2025-01-18 10:19:56
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line from a favorite poem to use as a joint prompt. (The wonderful thing about minds, about the dazzling variousness of them, is what different things can bloom in them from the same seed.)
I had been thinking about forgiveness — about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.
This is the poem that unfolded in me from Clifton’s opening line, read here by Nick Cave (who has written beautifully about self-forgiveness and who sparked my season of blessings by taking me to church, for the first time, the morning of my fortieth birthday).
FORGIVENESS
by Maria PopovaMay the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.
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.
2025-01-17 20:49:30
In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.
Papers declared her candidacy “a brazen imposture, to be extinguished by laughter rather than by law.”
People — working-class people, people of color, people relegated to the margins of their time and place — clamored to hear her speak, rose up in standing ovation by the thousands, cried and cheered.
Born in Ohio to an illiterate mother and an alcoholic father who made a living by selling $1 bottles of opiate-laden “Life Elixir,” Victoria was named for the English Queen coronated the year she entered the world as the seventh of ten children, four of whom would not survive childhood. At eleven, when her father’s schemes ran the family into bankruptcy, she was forced to leave school after only three years of education. At fourteen, having been belted and starved all her childhood, she fled her father’s brutality in a desperate marriage to her 28-year-old physician, only to discover that he too was an alcoholic and a philanderer. Still in her teens, she bore two children — a son with developmental disabilities and a daughter whose delivery her husband so mishandled that both mother and baby almost bled to death.
Like Hildegard of Bingen, like Joan of Arc, like many people of uncommon strength and vision who have had to survive uncommon trials of circumstances, Victoria came to believe — had to believe — that she was guided and protected by the spirits. When her husband’s alcoholism became so disabling that it fell on her to support the family, she began working as a spiritual healer. As she traveled across America, she began to see the scale and depth of the suffering from which most people chose to avert their eyes — the pain of the enslaved, the struggle of the working class, the domestic enslavement of women’s minds and bodies, the syphoning of children’s souls by an education system that excluded most.
Eventually, Victoria managed to divorce her husband — something so scandalous in her era that it would later lead tabloids to headline her “The Prostitute Who Ran for President.” She continued to work as a healer, remarried, and used her income to open a Wall Street brokerage firm with her sister. At thirty-two, Victoria Woodhull became America’s first female stock broker.
She began publishing a weekly paper to advance the ideals of the suffrage and antislavery movements. But half a century after Mary Shelley insisted that “it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Woodhull saw that words alone were not enough to write the history of the future.
She decided to run for President.
Central to her campaign were ideas an epoch ahead of their time. In a century when only four women obtained a divorce in all of England, she insisted that in America love should be “unbiased by any enacted law or standard of public opinion,” that neither social norms nor government regulation should tamper with the freedom to marry and to divorce. In an age when maternity was considered the fulfillment of a woman’s destiny, she declared it another form of slavery and insisted that women must never “give the control of their maternal functions over to anybody,” much less the government. “It is a fearful responsibility with which women are entrusted by nature,” she wrote in what stands as a founding credo of reproductive rights, “and the very last thing that they should be compelled to do is to perform the office of that responsibility against their will, under improper conditions or by disgusting means.”
Months before the election, Woodhull published a 39-page manifesto reclaiming the real meaning of equality, justice, and freedom. On its pages, she cautioned that the young dream of democracy was already slipping into a trance of authoritarianism — a rule of law seemingly chosen by the people, but in fact the product of coercive control and manipulation by a new breed of money-men who capitalize on human vulnerability and fear. True freedom, she argued, has never existed for individuals — in all systems of government thus far, “grades and castes of people have built themselves, the stronger upon the weaker, and the people as individuals have never appeared upon the surface.”
She writes:
There has never been such a thing as freedom for the people. It has always been concession by the government. There has never been an equality for the people. It has always been the stronger, in some sense, preying upon the weaker; and the people have never had justice. When there is authority, whether it be of law, of custom, or of individuals, neither of these can exist except in name. Neither do these principles apply to the people in their collective capacity but when the people’s time shall come they will belong to every individual separately.
This revolution would come about by a “double process,” yet unfinished — “the consolidation of nations into races, and the redistribution of power to the people.” She prophesies:
These two processes will continue until both are complete — until all nations are merged into races, and all races into one government; and until the power is completely and equally returned to all the people, who will no longer be denominated as belonging to this or that country or government, but as citizens of the world — as members of a common humanity.
America, she insists, is uniquely poised for the completion of this process. In it are the kindling and the spark of “the impending revolution” to benefit all of humanity:
As in this country the future race of the world is being developed, so also will the foundation of the future government be developed, which shall become universal… And that revolution will be the final and the ultimate contest between justice and authority, in which the latter will be crushed, never again to raise its despotic head among and to divide the members of a common humanity.
Such a triumph of justice, she argues, is only possible when true equality is achieved — another notion suctioned of meaning by misuse and overuse, needful of redefinition:
Equality for the people means… that no personal merit or demerit can interfere between individuals, so that one may, by arbitration or laws, be placed unequally with another. It means that every individual is entitled to all the natural wealth that he or she requires to minister to the various wants of the body… It also means that every person is entitled to equal opportunity for intellectual acquirements, recreation and rest, since the first is necessary to make the performance of the individual’s share of duty possible; while the second and third are the natural requirements of the body, independent of the individuality of the person, and which was not self-created but inherited… And yet it should be the duty of government, since it is a fundamental portion of its theory, to maintain equality among the people; otherwise the word is but a mere catch, without the slightest signification in fact.
Having thus defined freedom and equality, she argues that the deepest meaning of justice is “to maintain equal conditions among free individuals.” A century and a half before America elected, twice, a horseman of capitalism as President, Woodhull indicts the market forces already pulsating beneath the young nation as the great enemy of freedom — a way of replacing one system of exploitation and enslavement with another, “still more insidious in its character, because more plausible.” With an eye to the income inequality such a system invariably creates, she writes:
If penury and want exist, accompanied by suffering and privation, under the rule of a monarch, he may justly be held responsible. But when it exists under the reign of freedom, there is no responsibility anywhere, unless it may be said to be in the people themselves, which is equivalent to saying responsibility without application.
Market capitalists, she argues, can only serve as ruling monarchs of this experiment in democracy by means of extreme manipulation of the people — a theater of freedom, in which we are cast as actors, only to find ourselves commodities. She indicts the railroads — the Big Tech of her day, the first great monopoly and the original social media — as a “system of huckstery” that makes magnates of middlemen. (What would Victoria Woodhull have made of the sovereignty we have willingly ceded to the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world.) More than a century before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Woodhull takes a stance of extraordinary courage, even more countercultural today:
I would rather be the unwilling subject of an absolute monarch than the willing slave of my own ignorance, of which advantage is taken by those who spend their time in endeavoring to prove to me that I am free and in singing the glories of my condition, to hoodwink my reason and to blind my perception… That system of government by which it is possible for a class of people to practice upon my credulity, and, under false pretenses, first entice me to acquiesce in laws by which immense corporations and monopolies are established, and then to induce me to submit to their extortions because they exist according to law, pursuing none but lawful means, is an infernal despotism, compared to which the Russian Czar is a thousand times to be preferred.
At the heart of her far-seeing manifesto is the insistence that a truly just system of government can take root in the soul of a people, in the souls of all people, only when we cease prioritizing wealth over wisdom; only then may humanity “join in a common effort for the great political revolution, after the accomplishment of which the nations shall have cause to learn war no more.” She writes:
The impending revolution, then, will be the strife for the mastery between the authority, despotism, inequalities and injustices of the present, and freedom, equality and justice in their broad and perfect sense, based on the proposition that humanity is one, having a common origin, common interests and purposes, and inheriting a common destiny.
But this, she auguries, will not be a smooth transition from one world order to another. It will not come to pass without the requisite upheaval of truly transitional times:
No person who will take the trouble to carefully observe the conditions of the various departments of society can fail to discern the terrible earthquakes just ready to burst out upon every side, and which are only now restrained by the thick incrustations with which customs, prejudices and authorities have incased humanity. Indeed, the whole surface of humanity is surging like the billows of the stormy ocean, and it only escapes general and destructive rupture because its composition, like the consciences of its constituent members, is so elastic. But, anon, the restrained furies will overcome the temper of their fastenings, and, rending them asunder, will sweep over the people, submerging them or cleansing them of their gathered debris, as they shall have located themselves, with regard to its coming.
Days before the election, Woodhull was arrested on obscenity charges — her paper had published an exposé of the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher’s affairs with too much detail for Victorian propriety standards. She was acquitted, but she was also disillusioned — the dream of a truly just America, she came to see, was premature, haunted by the nightmare of businessmen puppeteering politics and commodifying the commons. She eventually moved to England, where she continued lecturing on suffrage, became involved in education reform, helped establish a women’s aviation league, and founded a humanitarian magazine with her daughter Zula.
She never stood a chance, of course, in her time and place. But she opened the aperture of possibility, for a more possible future is only ever made by taking on what the present deems impossible.
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.
2025-01-17 02:20:18
Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.
I remember the moment a friend’s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he realized while talking to a classmate that the notion of a mental image is not merely a metaphor, that other people can conjure up in their minds things not before their eyes. And the moment another friend discovered that the inner stream of language with which most of us narrate our lives courses through neither his mother’s nor his sister’s mind. And always the moment I waded into the winter ocean with someone with whom I thought I shared uncommon understanding, and I exclaimed “Those needles!” as the icy water stabbed at my flesh, and she stared at me blankly, and when I asked what her sensation was, she took a long pause, then said: “Pressure.” Two bodies so seemingly similar, sharing 99.9% of their genome and 100% of their trust, immersed in the exact same environment, governed by consciousnesses so invisibly different as to render the contact between self and world sharp for one and blunt for the other.
Moments like these jolt us awake from the dream of perfect understanding, stagger us with the realization that no one ever really knows what it is like to be somebody else, that between one consciousness and another there always gapes an abyss black as the inside of a skull, and though we may try to reach each other with love and reason, they twine but a tenuous footbridge across it. The best we can do is hold on to the ropes and hope that they will not fray before we reach the rim of understanding, the outer edge of the other, which is all we can ever touch — and still it is enough, this sliver of salvation from the loneliness of being ourselves, this outstretched hand across the icy blue.
Anne Enright faces this abyss in her lyrical novel The Wren, the Wren (public library), drawing from it not a point of despair but portal of possibility.
She writes:
We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.
Looking back on viewing empathy “like it’s the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything,” the protagonist reflects:
I had a big beautiful cake in my head called “Feeling the Pain of Others” and I sliced it this way and that because I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It’s just like melting. We can merge, you know. We can connect. We can cry at the same movie. You and I.
And yet, she comes to see, we struggle to do this, for it is at bottom a profoundly complicated thing. But perhaps we struggle because we have the wrong goal in mind — merging, in the end, is not the measure of closeness, of understanding, of the proximity between consciousnesses in the icy waters of being. Enright writes:
There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first… Now, I think the word we need is “translation.”
Given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, this gap in how we perceive the world is reflected in our actual sight — we each see the same photons differently due to variations in how our eyes and brains process light. While science is not there to furnish us with metaphors — its task is truth — we are creatures of meaning who cannot help but turn to metaphor as our best footbridge between truth and meaning. Enright’s protagonist reflects:
These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.
Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding — which is “love’s other name” — is not seeing the same light but seeing the light in each other, the shy light shimmering over the ocean of our singularity.
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.
2025-01-17 00:28:00
Among the myriad things that didn’t have to exist — music, minds, the meadow lark — none is more symphonic, more defiant of logic, more capable of winging existence with life than love. Biologically, we could have done without it, could have spent the eons fertilizing cells without feeling. Hydrogen need not love oxygen to bind into the molecular cathedral that makes this rocky planet a wet breathing world. But we, creatures of poetry and psalms, bind differently, bind with passion and purpose, with a blessed bewilderment we call love. It breaks us and it balances us. It is the great miracle and the great moral imperative, the first and final truth of life.
Hardly anyone (except perhaps Hannah Arendt) has captured this all-transcending, all-demanding power of love more precisely yet poetically than Paul the Apostle — a saint not only in the religious tradition, but also by Leonard Cohen’s definition of the saints among us.
Saint Paul — whose central teaching was that hope, faith, and love are the fundaments of life, but love is of them the most fundamental — writes:
If I… have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
But perhaps because love is the sum total of our experience, because experience is always larger than the meaning we give it, what loves means is a question both too immense and too microscopic with intimate subjectivities to be fitted to a single answer.
It helps to be given a little guidance in how to love and a simple, perfect definition.
It helps to be given some assurance that it is never, even in our darkest hour, beyond our reach.
And if all else fails, it helps to ask a bird for a divination:
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.
2025-01-15 01:39:58
In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices, declaring ourselves creatures of reason. Western civilization, with its structural bias favoring the left brain, has been especially culpable in this dangerous dissociation from ourselves, our full and feeling selves. Despite everything our analytical tools have revealed about how the mind constructs the world, about how our entire experience of reality is a function of that great sieve of emotional relevance — attention — we continue casting ourselves in the theater of rationality, only to find ourselves bewildered again and again by our own nature, by the constant revelation of illusion we mistake for reality.
The pioneering psychiatrist Otto Rank (April 22, 1884–October 31, 1939) — who strongly influenced Carl Jung and served as therapist to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and other visionary artists — pulls the curtain on that illusion in Beyond Psychology (public library) — a book “pleading for the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life”; the book he knew would be his last, the wartime publication of which he never lived to see.
A century before philosopher Martha Nussbaum made her rigorous case for the intelligence of emotion, observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” Rank writes as humanity is breaking into its second world war:
Our present general bewilderment… lays bare the irrational roots of human behavior which psychology tries to explain rationally in order to make it intelligible, that is, acceptable… People, though they may think and talk rationally — and even behave so — yet live irrationally.
[…]
Bound by the ideas of a better past gone by and a brighter future to come, we feel helpless in the present because we cannot even for a moment stop its movement so as to direct it more intelligently. We still have to learn, it seems, that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man’s* ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.
Much of our self-delusion, Rank observes, is due to the fact that we live in language — “a rational phenomenon meant to communicate thoughts and to explain actions in rational terms.” (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so wonderfully countercultural and altogether reality-expanding.) Art in all its forms, from poetry to painting, has tried to find the emotional language of the unconscious, to embrace the surge of the irrational. (Nin herself articulated this memorably in her insistence on the importance of emotional excess for creativity: “Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them,” she wrote in her diary between sessions with Rank.) And yet we remain storytellers, telling the story of our own lives largely in language. With the exception of dreams — the imagistic language evolution invented in the brains of birds — the mind navigates the world by talking to itself in a constant inner stream of language. And so it may be, Rank intimates, that the “beyond” of language is simply unreachable to us, that we are trying to dismantle our own captivity with the captor’s tools. He considers the paradox:
In their extremely conscious effort to reproduce what they call the “unconscious” modern painters and writers have followed modern psychology in attempting the impossible, namely to rationalize the irrational. This paradoxical state of affairs betrays itself in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, a mechanistic theory of life according to which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something which in itself is unknown and undeterminable. Modern art has adopted this rational psychology of the irrational legitimately, because art itself, like psychology, has been from the beginning an attempt to master life rationally by interpreting it in terms of the current ideologies, that is, it has striven to re-create life in order to control it. The socio-political events of our day amply justify the need for something “beyond” our psychology which has proved inadequate to account for such strange happenings.
Echoing the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s haunting observation that “we ourselves are events in history [and] things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us,” Rank insists that the only way of avoiding the socio-political upheavals that periodically rupture humanity is to embrace the irrational within ourselves. A century after Macmurray wrote that “our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind” and that we must recognize them in this universal setting in order for our private difficulties to “become really significant,” Rank writes:
Because of the inherent nature of the human being, man* has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally. If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living, then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes — vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. These new values which have to be discovered and rediscovered every so often are in reality old values, the natural human values which in the course of time are lost in rationalizations of one kind or another.
These elemental values, Rank observes, lie beyond reason — we rediscover them when we cease trying to control life by rationalizing it and surrender to its experiential flow, inherently irrational and pulsating through the life of the body, which, we now know, is the true locus of consciousness. He writes:
We are born in pain, we die in pain and we should accept life-pain as unavoidable — indeed a necessary part of earthly existence, not merely the price we have to pay for pleasure… Man* is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own.
And this precisely why you must not spare yourself.
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.
2025-01-11 08:47:39
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.
We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation — religion to save us from our sins, therapy to save us from our traumas, marriage to save us from our loneliness — in order to salve our suffering, which is the price we pay for the fulness of living. And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.
That is what the Uruguayan novelist, journalist, and poet Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) explores in his astonishing poem “No Te Salves” — part indictment, part invitation, reminding us that we most often break our hearts on the hard edges of our own fear of living, on the parts of us so petrified that they have become brittle to the touch of life, the touch of love.
Since I didn’t feel that the standard English translation quite captures the urgency and intimacy of the original language, I have translated it anew. It is read here in the original Spanish by my friend Karen Maldonado (who introduced me to the poem), in English and Bulgarian by me, and in Russian by my mother (who translated it into Russian and our native Bulgarian), to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major.
NO TE SALVES
por Mario BenedettiNo te quedes inmóvil
al borde del camino
no congeles el júbilo
no quieras con desgana
no te salves ahora
ni nunca
no te salves
no te llenes de calma
no reserves del mundo
sólo un rincón tranquilo
no dejes caer los párpados
pesados como juicios
no te quedes sin labios
no te duermas sin sueño
no te pienses sin sangre
no te juzgues sin tiempopero si
pese a todo no puedes evitarlo
y congelas el júbilo
y quieres con desgana
y te salvas ahora
y te llenas de calma
y reservas del mundo
sólo un rincón tranquilo
y dejas caer los párpados
pesados como juicios
y te secas sin labios
y te duermes sin sueño
y te piensas sin sangre
y te juzgas sin tiempo
y te quedas inmóvil
al borde del camino
y te salvas
entonces
no te quedes conmigo.
DO NOT SPARE YOURSELF
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria PopovaDon’t stand motionless
by the side of the road
don’t petrify your joy
don’t desire with reserve
do not spare yourself now
or ever
do not spare yourself
don’t fill up on tranquility
don’t claim from the world
only a quiet corner
don’t let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
don’t remain lipless
don’t fall asleep unready to dream
don’t think yourself bloodless
don’t deem yourself out of timebut if
in spite of it all you can’t help it
and petrify your joy
and desire with reserve
and spare yourself now
and fill up on tranquility
and claim from the world
only a quiet corner
and let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
and remain lipless
and fall asleep unready to dream
and think yourself bloodless
and deem yourself out of time
and stand motionless
on the side of the road
and you have been spared
then
do not stay with me.
НЕ СЕ ЩАДИ
Марио Бенедети
превод от Лилия ПоповаНе стой неподвижно
край пътя
не вкаменявай радостта си
не желай неохотно
не се щади сега
и никога
не се щади
не се изпълвай с покой
не искай от света само едно тихо кътче
не позволявай на клепачите ти да паднат,
тежки като присъди
не оставай беззвучен
не заспивай без сънища
не се мисли за безсилен
не се съди без времено ако
все пак не успееш
и вкамениш радостта си
и желаеш неохотно
и се щадиш сега
и си изпълнен с покой
и искаш от света само едно тихо кътче
и позволиш клепачите ти да паднат,
тежки като присъди
и останеш беззвучен
и заспиваш без сънища,
и се мислиш за безсилен,
и се съдиш без време
и стоиш неподвижно край пътя
и си пощаден
тогава
не оставай с мен.
НЕ ЩАДИ СЕБЯ
Марио Бенедети
перевод Лилии ПоповойНе стой тихо на краю дороги
не загораживай свою радость
не желай с неохотой
не щади себя сейчас
и никогда
не щади себя
не исполняйся покоем
не проси у мира только тихий уголок
не дай опускаться векам твоим,
тяжелыми, как приговор
не оставайся безмолвным
не усыпай без снов
не думай, что безсилен
не суди себя без временино если
однако не сможеш
и загораживаешь свою радость
и желаеш с неохотой
и щадишь себя сейчас и навсегда
и исполнен покоем
и просишь у мира только тихий уголок
и даеш опускаться векам своим,
тяжелыми, как приговор
и остаешься безмолвным
и засыпаешь без снов
и думаешь, что ты бессилен
и судишь себя без времени
и стоишь тихо на краю дороги
и щадишь себя
тогда
не оставайся со мной.
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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