2025-04-26 01:14:07
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life.
Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.
You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. “The gardener,” Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, “digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”
This is why Debbie Millman (yes) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything.
A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity — a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself.
Page after painted page, Debbie’s lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree.
Seeds and flowers come to punctuate the story of her life — chapters ending, chapters beginning, the maelstroms of uncertainty, the discomposure of loss, the discomposure of love. They appear at auspicious moments, illustrating the vital difference between signs and omens:
Walking by a few days later, she halts mid-stride upon seeing the peonies blooming once more — only to realize that another mourner had placed a posy of plastic flowers where the real ones had thrived. In the artifice, connection; in the simulacrum, a prayerful bow before the deepest reality we share — time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss.
Half a lifetime later, living in a brownstone of her own, Debbie nurses herself back from heartbreak by making a small hopeful flower garden with a birdbath and tending to it daily with blind devotion.
She falls in love again, marries her soul mate, moves to California for a season and begins growing vegetables.
She navigates the terror and uncertainty of the pandemic by watching the smallest things grow.
And when the world finally regains its precarious balance, she travels its jungles and gardens, orchards and forests, to kneel on the woolly moss of Ireland, to bow before Japan’s sacred lotus, to savor Morocco’s Sanguine oranges and Tuscany’s Pesca Regina di Londa peaches, to run her hands over the elephantine trunks of Cambodia’s banyan trees and her fingers along the fibonacci spines of Mexico’s agave.
Over and over, she returns to her own garden for consolation and calibration. She learns patience. She learns perspective. Watching things come alive after a long germination, she begins to befriend time — the time it takes for a heart to heal, for a world to heal, for an ending to end so that a beginning may begin. Watching things die despite her best efforts, she confronts her lifelong fear of doing anything she isn’t good at — that is, she faces the abyss between the ego and the universe, the will and the world, the abyss in which we live.
What emerges from her Love Letter to a Garden (public library) is a tender reminder that we are here to plant a garden in the abyss, and to trust time.
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.
2025-04-25 08:52:05
I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the easiest and most marketable, because amid a culture that reduces literature to a commodity and binds readers in a moral paradox they ask us to think more widely and feel more deeply.
Having always believed that the most valiant way to complain is to create, I have joined forces with my friends at McNally Jackson — New York’s most beloved independent bookstore, and the independent publisher with whom I partnered on my Almanac of Birds — to launch Marginalian Editions: an act of resistance to the erasures of culture and a loving corrective for the collective selective memory called history.
Every year, Marginalian Editions revives three such out-of-print treasures that offer a torchlight in our search for meaning — from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s books. I introduce each with a reflection on how it has shaped my inner world and why our world needs it. Some are forgotten books by beloved writers like Margaret Wise Brown, Henry Miller, and Diane Ackerman. Some are books of timeless resonance by forgotten visionaries like Kathleen Lonsdale (the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist who became the first woman to preside over the British Association of Sciences and helped keep the Cold War from ending in a nuclear holocaust), Jane Ellen Harrison (the iconoclastic historian who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, bridged science and religion, and influenced writers as various as Virginia Woolf and Mary Beard), and Hockley Clarke (a onetime teenage soldier who spent a decade befriending a family of blackbirds).
This is our inaugural trio:
A deep bow to Margaret Harring at McNally Jackson for the raptures of geometry and color gracing our covers and fathoms of gratitude to Elizabeth Alexander, whose poem “Amistad” led me to the stunning Muriel Rukeyser book I was so determined to save from oblivion that I launched this entire imprint.
Below is my foreword as it appears in that spark-book of the series:
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) begins her book-length prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) — a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: “a phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art”; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following “the imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the impelled spirit.”
Rukeyser was twenty-one when Theory of Flight — her debut poetry collection, based on the flying lessons she had taken barely out of her teens — won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. Critics didn’t know what to make of her. Some were offended by “the confident self-assurance of the young woman taking on the Whitman mantle of prophecy.” Others saw her unexampled art as the kind “that makes people act a little more valiantly when they have understood it.” A year earlier, she had been arrested in Alabama while reporting on the Scottsboro case; a year later, she would arrive in Spain on the eve of the Civil War to cover the defiant alternative to the Nazi Olympics in Berlin–the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona. She would go on to place her very body in the path of a South Korean dictatorship that had sentenced an obscure radical poet to death. Her motto would become: “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” She would never cease defending and celebrating the “axiom-breaking” visionaries who dismantle the world in order to reimagine it. She would become the poet of possibility.
The daughter of a Yonkers bookkeeper and a concrete salesman, Rukeyser had been writing poems since she was a teenager; she had been trying to see the world whole. The Yale prize conferred upon her the thorny crown of expectation to become America’s next great poet. And she would. Adrienne Rich would regard her as a genius “beyond her time,” and Anne Sexton would call her “Muriel, mother of everyone.” But first she would spend seven years immersed in the world of this strange and solitary axiom breaker, whose story interlaces with the story of science, of America, of our search for equilibrium in the very substance of being.
Working in silence and isolation, through indifference and rejection, Willard Gibbs, with his gentle beautiful face and his unwillingness to concede that anything is unknowable, revolutionized thermodynamics — the science of heat, work, and energy that governs the universe and its every echo in an engine, in the ocean’s tides, in the energy metabolism that keeps us alive. “He becomes a shadow radiating light; by that light we see the map of possibilities,” Rukeyser writes. “He had taken a field not regarded as fertile and had taught the laws of its fertility; this lean, laconic gardener still gives us harvest, and promise of more.” Einstein placed him in the highest rank of genius. Ludwig Boltzmann lauded his statistical mechanics as the greatest achievement in science since Newton’s theory of gravity. Many consider him the greatest scientist America has so far produced. The head of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company — an industry that could not exist without Gibbs’s work, an industry that evolved to become the internet — lamented that Gibbs’s science is so difficult to convey precisely because it is so fundamental: “a ponderous foundation on which so great a superstructure has been built that no one notices the foundation anymore.”
The foundation was vast and various. The statistical mechanics he invented came to underpin fields as disparate as game theory, weather forecasting, the study of neural networks, and the calculation of life insurance. His vector analysis shaped the geometry of motion applied in miracles of invention he could have never imagined: cinema, space flight, self-driving cars. His equilibrium studies shed light on the ancient mystery of human blood. His work on heat fostered a new understanding of the most haunting and intimate consequence of thermodynamics — entropy, that grand cosmic march of dissolution dragging us along the vector of irreversibility from order to disorder and dissolution: the salad that will never again become a garden, the first gray hair auguring the grave; it was Gibbs’s entropic thermodynamics that led Max Planck, in his passionate debates with Boltzmann, to come up with the notion of energy quanta that lit the dawn of quantum physics. His phase rule — Gibbs’s great triumph — illuminated the thermodynamic properties of a system as matter changes from one state to another across solid, liquid, and gas, a system for “the gathering of atoms, of constellations.” It made rubber gloves and rockets possible. It sparked a new use of alloy systems that ushered in the birth of automobiles, air travel, and radio; it helped agricultural chemists better understand soil, that lifeblood of the biosphere; it made Rukeyser’s father’s work, cement, possible. Edison profited greatly from knowledge of the phase rule — without it, there could be no incandescent bulb. The pioneering polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team froze to death by ignorance of it — they had left their oil cans, precious source of heat and fuel, atop an icy cairn, not aware that at extremely low temperatures, the tin alloy changes phase and turns to powder. Today, the phase rule underpins the new field of computational material science, which allows us to computationally model the properties of alloys never previously imagined and then to make them — high-entropy alloys that can withstand the roiling atmospheres of other worlds to let our space probes gather clues about the origin, nature, and possibility of life.
“Here was a principle that had made a clean sweep,” Rukeyser writes, “not only of its science, but of a whole way of thinking.” Here was a mind “controlled and flowing, the source of a flashing river,” heavy with the burden of communicating itself to a world not yet ready for him — this reserved and intensely imaginative man who lived with his sister and never married, who honed his equations walking the garden and climbing the red canyons around New Haven, who spent nights delighting in the chess puzzles of Alice in Wonderland with the neighbor’s children, who wrote poetry and believed above all else that “the whole is simpler than its parts.” A visitor to one of his lectures remembered walking into a classroom with only four students “sitting with faraway looks like angels’ on their faces” as Gibbs drew circles on the blackboard, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Through his arcane equations, Muriel Rukeyser saw an expression of “the great dream of order that moved any man or woman living in protest against the forces of the nineteenth century”; saw a creator who “lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America”; saw the kinship between his time and hers, as we see the kinship between her time and ours: the way “people seemed, as they do in any wartime, to open their minds to their relation to human beings,” and how “in these sudden wakening to old relationships, they searched for new ideas”; saw work that “led up to fearfully significant and branching changes: a fountain of results, reaching in war and peace, not only to our moment, but to the future” — work done in science but furnishing a framework for society, for creativity, for the life of the human spirit.
Through her twenties, through the outbreak of World War II, Rukeyser labored at this elaborate lattice of ideas, never losing sight of the parallels between his science and her art: “He was in the position of a great poet whose idiom must reach its audience through dilution after dilution, the work of prose writers and lesser poets, imitators and contemporaries who in their detailed flashes indicate his wider constellations.” She would later say she wrote the book she needed to read. At its heart is a search for an organizing principle of the imagination — in science, in art, in politics, in the collaborative creation we call culture:
The parable of his acceptance and rejection, of his background and his emergence, becomes a parable of human freedom and a free attitude toward the gifts which the imagination makes. Truth, belonging to no group, no leader, no army, may be chosen by a free people; that is a test of both for freedom and for truth. This power, which may emerge from the stillest of centers, which has emerged from the imagination of Gibbs, is to be used. It belongs to the stream of that great tradition from which free people are at liberty to choose their own ancestors. Gibbs is an ancestor and a contemporary of our moment in history. We bear many of the penalties he bore; many of the narrownesses are what we suffer from today, in our time and in our war; but in the generosity of his spirit he made his gifts. They, in their turn, enter into history; they are an image of its tendency.
We are still living these tendencies of history a century after Rukeyser and two after Gibbs, in our time of new wars and new leaps of the imagination. Our redemption, if it is to be had, lies still in the same recognition:
The sight of the truth is the crucial vision; the sight of the chance of America, or the chance of people anywhere in the world, to use the gifts that are offered. War is made by imagination, and the peace that follows is made in the same way. The tendencies of history are directed by the acceptance or rejection of the imagination. Economic pressures and the will of the people, aroused to resistance or producing in the full vividness of conscious life — they make these tendencies, which may go burning to war, or flow toward creative belief and the wish for a living order.
There is a lineage that emerges, a lineage of revelations and responsibilities, of which we are the inheritors and stewards. Likening Gibbs to Melville and to Whitman — creators all obscure and neglected at the peak of their creative powers, who went on to become great catalytic forces for other minds — Rukeyser writes:
We look for ancestors as if the world were completed. It is constantly being torn away. Wars and suppression on every level tear it. The life of the world is in its living people, in those who express that life and the dynamic equilibrium, which is its home. Once that expression is made, the responsibility is to receive it.
“It is said that his time was easier than ours,” James Baldwin wrote in his consummate essay on Shakespeare, “but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” Muriel Rukeyser never fell prey to the ahistorical self-pity of the present. Writing at the peak of the second planetwide war of the twentieth century, she still saw the nineteenth as “more desperate and contradictory than any other hundred years” and its final quarter — the years when Gibbs’s great breakthrough was lighting other minds afire — as “ill-equipped and grasping, romantic and wasteful, tinkering with the details of the democratic state and ignoring the vast hope and invention that would have to come before that state could be confirmed.” Still, she saw deeper into the heart of the epoch than its want and waste and farther past the horizon of possibility:
Even so, in these years, the country lifted up freshness and hope, a frontier brightness as the frontier passed. That line had wandered West as the equilibrium of America changed — indeed, as an image, the country might be seen as one of Gibbs’s mixed fluids, with the frontier, a barrier of single molecules, drawn down the map as a surface of discontinuity. The hope was always there: a lawless hope, since no one could predict the future of this system, unless they worked as Gibbs was working, frankly with partial knowledge, toward great and partial ends.
Throughout the book, Rukeyser keeps widening the aperture of attention and connection without sacrificing the finest detail, writing with the same vigor of mind about democracy as she does about vector analysis and membrane equilibrium and the crystalline phases of ammonium nitrate. To paint the landscape of thought in which Gibbs worked, she invokes John Quincy Adams and William James and a constellation of scientists, writers, and politicians who were once household names and who now draw a blank in most minds — a haunting reminder of how ahistorical our lives are, how limited our perspective by the collective selective memory of our culture, with all its erasures and indifferences. Over and over, Rukeyser counters this loss of perspective, drawing a continuous thread of revelation between the Amistad slave uprising and America’s first observatory, between Newton and Whitman, between the phase transition of alloys and the political forces behind World War II. Over and over, she zooms in to the level of the atom and out to the level of the world — the human world, that thing of chaos and contradiction, charged and fractal in its narratives of history, in its visions of possible futures. Adrienne Rich would come to laud her as “one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.” It was through the life of Gibbs that the young Rukeyser honed her reparative vision, her lifelong insistence on the need to integrate and connect — people, ideas, disciplines, differences. Later, she would come to see poetry as an “exchange of energy,” a “system of relationships” — notions at the center of Willard Gibbs’s science, at the center of her vision for a thriving democracy that permeates the book like a spell and a summons, cast upon our own time, calling us to rise to it with our own lives:
The highest level, that level of our thought at which Gibbs stands, looks to the past with re-affirmation and to the future with foreboding. Such foreboding is not the dark gaze, but the creation of images, which speak for the future as it arrives, with the speed of the poet . . . The re-affirmations are on the side of human chance. And it is this combination that permits Gibbs to play his immense part in a world in rearrangement, whose development he, as a mortal man, did not foresee.
What emerges from his story is a portrait of a country, a century, a cosmos of creativity that would color every realm of the human endeavor for epochs to come — an antidote to the artificial split, often antagonistic, between the different kinds of imagination. Enveloped in Rukeyser’s passionate and rigorously researched prose, Gibbs’s life becomes a living poem of possibility.
All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts by Muriel Rukeyser
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.
2025-04-21 04:43:59
Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings.
In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order. In the extreme conditions of the kiln, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance converge to make a third glaze that may turn out to be infinitely more beautiful than either of the two, or disastrous, discolored, hideously cracked with exposed impurities and cratered with burst bubbles.
This, of course, is what happens in our most intimate relationships, themselves the product of chemistry and chance. Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.
A century after the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore observed that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,” physicist Carlo Rovelli traces the scientific path to that same truth in his excellent quantum primer Helgoland (public library), titled after the windswept North Sea island on which the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg arrived at the idea that became the mathematical blueprint for the staggering cathedral of quantum field theory: that revolutionary description of how one aspect of reality — one object, one entity, one part of nature — manifests itself to any other. Because every description of a thing is a claim about its nature, at the heart of the theory is the claim that interaction is the fundamental reality of the universe, that there are no entities as such — only dynamic manifestations of which we catch an evanescent glimpse and call that flashing image entity.
Rovelli writes:
The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call “reality,” is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other.
[…]
The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions.
This is why objectifying — the impulse to reduce something or someone to a set of properties — always misses the point of the objectified, and why we always draw closer to reality when we instead “subjectify” the universe, as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her magnificent meditation on the interplay of poetry and science. The intersubjective — the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties — is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you — the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.
Observing that the “phantasmal world of quanta is our world,” Rovelli writes:
The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision. It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.
With an eye to quantum entanglement, he articulates what I learned at the kiln:
Even if we know all that can be predicted about one object and another object, we still cannot predict everything about the two objects together. The relationship between two objects is not something contained in one or the other of them: it is something more besides.
The great paradox of this subject-object approach to modeling reality is that all of our descriptive models are inherently claims of an outside perspective on it, and yet they all arise from our mental activity, which is inherently interior. In a passage that calls to mind quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” Rovelli writes:
If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world… is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based. If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.
This fundamental axiom of being is, to me, the first and final proof that the measure of our lives is the light between us.
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.
2025-04-18 05:23:51
The two great tasks of the creative life are keeping failure from breaking the spirit and keeping success from ossifying it. If you do attain success by the weft and warp of hard work and luck, it takes great courage to resist becoming a template of yourself that replicates whatever has garnered you acclaim in the past, continually lowering and lowering your willingness to take risks, narrowing and narrowing your locus of curiosity — that elemental building block of creativity.
In 2005, while working as a designer at a branding agency, Debbie Millman — my onetime partner, now closest friend — rented a microphone and a room in an office building and sat down, excited and nervous and overprepared, to conduct her first interview. She had never interviewed anyone before. The word “podcast” did not yet exist. She had to pay a commercial internet radio service to air her tiny labor of love, which she called Design Matters.
It began as an inquiry into how her design heroes came to be who they are. But in a living testament to Bertrand Russell’s abiding insight that the key to a fulfilling life as you grow older is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” over the years the interviews rippled beyond design to draw out the inner lives of musicians and poets, philosophers and physicists, and a panoply of artists across every discipline. These conversations would widen and widen to become one great investigation of what it takes to design a creative life, a life of substance and significance that touches other lives in a meaningful way.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Design Matters — the best of which is collected in this excellent book — I decided to revisit my favorite interviews from the entire archive and apply to them my bird divination process, reading over the hundreds of pages of transcripts, taking down words and phrases that called out to my imagination as particularly original or beautiful or plainly true, and rearranging them into a kind of lyric, or perhaps divination, that captures the spirit of the show and the overarching philosophy for living emanating from it.
I used twenty voices from the twenty years — nineteen interview subjects (Suleika Jaouad, David Spergel, Rosanne Cash, Jacqueline Woodson, Alison Bechdel, Roxane Gay, Joan As Police Woman, Indigo Girls, Susan Cain, Esther Perel, Alain de Botton, Sophie Blackall, Jad Abumrad, Krista Tippett, Seth Godin, Toshi Reagon, Tim Ferriss, Elizabeth Alexander) and Debbie herself. Each line comes from a different person, sometimes two in a single line. The final stanza, beginning with Debbie’s signature “And remember…” that closes every podcast episode, is composed entirely of her own words and phrases spoken in these nineteen interviews.
Here is the fruit of this strange, wildly time-consuming, and utterly joyful labor:
TWENTY WAYS TO MATTER
Excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth —
the deeper you go, the simpler it gets:
the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss —
all of it part of the same fabric,
all just a story
emerging from the quantum foam.Move through the world
knowing that everyone around you
is doing the best they can,
that humanity is capable
of the Moonlight Sonata
and the concentration camp,
that you are a piece
of the same puzzle.If you are longing for
the world to be more perfect
do something about it:
become a kind of translator
between reality and possibility,
cast a light on a parallel world,
that little speck in the distance —
it is the hope, it is the struggle, it is the reward.Let go of the future
but hold on to the beautiful things
that, like music, exist outside of time —
the sense of wonder and love and light.When the chord changes on you
what if you harmonized it?The black hole of your devastation
is a wild strange expansive place.
We are really good at coming up
with reasons to not go there.
Go there.
You will find the seeds
that become galaxies of growth.
You will find
what the soul and the spirit and the heart
need to know.Be on the inside of your heart,
make a home inside yourself,
for to keep other people happy
is distraction from the real work of being
in which there is no final test
for how to be human —
only the open question
of how to be yourself
which you must answer daily
with all the strength and kindness
that you’ve got.And remember
that life is an extraordinary creative collaboration,
that if we keep shining a light
on the things that mean and matter the most
the light overcomes the darkness,
that love is the oldest light in the universe
and when you live and work and listen
with open-hearted love
everything
everything
everything
is possible
for your 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.
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.
2025-04-16 06:54:02
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.
But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.
The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.
The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.
The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.
The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.
The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.
The loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.
In his 2008 psychology classic Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (public library), Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all the possible lonelinesses into the three core kinds that pulsate beneath our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls “the profound loneliness of being close to God.” This I take to mean the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity that dwells at the intersection of time, chance, and love; God is just what some call their dream of a crosswalk when they face that intersection.
The first two lonelinesses are rooted in time, which is itself fractal — there are many kinds of time we live with. The third kind of loneliness deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time — like music, like wonder, like love. It is an existential loneliness, a creative loneliness, made not from the atoms of now that compose the other two lonelinesses but from the atoms of forever.
Because we, creatures made of time, cannot comprehend forever, it is easy to call it God — that catchall for everything immense and incomprehensible we face in ourselves. But this is an illusion — forever too is fractal, with myriad visitations of it in our daily lives. In a testament to James Baldwin’s timeless insistence that “the poets… are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” it is not the psychologists or the philosophers but the poets who part the veil of illusion to reveal the truth:
SOME KINDS OF FOREVER VISIT YOU
by Brenda HillmanThe unknowns are up early;
they browse through the bronze
porch bells. Crows
call & late
apples blaze
toward western emptiness.
In your illness,
the edges hesitate;
like the revolt
of workers, they
will take a while…Here comes the fond
mild winter; other
realms are noisy
& unanimous. You tap
the screen & dream
while waiting; four
kinds of forever
visit you today:
something, nothing,
everything & art,
greater than you are
& of your making —
Poem courtesy of the Academy of American Poets
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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2025-04-12 07:34:07
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing.
But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love (the kind we feel for siblings, children, parents, and friends), eros (the love of lovers), and agape (the deepest, purest, most impersonal and spiritual love). After the Enlightenment discounted all love as a malfunction of reason, the Romantics reclaimed it and revised the ancient taxonomy into a hierarchy, under the tyranny of which we still live, placing eros at the pinnacle of human existence. And yet our deepest relationships — the ones in which we both become most fully ourselves and are most emboldened to change — tend to elude the commonplace classifications and to shape-shift across the span of life.
Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen when she wielded her uncommon intellect at these questions on the pages of her journal, later published as Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library). In between composing her resolutions for a life worth living, Beauvoir began thinking seriously about the nature of love, its dialogue with her own nature, what she may want of it and what it may demand of her — “in brief, how souls can interact with one another.” In the midst of an intellectual infatuation with a young man who would go on to become an eminent philosopher himself — not the one she would eventually marry in a convention-breaking union of minds — she examines the substance of the feeling:
To say that I love him, what does that mean? Does the word itself have a meaning?
Questioning the tangle of idolization and desire that masquerades as love, she grows suspicious of the very concept of personal love as an absurdity against the backdrop of the largest love we can carry:
When you love beings… not for their intelligence, etc., but for what they have in their very depths, for their soul… you love them equally: they are entireties, perfect inasmuch as they are (to be = perfection). Why then is there this desire to get closer? To know them, and thus to love them more perfectly for what they really are. What is surprising is not that we love them all, but rather that we prefer one of them.
Invoking the love she feels for her friends, the sum total of them, she writes:
Something sharp runs through me which is my love for them… This is not intellectual love. This is a love for souls, from all of me towards all of them in their entirety.
Over and over she returns to the elemental question:
What then is love? Not much, not much… Sensitivity, imagination, fatigue, and this effort to depend on another; the taste for the mystery of the other and the need to admire… What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.
Drawing on Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, in which for any conscious subject to be free means freeing the other, she arrives at a “formula” for the ideal friendship: “absolute reciprocity and the identity of consciousness.” The cultural ideal of romantic love, on the other hand, replaces this “absolute reciprocity” with engulfment and sublimation of one self into the other. She writes:
It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.
This, of course, is Rilke’s model of a perfect relationship — one in which “the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other” — consonant with Octavio Paz’s lovely definition of love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”
Beauvoir ultimately found it not in romantic love but in the deepest friendship of her life — that with Zaza, her childhood best friend.
A year older than her and also enamored of books, Zaza was the only one with whom the young Simone could have “real conversations.” In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (public library) — the first volume of her autobiography, largely a loving memorial to this formative relationship — she would write of talking to Zaza:
My tongue was suddenly loosened, and a thousand bright suns began blazing in my breast; radiant with happiness.
When Zaza’s dress caught fire and charred her leg to the bone, she endured the long convalescence valiantly, then went on to climb trees and do cartwheels, to play the piano and the violin. Beauvoir relays a moment radical in the context of early twentieth-century French bourgeoise society, emblematic of Zaza’s defiant spirit and playful disdain for convention:
One year at a music recital [Zaza] did something while she was playing the piano which was very nearly scandalous. The hall was packed. In the front rows were the pupils in their best frocks, curled and ringleted and beribboned, who were awaiting their turn to show off their talents. Behind them sat the teachers and tutors in stiff black silk bodices, wearing white gloves. At the back of the hall were seated the parents and their guests. Zaza, resplendent in blue taffeta, played a piece which her mother thought was too difficult for her; she always had to scramble through a few of the bars: but this time she played it perfectly, and, casting a triumphant glance at [her mother], put out her tongue at her! All the little girls’ ringlets trembled with apprehension and the teachers’ faces froze into disapproving masks. But when Zaza came down from the platform her mother gave her such a light-hearted kiss that no one dare reprimand her. For me this exploit surrounded her with a halo of glory. Although I was subject to laws, to conventional behaviour, to prejudice, I nevertheless liked anything novel, sincere, and spontaneous. I was completely won over by Zaza’s vivacity and independence of spirit.
This strength of spirit, this defiance of the givens, is what the young Simone most admired about her friend — it emboldened her to defy convention in her own life.
Part of the unexamined convention Beauvoir had internalized growing up was the belief that “in a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honourable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendour of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion.” And yet through her relationship with Zaza, she came to question this limiting “hierarchy of the emotions” and to see friendship as the deepest stratum of connection. “I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions,” she would reflect decades later.
It was only in Zaza’s absence — absences inflicted by their families and school schedules and the general fractures of continuity that life presents — that Beauvoir came to grasp the importance, the consolation, the salvation of her friend’s presence:
So total had been my ignorance of the workings of the heart that I hadn’t thought of telling myself: ‘I miss her.’ I needed her presence to realize how much I needed her. This was a blinding revelation. All at once, conventions, routines, and the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was overwhelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.
In her diary, she recounts one such reunion during her freshman year as a philosophy student:
I found Zaza again! All last year and during this vacation, I believed that she was far, very far from me. And there she was infinitely close by and now we are going to be true friends. Oh! What a beautiful meaning this word has! Never have we spoken so, and I was not even hoping that it could happen — but why, too, never believe in happiness… Let us bring our two solitudes together!… When I had left her, I experienced one of the most beautiful hours of my life, my love and my friendship both greater from their union.
Beauvoir was discovering deep friendship as safer and more resilient than romance, free from “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures,” never “introducing jealousy, demands, and doubts.” To have what the ancient Celts called anam cara — “soul friend” — asks everything of us, invites all the parts we live with and urges us to show up whole, yet demands nothing.
Looking back on her life, Beauvoir reflects:
I didn’t require Zaza to have any such definite feelings about me: it was enough to be her best friend. The admiration I felt for her did not diminish me in my own eyes. Love is not envy. I could think of nothing better in the world than being myself, and loving Zaza.
Midway through Beauvoir’s sophomore year, Zaza died suddenly and mysteriously — an illness swift and merciless as an owl. She was 21. Amid the savage grief, Beauvoir turned even more sharply toward philosophy, seeking its eternal consolations. Across the sweep of the years and decades, Zaza’s inextinguishable presence never left her life. (“No one you love is ever dead,” Ernest Hemingway wrote around that time in a letter of consolation to an inconsolable friend.) Loving Zaza had ignited Beauvoir’s becoming, setting her on the course of who she would become — one of humanity’s most daring breakers of convention, her ideas reaching into the depths of her time, shaping the times to come, touching the lives of generations of strangers the way a true friendship does. Touching mine. Perhaps touching yours.
Complement with Seneca on true vs. false friendship and Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on losing a friend, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are and the art of growing older.
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.