2025-11-06 04:02:03
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch each other, feel the shape of the world, hold our own experience. We live in language — it is our interior narrative that stitches the events of our lives into a story of self. We love in language — it is the lever for every deep and valuable relationship, which Adrienne Rich knew to be “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” When two people meet in a third language, parts of each always remain unmet by the other. When two people meet in the same language, they must learn to mean the same things by the same words in order to meet in truth. And so we must love language in order to love each other well, in order to love our own lives.
I know of no greater love letter to language, to its simple pleasures and its infinite complexities, than the one Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) tucks into his posthumously published Memoirs (public library) under the heading “Words” — a stream-of-consciousness prose poem nested between chapters about his changing life in Chile and his eventual choice to leave Santiago, “a captive city between walls of snow,” half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.”
A generation after Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice that “words belong to each other,” Neruda writes:
… You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend … I bow to them … I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down … I love words so much … The unexpected ones … The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop … Vowels I love … They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew … I run after certain words … They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem … I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives … And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go … I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves … Everything exists in the word … An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her … They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long … They are very ancient and very new … They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower.
Nested into Neruda’s passionate ode to the brightness of language is also a reminder of the darknesses out of which its light arose:
What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors … They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then … They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks … Wherever they went, they razed the land … But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here … our language. We came up losers … We came up winners … They carried off the gold and left us the gold … They carried everything off and left us everything … They left us the words.
We forget this, but it is a truth both uncomfortable and liberating — that there is no wasted experience, that the heartbreaks, the disasters, the plunderings of trust and territory all leave the seeds of something new in their wake. Our very world was born by brutality, forged of the debris that first swarmed the Sun four and a half billion years ago before cohering into rocky bodies that went on to pulverize one another in a gauntlet of violent collisions that sculpted the Earth and the Moon. Words too can do that — universes of perspective colliding in order to shape a habitable truth, to shape the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, the stories we tell each other and call 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.
2025-11-03 07:14:14
When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlando. I had no idea that Usnea longissima is just one of more than 20,000 known species of lichen — almost twice as many as birds.
In the lifetime since, I have collected and photographed lichen all over the world, from the spruces lining the wild shores of Alaska to the stone walls lining the rural roads of Ireland, from Basquiat’s grave in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery to my oldest friend’s young husband’s tombstone in London’s Brompton Cemetery. And because anything you polish with attention will become a mirror, I have come to see that lichen knows many things we spend our lives learning — about adversity, about belonging, about love.
Here are some instructions for living gleaned from nature’s tiniest titans of tenacity:
Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.
Roots are overrated — invent other structures of belonging. Lichens don’t have a root system to draw nutrients and moisture from the ground. Instead, they alchemize sunlight into sugar, using their plant part to photosynthesize and their fungal part to grow root-like rhizines that allow them to attach to nearly any surface — house walls and tree bark, dead bones and living barnacles — drawing moisture and nutrients from the air. This allows them to thrive across an astonishing range of environments — from tide pools to mountaintops, from the hottest deserts to the iciest tundra.
Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.
Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.
When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space: When a team of Spanish scientists sent the common map lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum and the bright orange wonder Rusavskia elegans aboard a Russian spacecraft to be exposed to cosmic radiation for 15 days, the lichens returned to Earth unperturbed and resumed their reproductive cycles.
Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.
Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.
Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.
Become a living poem. Lichen anchors one of the subtlest, most powerful poems ever written — Elizabeth Bishop’s ode to time and love lensed through the greying hair of the love of her life, the Brazilian architect and landscape designer Lota de Macedo Soares:
THE SHAMPOO
by Elizabeth BishopThe still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
— Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
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.
2025-11-01 04:01:44
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.
Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.
The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”
Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.
In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:
All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”
Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:
The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.
(This is precisely why learning something is the best way to lift yourself up when the world gets you down.)
A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:
Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.
In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.
Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:
My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.
[…]
I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.
A century later, George Orwell would embody the same truth about the spirit, growing a rose garden while dismantling totalitarianism.
Couple with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Hawthorne on how to look and really see.
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.
2025-10-30 04:20:12
We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation and destruction is the price we pay for our own complexity. We live with it and die by it and make poems and paintings and psalms to transform the constant tension between the two into meaning, into something of beauty and substance that outlasts the dust of power — these are the shoreless seeds and stardust that survive us.
In a world teetering on the event horizon of its third global war, Italian artist Alessandro Sanna set out to paint to life his favorite poems from the time of the first. It all began with a single poem — a splendid addition to the small, surprising canon of stone poems for trusting time — written in the sweltering trenches of the third summer of WWI:
I AM A CREATURE
by Giuseppe Ungaretti
translated from Italian by Geoffrey BrockLike this stone
on San Michele
this cold
this hard
this arid
this impervious
this utterly
spiritless
like this stone
is my
unseen griefWe pay down
death
by living
But as Sanna tried to paint the work of his favorite wartime poets, he found himself unable to shake off the mental images of all that ruin, the emotional atmosphere of all that grief. In the author’s note to what became Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War (public library) — his extraordinary wordless reckoning with humanity and war — he echoes artist Ann Hamilton’s moving manifesto “Making Not Knowing” and writes:
I could already feel my hands thinking along other lines… I have always put my faith in my hands — in their manner of working, and in how they seek to capture the best gesture with which to solve the challenge of depicting a sky, a mountain, or a wind-tossed sea. Hands think differently from our minds; hands are more daring and audacious. When hands work, they are strangely farsighted and free of preconceptions, constantly opening scenes, erasing them, starting over from scratch — as if they never work from a plan.
When his hands parted the mind’s curtain of preconception and dilated the aperture of the present, he began seeing the bigger picture stretching like a tapestry all the way back to the dawn of our species, to the birth of our lust for domination, and all the way forward to a placid universe that survives us.
In consonance with Rachel Carson’s parting insistence that humanity has reached a point where it must “prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself,” Sanna writes:
Ever since the dawn of time, the stars sparkling in the sky have looked down upon us with indifference, as we strain in the age-old, tormented contest to dominate all things that can be named. For glimpsed from that distance, the Earth is no more than a luminous, watery pearl that appears just as immutable as immovable stone.
There are echoes in these words of Auden’s timeless poem “The More Loving One,” with its “stars that do not give a damn,” with its central antidote to the human impulse for destruction and domination in the simple, immense vow: “Let the more loving one be me.”
With the feeling-tone of an epic myth and the chill of a mirror held up to reality, the story begins with a single stone that rolls down from the cloud-crowned top of a mountain into a valley where two humans, each wanting to possess it, invent the first weapon: want. The men become clans that become armies that set out to defeat each other, to conquer the elements, to own the other animals, with fists that become sticks that become bows that become guns that become the mushroom cloud.
All the while, the Sun and the Moon and the stars look on indifferent, watching us forget what Dante called the love that moves them, watching us turn this improbable world, this one and only heaven we will ever know, into a living hell.
What emerges from Sanna’s pages is a bittersweet yet hopeful meditation on the choices that stand between our predilections and our possibilities, intimating that peace is not only possible, not only our moral imperative, but our creaturely inheritance from star and stone; that perhaps we are here simply to learn how to be more loving creatures.
Couple Old as Stone, Hard as Rock with Einstein and Freud’s little-known correspondence about war and human nature, then revisit Sanna’s magnificent alternative origin story of humanity.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books
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.
2025-10-28 11:42:09
The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing in an encounter with the majesty and mystery of what is not ourselves — birds migrating at midnight, the magic of autumn, the grandeur of Machu Picchu; almost always, in consonance with William James’s criteria for transcendent experiences, they are ineffable. Still, we are here to tell each other what it is like to be alive and language remains the best technology we have invented for bridging the abyss between one aliveness and another.
Few encounters with the wildness and wonder of this world can be more powerful than that with an orca, and no one has painted a more moving word-portrait of that encounter than Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager.
Seventeen centuries after the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described the largest member of the dolphin family as “an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth” in a small passage of his thirty-seven-volume natural history encyclopedia, Carl Linnaeus named it Orcinus orca — “the demon from the underworld.” But while this striking marbled creature is nature’s most successful and creative predator, it is also the tenderest, paying the same high price of consciousness that we pay. To encounter an orca is to both to face something almost incomprehensibly other and to face the depths of ourselves. Strager channels that transcendent duality throughout The Killer Whale Journals (public library) — the riveting record of how she escaped the cage of theory that was her landlocked biology degree and Trojan-horsed her way into an expedition to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, breaking in through the cracks of the patriarchy to study Earth’s most powerful matriarchal society by volunteering to cook on a small research vessel.
She writes:
Killer whales are unconcerned with our attitudes. They don’t need our love or our hatred. How we understand and interact with a big predator like the killer whale is instead a reflection of ourselves and how we want to live with the complexity of other animals around us.
To come close to an orca is no easy endeavor, even for those who have ventured to the remotest and most undisturbed reaches of the oceanic wilderness. Strager recounts the thrill of trailing two elusive male orcas in the setting sun, the hint of their presence turning the sea into “a piece of heavy silk… gently moved by invisible hands.” But even when they vanish beneath the still surface, other senses can reveal their presence. Recounting her first experience of eavesdropping on the sea’s undersound with a hydrophone connected to an amplifier, she writes:
Through the headphones, I could clearly hear the splash and gurgling from the hydrophone as it sunk, and then the quietness of the big sea, with a low thrumming in the background, which I would later learn was the sound of boat traffic in the distance. But through the muffled noises of engines and water, I also heard the most incredible sounds, eerie and melodious at the same time. Like a tropical bird singing a mournful song or people whistling from far away across a deep valley.
[…]
Somewhere, in the vast ocean below me, in the great darkness under the leaden surface of the sea, animals were calling and responding to each other.
Understanding — which is a thing of the mind — that these majestic animals are dwelling below the surface is one thing, encountering them with the full creaturely sensorium of bodies meeting in space is something else entirely. Strager reflects on the inner transformation sparked by her first direct encounter with an orca:
A large male came up right next to the boat, so close that I could see water running down his gleaming skin. A pearly black eye just in front of the white eyepatch stared right at me. It was just a quick moment, but it stayed with me after the whale was gone. I realized that this huge killer whale had been checking us out — just as we were checking them out. To sense the awareness and curiosity of another being, and perhaps even its desire to connect, shatters an invisible barrier. It perforates the solitude of being human in a wild world where we are surrounded by creatures we don’t understand and can’t reach.
Immense and indifferent, the orcas have no sense of or concern with the myths and legends we have woven them into, the Instagram sensations and the scientists’ journals. And yet we share the kinship of curiosity, that yearning to apprehend what it is to be another — the only thing that saves us from the existential loneliness of being ourselves.
Couple with the fascinating science of what it’s like to be an owl, then revisit what orcas can teach us about love and loss.
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.
2025-10-26 07:55:31
We are the only animal captive in a cage of its own making. Its bars can look like many things — the screen, the self, the scintillation of being right — but it is from within it that we look out and call our little view the world, forgetting that to recover our wildness is to recover our humanity, to waste it is to waste our aliveness.
Few have offered a more powerful key to the cage than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — the Audubon of the pampas, who discovered his gift for channeling the beating heart of nature amid the ruin of his best laid plans and went on to influence generations of writers, from Henry James and Ernest Hemingway to Barry Lopez and Robert Macfarlane.
All visionaries, even the farthest seers, are still a product of their time and place. In an era when hunting was the most popular sport and science studied living species as dead specimens, Hudson recounts how he first approached nature as “a sportsman and collector, always killing things.” But he was haunted by the uneasy sense that he was paying a high price for this violent negation of his kinship with other creatures, relinquishing some essential part of his own creatureliness.
Eventually, he traded the gun for the binoculars and the field notebook, determined to understand living beings on their own terms, collecting not bodies but observations, hunting not for game but for the play of ideas in a mind restless to apprehend the world.
Although he called himself a field-naturalist, Hudson wrote about what he observed with a scientist’s thirst for truth, a philosopher’s hunger for meaning, and a poet’s tenderness for the complicated miracle of being alive. In his moving 1919 memoir The Book of a Naturalist (public domain), he looks back on what he gained by giving up his era’s givens:
Abstention from killing had made me a better observer and a happier being, on account of the new or different feeling towards animal life which it had engendered. And what was this new feeling — wherein did it differ from the old of my shooting and collecting days, seeing that since childhood I had always had the same intense interest in all wild life? The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years!
These echoes of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” are echoes of Hudson’s childhood — he had devoured On the Origin of Species as a boy in the wake of his mother’s death and had been deeply moved by its revelation of life as a ceaseless conversation between organisms and their environment, of the human animal as part of a vast and complex system, a part neither central and nor inevitable. Like most adults, he had unlearned the elemental truths we touch for a moment as children before culture and civilization slap our hand. Unlike most adults, he devoted his life to remembering what he had been bamboozled into forgetting — the wild wonder of life, the lavish otherness of its “endless forms,” so unbidden in their variousness: The world didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t owe us three hundred species of hummingbirds, the needless blue extravagance of the bowerbird, the Fibonacci perfection of the argonaut.
Reflecting on this awakening to the wonder of wildness and how it consecrates the world, Hudson writes:
The main thing was the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human. Nay, the very fact that the forms were unhuman but served to heighten the interest; — the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.
Couple with Seamus Heaney’s magnificent poem “Death of a Naturalist,” then revisit Hudson on how to be a happier creature and Darwin on the spirituality of nature.
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.