2025-09-17 02:08:02
In the spring of 1859, as On the Origin of Species was going to press, New Yorkers flooded the first studio building for artists to see The Heart of the Andes — a single painting exhibited by itself in an unknown young artist’s studio.
Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his time Latin America, which had sent Darwin on his epochal voyage, had sent Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826–April 7, 1900) in Humboldt’s footsteps and returned him enraptured, transformed, restless to render the experience palpable, to transport others who would never have a chance to contact such ravishing wildness — a place of “perpetual spring,” as Humboldt had written in Cosmos, where “the depths of the earth and the vaults of heaven display all the richness of their forms and the variety of their phenomena,” where the laws of nature “stand indelibly described on the rocky walls and abrupt declivities of the Cordilleras.”
Quiet and introverted, prone to melancholy, Church had always been drawn to the wild wonders of nature, saved and set free by them. An earlier painting of Niagara Falls had prompted a London paper to declare that “art wasn’t limited to Europe” and that “it was not necessary for genius to study in any school but that of nature.” His cloudscapes surpassed even those of his Norwegian contemporary Knud Baade.
But The Heart of the Andes was something else entirely.
On the immense canvas, occupying nearly the entire wall of his studio, the thirty-two-year-old artist had painted not what he had seen in the Andes but what he had felt — the “unparalleled magnificence” of this lush land, he gasped in his diary, proclaiming it “one of the great wonders of Nature.” The setting was a real place just outside Quito, but Church had infused it with elements of other Andean landscapes that had impressed themselves upon his soul during two separate trips four years apart — a composite of the enchanted imagination he spent more than a year composing.
Peak by peak the mountain cascades toward the clouds until it merges with the sky as its foot melts into a waterfall. Details of exquisite aliveness punctuate the vista — a blue-blooming shrub, a pendulous bird’s nest, a resplendent quetzal perched on a branch, lichen on the bark of a broken tree, two people kneeling before a white wooden cross — all of it awash in light that only consciousness can see, impossible for a camera lens to capture.
Rebelling against the stale convention of gilded frames, Church had invented a new kind of frame made of walnut wood, onto which he draped curtains to give the illusion of a window opening when the painting was being revealed. Silver reflectors focused gas lights onto the canvas to emulate the sunlit atmosphere of the landscape itself. The effect, The New York Times wrote, was “simply magical” — “a new sensation in art, giving a reality of atmospheric space to the picture, and a delicacy to the tones of the coloring, which must be seen to be at all appreciated or understood.” Before the days of easy travel, before color photography, most of the visitors had never seen and would never see with their own eyes nature so wild, mountains so majestic. Here was virtual reality — an immersion in light, color, and feeling that speaks not just to the eye but to the entire system of being we call soul.
For three weeks, people packed into Church’s studio, sometimes more than two thousand per day, gasping each time the curtain was drawn open, shuddering with the vertigo of the sublime. On the closing day, the line for admission curled around the block, around the clock. An influential art collector who would help found the Metropolitan Museum of Art a decade later ended up purchasing the painting for $10,000 — more than anyone had ever paid for a work by an American artist.
The Heart of the Andes was also an emblem of the cruelties of chance and the mercies of chance. Just after the exhibition opened, Church received devastating news of his hero — 89 and weakened by a stroke, Alexander von Humboldt had greeted death the way he had lived life: “How glorious these sunbeams are!” were his last words, “They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!”
He could have been describing Church’s painting; he could have been describing that incandescent cosmos of connection two people enter when they fall in love — the cosmos Church what thrust into without warning when he encountered among the thousands of spectators the woman who would become the love of his life. Within a year, he had married Isabel at the picturesque Hudson Valley mansion he bought with his earnings from The Heart of the Andes.
At forty-four, on the insistence of Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted, Church became Park Commissioner of New York — the closest thing to a guardian angel of the urban wilderness. He would devote the rest of his life capturing nature’s wildness and wonder in transportive paintings of rainbows and volcanos, waterfalls and icebergs, numberless cloud studies and sunsets, moonrise and the aurora borealis, all of them rendered with that rare combination of passion and precision that makes anything — a painting, a poem, a person — great.
And much of it he shared with Isabel, who sat with him sunset after sunset over the Hudson Valley, pressed ferns into an herbarium alongside him while he painted in Jamaica — a living reminder that there is no greater form of love than looking together in the direction of wonder.
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.
2025-09-13 08:45:15
On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about -173°C) at night. But these unique nooks, which are most likely collapsed lava tubes, are a cozy 63°F (17°C) inside — he feeling-tone of a crisp autumn day in Brooklyn, where I live. Images from the LRO suggested that these pits might unfold into caves that would make perfect sites for lunar exploration — campsites with a stable temperature, more protected from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micrometeorites.
There is something poetic in knowing that we evolved in caves and might one day inhabit caves on another celestial body, having invented the means to get there with the imagination that bloomed over millions of years in the lonely bone cave of the mind.
There is also something poetic in knowing that as we fantasize about leaving for the Moon, the Moon is leaving us.
The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this disquieting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. Nobody believed him — the Moon looked so steady, so unlosable. It took a quarter millennium for his theory to be vindicated: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the lunar surface and when laser beams were beamed a them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year — more than half the rate at which a child grows.
The Moon is leaving us because of the gravitational conversation between it and the Earth: the ocean tides. The drag they cause slows down the planet’s spin rate. Because gravity binds the Moon and the Earth, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us.
We know this thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the revelation that space is not flat, time is not absolute, and spacetime is a single fabric along the curvature of which everything, including light, moves.
I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.
Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote it, having always believed that every good children’s book is a work of philosophy in disguise, a field guide to the mystery we are a part of and the mystery we are — in the language of children, which is the language of curiosity and unselfconscious sincerity, such books speak the most timeless truths to the truest parts of us by asking the simplest, deepest questions to help us understanding the world and understanding ourselves so that we may be more fully alive.
By one of those wrinkles in time and chance that we call luck, shortly after I sent the manuscript to my friend Claudia at Enchanted Lion Books, I received a lovely note from a stranger named Sarah Jacoby in response to my essay about Margaret Wise Brown’s complicated love with Michael Strange. Sarah told me that she too had fallen under the spell of their singular love while illustrating a picture-book biography of Margaret. I ordered it and, enchanted by Sarah’s soulful watercolors and tender creatures, spontaneously invited her to illustrate my lunar story of loneliness and love on nothing more than an instinct of creative kinship. She must have felt it too because, felicitously, she said “yes.”
And so The Coziest Place on the Moon (public library) was born.
This is how it begins:
It was on a Tuesday in July that Re woke up feeling like the loneliest creature on Earth and decided to go live in the coziest place on the Moon.
At exactly 7:26 — a pretty number, a pretty hour — Re mounted a beam of light and sailed into space.
It took exactly 1.255 seconds, because light travels at the speed of dreams, to land exactly where Re wanted to land.
Across Sarah’s enchanted spacescapes, Re has a surprising encounter that takes the story to where it always wanted to go — a reckoning with how to bear our loneliness and what it really means to love.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-09-12 01:55:32
Evolution invented REM sleep, that ministry of dreams, to give us a safe way of practicing the possible into the real. The dreams of the night clarify our lives. The dreams of the day complicate them, charge them with the battery of fear and desire, quiver them with the urgency of our mortality and the fervor of our lust for life. To dream is to dare traversing the roiling ocean between what is and what could be on a ramshackle raft of determination and luck. The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life — that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail over the probable amid the cold austerity of eternal night.
But what may be even harder than getting what you dream of is knowing what to dream of, annealing your imagination and your desires enough to trust that your dreams are your own — not the second-hand dreams of your parents, not your heroes’ costumes of achievement, not your culture’s templates of success. “No one can acquire for another — not one,” Walt Whitman reckoned with how to own your life, “not one can grow for another — not one,” while two hundred miles north Thoreau was reckoning with the nature of success, concluding: If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
They are nothing less than patron saints of the human spirit, those who protect our dreams from the false gods of success.
Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint. Half a lifetime before taking up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (public library) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for — Roy captured the crux of our confusion about the real metrics of our lives a passage from her 1999 book The Cost of Living (public library).
Recounting a conversation with an old friend in the wake of the disorienting success of her novel The God of Small Things, Roy finds herself suffocated by the intimation that “the trajectory of a person’s happiness… had peaked because she had accidentally stumbled upon ‘success'” — a notion “premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody’s dreams.” She tells her friend:
You’ve lived too long in New York… There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.
The people who are less successful “in the most vulgar sense of the word,” she observes, are often more fulfilled — like her beloved uncle, who had become one of India’s first Rhodes scholars for his work in Greek and Roman mythology but had chosen to give up his academic career in order to start a pickle, jam, and curry-powder factory with his mother and build balsawood model airplanes in his basement.
When Roy’s friend meets her point with raised eyebrows awning a look of slight annoyance, she takes a moment to distill her thoughts, then writes them on a paper napkin for her friend to hold on to, formulating with that rare and exultant combination of passion and rigor what success really means:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Couple with Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit John Quincy Adams on impostor syndrome and the true measure of success.
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.
2025-09-10 09:23:40
“I think we moderns lack love,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war.
The paradox is that when we lack something long enough, we forget what it looks like, what it means, how to recognize it when it comes along. And so we love without knowing how to love, wounding ourselves and each other.
Over and over, in her novels and her essays, in her letters and her journals, Woolf tried to locate love, to anneal it, to define it in order to reinstate it at the center of life.
“To love makes one solitary,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway a generation before Sylvia Plath contemplated the loneliness of love — because “nothing is so strange when one is in love… as the complete indifference of other people.”
Two years later, she set out to “throw light upon the question of love” in To the Lighthouse, to illuminate its “thousand shapes.”
Nothing, she wrote, could be “more serious… more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death.”
Against “the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its scrupulosity,” she pitted the kind of love “that never attempted to clutch its object but, like the love that mathematicians bear their symbols or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.” She found it “helpful” and “exalting” to know that people could love like that.
At its best, at its truest, the experience of falling in love partakes of that exaltation, that transcendent participancy in the order of things. She captures the phase transition as her characters flood with “being in love”:
They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting [was] how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
Above all, perhaps, love is a function of time and chance, time and choice — an equivalence that Woolf conjures up on the pages of Orlando, drawing on her relationship with Vita Sackville-West to compose what Vita’s son would later call “the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Virginia] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.” Here, to love someone is to choose them again and again day after day, century after century, as they change and morph and fluctuate across the spectrum of being, to continue to see and cherish the kernel of the person beneath the costume of personality, the soul beneath the self. In this sense, love is a revelation of the essence — “something central,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, that permeates the fabric of a person, “something warm” that breaks up the surface and ripples the “cold contact” between people:
It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation… an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.
The great tragedy of human life is that we ask of love everything and gives us an almost; the great triumph is that we know this, know the price of the illumination, and we choose to love anyway.
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.
2025-09-06 10:55:47
Alpha and Omega, originally published in 1915, is the third title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition, as it appears in on its pages.
“Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith — this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking on the cold hard floor of a world that has always mistaken the limits of the imagination for the limits of reality. And I thought of Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — the classicist who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, who declared herself a “deeply religious atheist” and devoted her life to excavating the roots of the religious impulse from the clay of the psyche, teaching us that it is not who or what we pray to but what we pray for that reveals and redeems our lives; that what we pray for, not on our knees but in our choices and the stories we tell about them, conjures up the world we yearn to live in and it is our yearning that we act upon to make the world. Every choice we make in our political and personal lives is a prayer. All change is prayerful action toward a different kind of world — an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo.
“To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,” Jane Ellen Harrison declared from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life. She loved a woman a generation younger than her, loved a world millennia older than hers, loved ideas epochs ahead of her time. Virginia Woolf was taken by “her superb high thinking agnostic ways.” In the nascent evolutionary theory, which Harrison she insisted every thinking person should read, she saw a lens on the human soul and its constellation in societies, saw “how the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,” saw how science and spirituality both reach for that “invisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.” She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in “the value of each individual manifestation of life,” and above all in the merging of the two in “the strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.”
She cherished the “inward and abiding patience” of science, its “gentleness” in understanding the true timescales of change, how long it takes to uproot an invasive untruth from the garden of culture. Religion she regarded as a “necessary step in the evolution of human thought,” but she detested its dogmas — its “net of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,” the way its doctrines “distract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.” She sought to understand the need for it: “Man,” she wrote when we were all men, “feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his confused thinking, he develops a god.” Her god was not our maker but our making, not a pacifier for the lonely confusion of being a self but a clarifying force for the cosmos of connection between us and everything that is — that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is “the new religion for which the world wait” but “already is, if unconsciously, our religion.” She insisted that in order to attain “real freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,” we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. “Repression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,” she warned in the first year of the world’s first global war, urging us to take “a step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.”
Because she recognized that faith is an adaptation of the self, she was especially fascinated by experiences of religious conversion, by all mystical experiences, fascinated by how they tend to come just after moments of profound personal crisis or heartbreak, when “some shattering blow has been dealt to a man’s personality, to his affection or ambition.” Here was a cathartic unselfing, a submergence of the self into the oneness — in conversion, “the individual spirit is socialized.” She saw science as another instrument of unselfing, the way “it holds immediate personal reaction in suspense” to reveal a larger reality — “the whole, the unbounded whole,” to which religion is a reaction: In our inability to hold “the real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow,” we create “various and shifting” eikon — Greek for image, figure, or likeness, origin of the English icon. This “attempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known” is our self-expatriation from the mystery we live with, the mystery we are. Here speaks Harrison the heretic:
To be an Atheist, then, […] is to me personally almost an essential of religious life.
Harrison came to the study of faith through the back door. Raised “Evangelical, almost, though not quite, to the point of Calvinism,” she grew quickly disenchanted with the unthinking dogmas of religion, but remained “a ritualist at heart.” By her mid-twenties, she had become “a complete Agnostic.” She would later recall:
Having tried all the theologies open to me, I came to the conclusion that religion was not for me, that it said nothing to my spiritual life, and I threw myself passionately into the study of literature and art.
But that secular passion took her back to the sacred — Greek art led her to Greek mythology, where she could suddenly see religion’s myriad tendrils into every tissue of human thought and feeling, into the gloaming regions of the psyche, where our half-conscious hopes and fears dwell, into everything animating our search for meaning in these transient lives between atom and dust; she could suddenly touch the “vital and tremendous impulse” beneath all the “pernicious superstitious errors” of dogmatism, recognized it as “a thing fraught indeed with endless peril, but great and glorious, inspiring, worth all a lifetime’s devotion.”
“It was not that I was spiritually lonely or ‘seeking for the light,’” she recalled, “it was that I felt religion was my subject.” It held no interest to her as a “personal question,” but she was drawn to how, across cultures and civilizations, it has voiced and shaped the questions our species asks of the universe, the questions we ask of ourselves — the unanswerable questions the only answer to which is life.
This is why Harrison never faulted religion for the divisive dogmas sundering humanity, for she saw that it only “embodies and reflects social fact,” the fact of our need to feel right and right together, breaking our fingers on the faults of the designated other — a gesture we mistake for belonging, a false kind of faith. She could have been writing about the herd righteousness of social media when she admonished, ahead of two world wars, that “the only human will to which we bow nowadays is the collective will of the people of which we are ourselves a part.” Righteousness is a species of certainty, mortised and tenoned with the myth of control, and the sense of control has always been what we reach for in the absence of faith.
She drew on St. Paul and Darwin, on Whitman and Tagore, guarding religion from theology and defining it simply as “that commerce with the unseen and unknown” that is the natural consequence of our imagination and our capacity for free thought. Theology, she thought, is a metastasis of our unease with the unknown, of our need to create a referent for it in the known — something to make us feel “relieved, comforted, reassured, at home” — and bow to it, calling it God. But such gods, she cautioned, are “a moving away from religion . . . a rationalizing into the known, not a relation of faith to the unknown.” It was faith she was interested in — the psychology of it, the source of it, the different meanings and manifestations of it to different people at different times across different cultures. The questions at the heart of faith — what we believe in, what we pray for, how we ritualize our beliefs in opinions and actions — became her lens for understanding nearly every aspect of human culture and society.
In consonance with Willard Gibbs’s koan-like pronouncement that in science “the sum is simpler than its parts,” Harrison knew that in society “the real issue of a problem is always best seen when its factors are so far as possible simplified.” Equality was the great problem of her time and dismantling the wall society has always erected against it — the wall called bias — was the great occupation of her mind. She recognized bias as a species of belief, related therefore to the religious impulse, and she saw the “serious spiritual danger” that all systems of oppression pose — to all whose lives they touch, but most of all to the oppressor, the warden of bias.
Because she knew that “thought, to be living, does and must arise straight out of life,” she knew that to understand a style of thinking — a belief, an opinion, a bias — one must understand the life from which it arose. “What always interests and often helps me,” she wrote, “is to be told of any conviction seriously and strongly felt by another mind, especially if I can at the same time learn in detail the avenues by which that conviction has been approached.” When a young colleague declared that no one over the age of thirty is worth speaking to, Harrison delighted in the live specimen on her dissection table:
This is really very interesting and extraordinarily valuable. Here we have, not a reasoned conclusion, but a real live emotion, a good solid prejudice.
[…]
It is my business to understand and, if I can, learn from it. Give me an honest prejudice, and I am always ready to attend to it.
She saw right and wrong as distractions from what must always be the aim and the end:
I am long past blame and praise, or, rather, I am not yet ready for them; there is so much still waiting to be understood.
This way of thinking is, of course, not only countercultural but downright heretical in our own era of blame-thirsty opinions ossified into identities — because understanding is a dynamic thing, evolving as it integrates and relates new information, it is the antithesis to the stasis of opinion and an antidote to it, a way of remembering that we must go on changing in order to go on living. This is why Harrison held her own opinions lightly — she knew that life changes us, changes the fabric of a person, “dyes and alters the whole personality, so that it never is, never can be the same.” She reflects on her changed views on suffrage, to which she was initially indifferent — that Stockholm syndrome of the psyche that hypnotizes the oppressed, even the brilliant among them, into siding with the oppressor:
Politics seemed to me, personally, heavy and sometimes rather dirty work.
[…]
I am not ashamed of my lack of interest in politics. That deficiency still remains and must lie where it has always lain, on the knees of the gods. But that I failed to sympathize with a need I did not feel, of that I am truly ashamed. From that inertia and stupidity I was roused by [the] delicate and fastidious women who faced the intimate disgusts of prison life because they and their sister-women wanted a Vote. Something caught me in the throat. I felt that they were feeling, and then, because I felt, I began to understand. To feel keenly is often, if not always, an amazing intellectual revelation. You have been wandering in that disused rabbit-warren of other people’s opinions and prejudices which you call your mind, and suddenly you are out in the light.
Suddenly, she could see the patriarchy for the dogma that it is, gender for the dogma that it is, socially constructed and morally enforced. Long before her friend Virginia Woolf threw the gauntlet of Orlando at the binaries of gender, Jane Ellen Harrison set out to dismantle the dogma. The mind, she insisted, has no gender, but each mind has elements of the feminine and the masculine — the feminine being more “resonant,” the masculine more “insulated.” This word choice is too peculiar not to betray Jane Ellen Harrison’s influence on Woolf, who would soon write in A Room of One’s Own that the most “naturally creative” mind is “the androgynous mind,” which is “resonant and porous.” Each person, Harrison wrote in a blazing public letter to an anti-suffragist, is the product of “an accident of sex” within and around which are gender roles that play out politically, socially, and personally — artificial binaries that are a product of a “moral industry” resting upon a “rather complex confusion of thought . . . dangerous and disastrous to the individual, dangerous and disastrous to the society of which he or she is a unit.”
These were heretical ideas, a century ahead of their time. Suffrage was to her merely an instrument for breaking down these binaries in order to liberate the human potential in each person and thus elevate the whole of society. I don’t know if even Jane Ellen Harrison could envision a world in which women enter politics in large numbers and in leadership positions — even the greatest visionaries can never fully bend their gaze past the horizon of their culture’s given — but I do think she understood both the vector of change and the long axis of time along which it progresses, always against the tremendous counterforce of the status quo. More than a century before the world’s second-largest democracy twice rejected a female president, she observed:
The beginnings of a movement are always dark and half unconscious, characterized rather by a blind unrest and sense of discomfort than by a clear vision of the means of relief.
It is sobering to find ourselves still in the restless shadows a century hence. But she understood the paradox of why even in our reach for light we are prone to self-sabotage: “Perfect sanity can never fairly be demanded from those in bondage or in pain.” This, perhaps, can only be so: All substantive change requires reaching for something so different from what is as to border on the unimaginable, which in turn requires trusting that the unimaginable is possible — a supreme act of faith. Faith is always larger than reason in its imagination and is therefore saner.
This is why, although she lamented living through an “anti-rational age” in which reason seemed to have “suffered a certain eclipse,” Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life, that time is the richest subject of philosophy, that the poet’s job is to love people and show them “the bigness, the beauty, of their lives,” that science should resist the push toward specialization and break down the artificial boundaries between disciplines that keep us from seeing the full picture of reality. Out of her life and her work, out of her politics and her passions, arises her simple animating ethos: “By contacts we are saved.”
And so, having made a life in scholarship, she returned over and over to love — the supreme unselfing, the great cathedral of the mystery to which all science and all religion are an incomplete response, the light looking out from the face between the palms that we may call faith. “Learning severs us from all but a few — love reunites us,” she wrote. “Such is the mystery of life.”
The day after Jane Ellen Harrison died at age seventy-seven — an unseasonable spring day of “bitter windy rain” — Virginia Woolf took a break from working on Orlando — her four-century love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the great love of her own life — and went for a walk in the cemetery, where she ran into the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, Jane’s partner, “the colour of dirty brown paper,” distraught and “half sleep” with grief.
Virginia recounted her encounter with the broken Hope:
We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.
Virginia got to the funeral just as the service was ending. The clergyman was reading “some of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible,” but she felt unmoved.
As usual, the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is ‘God’ & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?
Outside, “a bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed.”
Later, Hope later received a note of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. “It was more comforting than all my other letters put together,” she told a friend half a lifetime later. It read:
But remember what you have had.
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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2025-09-05 03:39:30
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”
Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see, lensed through its anticipations and past experience. “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote about the science of looking. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote a century earlier about the art of seeing.
It does not come easily to us, true noticing — that transmutation of looking into seeing. We must apprentice ourselves to it daily. It is our life’s work.
The best apprenticeship I know is spending time in nature, there amid the ceaseless quivering of phenomena and quickening of aliveness, the deep stillnesses and broad silences, all the dazzling othernesses with their myriad occasions for unselfing. The second best is poet Lia Purpura’s magnificent essay collection On Looking (public library) — an invitation to see the world whole by apprehending its details and the dialogue between them: church spires and glaciers and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, the wings of the house fly “gently veined like a fine pen drawing of tributaries,” the late-afternoon light silvering the sardines in the open can. What emerges is a reckoning with the way “events crosshatch” and “particulars mingle, particulars assert, conspire, assemble,” so that “the moments go layering up” to stratify life into the shape of being.
Purpura writes:
If looking… is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer, it is the sole practice I had available to me as a child. By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.
[…]
I never thought to say, or call this “God,” which even then sounded like shorthand, a refusal to be speechless in the face of occurrences, shapes, gestures happening daily, and daily reconstituting sight. “God,” the very attitude of the word — for the lives of words were also palpable to me — was pushy. Impatient. Quantifiable. A call to jettison the issue, the only issue as I understood it: the unknowable certainty of being alive, of being a body untethered from origin, untethered from end, but also so terribly here.
To concentrate attention in an act of noticing is to consecrate this here — a way of blessing our own lives.
Purpura considers the consecration:
It’s the noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.
Shows we’re in use.
Uses us.
Right now.
Right this minute.
Anything we notice, then, becomes a pinhole through which the whole universe rushes in — but only if we open the valve of fear and preconception. A century after poet H.D. anchored her ravishing metaphor for how we see in a jellyfish, Purpura writes:
There is not, as many think, any air at all in a jellyfish, just organized cilia and bell muscles, a gelatinous scaffolding for hydrostatic propulsion. These simplest drifters are like bubbles of milky glass — and who doesn’t want to see through to a thing’s inner workings, the red nerves, and blood and poison with a clear pulse, circulating… In order to see their particular beauty, to see them, we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.
Then there is the night itself, in the smallest patch of which Purpura finds evidence that “every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal.”
Scraps of matter, scraps of time, filigrees of flesh — these are the constituents of our lives. We see with the mind, but it is the body that does the looking. To notice is to orient the body to the world, to turn matter over on the tongue of the mind until, like a koan, it releases its meaning. And since time is the substance we are made of, to notice things is also, inevitably, to notice time — “the loops of years pierced and containing the point.” When a storm domes her neighborhood in a particular darkness that transports her to the storms of her childhood, Purpura observes:
What it is — is what else it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.
What it is — is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall; leaves dry, scratch and blow, not crabs,” I’m jittery walking down the street — not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid — but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an elsewhere comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind — and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.
These Möbius moments of time folding in on itself often feel significant, sign-like — and yet they betoken the difference between signs and omens, living reminders that meaning does not inhere in the world but in the stories we tell ourselves about it. Purpura writes:
These moments of recurrence/concurrence are not messages fluttering toward, bearing secrets, but stories in which we are part of the telling. We are, for a spell, of the path where shape forms, where flux assembles, briefly, a center. And there are so many centers.
“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” Kierkegaard wrote a quarter millennium earlier in his refutation of time. And if Muriel Rukeyser, who was right about so much, was right that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” we are the makers of the moment with the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be alive.
On the first anniversary of a significant death, paging through a catalogue of model houses while thinking about Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” Purpura writes:
I keep coming back to this spot of green. That’s all, just the green, which, above all, holds me. It’s of ripe avocados and hard young apples. Thin-skinned lake plants, as they float, cloud and wave. A curl of lime peel. New moss. Peridot, milked down with light. This simple-flat, sad-tender green, suspended against the broom-swept cirrus sky… Of all the green I make a stillness. Of sun-through-leaves, now, this June, I make a stillness. Of all the green, transparent spots I make a moment.
A century after Virginia Woolf located the art of presence in those “moments of being” that make you who you are, Purpura touches the beating heart of one such moment:
The end of the day swells like a breaker, holds itself curled against the green field. Keeps itself brief above the grasses. Keeps itself sheer before it falls. Now in the half-light above the field, the day is something vanished-but-present, or present-but-going. A crest then a wobble, hovering.
“Into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen,” Jane Kenyon wrote in one of my favorite poems. It is the falling we are here to notice in the half-light between never before and never again.
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.