2026-04-13 11:28:33
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than not, when someone breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell. But in any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores this central perplexity of human life with her characteristic intellectual agility and emotional virtuosity in one of the essays found in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books, which also gave us Murdoch on what love really means, the myth of closure, and the key to great storytelling. She writes:
People are so very secretive. Sometimes it is said, “Those characters and that novel are purely fantastic — nobody in real life is like that.” But people in real life are very, very odd, as soon as one gets to know them at all well, and they conceal this fact because they are frightened of appearing eccentric or shocking… What are other people really like? What goes on inside their minds? What goes on inside their houses?
It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else — this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.
Paradoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination — of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots. Murdoch writes:
Imagination, as opposed to fantasy, is the ability to see the other thing, what one might call, to use those old-fashioned words, nature, reality, the world… Imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth.
In another essay from the book, Murdoch considers the existential jolt of discovering how poorly we know ourselves, for we are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. Defining it as the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control,” Murdoch locates Angst in any experience where we feel the discrepancy between our ideals and our personality. She writes:
Extreme Angst, in the popular modern form, is a disease or addiction of those who are passionately convinced that personality resides solely in the conscious omnipotent will.
In a sense, Angst — which often manifests as anxiety, to use a presently fashionable term — is the loss of faith in the omnipotence of the rational will, the discovery that much of our conduct is governed by unconscious tendrils of our personality impervious to our conscious ideals. This makes the project of change far more complex and durational than we would like it to be.
Murdoch writes:
The place of choice is certainly a different one if we think in terms of a world which is compulsively present to the will, and the discernment and exploration of which is a slow business. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the “decision” lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be “cultivated.” If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at… Will continually influences belief, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality.
This is so because pure attention reveals the fundamental necessity of our lives, and where there is necessity there is no need for choice — there is only what Murdoch calls “obedience to reality,” which is always “an exercise of love.” Such attention — “patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation” — shapes what we believe to be possible and, when coupled with the conscious will, shapes our lives. It is only through obedience to reality that we can ever see clearly enough — ourselves or another — to be in loving relationship, by discovering, in Murdoch’s lovely words, “the real which is the proper object of love.”
Couple this fragment of the altogether superb Existentialists and Mystics with Adam Phillips on the paradoxes of changing, then revisit Iris Murdoch on how attention unmasks the universe and how to see more clearly.
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.
2026-04-13 03:09:56
“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited with proclaiming, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Intelligence, of course, is a loose grab-bag term that encompasses multiple manifestations, but the insight attributed to Einstein applies most unequivocally to the ninth of developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences: existential intelligence. Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.
This notion was at the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien view of the psychology of fairy tales. Nearly a century later when, in retelling Hansel and Gretel, Neil Gaiman asserted that “if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.”
The great Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) makes a wonderfully spirited case for the developmental gift of frightfulness in Nonrequired Reading (public library) — that magnificent prose collection of her responses to and riffs on books she devoured during one voracious reading binge in the 1970s, which also gave us her meditations on what books do for the human spirit and how the prospect of cosmic solitude can enlarge our humanity.
In a piece titled “The Importance of Being Scared” — a reflection on the first edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, which revolutionized storytelling — Szymborska writes:
Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. Andersen scared children, but I’m certain that none of them held it against him, not even after they grew up. His marvelous tales abound in indubitably supernatural beings, not to mention talking animals and loquacious buckets. Not everyone in this brotherhood is harmless and well-disposed. The character who turns up most often is death, an implacable individual who steals unexpectedly into the very heart of happiness and carries off the best, the most beloved. Andersen took children seriously. He speaks to them not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often undeserved defeats. His fairy tales, peopled with fantastic creatures, are more realistic than whole tons of today’s stories for children, which fret about verisimilitude and avoid wonders like the plague. Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.
Complement this particular fragment of the thoroughly terrific Nonrequired Reading with Neil Gaiman on the allure of scary stories, Flannery O’Connor on why the grotesque appeals to us, and the most beautiful illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales, then revisit Amanda Palmer’s enchanting readings of Szymborska’s poems “Possibilities” and “Life While-You-Wait.”
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.
2026-04-13 03:07:36
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.
We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.
Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.
In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:
We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.
Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.
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.
2026-04-12 12:46:45
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of the possible.
Everything that is possible is in some sense real, because behind every “what if” is the “if/then” of a causality tethered back to the first thing that ever happened — the inception of this particular universe with its particular set of permissions — and dominoing forward to what has not yet happened but is happenable in this very universe. Hope is the potential energy of reality. But it takes trust in the possible to release it.
Alongside physics and poetry, fairy tales may be our best instrument for discerning the axioms of reality and building from them scale models of possibility. (“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”)
In her revelatory reckoning with how fairy tales reveal us to ourselves, found in her posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) examines the relationship between the hope and trust, and the dangers of confusing them, in our quest for the possible. She writes:
The impossible awaits the hero of a fairy tale. But how is a person to reach the impossible if not, precisely, by means of the impossible?
[…]
The fairy-tale hero… must forget all his* limits when he contends with the impossible and pay constant attention to these limits when he performs the impossible.
The great appeal of the fairy tale and its ultimate payoff, Campo argues, is “victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships” — that is, a new organizing principle that is not deterministic but possibilistic. “I said to my soul,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Addressing the soul of the person who wishes to be the hero of their own fate — that is, to refuse to be a victim of the myth of the impossible — Campo writes:
Whom does a marvelous fate befall in fairy tales? He who trusts hopelessly in what is beyond hope. Hope and trust must not be confused. They are different things, as the expectation of fortune here on earth is different from the second theological virtue. He who blindly, obstinately repeats “let us hope” does not trust; he is really only hoping for a lucky break in the momentarily propitious game governed by the law of necessity. Those who trust, on the other hand, do not count on particular events, for they are sure there is an economy that encompasses all events and surpasses their meaning the way a tapestry, a symbolic carpet, surpasses the flowers and animals that compose it.
The great paradox of real life — this social contract so trammeled by permissions as to be blind to possibilities — is that those who see the tapestry are often seen as mad. (This, of course, has always been the case — take Kepler, take Blake, take Dickinson.) An epoch after G.K. Chesterton contemplated how we stay sane in a mad world and offered his insightful taxonomy of life as a poem, a novel, or a fairy tale, Campo writes:
In the fairy tale, the victor is the madman who reasons backward, who reverses the masks, who discerns the secret thread in the fabric, the inexplicable play of echoes in a melody; he who moves with ecstatic precision in the labyrinth of formulas, numbers, antiphons, and rituals common to the Gospels, fairy tales, and poetry. He believes, like the saint, that a person can walk on water, that a fervent spirit can leap over walls. He believes, like the poet, in the word, from which he can conjure concrete wonders.
Couple with Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope and J.R.R. Tolkien on fairy tales and the psychology of fantasy.
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.
2026-04-12 12:14:50
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of raw material to feed the “combinatory play” Einstein considered the crux of creativity.
The first comes from experience — intuition is what we call the pattern recognition unconsciously honed in the act of living. The third also comes from experience — everything we have ever read and seen, everyone we have ever loved, everything we have suffered becomes a building block for the combinatorial alchemy of creation. The second is the fault line between genius and madness — a creative revelation, be it the heliocentric model of the universe or the Goldberg Variations, is seeing something no one else has seen, which has acute relevance to the world as we know it, touches it, transforms it; a hallucination is seeing something no one else can see without the ability to evaluate its irrelevance to the real world.
A quarter millennium after Lovelace, we face the question of whether AI can achieve all three, and therefore originate truly new ideas, or remain in the straitjacket of binary logic — a disembodied intellect without the lived experience, in all its embodied and ambiguous wildness, on which true creativity draws. Out of this arises the far more disquieting question of whether we, as a species, are being trained by this “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation to mistake the simulacrum of life for life itself, to reduce our aliveness to algorithms. Given that creativity is a hallmark of our species, questions about the nature of creativity in human and non-human minds are ultimately questions about what it means to be — and remain — human.
Few have reckoned with these questions more deeply, or more durationally, than British philosopher Margaret Boden (November 26, 1936–July 18, 2025), who composed her revelatory book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (public library) when the Internet was just a few years old and computational models still in their infancy. At its heart is an investigation of how the human mind can surpass itself, how our intuition works, and how it is possible for us to think new thoughts, anchored in the insight that “a computational approach gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypotheses about the rich subtleties of the human mind,” that AI-concepts are valuable not because they can (which they very well could) originate new ideas but because they can help us do so, because “both their failures and their successes help us think more clearly about our own creative powers.”
All of this requires a clear definition of those powers — not the ancient cop-out of divine inspiration, not the Romantic conceit of the chosen few gifted with special talents, but a model that accounts for both the immense range of creativity and the wide variations across that range, for its fundamentally mysterious nature and for the possibility of comprehending the mystery without reducing it to code.
An epoch after Einstein observed that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious” because there is always “something deeply hidden… behind things,” after Carl Sagan insisted that “bathing in mystery… will always be our destiny [because] the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it,” Boden considers the mystery of the universe within:
If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.
[…]
A science of creativity need not be dehumanizing. It does not threaten our self-respect by showing us to be mere machines, for some machines are much less “mere” than others. It can allow that creativity is a marvel, despite denying that it is a mystery.
Defining creativity as “the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable,” Boden argues that it permeates every aspect of human life, is not a special “faculty” of the mind but “grounded in everyday abilities such as conceptual thinking, perception, memory, and reflective self-criticism,” and is not binary — the question that should be asked is not whether an idea is creative but how creative it is, which allows us to assess both the subtleties of the idea itself and the “subtle interpretative processes and complex mental structures” through which it arose in the mind.
Drawing on everything from Euclid’s revolutionary geometry to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” she distinguishes between two types of creativity — personal creativity, which “involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it” no matter how many other people have come up with it, and historical creativity, in which the idea is completely new in the whole of human history. Both are axoned in a substrate of surprise — “the astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible idea. It just couldn’t have entered anyone’s head, you feel — and yet it did.”
Boden identifies three aspects of creativity: First there is tessellating familiar ideas into unfamiliar combinations. Arthur Koestler, who greatly influenced Boden, termed this “bisociation” in his pioneering model of creativity. Gianni Rodari echoed in his notion of “the fantastic binomial” key to great storytelling. For such a combination to be truly novel, Boden observes, it requires “a rich store of knowledge in the person’s mind, and many different ways of moving around within it.”
The other two aspects of creativity both involve the conceptual spaces in people’s minds — those structured styles of thought we absorb unconsciously from our peers, our parents, our culture, the fashions and fictions of our time and place: styles of writing and dress, social mores and manners, existing theories about the nature of reality, ideological movements. One creative approach to conceptual space is exploration. Boden writes:
Within a given conceptual space many thoughts are possible, only some of which may actually have been thought… Exploratory creativity is valuable because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn’t glimpsed before.
Exploratory creativity discovers novel ideas within an existing conceptual space and, in the process, invites others to consider the limits and potential of the space. But one can go even further, beyond exploring and toward transforming the conceptual space:
A given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible — which is to say, unthinkable… The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn’t have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.
This, of course, is the paradox of all transformation, best illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — because our imagination is the combinatorial product of past experience, we are fundamentally unable to imagine a truly altered future state and deem such states impossible, chronically mistaking the limits of our imagination (which transformative experience expands) for the limits of the possible.
Boden picks up where Koestler left off to explore what it takes for an idea to be truly transformative. “Bisociation” alone, she argues, is not enough to originate such ideas:
Combining ideas creatively is not like shaking marbles in a bag. The marbles have to come together because there is some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them which we value because it is interesting — illuminating, thought-provoking, humorous — in some way… We don’t only form links; we evaluate them.
This question of value is where the central paradox of creativity resides, because our values are largely inherited conceptual spaces, making it difficult to assess or even recognize the value of a transformative idea whose originality overflows and overwhelms the conceptual space. In consonance with Bob Dylan’s observation that “people have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” Boden writes:
Our aesthetic values are difficult to recognize, more difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to state really clearly. (For a computer model, of course, they have to be stated really, really clearly.) Moreover, they change… They vary across cultures. And even within a given “culture,” they are often disputed: different subcultures or peer groups value different types of dress, jewellery or music. And where transformational creativity is concerned, the shock of the new may be so great that even fellow artists find it difficult to see value in the novel idea.
She returns to the most crucial element of creativity — surprise so intense it has an edge of shock: Something previously unthinkable has entered your mind. To be surprised is to watch your calculus of probability crumble in the face of the possible, to find the locus of your expectations too small to encompass what you have just encountered. (This is why societies and epochs, such as ours, that prioritize certainty and self-righteousness over exploration and surprise are shackling their own creativity.) Boden writes:
A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar, ideas. A radically original, or creative, idea is one which cannot.
[…]
To be fundamentally creative, it is not enough for an idea to be unusual — not even if it is valuable, too. Nor is it enough for it to be a mere novelty, something which has never happened before. Fundamentally creative ideas are surprising in a deeper way. Where this type of creativity is concerned, we have to do with expectations not about probabilities, but about possibilities. In such cases, our surprise at the creative idea recognizes that the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could.
We are animated by this creative urge to bridge the actual and the possible because it matters to us what world we live in — it matters because we are made of matter, because while a computer’s generative flow is, as Boden puts it, “implemented rather than embodied,” ours streams in through through the sensorium of our bodily aliveness. A quarter century after the publication of Boden’s seminal book, months after the emergence of transformer-based large language models, Cambridge University endowed a lecture series in her honor. In her inaugural address, she reflected:
Homo sapiens is an intensely social species. Our needs for what Maslow called “love and belonging” (which includes collaboration and conversation) and “esteem” (which includes respect and dignity) are not mere trivialities, or optional extras. They matter. They must be satisfied if we are to thrive. Their degree of satisfaction will influence the individual’s subjective experience of happiness (and others’ measurements of it).Computers have no such needs.
It is out of this mattering, out of our creaturely neediness, that we originate anything of substance, value, and surprise. It is because things matter to us that we suffer, and it is because we suffer that we are impelled to transmute our suffering into art.
In the remainder of The Creative Mind, Boden goes on to explore the complementary role of chaos and constraint in creativity and how, despite their limitations, AI models can help us better understand the mystery of human intuition. Complement it with Oliver Sacks, writing three decades before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning, then revisit his own take on the three essential elements of creativity.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-04-12 01:29:35
In early September 1947, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910–November 13, 1952) watched the love of her life fade to black.
Michael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret — outspoken, sophisticated, and self-possessed, so tall Margaret had to lift her grey-blue eyes to meet the black of Michael’s, her tall frame clad in masculine clothing she herself had designed to cling to her curves, with a musical voice unspooling from her haunting dark beauty, a deep velvet laugh, and a reputation for rarely keeping a promise. In her tight tweed pants and long-tailed blazers and oversized ties, she moved effortlessly through the sea of gloves and lace and whispering society ladies.
When her wealthy family of Austrian royal lineage had found her erotic poetry embarrassing, Blanche had emancipated herself under the male nom de plume, which soon became a stage name as she strode into the theater world as playwright and actress, and eventually swelled into a total persona — the name with which she signed her letters, the name by which her intimates addressed her, the name of her self-image.
HE AND SHE
by Margaret Wise BrownPut a he on a he
Or a she on a she
And it never adds up
To 1 2 3
Put a he on a she
Or a she on a he
And before you can even say Jack Robinson
You’ve made 3
He times she divided by he
Then take away she
And now what have you left —
A he or a she
And what’s this strange geometry
Within the heart of you and me
This place apart
This secret heart
When all is what
It seems to be
In her youth, Blanche had been named the most beautiful woman in Paris. Now, about to turn fifty-eight, Michael Strange was a ghost on a New York stage, her skin sallow, her body emaciated to the size of a child’s after refusing to let her aggressive leukemia keep her from performing.
Margaret and Michael had met seven years earlier. One day on Vinalhaven — the Maine island where Margaret would spend much of her life and write most of her books — she had rowed to a lover’s cottage and found the luscious stranger sunbathing there with her lover. Soon, back in New York, she was surprised to receive a lunch invitation from Michael, who had shown up dressed in fur from head to toe, asking bold questions about her love life while sipping sherry. Margaret was thirty, Michael fifty and on her third unhappy marriage; her latest husband had never read her poetry. Both women were born in the wrong century, bent on bending it to their will; both were accidental radicals, just by living unselfconsciously; both had had affairs with Thomas Wolfe; both were at heart poets more than anything else.
By the middle of the World War, they were lovers; Michael had declared that she had never loved anyone the way she loved Margaret and never would; she had promised to love her until her dying day.
from “THAT’S THE WAY THINGS ARE”
by Margaret Wise BrownWhen first we met
I never, never, never knew
That I was meeting you
Then something hit me suddenly
Sudden as a shooting star
I felt things beating 8 to the bar
And that’s the way things are[…]
You may be wild, you may be witty
And you can’t even drive a car
I’ll never let you drive my car
But you’re my only girl and mighty pretty
And that’s the way things are.
Late one night, Margaret’s phone rang. Michael’s voice poured in, sped up with alarm, imploring her to get into a taxi right away. Her husband had found out about their relationship and, in an era when the diagnostic manual of psychiatry classified same-sex love as a mental illness, was threatening to have her locked away in an asylum. A doctor was on his way to “diagnose” her. With her maid’s help, Michael managed to slip out through the back staircase and into the taxi as Margaret was pulling up.
On the disorienting ride through the New York nocturne, they weighed their options and decided to head to the high-society women’s club Michael frequented. There, she collected herself, phoned her husband to demand a formal apology, then set the wheels in motion for a legal separation.
From this point on, Michael became — to use the modern term, hard-won and ahistorical — Margaret’s partner. Soon, they were living across the hallway from each other, in a pair of twin apartments on the East End, with Margaret part nominal tenant and part unnamed wife as she was quickly becoming one of the country’s most original and beloved children’s book authors.
It was a stormy love that pushed and pulled, but grafted itself onto Margaret’s being. Michael wrote adoring letters and criticized Margaret’s diction at dinner parties. She gave her a golden wishbone necklace and a ring, made her feel like she was too needy, and derided her children’s books as unsophisticated, “silly furry stories,” not Real Literature: an actress and socialite who had not published a poem in a decade and was feeling abandoned by her own muse, deriding one of the most vibrantly creative people of the past century — poet, songwriter, progressive education reformer, author of more than a hundred singularly wondrous books for the young, with which she would earn herself a little red house, a yellow convertible, and the love of millions of children; the author whom the visionary Ursula Nordstrom had no qualms calling her favorite author, despite also publishing Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and E.B. White. Even Michael’s pet name for Margaret was laced with this ambivalent mixture of affection and disdain: Bunny-no-good.
And yet nobody ever knows what electrifies the infinite sky between two people, what magnetizes them together, what roils deep beneath the faint surface trails left in letters and diaries and the recollections of bystanders, what animates the long days between the islanded moments crashed by emotion and frozen in time. Margaret loved Michael with unassailable devotion, not unlike the kind that marked Auden’s relationship with Chester Kallman and inspired his eternal poem “The More Loving One.” At every turn, even through the drama at Michael’s deathbed, Margaret remained the more loving one, true to her lifelong conviction that “you can never in this world love anyone you love enough.”
SPEAK NOT OF LOVE
by Margaret Wise BrownSpeak not of love
Who only love would show
There is a greater bondage
That those who love might know
Beyond the outward show
Speak not of love
Who loves the mirrored I
Nor ask true lovers why
This mirrored love should die
There are hard paths where love can flow
That only pain in love can show
Quiet places where they go
Then speak of love
All those who know
Throughout the turbulence, Margaret channeled the swell of feeling in poems and song lyrics. Decades after her own tragic death, they were published in the digital collection White Freesias; some, including previously unpublished fragments, were later included as chapter epigraphs in the altogether magnificent biography In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown (public library) by Amy Gary, who has devoted her life to stewarding and reviving this remarkable woman’s legacy, bringing many of her out-of-print books back to life and publishing her previously unknown manuscripts.
Music had always been Margaret’s salvation — it was only at the piano that her mother came alive from the depression that deadened her all through Margaret’s childhood — but poetry was her first and greatest love. As a girl, during two lonely years at a strict boarding school in Switzerland, she had entertained herself with memorizing poems by reciting them to her favorite music. It was her love of poetry that led her to persuade Gertrude Stein to compose her children’s book — in the simply-worded profundity and playful language puzzles of the literary titan, Margaret saw a natural resonance with children’s minds. Poetry came to permeate her own children’s books. It was the language of her mind — her art of noticing. In poetry — “this facile writing of verse” — she felt she could give voice to “the curse” of all she felt, inexpressible in any other way.
NO POETRY
by Margaret Wise BrownThere will be
No poetry in this heart
Of you and me
No poetry
No winds crying in the trees
No wild crashing of the seas
No drowsy hum of summer bees
All these will pass with this
Unreal war
And they will not come back any
Anymore
For a long time
Rot!
There will always be poetry
In this heat of you and me
Always the crashing of the seas
Always the murmur of the bees
That split second when we see
What for us is poetry?
Between the rumble of the guns
As long as a split second come
Poetry came pouring out of her throughout the war and throughout the private battlefield of her relationship with Michael — a relationship particularly inexpressible, partly for the social stigma and partly for its intrinsic complexities. It was on poetry she leaned when the specter of loss came to hover over that inexpressible totality as Michael’s leukemia progressed and her state of mind became even more erratic.
When she collapsed during one of her performances and was given no more than a year to live, Michael leapt from the edge of reason, the way existential panic often leads the human animal to do, and turned to religion. She declared that their relationship was a sin and had caused her leukemia. She demanded that Margaret move out of their apartments. Margaret pleaded with her, composed impassioned love letters reminding her of all that magnetized them together, promised to care for her throughout the illness. Michael insisted that their physical passion had syphoned her health and if they were to remain connected at all, it could only be as friends. She refused to see Margaret, further demoting their relationship to an epistolary one.
Margaret was shattered with incomprehension. Her world seemed to have come undone, hollowed of its center. She contemplated suicide. (It is strange how, under the blinding beam of emotional intensity, we so easily mistake our tormentors for our muses.) Somehow, remembering Michael’s characteristic inconstancy, she grasped at the blind faith that she might change her mind.
IN GREATER AMICUS
by Margaret Wise BrownFor having felt well loved by you
For having felt no shyness that you should watch my face
For the joyous meeting of eyes in laughter
The fling of your head
And the dark bright look of you
The warm flowing laughter
From a hundred hidden springs in other years
And for the constant uncertainty
Of when you would laugh
One Indian-summer day, walking in the cemetery where they had buried their dogs, Margaret picked up a marigold to press into a letter for Michael, then noticed a ripe yellow apple that had dropped to ground, blending into the constellation of marigolds in the yellowing grass. The image hurled her into a time machine, back to a day during that childhood loneliness in Switzerland, when her class was being marched down the lake shore on which the teenage Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein. She heard an old French ballad that impressed itself upon her imagination: “The Time of the Cherries,” composed during the Parisian Commune Revolution of 1871, told the story of a young ambulance nurse shot during the revolt, her blood blooming through her white uniform, as red as the cherry juice that painted the streets of Paris in the cherished season of the cherries, forgotten during the bloody revolution. It was a song about the senselessness of death and how it drains the world of beauty, but how beauty persists when one chooses to turn toward it and rise above sorrow. The memory of the ballad blended with the intensity of her loss and became a lyric.
WHEN THE CHERRIES ARE RED
by Margaret Wise BrownWhen the time comes around
When the cherries are red
And the songs are all sung
And the sweet words all said
Then the cherries are red
And the promise of spring
In that wild blooming tree
And the wild birds that sing
In the wild cherry tree
Has been realized
And I am with you
And you are with me
And the cherries are ripe
On the red cherry tree
But the time will soon come
When the cherries are gone
And the end will have come
To our own gentle song
When the cherries were red
And I lie on the grass
And leaves fall on my head
And I dream of the time
When the cherries were red
Oh there once was a time
When the cherries were red
When I was with you
When the cherries were red
And the words were all said
Margaret’s loving letters seemed to only widen the rift. She saw no other way of remaining in Michael’s life than to acquiesce to the asexual relationship. She vowed to become less needy, less passionate, anything Michael wanted her to be.
Michael responded with a terse telegram, informing Margaret that all she needed from her was total silence. She was dying, and she could not face it, so she could not face Margaret.
TO A FRIEND DEPARTING IN TIME
by Margaret Wise BrownCould I write before you go
But one verse
Who loved you so
But one verse that you should know
How I loved you, ere you go
I would write it in a rhyme
That would ring beyond our time
That would keep this moment clear
Far beyond our little year
But this I cannot write, my dear
So I write before you go
All these words
Who loved you so
Just before Christmas, Michael summoned her last energies for the final stop on her tour — a performance at one of Broadways’s smallest theaters, with only five hundred seats. When Margaret learned that the tickets were not selling, she couldn’t bear the thought of Michael performing to a half-empty house on opening night, so she bought rows of empty seats and enlisted friends in attending. She left a vase of flowers in Michael’s dressing room, along with keys to the Connecticut house where she was staying, and a note of apology that winter had kept her from finding a permanent home to move out of their apartments into.
Michael responded by messenger, thanking Margaret for the flowers and demanding that she stay away, or else her energy for the performance would be syphoned. She had her doctor call Margaret on her behalf to reiterate the admonition, then added the extortionist half-promise that if Margaret could comply with not contacting her, they might be able to have a relationship in the future.
But there was no future. When she took the stage in the theater filled by Margaret and vacant of her, Michael’s daughter — who had come to see Margaret as her closest ally with her turbulent mother — gasped in the front row at the sight of the ghostly childlike body on the stage: a skeleton in a Grecian gown, mortality incarnate in a spectacle of life.
After the show, Michael seemed to vanish into thin air. Sick with worry, afraid to reach out directly less she violate Michael’s conditional promise, Margaret tried to find out where she had gone. Eventually, Michael’s daughter broke her mother’s vow to secrecy and told Margaret that she had gone to Switzerland for an experimental treatment of radiation, blood transfusions, and vitamin injections.
MELANCHOLY
by Margaret Wise BrownLet no melancholy thought be here
My happy untouched days with you
Like flies in amber, crystal still
And crystal clear
No tear can change, no distance jar
And so my thoughts being gentle thoughts
Must steal across the night to where you are
On Valentine’s Day, as snow fell over Manhattan, Michael called. They began writing letters again, Margaret carefully calibrating just how much love she let herself express, burned by the cold months of silence, terrified of another rupture. She longed to visit Michael at the clinic before it was too late — a longing Michael must not have actively discouraged, for soon Margaret was crossing the ocean of sky and checking herself into a Swiss hotel.
But a letter from Michael already awaited her, reinstating her ban on contact — her doctor, she said, was ordering Margaret to stay away because their relationship was a source of stress and all stress ought to be eliminated if she was to achieve remission.
CRACKED IS THE HEART
by Margaret Wise BrownCracked is the heart that might
Have loved full well
Flattened the mind
Where bright thoughts soared
Fluttering heart that has lost its thump
Divided into many parts, not whole
And one small lifetime whizzing by
And the time wasting, wasted.
The brain unfed by the halfhearted heart
That dies for lack of another’s
While the face smiles on
The words flow on
To success or failure
Time is gone.
By some superhuman feat of self-transcendence — which might just be the other name of love — Margaret, in all her devastation and majesty of spirit, responded that she would do anything for Michael, for her health and her happiness, even if that meant removing herself, erasing herself.
She lingered in Switzerland for another couple of days, hoping Michael would once again change her mind. When she didn’t, Margaret headed to Italy to visit an artist with whom she was working on another book. She was at the peak of her powers, her books having finally crested into the tipping point of popularity despite — or perhaps because of — their bold deviation from convention in the way they captured the poetic pulse-beat of children’s emotional reality.
On the train to Rome, a man pressed a rag of chloroform over her face. She awoke to find her purse, with all of her money and her documents, gone. But he had left her valuables — her manuscripts and journals. When she managed to return to America, she discovered that her former publisher — to whom she had brought some of the era’s greatest illustrators, and for whom she had secured Gertrude Stein’s children’s book — was not only taking credit for her ideas, now that they were finally being celebrated, but was suing her for future rights on unpublished manuscripts with other publishers.
In that strange way the mind has of compartmentalizing trauma, she might have been more perturbed by these violations were she not so wholly consumed by anticipatory loss as Michael wasted away. When the Swiss clinic failed to grant her remission, she returned to their twin apartments and gave herself over to Margaret’s care, leaning on the very instrument of survival she had once derided — Margaret’s “silly furry stories”: To lift her spirits, they began writing a collaborative series about two bunnies living together, Rabbit M.D. and Bunny-no-good.
COULD I TELL YOU THAT I LOVE YOU
by Margaret Wise BrownCould I tell you that I love you
And never say it so
Could I show you that I love you
Without the out the outward show
And then you smile
Because you know.
Michael grew too ill to be at home and moved into a Boston hospital specializing in leukemia. Margaret went with her, renting a hotel suite across the street, spending every day and many nights at the hospital. When Michael could sit up at all, she was swallowed by the chair in her room, her lips cracked with blood.
One day, the doctor in charge of her case, who seemed uncomfortable with the couple’s closeness, pronounced that Michael was to have no more visitors — her only interaction was to be with hospital staff. Michael was too weak to speak, but she scrawled a protestation on a piece of paper she tried to hand to Margaret. The doctor snatched it away and threatened to send Michael to the psychiatric ward if she did not comply with his command. When Margaret begged him to give Michael something to help her sleep through the agony, he declared that the only thing keeping her awake was her “hysteria.”
Margaret left, then returned with a bouquet of Michael’s favorite flowers — primrose. Too anxious to antagonize the despot in the white coat less he deliver on his threat, she sat in the hallway holding the flowers until nightfall, then handed them to the nurse they had befriended to leave by Michael’s bedside, and left.
An hour past midnight, Michael called, having regained her voice, panic-stricken that death was at her doorstep, beseeching Margaret to escort her through. When Margaret called the hospital to ask permission, she was denied. As daybreak neared, she was still struggling with what to do when the phone rang. One of the nurses urged her to come immediately — Michael was in mortal agony, the doctor had left without a prescription for pain relief, and it seemed like the time had come.
THINGS TO REMEMBER
by Margaret Wise BrownRemember this
And never forget:
The first spring snowdrop,
All green and wet and unexpected,
A white flower blooming out of the dark
Never forget it.
Remember this
And never forget it:
That the bees flew about you
And the flowers bloomed
In the hot drowsy fields that smelled of summer
And smelled of noon
Never forget it.
And remember this:
The lightning bug
You caught in your hand,
And there was the light
In the palm of your hand
And you held it.
Remember this
Michael lived through the night. By morning, Margaret was sitting outside her door, heavied by the knowledge that Michael’s estranged son — the only one of her three adult children who would not die by their own hand — had refused to go see his mother. She could hear Michael crying for her through the door. The doctor barred her from entering.
An infinity later, the door opened. The nurse came out with the solemn permission to enter — Michael, she said, had died. But when Margaret rushed in to close Michael’s eyes, kissing them and taking her hand into hers, the hand squeezed back, vivified by the familiar touch of love. In these last moments together, Margaret promised to read Michael’s poetry each morning in the long loneliness to come. She told her that when she is gone, a part of her own soul would also go, but in another Michael would live on forever.
THE BROKEN POEM
by Margaret Wise BrownFor you to go
And leave this world
So much you loved this world
The world must grieve a lover
The shadows lose you as they pass
Unloved across the swift green grass
Sorrow is green in the dark green tree
That you no longer see
Song of solitary bird
Unheard
The world must grieve a lover.
When Michael died, obituaries described her as the former wife of her famous second husband.
The papers reported that her son had been at her deathbed.
No mention of Margaret was made.
WHO DOES YOUR HEART RETURN TO
by Margaret Wise BrownWho does your heart return to
Who do you really love
In that blue hour of evening
Who are thinking of
Who does your wild young heart turn to
In those dark dreams of night
Whose is the face before you
When you turn out the light
Who does your heart return to
Who are you dreaming of
In the wild wastes of nowhere
Who do you really love
For everyone lives in a life apart
In the warm dark silence
Of his secret heart
And everyone has a place to go
In the dusk of night
When the lights burn low
After her long bereavement, Margaret would fall in love again. By the time of her own untimely death — by medical misconduct in a Parisian hospital after a minor operation, buried under her chosen epigraph: “Writer of Songs of Nonsense” — she was engaged to be married. But it was a different sort of love, more a lullaby than a ballad, comfortable in its simple ease, free from the uneven passions that roiled between her and Michael — those syncopations that fed Margaret’s spirit and pen in ways no one, not even she, could understand.
While Michael was dying and Margaret was considering writing a biography of their shared life, she had written in her diary:
What is there to tell beyond the endearing humanity of one on a scale more intense and larger than others? And the significance — aliveness and honesty in their own years… All the long-range back and forth in the shuffle and shuttle of being alive. And the preservation of a few of the heights in all the years. For I believe that at five we reach a point not to be achieved again and from which ever after we at best keep and most often go down from. And so at 2 and 13, at 20 & 30 & 21 & 18 — each year has the newness of its own awareness to one alive. Alive — and life. That is the significance of… one who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us.
Complement with Emily Dickinson’s electric love letters to her soul mate and muse, then revisit Moomins creator Tove Jansson’s almost unbearably beautiful letters to the love of her life, who inspired her most beloved Moominvalley character.
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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