2026-04-04 00:27:39
“I have always had a quarrel with this country not only about race but about the standards by which it appears to live,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead as they sat down together to reimagine democracy for a post-consumerist world. A generation later, the poet, farmer, and ecological steward Wendell Berry — a poet in the largest Baldwinian sense — picked up the time-escalated quarrel in his slim, large-spirited book The Hidden Wound (public library) to offer, without looking away from its scarring realities, a healing and conciliatory direction of resistance to a culture in which our enjoyment of life is taken from us by the not-enoughness at the hollow heart of consumerism, only to be sold back to us at the price of the latest product, and sold in discriminating proportion along lines of stark income inequality.
Berry writes:
It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been conditioned by the lives of black people, I have had surprisingly little to say about them in my other writings. Perhaps this is justifiable — there is certainly no requirement that a writer deal with any particular subject — and yet it has been an avoidance. When I have written about them before I have felt that I was doing little more than putting down a mark, leaving an opening, that I would later have to go back to and fill. For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound — a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life.
Berry recounts growing up around a black man named Nick, who worked for Berry’s grandfather. Nick, to whom he dedicates the book, was a benediction of presence during Berry’s most formative years — a hard-working man with a buoyant imagination and an uncommonly cheerful mindset. The small child befriended the large fifty-something man with the ardor of kinship chosen and not dictated by blood. Berry recalls his love of Nick with sweetness undiminished by the flight of decades:
One of my two or three chief ambitions was to be with him… I dogged his steps. So faithful a follower, and so young and self-important and venturesome as I was, I must have been a trial to him. But he never ran out of patience.
This bond had a deep impact on Berry as a writer and a human being, shaping both his poetry and the personhood from which it springs. He reflects:
The great benefit in my childhood friendship with Nick… was not an experience of sympathy, though that was involved and was essential, but a prolonged intense contact with lives and minds radically unlike my own, and radically unlike any other that I might have known as a white child among white adults. They don’t figure in my memory and in my thoughts about them as objects of pity, but rather as friends and teachers, ancestors you could say, the forebears of certain essential strains in my thinking.
From Nick, who had been working hard since childhood for the smallest of wages and with the slimmest of prospects for living any other way, Berry learned one of the hardest, most beautiful truths about living a rich life — a kind of existential contemplative practice of inclining the mind, whatever the conditions of the body, toward delight. A century after Hermann Hesse placed attendance to life’s little joys at the center of living with gladsome presence, Berry writes:
There were two heavy facts that Nick accepted and lived with: life is hard, full of work and pain and weariness, and at the end of it a man has got to go farther than he can imagine from any place he knows. And yet within the confines of those acknowledged facts, he was a man rich in pleasures. They were not large pleasures, they cost little or nothing, often they could not be anticipated, and yet they surrounded him; they were possible at almost any time, or at odd times, or at off times. They were pleasures to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all. There were the elemental pleasures of eating and drinking and resting, of being dry while it is raining, of getting dry after getting wet, of getting warm again after getting cold, of cooling off after getting hot. There was pleasure to be taken in good work animals, as long as you remembered the bother and irritation of using the other kind. There was pleasure in the appetites and in the well-being of good animals. There was pleasure in quitting work. There were certain pleasures in the work itself. There was pleasure in hunting and in going to town, and in visiting and in having company. There was pleasure in observing and remembering the behavior of things, and in telling about it. There was pleasure in knowing where a fox lived, and in planning to run it, and in running it. And… Nick knew how to use his mind for pleasure; he remembered and thought and pondered and imagined. He was a master of what William Carlos Williams called the customs of necessity.
In a sentiment evocative of Kurt Vonnegut’s short poem about the secret of happiness and of Viktor Frankl’s hard-earned conviction that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” Berry adds:
In these times one contemplates it with the same sense of hope with which one contemplates the sunrise or the coming of spring: the image of a man who has labored all his life and will labor to the end, who has no wealth, who owns little, who has no hope of changing, who will never “get somewhere” or “be somebody,” and who is yet rich in pleasure, who takes pleasure in the use of his mind! Isn’t this the very antithesis of the thing that is breaking us in pieces? Isn’t there a great rare humane strength in this — this humble possibility that all our effort and aspiration is to deny?
Berry takes great care to address the reasonable objection that, given his position as a white man of moderately comfortable means, his portrait of Nick may be misconstrued as romanticizing poverty. (Baldwin acknowledged a kindred objection in contrasting the warmhearted poor of Istanbul with the wealthy but unsympathetic Swiss he had encountered during his relatively privileged life in Europe.) “I am uncomfortably aware,” Berry notes, “of the dangers and difficulties in a white man’s attempt to write so intimately of the life of a black man out of a child’s memories a quarter of a century old.” And yet, across this vast ocean of time and difference, Berry lands on shared shore of tremendous, boldly countercultural wisdom:
This much is clear to me: insofar as I am capable of feeling such pleasures as I believe Nick felt, I am strong; insofar as I am dependent on the pleasures made available by my salary and the things I own, I am weak. I feel much more secure in those pleasures for which I am dependent on the world, as Nick was for most of his, than in those for which I am dependent on the government or on a power company or on the manufacturers of appliances. And I am far from conceding anything to those who assume that the poor or anyone else can be improved by recourse to that carnival of waste and ostentation and greed known as “our high standard of living.” As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.
Complement this excerpt from The Hidden Wound — a powerful, tenderhearted, and increasingly necessary read in its entirety — with Baldwin and Mead’s contemporary E.F. Schumacher’s paradigm-challenging vision for Buddhist economics and Bertrand Russell on the relationship between work, leisure, and social justice, then revisit Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being and Amanda Palmer’s reading of his stunningly prescient poem “Questionnaire.”
Thanks, Courtney
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-04-03 08:09:52
“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion wrote after losing the love of her life. “The people we most love do become a physical part of us,” Meghan O’Rourke observed in her magnificent memoir of loss, “ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.” Those wildly unexpected dimensions of grief and the synaptic traces of love are what celebrated British children’s book writer and poet Michael Rosen confronted when his eighteen-year-old son Eddie died suddenly of meningitis. Never-ending though the process of mourning may be, Rosen set out to exorcise its hardest edges and subtlest shapes five years later in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (public library) — an immensely moving addition to the finest children’s books about loss, illustrated by none other than the great Quentin Blake.
With extraordinary emotional elegance, Rosen welcomes the layers of grief, each unmasking a different shade of sadness — sadness that sneaks up on you mid-stride in the street; sadness that lurks as a backdrop to the happiest of moments; sadness that wraps around you like a shawl you don’t take off even in the shower.
What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart’s enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.
This is me being sad.
Maybe you think I’m happy in this picture.
Really I’m sad but pretending I’m happy.
I’m doing this because I think people won’t like me if I look sad.
Sometimes sad is very big.
It’s everywhere. All over me.
Then I look like this.
And there’s nothing I can do about it.What makes me most sad is when I think about my son Eddie. I loved him very, very much but he died anyway.
With exquisite nuance, Rosen captures the contradictory feelings undergirding mourning — affection and anger, self-conscious introspection and longing for communion — and the way loss lodges itself in the psyche so that the vestiges of a particular loss always awaken the sadness of the all loss, that perennial heartbreak of beholding the absurdity of our longing for permanence in a universe of constant change.
Sometimes this makes me really angry.
I say to myself, “How dare he go and die like that?
How dare he make me sad?”
Eddie doesn’t say anything,
because he’s not here anymore.
Sometimes I want to talk about all this to someone.
Like my mum. But she’s not here anymore, either. So I can’t.
I find someone else. And I tell them all about it.
Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it.
Not to anyone. No one at all.
I just want to think about it on my own.
Because it’s mine. And no one else’s.
But what makes the story most singular and rewarding is that it refuses to indulge the cultural cliché of cushioning tragedy with the promise of a silver lining. It is redemptive not in manufacturing redemption but in being true to the human experience — intensely, beautifully, tragically true.
Sometimes because I’m sad I do crazy things — like shouting in the shower…
Sometimes I’m sad and I don’t know why.
It’s just a cloud that comes along and covers me up.
It’s not because Eddie’s gone.
It’s not because my mum’s gone. It’s just because.
Blake, who has previously illustrated Sylvia Plath’s little-known children’s book and many of Roald Dahl’s stories, brings his unmistakably expressive sensibility to the book, here and there concretizing Rosen’s abstract words into visual vignettes that make you wonder what losses of his own he is holding in the mind’s eye as he draws.
Where is sad?
Sad is everywhere.
It comes along and finds you.
When is sad?
Sad is anytime.
It comes along and finds you.
Who is sad?
Sad is anyone.
It comes along and finds you.
Complement the absolutely breath-stopping Michael Rosen’s Sad Book with Oliver Jeffers’s The Heart and the Bottle and the Japanese masterpiece Little Tree, then revisit Joan Didion on grief.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-04-02 21:15:08
A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its discomposing unlikeness to anything you have known before. Down, down you go into the depths of the unconscious, dark and fertile with the terror and longing that make for suffering, the surrender that makes for the end of suffering, not in resignation but in faith. It is then that the still, small voice of the soul begins to sing; it is then that the trapdoor becomes a portal into a life larger, truer, and more possible — a kind of rebirth.
Nobel laureate Louise Glück (April 22, 1943–October 13, 2023) captures the essence of such experiences, the way they sober us to being mortal and to being alive, with an image of piercing originality in the title poem of her 1992 collection The Wild Iris (public library).
THE WILD IRIS
by Louise GlückAt the end of my suffering
there was a door.Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Couple with Ursula K. Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain, then revisit Glück’s love poem to life at the horizon of death.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-04-02 10:13:39
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.
We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation — religion to save us from our sins, therapy to save us from our traumas, marriage to save us from our loneliness — in order to salve our suffering, which is the price we pay for the fulness of living. And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.
That is what the Uruguayan novelist, journalist, and poet Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) explores in his astonishing poem “No Te Salves” — part indictment, part invitation, reminding us that we most often break our hearts on the hard edges of our own fear of living, on the parts of us so petrified that they have become brittle to the touch of life, the touch of love.
Since I didn’t feel that the standard English translation quite captures the urgency and intimacy of the original language, I have translated it anew. It is read here in the original Spanish by my friend Karen Maldonado (who introduced me to the poem), in English and Bulgarian by me, and in Russian by my mother (who translated it into Russian and our native Bulgarian), to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major.
NO TE SALVES
por Mario BenedettiNo te quedes inmóvil
al borde del camino
no congeles el júbilo
no quieras con desgana
no te salves ahora
ni nunca
no te salves
no te llenes de calma
no reserves del mundo
sólo un rincón tranquilo
no dejes caer los párpados
pesados como juicios
no te quedes sin labios
no te duermas sin sueño
no te pienses sin sangre
no te juzgues sin tiempopero si
pese a todo no puedes evitarlo
y congelas el júbilo
y quieres con desgana
y te salvas ahora
y te llenas de calma
y reservas del mundo
sólo un rincón tranquilo
y dejas caer los párpados
pesados como juicios
y te secas sin labios
y te duermes sin sueño
y te piensas sin sangre
y te juzgas sin tiempo
y te quedas inmóvil
al borde del camino
y te salvas
entonces
no te quedes conmigo.
DO NOT SPARE YOURSELF
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria PopovaDon’t stand motionless
by the side of the road
don’t petrify your joy
don’t desire with reserve
do not spare yourself now
or ever
do not spare yourself
don’t fill up on tranquility
don’t claim from the world
only a quiet corner
don’t let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
don’t remain lipless
don’t fall asleep unready to dream
don’t think yourself bloodless
don’t deem yourself out of timebut if
in spite of it all you can’t help it
and petrify your joy
and desire with reserve
and spare yourself now
and fill up on tranquility
and claim from the world
only a quiet corner
and let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
and remain lipless
and fall asleep unready to dream
and think yourself bloodless
and deem yourself out of time
and stand motionless
on the side of the road
and you have been spared
then
do not stay with me.
НЕ СЕ ЩАДИ
Марио Бенедети
превод от Лилия ПоповаНе стой неподвижно
край пътя
не вкаменявай радостта си
не желай неохотно
не се щади сега
и никога
не се щади
не се изпълвай с покой
не искай от света само едно тихо кътче
не позволявай на клепачите ти да паднат,
тежки като присъди
не оставай беззвучен
не заспивай без сънища
не се мисли за безсилен
не се съди без времено ако
все пак не успееш
и вкамениш радостта си
и желаеш неохотно
и се щадиш сега
и си изпълнен с покой
и искаш от света само едно тихо кътче
и позволиш клепачите ти да паднат,
тежки като присъди
и останеш беззвучен
и заспиваш без сънища,
и се мислиш за безсилен,
и се съдиш без време
и стоиш неподвижно край пътя
и си пощаден
тогава
не оставай с мен.
НЕ ЩАДИ СЕБЯ
Марио Бенедети
перевод Лилии ПоповойНе стой тихо на краю дороги
не загораживай свою радость
не желай с неохотой
не щади себя сейчас
и никогда
не щади себя
не исполняйся покоем
не проси у мира только тихий уголок
не дай опускаться векам твоим,
тяжелыми, как приговор
не оставайся безмолвным
не усыпай без снов
не думай, что безсилен
не суди себя без временино если
однако не сможеш
и загораживаешь свою радость
и желаеш с неохотой
и щадишь себя сейчас и навсегда
и исполнен покоем
и просишь у мира только тихий уголок
и даеш опускаться векам своим,
тяжелыми, как приговор
и остаешься безмолвным
и засыпаешь без снов
и думаешь, что ты бессилен
и судишь себя без времени
и стоишь тихо на краю дороги
и щадишь себя
тогда
не оставайся со мной.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-04-02 05:49:09
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.
Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters (public library) edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.
From the outset, her letters command and caress at the same time. “Write to me often and long, the longer the better,” she urges him in one. “On Saturday I’ll bring your sweater, your books and a lot of violets,” she tells him in another. She takes love as seriously as it ought to be taken but also knows it dies without play: “Sorry about constantly repeating the word ‘love’ five times in a row, but it’s just that I’m very silly.” She signs herself “your pretty girl (monkey face),” “your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like,” “your sister (girlfriend, buddy, wife).” (It starts so early, that trembling gamble of the heart by which a person tries to discern what they mean to another.) Over and over, she offers glimpses into her uncommon inner world. In a letter penned the summer she turned seventeen, after some arrangements for how they can see each other — Frida’s parents disapproved of the relationship — she writes:
Now I’m going to read Salambo until half past 10, it’s 8 o’clock now, and then the Bible in three volumes and, finally, think for a while about huge scientific problems and then go to bed, and sleep until half past 7 in the morning, eh? Until tomorrow, may we have a good night and may we both think that great friends must love each other very, very much, much, much, much, much, mucho . . . with “m” for music or for “mundo.”
A month later, she offers that lovely unasked assurance that makes a fragile young love feel safe and solid:
My Alex, since I won’t see you for two days and I miss you so much, I’m writing you this so that you will start to believe something that you don’t believe, but which is very true.
And then, beneath a drawing, she adds:
Please forgive me for not writing any more but I started to draw the doll at 9 and it took me an astronomical three quarters of an hour to draw and another half hour to write, so it’s about 10 now and you know that makes me sleepy like the hens, but I’ll keep writing this letter in my dreams and you know that I would write enough to fill at least a thousand pages.
I love you very much.
Your pretty girl (monkey face)
On Christmas Day, she tells him:
My Alex: I loved you since I first saw you. What do you say to that? Since we probably won’t see each other for several days, I’m going to beg you not to forget your little woman, eh?
[…]
You must like easy things… I would like to be even easier, a tiny little thing that you could just carry in your pocket always, always… Alex, write to me often and even if it’s not true, tell me that you care for me a lot and that you can’t live without me…
Your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like
Frieda
Punctuating the teenage ardor is the stuff of life — she tells him about taking classes in shorthand and typing so as not to waste money on paying the telegraph operator, tells him about applying for a job at the Education Library for four pesos an hour, tells him about her material and domestic struggles, but always places him above all else. When he gets sick, she writes to him:
Right now the only thing I want is for you to get better and all the rest is in 5th and 6th place, because in 1st to 4th place is that you get better and that you love me… Get better very, very soon and think about me a little bit, that’s what your sister (girlfriend, buddy, wife) wants.
She couldn’t have known, in comforting him through his minor ailment, that only a few months later her own embodiment would be pushed to the brink of mortality. Twenty-five days after the accident, bedridden at the hospital where her mother had only visited her twice and her father once, she writes in a letter adorned with a drawing of skull and bones:
Alex of my life: You know better than anyone how sad I have been in this filthy hospital… Everyone tells me not to despair; but they don’t know what it is for me to be bedridden for three months, which is what I need to be, after having been a first-class stray cat all my life, but what’s there to do, since la pelona didn’t carry me away. Don’t you think?… The day I see you Alex, I’m going to kiss you, there’s no help for it; now I see more than ever how I love you with all my soul and I won’t trade you for anyone; you see how suffering something is always worthwhile.
On the eve of her discharge, she writes:
Here or there, I’ll be waiting for you. I’m counting the hours as I wait for you wherever, here or at home, because seeing you, the months in bed will pass much faster… Life begins tomorrow…! — I adore you —
But rather than revival, she entered a long convalescence, confined to bed and savaged by pain in every region of her body as both of her parents fell seriously ill. Six weeks into her confinement, just after her mother had a seizure, she writes to Alejandro:
I want you to come see me because I’m in over my head and I can’t help but hold on, because it would be worse if I despaired, don’t you think? I want you to come and talk to me like before, to forget everything and to come see me for the love of your holy mother and to tell me that you love me even if it’s not true, ok? (The pen doesn’t write very well with so many tears.)
Alejandro remained by her side for more than a year into her convalescence, then left for Europe in the early spring of 1927. In her passionate dispatches, she never minimized her pain, but she never let it dominate her stubborn will for life.
Four months into their separation, having just completed one of her tenderest self-portraits, she writes:
My Alex: I still can’t tell you I’m doing better, but nevertheless I feel much happier than before, I have so much hope of getting better by the time you return that you shouldn’t be sad on my account for a single moment. I almost never lose hope now… There is no reason for you to suffer for me, everything I tell you in my letters is because I’m such a “cry-baby” and at the end just a young girl, but it is not that much, it is fine to suffer a little, don’t you think, my Alex?… You are coming back, what more could I ask for? You can’t imagine how marvelous it is to wait for you with the same serenity as the portrait… Write to me a little bit more, your letters really heal me.
Two weeks later, amidst worries about having enough money for another X-ray, she writes:
You can’t imagine with what pleasure I would give all my life just to kiss you. I think this time I have really suffered, so I must deserve it.
[…]
Your Frieda
(I adore you)
Seven months into Alejandro’s absence, she names the terror of abandonment trembling in every lover’s heart even in the closest proximity, for between two people there is always an ocean in which to meet or drown:
Life is ahead of us… In Coyoacán the nights are amazing… and the sea, a symbol in my portrait, synthesizes life, my life.
You haven’t forgotten me?
It would almost be unfair, don’t you think?
She had first voiced this fear a season earlier, writing to him at the peak of summer:
Alex: I’m going to confess one thing: there are moments that I think you’re forgetting me, but you aren’t, right? You couldn’t fall in love with the Mona Lisa.
But he did. Alejandro broke off the relationship shortly after returning to Mexico that autumn. Frida may have intuited it, but she was not prepared, the way we never really are even for the blows we feel coming. Barely twenty, her body shattered and her heart broken, she found herself reeling with that most difficult, most eternal question: Where does love go when it goes?
It went where it always goes — into the totality of her person. We make everything we make with everything we are, everything we have touched that has touched us back in that tender and terrifying contact with life we call experience.
Several months later, Frida completed a portrait of Alejandro looking plaintive, almost fragile, and inscribed it at the top:
Alex, with affection I painted your portrait, that he is one of my comrades forever, Frida Kahlo, 30 years later.
Frida did not live another thirty years. But this young love that had shaped her life, possibly saved it, pulsates beneath every painting she ever painted to tell the centuries what it is like to be alive, with all the pain and passion of it — an inextinguishable reminder that every love we have ever loved, every loss we have ever suffered, becomes part of us, part of what we have to give; for, in the end, how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are.
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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2026-04-01 21:49:53
“A life of patient suffering… is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write,” the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson shortly before her untimely death. “It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.”
Suffering is the name we give to how we live with life’s imperfection, and with our own — which is so often the wellspring of our profoundest suffering. How we bear this imperfection, what we make of it, is our great living poem.
This awareness pulsates throughout the essay collection Serious Face (public library) by Jon Mooallem — one of the finest magazine journalists of our time, and one of the most original storytellers. He writes in the preface:
Twenty years years ago, I was working at a small literary magazine in New York City, screening the bulging slush pile of poetry submissions for anything that the editors might be interested in publishing. Please know that passing judgment on all these people’s poems made me queasy. I was twenty-two years old, not especially well-read, and my only previous full-time employment had been as a kosher butcher. I could only like what I liked. Also, I was extraordinarily sad. My father had died a year earlier, and the grief and bewilderment I’d kept tamped down were beginning to burble upward. I felt alone. I felt lost. And I was fixated on figuring out why everything was so hard, what I was doing wrong. Some evenings, I’d walk the fifty-eight blocks home from the office, excessively serious-faced, wrenching my mind around like a Rubik’s Cube, struggling to make it show a brighter color.
And then, from among the thousands of poems whose literary merit he was uncomfortably tasked with brokering, one stopped him up short: “Frost on the Fields” by Eric Trethewey, no longer alive; one particular line in it crowning the lyric of landscape:
Why are we not better than we are?
This would become the animating question of Jon’s life, as a writer and as a human being; a question that each of the essays whispers or bellows, none more poignantly than one titled by a kindred question: “Why These Instead of Others?” — his account, across the abyss of twenty years, of a trip to the remote reaches of Alaska he took with two of his college friends in the spring of life.
An epoch after Rockwell Kent voyaged there to find the crux of creativity, the three young men arrived into a realm of remoteness so discomposing to their city consciousnesses as to appear entirely alien:
As the boat that delivered us vanished, the drone of its engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off, it became unthinkably quiet on the beach, and the largeness and strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent… It felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth’s atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we weren’t in space. We were on earth — finally, really on earth.
But this transcendent idyll was soon interrupted by the brute impartiality of nature — a boom, then a crash, then faster than the speed of reason, a colossal tree atop one of the three friends. (Incidentally, also named Jon.)
They managed to radio for help. After firing a flaccid flare, they began fearing they were undiscoverable in the uncharted wilderness far inland from their camp. All they knew was that they had to keep him conscious until help arrived, pinned as he was by the tree in an icy creek, hypothermia on top of all the internal bleeding that was no doubt flooding his system.
By some animal instinct, kneeling over the other Jon, this one leaned on the semi-automation of his mind:
What can a person say? I had two literature professors in college who made us memorize poems. You never knew when some lines of verse would come in handy, they claimed. One liked to brag that, while traveling through Ireland, he found that if he spat out some Yeats at a pub, he could drink for free. This is how I wound up reciting a love poem to Jon.
That poem was “The Shampoo” by Elizabeth Bishop. He moved on to Auden’s “The More Loving One.” Then some Robert Frost, some Kay Ryan. He recounts:
Jon and I would spend about an hour and a half together alone on the forest floor. I ran through everything in my quiver—Kay Ryan, A. R. Ammons, Michael Donaghy—padding each poem with little prefatory remarks, while Jon said nothing, just signaled with his eyes or produced a sound whenever I checked in. I felt like a radio DJ playing records in the middle of the night, unsure if anyone was listening. And here’s one about owls by Richard Wilbur, I would tell Jon, and off we would go.
He was unsure — how can anyone be sure? — that he was doing the best thing, that he couldn’t do something better, be better. But it was the best he had.
The other Jon survived, and lived to remember the poetry on the forest floor as a serene moment amid the terrifying uncertainty and the adrenalized pain. Reflecting on the experience, now both of them twice the age they were then, this Jon writes:
Even my reciting those poems, which to me had always felt like a moment of utter helplessness, became, in Jon’s telling, a perfect emblem of that streak of serendipitous problem-solving. “You conveyed a calmness,” he told me recently.
This was poetry as time-dilation and poetry as prayer — a way to keep a drifting mind anchored in the questions that daily keep us from sleeping and quicken the creative restlessness we call art, we call meaning. One way to answer that long-ago question: with this tenderest testament to how, sometimes — and mostly when life boughs us to our knees on the forest floor of crisis — we are better, better than we ever thought we could be while coasting in the illusory safety of our daily lives.
Moved by the improbable way in which a stranger’s poem had helped Jon save his friend’s life and had shaped his own, I asked him to read it for us half a lifetime after his chance encounter with it in the submissions pile of his entry-level job, with a side of Bach:
Complement with Gwendolyn Brooks’s lifeline of a poem and Mary Oliver on how books saved her life, then revisit the strikingly kindred story of how Oliver Sacks saved his own life by reciting poetry.
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.