2026-02-24 01:49:31
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca.
The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony.
Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from what Rachel Carson called “those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss,” through the growling din of the engines that conduct consumerism between continents, orcas are communicating in their sonic hieroglyphics, speaking to each other in haunting and melodious voices that summon the most coordinated hunting strategy known in the animal kingdom.
Traveling in matrilineal groups, they search for seals across the frozen expanse, moving effortlessly through pack ice that sinks immense ships. As soon as they identify the prey, they swim together under the ice to shatter it with a sub-surface shock wave, then begin blowing bubbles beneath to push the broken pieces apart. Once the cracks are wide enough, they turn on their sides to create a synchronized surface wave so large its crest crashes onto the ice, pushing seals into the water, where the pod divides the bounty according to a complex calculus of social bonds.
All the while, they are teaching their young how to perform this collaborative symphony of physics and predation — a further testament to social learning as a key substrate of intelligence — and it is the females, particularly post-menopausal matriarchs, who are doing the teaching. Orcas have such strong maternal bonds that sons stay with their mothers for life — a phenomenon so well documented that the researchers behind one longitudinal study dubbed male orcas “mamma’s boys.”
But while these bonds are the orcas’ great strength, they are also their great vulnerability.
In 2018, while secluded on a small mossy island in Puget Sound to finish my first book, I watched the world turn with shattering tenderness toward an unfolding local event — for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean, an orca mother carried her dead calf draped over her head, hardly eating, barely keeping up with her pod. NPR called it her “tour of grief.” When she lost another calf in early 2025 — two thirds of orca pregnancies result in either miscarriage or infant death — she did the same, this time seventeen days.
Such sights so chill us because they are emblems of the miracle and tragedy of consciousness. Orcas would not be capable of such staggering success as predators if they were not also capable of such shattering grief, both a function of their intricate bonds, their collaborative interdependence, their complex consciousness that differentiates and bridges the difference between self and other. In the human realm, we call this love — the aspect of consciousness subject to the cruelest evolutionary equation: As Hannah Arendt so poignantly articulated, loss is the price we pay for love. It seems almost unbearable as we watch the mother orca carry her dead calf, and yet we too must bear it, and do bear it, however long and however far we may have to carry the dead weight of our grief — because we must, if we are worthy of our own aliveness, love anyway. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” wrote Rumi. Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth any price, any price at all.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-23 19:59:50
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (September 24, 1794–January 25, 1871) was eleven when her mother died. Just before her eighteenth birthday, she set out for Paris from her home in rural France, on foot — a walk of more than 300 kilometers along the vector of her dream to become a dressmaker. On the way, the cousin assigned as her travel guardian assaulted her and fled with her identity papers. Jeanne made her way to a convent and, as soon as she managed to have new travel documents made by local police, kept going. But by the time she made it to Paris, the position she had been promised was already taken. The only job she could secure was as a seamstress’s assistant.
Four years and thousands of dresses later, Jeanne was tasked with outfitting a duchess for a royal wedding. At the ceremony, she met and fell in love with an English merchant, married him, and moved with him to the harbor city of Messina on the island of Sicily. There, she immersed herself in passionate reading about geology, archeology, and natural history — the closest a woman could get to a scientific education at the time — and set out to study the island’s ecosystem.
Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, she fell in love with one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small sepia-like octopus Argonauta argo, known as paper nautilus for the thin, intricately corrugated shell of its females and the sail-like membranes protruding from it like a pair of bunny ears.
The argonaut had fascinated naturalists since Aristotle with the mystery of its spiral shell.
They wondered whether the animal made it, or, like the hermit crab, inherited as a hand-me-down.
They wondered why only the females had a shell, why its shape was so unlike that of the animal body it housed, and why the dweller could completely detach from the shell like no other mollusk did, yet never abandoned it.
They wondered how the shell managed to quadruple in size during the five-month reproductive period — an astonishing feat of on-demand engineering seen nowhere else in the animal kingdom.
In the memoir of her researches, Jeanne Villepreux-Power wrote:
Having for several years devoted to the natural sciences the hours that remained to me free from my domestic affairs, while I was classifying some marine objects for my study, the octopus of the Argonauta transfixed my attention above the rest, because naturalists have been of such various opinions about this mollusk.
Observing argonauts in the wild is incredibly difficult — the shy, skittish creatures flee the surface and plunge into the depths as soon as they feel they are being approached, puffing a cloud of ink between themselves and their perceived predator, even if she is only a scientist:
When the air is serene, the sea calm, and she believes herself unobserved, the Argonauta adorns herself with her beauties; but I had to be prudent enough to enjoy her rich colors and graceful pose, for this animal is very suspicious, and as soon as it perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees to the bottom of the cage or the sea, reemerging to the surface only when it thinks it is safe from all danger. It is at this time that we can observe its movements and its habits.
And so, for ten years, Jeanne Villepreux-Power made it her “duty” to do “serious research” on the most contested aspects of the physiology, morphology, reproduction, and habits of these tender cephalopods. A skilled self-taught artist, she made her own drawing of what she saw.
Unlike other naturalists, who had studied preserved specimens, Jeanne realized that she could only discover the true origin of the shell if she observed living creatures. To bypass the evolution-mounted obstacle of their extreme shyness, she designed and constructed one of the world’s first offshore research stations — a system of immense cages she anchored off the coast of Sicily, complete with observation windows through which she could study the argonauts undisturbed. Every day, she prepared food for them, rowed her boat to the cages in her long skirts, and knelt at the platform, observing for hours on end.
But long skirts and long hours in cold water make not for a felicitous scientist. And so, in order to transfer her observations and experiments ashore, Jeanne Villepreux-Power pioneered the aquarium.
Her home became a marine biology lab, stacked with vast tanks, which she populated with living argonauts. Conducting experiment after experiment and observation after observation, magnifying eggs and shell fragments under her microscope, she set about illuminating the mysterious living realities of these otherworldly earthlings, following her intuition that — contrary to what her male peers believed — the females did make their own shells. She wrote:
I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.
In a series of groundbreaking experiments she began in 1833 — the final year of her thirties — the seamstress-turned-scientist solved the ancient nested mysteries of whether (yes), how (through a marvel of biochemistry), and when (within days of hatching) the argonaut makes its spiral home: With her elegant empiricism, Jeanne Villepreux-Power managed to “demonstrate, by unequivocal proofs, that the Argonauta octopus is the builder of its shell.”
She started with the obvious yet radical insight that you cannot understand the living morphology of a creature by studying dead specimens — to find out when and how the argonaut gets to have a shell, you must observe it from birth. And so she acquired three pregnant females, each housing thousands of eggs in its enlarged shell, and watched them hatch — tiny baby octopuses, naked in their gelatinous sacs. Every six hours, she visited the babies to observe them closely for three continuous hours.
One day, she carefully removed a nine-millimeter baby octopus from the mother and, upon examining it, noticed that it was in a position of self-embrace, its membranous arms enfolded around its sac, the end of which the baby had begun to fold into the shape of a spire. Not wishing to disturb the hatchling, she put it back under the mother and returned six hours later to examine it again. To her astonishment, the tiny octopus had already begun building its shell out of a thin film, following the geometry of the mother’s. Within hours, the thin film had begun to thicken into the signature furrows of the argonaut shell — here was living proof that the argonaut was the maker of its own shell, beginning almost at birth.
But her most revolutionary experiment demonstrated something no one else had even thought to wonder about — a living incarnation of Schopenhauer’s exquisite insight that “talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach [whereas] genius is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot even see.”
Jeanne made a small puncture in the shell of an adult female to see whether and how the animal would repair itself, and what that might reveal about its intelligence, in an era when science was yet to recognize the consciousness of non-human animals. She watched in marvel as the octopus protruded its front arms and, sweeping the silvery membranes previously thought to function as sails over the puncture like a windshield wiper, seal it back into cohesion with a glutenous substance, the chemical composition of which she analyzed and determined to be identical to the calcium carbonate of the original shell. The restored part, she observed, was more robust than the shell itself, “somewhat bumpy, puffy,” not following the regular furrows of the shell but corrugating sideways, almost perpendicularly to them — a sort of scar, the mollusk equivalent of what is known as “proud flesh” in horses.
In a wildly imaginative twist of the experiment, she decided to see whether the argonaut could repair its shell using not its own substance but spare parts, so to speak. She broke off a small piece of an adult’s shell, but this time she placed in the tank next to it fragments from other shells. To her astonishment, the argonaut rushed to the pieces and began feeling them out with its arms, searching for the suitable puzzle shape, then applied it to its own shell and, once again waving the membranes over it, began the work of welding, struggling to orient the furrows of the borrowed piece parallel to those of its existing shell.
She spent hours bent over the cage, watching this staggering feat of multiple intelligences. Naturalists before her, working only with dead specimens and theoretical conjecture, had declared this impossible. But after repeating her experiment for five years and obtaining the same result over and over, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated that the octopus is indeed this planet’s patron saint of the possible.
Since women were excluded from the scientific establishment, unable to attend universities or present at learned societies, her research traveled into the world by proxy. The week photography was born in 1839, Sir Richard Owen — England’s preeminent scientists in the era before Charles Darwin, with whom she had been in regular correspondence throughout her experiments — read one of her letters and presented her findings before the London Zoological Society. Her research was a revelation. Soon, it was being published in English, French, and German, and circulated widely across Europe. By the end of her long life, Jeanne Villepreux-Power belonged to more than a dozen scientific societies. Her research not only illuminated an enduring mystery about the physiology and biology of a particular species of octopus, but, through her experiments on shell repair, laid the groundwork for the study of octopus intelligence, which has forever changed our understanding of consciousness itself.
Complement with some stunning drawings of octopuses from the world’s first encyclopedia of deep-sea cephalopods, created a quarter century after Jeanne Villepreux-Power’s death, then savor Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent poem “Octopus Empire.”
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-23 19:45:20
“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease — for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.
The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit — James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.
In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon — an old high school friend of his — to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book Nothing Personal (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits — of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age- and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope — are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”
At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:
Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.
It is a fearful speculation — or, rather, a fearful knowledge — that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.
Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds:
Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it — life — one more time?
After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay — lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” — Baldwin continues:
I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.
That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life — to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.
In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes:
For, perhaps — perhaps — between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct — I believe — causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death.
And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith — so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM:
At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor — the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self — death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. — And many of us perish then.
What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers:
But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality — oneself — which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again.
Baldwin — whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death — wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try — we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.
Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours:
Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost.
More than half a century later, Nothing Personal remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-23 08:21:27
Legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) is best known as one of literary history’s titans, but he was also a brilliant entrepreneur and pioneer of self-publishing. Under the auspices of his enterprising wife Anna, Dostoyevsky overcame his ruinous gambling addiction to become Russia’s first self-published author. But it was the release of A Writer’s Diary (public library) — the same collection of his nonfiction and fiction writings that gave us Dostoyevsky’s memorable recollection of how he discovered the meaning of life in a dream — that turned him into a national brand.
In February of 1876, reflecting on the unanimous acclaim with which the first volume of the journal had been received, 55-year-old Dostoyevsky contemplates the paradox of people-pleasing and writes in the very diary whose success he is pondering:
I am interested only in the question: is it, or is it not, good that I have pleased everybody?
From this, under the heading “On the Subject That We All Are Good Fellows,” he springboards into an exquisite discussion of our deepest goodness, emanating a deep faith in the human spirit — all the more impressive given what Dostoyevsky himself endured — and a conviction that we are inherently good despite the badness we sometimes put on like an ill-fitting suit to impress by imitating those we mistake for impressive.
A century before Isaac Asimov’s memorable invitation to optimism over cynicism about the human spirit, Dostoyevsky writes:
We are all good fellows — except the bad ones, of course. Yet, I shall observe in passing that among us, perhaps, there are no bad people at all — maybe, only wretched ones. But we have not grown up to be bad. Don’t scoff at me, but consider: we have reached the point in the past where, because of the absence of bad people of our own (I repeat: despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches), we used to be ready, for instance, to value very highly various bad little fellows appearing among our literary characters, mostly borrowed from foreign sources. Not only did we value them, but we slavishly sought to imitate them in real life; we used to copy them, and in this respect we were ready to jump out of our skins.
While much of Dostoyevsky’s discussion of such misplaced imitation pertains to that specific point in Russia’s cultural history, embedded in it is a broader reminder that, to borrow Eleanor Roosevelt’s memorable words, “when you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” In a remark particularly poignant in the context of Russia’s troubled present-day civic climate, Dostoyevsky considers the allure of imitating such villains:
We used to value and respect these evil people … solely due to the fact that they appeared as men of solid hate in contradiction to us Russians, who, as is well known, are people of very fragile hate, and this trait of ours we have always particularly despised. Russians are unable to hate long and seriously, and not only men but even vices — the darkness of ignorance, despotism, obscurantism and all the rest of these retrograde things. At the very first opportunity we are quick and eager to make peace… Please consider: why should we be hating each other? For evil deeds? — But this is a very slippery, most ticklish and most unjust theme — in a word, a double-edged one… Fighting is fighting, but love is love… We are fighting primarily and solely because now it is no longer a time for theories, for journalistic skirmishes, but the time for work and practical decisions.
Noting that the Russian people must recover from “two centuries of lack of habit of work,” he articulates the more universal and rather lamentable human tendency to deflect insecurity by lashing out:
The more incompetent one feels, the more eager he is to fight.
And yet Dostoyevsky approaches the problem with deep compassion rather than harsh judgment:
What, I may ask you, is there bad about it? — Only, that this is touching — and nothing more. Look at children: they fight precisely at the age when they have not yet learned to express their thoughts — exactly as well. Well, in this there is absolutely nothing discouraging; on the contrary, this merely proves to a certain extent our freshness and, so to speak, our virginity.
He observes how this tendency plays out in his own craft — something undoubtedly amplified today, when criticism is not only professionalized but also sensationalized for profit by the commercial media industrial complex:
In literature, because of the absence of ideas, people scold each other, using all invectives at once; this is an impossible and naïve method observed only among primitive peoples; but, God knows, even in this there is something almost touching: exactly that inexperience, that childish incompetence even in scolding in a proper manner.
But underneath such defensive insecurity and cynicism, Dostoyevsky argues, lies a deeper, most earnest yearning for goodness:
I am by no means jesting; I am not jeering: among us there is a widespread, honest and serene expectation of good (this is so, no matter what one might say to the contrary); a longing for common work and common good, and this — ahead of any egoism; this is a most naïve longing, full of faith devoid of any exclusive or caste tinge, and even if it does appear in paltry and rare manifestations, it comes as something unnoticeable, which is despised by everybody… And why should we be looking for “solid hate”? — The honesty and sincerity of our society not only cannot be doubted, but they even spring up into one’s eyes. Look attentively and you will see that … first comes faith in an idea, in an ideal, while earthly goods come after.
It is our responsibility as human beings, Dostoyevsky suggests, to peer past the surface insecurities that drive people to lash out and look for the deeper longings, holding up a mirror to one another’s highest ideals rather than pointing the self-righteous finger at each other’s lowest faults:
A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.
He urges that such compassion be granted to the Russian people, but in his words there is to be found an enduring case for all disenfranchised groups and harshly judged communities:
Judge [the people] not by those villainies which they frequently perpetrate, but by those great and holy things for which they long amidst the very villainy. Besides, the people are not composed of scoundrels only; there are also genuine saints — and what saints! They themselves are radiant and they illuminate the path for all of us!
More than a century before modern psychology exposed the creative mental gymnastics of how we rationalize our bad deeds, Dostoyevsky speaks to the perils of such rationalization:
Somehow, I am blindly convinced that there is no such villain or scoundrel among the Russian people who wouldn’t admit that he is villainous and abominable, whereas, among others, it does happen sometimes that a person commits a villainy and praises himself for it, elevating his villainy to the level of a principle, and claiming that l’ordre and the light of civilization are precisely expressed in that abomination; the unfortunate one ends by believing this sincerely, blindly and honestly.
With the wry caveat that he is “speaking only about serious and sincere people,” Dostoyevsky reiterates his appeal at the heart of his creed:
Judge [people] not by what they are, but by what they strive to become.
All of A Writer’s Diary is a trove of Dostoyevsky’s great sensitivity to the human experience and his enduring wisdom on literature and life. Complement it with Tolstoy and Gandhi’s little-known letters on why we hurt each other and Kierkegaard on why haters hate.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-23 00:56:58
Here we are, watched over by the stone faces of mountains creased with the laugh-lines of time as we walk over the bones of our dead, over the fossils of all the other animals who paid with their lives for the birth of our eyes and lungs and opposable thumbs on a planet domed with two trillion galaxies each housing numberless stars orbited by numberless possible worlds.
The great paradox of consciousness, or perhaps its very function, is its fiery longing to make this life, this flash of borrowed stardust, matter amid the incomprehensible immensity of space and time; to find between our insignificance and our self-importance something truer than both.
That longing, argues philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein in The Mattering Instinct (public library), is more than a whim of feeling, more than a wave in the mind — it is part of our creaturely inheritance, part of the price of consciousness, the source of our deepest consanguinity and our most ferocious conflicts. It is the fulcrum of the difficult durational endeavors we undertake to light up our lives with a sense of purpose. It is the sum total of “the values we use in justifying ourselves to ourselves.” It is what makes life alive.
Goldstein writes:
Every living thing is organically driven by a mandate that ensures it matters to itself — which is to say that it prioritizes its own surviving and thriving. In lifeforms as massive as blue whales and as scanty as a sliver of grass struggling up through a crack in the sidewalk, biology encodes the message of self-mattering.
But when it comes to humans, mattering takes on a different order of complexity. In us, the organic mandate of self-mattering engenders one of the most persistent forces in human motivation, which has us striving not only to survive and thrive but also striving after an existence that we deem to be meaningful in our own eyes. For us, and us alone, the organic mandate of self-mattering does not suffice. We need to convince ourselves that our own self-mattering is warranted, that we can provide a reason for it that extends beyond our being, trivially, ourselves — just as all things are, trivially, themselves. We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel that we matter is that we objectively do.
How human, then, to tremble with self-doubt in the absence of an objective validator of our mattering — an external seal of approval that what we do, and therefore who we are, is worthwhile. With an eye to W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” — which I consider the single best piece of advice on self-doubt ever put to words, the ultimate antidote to the itch for approval — Goldstein writes:
To live out every day in the presence of such doubts is to live with unease, your whole life at the mercy of your art.
But then poets are a breed apart, praying to the Muse to grant them the genius to weave words into wonder. The rest of us are thankfully different. Only we’re not. It’s not the specific way that we respond to the mattering instinct that breeds the unease. It’s the mattering instinct itself. Even if we pursue our lives far from the rarified air breathed by poets, the unease of the poet is the unease of us all.
Half a century after Ernest Becker identified the denial of death — that is, the moral outrage at our mortality — as the root of our existential longing, Goldstein observes that our mattering instinct dwells somewhere between our materiality and our morality, that it arises from the conversation between the two:
Our deepest struggles — to persist, to thrive, to make a difference, to do right, to create beauty, to make sense of ourselves and our world — emerge from the physical forces that made us. These are the forces that coaxed intricate, sentient, and purposeful organisms out of the disorder and dissolution entailed in the direction of time itself, as described by the most fundamental law of physics.
[…]
You yourself, so fragile and tenuous, are implicated in the answer to the most profound of all metaphysical questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Mattering, she intimates, is the substance of somethingness animating these lives bookended by nothingness, at least for the consciousness experiencing them. We may go about it in different ways — she divides people into four archetypes of approach: socializers (who seek to matter to others), transcenders (who seek to matter “to the spiritual presence that exists beyond, or that permeates throughout, the spatio-temporal realm”), competitors (who seek to matter relativistically, more than others), and heroic strivers (who seek to measure up to the standards of excellence they set for themselves) — but it springs from a single source embedded in our animacy.
What emerges from the pages of The Mattering Instinct is the insistence that while mattering is ultimately a profoundly private process of discovery that cannot be validated or invalidated by any designated arbiter — not god, not fame, not the person you love — it is also something we can magnify for each other by the example of how we live our lives. Mattering is the mirror we hold up to ourselves that reflects the universe.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-23 00:55:17
Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.”
I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. (This essay is drawn from my book.)
Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”
Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parents’ death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness — her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine.
“Best Witchcraft is Geometry,” Emily Dickinson would later write. Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle. But Emily’s was no temporary infatuation. Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:
To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss —
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!
A tempest of intimacy swirled over the eighteen months following Susan’s arrival into the Dickinsons’ lives. The two young women took long walks in the woods together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense, intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. “We are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”
By early 1852, the poet was besotted beyond words. She beckoned to Susan on a Sunday:
Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is Love — shall intercede for us!
When Susan accepted a ten-month appointment as a math teacher in Baltimore in the autumn of 1851, Emily was devastated at the separation, but tried to keep a buoyant heart. “I fancy you very often descending to the schoolroom with a plump Binomial Theorem struggling in your hand which you must dissect and exhibit to your uncomprehending ones,” she teased in a letter. Susan was science personified, capitalized — she would haunt Dickinson’s poems for decades to come as “Science.”
In a comet of a letter from the early spring of 1852, eight months into Susan’s absence, Emily hurls a grenade of conflicted self-revelation:
Will you be kind to me, Susie? I am naughty and cross, this morning, and nobody loves me here; nor would you love me, if you should see me frown, and hear how loud the door bangs whenever I go through; and yet it isn’t anger — I don’t believe it is, for when nobody sees, I brush away big tears with the corner of my apron, and then go working on — bitter tears, Susie — so hot that they burn my cheeks, and almost scorch my eyeballs, but you have wept much, and you know they are less of anger than sorrow.
And I do love to run fast — and hide away from them all; here in dear Susie’s bosom, I know is love and rest, and I never would go away, did not the big world call me, and beat me for not working… Your precious letter, Susie, it sits here now, and smiles so kindly at me, and gives me such sweet thoughts of the dear writer. When you come home, darling, I shan’t have your letters, shall I, but I shall have yourself, which is more — Oh more, and better, than I can even think! I sit here with my little whip, cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it — then you are here! And Joy is here — joy now and forevermore!
That year, in a Prussian lab, the physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz measured the speed of nerve conduction at eighty feet per second. How unfathomable that sentiments this intense and emotions this explosive, launched from a mind that seems to move at light-years per second, can be reduced to mere electrical impulses. And yet that is what we are — biomechanical creatures, all of our creative force, all of our mathematical figurings, all the wildness of our loves pulsating at eighty feet per second along neural infrastructure that evolved over millennia. Even the fathoming faculty that struggles to fathom this is a series of such electrical impulses.
The electricity of Dickinson’s love would endure, coursing through her being for the remainder of her life. Many years later, she would channel it in this immortal verse:
I chose this single star
From out the wide night’s numbers —
Sue — forevermore!
But now, in the dawning fervor of early love, forevermore collides with the immediacy of want. Midway through her spring outpouring, Emily suddenly casts Susan in the third person, as if beseeching an omnipotent spectator to grant her desire in the drama of their impending reunion:
I need her — I must have her, Oh give her to me!
The moment she names her longing, she tempers its thrill with the lucid terror that it might be unspeakable:
Do I repine, is it all murmuring, or am I sad and lone, and cannot, cannot help it? Sometimes when I do feel so, I think it may be wrong, and that God will punish me by taking you away; for he is very kind to let me write to you, and to give me your sweet letters, but my heart wants more.
Here, as in her poetry, Dickinson’s words cascade with multiple meanings beyond literal interpretation. Her invocation of “God” is not a cowering before some Puritanical punishment for deviance but an irreverent challenge to that very dogma. What kind of “God,” she seems to be asking, would make wrong a love of such infinite sweetness?
Four years earlier, during her studies at Mount Holyoke — the “castle of science” where she crafted her stunning herbarium — Emily had begun giving shape to the amorphous doubt about the claims of religion that had been gnawing at her since childhood — doubt she would later immortalize in verse:
It troubled me as once I was —
For I was once a child —
Deciding how an atom — fell —
And yet the heavens — held.
Facing her desire for Susan, her deepest fear was not punishment from “God” but that her wayward heart was its own retribution — as well as its own reward. She writes plaintively that heated summer:
Have you ever thought of it, Susie, and yet I know you have, how much these hearts claim; why I don’t believe in the whole, wide world, are such hard little creditors — such real little misers, as you and I carry with us, in our bosom every day. I can’t help thinking sometimes, when I hear about the ungenerous, Heart, keep very still — or someone will find you out!… I do think it’s wonderful, Susie, that our hearts don’t break, every day… but I guess I’m made with nothing but a hard heart of stone, for it don’t break any, and dear Susie, if mine is stony, yours is stone, upon stone, for you never yield, any, where I seem quite beflown. Are we going to ossify always, say Susie — how will it be?
There is palpable restlessness in Emily’s oscillation between resignation and demand, between love’s longing to be unmasked and the fear of being found out. Later that month, she exhorts Susan: “Loved One, thou knowest!” — an allusion to Juliet’s speech in Romeo and Juliet: “Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face.”
By June, anticipating Susan’s return from Baltimore in three weeks, Emily is pining with unbridled candor:
When I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.
I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider… every day you stay away — I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie… Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you… yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me… I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for til now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.
She ends her letter with aching awareness of the dissonance between her private desire and the public norms of love:
Now, farewell, Susie… I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don’t let them see, will you Susie?
Two weeks later, with Susan’s return now days away, her anticipatory longing rises to a crescendo:
Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?… I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that now I must have you — that the expectation once more to see your face again makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast — I go to sleep at night, and the first thing I know, I am sitting there wide awake, and clasping my hands tightly, and thinking of next Saturday… Why, Susie, it seems to me as if my absent Lover was coming home so soon — and my heart must be so busy, making ready for him.
Dickinson would frequently and deliberately reassign gender pronouns for herself and her beloveds, recasting her love in the acceptable male-female battery of desire. Throughout her life, she would often use the masculine in referring to herself — writing of her “boyhood,” signing letters to her cousins as “Brother Emily,” calling herself a “boy,” “prince,” “earl,” or “duke” in various poems, in one of which she unsexes herself in a violent transfiguration:
Amputate my freckled Bosom!
Make me bearded like a Man!
Again and again, she would tell all the truth but tell it slant, unmooring the gender of her love objects from the pronouns that befit their biology. Later in life, in flirting with the idea of publication, she would masculinize the pronouns in a number of her love poems — “bearded” pronouns, she called these — to fit the heteronormative mold, so that two versions of these poems exist: the earlier addressed to a female beloved, the later to a male.
That insufferable spring, she had already declared to Susan that her “heart wants more.” Twenty Augusts after they met, Dickinson would write:
Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits.
But when Susan returned from Baltimore on that long-awaited Saturday, something had shifted between them. Perhaps the ten-month absence, filled not with their customary walks in the woods but with letters of exponentially swelling intensity, had revealed to Susan that Emily’s feelings for her were not of a different hue but of a wholly different color — one that she was constitutionally unable to match. Or perhaps Emily had always misdivined the contents of Susan’s heart, inferring an illusory symmetry of feeling on the basis not of evidence but of willfully blind hope.
Few things are more wounding than the confounding moment of discovering an asymmetry of affections where mutuality had been presumed. It is hard to imagine how Dickinson took the withdrawal — here was a woman who experienced the world with a euphoria of emotion atmospheres above the ordinary person’s and who therefore likely plummeted to the opposite extreme in equal magnitude. But she seems to have feared it all along — feared that her immense feelings would never be wholly met, as is the curse of those who love with unguarded abandon. Five months earlier, she had written to Susan:
I would nestle close to your warm heart… Is there any room there for me, or shall I wander away all homeless and alone?
She suspected, too, that she might injure — and not only herself — with the force of her love:
Oh, Susie, I often think that I will try to tell you how dear you are… but the words won’t come, tho’ the tears will, and I sit down disappointed… In thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain me up there such times, so I won’t injure you.
Even in her ardent anticipatory letter penned before Susan’s return, she questions for a moment whether the love that stands as the central truth of her daily being is real:
Shall I indeed behold you, not “darkly, but face to face” or am I fancying so, and dreaming blessed dreams from which the day will wake me?
Now she had been awakened — not rudely, but unmistakably and irreversibly. In the anxious insistence of her entreaty is the sorrowful sense that Susan is slipping away from her — and toward Austin, who commenced an open courtship of her.
That summer, Emily Dickinson cut off her auburn hair.
The following autumn, Susan Gilbert married Austin Dickinson, largely to be near Emily, and they moved into the Evergreens — the house erected for the newlyweds by Austin and Emily’s father, across the lawn from the Homestead, the house where the lovesick poet lived.
A corridor denuded of grass soon formed between the Homestead and the Evergreens as Emily and Susan traversed the lawn daily to see each other or to press into the other’s hand a letter unpinned from the bosom of a dress. A “little path just wide enough for two who love,” Dickinson called it. Over the next quarter century, 276 known poems would travel between their homes — some by hand and foot, but many by post. I have often wondered what prompted the poet to head for the mailbox and not the hedge, stuffing her sentiments into an envelope addressed to a house a stone’s throw from her own. And yet the heart is not a stone — it is a thing with feathers.
“She loved with all her might,” a girlhood friend of Dickinson’s would recall after the poet’s death, “and we all knew her truth and trusted her love.” No one knew that love more intimately, nor had reason to trust it more durably, than Susan. Where Austin’s love washed over her with the stormy surface waves of desire, Emily’s carried her with the deep currents of devotion — a love Dickinson would compare to the loves of Dante for Beatrice and Swift for Stella. To Susan, Dickinson would write her most passionate letters and dedicate her best-beloved poems; to Susan she would steady herself, to her shore she would return again and again, writing in the final years of her life:
Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory —
Both in one package lain
And lifted back again —
Be Sue — while I am Emily —
Be next — what you have ever been — Infinity.
Something of the infinite would always remain between them. Thirty years into the relationship, Susan would give Emily a book for Christmas — Disraeli’s romance novel Endymion, titled after the famous Keats poem that begins with the line “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” — inscribed to “Emily, Whom not seeing, I still love.”
Some loves lodge themselves in the tissue of being like mercury, pervading every synapse and sinew to remain there, sometimes dormant, sometimes tortuously restive, with a half-life that exceeds a lifetime.
Their uncommon love, the splendors and sorrows of which I explore further in Figuring, would become the pulse-beat of Dickinson’s body of work, which radicalized its era and forever changed the landscape of literature — a shimmering testament to the fact that love, longing, and the restlessness of the human heart are the catalyst for every creative revolution.
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.