2026-10-14 11:59:54
This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives searching for certainty. The word auspicious derives from the Latin auspex — one who examines the flight of birds for omens and divinations of the future. Today, our birds are made of bits — wind-up larks of our own making we call algorithms — but they serve the same function: to let us believe that we can divine the future in order to respond to it; to sedate our anxieties of living by selling us the illusion of control over the unknowable.
All power structures are prisons we choose to live inside and all prediction technologies are power structures. Prophets have always been the true governors of empires, first counsels to kings, final ventriloquists of the future.
We can never break free from the uncertainties of living, for we ourselves are bright violations of probability, but we can break free from the prison of prediction in order to be more alive: The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves — that our future is not the computational sum of our past and our destiny not a deterministic equation but an ongoing process constantly creating itself, the way a memory reconstitutes itself with each retelling. Every algorithm that tries to tell us what we will like or do next based on what we have liked or done previously is stealing our self-respect — the respect for the fundamental capacity for self-surprise that makes life worth living — and selling it back to us at the price of the product.
How to defend this vital aspect of our humanity, of life itself, from the merchants of prediction is what Carissa Véliz explores in Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (public library) — a book that, in an epoch when it is difficult to say anything original about AI, offers a revelatory look at the prison we have chosen to live inside and a key out.
She writes:
The computer scientists of today play the same role in power and prophecy as the oracles of the ancient world, the astrologers of the Middle Ages, and the social scientists of the nineteenth century, as we will see… Prophets are merchants of prediction… Artificial intelligence is the new Oracle of Delphi. The likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Eric Schmidt sharing drinks with presidents and prime ministers is reminiscent of Nostradamus advising Catherine de’ Medici, and Rasputin counseling Nicholas II.
[…]
Predictions are often power moves disguised as quests for knowledge. Even when predictions are sincere, they can create currents of political influence that change the world. They become power moves.
She offers a fascinating history of how such technologies of power became possible, became desirable, became the norm — a history that chronicles the shift from the spiritual to the statistical, from faith to blind trust:
With God gradually moving into a background position, the grip of fate loosened. Along with worldviews that could make sense of and contemplate the notion that chance might play an important role in the world, the invention of printing with movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century facilitated the development of abstract numerical thinking, and with it, scientific inquiry and bureaucratic organization.
[…]
Trust in numbers was partly born out of distrust in people.
It was not only the Church’s disapproval that led to a decline in traditional forms of divination; common people were tired of depending on experts to catch a glimpse of the future. Reading animal entrails or the flight of birds is not obvious, and astrology is technical. The opaqueness of these methods facilitated fabrication, errors, and corruption. Divinatory lots such as dice are ways of potentially communicating with the gods in an open way, visible and readable to all. They also invite asking questions about randomness and probability, which might have contributed to probabilistic thinking. But dice were unfit for purpose in the Enlightenment and beyond. Games of chance were associated with gambling and vice, and leaving decisions to pure chance was counter to rationality. Statistics came to the rescue.
After getting a kick start from astronomers, statistics developed mostly thanks to bureaucrats who were responding to challenges in public life. It was a practical endeavor, not a scientific one. Merchants, bankers, farmers, militaries, and tax officials needed to count in standardized ways. Extensive trade needs prices and measures, and therefore extensive quantification. As bureaucracies grew, standardization and public justification were necessary. There was also the question of how to hide power struggles to make them look as rational as possible. Numbers, standards, and statistics make politics and power invisible. That’s convenient to anyone wanting to justify what they do as free from values.
Behind our trust in numbers is a closely related philosophical idea: that values cannot be derived from facts.
Which, of course, they cannot. None of the things we most value — not mountains, not music, not love — can be reduced to a set a facts. Numbers and figures can contour for us what the world is — truly or falsely — but they can never shade in how to live in it, how to share it, how to reshape it into the kind of world we want to live in. Statistical probability will never tell us anything about the reach of possibility. Probability theory pioneer Marc Kac himself recognized that all creative acts — those triumphs of our humanity — spring from “a world with its own passions, elations and despairs, and it is here that… one may even hear the voice of God.”
Véliz counters the cultural myth we have been sold:
The world is not inherently statistical; we made it so by quantifying it, the better to control it.
Statistics invented society. Since the statistical regularities in phenomena like crime and suicide could not be traced to individual actions, these patterns became attributed to “society” itself. Society became a living entity, above and beyond the individuals constituting it. From 1830, these numerical regularities were interpreted as the most compelling evidence of society’s existence. Statistics invented normal people too.
[…]
Probabilistic thinking changed our views of reality (our metaphysics), how we think about what we know (our epistemology), what we count as a good argument and an explanation (our logics), and how we think of the good life (our ethics). It might have even changed the way we think about how we think.
It didn’t just change us, it killed something essential of our nature — the shimmering irregularity that makes each of us who we are, a singular constellation of atoms and story unmatched in all the history and future of the universe. She writes:
The murderers were philosophers, gamblers, mathematicians, sociologists, insurers, and, above all, bureaucrats. The murder weapons were quantification, data collection, and statistical tools like the normal curve… The motive was power, understood broadly: from astronomers wanting to predict the skies for the purposes of navigation and timekeeping, to insurers wanting to make a profit, to bureaucrats vying for authority and wanting to have more control over the population. We killed individuals with names, personalities, and idiosyncrasies. We killed valuing people for who they are, without attaching categories, numbers, or, worse, rankings to them. We killed our confidence in free will, a topic to which we will come back in chapter eight. We killed trust in people and replaced it with trust in numbers. We gained order, but it came at a price. What we lost is rarely subject to quantification. But that it cannot be quantified doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist or matter.
In a passage that calls to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s eternal insistence that “words are events, they do things, change things,” she adds:
We do things with words, other than describe the world. Predictions are not mere assertions; they are acts in the world, and that is a further reason why they are not facts. Predictions are speech acts: assertions that do something.
[…]
When someone makes a prediction, depending on the context and their methods, as well as their will to power (what they want), they might be doing very different things: expressing their degree of confidence about something, expressing the chances of something happening in the world, expressing what they want the world to look like in the future, trying to manipulate their audience into buying what they sell, or a combination… What they are not doing, however, is uttering a true statement about the world.
[…]
Predictive societies tend toward oppression through surveillance and self-fulfilling prophecies because predictions are speech acts that are closer to commands than to truth claims.
Given our cognitive apparatus is wired for our expectations to shape our reality, the predictions we believe end up shaping our lives:
A prediction about people has reflexive qualities, acting like a magnet that bends reality toward itself. When the force of the magnet is strong enough, the prediction becomes the cause of its becoming true.
[…]
Predictions are commands disguised as descriptions… Predictions change the reality they purport to predict, and sometimes their accuracy is evidence not of knowledge or understanding but of despotism.
Our greatest frontier of resistance is to remember that we can be the makers of our own destiny with our choices, but our choices are driven by our beliefs, which are the easiest thing to manipulate and imprison in a power structure, and therefore the first thing that must break free. Véliz — who delves deeper into these questions in this excellent Where Shall We Meet interview — insists that the key is in our hands if we keep in mind — our gloriously fractal, wildly associative, defiantly illogical mind — a few truths about being human that the prophets of prediction try to obscure:
- What we deem inevitable often never comes to pass, while what we thought impossible awaits around the corner.
- Spaces of indeterminacy are where creativity, humor, and innovation flourish.
- Allowing defiance is the right way to treat human beings, who are ends in themselves, with their own idiosyncratic views and preferences. Every life is worth living, every life a work of art to be created much more than discovered.
- We shape our ideas and our ideas shape us
Reflecting on the tapestry of paradoxes threading through our yearning for control and our vulnerability to exploitation, she asks:
Unpredictability, arising from partial knowledge, social complexity and reflexivity, scientific and technological breakthroughs, flukes, and blindness, is never going away. Given this unsettling fact of life, how should we live?
The best answer I know is this Marie Howe poem.
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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2026-10-14 04:58:26
The great Polish-American mathematician Mark Kac (August 3, 1914–October 26, 1984) possessed one of the most dazzling minds of the twentieth century. In pioneering probability theory, he paved the way for a radical new conception of truth and ushered in the first generation of scientists trained to think probabilistically — a more accurate assessment of knowledge, making room for uncertainty, be it scientific or otherwise. This probabilistic mode of judgment is all the more necessary today as the growing complexity of the world is swirling us into exponentially increasing uncertainty, which we attempt to tame through artificial absolutism.
Mathematics literally saved Kac’s life. His student work earned him a post-doctoral fellowship to study abroad, so he left Poland for Johns Hopkins University in December of 1938. World War II broke out months later. His entire family, along with millions of other Jews, was killed by the Nazis.
Kac went on to lead a long and creatively fertile life — one he considered, despite this unfathomable share of misfortune, a tremendously fortunate one. “I must pay tribute to that powerful but capricious lady, Chance, who chose to bestow her beneficence on my personal life even though I spent much of my mathematical life trying to prove that she does not really exist,” he wrote with his characteristic mix of wit and wisdom in Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography (public library) — a small, wonderful 1976 book I discovered via a passing mention in an interview with the trailblazing astronomer Vera Rubin. (Here is further proof of my longstanding conviction that literature is the original Internet — such citations, allusions, and cross-references between books are the wondrous “hyperlinks” connecting human knowledge throughout our “common record.”)
Kac writes:
Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place. It is a world with its own passions, elations and despairs, and it is here that, if one is as great as Einstein, one may even hear the voice of God. The two worlds are intimately and intricately connected. Jealousy, the desire for recognition and competitiveness, for example, are part of the ordinary world but they are among the forces which propel into the second. Similarly, dreams and triumphs in the second have a way of merging with less than lofty thoughts of rewards in the first.
With an eye to the particular challenge that autobiography presents to the creative person, he adds:
To create a coherent and truthful picture of life in the two disparate and yet interrelated worlds is a nearly impossible task.
In discussing his great heroes and influences, Kac delineates another dichotomy in creative culture — the bifurcation of brilliance by degree and by kind:
In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a [person] that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works.
He points to the nuclear physicist Hans Bethe as an example of an “ordinary genius” and to Richard Feynman as a “magician.” (Kac’s distinction appears in James Gleick’s superb biography of Feynman and there is a high probability that it inspired the title of BBC’s documentary about the legendary physicist, No Ordinary Genius.) I would add Alan Turing to the “magicians” category, and of course Albert Einstein.
In the postscript, Kac considers what lends mathematics its enduring enchantment — what renders people besotted with it:
Mathematics is an ancient discipline. For as long as we can reliably reach into the past, we can find its development intimately connected with the development of the whole of our civilization. For as long as we have a record of man’s curiosity and his quest for understanding, we find mathematics cultivated and cherished, practiced and taught. Throughout the ages it has stood as an ultimate in rational thought and as a monument to man’s desire to probe the workings of his own mind.
[…]
The urge to understand and to create mathematics has always been remarkable, considering that those who have devoted their lives to the service of this aloof and elusive mistress could expect neither great material rewards nor widespread fame.
A champion of nuance, Kac challenges Bertrand Russell’s famous assertion that “mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.” Kac finds it to be a “dull and rather miserable picture of mathematics” and yet “not wholly wrong,” “just hopelessly incomplete and one-sided.” Instead, he considers what grants mathematics its richness as a mode of illuminating reality:
I am reminded of something Balthazaar van der Pol, a great Dutch scientist and engineer who was also a fine musician, remarked to me about the music of Bach. “It is great,” he said, “because it is inevitable and yet surprising.” I have often thought about this lovely epigram in connection with mathematics… The inevitability is, in many cases, provided by logic alone, but the element of surprise must come from an insight outside the rigid confines of logic.
It warrants noting that the altogether marvelous Enigmas of Chance is part of a series of scientists’ autobiographies funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has probably done more for science and its social life than any other entity in the past half-century. Complement it with this beautiful love letter to mathematics by the pioneering 19th-century English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, the illustrated life of the eccentric mathematical genius Paul Erdos, and the great English mathematician John Horton Conway on tinkering, thinkering, and the art of being a professional nonunderstander.
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.
2026-10-14 04:03:14
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together.
This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the spirit — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul above the self, unselfing us into seeing each other, into remembering, as James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their epochal conversation, that “we are still each other’s only hope.”
Born in Iran months after the end of the First World War and raised by farming parents in present-day Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was still a girl when she sensed something deeply wrong with the unquestioned colonial system of her world, with the oppression that was the axis of that world. By the time she was a young woman — a time when our urge to rebel against the broken system is fiery but we don’t yet have the tools to rebel intelligently, don’t yet know the right questions to ask in order to tell whether the answer we are holding up as an alternative is any better or worse — she rebelled by embracing Communism as “an interesting manifestation of popular will.” Working by that point as a telephone operator in England, she joined the Communist Party. “It was a conversion, apparently sudden, and total (though short-lived),” she would later recall. “Communism was in fact a germ or virus that had already been at work in me for a long time… because of my rejection of the repressive and unjust society of old white-dominated Africa.” It didn’t take her long to see the cracks in Communism. She left the party, discovered Sufism, grew fascinated with the nascent field of behavioral psychology and its revelatory, often disquieting findings about the inner workings of the mind, of its formidable powers to act and its immense vulnerabilities to being acted upon. But she found no ready-made answer to the problem of social harmony.
And so, in that way artists have of complaining by creating, she devoted her life — almost a century of life, a century of world wars and violent uprisings, of changes unimaginable to her parents — to asking the difficult, clarifying questions that help us better understand what makes us human, how we allow ourselves to dehumanize others, and what it takes to cohere, as individuals and as societies. At 87, she became the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for writing that “with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.”
In 1985, months after I was born under Bulgaria’s Communist dictatorship, Doris Lessing delivered Canada’s esteemed annual Massey Lectures, later adapted into a series of short essays under the haunting title Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (public library) — a searching look at how it is that “we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives,” lensed through a lucid faith that we have all the power, urgency, and dignity we need to choose otherwise, to use what we have learned about the worst of our nature to nurture and magnify the best of our nature, to figure out “how we behave so that we control the society and the society does not control us.”
In a sentiment Rebecca Solnit would echo three decades later in her modern classic Hope in the Dark, Lessing writes:
This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that — a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice — or if we notice, belittle — equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.
To be realistic about our own nature, Lessing argues, requires attentiveness to both of these strands — the destructive and the creative. This is the cosmic mirror Maya Angelou held up to humanity in her stunning space-bound poem, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” An epoch before her, Bertrand Russell — also a Nobel laureate in Literature, though trained as a scientist — reckoned with our twin capacities to define them in elemental terms — “We construct when we increase the potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy when we diminish the potential energy.” — and in existential terms: “Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”
Our sanity, Lessing observes, lies in “our capacity to be detached and unflattering about ourselves” — and in the understanding that our selves are not islanded in time but lineages of beliefs and tendencies with roots much longer than our lifetimes, not sovereign but contiguous with all the other selves that occupy the particular patch of spacetime we have been born into. It is vital, she insists, that we examine ourselves — our selves, and the constellation of selves that is our given society — from various elsewheres.
This is why we need writers — those professional observers, in Susan Sontag’s splendid definition, whose job it is to “pay attention to the world” and shine the light of that attention on every side of the kaleidoscope that is a given culture at a given time. A decade after Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb reckoning with the role of literature in democracy that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Lessing writes:
In totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this reason… Writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function that has been evolved by society… Literature is one of the most useful ways we have of achieving this “other eye,” this detached manner of seeing ourselves; history is another.
Because we are the future of our own past, the posterity of our ancestors, looking back on history from our present vantage point offers fertile training ground for looking forward, for shaping the world of tomorrow. Lessing writes:
Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next. There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost impossible to detach ourselves.
[…]
There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the right, because within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new development — at the best, something that has been changed, all passion spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.
In consonance with Carl Sagan’s admonition against “the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth” and with Joan Didion’s admonition against mistaking self-righteousness for morality, Lessing offers:
This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong; our cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense, if not as downright evil… Well, in our sober moments, our human moments, the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate us, we all of us suspect that this “I am right, you are wrong” is, quite simply, nonsense. All history, development goes on through interaction and mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life, as one strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in history. In fact, it is as if what is real in human development — the main current of social evolution — cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to expel extremes and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general stream.
Looking back on the colonialist Zimbabwe of her childhood, on the “prejudiced, ugly, ignorant” attitudes of the ruling whites, she reflects:
These attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though the merest glance at history would have told them (and many of them were educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their certitudes were temporary.
At the center of Lessing’s inquiry is the paradox of how seemingly sound-minded, kind-hearted people get enlisted in ideologies of oppression. Kierkegaard had written in the Golden Age of European revolutions — those idealistic but imperfect attempts to unify fractured feudal duchies into free nations, attempts that modeled the possibility of a United States of America — that “the evolution of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the individual apart from the crowd,” that “truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because… the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” An epoch and a world order later, Lessing considers how regimes of terror take hold:
Nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically. But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.
The mess we have made, she intimates, may be the most effective teaching tool we have — a living admonition against doing the same, a clarion call to rebel by doing otherwise:
Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest, wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”
As for us, here in the roiling mess, our sole salvation lies in learning to “live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.” Lessing writes:
While all these boilings and upheavals go on, at the same time, parallel, continues this other revolution: the quiet revolution, based on sober and accurate observation of ourselves, our behaviour, our capacities… If we decided to use it, [we may] transform the world we live in. But it means making that deliberate step into objectivity and away from wild emotionalism, deliberately choosing to see ourselves as, perhaps, a visitor from another planet might see us.
This, in fact, was the conditional clause in Baldwin’s words to Mead — in order to be “each other’s only hope,” he said, we ought to be “as clear-headed about human beings as possible.” This, too, was Maya Angelou’s conditional optimism for humanity: “That is when, and only when, we come to it” — to that “Brave and Startling Truth,” balanced on the fulcrum of our conflicted capacities, “that we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-10-13 11:26:22
Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our values. We read for the assurance that others have lived through what we are living through. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin reflected in his most personal interview.
And yet while books may give us a foothold for the disorientation of being and an antidote to our existential loneliness, the paradox of living is that no example, no parallel, no borrowed wisdom is a substitute for life itself. The story of our own lives is only ever written on the blank page of living, our store of wisdom only ever found in the deepening truth of our own experience.
In 1918 — more than a decade before he penned his magnificent essay on the timeless magic of books and three decades before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962), entering his forties, captured this paradox in a short poem of great simplicity and loveliness, found in the posthumous collection The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Herman Hesse (public library).
BOOKS
by Hermann HesseAll the books of the world
will not bring you happiness,
but build a secret path
toward your heart.What you need is in you:
the sun, the stars, the moon,
the illumination you were seeking
shines up from within you.The quest for wisdom
made you comb the libraries.
Now every page speaks the truth
that flashes forth from you.
The young Proust had arrived at the same conclusion in his reflections on why we read, observing that “the end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own” because “the essential book, the one true book… already exists in every one of us.”
Complement with Pythagoras on the purpose of life and the meaning of wisdom, Nick Cave on the importance of trusting yourself, and Rebecca Solnit on how books solace, empower, and transform us, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to be more alive.
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.
2026-10-12 04:12:15
Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in another solar system, as if it got lost like the Little Red Riding Hood or the names of the women who painted the caves. Like the paradoxical notion of finding yourself, the notion of finding love pulsates with equal parts helplessness and hubris — a rueful recognition that something is missing from your life and a belief that it falls on you to do the looking, that if you only look hard enough and long enough, you will achieve the goal of finding it. But no one, not one person in the history of the heart, achieved love by striving.
From the vantage of love, it is you who are lost; it is love that finds you — and not the way you expected.
No one has articulated this more perfectly, more poignantly, than James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) in a conversation with his young filmmaker friend Sedat Pakay, quoted in Nicholas Boggs’s altogether excellent biography Baldwin: A Love Story (which also gave us the moving letter Baldwin received at the peak of his fame and his heartbreak from his childhood teacher).
Having turned his entire life around to follow his improbable Turkish lover to Istanbul, Baldwin reflects:
I will never be able to deny for any reason at all is a certain power that I had to deal with, which has dealt with me, which is called love. And love comes in very strange packages. And I think everything depends in life on whether or not you are able to accept what comes to you. Because it never comes to you the way you think it will. It never comes to you the way you’re taught it will. It comes as it comes.
Never having imagined that love would make of the Harlem River an estuary to the Bosphorus, Baldwin finds himself reckoning with the broader meaning of it all:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
The trouble, of course, is that we can choose, without knowing we are choosing, to stay behind the mask, chose being sure over being seen, chose control — which is always the feeling of control, never the fact of control — over possibility. The notion of finding love suffers the same pitfall, for it presumes that the searcher is in control of the find. Elsewhere, Baldwin razes through the delusion:
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all — a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named — but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
Ultimately, love asks of us the same thing life does — to meet it on its terms. Baldwin writes:
People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2026-10-12 03:53:01
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
“Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.”
In late 1791, as important men were sitting down in America to make ten amendments to the young country’s constitution, which they called a Universal Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was sitting down in England to complete A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects — the beacon of political philosophy, inspired by Paine’s treatise, that would expand the universal to include all chromosomal arrangements, “demanding justice for one half of the human race” and laying the foundation of women’s political power, not by shaming and blaming the oppressor but by painting a passionate portrait of possibility.
When Wollstonecraft’s publisher invited her to a dinner celebrating one of those important men — Thomas Paine, whose landmark insistence on the right of the people to overthrow their rulers had inspired Wollstonecraft’s treatise — another of the publisher’s most successful and controversial authors was also there: the radical political philosopher William Godwin.
Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, who had never before met, had made their reputations on the bold denunciation of institutions, including the institution of marriage: Wollstonecraft in her Vindication and Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice, which issued a rigorously reasoned eight-book call for a society of equals, indicting government, religion, and marriage as oppressive forces that limit individual freedom and gape the abyss of inequality. Government and religion, Godwin argued, would be rendered obsolete with sufficient advancement of human knowledge and morality. “Marriage, as now understood,” he wrote, “is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.”
Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead — equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners — seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it — in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old — is the measure of our progress.
She had seen firsthand the moral, emotional, and bodily tyranny of an institution that considered the wife property of the husband, a creature owed as much sympathy and tenderness as a boot. As a child growing up in a house shaken by the cries of her own mother, regularly raped and beaten by her alcoholic husband, Wollstonecraft had stood sentinel before her mother’s door to keep her father from entering, which only aggravated his brutality. In a culture where just four women successfully obtained a divorce in the whole of a century, she came to see that to salvage the family, one had to revise the entire political foundations of society.
When the two philosophers met at their publishers’ dinner, the balding and reserved Godwin — a man so afraid of emotion that he never cared for music — found Wollstonecraft — a woman of symphonic intellect and unselfconscious passions — too eager to dominate the conversation with Paine. The middle child in a brood of thirteen, Godwin had always been introverted, awkward, and greatly challenged at attuning to the emotional states and needs of others. He regarded his peculiarity with both self-awareness and genuine bafflement:
I have a singular want of foresight on some occasions as to the effect what I shall say will have on the person to whom it is addressed. I therefore often appear rude, though no man can be freer from rudeness of intention and often get a character for harshness that my heart disowns.
Wollstonecraft was extroverted, her quick mind coupled with a kind of social magnetism, but the very capacity for large thought and feeling that made her so magnetic also made her capable of despair so fathomless that she came to regard herself as “a strange compound of weakness and resolution,” marked by a great “defect” of mind and a “wayward heart” that creates its own misery.
For the two philosophers, love did not barge through the barn door of animal passion — it entered slowly, quietly, through the sun porch of shared ideals and mutual respect. Respect begot friendship begot love. Wollstonecraft came to see the “tender affectionate creature” from which Godwin’s coolly reasoned idealism sprang — his pursuit of political justice was at bottom a philosophy of universal sympathies and unconditional kindness, impulses of which his own nature was woven. Godwin discovered above the gratifications of being admired the gladness of being seen:
After all one’s philosophy it must be confessed that the knowledge that there is some one that takes an interest in one’s happiness, something like that which each man feels for his own, is extremely gratifying.
There is something singularly endearing in his matter-of-fact account of how their relationship developed:
The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined kind of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each… When in the course of things the disclosure came there was nothing in the matter for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanations attendant upon the tale. It was friendship melting into love.
In his autobiography, never published in his lifetime, he would eventually acknowledge that “there is nothing that the human heart more irresistibly seeks than an object to which to attach itself.” When he did attach himself to Wollstonecraft, it was a molecular bond that staggered him, altered him.
In the first days of spring in 1797, in the small churchyard of St. Pancras, four months into her pregnancy, Mary and William entered a trailblazing marriage of equals, then took up residence together in a home where they shared a bed and a value system but kept separate studies, Wollstonecraft writing and receiving visitors in a room of her own, and Godwin in his. The choice to marry against their stated credos had puzzled both their public admirers and their private circle. It mattered little, even the response from Godwin’s mother, spiked with the fine quills of passive aggression of which only mothers are capable: “Your broken resolution in regard to matrimony encourages me to hope that you will ere long embrace the Gospel.”
Convinced that their child was to be a boy, the parents-to-be named him William. Wollstonecraft resumed work on a book of moral lessons for children, which William Blake would later illustrate. Godwin channeled their daily conversations about how to bring up happy, intelligent, and morally elevated children in a series of essays later published as The Enquirer his most timeless, if least known, book: an incisive inquiry into how we become who we are, laying out a radical new vision for optimal parenting and early childhood education.
“William” arrived on August 30, 1797, and was corrected, without fret or fanfare, to a Mary. After nine hours of labor and a difficult birth, the placenta and fetal membranes failed to leave Wollstonecraft’s uterus. A surgeon was summoned to extract it, rushing in from the street to plunge his hands into her flesh.
Within hours, the young mother was shivering with a savage fever.
* * *
Exactly fifty summers later, the Vienna General Hospital — one of the best teaching hospitals in the world — found itself the epicenter of a menacing medical mystery blackening the crucible of life with death: Young women were dying in agony by the legion shortly after giving birth.
The hospital had two maternity wards — one staffed by elite obstetricians and their medical students, the other by midwives with no formal medical training. (This was an era when the world’s university doors were closed to women.) Tenfold more mothers were dying of puerperal fever in the first.
The medical elders initially assumed that the students were treating the pregnant women too roughly. But retraining didn’t change the ratio. Baffled, these thoroughly trained scientists fell to superstition — a priest walked through the doctors’ ward ringing a bell for each death and a theory emerged that the haunting sound was terrifying the living mothers into dying.
A young Hungarian doctor by the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, in his first year as assistant professor at the hospital, wrote in his diary:
Even to me myself it had a strange effect upon my nerves when I heard the bell hurried past my door; a sigh would escape my heart for the victim that once more was claimed by an unknown power. The bell was a painful exhortation to me to search for this unknown cause with all of my might.
When the pastor was asked to stop making his bell rounds, the deaths continued and the sigh kept bellowing in the young doctor’s heart as he bent his mind around the mystery. He catalogued all the visible variables and pored over the data, but it told no discernible story. Because the unknown will always be greater than the sum of all our analyzable knowns, because the sum is always “simpler than its parts,” the history of science, the history of knowledge, is a rosary of breakthroughs that arrive through the side door of our reasoned theories. One day, Semmelweis’s mentor was teaching dissection at the morgue when a student accidentally nicked the professor’s finger with the scalpel while cutting open the cadaver on the table. Within days, he died a horrific death. A familiar death. It devastated Semmelweis, but it also pressed his face against the revelation — the doctors and medical students at the hospital were doing the exact same thing with the pregnant women: dissecting cadavers at the morgue, which none of the midwives did, and immediately going into the maternity ward to touch open flesh.
The young doctor realized that the men’s hands transferred some particle of death to the vulnerable living. He called them “cadaver particles” and set about devising ways to eradicate them, experimenting with various washing solutions and testing his results by smell alone — did his hands still have the putrid cadaver smell after washing them in the different agents. Eventually, he settled on a solution of chlorine and lime — bleach not strong enough to burn his hands, but strong enough to vanquish the other and, with it, the cadaver particles he theorized. When he implemented the protocol at his ward, the death count plummeted to that of the other ward.
That year, Louis Pasteur began his crystallography research that would lead to the birth of germ theory more than a decade later. The notion that some invisible unit of matter could unravel a body was still inconceivable. Semmelweis was a brilliant theorist and a fine empiricist, but a terrible communicator. He took the opposite of Mary Wollstonecraft’s approach, pouring polemics into letters to every major hospital and medical school, pummeling colleagues with that least effective of all behavioral change strategies: shaming. He went as far as calling doctors who didn’t wash their hands murderers and warned medical students that unless they adopted his protocol, they would be accomplices in an epochal crime.
Unsurprisingly, Semmelweis was largely dismissed; unsurprisingly, he grew increasingly cantankerous. By the time he was in his early forties, the idealistic young doctor had undergone a staggering physiological and psychological change — he looked at least sixty, had frequent detonations of temper, and suffered baffling lapses of memory in the midst of lectures. The mysterious malady — possibly early-onset Alzheimers, possibly tertiary syphilis, likely some parallel discomposure of body and spirit — made him unbearable to be around.
One day, a colleague lured him to an asylum on the pretext of seeing a new facility. When Semmelweis realized he was about to be committed against his will, he raged to get away, but was brutalized by the wardens and put into a straitjacket.
He died two weeks later from an infection contracted from the beating.
Four years later, two French scientists discovered the microbes en chainettes — “microbe chains” — of his hypothesized “cadaver particles,” which Pasteur would identify as the bacterium haemolytic streptococcus a decade later. It was ultimately a nurse — Florence Nightingale — whose extraordinary data diagrams and passionate advocacy persuaded the medical establishment to standardize hospital sanitization.
* * *
Just before eight on a late-summer morning ten days after giving birth, Mary Wollstonecraft drew her last breath, leaving behind a fragile baby girl, a baffled philosopher stony with heartache, and an angel-winged William Blake etching.
For Godwin, who had spent his life sieging religion with the artillery of reason, the loss was total and irrevocable. The notions of personal immortality and reunion with loved ones in an imaginary afterlife were the pacifier of puerile minds. And yet loss unlatches an emotional trapdoor beneath our firmest cerebral convictions, plunging us into elemental questions that live beyond our reasoned beliefs, childlike in their disbelieving sincerity. It was such a question that sprang unbidden to my atheist engineer grandmother’s lips as she stood over the hospital bed holding the dead body of my atheist engineer grandfather, her love of half a century: Where did you go, my darling?
The guarded Godwin kept a diary more like a ship’s log than a discursive journal of an inner life:
“Seneca, Ep. 8, 9.”
“Call from Coleridge.”
“Queen dies.”
On the day of his beloved’s death, this man of factual records could not bring himself to name the fact. All he wrote in the ledger was “20 minutes before 8,” followed by an interminable sequence of dashes suturing the unspeakable.
“– — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ”
By evening, he was able to write to his oldest friend with a confused fusion of dissociation and disconsolation:
My wife is now dead. She died this morning at eight o’clock… I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. When you come to town, look at me, talk to me, but do not — if you can help it — exhort me, or console me.
In the corner, his baby daughter was sleeping in her crib. She would learn to read by tracing the letters on her her mother’s tombstone and would come to write, while still a teenager, an epochal reckoning with the eternal interplay of life and death.
The year her Frankenstein was published, Ignaz Semmelweis was born in a Hungarian hospital.
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.