2025-12-24 00:47:06
The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we so vehemently resist change, too afraid to unsettle the structure of our lives — even when it doesn’t serve us. “People wish to be settled,” Emerson wrote, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” In another epoch, another prophet consecrated the elemental: “All that you touch you change,” wrote Octavia Butler. “All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
If suffering is the magnitude of our resistance to reality, and if change is the fundamental constant of reality, then our resistance to change is our self-directed instrument of suffering.
Half a lifetime before her brilliant meditation on menopause as a microcosm of the human animal’s hostility to change, Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) offered a perfect refutation of the central fallacy at the heart of our resistance to change — our tendency to mistake stasis for equilibrium and to mistake the complacency of equilibrium for contentment — in a passage from her 1971 novel The Lathe Of Heaven (public library).
Speaking to a part that lives in all of us — the “self-cancelling, centerpoised personality” that leads us “to look at things defensively” — one character urges another:
Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? Try to detach yourself from yourself and try to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life — evolution — the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy — existence itself — is essentially change… When things don’t change any longer, that’s the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is — and the more life.
Observing that life itself, like love, is “a huge gamble against the odds,” he insists that, just as we must love anyway, we must live anyway:
You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully.
Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Terry Tempest Williams on the paradox of change, and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then revisit Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2025-12-21 03:02:11
Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence.
Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.
That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.
THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE
by Derek WalcottThen all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill —
the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,
the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” appears in Walcott’s indispensable Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (public library), which also gave us his “Love After Love” — one of the greatest poems ever written.
For a kindred vision of a more harmonious world, lensed through the possible in us, savor Marie Howe’s poem “Hymn.”
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.
2025-12-19 23:58:52
Two of the most dangerous myths we live with are the idea, handed down to us by the Romantics, that in true love two people meet each other’s every need and desire, and the idea, sold to us by the merchants of materialism and woven into the fundamental mythos of the modern world, that happiness is a matter of attaining the external objects of our desire that would finally give us the interior stillness of enough.
But then we live.
We live and we discover that our desires are mirages in the desert of our self-knowledge, discover that of all we attain nothing holds, nothing but the light between us. We discover that love is not found in the grand gestures and dramatic demonstrations of devotion, is not proven by doing the impossible for someone, but dwells quietly in showing up with passion and persistence for the possibility of more light.
French author Nadine Brun-Cosme and artist Olivier Tallec invite that discovery with great tenderness in Big Wolf & Little Wolf: The Little Leaf That Wouldn’t Fall (public library) — the sequel to their uncommonly lovely parable about loneliness, belonging, and how friendship transforms us that remains one of my favorite books of all time.
High up in a tree was a little leaf.
In the spring, this leaf was such a sweet and tender green that Little Wolf wanted nothing more than to eat it up.
“Big Wolf,” said Little Wolf. “Go get me that leaf. I just have to taste it.”
“Wait,” said Big Wolf. “Eventually it will fall.”
When summer comes, the leaf grows shiny and deep green, so dazzling that Little Wolf wants it even more, to use as a mirror. Big Wolf keeps assuring him that it will fall if he waits.
When autumn comes to color the tree with its magical alchemy of photons and frugality, Little Wolf is even more beguiled by the leaf, yearning to press it against his cheek. Once more Big Wolf counsels him to wait for it to fall.
But then it doesn’t.
As the skeletal tree rises from the snow-covered hill, the little leaf keeps waving in the gale, a banner for the kingdom of longing.
One morning, Big Wolf awakes, stretches, and, in the unbidden way that those who love show up for those whom they love, announces that he is going to climb the tree.
He said it just like that, for no reason at all.
Just to see Little Wolf’s eyes sparkle.
As Big Wolf ascends the tree and climbs onto thinner and thinner icy branches, Little Wolf’s delight petrifies to fear.
But when Big Wolf finally stretches across the thinnest branch and manages to touch the edge of the leaf with his fingertips, the leaf crumbles at his touch, raining red and gold flakes down upon Little Wolf in the setting sun.
Little Wolf looked up into this rain of gentle stars.
As pieces passed in front of his nose, Little Wolf caught a teeny tiny one onto his tongue, and he tasted its sweetness.
As another passed before his eyes, he saw how bright it was.
When a piece slid all the way down his cheek, he felt how gentle it was, and he trembled for a long time.
Then all the pieces blew farther and farther away.
Big Wolf watches from above, still and smiling.
Back down on the ground, they sit together as night falls and Little Wolf whispers:
That was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
This may be what love is — how the fantasy can crumble into a reality more beautiful than you could have imagined, how in the failure to meet the other’s need is the tender triumph of having tried, how these gestures of kindness and care are in the end the most beautiful thing we can give one another.
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.
2025-12-18 19:27:00
Nothing changes the history of the world more profoundly than changing the landscape of permission and possibility for people — what is possible and permissible for whom in a given culture. And no one has changed the history of the world more profoundly than the people who, with the self-permission to defy the prohibitive dogmas of their time and place, have broadened the horizon of possibility for others; who by some variable of their birth were not allowed or expected to do the thing — the bold thing, the passionate thing, the unreasonable thing — they ended up doing.
“So wild and grand and mysterious,” Mina Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) writes in her journal, looking out at Labrador from beneath her narrow-brimmed felt hat, feeling the weight of her revolver, hunting knife, and compass belted onto the skirt she is wearing on top of loose men’s breeches and heavy leather moccasins rising almost to her knees. Stowed in her canoe are her sextant, barometer, folding Kodak camera, and some fishing tackle. After weeks at sea, she has finally arrived at the last unexplored frontier of her continent, which she would come to see as an “uncommon place with an uncommon power to grasp the soul.”
Meanwhile, her competitor — the man she blames for her young husband’s death in this very landscape twenty months earlier, now leading a parallel expedition — is seeing only “dismal waste” in it, feeling menaced by the “desolate” landscapes, and complaining about the mosquitos. “Homecoming will be the best part of the trip,” writes Dillon Wallace. “I dread going back,” writes Mina Hubbard, her state of mind “one of continued surprise” as she watches the river grow “more and more splendid all the time,” the majestic migration of the caribou, the aurora borealis swirling above the crackling campfire.
In the official accounts of their expeditions, neither would make mention of the other. Mina alone would make a lasting scientific contribution — her maps of the Naskaupi and George Rivers would backbone all atlases of the region for decades, until the advent of aerial mapping in the 1930s. She would accomplish this by making a home at that place where poetry and science meet — the blessing refusal to decouple truth and beauty — revolutionizing the literature of exploration.
Born on a pioneer farm in Canada — a cluster of colonies Queen Victoria had confederated into a country just three years earlier — Mina Benson was the seventh child in a family of meager means and strict adherence to a Methodist church that believed higher education corrupts the soul. She learned to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse by the local sawmill with a belfry on the roof and a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall. By sixteen, she had become an elementary schoolteacher herself. But she dreamt of a larger life. After a decade of teaching, she left for New York and enrolled in nursing school.
“Oh dear I wonder what is going to become of me,” she wrote to her sister just before her thirtieth birthday.
Five months later, having risen to assistant superintendent of a Staten Island infirmary, she was assigned a young man with typhoid fever. Two years younger than her, he too was a dreamer who had grown up on a pioneer farm and had gone to New York seeking to contact the world, starving his way into journalism.
Less than a year later, Mina Benson married Leonidas Hubbard, her “Laddie,” in a small New York church with no family present. They honeymooned in the wilderness and in the years that followed, she often accompanied him on assignments in nature.
In 1903, Leonidas Hubbard persuaded his boss at Outing magazine to assign him to Labrador — three paid articles about the last frontier, and an unsalaried leave to undertake the expedition they would require. He invited his new friend Dillon Wallace, in many ways his opposite — a junior partner in a law firm, pale and pot-bellied from his desk job, suspicious of the remote wilderness. But, perhaps driven by the secret yearning that even the most contentedly caged creatures have for freedom, Wallace accepted the invitation.
On the last day of spring, their expedition sailed from the Brooklyn harbor with Mina aboard. After passing through Halifax, they spent a night at a hotel in a St. John’s hotel where, by an auspicious stroke of chance, they met the Newfoundland captain who had once been first mate on Robert Peary’s historic expedition to the North Pole. At Battle Harbor, Mina disembarked and the men continued on. “Fog and rain,” she wrote in her journal. “Cried. I wanted to.”
On January 22, after months of anxious silence, Mina Hubbard received a telegram that simply read:
Mr. Hubbard died October 18th in the interior of Labrador.
Her bright-eyed Laddie, her beloved dreamer she would always remember as “glad of Life because it gave him a chance to love and to work and to play.”
She would eventually learn that the two men and their local guide, George Elson, had run out of provisions after going up the wrong river; that Wallace and Elson had turned around to search for a cache of flour, leaving Hubbard in a tent; that Wallace had returned to search for him, but had lost his way and nearly his life in a snowstorm. Hubbard’s famished body was found a fortnight later, his diary at his side. Wallace’s circling footsteps were preserved in the snow just two hundred yards of the tent. It seemed to Mina that he “simply turned around and went back.”
Wild with grief, unable to bear the finality of his death, Mina Hubbard set out to honor her husband’s life and commissioned Wallace to write an account of their expedition.
Upon receiving the manuscript, she was galled to find a hero’s journey with Wallace as the heroic explorer and her husband as the “homesick boy” who perishes along the way. She asked Wallace to return her husband’s papers. He refused, keeping Hubbard’s field notes, maps, and photographs, sending her only his last letters, and holding on to the diary until the book was finished. Against Mina’s explicit repudiation, he published it, illustrated with Hubbard’s uncredited maps and photographs.
One January night in 1905, after weeks of “feeling very, very helpless and sad” while living as a boarder at another widow’s house in Williamstown, Mina Hubbard heeded a call that came to her “like a sudden illumination of darkness,” saying simply: “Go to Labrador.”
In February, Wallace’s book was published. It was nightmarish enough to watch it become a national bestseller, but when Wallace decided to capitalize on his newfound fame and recast himself from desk-bound lawyer to writer and intrepid explorer, announcing it was “God’s will” that he should finish “the work of exploration Hubbard began,” Mina couldn’t bear the idea of him warping her husband’s image and hijacking his dream.
She protested the only way a person of courage and creative vitality protests — she would do it herself.
With redoubled determination, she set out complete her husband’s work by embarking on a 600-mile expedition across the wildest edge of the continent, discovering herself along the way and charting a new terrain of permission and possibility for others.
She kept her plans secret, even from her parents, only telling her mother that she was going on a long journey. Understanding that the fulcrum of any great feat is the total person, body and mind, she enrolled as student in the senior class of the Williamstown high school. Every morning, Mina Hubbard, thirty-four, laced up her mourning black and headed to the classroom to study the classics alongside the teenagers, then went home to work on her meticulous provision and equipment lists.
On June 16, 1905, while the young Albert Einstein was sitting at a Swiss government desk dreaming up the relativity theory that would make GPS possible, Mina sailed for Labrador to map its uncharted rivers.
Her vast arsenal of equipment and provisions included two balloon-silk tents, three axes, two Kodak cameras, and twelve pounds of chocolate.
After a nauseating ten-day crossing, she found herself not in the “desolate peninsula” she had read about in the accounts of other explorers who had approached and turned away but a place of “strange, wild beauty, the remembrance of which buries itself silently in the deep parts of one’s being.”
Dillon Wallace, who had found out about her expedition from the newspaper headlines, was on her heels. Although they had left days apart, he arrived six weeks after her, already paying the price of their different strategies. By the overconfidence that is the Achilles heel of performative masculinity, Wallace had set out with just two canoes and three assistants hired from the mainland primarily for their academic training and their skills as handymen, all novice canoeists. They had lost their way attempting to follow old portage overground routes, lost some of their equipment trying to canoe into a snowstorm, and finally turned up at the Hudson Bay Company’s trading post at the mouth of the George River, trapped on a cliff after running their canoes into the low-tide mud. They had to be rescued by the company employees ashore.
Mina, though less resourced, had invested in three canoes and hired local guides — George Elson, who had tried valiantly and in vain to save her husband’s life, a Cree man who spoke his few English words prolifically and with great cheer, and a half-Cree, half-Russian man who hardly spoke at all and startled with his Scottish accent when he did. Her party traveled the native way, sticking to the river by canoe.
All along, Mina filled her diary with observations and exultations. Against the history of male explorers writing about nature and native cultures in the phallic language of conquering continents and penetrating uncharted wildernesses in a perpetual hysteria about the hardships their heroism surmounted, Mina’s account stands as a love letter — to the wilderness, to its people, to her Laddie, to the courage of facing the unknown with openhearted curiosity.
From the moment she set foot its shores, she looked at Labrador not with a plunderer’s eye but with a painter’s, like a poet, marveling at the silver cloud masses, the “deep rich blue” of the hills and rocks, “the sweet, plaintive song of the white-throated sparrow.” She writes in her diary:
I awoke on Friday at 2.30 A.M. The morning was clear as diamonds, and from the open front of my tent I could see the eastern sky. It glowed a deep red gold, and I lay watching it. An hour later the sun appeared over the hills touching the peak of my tent with its light, and I got up to look out. The mists had gathered on our little lake, and away in the distance hung white over the river.
As she struggled with her sextant and the eternal problem of latitude, she never ceded her responsibility to awe:
The trail led down into a valley opening eastward to Seal Lake, and walled in on three sides by the hills. On either hand reaching up their steep slopes were the spruce woods with beautiful white birches relieving their sombreness, and above — the sheer cliffs. A network of little waterways gave back images of delicate tamaracks [Larches] growing on long points between. Not a leaf stirred, and silence, which is music, reigned there. The valley was flooded with golden light, seeming to hold all in a mysterious stillness, the only motion the rapids; the only sound their singing, with now and again the clear call of a bird.
Among the purposes of all three expeditions was to meet the indigenous Naskapi people — a branch of the Cree nation, considered at the time the most “primitive” of “Indians” — known today by their own term for themselves: Innu, meaning “human beings” or “the people.” Taunted with tales of rape and violence at their hands, Mina simply met the people she encountered as people — sitting with the women, playing with the children, photographing families with her Kodak, and chuckling at how much the young men’s advances resembled those you would encounter at a New York bar — those “little touches that go to prove human nature the same the world over”:
One of the young men, handsomer than the others, and conscious of the fact, had been watching me throughout with evident interest. He was not only handsomer than the others, but his leggings were redder. As we walked up towards the camp he went a little ahead, and to one side managing to watch for the impression he evidently expected to make. A little distance from where we landed was a row of bark canoes turned upside down. As we passed them he turned and, to make sure that those red leggings should not fail of their mission, he put his foot up on one of the canoes, pretending, as I passed, to tie his moccasin, the while watching for the effect.
But as she marveled at how “Labrador can be so kind and so beautiful,” Mina did not romanticize the indifference and brutality of wild nature. Her hands were swollen with sunburn, her neck “wet and sticky with blood” from the “mosquitos and flies in clouds,” whose bites felt “like the touch of live coal.” Some days she walked most waking hours across hard rocks and thorny bush, crossing mountains along bear paths, watching the river make playthings of her tents and canoes. When the canoe capsized in the violent rapids, one of her men nearly drowned and the river swallowed half of what was stowed in the boat — their stove, tarpaulin, frying pans, one pole, one paddle, and all of their axes. That night, Mina wrote in the diary:
No thought of giving up.
Only anxious to go at it harder than ever.
What menaced her was not fear of the forces without but the terror within. She was haunted by the knowledge that her beloved had looked upon these same hills, bathed in these same rivers, slaked his own soul on the same beauty. “Try to make memories breathe inspiration, not discouragement,” Mina instructed herself in the diary.
Some days were harder than others. On the two-year anniversary of the day she said goodbye to her Laddie at Battle Harbor not knowing she would never kiss him again, she writes:
Sometimes seems too much to bear. This work keeps me from being utterly desperate. Wonder what I shall do when this is done.
Over and over, she met him in beauty:
To-night after the rain the sun came out again before disappearing beyond the hills and lit everything up with a golden light. Clouds lay like delicate veils along the hillsides sometimes dipping down almost to their feet. It is all so wild and grand and mysterious and how his heart would have beat hard with pride and joy in it all if he could be here. Along the edge of the bank I watched it for some time thinking, thinking.
It took Mina two months to complete her maps, traveling the George River and tracing the Naskapi River to its source — the first white person to do so. Reluctantly, she left Labrador, knowing Labrador would never leave her.
Upon returning home, Mina began writing her account of the expedition and nested into it a loving memorial of her husband. A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador was published three years later to patronizing reviews, focusing more on the body of the explorer than on the body of work accomplished. One reviewer, aiming to compliment, described Mina as “one of those semi-masculine ladies who astonish their readers by their courage.” Another dismissed the book as “essentially a woman’s story, filled with the unsophisticated wonder of it all,” taking care to note that “Mrs. Hubbard would probably have been a failure were it not for her male companions.”
A sole review in a London paper focused on the science, comparing her work to Wallace’s:
The main geographical results of both expeditions are the maps which the books contain, and it must be admitted that Mrs. Hubbard’s contribution to the cartography of Labrador is far superior to that of Wallace. It is both on a larger scale and more carefully plotted… It would require a third exploration to show whether Wallace or Mrs. Hubbard is the more accurate surveyor, but from the extremely sketchy character of Wallace’s maps we may hazard the opinion that the lady would prove the safer guide.
Within weeks, Mina and the reviewer were engaged, and so began the second chapter of her life. She moved to London, went on a lecture tour, raised three children, and became an advocate for women’s participation in the study of the natural world.
One spring morning in her mid-eighties, crossing the railway tracks by her house, Mina was killed by an oncoming train — that fuming mechanical mascot of industrialization, emblem of all that is unwild.
Covering the bed she had woken up in were her two plain wool blankets from Labrador, emanating all that unsophisticated wonder of a life worth living.
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.
2025-12-15 00:44:59
In modern society, Simone de Beauvoir observed in her later years, “it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life” — it is something upon which the vast majority of humanity looks upon “with sorrow and rebellion,” dreading it more than death itself. But her one solution to the problem of keeping old age from becoming “an absurd parody of our former life” is balanced precariously on the tip of Maslow’s pyramid, entirely depended on the needs below being met. So too with Bertrand Russell’s key to growing old contentedly and Ursula K. Le Guin’s insistence on the civilizational value of elders. The great paradox of modernity is that we are creatures of fraying flesh and brittle bone whose destiny is to diminish in abilities until all is dust, living in a culture equating productivity with the value of personhood, so that the person in the creature is increasingly devalued with the ripening of age.
Eva Perón (May 7, 1919–July 26, 1952) was still in her twenties when she set out to change that.
Growing up in rural Argentina, she had been moved to tears by the elderly man who regularly came to her family home asking for help, “humiliated to the point where the only thing he had left was his humility,” she would later recall. That humiliation, she came to see, was a structural problem, a flaw of the system design. And so, knowing that the most valiant way to complain is to create, she set out to redesign the system.
After researching all past efforts across legislation and philosophy, none of which offered an adequate solution to the problem of ensuring rights she saw as “profound” and “primordial” — “the Rights of Old Age” — Evita wrote them herself. She did not know then, nine months before her thirtieth birthday, that she would never live to know old age.
On August 28, 1948, before the eyes of her people, Evita presented to the president — her husband — the decalogue she had been working on obsessively, to be included in Argentina’s Constitutional Reform the following year. Addressing the nation, she held the whole world accountable for what she saw as one of the most overlooked social injustices of our civilization:
The problem of abandoned or dispossessed elderly people lacking the essentials of life has always been a key concern for the governments of all nations. Unfortunately, it has never achieved a definitive resolution… The issue remains open to all kinds of improvisations, theories, and even undermining born of apathy…
At stake, she insisted, was nothing less than “the miracle of successfully closing the cycle of human life” — a miracle that demands of society a “collaborative, just, humane, and effective” collective will that includes “all individuals without exception.” The ten rights she outlined were not just a political statement but a humanistic appeal to “all people of goodwill who feel connected to the plight of those who, after contributing their labor and social support, reach old age deprived of the means necessary to continue living with dignity in the common life of humanity.”
These are the ten rights, which I have translated into English from the original 1948 document held in the archives of the Congressional Library of Argentina:
I. RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE
Every elderly person has the right to fundamental protection, under the auspices and at the expense of their family. In cases of abandonment, it is the State’s responsibility to provide such protection, either directly or through institutions and foundations created, or to be created, for that purpose, without prejudice to the State’s or said institutions’ right to subrogate and demand the corresponding contributions from any non-compliant but solvent relatives.II. RIGHT TO HOUSING
The right to hygienic shelter with basic household comforts is inherent to the human condition.III. RIGHT TO NOURISHMENT
Healthy nourishment, adequate for each person’s age and physical condition, must be particularly considered.IV. RIGHT TO CLOTHING
Decent clothing appropriate to the climate complements the previous right.V. RIGHT TO PHYSICAL HEALTH CARE
Care for the physical health of the elderly must be an especial and ongoing concern.VI. RIGHT TO MORAL HEALTH CARE
Free exercise of spiritual expression, in accordance with morality and creed, must be ensured.VII. RIGHT TO RECREATION
The elderly must be recognized as having the right to enjoy a moderate amount of diversion in order to bear contentedly their awaiting time.VIII. RIGHT TO WORK
When the state and conditions permit it, occupation through productive work therapy must be facilitated. This will prevent the decline of the personality.IX. RIGHT TO TRANQUILITY
To enjoy tranquility, free from anguish and anxiety, in the final years of life is the heritage of the elderly.X. RIGHT TO RESPECT.
The elderly have the right to the respect and consideration of their fellow human beings.
While Evita was ensuring that growing old remains a privilege and not a privation, cells were silently mutating in her body to deny her that privilege. But the decalogue she left behind was nothing less than a revolution. Word of it traveled throughout Latin America, so that when the young Che Guevara passed through Peru on his motorcycle as Evita lay dying at thirty-three, an old indigenous man who spoke no Spanish timidly approached him and, with his son translating, asked for a copy of the famous rights of the elderly in Argentina’s new constitution. Che “enthusiastically promised to send him one.”
Rights, however, are not one-time feats but the ongoing responsibility of the society which they serve. Within three years of passing the Constitutional Reform, the widowed Juan Perón was overthrown and the military dictatorship that set in overturned his constitutional amendments, cutting out Evita’s decalogue, affirming what we so willingly forget: that progress is not a vector pointing up and up but a sine wave slowly undulating upward through regular dips. John Steinbeck knew it: “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” he wrote at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” Zadie Smith knows it: “Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” she wrote in the wake of the first Trump election.
Evita’s revolution of dignity may have been stricken from the Argentine constitution, but the words with which she ended her speech that August day lit a torchlight for the future history of our world:
Our aspirations seek to be realized even more profoundly, encompassing not only the vulnerable elderly of our society, but all the forgotten of the earth. Justice and solidarity neither recognize nor can recognize borders. They are higher manifestations of the human condition, revealing forms of the divine breath that animates our lives and that seeks to be perfected in the face of eternity… [I have] the unwavering faith that these same rights we proclaim today, presented before the nations of the world, will serve as inspiration, stir consciences, and one day reach, like a distant inspiration, the white heads of all the vulnerable elderly people of the earth.
Nothing more.
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2025-12-13 23:20:52
Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. Here are the books I read this year that clarified and magnified my life, that will stay with me for the rest of it.
Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.
Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.
In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.
Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.
Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”
What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).
She writes:
What do we say to longing?
If you have sat in the chill
of early morning bleaknessand watched as the deep blue
sighed and blushed, touchedby the warm curve of dawn
and pinker than pink thenapricot soft and spreading its
glow, you know. You know.
Read and see more here.
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser begins her book-length prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of the forgotten scientist whom Einstein considered the greatest mind America ever produced. Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts — the inaugural title in Marginalian Editions — is a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: “a phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art”; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following “the imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the impelled spirit.”
Rukeyser writes:
All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
Read more here.
I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. “The Air Vendor” was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing.
Just a few years earlier, young idealists high on the dream of democracy — my parents among them — had finally torn down Bulgaria’s forty-year dictatorship, only to watch the tyranny of capitalism replace the tyranny of communism, one kind of propaganda supplanting another with a sudden explosion of storefronts selling every imaginable commodity, bottling water and branding bread, packaging things in shiny tinfoil emblazoned with words like “happiness,” “health,” and “love.”
I read “The Air Vendor” over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari (October 23, 1920–April 14, 1980).
I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician.
But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis (“books written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one’s studies than a hundred years of school,” he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower.
Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak’s insight that great stories have “the shape of music.”
Having worked as an elementary school teacher since he was only a teenager, having watched his country’s spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking.
One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers — a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis:
If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.
Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas.
Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy (public library), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe.
Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living.
Noting that he is making no “attempt to establish a fully fledged ‘theory of the fantastic,’ with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry,” that he is not seeking “a complete theory of the imagination and invention,” Rodari offers:
I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. “All possible uses of words for all people” — this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.
Find my favorite parts of it here.
“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.
A river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood.
This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? (public library) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive.
Extending an invitation to “imagine water otherwise” — and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise — he writes:
For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.
With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s vivifying notion of a “grammar of animacy,” he adds:
A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.
Read more here.
Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes love. Come to see anything or anyone this clearly — a falcon, or a mountain, or a patch of moss — and you will find yourself loving the world more deeply.
One winter day, walking through the placid English countryside while on pandemic-forced sabbatical from her roiling job as a foreign policy political advisor in London, Chloe Dalton stopped mid-stride at the sight of a small still creature haloed by the sunlight — a baby hare no bigger than her palm, right there in the middle of the path, about to change the course of her life, though she did not yet know it. In her moving memoir Raising Hare (public library), she recounts that catalytic encounter:
The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard-packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.
The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.
Unlike rabbits, so populous and docile that we have tamed them into pets and children’s book characters, hares are rare and furtive to begin with — wild creatures glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye as they vanish into the thicket of their secret lives. Dalton had never seen a leveret before. She didn’t know what to do — if she left it there, stranded and helpless as any newborn, it would be vulnerable to becoming prey or roadkill; if she touched it to move it into the tall grass, its mother, if alive at all, might not find it or might reject it, as wild animals are apt to do when the smell of their young has been tainted.
One of life’s great cruelties is that quick decisions we make at a certain hour on a certain day, decisions we could have and would have made otherwise on a different day in a different state of mind, end up shaping the years and decades ahead, shaping our very self. One of life’s great mercies is that we never realize this at the crossing point of seemingly inconsequential choices — or else we would be paralyzed to take even the littlest step on the path of our becoming.
Unable to reason her way out of the paradox, Dalton follows her own animal instinct and carefully swaddles the leveret in dry grass to avoid touching it, then tucks it into her coat, thinking she was taking it home for the night. She ends up raising it, and in a sense being raised by it toward her full humanity — shaken awake from the trance of workaholism, freed from the conditionings and compulsions we mistake for needs, resensitized to the wonder of life. She chronicles the experience — one rife with biological, ecological, and existential revelations — with the tenderness of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of his three weeks cohabitating with a bunny, the respectful observational rigor of Thoreau’s overnight fosterage of a little owl, and the searching intellect of Helen Macdonald’s life with a goshawk. Read some of it here.
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.
An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.
The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.
And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.
This inflicts no small identity crisis:
What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.
But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.
Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.
A little note of misery sounded in his mind.
What could possibly be wrong?
It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.
Read and see more here.
“Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith — this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking on the cold hard floor of a world that has always mistaken the limits of the imagination for the limits of reality. And I thought of Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — the classicist who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, who declared herself a “deeply religious atheist” and devoted her life to excavating the roots of the religious impulse from the clay of the psyche, teaching us that it is not who or what we pray to but what we pray for that reveals and redeems our lives; that what we pray for, not on our knees but in our choices and the stories we tell about them, conjures up the world we yearn to live in and it is our yearning that we act upon to make the world. Every choice we make in our political and personal lives is a prayer. All change is prayerful action toward a different kind of world — an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo.
“To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,” Jane Ellen Harrison declared from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life in one of the superb essays collected in Alpha & Omega (public library). She loved a woman a generation younger than her, loved a world millennia older than hers, loved ideas epochs ahead of her time. Virginia Woolf was taken by “her superb high thinking agnostic ways.” In the nascent evolutionary theory, which Harrison she insisted every thinking person should read, she saw a lens on the human soul and its constellation in societies, saw “how the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,” saw how science and spirituality both reach for that “invisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.” She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in “the value of each individual manifestation of life,” and above all in the merging of the two in “the strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.”
She cherished the “inward and abiding patience” of science, its “gentleness” in understanding the true timescales of change, how long it takes to uproot an invasive untruth from the garden of culture. Religion she regarded as a “necessary step in the evolution of human thought,” but she detested its dogmas — its “net of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,” the way its doctrines “distract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.” She sought to understand the need for it: “Man,” she wrote when we were all men, “feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his confused thinking, he develops a god.” Her god was not our maker but our making, not a pacifier for the lonely confusion of being a self but a clarifying force for the cosmos of connection between us and everything that is — that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is “the new religion for which the world wait” but “already is, if unconsciously, our religion.” She insisted that in order to attain “real freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,” we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. “Repression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,” she warned in the first year of the world’s first global war, urging us to take “a step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.”
Because she recognized that faith is an adaptation of the self, she was especially fascinated by experiences of religious conversion, by all mystical experiences, fascinated by how they tend to come just after moments of profound personal crisis or heartbreak, when “some shattering blow has been dealt to a man’s personality, to his affection or ambition.” Here was a cathartic unselfing, a submergence of the self into the oneness — in conversion, “the individual spirit is socialized.” She saw science as another instrument of unselfing, the way “it holds immediate personal reaction in suspense” to reveal a larger reality — “the whole, the unbounded whole,” to which religion is a reaction: In our inability to hold “the real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow,” we create “various and shifting” eikon — Greek for image, figure, or likeness, origin of the English icon. This “attempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known” is our self-expatriation from the mystery we live with, the mystery we are.
She drew on St. Paul and Darwin, on Whitman and Tagore, guarding religion from theology and defining it simply as “that commerce with the unseen and unknown” that is the natural consequence of our imagination and our capacity for free thought. Theology, she thought, is a metastasis of our unease with the unknown, of our need to create a referent for it in the known — something to make us feel “relieved, comforted, reassured, at home” — and bow to it, calling it God. But such gods, she cautioned, are “a moving away from religion . . . a rationalizing into the known, not a relation of faith to the unknown.” It was faith she was interested in — the psychology of it, the source of it, the different meanings and manifestations of it to different people at different times across different cultures. The questions at the heart of faith — what we believe in, what we pray for, how we ritualize our beliefs in opinions and actions — became her lens for understanding nearly every aspect of human culture and society.
But although she lamented living through an “anti-rational age” in which reason seemed to have “suffered a certain eclipse,” Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life, that time is the richest subject of philosophy, that the poet’s job is to love people and show them “the bigness, the beauty, of their lives,” that science should resist the push toward specialization and break down the artificial boundaries between disciplines that keep us from seeing the full picture of reality. Out of her life and her work, out of her politics and her passions, arises her simple animating ethos: “By contacts we are saved.”
And so, having made a life in scholarship, she returned over and over to love — the supreme unselfing, the great cathedral of the mystery to which all science and all religion are an incomplete response, the light looking out from the face between the palms that we may call faith. “Learning severs us from all but a few — love reunites us,” she wrote. “Such is the mystery of life.”
The day after Jane Ellen Harrison died at age seventy-seven — an unseasonable spring day of “bitter windy rain” — Virginia Woolf took a break from working on Orlando — her four-century love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the great love of her own life — and went for a walk in the cemetery, where she ran into the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, Jane’s partner, “the colour of dirty brown paper,” distraught and “half sleep” with grief.
Virginia recounted her encounter with the broken Hope:
We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.
Virginia got to the funeral just as the service was ending. The clergyman was reading “some of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible,” but she felt unmoved.
As usual, the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is ‘God’ & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?
Outside, “a bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed.”
Later, Hope later received a note of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. “It was more comforting than all my other letters put together,” she told a friend half a lifetime later. It read:
But remember what you have had.
“I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) wrote in the wake of his terminal diagnosis as he contemplated what makes life worth living, having devoted his own life of visionary lunacy to shedding light on what makes a person, how we find ourselves and lose ourselves in the convoluted corridors of the mind.
His singular spirit, the quiet passion of his devotion to the human project, and his uncommon insight into the life of the mind come alive in his posthumously published Letters (public library), revealing in a new way — in that singular way that only the contact point between one consciousness and another can reveal — his views on the self, the creative process, music, the relationship between art and science, the nature of love, and much more.
Read some of my favorite fragments of the book — Oliver’s dazzling love letters to his Hungarian lover — here.
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life.
Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.
You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. “The gardener,” Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, “digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”
This is why Debbie Millman (yes) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything.
A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity — a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself.
Read and see more here.
Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life — to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of being alive — a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible and permissible for a person, no to the banality of approval, no to every Faustian bargain of so-called success offering prestige at the price of authenticity.
One night after a long day shift as a waitress, a young mother tucked her sickly daughter into bed and handed her one of the few precious remnants of her own childhood — a 19th-century book of illustrated poems for boys and girls titled Silver Pennies.
Just as The Fairy Tale Tree awakened the young Nick Cave to art, this was Patti Smith’s precocious awakening as an artist. The opening sentence enchanted her:
You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find.
It seemed like a clear instruction, the price of what she yearned for: “entrance into the mystical world.” In that way children have of touching the elemental truth of things, she intuited the two things needed for entry: “the heart to pierce other dimensions, the eyes to observe without judgment.”
She couldn’t have known it then, but this may be the purest definition of what it takes to be an artist; she couldn’t have known that she would spend the rest of her life not finding silver pennies but making them — for others to find, for her own salvation, for paying the price of her nos in living the enchanted yes of being an artist.
In her moving memoir Bread of Angels (public library), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds — the odds of bodily survival, with a “Proustian childhood” punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with losses so harrowing to read about it is hard to imagine living with, from the death of her childhood best friend at twelve to a season of being marked by an incomprehensible cascade of losses: her artistic soul mate is taken by AIDS, her husband falls ill and dies at the hospital where their children were born, and in the wake of all that grief her beloved brother is slain by a stroke while wrapping a Christmas present for his daughter. What saves her again and again is her reverence for the magic and mystery of life. Pulsating beneath it all is “love, the ineffable miracle” — that delicate art of holding on and letting go, our training ground for trusting time.
Read more here.
Evolution invented REM sleep, that ministry of dreams, to give us a safe way of practicing the possible into the real. The dreams of the night clarify our lives. The dreams of the day complicate them, charge them with the battery of fear and desire, quiver them with the urgency of our mortality and the fervor of our lust for life. To dream is to dare traversing the roiling ocean between what is and what could be on a ramshackle raft of determination and luck. The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life — that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail over the probable amid the cold austerity of eternal night.
But what may be even harder than getting what you dream of is knowing what to dream of, annealing your imagination and your desires enough to trust that your dreams are your own — not the second-hand dreams of your parents, not your heroes’ costumes of achievement, not your culture’s templates of success. “No one can acquire for another — not one,” Walt Whitman reckoned with how to own your life, “not one can grow for another — not one,” while two hundred miles north Thoreau was reckoning with the nature of success, concluding: “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
They are nothing less than patron saints of the human spirit, those who protect our dreams from the false gods of success. Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint, and she takes up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (public library) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for. Along the way, and inevitably — because “success” is simply what we call the airbrushing of our yearning for self-actualization, for happiness, for living into and up to our gifts — she explores the interlaced complexities of family, culture, creativity, love, and forgiveness.
It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and gave it form so we can hear it with our eyes and see with our minds, making shapes for sounds and meaning from the shapes.
We take it for granted now, this makeshift miracle permeating every substrate of our lives, and go on tasking these tiny concrete things with conveying our most immense and abstract ideas. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth’s largest living organism, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archeological artifact, touches more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters carry the history of our species and of our world, their shapes shaped by a conversation between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped.
Kelli Anderson, maker of material magic, brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape — a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter.
Through a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelli shines a dazzling light on how we went from ink to lead to pixel, drawing on everything from Plato’s Cratylus to an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom to (which sparked the concept of the first computer code in the fertile mind of the the young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to conjure up the digital universe.
Read and see more here.
The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love.
It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme.
We need silence.
We need solitude.
The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls.
Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee “red-cheeked and glowing with life” and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that “keeps shining, like a candle in the fog.”
He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality:
The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I’ve never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an “occasion for unselfing,” in Iris Murdoch’s lovely term, is no small gift — one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson’s lovely term, “active surrender.” We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery — which is “not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop” but “active and thrumming, almost palpable” — and it comes to him redoubled:
Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.
[…]
Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
Read more here.
I know of no better medicine for the spirit than a daily creative practice, and I know of no better field guide to embarking on one and sticking with it, no better floatation device for the ocean of self-doubt that regularly engulfs all creative work, than The Book of Alchemy (public library) by Suleika Jaouad, whose very life is a testament to art as the alchemy of suffering into strength, into connection, into meaning.
Pulsating beneath this gentle guided tour of your own creative potential is the assurance that fear is a signpost toward the right direction, consonant with David Bowie’s advice to “go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” Suleika writes:
Trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need.
At the center of it all is the creative power of keeping a journal, to which some of humanity’s most beloved artists and writers have attested: Virginia Woolf did it “to loosen the ligaments” of her formal writing; Anaïs Nin did it “to capture the living moments”; Thoreau did it to know how “the imaginary hero” of his own life “lived day to day”; Susan Sontag did it as a way of feeling “emotionally and spiritually independent.” Drawing in her own experience of extended illness, on that terrible loneliness of standing perched on the precipice of life while everyone else goes on living, Suleika reflects on how “journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude” and writes:
If you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.
[…]
Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It’s a rare space, in this age of hypercurated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life. Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers that are already inside of you, and you begin to transform. And yet, at the same time that it offers transcendence, there’s nothing more humble than the journal.
In the remainder of The Book of Alchemy, she invites a dazzling spectrum of minds — poets, philosophers, novelists, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, musicians, and various other revolutionaries of the commonplace — to each share a creative prompt, ranging from a blessing to a letter to George Saunders’s magnificent four-stage action/reaction prompt “designed to disrupt your idea of who you are, and give you, perhaps, a slightly more generous vision of your capabilities.”
On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about -173°C) at night. But these unique nooks, which are most likely collapsed lava tubes, are a cozy 63°F (17°C) inside — the feeling-tone of a crisp autumn day in Brooklyn, where I live. Images from the LRO suggested that these pits might unfold into caves that would make perfect sites for lunar exploration — campsites with a stable temperature, more protected from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micrometeorites.
There is something poetic in knowing that we evolved in caves and might one day inhabit caves on another celestial body, having invented the means to get there with the imagination that bloomed over millions of years in the lonely bone cave of the mind.
There is also something poetic in knowing that as we fantasize about leaving for the Moon, the Moon is leaving us.
The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this disquieting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. Nobody believed him — the Moon looked so steady, so unlosable. It took a quarter millennium for his theory to be vindicated: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the lunar surface and when laser beams were beamed at them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year — more than half the rate at which a child grows.
The Moon is leaving us because of the gravitational conversation between it and the Earth: the ocean tides. The drag they cause slows down the planet’s spin rate. Because gravity binds the Moon and the Earth, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us.
We know this thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the revelation that space is not flat, time is not absolute, and spacetime is a single fabric along the curvature of which everything, including light, moves.
I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.
Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote The Coziest Place on the Moon (public library) — a modern fable about how to live with loneliness and what it means to love, illustrated by the wildly talented Sarah Jacoby. Peek inside here.
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