent, how to live openheartedly in a harsh world, and her stunning poem about the relationship between presence, solitude, and love.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-13 18:34:10
“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life. It can only be so — given how many parallel truths comprise any given situation, given how multifarious the data points packed into any single experience, given that this very moment “you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest.
But what we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life. That is what philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) explores in a marvelous 1994 paper in the Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, marvelously titled User-Friendly Self-Deception.
Recognizing that “many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful,” Rorty writes:
We should not wish to do without the active, self-induced illusions that sustain us. Nor can we do without second order denials that they are illusions, the second order and regressive strategies that we self-deceptively believe rationalize our various self-deceptive activities. The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?
Self-deception, she notes, has various “cousins and clones” — among them “compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false consciousness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection” — some of which are socially rewarded for their adaptive value in helping us attain our goals:
When we admire persistent and dedicated single-minded attention that systematically resists the distraction of fringe phenomena, we call it courage or purposeful resolution.
But as much as self-deception might animate our own inner lives, with our reflexive tendency to mistake self-righteousness for morality, we too readily indict with self-delusion anyone whose model of reality differs from ours:
The person who does not have our favoured reactions is open game for the charge of self-deception, if not of a more serious form of psychological abnormality.
One necessity of self-deception is the paradox of the self in time: We must each answer the question of what makes us and our childhood selves the “same” person despite a lifetime physical and psychological change, and we can only do so with a certain measure of self-deception, because, of course, in some essential sense we are not the same person — our personhood is pocked by inconstancy and inner contradiction, unstable across time. As Iris Murdoch reminds us, “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion” — the fundamental illusion upon which the structure of human life is built.
Rorty considers the psychological roots and mechanisms of self-deception:
Like deception, self-deception is a species of rhetorical persuasion; and like all forms of persuasion, it involves a complex, dynamic and co-operative process. Successful deceivers are acute rhetoricians, astute seducers who know how to co-opt the psychology of their subjects. They begin with minute and subtle interactions designed to establish trust, with a manner of approach, certain gestures and intonation patterns, intimations of directed and redirected attention.
With an eye to the social dimension of all deception, she adds:
Deception and self-deception are not merely detached conclusions of invalid arguments: they are interactive processes with a complex cognitive and affective aetiology.
[…]
The canny self-deceiver puts herself in situations where her deflected attention will be strongly supported by her fellows.
[…]
It is extremely difficult to sustain self-deception without a little help from our friends, often rendered by observant but tactful silence.
This very fact points at the best antidote to harmful self-deception:
Since we are highly susceptible to socially induced self-deception, the wisest practical course is to be very careful about the company we keep… Unfortunately self- deception is just the thing that prevents us from seeking its best therapy: it does not know when to expand, and when to limit its epistemological company. Fortunately, we have many other kinds of reasons for being astute about the company we keep. With luck, a canny self-deceiver’s other psychological and intellectual habits — a taste for astringency and a distrust of hypocrisy, for instance — can prevent the wild imperialistic tendencies of self-deception from becoming entrenched and ramified.
Much self-deception, Rorty observes, is not a matter of outright lying to oneself, but of selective attention and fragmentation of truth:
Self-deception need not involve false belief: just as the deceiver can attempt to produce a belief which is — as it happens — true, so too a self-deceiver can set herself to believe what is in fact true. A canny self-deceiver can focus on accurate but irrelevant observations as a way of denying a truth that is importantly relevant to her immediate projects.
This is something that stems from the psychological machinery of all deception, possible because “any experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptions”:
Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers — something red, something anomalous, something desirable — in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. The strategy of perceptual self-deception is identical: the trick is to place oneself where patterns of salience are likely to deflect attention away from what we do not wish to see.
But for all of its pitfalls, and for all the urgency of continually questioning when it becomes self-defeating, self-deception can be greatly beneficent in our endeavors of self-transformation and growth, offering assurance that bolsters our will and an antidote to the “generalized uncertainty about the worth of our projects.” Rorty writes:
By convincing themselves that a desired self-transformation is within relatively easy reach, canny self-improvers can use self-deception as an energizing instrument.
Self-deception is also necessary in propping up the precarious pillar of modern life in this century of selfing — identity:
We invent something we call our identity, resting our self-respect on our engaging in its projects, independently of any other measure of their merits.
But perhaps the most essential function of healthy self-deception is in allaying our ambivalence about projects and life-choices that bring us tremendous rewards, but also have tremendous personal costs, an accurate assessment of which might undermine our willingness to undertake them:
Without some species of self-deception, our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse. In deciding to have children, we ignore the travails of parents, obliterating our otherwise keen awareness of the typical relations among parents and children; in devoting ourselves to writing philosophy, we conveniently forget how little philosophy we are willing to read; in the interest of sanity and joy, we sidestep our deep ambivalences about our kith and kin.
[…]
Disguising and submerging the ambivalence that is natural to most of our enterprises not only brings us the energy, verve, style and ease that successful action requires; it also helps to assure the social co-operation that is equally essential to our individual and collective projects. A good deal of the polite conversation of social life, — the public description of the joys of our social roles and functions (friend, mother, teacher, scholar) — channels and streams us to play our parts without the mess, confusion and upheaval that would occur if we openly expressed our natural and sensible ambivalence about these roles. It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.
Complement with Walter Lippmann’s superb century-old anatomy of deception and self-delusion, then revisit Rorty on what makes a person: the seven layers of identity, in literature and life.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-13 08:45:43
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer — the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light — recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment.
The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut’s eyes may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian.
While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:
I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I’ve done, and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism — it is your life to tinker with, learn from, live and love.
This ongoingness of creation — the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten — is nowhere more visible, life’s ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective:
It’s endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths.
A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster’s astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and it is with a poet’s sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair — the Bahamas, seen from space in all their “huge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists.”
Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself — the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century.
Many died to know the unknown.
Many sank into “soul-despairing depression” during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime.
Over and over, they were saved by wonder.
In the first year of the twentieth century — that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration — the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis — that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun’s corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth’s magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic.
Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth’s most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. (“I realized that it had to be oil paint,” he wrote, “that could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.”) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter.
Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these “huge, luminous beams with folds… now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere… like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth.” He writes in his memoir:
The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like “supernatural,” “divine,” “miraculous.” I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that… I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding.
It is not unimportant that the word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things — the only perspective, available in every act of unselfing with wonder right here on Earth, that hallows a broken world whole.
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.
2026-03-13 08:14:34
“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she reflected on the relationship between nature and human nature. But what we call place — that unalloyed presence with a here and now, with the unfolding of time in a locus of space — penetrates more than the mind: it permeates body and spirit and the entire constellation of being. There is a reason why the original Latin use of the word genius was in the phrase genius loci — the spirit of a place. We become who we are in the crucible of where we are.
Our minds, however, are born wanderers — perpetual refugees from presence, perpetually paying for their flight with loneliness. We go on forgetting that we are not only embodied creatures, but embodied in the body of the world; we go on forgetting that the here and now — that locus of intimacy with everything and everyone else inhabiting this island of spacetime, intimacy with the pulsating totality of our own being — is our only refuge from the existential loneliness that is the price of being alive.
That is what Barry Lopez (January 6, 1945–December 25, 2020) explores in “Invitation” — one of the twenty-six exquisite essays in his posthumous collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (public library).
Drawing on his longtime immersion in indigenous cultures and his lifelong travel with native companions, Lopez counters the hollow stereotype that indigenous people’s connection to place is a sort of “primitive” sensitivity to be contrasted with “advanced” civilization:
Such a dismissive view, as I have come to understand it, ignores the great intangible value that achieving physical intimacy with a place might provide. I’m inclined to point out to someone who condescends to such a desire for intimacy, although it might seem rude, that it is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness. Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.
Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.
This longing to belong with the world is the fulcrum of our yearning for meaning. Whitman knew it when, after his paralytic stroke, he arrived at what makes life worth living; Mary Shelley knew it when, in the wake of her staggering bereavement, she reckoned with what gives meaning to a broken life; Lopez knows it, locating the cure for our existential loneliness in our intimate relationship to place:
The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.
This question of how our relationship to place deepens our relationship to life permeates the entire book. In another essay from it, titled “An Intimate Geography,” he writes:
Intimacy with the physical Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes. Based on my own inquiries, my impression is that we experience this primal connection regularly as a diffuse, ineffable pleasure, experience it as the easing of a particular kind of longing.
Lopez is the ultimate modern anti-Cartesian, reminding us again and again of our creaturely nature, interconnected and indivisible — the life of the mind indivisible from the life of the body, our portable totalities interleaved with the whole of the world. He offers a succinct prescription for remedying the elemental longing pulsating beneath our restlessness and our loneliness:
Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.
Complement these fragments from the wholly magnificent Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World with C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing and this lovely illustrated antidote to our elemental loneliness, then revisit Lopez on the key to great storytelling and the three steps to becoming a writer.
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.