By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The year is 1174.

Gravity, oxygen, and electricity have not been discovered.

Clocks, calculus, and the printing press have not been invented.

Earth is the center of the universe, encircled by heavenly bodies whose motions are ministered by angels.

Most people never live past their thirties.

Medicine abides by the Greek theory of the humors and treats all ailments with a combination of bloodletting, herbal tinctures, amputation, and the King’s Touch.

No university will educate a woman. In fact, no university exists.

At seventy-six, Hildegard of Bingen — poet, painter, healer, composer, philosopher, mystic, medical writer — has just finished writing and illustrating her third and farthest-seeing book: The Book of Divine Works, chronicling seven years of prophetic visions. God had first begun speaking to her in “the voice of the Living Light” when she was three, but she never suffered the hubris of a self-appointed prophet — rather, she considered herself “a totally uneducated human being,” a “wretched and fragile creature,” who is merely a channel for divine wisdom. She may be the Western world’s first great crusader against dualism — in the sermons she delivered to priests, bishops, abbots, and ordinary people all over present-day Germany and Switzerland, she preached that “God is Reason,” that “Reason is the root” from which “the resounding Word blooms,” but also that “from the heart comes healing,” that we apprehend the world and its wisdom most clearly through the intuitions of the “inner eye” and “inner ear.”

Hildegard was fifty-six when she began receiving the vision that would become her Book of Divine Works. On its pages, between writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, between reckonings with the nature of eternity and the fundaments of love, she conceptualizes something the word for which would not be coined for another seven centuries: ecology.

Long before Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” before John Muir insisted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Hildegard places at the center of her cosmology the notion of viriditas, from the Latin for “green” — a greening life-force pervading the world, mirrored in the virtues that enlush the soul.

Human beings, she writes, are “co-creators with God” in the operations of nature. We must cooperate with one another in the task of protecting and nourishing this interconnected creation, and we must do so by integrating the rational and the intuitive in us. Hildegard’s human being is “the fragile vessel where soul and reason are active,” filled with “the fullness of time.”

In one of her visions, collected in the wonderful translation Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works: With Letters and Songs (public library), she paints a menacing picture of a world in which we have grown disconnected from the greening life-force of our own souls. Seven centuries before Eunice Newton Foote discovered greenhouse gasses, and an epoch before we had any sense of climate change or our own hand in it, Hildegard prophecies:

Then the greening power of the virtues faded away, and all justice entered upon a period of decline. As a result, the greening power of life on Earth was reduced in every seed because the upper region of the air was altered in a way contrary to its first destiny. Summer now became subject to a contradictory chill while winter often experienced a paradoxical warmth. There occurred on Earth times of drought and dampness… As a result, many people asserted that the Last Day was near at hand.

She was unambiguous about what stands between us and such fate:

If… we give up the green vitality of [our] virtues and surrender to the drought of our indolence, so that we do not have the sap of life and the greening power of good deeds, then the power of our very soul will begin to fade and dry up.

And yet Hildegard believed in “the green vitality of human volition,” believed that “the soul knows what is good and what is harmful.” By integrating our rational faculty with our heart-honed intuition, by refusing to dishonor our own souls, we have within us the power to revivify this Earth. It what may be the clearest, most succinct manifesto for climate action, she writes:

Our thinking affects our greening power… The soul is the green life-force of the flesh… When we humans work in accord with the strivings of our soul, all our deeds turn out well.

This, indeed, is the beating heart of Hildegard’s viriditas: the insistence that the stewardship of Earth’s life-force is not merely our moral obligation to the universe but our spiritual duty to our own souls. And this can only be so — the words holy and whole share a Latin root; if an ecological conscience is a way of seeing the world whole, it is a way of seeing its holiness, of seeing our own holiness — not above it, but nested within it. Rachel Carson knew this when, picking up Hildegard’s torch eight centuries later to catalyze the modern environmental movement, she observed that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” that the task now before humanity is “to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.” It was Hildegard who gave us the original model of poetic ecology.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices, declaring ourselves creatures of reason. Western civilization, with its structural bias favoring the left brain, has been especially culpable in this dangerous dissociation from ourselves, our full and feeling selves. Despite everything our analytical tools have revealed about how the mind constructs the world, about how our entire experience of reality is a function of that great sieve of emotional relevance — attention — we continue casting ourselves in the theater of rationality, only to find ourselves bewildered again and again by our own nature, by the constant revelation of illusion we mistake for reality.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

The pioneering psychiatrist Otto Rank (April 22, 1884–October 31, 1939) — who strongly influenced Carl Jung and served as therapist to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and other visionary artists — pulls the curtain on that illusion in Beyond Psychology (public library) — a book “pleading for the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life”; the book he knew would be his last, the wartime publication of which he never lived to see.

A century before philosopher Martha Nussbaum made her rigorous case for the intelligence of emotion, observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” Rank writes as humanity is breaking into its second world war:

Our present general bewilderment… lays bare the irrational roots of human behavior which psychology tries to explain rationally in order to make it intelligible, that is, acceptable… People, though they may think and talk rationally — and even behave so — yet live irrationally.

[…]

Bound by the ideas of a better past gone by and a brighter future to come, we feel helpless in the present because we cannot even for a moment stop its movement so as to direct it more intelligently. We still have to learn, it seems, that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man’s* ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.

Much of our self-delusion, Rank observes, is due to the fact that we live in language — “a rational phenomenon meant to communicate thoughts and to explain actions in rational terms.” (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so wonderfully countercultural and altogether reality-expanding.) Art in all its forms, from poetry to painting, has tried to find the emotional language of the unconscious, to embrace the surge of the irrational. (Nin herself articulated this memorably in her insistence on the importance of emotional excess for creativity: “Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them,” she wrote in her diary between sessions with Rank.) And yet we remain storytellers, telling the story of our own lives largely in language. With the exception of dreams — the imagistic language evolution invented in the brains of birds — the mind navigates the world by talking to itself in a constant inner stream of language. And so it may be, Rank intimates, that the “beyond” of language is simply unreachable to us, that we are trying to dismantle our own captivity with the captor’s tools. He considers the paradox:

In their extremely conscious effort to reproduce what they call the “unconscious” modern painters and writers have followed modern psychology in attempting the impossible, namely to rationalize the irrational. This paradoxical state of affairs betrays itself in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, a mechanistic theory of life according to which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something which in itself is unknown and undeterminable. Modern art has adopted this rational psychology of the irrational legitimately, because art itself, like psychology, has been from the beginning an attempt to master life rationally by interpreting it in terms of the current ideologies, that is, it has striven to re-create life in order to control it. The socio-political events of our day amply justify the need for something “beyond” our psychology which has proved inadequate to account for such strange happenings.

René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

Echoing the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s haunting observation that “we ourselves are events in history [and] things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us,” Rank insists that the only way of avoiding the socio-political upheavals that periodically rupture humanity is to embrace the irrational within ourselves. A century after Macmurray wrote that “our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind” and that we must recognize them in this universal setting in order for our private difficulties to “become really significant,” Rank writes:

Because of the inherent nature of the human being, man* has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally. If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living, then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes — vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. These new values which have to be discovered and rediscovered every so often are in reality old values, the natural human values which in the course of time are lost in rationalizations of one kind or another.

These elemental values, Rank observes, lie beyond reason — we rediscover them when we cease trying to control life by rationalizing it and surrender to its experiential flow, inherently irrational and pulsating through the life of the body, which, we now know, is the true locus of consciousness. He writes:

We are born in pain, we die in pain and we should accept life-pain as unavoidable — indeed a necessary part of earthly existence, not merely the price we have to pay for pleasure… Man* is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own.

And this precisely why you must not spare yourself.

 January 22, 2025 (menalive.com)

By  Jed Diamond

I have been searching for mature masculinity since I was five years old when my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping pills. He had become increasingly depressed because he felt he couldn’t support his family doing the work that he loved. We are living at a time when males feel increasingly disconnected from themselves, their families, and the community of life on planet Earth. Fortunately, my father survived, but our lives were never the same. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and how I could help other families avoid the pain we suffered. I wrote about his healing journey, and my own, in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.

            I have just finished reading a timely and important book, Boys a Rescue Plan, by New York Times Bestselling author, Michael Gurian and Sean Kullman, President of the Global Initiative for Boys and Men. I recently did an interview with Gurian and Kullman where we explored the ways we can move beyond the politics of masculinity and how we can rescue our boys and heal our men.

            You can watch the full interview and the timely discussion here.

            The book has received praise from leading experts including Daniel Amen, M.D., Christine Hoff Sommers, PhD, and Dr. Warren Farrell who wrote the book’s Foreword. After reading the book, I said, in part,

“I believe Boys, A Rescue Plan is the book for our times. The research is clear—males are suffering from deaths of despair at rates higher than females. This is not only a tragedy for boys and men, but also for girls and women. Gurian and Kullman bring good science and practical data to help improve the lives of all.”

            The book not only tackles some of the most challenging and controversial topics about the boy crisis but offers a specific plan for helping boys and men, girls and women. The book is divided into 24 helpful, easy to read, chapters under the following four parts:

            Part 1: The Male Mental Health Crisis

            Part 2: Boys, Sexual Dimorphism, and the Culture of Exception

            Part 3: Big Three Politics That Keep Us From Helping Boys

            Part 4: The Seven Point Plan to Rescue Our Boys

            My colleague, Warren Farrell, is one of the world’s leading experts on boys and men. He has been chosen by the Financial Times of London as one of the world’s top 100 thought leaders. His books are published in 19 languages. He is the author of numerous best-selling books including The Boy Crisis co-authored by Dr. John Gray.

            In the Foreword to Boys, A Rescue Plan, Dr. Farrell shares his own perspective on the value you will receive in reading the book:

            “Scientists are rarely advocates and advocates are rarely scientists, And those who raise children and grandchildren, even as they have a long and deeply loving marriage, rarely have the time to have an international impact and create an infrastructure that will outlast them. Their accomplishments are rarely infused with the balance and wisdom that emanates from raising children and loving the children’s mother. In the thirty-five years that I have known Michael Gurian, I have witnessed him be all that. Through his books, speaking, workshops, and the Gurian Institute.”

            Dr. Farrell goes on to say,

“Fortunately, in Boys, A Rescue Plan, we are also blessed with Sean Kullman. Sean is a younger generation’s version of Michael Gurian (except for the grandchildren!) Sean is also a data-driven advocate with whom I have worked for more than a decade on the Coalition for a White House Council on Boys and Men.”

            Although the book is packed with valuable tools that will help us all heal ourselves and our families and help us understand issues that often confuse and divide people, the care, compassion, and humanity of the authors shine through every page.

            As a man, husband, father, grandfather, and great grandfather, I was moved to tears as Michael shares his personal life of love and loss, birth and death:

            “Holding your own child in your arms is a miracle. Holding your grandchild is, too, as I’ve recently learned. In June of 2014 I arrived in Seattle where my daughter, Gabrielle, gave birth to Lev Micah Quen-Murray. The hospital, the C section, the smells and sounds, the anticipation and nervousness, the yearning to protect and support, the deep call from the soul to be a part of the miracle of birth flowed through me as they all had back when Gabrielle, my first child, was born 34 years before and then Davita three years later—another C section, another birth, another miracle-then again in August of 2024 when Davita gave birth to her daughter, Effy Gail Herrington.”

            “The miracles of my grandchildren’s births were amplified, I think, because just before my daughters became parents and I became a grandfather a deep loss attached itself to our family. My children and I lost my wife, their mother, Gail, in the summer of 2023. Gail and I had been together 39 years and married 37. Pancreatic cancer took her swiftly and painfully. Just a few weeks after Gail died, Gabrielle got pregnant and then, two months later, Davita followed. Our family believes (without scientific proof but with spiritual happiness) that Gail watched over our daughters and their husbands from her mysterious perch: gave to them the lives that she, ready to retire from her counseling practice to take care of grandchildren, wanted most in  her elder years: the miracle of grandchildren.”

            Even writing this now, I do so with tears of sadness and tears of joy for a man who has given so much in his life to help boys and men, girls and women. I honor his gifts and blessings and the courage he demonstrates as a healer and an author to share his most private thoughts and feelings with the world. Michael opens his heart and soul because he knows that true love and wisdom only comes with deep sorrow and grief.

            We all must die some time and we all hope to pass on some bit of experience and wisdom with the time we are allotted her on Earth.  I know that Michael and Sean will resonate with these words from one of my mentors, the philosopher, Paul Tillich who said,

“Every serious thinker must ask and answer three fundamental questions:

• What is wrong with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of our alienation? Our disease?
• What would we be like if we were whole? Healed? Actualized? If our potentiality was fulfilled?
• How do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness? What are the means of healing?”

I had met the eminent philosopher Paul Tillich towards the end of his life when he was a guest lecturer at U.C. Santa Barbara where I went to college. I was nineteen years old at the time and I felt his wisdom was a beacon of light that offered me guidance from a wise father-figure at a time when I needed it the most.

I believe that Michael Gurian and Sean Kullman offer us all wisdom that can not only help us raise healthy sons into strong caring men but can help us heal the wounds in our society that produces wounded “boymen” who never really grow up. These kinds of men are a danger to themselves and others. I will continue exploring these ideas in the second part of this series. Stay tuned.

If you would like to get more information about Michael Gurian and his work you can connect with him here:  https://gurianinstitute.com/

If you would like to get more information about Sean Kullman and his work, you can do so at the Global Initiative for Boys and Men (GIBM) here: https://www.gibm.us/

If you would like to connect with me and receive our free weekly newsletter and more articles exploring healthy masculinity and ways we can improve our mental, emotional, and relational health, come visit me at https://menalive.com/. You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/.

Previous Article

Best Wishes,

Jed Diamond

Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive

The Two of Swords The Lord of Peace is a card which advises us to climb to the high ground in order to get a perspective, particularly on any emotional difficulties that we might have. Sometimes, a conflict bogs us down so badly in our reactions that we find it difficult to achieve an objective view. Instead we wallow about, knee deep in hurt feelings and negativity, never able to get an overview.Yet if we can just move our position a little, see the centre of the conflict, often we perceive the whole situation more clearly. And once we manage that, a way through the tangle becomes apparent. When we can see that pathway we know what we need to do, and it’s easy to see what’s really important and what is rubbish that we collected along the way.So on a day ruled by the Two of Swords, if there are any issues about which you feel emotionally sore and unhappy, make a deliberate and conscious effort to get to the high ground, above the situation.If you have no pressing emotional hurts right now, pick a matter that causes you concern more randomly – a long-running confusion, maybe, or something which you wish could have been resolved in the past. Use the same process of climbing above it with the intention of finding another way of looking at it, which is more comfortable for you than the one you now have.And then stick with it, and enjoy the sense of peacefulness that comes from finding a solution to something that hurts you! Affirmation: “Conflict resolves into tranquillity”

“When a man sees the one in all things, he is above mere understanding.” Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) German Theologian

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

“If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.”

― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

ANTONY: Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous. He is a noble Roman, and well given.

CAESAR: Would he were fatter!”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“His life was gentle; and the elements
so mixed in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!” [Brutus eulogizing Caesar]

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Old Man: God’s benison go with you; and with those that would make good of bad, and friends of foes!

― William Shakespeare,  Macbeth

William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet, playwright, actor, and theater entrepreneur. He is often called the “Bard of Avon” and England’s national poet. His plays are performed more often than any other playwright’s and have been translated into every major living language. Shakespeare’s plays explore timeless themes like life and death, love and hate, and fate and free will. He also created new words, including compound words, adverbs, and adjectives from verbs. More References: Wikipedia, +6

President Yoon Suk Yeol will stand trial along with his former defense minister and others who participated in his short-lived imposition of martial law.

By Choe Sang-Hun

Jan. 26, 2025 (NYTimes.com)

South Korea’s impeached and arrested president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was formally indicted on Sunday on charges of leading an insurrection last month when he briefly imposed martial law, prosecutors said.

Mr. Yoon’s indictment means that his trial is likely to start soon. It follows the indictments of a former defense minister and several military generals and police chiefs, all of whom face criminal charges of helping Mr. Yoon commit the same crime.

He is the first president in South Korean history to face criminal charges while still in office.

His downfall began when he unexpectedly declared martial law on Dec. 3, accusing the opposition-controlled National Assembly of “paralyzing” his government. The Assembly voted the measure down, forcing him to rescind the order after about six hours. But it has set off South Korea’s worst political crisis in decades.

As people called for Mr. Yoon’s ouster, the Assembly impeached him on Dec. 14, suspending him from office. The country’s Constitutional Court is deliberating whether the parliamentary impeachment was legitimate and if he should be formally removed from office. Separately, criminal investigators detained Mr. Yoon on the insurrection charges on Jan. 15.

From his jail cell, Mr. Yoon has vowed to fight to regain office.

A majority of South Koreans approved of his impeachment and consider him guilty of insurrection, according to public opinion polls. But Mr. Yoon’s die-hard supporters have called his impeachment “fraud.” Some of them shocked the country when they vandalized a courthouse in Seoul after one of its judges approved a warrant to arrest him on Jan. 19. Nearly 60 people were arrested in connection with that unrest.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Yoon committed insurrection during the short-lived imposition of marital law when, they said, he banned all political activities and ordered military commanders to break the Assembly’s doors down “with axes” or “by shooting, if necessary” and “drag out” lawmakers. They said Mr. Yoon sent the troops there to seize the Assembly and detain political leaders.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea. More about Choe Sang-Hun

Published: September 28, 2011 (TheOnion.com)

WASHINGTON—With the United States facing a daunting array of problems at home and abroad, leading historians courteously reminded the nation Thursday that when making tough choices, it never hurts to stop a moment, take a look at similar situations from the past, and then think about whether the decisions people made back then were good or bad.

According to the historians, by looking at things that have already happened, Americans can learn a lot about which actions made things better versus which actions made things worse, and can then plan their own actions accordingly.

“In the coming weeks and months, people will have to make some really important decisions about some really important issues,” Columbia University historian Douglas R. Collins said during a press conference, speaking very slowly and clearly so the nation could follow his words. “And one thing we can do, before making a choice that has permanent consequences for our entire civilization, is check real quick first to see if human beings have ever done anything like it previously, and see if turned out to be a good idea or not.”

“It’s actually pretty simple: We just have to ask ourselves if people doing the same thing in the past caused something bad to happen,” Collins continued. “Did the thing we’re thinking of doing make people upset? Did it start a war? If it did, then we might want to think about not doing it.”

In addition, Collins carefully explained that if a past decision proved to be favorable—if, for example, it led to increased employment, caused fewer deaths, or made lots of people feel good inside— then the nation should consider following through with the same decision now.

While the new strategy, known as “Look Back Before You Act,” has raised concerns among people worried they will have to remember lots of events from long ago, the historians have assured Americans they won’t be required to read all the way through thick books or memorize anything.

Instead, citizens have been told they can just find a large-print, illustrated timeline of historical events, place their finger on an important moment, and then look to the right of that point to see what happened afterward, paying especially close attention to whether things got worse or better.

“You know how the economy is not doing so well right now?” Professor Elizabeth Schuller of the University of North Carolina said. “Well, in the 1930s, financial markets—no, wait, I’m sorry. Here: A long, long time ago, way far in the past, certain things happened that were a lot like things now, and they made people hungry and sad.”

“How do you feel when you’re hungry? Doesn’t feel good, does it?” Schuller added. “So, maybe we should avoid doing those things that caused people to feel that way, don’t you think?”

Concluding their address, the panel of scholars provided a number of guidelines to help implement the strategy, reminding the nation that the biggest decisions required the most looking back, and stressing the importance of checking the past before one makes a decision, not afterward, when the decision has already been made.

While many citizens have expressed skepticism of the historians’ assertions, the majority of Americans have reportedly grasped the concept of noticing bad things from earlier times and trying not to repeat them.

“I get it. If we do something bad that happened before, then the same bad thing could happen again,” said Barb Ennis, 48, of Pawtucket, RI. “We don’t want history to happen again, unless the thing that happened was good.”

“When you think about it, a lot of things have happened already,” Ennis added. “That’s what history is.”

In Washington, several elected officials praised the looking-back-first strategy as a helpful, practical tool with the potential to revolutionize government.

“The things the historians were saying seemed complicated at first, but now it makes sense to me,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who reversed his opposition to oil-drilling safety regulations after checking past events and finding a number of “very, very sad things [he] didn’t like.” “I just wished they’d told us about this trick before.”

about:blank

Edward Stone with a model of a Voyager spacecraft in 1980. Caltech Archives

The Lives They Lived

Edward Stone

B. 1936

To run a scientific expedition that lasts for decades, it takes more than great engineers — it takes a great manager. 

By Jon Gertner, New York Times Magazine (NYTimes.com)

In 1972, Edward Stone was working as a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology when he was asked to become the lead scientist for a new, hugely ambitious NASA mission to the solar system’s outer planets. The mission involved two identical ships to be launched in 1977 on a trajectory to Jupiter and Saturn; after that, one ship might also go on to Uranus and Neptune. Eleven different teams would be responsible for the 11 science instruments on each spacecraft. Though Stone’s specialty was cosmic rays, the subatomic particles that emanate from exploding stars, his main job would be to manage a potentially unruly scientific corps of nearly 100 people.

Internal tensions are inevitable on a big space project. A ship might require a certain flight path or orientation, for instance, to ensure optimal viewing conditions for its cameras, but at the expense of some other scientific reading (an ultraviolet sensor, say). With the probes swooping past planets at upward of 30,000 miles per hour, observation opportunities would be brief, the trade-offs unpleasant. What Stone came to realize, he later told an oral historian of Voyager, as the project eventually came to be known, is that “if you decide to do this versus that, because you can’t do both, you’re basically deciding that this team gets to make a discovery and that one doesn’t.”

Stone’s first demonstration of organizational acumen came during an early meeting of the science team. His sharp intellect — “Whenever I talked to him,” his colleague Alan Cummings recalls, “I felt like I was talking to the smartest person I’d ever met” — did not preclude a sense of humility. He was, according to his daughter Janet Stone, “a true lifelong learner” who could devote extraordinary amounts of time to anything necessary for his job. Warren Keller, from NASA headquarters, once said that at the first meeting, when each of the scientists — the primary investigators, or P.I.s — stood up to explain their Voyager instruments, “Ed Stone knew more about every one of their instruments than the P.I.s themselves knew. This man was tremendous.” 

His next move, to keep 11 teams from focusing only on their own agendas, was ingenious: He plucked out members to form “working groups” that hewed to scientific interest rather than scientific instrument — atmospheric science, for example, and planetary moons. These new teams could discuss common goals and how certain instruments or trajectories might yield superior results.

Through it all, Stone pressed his own brand of intellectual empathy on researchers: Advancing science meant considering a competitor’s point of view. And whenever Voyager reached a planet — Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1980, Uranus in 1986, Neptune in 1989 — Stone conducted workshops in the backrooms of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which ran the mission for NASA in Pasadena, Calif. The science teams presented their new data to help Stone decide what merited an announcement. Ultimately, Stone was judge and jury, yet he weighed every argument and counterargument.

Understanding the internal politics of Voyager might be akin to understanding the inner workings of a championship sports team. What was in their playbooks? How important was the coaching, compared with the players’ natural talents? Such questions would lack salience if the mission ended as a middling scientific effort. Yet it went on to become the farthest-reaching expedition in human history, with Voyager 1 now 15.4 billion miles from Earth and Voyager 2 now 12.8 billion miles away. Stone remained Voyager’s research chief for 50 years, overseeing this once-in-a-generation investigation that overturned many established ideas about the outer planets and their moons and gave us thousands of images that have defined how we see our solar system. Several missions have built on Voyager’s discoveries (one set out two months ago for Jupiter’s icy moon Europa), but Voyager is alone in passing near Uranus and Neptune.

The findings go beyond the planetary. By traveling toward the solar system’s edge, Voyager told us where the influence of our sun wanes (beyond a protective bubble known as the heliosphere) and where a stream of incoming particles (the interstellar wind) picks up. Those discoveries required a dexterous act of management, too — helping Voyager receive steady funding, for more than 20 years, after the ships passed Neptune and turned their cameras off. It helped that Stone had increasing political influence: Late in his career, he also became the director of the Jet Propulsion Lab.

The Voyagers are now ailing: geriatric, glitchy, unsteady. Visiting J.P.L. during a recent crisis, I watched engineers plot how to repair a computer on one of these far-off ships. With luck and effort, the Voyagers might last another five years. On a previous visit, I had met with Stone at Caltech, and his reminiscences drifted to a row of journals near his desk that chronicled every Voyager meeting he had attended. “I think this helped my credibility with the team as I made those hard decisions,” Stone told me. “They saw that I was actually recording what they were saying.” In asking his colleagues to explain their differences, in other words, he grasped one thing from the start: If you seek to lead, you need to be the most attentive listener of all.

Jon Gertner has been writing about science and technology for the magazine since 2003.

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

by Jalaluddin Rumi

(Image from irandoostan.com)

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A Joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awaremess comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

(Contributed by Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.)