2026-01-24 03:33:20
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our myriad conscious and unconscious longings, despairs, and patterned desires. And yet there is something profoundly paradoxical about such an appeal to reason in the notion that we can exercise prudence in matters of love — to have loved is to have known the straitjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.
How to heed Augustine’s caution, not by subjugating but by better understanding our experience of love, is what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in her least known but in many ways most beautiful work, Love and Saint Augustine (public library) — Arendt’s first book-length manuscript and the last to be published in English, posthumously salvaged from her papers by political scientist Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosopher Judith Chelius Stark.
For half a century after she wrote it as her doctoral thesis in 1929 — a time when this apostle of reason, who would become one of the twentieth century’s keenest and most coolly analytical minds, was composing her fiery love letters to Martin Heidegger — Arendt obsessively revised and annotated the manuscript. Against Augustine’s whetstone, she came to hone her core philosophical ideas — chiefly the troublesome disconnect she saw between philosophy and politics as evidenced by the rise of ideologies like totalitarianism, the origins of which she so memorably and incisively examined. It was from Augustine that she borrowed the phrase amor mundi — “love of the world” — which would become a defining feature of her philosophy. Occupied by questions of why we succumb to and normalize evil, Arendt identified as the root of tyranny the act of making other human beings irrelevant. Again and again, she returned to Augustine for the antidote: love.
But while this ancient notion of neighborly love, which would come to inspire Martin Luther King, Jr., was central to Arendt’s philosophical concern and her interest in Augustine, its political significance is inseparable from the deepest wellspring of love: the personal. For all of the political and philosophical wisdom she draws from it, Augustine’s Confessions is animated by his experience of personal love — that eternal force that governs the Sun and the Moon and the stars of our interior lives, reflected and codified in our cultural and social structures.
With an eye to Augustine’s conception of love as “a kind of craving” — the Latin appetitus, from which the word appetite is derived — and his assertion that “to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,” Arendt considers this directional desire propelling love:
Every craving is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves. For, as Augustine writes, love is “a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something.” What determines the motion of desire is always previously given. Our craving aims at a world we know; it does not discover anything new. The thing we know and desire is a “good,” otherwise we would not seek it for its own sake. All the goods we desire in our questing love are independent objects, unrelated to other objects. Each of them represents nothing but its isolated goodness. The distinctive trait of this good that we desire is that we do not have it. Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing. As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of “aiming at” and “referring back to.” It refers back to the individual who knows the world’s good and evil and seeks to live happily. It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy, our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires. Craving, or love, is a human being’s possibility of gaining possession of the good that will make him happy, that is, of gaining possession of what is most his own.
That is why a generous and unpossessive love — a love undiminished by the failure to attain the good for which it craves — can seem like a feat nothing short of superhuman. (“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me,” Arendt’s good friend and great admirer W.H. Auden wrote in his sublime ode to that superhuman triumph of the heart.) But a love predicated on possession, Arendt cautions, inevitably turns into fear — the fear of losing what was gained. Two millennia after Epictetus offered his cure for heartbreak in the acceptance that all things are perishable and therefore even love ought to be held with the loose fingers of nonattachment, Arendt — who notes Augustine’s debt to the Stoics — writes:
So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.
Half a century after Tolstoy admonished that “future love does not exist [for] love is a present activity only,” Arendt adds:
The present is not determined by the future as such… but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future, and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good, and even more in being sure of not losing it. Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss. However, for Augustine the happiness of having is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing. The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake.
Death, of course, is the ultimate loss — of love as well as life — and therefore the ultimate object of our future-oriented dread. And yet this escape from presence via the portal of anxiety — perhaps the commonest malady to which human beings are susceptible — is itself a living death. Arendt writes:
In their fear of death, those living fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains.
Against this background of negative space, Arendt casts the shape of love’s ultimate object according to Augustine:
Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear.
In a sentiment that illuminates the central mechanism by which frustration fuels (temporary) satisfaction in romantic love, she adds:
A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die. In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.
If presence — the removal of expectancy — is a prerequisite for a true experience of love, then time is the elemental infrastructure of love. Nearly half a century later, in becoming the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures in the 85-year history of the series, Arendt would make this notion of time as the locus of our thinking ego a centerpiece of her landmark lecture, The Life of the Mind. Now, quoting from Augustine’s writings, she considers the paradox of love beyond time for creatures as temporal as we are:
Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?
Time exists only insofar as it can be measured, and the yardstick by which we measure it is space.
For Augustine, she notes, memory is the space in which time is measured and cached:
Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
One of the major themes I explore in Figuring is this question of the temporality of even our lushest experiences. “The union of two natures for a time is so great,” Margaret Fuller — one of my key figures — wrote. Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity. Fuller’s exclamation upon seeing the paintings of Correggio for the first time, overcome with beauty she had not known before, radiates a larger truth about the human heart: “Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.”
Arendt locates this fundamental fact of the heart in Augustine’s writings. A century after Kierkegaard asserted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” she observes:
The Now is what measures time backwards and forwards, because the Now, strictly speaking, is not time but outside time. In the Now, past and future meet. For a fleeting moment they are simultaneous so that they can be stored up by memory, which remembers things past and holds the expectation of things to come. For a fleeting moment (the temporal Now) it is as though time stands still, and it is this Now that becomes Augustine’s model of eternity.
Augustine himself captures this transcendent temporality:
Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable… but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.
Arendt hones in on the heart of the paradox:
What prevents man from “living” in the timeless present is life itself, which never “stands still.” The good for which love craves lies beyond all mere desires. If it were merely a question of desiring, all desires would end in fear. And since whatever confronts life from the outside as the object of its craving is sought for life’s sake (a life we are going to lose), the ultimate object of all desires is life itself. Life is the good we ought to seek, namely true life.
She returns to desire, which simultaneously takes us out of life and plunges us into it:
Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it… Since man is not self-sufficient and therefore always desires something outside himself, the question of who he is can only be resolved by the object of his desire and not, as the Stoics thought, by the suppression of the impulse of desire itself: “Such is each as is his love” [Augustine wrote]. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody.
[…]
Man as such, his essence, cannot be defined because he always desires to belong to something outside himself and changes accordingly… If he could be said to have an essential nature at all, it would be lack of self-sufficiency. Hence, he is driven to break out of his isolation by means of love… for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging. Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being.
It is stunning to trace the line of these ideas across the life of Arendt’s mind. Decades after her doctoral days, she would compose her influential treatise on how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression — totalitarianism, in other words, is not only the denial of love but an assault on the essence of human beings.
In the remainder of Love and Saint Augustine, Arendt goes on to examine Augustine’s hierarchy of love, the psychological structure of craving, the perils of anticipation, and the building blocks of that “love of the world” so vital to a harmonious life and a harmonious society. Couple it with Elizabeth Barrett Browning on happiness as a moral obligation, then revisit Arendt on action and the pursuit of happiness, lying in politics, the power of being an outsider, and the difference between how art and science illuminate the human condition.
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.
2026-01-24 01:55:42
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, “involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”
Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belief stems from the habitual conceit of a culture blinded by its own presentism bias, ignorant of the past’s contextual analogues. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continually reinforce in our present informational ecosystem — a Pavlovian system of constant feedback, in which the easiest and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.
Few people in the two centuries since Emerson issued his exhortation to “trust thyself” have countered this culturally condoned blunting of individuality more courageously and consistently than E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962) — an artist who never cowered from being his unconventional self because, in the words of his most incisive and competent biographer, he “despised fear, and his life was lived in defiance of all who ruled by it.”
A fortnight after the poet’s fifty-ninth birthday, a small Michigan newspaper published a short, enormous piece by Cummings under the title “A Poet’s Advice to Students,” radiating expansive wisdom on art, life, and the courage of being yourself. It went on to inspire Buckminster Fuller and was later included in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised (public library) — that wonderful out-of-print collection which the poet himself described as “a cluster of epigrams, forty-nine essays on various subjects, a poem dispraising dogmata, and several selections from unfinished plays,” and which gave us Cummings on what it really means to be an artist.
Addressing those who aspire to be poets — no doubt in that broadest Baldwinian sense of wakeful artists in any medium and courageous seers of human truth — Cummings echoes the poet Laura Riding’s exquisite letters to an eight-year-old girl about being oneself and writes:
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
Cummings should know — just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with tradition and being nobody-but-himself in his art. With an eye to that unassailable creative integrity buoyed by relentless work ethic, he adds:
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
Complement the thoroughly invigorating E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised with a lovely illustrated celebration of Cummings’s creative bravery, then revisit Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren on what it really means to find yourself and Janis Joplin on the courage of being what you find.
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.
2026-01-23 06:19:42
“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie.
The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry.
An inquiry, an invocation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter into the unknowns of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, into the desolate haunts of our own interior that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a kind of prayer: for presence, for understanding, for seeing the world more closely in order to cherish it more deeply. To name, to understand, to dignify and hold — these are the gifts of poetry, and these too are the antidotes to just about every form of fear.
In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is essentially a field guide to loving life more, anchored in the recognition that “the opposite of love is not hatred or rancor but fear” and in a passionate insistence on “how important is it — how critical — to understand there is and has always been, for each of us, a wilderness within.”
She writes:
Vulnerability, uncertainty, and even desperation are not only signs of life, but tools for moving forward toward courage, hope, and purpose.
[…]
It is curiosity, not foreknowledge, that leads a reader (and a poet, and a poem) beyond the limits of habitual understanding — questions, rather than answers, being the building blocks of insight. Questions, which spring from the unconscious mind’s ability to remember, intuit, and speculate (Was he desperate? Alone? Did he do it out of grief?), are capable of bridging distances of time, place, allegiance, belief, and any other supposed border used to separate people from one another. Moreover, to form a question is an active creative stance, a way of announcing: I’m paying attention! I’m ready to observe, remember, intuit! Curiosity is, at heart, courage; readiness not for a fixed or foretold outcome, but rather a type of uncharted encounter — an adventure.
Poetry’s essential “de-emphasizing of answers and certainty” invites “a productive form of introspection,” the recompense of which is the wonderful capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying into a template of ourselves:
We surprise ourselves. We defy pat summary. Poetry is an art form through which we might better recognize and appreciate the circumstances under which you and I remain — even to ourselves — a kind of mystery… Occasional barriers to certainty and resolution in a poem and in a life are an invitation to exercise different faculties of discernment and perception.
[…]
In life, when mystery, doubt, and quiet fear rear up, our habit is to seek the assurance of answers, strategies, expert advice. We hedge our bets, make contingency plans, cleave to platitudes. We do what it takes to stay materially and emotionally afloat. But poetry is a different kind of enterprise, one engaged with the deep reserves of wisdom, memory, and emotional wherewithal every one of us possesses. And so rather than neatening up a state of quandary or denying inevitability, a poem might seek to operate from within these very circumstances.
These very circumstances are also what that most often incite fear. In making them something to be “pondered, grappled with, marveled at,” poetry offers a mighty antidote to that internal flinch at the unknown. A generation after Audre Lorde insisted that poetry affords us a kind of intimacy with ourselves by which “those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us,” Smith writes:
Fear stuns, blurs out our options, convinces us it is better to fall silent and still, to consent, to go along and trust that eventually everything will feel normal again. Fear, running its course long enough, convinces us that the moral disequilibrium in which we find ourselves is normalcy. Fear dissuades us from believing our bodies, our hearts, our deepest memories. Fear is an isolating, alienating technology. At its most dangerous, fear keeps us from facing or even fully contemplating what, for our own survival, we must endeavor to change.
But a poem can mitigate fear by facilitating a form of dialogue with it. A poem might ask its author, What wakes you up in the middle of the night? What do you cower from? And when the poet answers, the poem will likely brighten, inviting: Sit down here in this chair where you are perfectly safe. Now, let’s approach it together.
Fear, Smith observes, often stems from the “fissure widening between us and ourselves,” the remedy for which is attention, is awareness, is an active curiosity about what dwells in that gaping abyss — a curiosity that begins with finding the words to name what we feel, to hold what we don’t want to feel. She writes:
Our relationship to language has great bearing upon our capacity to be wide awake and at home both in the imperfect world and in the dimensions of our full selves. Our ability to ask and grapple with difficult questions. Our willingness to accept uncertainty, to withstand discomfort. The curiosity with which we approach another person’s perspective. These things fortify us to recognize and celebrate the complex feelings to which we and others are susceptible. And while engaging with poetry isn’t the only way to strengthen our powers of listening and responding, asking and offering, poems are remarkable in their ability to augment our stamina for such tasks. Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention. Can we attend more rigorously, more compassionately to ourselves and others?
[…]
To create new patterns of language, as poems and poets exist to do, is to alter or correct course on our story of reality. To move from a state of fear to one of understanding, or from the sense that you are small and bound by the circumstances in your life to an acknowledgement that you are large and your purpose eternal — that kind of transformation begins in language, in talking and listening to yourself, to others, to a voice on a page. Language is the engine for our sense of the possible, and poetry fosters a productive impatience with the notion that things as they are cannot or must not be made to change.
In the remainder of Fear Less, Smith offers a guided tour of some of her favorite poems — among them treasures by Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Mark Doty, and Joy Harjo — and a glimpse of her own process to explore the mastery of craftsmanship behind the mystery of poetry’s singular power. Couple it with Audre Lorde on poetry as an instrument of change and feeling as an antidote to fear, then revisit this luminous animation of Smith’s masterpiece “My God, It’s Full of Stars.”
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.
2026-01-23 00:34:05
One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.
It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact, and a life’s triumph to accept it not with bitterness but with love.
How to make that liberating shift of perspective is what the playwright, suffragist, and psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell (September 14, 1883–March 6, 1979) considers in a passage from her 1968 autobiography The Measure of My Days (public library).
She writes:
A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Kahlil Gibran’s insight into the delicate balance of intimacy and independence essential for romantic love — which is always an echo of our formative attachments — she adds:
It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.
With a wary eye to the brunt of parental expectation under which all children live, well into adulthood, she writes:
No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.
Perhaps that glimpse is what Maurice Sendak meant when he observed that life is largely a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”
Complement with Kahlil Gibran’s advice on children, the pioneering psychologist Donald Winnicott on the mother’s contribution to society, and Alison Bechdel’s superb Winnicott-inspired Are You My Mother?, then savor My Mother’s Eyes — a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love — and Mary Gaitskill’s poignant advice on how to move through life when your parents are dying.
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.
2026-01-21 18:54:18
A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality, harmonious and symphonic with meaning.
And yet this musicality is more than a metaphor — it is part of our material nature, our creaturely inheritance. “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” wrote the poet Ronald Johnson. Music thrusts our neurobiology into transcendence. The poetic physicist Alan Lightman saw it as a language for the exhilaration of being alive. But it is also the language of mortality. “The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,” Richard Powers wrote.
Poet, French horn player, and choral singer Hannah Fries (who is also the visionary editor behind the Universe in Verse book) celebrates this enlivening relationship between music, meaning, and mortality in her stunning poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” inspired by Radiolab’s episode Memory and Forgetting and read here by Hannah herself to the sound of her young son improvising on the piano:
LET THE LAST THING BE SONG
by Hannah Friesi.
Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.
Behind locked doors
glow the unmarred pieces—
musical notes humming
in a jumble, only
waiting to be
arranged.ii.
What is left in one
who does not remember?
Love and music.Not a name but the fullness.
Not the sequence of events
but order of rhythm and pitch,a piece of time in which to exist.
iii.
A tone traveling through space has no referent,
and yet we infer, and yet it
finds its way between our cells
and shakes us.Aren’t we all still quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?iv.
When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, still
unspool its symphony?Sing to me — please —
and I will sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues past the final beat
of the stutter inside your chest.Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,
with the black hole’s
fathomless B-flat.
Couple with Marie Howe’s breathtaking “Hymn,” then revisit Nick Cave on music and transcendence in the age of AI and his reading of “But We Had Music.”
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.
2026-01-21 07:16:25
Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay something other than ourselves and hate is the veil of not understanding ourselves, then loving the world more — the other word for which is kindness — is largely a matter of deepening our awareness and sharpening our attention on both sides of the skin that membranes the self.
George Saunders — whose gorgeous novels and essays are a kind of jungle gym for playing with your assumptions rigorously and sensitively enough to grow the agility of perspective called empathy — explores this equivalence with his characteristic precision of mind and grandeur of heart in a wonderful interview on The Daily.
A practicing Buddhist and a writer whose core subject is how to love the world more, Saunders considers the parallels between Buddhism and writing as instruments of kindness honed on awareness and attention:
We have thoughts and they self-generate and dominate us. We mistake those thoughts for us. In both Buddhist practice and writing, you have a chance to go, Oh, those are just brain farts. They’re just happening spontaneously, and I didn’t actually create them, and I’m not sure I really want to take ownership of them. At the same time, they’re affecting my body. So you have to just get clear for long enough to recognize them as being separate from who you actually are.
Kindness, he observes in reconsidering his now-classic 2013 meditation on the subject, is something both greater than and simpler than niceness — a stilling of that “monkey mind” just long enough to consider what is most helpful to the other in a given situation. (Few things are more moving in this culture of opinions tattooed on the skin of the self than to see a person change their mind or evolve their perspective in public.)
Literature, Saunders insists, can quiet our habitual thoughts just enough to invite “a little more empathy, a little more engagement, a little more patience,” effecting “incremental changes of consciousness on the part of the writer and the reader” — changes that have to do with unclenching the fist of story and certainty that is the self and hold out to the world the open palm of curiosity. He identifies three awarenesses we must eventually attain in order to wake up from the core delusions that keep our lives clenched, that stand between us and kindness:
You’re not permanent.
You’re not the most important thing.
You’re not separate.
There are Buddhist precepts, but they are also the rewards of great literature — something Saunders captures beautifully in his introduction to the collected stories, essays, and poems of one of his own favorite writers, Grace Paley:
A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is as about as close as we can get to modeling pure empathy.
[…]
The world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.
Showing us how has been his life’s work, whether or not Saunders realized it along the way — we are always insensible to our own becoming, bud blind to blossom. Two decades before he came to the question of kindness directly, he shone a sidewise gleam at its substrate — the relationship between storytelling and unselfing — in his prescient 2007 essay collection The Brainded Megaphone.
Given that narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are comes to shape who we act ourselves into being, who we become in relation to the world. This fundamental vulnerability of consciousness, Saunders observes, can be and is exploited, but it is also what gives storytelling its transformative power:
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.
The point, of course, is that beneath the constructed idea is the world itself, just as beneath the self — the scaffolding of ideas upon which we construct our experience of reality — is the soul, that loose and baggaged word we use to hold something immense and pure: the elemental essence of being. In our culture, there is no greater courage than to strip the armor of ready-made answers and face the world as naked soul, blank as a question; to discover rather than dictate who we are and what this is — this brief burst of astonishment and anguish that we share before we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, wasted if seduced by certainty, wasted if shorn of kindness.
Saunders offer the simple, intensely difficult remedy:
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.
The great writer’s gift to the reader are not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a mechanism of transmuting confusion into kindness, and at the same time a way of seeing the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply. I find Saunders’s generous words about Grace Paley to apply perfectly to his own writing:
Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.
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What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking.
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Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more — love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.
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