“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
~ Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961 ) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist who founded analytical psychology. He was a prolific author and illustrator who studied many cultures to understand the human psyche. Jung’s theories and concepts, like “introversion” and “extroversion”, have influenced psychology, psychiatry, art, literature, religion, and more. Jung’s ideas differed from his mentor and later rival, Sigmund Freud.
Mention that a total solar eclipse is coming, and almost nobody will say, “Wow, we get to see the solar corona!” That’s despite the sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere being the number one sight during totality — a genuine jaw-dropper.
Instead, the focus on social media is always on the darkness during the day, arguably the least interesting — but easiest to grasp — aspect of a total solar eclipse. It’s no wonder that many people misunderstand and underestimate them, and think of eclipse chasers as a little odd.
But that’s not the half of it. There are dozens of things to see and experience during a total solar eclipse, so many that we’ve put together a checklist of things to see as you’re swallowed by the moon’s shadow. Here’s what you may experience during the solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, roughly in the order they occur from first contact — when the moon begins to eclipse the sun — to fourth contact, when it departs.
1. Sunspots
Look for sunspots during the partial phases. (Image credit: Stan Honda / AFP) (Photo by STAN HONDA/AFP via Getty Images)
Here’s one everyone in both the partial and total eclipse zones can see on Aug. 12, 2026. As the moon‘s silhouette moves across the sun, look through your ISO-certified safe solar eclipse glasses/solar filters. With luck, you’ll see the edge of the moon move across dark spots on the solar surface. These are sunspots, cool patches where the sun’s magnetic field is concentrated and complex. They’re where solar flares come from.
2. Planets
Venus is below the eclipse in this image from April 8, 2024. (Image credit: Photo by: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images))
You’ll often hear someone shout, “There’s Venus!” during the totality phase of a total solar eclipse, to which your response should rightly be: “Who cares?” as you focus on the much rarer sight of the solar corona. The correct time to look for planets is about 15 minutes before totality, when — on Aug. 12, 2026 — Jupiter will appear about 11 degrees west-northwest, with tiny Mercury about 4 degrees beyond. Venus will be much farther away, about 46° east-southeast of the sun, but easy to see. Mars will be low in the west, but much more difficult to see.You may like
Use a colander to create projections of crescent suns. (Image credit: Andrew Holt via Getty Images)
Here’s another one everyone can look out for during a deep partial solar eclipse. When over 50% of the sun is eclipsed, crescent-shaped shadows begin to appear on the ground beneath trees. It’s sunlight passing through tiny gaps, which act like the aperture control on a camera. The best way to see them is to grab a colander or spaghetti spoon — or anything with small, defined holes. Failing that, cross your fingers in a waffle pattern and you’ll project diffuse crescents.
4. Shadow bands
Shadow bands seconds after totality, 2 July, 2019 019 total solar eclipse in Vicuna, Chile – YouTube
Here’s one for eclipse chasers in Spain. About two minutes before and after totality, it’s sometimes possible to see wavy lines on white surfaces. It’s the reduced light from the crescent sun being refracted by atmospheric turbulence, and, for some reason, it’s much more noticeable when the eclipse is low in the sky — as it will be from Spain. They’re called shadow bands or “shadow snakes”. Pack as large a white sheet as you can (or borrow one from your bemused hotel).Signup to our newsletter
The light levels suddenly plummet just prior to totality. (Image credit: Photo by Dimitrios Manis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
As the partial eclipse reaches about 80%, you’ll begin to notice it getting cooler. By the time it’s just seconds before totality, it will be chilly as the light levels around you crash like nothing else you have experienced. “Darkness in the day” does not do it justice — it’s as if the world is ending. Even experienced eclipse chasers get a knot in their stomach about now as a primordial fear kicks in. That feeling is not helped by looking at the others around you, who, in the eerie, silvery light, suddenly look almost ghoulish.
This is a tricky thing to see. The prelude to totality is the arrival of the moon’s umbral shadow, which will race across observers at about 2,200 mph (Greenland and Iceland) to about 12,000 mph (in eastern Spain, where the shadow is by then oblique and about to skip off the Earth). You’ll need an elevated position — perhaps the side of a valley — looking northwest for this sight, and preferably a relatively uniform landscape. It’s something you can attempt to capture using a GoPro or similar.
7. Diamond rings and Baily’s beads
Baily’s beads appear just before and after totality. (Image credit: by Marc Guitard via Getty Images)
These are trademarks of totality, but require care to see. As the eclipse nears totality, a spectacular drop of sunlight (the diamond ring) breaks into tiny so-called Baily’s beads of light streaming through the moon’s valleys. When the final bead vanishes, totality begins. The opposite happens a few minutes later at the end of totality, when a Baily’s bead appears, then a few more, quickly coalescing into a second diamond ring. Do what experienced eclipse chasers do and ignore the first round — you’ll just end up with an after-image in your eyes, which will affect your vision just as the corona pops into view. Besides, it’s the second diamond ring that’s the real “wow” moment that ends totality. Its arrival means it’s time to put your solar eclipse glasses back on.What to read next
Seeing the sun’s corona is the main attraction during the totality phase of a total solar eclipse. (Image credit: Photo by: Alan Dyer/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Images)
This is what you came to see. The sun’s corona, its outer atmosphere, is where solar flares and coronal mass ejections come from. It’s the hottest part of the sun. It’s always there — but hidden from view by the much brighter surface of the sun, its photosphere. Only when the photosphere is blocked by the moon — totality — can the corona be seen. During this time, it’s essential that you remove your solar eclipse glasses to see the tenuous halo around the silhouette of the moon. It’s a surreal and remarkable sight. Should you bring binoculars just to look at the corona during totality, even if it’s only for a few seconds? Yes! This may be the most beautiful thing you will ever see.
9. Solar chromosphere
The chromosphere is fleetingly seen as a crimson line visible during totality. (Image credit: Photo by Chris Weeks/Getty Images)
Just after totality begins and just before it ends, a thin crimson line appears where the diamond ring just was and is about to be. This is the chromosphere, a layer of the sun’s atmosphere just above the photosphere. It’s a fleeting sight used by scientists to capture a “flash” spectrum that shows exactly what chemical elements are in the sun’s atmosphere.
10. Solar prominences
Prominences are towers of plasma in the sun’s chromosphere. (Image credit: Photo by STAN HONDA/AFP via Getty Images)
One of the most surprising aspects of witnessing a total solar eclipse is a view of prominences during totality, bright pink spikes or loops that appear around the moon’s silhouette. These are cool plasma structures extending from the chromosphere into the corona, usually lasting days or weeks. They’re particularly obvious when the sun is close to solar maximum — as it is right now.
11. Totality ‘sunset’
A composite of the trail of a total solar eclipse over the totality sunset. (Image credit: Mark Chivers via Getty Images)
Totality will be short for many eclipse chasers on Aug. 12, 2026, but if you can take your eyes off the solar corona, glance at the colors in the sky close to the horizon — it looks like a 360-degree sunset. If it’s cloudy and you miss the corona, the colors around you can be particularly memorable.
12. Meteors
The Perseid meteor shower peaks on Aug. 12-13, 2026. (Image credit: zhengshun tang via Getty Images)
By remarkable coincidence, the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12, 2026, comes only a few hours before the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Expect about 20-40 “shooting stars” to be visible every hour around midnight and into the early hours of Aug. 13, though among eclipse chasers, those in rural Spain will have a better chance since there are more hours of darkness than in Iceland and Greenland. Could there be a “shooting star” during totality? It’s possible — but to see it, you’d have to be looking away from the solar corona, which would be a mad thing to do.
13. Aurora borealis
Aurora is unlikely, but possible during totality in Iceland and Greenland. (Image credit: WanRu Chen via Getty Images)
Is it a long shot? Yes. Is it possible? Also yes. The specter of the aurora borealis appearing during totality in the skies above Iceland and Greenland during totality is getting eclipse chasers excited. The reality is that totality is never as dark as people think — it’s a twilight — plus aurora on the day-side of Earth is not nearly as strong as on the night-side. It could happen — though more likely is a display of the northern lights late at night, particularly in Iceland, where the night sky does get sufficiently dark in mid-August, and auroras are commonly seen at that time of year.
Jamie is an experienced science and travel journalist, stargazer and eclipse chaser who writes about exploring the night sky, solar and lunar eclipses, the Northern Lights, moon-gazing, astro-travel, astronomy and space exploration. He is the editor of WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com, author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners, co-author of The Eclipse Effect, and a senior contributor at Forbes.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?” ― Werner Heisenberg
“The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding.” ― Werner Karl Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. ” ― Werner Heisenberg
“Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty—by forms, I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are “true,” that they reveal a genuine feature of nature…. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“Only a few know, how much one must know, to know how little one knows” ― Werner Heisenberg
“If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli‘s, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli‘s analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
“I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations
“The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“In a darkened world no longer illuminated by the light of this center [God], technical advances are scarcely more than despairing attempts to make Hell a more agreeable place to live in. This must be particularly emphasized against those who think that by spreading the civilization of science and technology even to the uttermost ends of the earth, they can furnish all the essential preconditions for a golden age. One cannot escape the Devil so easily as that.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontier
“[The probability wave] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristoelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“We can never know anything.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“We may remark at this point that modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word ‘fire’ by the word ‘energy’ we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change, and the elementary particles can actually be made from this substance as is seen in many experiments on the creation of elementary particles. Energy can be changed into motion, into heat, into light and into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
“Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like “existence” and “space and time”. Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections. This is actually the fact when the concepts become part of a system of axioms and definitions which can be expressed consistently by a mathematical scheme. Such a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way in this field. But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philsophy
“The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as unimportant: there is much significance in one of the most outstanding men directing all his efforts to fighting against the development of Newtonian optics.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac … leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
“Modern physics plays perhaps only a small role in this dangerous process of unification. But it helps at two very decisive points to guide the development into a calmer kind of evolution. First, it shows that the use of arms in the process would be disastrous and, second, through its openness for all kinds of concepts it raises the hope that in the final state of unification many different cultural traditions may live together and may combine different human endeavors into a new kind of balance between thought and deed, between activity and meditation.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
“When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible… Atoms are not things.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
“[I]n the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory we can indeed proceed without mentioning ourselves as individuals, but we cannot disregard the fact that natural science is formed by men. Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our nature of questioning. This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought, but it makes a sharp separation between the world and the I impossible.
If one follows the great difficulty which even eminent scientists like Einstein had in understanding and accepting the Copenhagen interpretation… one can trace the roots… to the Cartesian partition….it will take a long time for it [this partition] to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.” ― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philsophy
“Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“The first thing we could say was simply: ‘I believe in God, the Father, the almighty creator of heaven and earth.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“This [chaotic environment,] I felt, was only possible because all these types of order were partial, mere fragments that had split off from a central order; they might not have lost their creative force, but they were no longer directed toward a unifying center. Its absence was brought home to me with increasingly painful intensity the longer I listened. I was suffering almost physically, but I was quite unable to find a way towards the center through the thicket of conflicting opinions. …There was a hush as, high above us, [a young violinist] struck up the first great D minor chord of Bach’s Chaconne. All at once, and with utter certainty, I had found my link with the center….The clear phrases of the Chaconne touched me like a cool wind, breaking through the mist and revealing the towering structures beyond. There has always been a path to the central order in the language of music, in philosophy and in religion, today no less than in Plato’s day and in Bach’s. That I now knew from my own experience.” ― Werner Heisenberg
“It was around three o’clock in the morning when the final results of my calculations were before me. I felt profoundly shaken. I was so agitated that I could not sleep. I left the house and began walking slowly in the dark. I climbed on a rock overlooking the sea at the tip of the island, and waited for the sun to come up…” ― Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg (1925) was a German physicist and philosopher who made significant contributions to 20th century theoretical physics. He is best known for developing the uncertainty principle in 1927 and receiving the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work. Heisenberg was a leader in the development of quantum mechanics, formulating it in terms of matrices and publishing a major reinterpretation of quantum theory in 1925. (Wikipedia.org)
Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed by a full stop to demarcate the terminus of life. It hovers there, so sure of itself, this punctuational emblem of an irrevocable end. And yet the surety of science about what happens when we die, like the surety of religion, is only speculative, for it is conceived by the living. Whitman — who often walked Green-Wood — knew this when he wrote that “to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Over and over we have mistaken our suppositions for sureties when both intellectual honesty and spiritual courage demand we concede that death is not a period but a question mark.
Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961) was only twenty and newly enrolled in medical school when he came to see death as a way of understanding life: His father, who had died six weeks earlier, appeared to him in a dream, announcing that he would be returning home after a holiday. Struck by how real the dream felt, Jung began devising a psychological cosmogony of death that would take him half a lifetime to formulate, its crux best articulated in his 1929 commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life:
Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life… For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.
Five years later, Jung developed these ideas in his most intellectually elegant essay, titled “Death and the Soul” and included in Jenny Yates’s altogether magnificent anthology Jung on Death and Immortality (public library). Developing the idea that “life strives towards a goal and is determined by an aim,” he wrote:
The question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living.
[…]
Life is an energy-process. Like every energy-process, it is in principle irreversible and is therefore directed towards a goal. That goal is a state of rest. In the long run everything that happens is, as it were, no more than the initial disturbance of a perpetual state of rest which forever attempts to re-establish itself.
This perspective, Jung realized, is not one our consciousness readily takes, for it requires a counterintuitive understanding of the substance we are made of — time. It was his encounter with Einstein — the two dined together in the early days of relativity — that allowed Jung to violate his own creaturely intuitions in order to conceive of death not as the endpoint of a line across the Euclidean space of being but as a curve following the curvature of spacetime itself: eternity as a field in which all directions are relative. Einstein’s great revelation was that space and time are one, that spacetime tells matter how to move and matter ballasted by gravity tells spacetime how to bend. At the heart of Jung’s conception is the intimation that consciousness bends spacetime one way and we call it life, bends it another and we call it death, while the energy that does the bending remains inexorable. The question of where life goes when it goes, like the question of where love goes when it goes, may be a question not of termination but of transmutation.
Carl Jung
Jung captured this idea in his response to a pastor who recounted having had a conversation with his brother at the time of his death, even though they were separated by a continent:
It is very probable that only what we call consciousness is contained in space and time, and that the rest of the psyche, the unconscious, exists in a state of relative spacelessness and timelessness. For the psyche this means a relative eternality and a relative non-separation from other psyches, or a oneness with them.
Recognizing that “no one knows what ‘psyche’ is, and one knows just as little how far into nature ‘psyche’ extends,” he observed:
It would seem to be more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to regard death as the fulfillment of life’s meaning and as its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation. Anyone who cherishes a rationalistic opinion on this score has isolated himself psychologically and stands opposed to his own basic human nature.
Just as Jung was finishing “The Soul and Death,” his sister died. He coped by writing a psychological analysis of The Tibetan Book of the Dead — an ancient instruction for shedding karmic illusions, which Jung likened to psychological complexes, drawing a parallel between the Buddhist notion of enlightenment and the aim of psychiatry: withdrawing our psychological projections in order to see clearly. Our conception of death, he argued, is a projection of our own hopes and fears — the core complexes that govern our lives — lensed through our creaturely intuitions about space and time, intuitions that have regularly misled us about the realities of nature, from the shape of the Earth to the centricity of the Solar System.
Jung collided with his own creaturely intuitions when, in the fourth winter of the world’s deadliest war, he had a near-death experience himself: His heart stopped, then, miraculously, restarted. In the wake of the heart attack he wasn’t meant to survive, he wrote in a letter:
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it… The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.
A year later, he was still thinking about it, about the “glimpse behind the veil” it had afforded him, writing in another letter:
Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely, will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness, a good ship that carries you through the darkness of your second birth, which seems to be death to the outside.
Central to his thinking was the concept of synchronicity — the meaningful alignment of two events in space and time — which he had co-invented with his onetime patient Wolfgang Pauli shortly after the physicist was awarded the Nobel Prize. Decades later, in a letter penned as he himself was approaching death, Jung would insist that we must not rule out “the possibility that there is an existence outside time which runs parallel with existence inside time,” intimating that life is simply the alignment of consciousness and time, but the unconscious could exist on another temporal plane. Beneath the seeming self-contradiction — there are no parallels in curved spacetime — was Jung’s insistence that curves, not parallels, are the best way to understand death by understanding life. A century and a half after the forgotten visionary Elizabeth Peabody offered her abiding wisdom on middle age and the art of self-renewal, and half a century before Ursula K. Le Guin penned her magnificent meditation on menopause as rebirth, Jung wrote in “Death and the Soul”:
The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose. The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature… From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.
In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Clarke. I inhaled it in a day.
Born in England in the final year of the nineteenth century, Hockley Clarke grew up loving nature. When he was sent to France with the British infantry during WWI, still a teenager, he looked for birds whenever he was out of the trenches or had a day’s rest, listening for them through the blaze of the machine guns, once hearing the song of the nightingale clear and bright over a heap of dead bodies. “Although I am not a religious man,” he would later write, “I have always regarded birds and all wild life as the manifestations of God.”
Having narrowly survived, he founded a birding magazine he went on to edit single-handedly for forty years, writing numerous books about birds along the way. He continued birding into his nineties.
Art by Thomas Jackson from Our Feathered Companions, 1870. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
In the savage winter of 1962 — the coldest weather to strike Europe in eighty years (which didn’t stop Dervla Murphy from mounting her bicycle in Ireland headed for India) — a blackbird began roosting in Clarke’s elderberry tree. He named him Blackie and began bringing him food first thing every morning and again in the evening as the snow and ice lasted for weeks and weeks.
He didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of a long and tender relationship between Clarke’s family and Blackie’s.
Soon, Blackie was flying out of the tree at meal time, greeting Clarke with “a few glad chuckles.” Something began growing between man and bird, some unbroken thread of trust and tenderness.
Clarke writes:
Blackie and I had an understanding on those cold mornings. I spoke to him; he knew my voice and I am sure that he answered in his own language, of which I thought I had some understanding. There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him. Perhaps birds understand more than we think.
Clarke’s book was a lifeline from a friend when I most needed it. The moment I turned the last yellowed page, I rued that something so wonderful could have fallen out of print.
Because the most valiant way to complain is to create, and because Marginalian Editions was born precisely as such a constructive complaint against the tyranny of the marketable over the meaningful in modern publishing, Blackie & Co.: Blackbirds in My Garden is now back in a print, gilded and gladdening, each page a radiance of curiosity and kindness, the whole of it a bright assurance of the tenacity of life, a reminder that no matter the conditions of living, it is the unconditional that saves us.
Friendship is a lifeline twined of trust and tenderness. That we extend it to each other is benediction enough. To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.
“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.”
~ Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III was an American playwright and screenwriter who is considered one of the most important playwrights of 20th century American drama. He’s best known for his plays A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, which critics consider American classics. His work explored the human condition and societal constraints, often weaving autobiographical elements into his plays. (Wikipedia.org)
We updated this list as part of the the Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge! Join the challenge now!
Contemporary novels tend to fit into a certain range: around 300 pages is typical. A little more, or a little less, depending. But I have a particular fondness for the extremes: books over 500 pages, or books under 200. It is the latter category which draws us together today.
For our purposes here, the “contemporary” of the headline means published (in English) after 1970. (See here for a list of classic novels under 200 pages that you should also read.) NB that I’m not making a distinction between novellas and novels—I’m not sure there really is one—but I’m not including short story collections, or books that include a novella and stories. Finally, as ever, “great” is subjective, and this list is limited by time and space and the literary tastes of this editor. As always, feel free to add your own favorites in the comments below.
Probably the best fragment novel on the block: the saga of Money Breton, errant script doctor, mother of two, obsessive obssesser, is funny, irreverent, and weirdly moving. Not for nothing, but this novel is my own personal ultimate coolness test, because yep, I am an adult who judges other people’s coolness, and I do it based on the books they read.
Translated from the Spanish (Labatut is Chilean) by Adrian Nathan West, reading the first few paragraphs of When We Cease to Understand the World is like encountering a new intoxicant, with all its attendant thrills and shivers—and the uncertainty about where, exactly, things might lead.
In what is essentially a fictionalized account of the real lives of a miscellany of 20th-century scientific giants (some famous, some less so), Labatut wades through the murky waters of human genius, finding there the darker implications of discovery, for society and scientist alike. Reading the inner lives of the likes of Fritz Haber, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger—rendered by Labatut with the same kind of metaphorical heuristic so often employed to reveal truths about theoretical physics—one is left almost breathless by the grim consequences of all our endless wonder. There’s a reason this hybrid novel-biography has left its mark on nearly everyone who’s taken a taste. –Jonny Diamond (One of Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2021)
My other candidate for the best contemporary fragment novel—not to mention one of the best novels of the decade, full stop—is of course Offill’s luminous, eye-wormy (this is a term I have just now invented for the literary version of ear-wormy, you’re welcome, and sorry), and consistently wise modern classic, which is ostensibly the story of a marriage but is more importantly the story of a mind.
Johnson’s novella is a shibboleth among a certain kind of reader (and, typically, writer). In our list of the best novels of the decade, editor Dan Sheehan described it as “the incantatory story of a turn-of-the-century logger and railroad laborer, Robert Grainier, who loses his family to a wildfire and retreats deep into the woods of the Idaho panhandle as the country modernizes around him. Johnson’s spare, strange, elegiac prose conjures a world that feels both ancient and ephemeral, full of beauty and menace and deep sorrow. . . . An American epic in miniature, Train Dreams is a visionary portrait of soul untethered from civilization, a man stoically persevering on his own hermetic terms in the face of unimaginable tragedy. A haunted and haunting reverie.”
The Vegetarian has come under scrutiny for its translation, and the accuracy thereof, but since I can only read English, all I know is that whatever came out of the union of Kang and Smith is very, very good. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade, editor Molly Odintz wrote, “Han Kang’s tale begins with a description of a dutiful wife, unusual only in her refusal to wear a bra, whose sudden decision to stop eating meat sends her partner and family into a spiral of confusion, where forcible consumption of meat quickly becomes a metaphor for violation. The vegetarian begins a slow transformation into vegetable itself—first, she stops eating meat; gradually, she stops eating everything. Her withdrawal from culinary delights is mirrored by her withdrawal from the world. She basks in sunlight, is painted all over with flowers by her sister’s husband (a not-so-successful artist), and for all intents and purposes, attempts to become a plant. Is she onto something, or is she out of her mind? Is she denying the world, or is she fully embracing it? Han Kang leaves the answers to these questions deliberately vague, and the sign of a great work is its ability to be read by many people and interpreted differently by each one.”
A metafictional meditation on modernity and memory—and on “the dancer,” showing off for the abstracted “everyone,” the concept of which gets more relevant every day.
Vincenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes, Perfection (136 pages)
Some novels are mirrors, and this is one of those, and some novels are hit jobs on a certain kind of fantasy, and this is one of those too. It is a reworking, and updating, of George Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, and might itself have been subtitled A Story of the 2010s, the “things” replaced by, broadly, the “internet,” which directs the lives and identities of Anna and Tom, ex-pat “digital nomads” living in Berlin. Nothing happens, which is the point. Anna and Tom are just like you and I, neither more or less reprehensible, which is the point. Instead the book is a collection of images and ideas and ordinary moments and banal successes and disappointments that slowly becomes much more than the sum of its parts. (One of Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2025)
Ishiguro’s debut, first published in 1982, takes shape through the recollections of an aging Japanese woman, living in England, now alone after her husband’s death. But as she reflects, the memories become less secure—or at least less restricted to the past. Like everything Ishiguro writes, it’s beautiful, subtle, and not a little shadowy.
I register that this is something of a cheat, since Lispector’s first novel was originally published in Brazil in 1943—but considering that it wasn’t translated into English until 1990, I’m going to sneak it in here. After all, it is too glorious to ignore: evidence of a mind on fire. We follow Joana through her life in this short novel, but it’s really the sentences you should read for: sometimes inscrutable, sometimes wild, sometimes transcendent.
Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump, The Witch (144 pages)
In the French novelist’s latest to be translated into English (though published in France some 30 years ago), a woman decides to initiate her twelve-year-old daughters into their heritage: witchcraft. They are not impressed. “No offense, Mama, but it’s really all just so lame,” one of them tells her. But as the girls gain power, their family begins falling apart.
Okay, I’m hereby warning you: this novel is not for the squeamish. My best friend recommended this book to me not too long ago and didn’t tell me anything about it except that it was amazing, and it was totally a replay of that time she made me go see Hard Candy with her and told me it was going to be an indie comedy. And look, it is amazing, in the sense that you will have physical reactions reading this book, and in the sense that Moore perfectly captures a range of emotions and impulses rarely committed to paper. But like . . . you’re not going to feel good at the end. So just know that.
Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, Fever Dream (189 pages)
This is a weird and terrifying, almost suffocating novel that kept me up for an entire night. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade, our editorial fellow Eleni Theodoropoulos wrote that in this novel, “detail is dramatized through dialogue, and Schweblin knows just what to pick and what to leave out so that characters and readers alike are obsessed with the story about the poison. Everyone is at the mercy of someone: David is at the mercy of Amanda, Amanda at the mercy of David, and the reader at the mercy of both of them. The only way to find out the truth in Fever Dream is by trusting someone else’s narrative. Even in being swept away in the horrific progression of the novel, and simultaneously, the disease, the reader identifies with Amanda, a mother who realizes she cannot protect her child. In just under 200 pages, Schweblin has delivered a poignant, tragic tale of a fear come true.”
If you’ve been reading Lit Hub for any amount of time, you know how much we love Garth Greenwell’s debut, which is, after all, one of the best debut novels of the decade. It’s an exquisite book, both on the sentence and the story level, a mesmerizing work of art.
Kincaid’s semi-autobiographical, intertextual coming-of-age story follows a teenager from the West Indies who travels to the US to work as an au pair and to escape the life she has always known. A stranger in a strange land, and somewhat contemptuous of it, while also in a kind of love, she nonetheless finds her way, in spare but evocative prose, exploring her own sexuality and developing her own interests as the relationship between her employers unravels.
I still love Lerner’s debut, which is basically about a poet not writing poetry in Madrid, but is actually very good, despite that. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade, our editor Jessie Gaynor described it as one of the “most subtly hilarious novels around” and wrote that “Lerner invites the reader to laugh with his protagonist as well as with him. The novel feels propulsive rather than meandering, as if the reader is the one whose fellowship is quickly running short.”
DeLillo’s the rare writer who excels in both the long and the short form. This one, his fifteenth, is a destabilizing, compelling portrait of grief refracted through art. According to me, at least—it’s also one of DeLillo’s most polarizing novels, so you might as well read it, at least to have an opinion on the matter.
Thomas Bernhard, tr. Jack Dawson, The Loser (190 pages)
Possibly the best ill-tempered 190 page monologue in contemporary literature, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Emily Wilson, the classicist behind the buzziest Odyssey translation of my generation, has finally weighed in on the film adaptation of her favorite poem. And so dark was the shade that Wilson’s withering takedown crashed its host site: the London Review of Books, not typically known for its astronomic virality.
We might have predicted that Wilson wouldn’t be a fan of Christopher Nolan’s action-packed take on the epic. But the translator’s objections are layered and surprising.
She is no Cyclops. Wilson’s withering gaze falls equally on the “relentlessly didactic” sub-plots, the anachronistic language, the one-dimensional characters, and Agamemnon’s “weird Darth Vader outfit.”
It’s worth letting the poet speak for herself. But for those of us on a mission, with little time to spare, here are the ten worst burns from her review.
10.
“It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display—and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.”
Honestly? Fair enough, for an opening argument.
9.
“Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.”
Here we get a little florid, a little grander. (Appropriate for a poet interlocutor.) If Nolan’s an Aristophanic frog, he is just being placed in the water, with this one.
8.
“The visit to the Land of the Dead reminded me of the excursions beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones.”
Yikes. This one is context-dependent, but I think readers can safely assume that Emily Wilson is not a GoT fan.
7.
“Most of the non-white actors…play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist…”
Worth noting that certain social media corridors have contested this characterization, which gives short shrift to some exciting performances. But this line smarts because it takes aim at the one thing some of us were excited about, re: this Odyssey.
6.
“The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality.”
Now the shade expands to Nolan’s whole career and project. Let the simmering begin.
5.
“If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek…you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. “
I have to assume this would hurt any screenwriter’s feelings.
4.
“I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog…”
Here, a “Dang,” feels apt, from the cheap seats. (Not even the puppy moved her?)
3.
“…the script gives [Penelope] nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown. The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife…the real woman is barely more interesting.”
This one gets back to Wilson’s character critique. And serves up Damon and Hathaway, in the process.
2.
“It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
Enough to kill any amphibian. But lost me at the food part.
1.
“I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script…”
Well, that’s a dead frog, people.
Brittany Allen
Brittany K. Allen is a writer and actor living in Brooklyn.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Aug 2, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy Christopher Laprath, who works as a professional intuitive, is author of Trestle Creek: Things the Dead Fear. Christopher describes his extraordinary childhood growing up in an abusive household marked by disturbing paranormal phenomena, poltergeist activity, and profound psychic experiences that shaped the course of his life. He reflects on trauma, religious involvement, spiritual awakening, and how these experiences eventually led him toward healing and a deeper understanding of consciousness. In this first of two conversations, Laprath shares the remarkable personal journey recounted in his memoir. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:29 Childhood 00:08:59 Trestle Creek 00:15:30 Poltergeist phenomena 00:22:37 Psychic awakening 00:28:55 Religion 00:33:31 Hauntings 00:40:04 Healing 00:45:03 Teacher Barb 00:55:41 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on Saturday, June 27, 2026)
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche‘s mental breakdown on 3 January 1889 when he stayed at number six, Via Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy. There, a coach driver was having trouble with a “stubborn” horse. The horse refused to move, whereupon the driver lost his temper and took his whip to it. Nietzsche was greatly disturbed and threw his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His neighbor took him home, where he lay motionless and silent for two days on a divan, until he muttered the words “Mutter, ich bin dumm” (Mother, I am stupid). He lived for another ten years, gentle and demented, in the care of his mother and sisters.
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Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life… For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal.
