2025-10-23 23:45:17
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006 as a kind of field notebook on my expedition through the wilderness of life, searching for signposts. We live in a hexadecimal world that loves the round anniversaries, the numbers that polish the perfect rim of zero. But to me, 19 is a much more meaningful number than 20.
I was 19 when I left Bulgaria, at that point the poorest country in Europe and the most biodiverse per square kilometer. I left by myself, with $800 my family had cobbled together, to begin a new life from scratch on another continent, in an unrecognizably different culture, amid ecosystems full of life-forms I had never seen, all on the promise that a liberal arts education would teach me how to live. Instead, I found myself in an industrial model of learning that trains the mind to be machine for excelling at standardized testing while sidestepping the spirit altogether. Working four jobs to pay for it, too exhausted and disoriented to make friends, I was lonely and lost and sank into a profound depression.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin (of whom I had never heard) observed in looking back on his life.
And so I read.
I read Aristotle (whom my grandmother had quoted since I was a child) and Susan Sontag (of whom I had also never heard), discovered Maurice Sendak and Ruth Krauss (forging my conviction that great children’s books are philosophies for living in disguise), lost myself and found myself in Leaves of Grass.
My mind became itself in the margins of what I read. I began writing about it, then around it, then beyond, and that became The Marginalian.
To mark nineteen years of it, I have done something different from the usual annual inventory of life-learnings and combined two animating forces of my present life — sentences and ceramics — casting in clay thoughts I have had over the years that have stayed with me, truths I have learned the hard way and still habitually forget, still relearn afresh. Some of these sentences come from my published books, some from Marginalian essays, some from my bird divinations, some from the private pages of my journal. All of them are things I wish someone had told me at the outset of so-called adulthood.
Ceramics seemed a fitting medium — the clay teaches so much about the art of holding on and letting go, the kiln teaches so much about the quantum of relationships. I experimented with various letterforms, from children’s rubber stamps to vintage letterpress type, until finally settling on a century-old brass alphabet for leather carving that seemed to make the clay the happiest.
Each bowl is different, each imperfect, each — like life itself — the work of time and love, of the intentional and the unpredictable, of chemistry and chance. None but one turned out exactly as intended.
While every human life makes its own singular meaning in the act of living, beneath it course the same core hopes and fears, the same shy yearnings and screaming passions — we are all always learning the same lessons, in different guises and through different teachers.
To honor this kinship, I am giving the bowls away to you — the readers who have made it possible for this labor of love to remain free, ad-free, AI-free, and fully human for nineteen years. As with the urns for living, I will let chance solve the disparity of scale — so many people, so few bowls — by raffling them off. To enter, make a donation in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .19, whether it is $1.19 or $1,000.19. (This will help me separate the urn raffle from the regular donations.) On November 23, those upon whom chance has smiled will receive a private note from me and we will turn the fragile atoms over to the postal service. (And if they don’t survive, a lovely reminder that all sentences break.)
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.
2025-10-22 03:09:28
“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul,” Seneca wrote in considering true and false friendship two millennia before we commodified the word “friend” in the marketplace of loneliness we call social media.
It is easy to forget now how hard-earned that entry into the heart and soul is, and how precious. “Old friends cannot be created out of hand,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in the wake of losing a friend, mourning “the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.” Pulsating beneath his bittersweet lament is the knowledge that the treasure is not found but created — or, rather, co-created. It is more precious and more total than the romantic love our culture fetishizes, for a deep friendship courses through every true love, and it is always more enduring — true friends are the other significant others, often outlasting spouses, often outpacing siblings in running to the rescue of the heart. Such friendships are the hard work of truth and tenderness, sustained by an unfaltering commitment to showing up, a promise of absolute sincerity, and a quality of presence that leaves each aglow with the sense of being treasured.
How to do that work, how to attain the skills required for it and bear the vulnerabilities inherent to it, is what Alain de Botton takes up in the School of Life primer Secrets of Successful Friendships (public library) — a pointed, poignant field guide to cultivating meaningful connection in a world where loneliness looms oceanic as night.
At the heart of the book is the insistence that friendship — something “tender, fundamental, and emotionally sustaining” — is “as significant and as rare” as romantic love (a case Andrew Sullivan made exquisitely two decades earlier), yet our culture gives us no education in it while drowning us in narrow models of romantic love as the pinnacle of emotional achievement.
This commodification and devaluation of deep friendship is the turbine of our modern loneliness. A century and a half after Thoreau, brilliant and lonely, rued that “we feel a yearning to which no breast answers” and ultimately “walk alone,” De Botton observes that many of us “return home from parties dissatisfied and confused.” Defining friendship as “a sense that in the company of a very special person, we will at last be able to share the most vulnerable and fragile sides of ourselves and be witnessed in our true, unadorned state,” he celebrates it as an antidote to the loneliness and isolation of feeling those sides unwitnessed:
Loneliness can coexist alongside an outwardly highly cheerful and easy manner and even — paradoxically — alongside the possession of many so-called “friends”… The lonely may hold their own brilliantly at a party; they might be married, have children and more often than not be out in the evenings.
[…]
We are lonely because we are refusing to accept as genuine those cheap, counterfeit images of friendship promoted by a sentimental world keen to disguise the challenges of real connection. Those who feel a lack of friendship most deeply may simply be those who cleave most intensely and sincerely to its genuine promises.
More than a salve for the existential loneliness we are born into, the essential purpose of friendship is emotional growth:
In the company of a real friend, we should aspire to become wiser, more sensitive, more able to cope with the complexity of existence, more resilient and more generous.
Friendship, however, is not a unitary phenomenon — there are as many species of it as there are species of loneliness. He writes:
We tend to think of friendship as a unitary category, but, in reality, there are a number of different kinds of friendship, each of which is specifically adapted to addressing a particular kind of loneliness. We might say that there are as many kinds of friend as there are ways of feeling isolated.
He offers a taxonomy that includes such species as the emotional confidante, the thinking partner, and the counterpoint. (It is the luck of a lifetime to find a friend who can play many of these roles, and the work of a lifetime to nurture that friendship.)
The deepest friendships offer us a “true and fulfilling togetherness” that can help us “feel reconciled to our own company,” for they are often the twining of two parallel solitudes. Such friendships are not a matter of luck — just as chance and choice converge to make us who we are, chance may place someone wonderful in our path, but it is by choice — a daily choice — that we endeavor to walk together in the same direction and grow along the way.
De Botton writes:
True friendship is a skill, not a piece of divine inspiration. Those who find it are not simply lucky: they understand certain crucial ideas; they are guided by specific insights into themselves and other people. And these ideas and insights can be explained and described in precise ways. We don’t have to be born with innate talents for being, or making, a good friend; the capacities can be acquired via the right kind of education.
In the remainder of Secrets of Successful Friendships, De Botton offers the rudiments of such an education, from the enemies of friendship (overcommitment, envy, “the absence of shared challenges”) to its pillars (deep listening, acts of service, horizontal conversations) to its fate in the age of AI. Couple it with this excellent Where Shall We Meet conversation with Alain de Botton about the subtleties and varieties of friendship, then revisit this introvert’s guide to friendship from Thoreau and Alain de Botton on romantic love.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-10-20 02:04:16
We aren’t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the turbine of our suffering. The most difficult decisions in life are difficult precisely because we are unsummed, too divided to reconcile the desires of one part with those of another. We watch ourselves undergo overnight phase transitions of feeling as a different part seizes the dials of pleasure and pain that govern all human behavior, then pull the quilt of time and thinking over our head to maintain the illusion of coherence, disavowing entire regions of our own experience as if someone else lived them. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.),” wrote Whitman, knowing that we are each “of one phase and of all phases,” that within us each live the slaveholder and the slave, the woman being burned at the stake and the man striking the match.
Perhaps “god” is just how we name our yearning for a single truth, for an integrating voice to conciliate the contradictions, for something large and total to hold what we cannot hold.
Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics — those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul — channeled that voice in “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,” part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation “appears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,” writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (public library).
In “The Heart Thunder,” spoken word artist Kim Rosen brings this immortal abacus of the soul to life in a breathtaking performance, fusing the Gnostic gospel with the concluding mantra of the Buddhist Heart Sutra to the pulse-beat of a multi-instrumental orchestra — cello, percussion, piano, guitar, and vocals by musicians Jami Sieber, Wayne P. Sheehy, and Chloe Goodchild:
from THE THUNDER: PERFECT MIND
translated by Jane HirshfieldSent from the Power,
I have come
to those who reflect upon me.
Look upon me,
you who meditate,
and hearers, hear.
Whoever is waiting for me,
take me into yourselves.
Do not drive me
out of your eyes,
or out of your voice,
or our of your ears.
Observe: Do not forget who I am.For I am the first, and the last
I am the honored one, and the scorned,
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother, the daughter,
and every part of both.
I am the barren one who has borne many sons.
I am she whose wedding is great
and I have not accepted a husband.
I am the midwife and the childless one,
the easing of my own labor.
I am the bride and the bridegroom
and my husband is my father.
I am the mother of my father,
the sister of my husband;
my husband is my child.
My offspring are my own birth,
the source of my power,
what happens to me is their wish.I am the incomprehensible silence
And the memory that will not be forgotten.
I am the voice whose sound is everywhere
I am the speech that appears in many forms.
I am the utterance of my own name.Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who tell the truth about me, lie,
and you who have lied, now tell the truth.
You who know me, be ignorant,
and you who have not known me, know.For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am modesty and boldness.
I am shameless, and I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and I am peace.Give heed to me,
the one who has been everywhere hated
and the one who is everywhere loved.
I am the one they call Life,
the one you call Death.
I am the one they call Law,
the one you call Lawless.
I am the one you have scattered,
and you have gathered me together.
I am godless, and I am the one
whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon
and the one you have scorned.
I am unlearned,
and from me all people learn.
I am the one to whom you reveal yourself,
Yet wherever you think I hide, I appear,
And wherever you reveal yourself,
there I will vanish.Those who are close to me,
have failed to know me,
and those who are far from me know me.
On the day when I am close to you,
that day you are far from me;
on the day when I am far from you,
that day I am close.I am the joining and the dissolving.
I am what lasts, and what goes,
I am the one going down,
and the one toward whom they ascend.
I am the condemnation and the acquittal.
For myself, I am sinless,
and the roots of sin grow in my being.
I am the desire of the outer,
and control of the inner.
I am the hearing in everyone’s ears,
I am the speech which cannot be heard,
I am the mute who is speechless,
great are the multitudes of my words.Hear me in softness,
and learn me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am called truth.You praise me and you whisper against me.
You who have been defeated,Judge before you are judged:
the judge and all judging exist inside you,
and the one who formed you on the outside
is the one who shaped you within.And what you see outside you, you see within.
It is visible and it is your garment.Give heed then, you hearers,
and you also, angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits risen now from the dead.
I am the one who alone exists,
there is no one to judge me.
For though there is much sweetness
in passionate life, in transient pleasure,
finally soberness comes
and people flee to their place of rest.
There they will find me,
and live, and not die again.
Couple with “To Be a Person” — Jane Hirshfield’s magnificent poem about how to bear our human condition — then revisit Margaret Fuller’s account of touching “The All,” the Transcendentalists’ term for the totality of being the Gnostics eulogized in their gospel.
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.
2025-10-18 04:13:37
How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human experience that binds us. Suffering is the common record of our unreturned messages to hope, and because we are the hoping species, it is inseparable from what makes us human. More than a cerebral operation, it is an experience of the total organism, entwining synapse and sinew, engaging the entire orchestra of hormones and neurotransmitters and enzymes that plays the symphony of aliveness. This is why AIs — those disembodied cerebrators — will never know suffering and, not knowing the transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art, will never be able to write a truly great poem. (About suffering they will always be wrong, the new masters.)
Nick Cave — who has known more grief than most, having lost his young son and lost his own father at a young age, but has remained an unrelenting guardian of joy — takes up the question of that transmutation on the pages of his altogether magnificent book Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library).
An epoch after Carl Jung examined the relationship between suffering and creativity, he considers “these terrible, devastating opportunities that bring amelioration and transformation”:
Perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. Because, in grief, you become deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality. You go to a very dark place and experience the extremities of your own pain — you are taken to the very limits of suffering. As far as I can see, there is a transformative aspect to this place of suffering. We are essentially altered or remade by it. Now, this process is terrifying, but in time you return to the world with some kind of knowledge that has something to do with our vulnerability as participants in this human drama. Everything seems so fragile and precious and heightened, and the world and the people in it seem so endangered, and yet so beautiful.
In a passage that calls to mind the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s insistence that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he adds:
Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change… It somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better… This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.
Reflecting on how his son’s death left him feeling unbearably alone and at the same time “swept up in a kind of commonality of human suffering,” he recounts the lifeline of kindness that strangers extended to him and his wife — “points of light” lit up by that silent understanding of suffering we all carry in our marrow, illuminating the deepest truth of human nature that we have been bamboozled into disbelieving:
We began to see, in a profound way, that people were kind. People cared. I know that sounds simplistic, maybe even naïve, but I came to the conclusion that the world wasn’t bad, at all — in fact, what we think of as bad, or as sin, is actually suffering. And that the world is not animated by evil, as we are so often told, but by love, and that, despite the suffering of the world, or maybe in defiance of it, people mostly just cared. I think Susie and I instinctively understood that we needed to move towards this loving force, or perish.
Pulsating beneath The Red Hand Files — Nick’s soulful almanac of wisdom prompted by questions from fans — is this ongoing yearning to make use of our suffering. He addresses it directly in one issue:
What do we do with suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices — we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold on to it, and eventually pass it on.
In order to transform our pain, we must acknowledge that all people suffer. By understanding that suffering is the universal unifying force, we can see people more compassionately, and this goes some way toward helping us forgive the world and ourselves. By acting compassionately we reduce the world’s net suffering, and defiantly rehabilitate the world. It is an alchemical act that transforms pain into beauty. This is good. This is beautiful.
To not transform our suffering and instead transmit our pain to others, in the form of abuse, torture, hatred, misanthropy, cynicism, blaming and victimhood, compounds the world’s suffering. Most sin is simply one person’s suffering passed on to another. This is not good. This is not beautiful.
The utility of suffering, then, is the opportunity it affords us to become better human beings. It is the engine of our redemption.
Complement with Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering and the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich on how to bear your suffering in an extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson — neither of whom got to be an old poet — then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the two pillars of a meaningful 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.
2025-10-17 00:59:20
Born in the heyday of the denial of the human animal’s animality, in a world where nature was considered an ember of wildness to extinguish with civilization, its partitioned mystery dissected by various sciences walled off from one another, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859) set out to “establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,” in which “no single fact can be considered in isolation,” giving us the modern understanding of nature as a system. Napoleon hated him for his impassioned anticolonial and abolitionist views. Goethe cherished him as his greatest thinking partner, whose briefest company and conversation felt like “having lived several years.” Thoreau thought his very eyes “natural telescopes & microscopes.” Whitman declared himself a “kosmos” after the title of Humboldt’s epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily acknowledged that without Humboldt’s inspiring memoir-travelogue, entire passages of which he could recite by heart, he never would have boarded the Beagle, never would have written On the Origin of Species, never would have had his most transcendent experience while ascending the Andes in Humboldt’s footsteps.
Humboldt understood that a different way of seeing demands a different way of articulating the seen. Because nature is all there is, he insisted, writing about it demands prose “worthy of bearing witness to the majesty and greatness of the creation” — in other words, almost poetry. (A century and half after him, Rachel Carson would catalyze our ecological imagination with books emanating her conviction that because nature is inherently poetic, “no one could write truthfully about [it] and leave out the poetry.”) Such worthiness only comes from a perspective that recognizes interdependence as the source of that majesty.
Humboldt writes:
In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of humankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments.
Such a “glimmering perception” of nature’s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called “primitive” societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of “long and laborious observation.” His intimation, two centuries before physicist Richard Feynman made a kindred case in his superb ode to a flower, is that a scientific understanding of nature’s processes and phenomena doesn’t diminish but deepens our sense of their majesty and of our bright participation in this “great chain of cause and effect.”
And yet for all “the pleasure of finding things out,” in Feynman’s lovely phrase, Humboldt located the beating heart of this transcendent enjoyment not in the mind but in our animal sensorium. He was able to see nature as a system because he — unlike his contemporaries, unlike most of us — refused to forget that we are nature too, that we ourselves are systems in which thought and feeling, sensation and perception, impression and imagination are intertwined, that we can only apprehend the rest of nature not as disembodied intellects analyzing it from above but as embodied animals feeling it from within. In the Cartesian era of “I think, therefore I am,” Humboldt seems to be saying: “I feel, therefore I understand.”
Epochs before that process of “long and laborious observation” we call science discovered the transcendent state of “soft fascination” that stills the brain’s Default Mode Network — the turbine of overthinking — to lens the world through embodied feeling, Humboldt describes it perfectly in this prose poem of a passage from the preface to the first volume of his Cosmos:
In reflecting upon the different degrees of enjoyment presented to us in the contemplation of nature, we find that the first place must be assigned to a sensation, which is wholly independent of an intimate acquaintance with the physical phenomena presented to our view, or of the peculiar character of the region surrounding us. In the uniform plain bounded only by a distant horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waving grasses, deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves, softly rippling over the beach, leave a track, green with the weeds of the sea; every where, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths. Every where, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intellectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouchsafed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side, whether we look upward to the starry vault of heaven, scan the far-stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon across the vast expanse of ocean.
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.
2025-10-15 07:42:47
Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life?
Despite all the technologies of thought and feeling we have invented to divine an answer — philosophy and poetry, scripture and self-help — life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival. Beneath the overstory of one hundred trillion synapses, the overthinking animal keeps losing its way in the wilderness of want.
Not so the other animals. “They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (which is philosophy and poetry and scripture and self-help in one), “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”
A century and a half after Whitman, Annie Dillard looks to another animal for a model of how to live these human lives. Having let a muskrat be her teacher in unselfconsciousness, she recounts her lens-clearing encounter with a weasel in an essay originally published in her 1982 packet of revelations Teaching a Stone to Talk, later included in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library) — one of my all-time favorite books.
She writes:
I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray’s Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle’s nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.
This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There’s a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks — in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.
So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond’s shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky.
The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around — and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I’d never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.
Encounters are events, they touch things in us, change things in us, bend probability in the shape of the possible, tie time and chance into a knot of meaning between two creatures. Dillard recounts:
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.
Every meaningful encounter is a kind of enchantment — it comes unbidden and breaks without warning, leaving us transformed. As the weasel vanishes under the wild rose, Dillard finds herself wondering what life is like for a creature whose “journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown,” and what clues that life might give her about how to live her own. Reflecting on the memory of the encounter, on the revelation of it, she writes:
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular — shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands? — but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
Because we are creatures made of time, to change our way of being is to change our experience of time. She considers the chronometry of wildness:
Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein.
It is hard enough for a human being to attain such purity of being, harder still to share it with another. In a passage that to me is the purest, most exalted measure of love — love of another, love of life — she writes:
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
For more lessons on how to be human drawn from the lives of other animals, learn about time and tenderness from a donkey, about love and loss from an orca, and about living with a plasticity of being from a caracara.
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