Melancholy Woman, 1902-03 Art: Pablo Picasso
All posts by Mike Zonta
Translation workshop tonight March 3
To Prosperos students who have attended TRANSLATION CLASS,
We KNOW that Consciousness is our True Identity.
We KNOW that we are much more than a Digital Identity.
It is time NOW for us to APPLY what we KNOW! QUESTION: How do we apply what we know?
Well, we can teach, share, guide and inspire other people to APPLY or TRANSLATE their thoughts back to what they KNOW to be true: Essence, Beingness, Consciousness. Our world today if overwhelmed with information/WORDS/social media, etc. It is essential for us all to sit, relax and APPLY what we KNOW to be true!
Many of us are ready to KNOW and APPLY what we have learned in The Prosperos!
JOIN OUR TRANSLATION WORKSHOP – TONIGHT AT 5:00 pm Pacific Time!!!
LOVE is the KEY we must turn today (Peggy Lee’s words)
Heather C. Williams, H.W.,M.
TRANSLATION WORKSHOP
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
TIME: 5:00 pm Pacific Time/6:00 pm MTN time/7:00 pm Central Time/8:00 pm Eastern Time
ZOOM LINK: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83332177798
A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gravity, could have never compacted those first few atoms into a common center to bud the first star, could have never bloomed with billions of them. But here we are, circling a middling star in a modest solar system on a rocky planet replete with mountains and music, lichen and love, and on it the mirror the universe invented to contemplate itself: this shimmering consciousness.
It can be hard to bear, the weight of wonder, hard to hold all this bright improbability, hard to do laundry and email while reckoning with how the cosmos forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb.
Luckily, a species of mind has evolved to be the weight-bearer of wonder: the poet.
In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:
P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].
I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”
Phases of Venus and Saturn by Maria Clara Eimmart, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)
What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:
observe itself?
And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.
Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, begun in 1869 and completed in 1876 to teach women astronomy when they were barred from higher education in science. (Available as a print.)
Long available only as a lucky find in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (public library) is now resurrected under Marginalian Editions. To celebrate its second life, I asked Diane, now approaching eighty, what has most surprised her about the universe, and the microcosm of the universe that is this life, since she wrote those dazzling poems in her twenties — a span of time in which we sequenced the human genome, invented the Internet, discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson and the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star, and then ten thousand more as the horizon of the observable universe spilled 93 billion light-years away from the awed eye that took 500 million years to go from trilobite to telescope.
Diane’s answer is nothing less than a prose poem:
What surprises me now is not just the infinite, but the intimate. That carbon dust became breath and laughter. That our cells remember ancient oceans. That every discovery, no matter how remote, begins with the same feral impulse: our roving curiosity reaching outward, hoping to belong to a larger story of life seeding itself throughout the universe. The Cosmos expands and so does our vertiginous curiosity, an old companion still sending sparks of wonder through the brief ribs of our lives.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
In the author’s note to our new edition, Diane reflects on what had animated her when she wrote these eternal poems a lifetime ago:
I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.
How to Get Over Someone: Help for Heartbreak from the Evolutionary History of Hiccups
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Long before he became the world’s most beloved neurologist, Oliver Sacks was a twenty-seven-year-old medical resident on his first hospital post when an operation left one of his patients with an unstoppable hiccup. Already a bridge figure between medicine and literature, he found himself haunted by a Somerset Maugham short story about a man who dies of hiccups after a woman casts a spell on him. Fearing his patient might suffer the same fate unless something jolted his brain out of the spasmodic loop, Oliver suggested something radical yet emblematic of what would become his lifelong gift for harmonizing the physiology of the body and the poetry of the mind: bringing in a hypnotist. His colleagues were skeptical bordering on scornful. But the patient had been hiccuping for six days straight and no medical intervention had worked. Oliver recounts in his magnificent more-than-memoir:
“When I snap my fingers, you will wake up and no longer have hiccups.”
The patient woke up, free from hiccups, and they never recurred.
Why the strange mental intervention was so effective in abating this debilitating reflex of the body, and how it contours the most effective strategy for waking up from the trance of heartbreak, is rooted deep in our evolutionary history.
The spiral galaxy UGC 10214, known as Tadpole. (Photograph: Hubble Space Telescope)
A hiccup is an involuntary sharp inspiration of air as the epiglottis — the flap of skin in the back of the throat — shuts, producing the hic sound for which the spasm is named. Like our limbs carry the genetic blueprint of our dorsal fins, like our tailbones encode our primate ancestry, hiccups reminds us of where we came from. Although our basic neural infrastructure for breathing evolved from that of fish, the hiccup’s distinctive pattern of nerve and muscle activity is an inheritance from the tadpole stage of our amphibian ancestors. Tadpoles use both their gills and their lungs to breathe, pumping water into the mouth and across the gills but keeping it from entering the lungs by flapping the glottis to seal the breathing tube — one long hiccup.
Frontispiece of The Natural History of Fishes, Amphibians, & Reptiles, or Monocardian Animals, 1838.
While our bodies evolved beyond recognition from the tadpole, our brains maintained the neural circuitry of this dual process — most likely, to help nursing infants manage breathing and suckling simultaneously. The vestigial gills of human embryos are no longer present in most adults, but the neuroanatomy of gilled breathing remains and is activated by certain stimuli to cause hiccups — eating too much or too fast, drinking carbonated beverages, being exposed to a rapid temperature change, undergoing extreme stress.
This is why, despite the panoply of folk remedies and pop culture myths for stopping hiccups, ranging from backbends to biting into lemon, the most effective way is simply to reset the brain out of its evolutionary time machine by making a more complex demand of its neural circuits. (For me, doing a bit of calculus invariably stops a spell of hiccups.) Although physical interventions like controlled breathing can sometimes help, it is rather the cognitive demand they make with the focus they require that interrupts the spasms.
A paradox of the human animal is that while we have not fully outgrown the bodily vestiges of our evolutionary inheritance, we have also paid a heavy price for our growing mental complexity. (“Never say higher or lower,” Darwin scribbled in the margin of a natural history book, arguing with the author about the so-called higher animals. “Say more complicated.”) As we rose from the oceans and crawled onto the land, then climbed the trees to learn to be social, then back came down to walk upright beneath a canopy of one hundred trillion synapses, we became creatures capable of love, which made us capable of loss — this is the price of consciousness.
Superb lyrebird. (Available as a print and a notebook.)
The experience of heartbreak — a recursive mental gasp for reciprocity that is no longer available, or perhaps never really was — is essentially an emotional hiccup: a spasm of thought that feels involuntary, interrupts healthy functioning, and causes debilitating discomfort you are unable to will away. Like the ceaseless hiccups of Oliver’s patient, it is abated only by a mental reset — by setting the mind on a different track of focus that demands enough of its cognitive resources to displace the loop of rumination. It hardly matters what it is — beginning an absorbing new project (this is what the bird divinations did for me), learning a new language or a new craft (this is how ceramics came into my life), training for a triathlon or taking up the cello or going down a delicious rabbit hole about the impossibility of bats or the invention of the bicycle or the chemistry of blue (this is how I wrote Traversal). What does matter is to remember that all feeling floats on a current of thought coursing through the brain at eighty feet per second. Divert the current and the charge of the feeling dissipates — perhaps not to perfect neutrality, but to something bittersweet and bearable, like the memory of childhood, like the body remembers its gills.
The Astrology of March 2026 – Saturn Sextile Pluto
(Astrobutterfly.com)
In March 2026, we are in full swing of eclipse season. On March 3rd, we have a Total Lunar Eclipse in Virgo, bringing culminations, adjustments, and very real-world consequences.
At the same time, we are still integrating the Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries from February – the reset that marked the official beginning of a new era.
And yet, while the new era has technically begun, we are still processing the previous one. Pisces energy is still strong in March, with several planets lingering in the last sign of the zodiac.
This creates a very particular atmosphere – part closure, part ignition. We are standing with one foot in the ocean of the past, and the other already on dry land.
… then at the equinox, things heat up quickly – on March 20th, 2026, we have a rare concentration of 6 planets in Aries.
Later this month, we have an exact Saturn-Sextile Pluto.
But let’s take a look at the most important transits of the month:
March 3, 2026 – Full Moon And Total Lunar Eclipse in Virgo
On March 3rd, 2026, we have a Full Moon and Total Lunar Eclipse at 12° Virgo.
This is a South Node Eclipse, bringing to culmination themes that have been running in the background. In Virgo, this can show up as outdated systems, perfectionist habits, or responsibilities that no longer make sense in the context of where we are heading.
The Eclipse is sextile Jupiter, so despite the usual intensity associated with eclipse season, there is support available. There is a bigger framework that makes the adjustments easier to understand.
Not everything that ends is a loss – some things simply need to be reorganized.
March 6th, 2026 – Venus Enters Aries, Venus Conjunct Neptune And Saturn
On March 6th, 2026, Venus enters Aries, and from this moment on, it’s action time.
Venus is the first personal planet to activate 0° Aries, the point where Saturn and Neptune met in February – giving us a more personal taste of that larger reset.
On February 20th, Saturn and Neptune planted a seed. Now, when the personal planets start crossing that degree, we begin to understand what that seed actually means for us, personally. The collective shift becomes individualized.
And when we talk Venus, we talk values – what matters to us, what we desire, what we are willing to invest energy in.
Out of all the possibilities that have opened up, what truly resonates? What feels aligned with who we are now, not who we used to be? What does not only sound good on paper, but actually feels right?
March 7th, 2026 – Sun Conjunct Mercury
On March 7th, 2026, the Sun is conjunct Mercury retrograde at 16° Pisces, marking the beginning of a brand new Mercury cycle which sets the direction for the next 3-4 months.
The Sun-Mercury conjunction – like any conjunction – is a seed moment. It’s that “chemical reaction” where 2 planets come together and initiate something new. With the Sun and Mercury, this points to a new cycle of clarity around identity and purpose.
This conjunction also trines its ruler Jupiter, now at 15° Cancer, which adds support and coherence to the process.
If you have a project in mind – something related to your purpose, healing, improving relationships, or simply bringing a new idea into the world – this new Mercury cycle is especially supportive. The soil is receptive, and the timing is constructive.
March 11th, 2026 – Jupiter Goes Direct
On March 11th, 2026, Jupiter stations direct at 15° Cancer. From this point onwards, Jupiter will move forward quite quickly through Cancer, entering Leo already at the end of June.
We have 4 more months of Jupiter in the sign of its exaltation. This month, the planets in Pisces apply trines, one by one, to Jupiter, creating flow and support and helping things move forward more naturally.
Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.
March 14th-17th, 2026 – Mercury Conjunct Mars Conjunct North Node
Between March 14th and March 17th, we have a powerful triple conjunction: Mercury retrograde and Mars both activate the North Node, now at 8° Pisces. On March 15th we have the exact Mercury-Mars conjunction at 9-10° Pisces.
When the planet of the mind (Mercury) meets the planet of action (Mars), we not only think or talk about something – we act on it. We say what we mean. We walk the talk. We go for it.
And when we go for it, we don’t just go in any direction. With the North Node involved, the focus is aligned with where we are meant to grow, with the path of our destiny.
March 19th, 2026 – New Moon In Pisces
On March 19th, 2026, we have an auspicious New Moon at 28° Pisces. The New Moon is conjunct Neptune and Saturn (now in the early degrees of Aries) and is exactly sextile Uranus in Taurus.
This New Moon can help us see how exactly we can bring a dream – or something we never thought would actually materialize – into reality, in one way or another.
The outcome may not be exactly how we originally imagined it. Saturn and Neptune are now in Aries, so the expression is different from the Pisces version of the dream.
But it will nevertheless be an expression of something authentic, something that has been building for a long time and is now ready to take form in a more concrete way.
March 20th, 2026 – Sun Enters Aries
On March 20th, 2026, the Sun enters Aries. Happy birthday to all Aries out there – and happy new astrological year to everyone!
Just like Venus earlier in the month, soon after entering Aries the Sun will conjunct both Neptune (on March 21st) and Saturn (exact on March 25th).
Now we’re talking. THIS is the real beginning of a new cycle – a new hero or heroine’s journey.
The Sun’s ingress into Aries marks that threshold moment when we shift from waiting for things to happen “out there” to making things happen ourselves.
Aries in general – and particularly 0° Aries – carries that primordial ignition energy, generating incredible momentum. This is pure birth energy!
March 20th and the days that follow are particularly important for articulating and gaining clarity around your purpose. This is a time to make a commitment. From this point onwards, there’s no turning back to the old version of you.
March 21st, 2026 – Mercury Goes Direct
On March 21st, 2026, Mercury goes direct at 8° Pisces, clearing some of the mist that always gathers in the last sign of the zodiac.
But if we are really honest, sometimes we like getting lost in the fog. Call it daydreaming, creative wandering, or simply taking some time off – and “off” is a very Mercury-in-Pisces word.
Sometimes we need that silence, that drifting, that space where things are not sharply defined, in order to reconnect with ourselves and what actually matters.
As Mercury moves forward again, the insights gathered during the retrograde begin to crystallize. What was vague starts to make more sense.
March 26th, 2026 – Venus Conjunct Chiron In Aries
On March 26th, 2026, Venus is conjunct Chiron at 25° Aries, reminding us where there is still healing to be done, where there is still acceptance needed around the “I am.”
But we have come a long way. In the past 7 years, while Chiron has been in Aries, every single year we have gained a little more self-understanding, a little more courage to stand in who we are.
Believe it or not, this is the very last Venus-Chiron conjunction in Aries, at least for the next 43 years or so.
Venus conjunct Chiron will bring one final breakthrough in how we relate to ourselves – and a deeper recognition that we are enough as we are.
March 28th, 2026 – Saturn Sextile Pluto
On March 28th, 2026, Saturn (at 5° Aries) is exactly sextile Pluto (at 5° Aquarius). This is a subtle, yet constructive transit suggesting that deeper structural changes are starting to gain practical support.
Saturn brings discipline and implementation. Pluto brings systemic transformation. The sextile between them suggests that the world may begin putting some operational plumbing in place.
Conversations around infrastructure – perhaps something connected to energy, systems, or strategic alliances – could start moving from idea to execution.
This is not loud or dramatic. But it is functional. And sometimes that is exactly what is needed for real change to take hold.
March 30th, 2026 – Venus Enters Taurus
On March 30th, 2026, Venus enters her sign of domicile, Taurus.
Picture Aphrodite in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – pure, effortless beauty rooted in nature.
Even if we do not naturally connect with Venus from this more earthy, sensual angle – and that depends, of course, on our own natal chart wiring and current transits – every time Venus is in Taurus, the atmosphere shifts a little bit.
The world feels a little more grounded, a little more tangible, and a little more beautiful.
Aspects And Aspect Patterns 1-Year Program
On March 3rd, 2026 – yes, at the Lunar Eclipse sextile Jupiter – we are starting our 1-year course on Aspects and Aspect Patterns.
Aspects are the connective tissue of the chart – what brings the different parts of the chart to life. Aspects are the most real and tangible part of astrology, because aspects are nothing else but the movements of the planets in the sky.
The Astro Butterfly blog – the transit report – is simply a snapshot of the aspects planets make with each other in a given period of time, in this case one month.
And our natal chart is nothing else but a picture of the sky at the time of our birth, when planets were configured in particular aspects with each other.
When we understand how planets communicate with each other through aspects, 3 important things happen:
- We understand ourselves better. All our internal conflicts in life come from the fact that there are parts of us – parts of our psyche – that don’t fully understand each other. When we understand our aspects – properly, not with Google or computer-generated reports – we begin to see how those parts are wired together. We find acceptance. We find wholeness. We start fully living.
- We understand the world better. We begin to see how the energies of the moment are a reflection of the dance of the planets in the sky through aspects. With time, life becomes less of a mystery. We understand that events are part of larger cycles, and that everything fits into a broader framework.
- And most importantly, when inner understanding meets outer reality, we find alignment. We understand how we are meant to participate. We find our place in the world.
Astrology is one of the most wonderful tools for awareness and growth when we use it properly.
Aspects And Aspect Patterns is a 1-year journey into the language of aspects and aspect patterns – how they shape who we are, how they show up in the world around us, and how understanding them helps us live in alignment with both.
You can learn more about the program and enroll here:
>> Aspects And Aspect Patterns 1-year Program <<
Fanny Wright and the Radical Courage of Being Real: The Forgotten Woman Who Pioneered Scientific Thinking and Free Love in America
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
Just before the eleven-year-old Walt Whitman dropped out of school to begin his first job, his parents diverted a portion of their meager working-class means toward a subscription to the radical paper The Free Enquirer, inspired by The Enquirer published by the radical philosopher William Godwin — Mary Shelley’s father — a generation earlier and an ocean over.
The prospectus of The Free Enquirer promised:
One half of that we was the Scottish-born, newly naturalized radical reformer Fanny Wright. “She possessed herself of my body and soul,” Whitman would recall of her in the final years of his life, adding that he “never felt so glowingly towards any other woman.” He would remember her as “a brilliant woman, of beauty and estate, who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good—public good, private good,” a woman “whose orbit was a great deal larger” than those of her contemporaries — “too large to be tolerated long by them,” rendering her “one of the best in history though also one of the least understood.”
Fanny Wright
Born into a well-off freethinking family in Scotland in 1795, Frances Wright was still a toddler when she lost her father, her mother, and her only brother in close succession. No inheritance is large enough to recompense the loss that savages a child orphaned at so tender an age, but the inheritance Fanny and her surviving younger sister received contoured a different possibility of life than was granted most orphans. Into that possibility Fanny sketched in a life of uncommon courage and action.
Raised in England by an eighteen-year-old aunt who introduced her to the ideas of French materialism and bruised her with the temperamental lashes of a teenager, Fanny returned to Scotland at sixteen to live with a great-uncle — a professor of moral philosophy who vehemently opposed the slave trade and who now held the chair Adam Smith had held a generation earlier at the University of Glasgow, heralded as the academically commensurate but more progressive counterpart to Oxford and Cambridge. Taken with Fanny’s restive intellect, the university librarian risked his job to grant her full access to one of Europe’s most lavish repositories of knowledge. Fanny — tall, slender, muscular, with a firm step and large, forthright blue eyes awned by short, curly chestnut hair — sought out everything she could about the history of the United States, spending the leaden Scottish winters immersed in the ideals of the New World and the emerald summers roaming the ancient Highlands with her sure-footed stride, dreaming about the democratic vistas of the American experiment in government that had captivated her moral and political imagination.
She was eighteen when she composed A Few Days in Athens — an imaginative fictional translation of a lost ancient Greek manuscript. At the heart of her lyrical, thoroughly original novel is an admonition against self-righteousness and a clarion call for justice, tolerance, and moral discipline, advancing the Epicurean philosophy of atomic realism, which for many centuries was misunderstood as a philosophy of pleasure but is, in fact, predicated on a moral framework that the young Wright encapsulated perfectly:
Epicurus from an 1813 engraving by Anthony Cardon. (New York Public Library)
Much of what the world remembers of Epicurus — the first of the Greek philosophers to admit women as his students — has come to us on the wings of poetry. A quarter millennium after him, the Roman poet Lucretius grew enchanted with the Epicurean vision of fathoming life through matter, introducing it to a Roman audience in his monumental book-length poem On the Nature of Things, which opened with an ode to Venus and went on to inspire millennia of minds: Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson, Mary Shelley and Mary Oliver. Channeling Epicurus, Lucretius wrote in the first century:
nor ever set at wider intervals,
for nothing increases and nothing perishes.
Therefore the motion of the atoms themselves
is the same now as it has ever been,
and so hereafter will their motion be;
and what has been born will evermore be born
in the same way; will be, and will grow
strong with strength as it is given by natural law.
For nothing can ever change the sum of things;
there is no hiding-place, nothing outside,
no source-place where another power might rise
bursting, to change the nature and course of things.
Epicurus and Lucretius were the original arithmeticians of the world, the poets of interdependence, singing the totality of things. Across the immense expanse of time and space, across the abyss of cultures and civilizations, Walt Whitman would rise as the next great poet of totality, with Fanny Wright as his formative influence. “What chemistry!” he would exult in the transmutation of life into death into more life in a poem titled “This Compost.” But it was Fanny Wright who revived the Epicurean materialist poetics in the golden age of chemistry. In an author’s note tucked toward the end of the novel, she crystallized its basic conceit:
Epicurus was largely influenced by Democritus, born a century earlier — the first person to formulate an atomic theory of the universe. In one of the handful of surviving fragments from his immense and influential body of work, Democritus personifies the senses and the intellect, staging between them an argument about the nature of reality. When the intellect scoffs that everything we perceive as blue or red, sweetness or bitterness, is just “atoms in the void,” the senses quip: “Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.”
Epicurus seized upon this paradox to expose fundamental truths of human experience. Taking his ideas as a touchstone, Fanny Wright argued that everything from our happiness to our conceptions of right and wrong hinges on how well or poorly we understand “the position we hold in this beautiful material world.” She argued that “the elements composing all substances, so far as we know and can reason, eternal, and in their nature unchangeable; and it is only the different disposition of these eternal and unchangeable atoms that produces all the varieties in the substances constituting the great material whole, of which we form a part.”
She took care to keep materialism from slipping into reductionism — such a conception of nature’s phenomena, she added, “is not explaining their wonders, for that is impossible, but only observing them.” She placed the observation of external and internal phenomena at the center of our conscious experience, at the center of any understanding of the world calibrated by reality rather than taken on faith from doctrine and dogma. She argued — against the grain of her time, against the preoccupations of her age bracket — that moral philosophy is closer to science than to theology, for it concerns itself with the pursuit of truth and justice — a pursuit governed by observation and experiment:
Real philosophy is opposed to all systems. Her whole business is observation; and the results of that observation constitute all her knowledge. She receives no truths, until she has tested them by experience; she advances no opinions, unsupported by the testimony of facts; she acknowledges no virtue, but that involved in beneficial actions; no vice, but that involved in actions hurtful to ourselves or to others. Above all, she advances no dogmas — is slow to assert what is, and calls nothing impossible. The science of philosophy is simply a science of observation, both as regards the world without us, and the world within; and, to advance in it, are requisite only sound senses, well developed and exercised faculties, and a mind free of prejudice… Both as regards the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind, all is simply a process of investigation. It is a journey of discovery.
Light distribution on soap bubble from a 19th-century French science textbook. (Available as a print.)
The science-minded Thomas Jefferson cherished A Few Days in Athens as “a treat… of the highest order.” It became a great influence on the young Whitman, who saw in it an emboldening testament to how powerful an instrument the poetic imagination could be for dismantling dogma, unfastening social strictures, and magnifying alternative possibilities for the realities we have taken as givens. “[The book] was daily food to me: I kept it about me for years,” he recounted in old age, urging the young in his orbit to read it. At the age Mary Shelley was when she composed Frankenstein, Wright wrote:
[…]
All learning is useful, all the sciences are curious, all the arts are beautiful; but more useful, more curious, and more beautiful, is the perfect knowledge and perfect government of ourselves. Though a man should read the heavens, unravel their laws and their revolutions; though he should dive into the mysteries of matter, and expound the phenomena of earth and air; though he should be conversant with all the writings, and the sayings, and the actions of the dead… though he should do one or all of these things, yet know not the secret springs of his own mind, the foundation of his opinions, the motives of his actions; if he hold not the rein over his passions; if he have not cleared the mist of all prejudices from his understanding; if he have not rubbed off all intolerance from his judgments; if he know not to weigh his own actions, and the actions of others, in the balance of justice — that man hath not knowledge; nor, though he be a man of science, a man of learning, or an artist, he is not a sage.
Art by Ariana Fields from What Do You Know? by Aracelis Girmay
Fanny Wright was twenty-three when she left Scotland and sailed for America with her sister. Aboard the ship, she composed a poem in which she declared her “daring hand and fearless soul,” a soul whose twin she saw in Lord Byron’s Childe Harold — a soul “as strange, as proud, as lonely from its birth — with powers as vast.”
In her studies, she had seen again and again how every political system aimed at justice and equality, from the dawn of democracy in ancient Greece to the French Revolution of her childhood, had fissured under the uneven weight of its stated ideals staked on moral imagination and their warped enactments aimed at profit and power. America was to her the oasis of optimism that stood a chance of making the ideal real, and so she set out to see for herself how the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence were translating into practice. On America’s soil, she would soon prove herself to possess that rare and rapturous quality of resolve that sets the revolutionary apart from the mere rebel — a life devoted not only to exposing the roots of evil but to uprooting them, remedying the poisoned soil, and replanting lush ennobling alternatives.
Shortly after arriving in New York, she wrote, produced, and published a play about Switzerland’s fight for independence from Napoleonic rule, which Jefferson lauded for the way it granted “dignity and usefulness to poetry.” From there, Fanny and her sister traversed several thousand miles inland — two young women traveling unchaperoned across small towns and frontier hinterlands. She recorded her exuberant impressions in a series of letters to the erudite, radical, and charming Scottish relative who was the closest thing Fanny had to a mother figure — a woman who had lived in America in her youth and had encouraged the adolescent Fanny’s countercultural aspiration to be a woman of letters with the assurance to see herself as endowed with “the imagination, the temperament… of genius.”
1830s engraving of Fanny Wright by Charles Joseph Hullmandel after Auguste Hervieu. (Met Museum.)
Fanny exulted in the new frontiers of possibility in America, particularly around the one colossal issue on which she parted ways with the ancient Greeks: the Aristotelian assertion that men were the proprietors of reason and therefore the proprietors of women, whose reasoning faculty was inferior by nature. She saw America as Grecian in its democratic ideals but unencumbered by the limiting gender-role conventions of the old world — a new world where “women are assuming their place as thinking beings, not in despite of the men, but chiefly in consequence of their enlarged views and exertions as fathers and legislators.” But the reality of slavery — which had been only a political abstraction at the Scottish library — disquieted her, staggered her with its flagrant betrayal of this new nation’s founding principles.
Upon returning to Europe two years later, Fanny edited her transatlantic letters into what became one of the era’s most popular geopolitical bridges in literature: Views of Society and Manners in America — part travelogue, part memoir, part treatise of political philosophy. Luminaries and decorated revolutionaries on both sides of ocean and channel lavished her with commendations and invitations — Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Mary Shelley. Among them was the Marquis de Lafayette — a key figure in the French Revolution, who had been so moved by America’s struggle for independence that in the bad English he picked up along the way to Philadelphia, he had offered to serve, and did serve, without pay in the war, then helped draft one of the most influential documents of human rights in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson.
Through the portal of mutual admiration, across the gaping divide of language and nation and age, Fanny Wright and Lafayette became friends, then lovers. She wrote to him:
Three years later, Fanny returned to America, this time with Lafayette, accompanying him on his twenty-four-state farewell tour of the country, witnessing his hero’s welcome at every stop, and staying with him at Jefferson’s home at Monticello. He was especially celebrated in New York, where he was invited to ceremoniously lay down the corner-stone of a new free library for youths and mechanics. From there, Fanny Wright parted from Lafayette to travel down the Mississippi River by herself before rejoining him in New Orleans. Along the way, she grew increasingly disquieted to see the country she had admired since girlhood as a pinnacle of democracy prop itself up on the backs of disenfranchised people.
When Lafayette headed back to Europe, she decided to stay and do what she could to help a young nation live up to the ideals that would build not just a new nation but a new world. Within a year — her thirtieth — she had become an American citizen and ridden horseback to Memphis to found an experimental colony on the banks of the Wolf River, devoted to preparing enslaved men and women for their self-earned emancipation and lifelong empowerment, devoted to rectifying the many ways in which America’s institutions fell short of its founding principles. She had identified slavery as the greatest hypocrisy in the American dream of democracy — the greatest fault line along which the new landmass of possibility could collapse into a failed experiment. She had conversed with many a slaveholder and managed to sway them on moral grounds but failed to weaken their attachment to the material profit they derived from slavery. And so she set out to make her counterargument empirically — to prove that an enslaved person could become a free person with no cost to society, and an intellectual equal worthy of citizenship.
In the experimental community, labor was divided among all the members, who were paid for their work, and the work schedules were structured so that portions of each day were devoted to education and the elevation of mind. Raised in the lap of European aristocracy, where most young people never learn to perform basic chores, Fanny labored shoulder to shoulder with her Black colleagues from dawn until nightfall, her Amazonian frame seen chopping wood and rolling logs up the Tennessee hills. Word of the community — which she named Nashoba, the indigenous Chickasaw word for “wolf” — soon spread across the continent and across the Atlantic.
Art by Anna Read from The Wanting Monster by Martine Murray
When Fanny, having worked herself into physical collapse, became dangerously ill with malaria, her physician insisted that she take a break from the toil and the humid climate. She returned to England — partly to recover, but partly to recruit new allies for Nashoba. She met with Mary Shelley and left her longing to visit America for the blazing example of what a woman could achieve there, forever remembering “Miss Wright of Nashoba” as “the most wonderful and interesting woman I ever saw.”
But that is all Nashoba remained — a contour of possibility. The experiment struggled to flourish under a trying confluence of chance and callousness. Just as crop failure imperiled the community’s livelihood, it became known that Fanny had fallen in love with one of the Black women in the colony. Her critics squandered no time using the relation- ship against her, hurling incendiary public accusations of “free love” in the backwoods of the South. Fanny responded with dignity and reason, proposing that miscegenation, rather than a condemnable corruption of American society, was a necessary next step toward living up to America’s founding democratic ideals.
America was not ready — her supporters grew too frightened of being tarred with immorality by proxy and withdrew their support.
Having devoted years of her life and more than half of her material assets to the Nashoba experiment, Fanny dismantled the colony. It was decided that New Orleans would be the place for the Black Nashobans to resettle. She traveled with them to see to their safety, arranging for their housing and employment. She then headed to the country’s epicenter of culture to attack the problem at the root.
Fanny had come to see that prejudice — be it racism or sexism or the hostility to reality perpetrated by the religiously devout — was not the cause of the malady but a symptom of the malady: the American failure to rein in emotional quickenings with reason and discern fact from opinion. The remedy for unreason and unreality was science, is always science. Without science — without a framework for apprehending reality unsullied by human subjectivity — there can be no social justice.
In 1829, Fanny Wright moved to New York and purchased a former church in the Bowery. A generation after the French revolutionaries renamed Notre Dame “The Temple of Reason,” she converted the church into what she christened the Hall of Science — a space “uncontaminated and undistracted by religious discussion or opinionative dissensions,” devoted to examining facts rather than teaching opinions and making science the pasture of the many rather than the province of the few, devoted to the conviction that systematic advances in self-knowledge and the knowledge of reality are the only means for humanity to outgrow the childishness of religious superstition. The lectures she delivered there — impassioned, rigorously reasoned, rhetorically muscular speeches about universal access to education, about dismantling the docility of religious dogma, about women’s sexual freedom and reproductive rights, about the emancipation of slaves, about equitable divorce laws, about the necessity of being a reasoning creature and the inalienable right to be a human being among human beings no matter one’s gender, race, class, creed, or station — enveloped the city in a wildfire of scandal and wakefulness. They were the maturation and physical embodiment of the ideas she had first set forth in her Epicurean novel as a teenager, in which she had written:
Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Half a lifetime later, Fanny affirmed this animating ethos in her welcome speech at the Hall of Science opening ceremony, casting a farseeing eye on the potential — and pitfall — of the human mind and how the general practice of “teaching opinions,” rather than fostering critical thinking, “has tended to affect our species with a mental paralysis.” For two centuries, the antidote she offered would stand shelved and dust-coated in America’s apothecary of opinions:
Whitman would echo this countercultural invocation almost verbatim in the preface of Leaves of Grass, seeing himself, seeing poetry, as the great joiner of humanity. Fanny Wright saw science — this poetics of reality — as the mightiest binding agent for human divisiveness. Perched in time between the Transit of Venus expedition, which annealed a shared purpose in humanity for the first time, and Einstein’s insistence upon “the common language of science” amid a war-torn world, she exhorted:
Relish more of Fanny Wright’s visionary life, and how it entwines with the lives of other visionaries as varied as Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley, and Frederick Douglass, in Traversal.
The Who – My Generation
The Best Of – Home Of Classic Music Nov 1, 2012 Subscribe to The Best Of for more classic music history, videos and playlists: http://bit.ly/WdJ36u “My Generation” appeared on The Who’s debut album of the same name. It was released as a single on 5th November 1965, reaching No. 2 in the UK charts and 74 in the US. “My Generation” was recently named the 11th greatest song by Rolling Stone magazine on their list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”. Like us on Facebook: / therealbestof Follow us on Twitter: / therealbestof Visit http://www.thewho.com for more information. Lyrics: People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) Just because we get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) This is my generation This is my generation, baby Why don’t you all f-fade away (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-g-generation (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) This is my generation This is my generation, baby Why don’t you all f-fade away (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) And don’t try to d-dig what we all s-s-say (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) I’m not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-generation (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) This is my generation This is my generation, baby People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) Just because we g-g-get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) Yeah, I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) This is my generation This is my generation, baby
(Courtesy of Dan Rather)
The Story of the Fig Tree
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.A Modernist’s Modernist: On the Brilliance—and Influence—of Katherine Mansfield
“Thinking about Mansfield’s work makes me understand again how literature is never just a story.”
Kirsty Gunn January 23, 2023 (lithub.com)
The Katherine Mansfield Memorial Garden is a peaceful, oblong-shaped park set in the midst of Thorndon, in Wellington, New Zealand. It is named after the city’s most famous daughter, the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, whose work is widely read in France and Europe but has been slow to capture the attention of British and American readers and critics.
That is set to change this year, as the centenary of Mansfield’s death this month marks the beginning of a flurry of publications and reviews honoring the author of a prose style that Virginia Woolf envied (“I was jealous of her writing,” she wrote after Mansfield’s death, “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”) and whose stories established a prototype for the kind of short fiction in English we now take for granted.
Terms such as “slice-of-life” and in medias res may well be said to have been applied by Mansfield first: “Her work will always move closely against the grain of her own experience, but she will shake it free from the conventional plot, from the usual expectations.” writes Vincent O’Sullivan, editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield.
Her stories plunge the reader into their midst and off we go: “And after all the weather was ideal.” “The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.” “In the afternoon the chairs came.” From their first lines, the reader is brought right inside the fictional worlds which simply seem to open up and change as time passes—a method that Mansfield herself described as “unfolding,” introducing to literature a kind of free indirect narrative that traces the actions and minds of characters with such detail and nuance and sensitivity that she may as well be writing in invisible ink. “What form is it? you ask,” she wrote in a letter to the painter Dorothy Brett about her long short story “Prelude,” first published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. “As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention.”
My mother loved the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, and she loved Thorndon.
Scholars and critics are in general agreement that Mansfield’s best work—“comparable with Proust’s breakthrough into the subconscious world,” said Frank O’Connor—are the so-called New Zealand stories: “so-called” for while they are set in places not actually named as Wellington or Days Bay, the small summer town across the harbor from that city, or Karori, a northern suburb that is the setting for “Prelude” and “The Dolls House,” they are nevertheless clearly drawing upon these places and others, a lansdcape and world Mansfield had been born into and grew up amongst.
She left New Zealand to pursue a life of writing alongside the Bloomsbury set—Lawrence and Joyce, the Woolfs and EM Forster and Bertrand Russell were her friends and readers—and never returned, though the country continued to work upon her imagination right up until the end of her short life. “I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World,” she wrote in her journal, returning over and over to her theme. “It must be mysterious, as though floating. It must take the breath.” She died from tuberculosis at the age of 34 in Fontainebleau, even in her last days writing to her father about “a turn towards home.” “If I began asking you questions about Wellington ways there would be no end to it,” she concludes.
Thorndon is the right place for the Memorial Garden, which is a stone’s throw from the house where Katherine Mansfield was born and grew up. Thorndon is where she went to school, took cello lessons, saw friends, and went to parties that were celebrated in stories such as “The Garden Party,” “The Singing Lesson,” and “A Birthday.” Thorndon was where she returned as a girl, after her first trip to London where her education was “finished” at Queen’s College in Harley Street, and from where she left again “for ever” as she said, just before she turned 20. “I am ashamed of young New Zealand,” she wrote in letters to London, “—oh the tedium vitae of 19 years!”
The Gardens are laid to grass, mostly, crisscrossed by small paths and with an enclosed area set to one side which has been planted with scented herbs and flowers for the blind; the names of which, marjoram and camomile and verbena, are formed in Braille along the stone wall and planters that shelter them. The fragrance these give off on a high summer’s day in Wellington would have been familiar to the writer who spent months of her adult life in the South of France, as well as in Italy and Switzerland, seeking a cure for the disease that had hounded her for most of her adult life.
At the other end of the Gardens is an avenue of cherry trees, giving the whole place a sense of scale beyond its actual dimensions, which comprise an area no longer or wider than a small city street. My parents were photographed on their wedding day standing under those trees; I have a black and white print of them together, my mother looking as though she is a figure on top of a marzipan iced wedding cake—her arms held out on either side of her bell-shaped skirt, her face tilted to the camera, and her little tiara with its veil set in place on her short helmet of shiny hair. My father beside her is tall and tentative in his dark suit, which seems to be the same shade of black as the trunks of the trees that fall in ranks behind him; he holds his new wife at her tiny waist as though he might protect her.
“I was jealous of her writing,” Woolf wrote after Mansfield’s death, “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”
My mother loved the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, and she loved Thorndon. It is one of the oldest urban areas in New Zealand and full of (as Mansfield and my mother might have said) “charm.” The houses and buildings reflect their colonial past: planned and designed to follow the layout and architecture of streets and terraces “back home,” as people in New Zealand used to refer to Britain as late as the 70s, when I was growing up there. There are rows of workers cottages as well as the kind of detached two- and three-story mansions set in large gardens that you might see in London or Edinburgh, as well as family homes and shops and businesses with stained glass windows and heavy front doors.
My mother knew a great deal about colonial style, the lacy delicate trelliswork that decorated verandas and porches, the wide front steps and railings leading to hallways laid with kauri, a New Zealand redwood, and about the furniture, domestic wares, and paintings these houses had once contained. She collected “antiques,” as items no more than 100 years old were called in New Zealand then, and went to restoration and upholstery classes so that she could learn to restore the chairs and tables she collected, fit them out in the fabrics and finishes of their age.
Like Mansfield, whose stories contain the scenes and drawing room chatter of an Edwardian London even when located elsewhere, or who ascribes to her European settings a new-world sensibility that cuts through old-world class registers and niceties, my mother spent a great deal of her time thinking about what it was to imagine a somewhere else while being caught up in the reality of the present. Both liked to hold together the idea that one might simultaneously be here, and also, in some way, there.
So it was that Wellington, the capital city of a colonial outpost located in the Pacific Ocean, was imagined as part and parcel of an older place, of a Scotland or England; the country somehow part of Europe too. For Mansfield, the South of France would always remind her of Days Bay; for my mother, Days Bay was the South of France. They weren’t the only people to do this when I was growing up there.
A lot of us thought that way—going to schools with houses named after Scottish castles, dancing to the pipes at ceilidhs and Caledonian balls, singing “God Save the Queen” at sports days and in the cinema. It was no wonder that the here and the there might become merged in our minds. My sister and I used to imagine that over the bush-covered hills in the distance from our house were the avenues and streets of New York. It was just a case of making the journey over the Orongorongo ranges.
For my mother, Thorndon represented that “here and there” world completely. She was married in St Paul’s, where Mansfield went to church as a child, a white-painted wooden cathedral a five-minute walk from the Gardens where she was photographed. She sent my sister and me to a girls’ school that was around the corner from Mansfield’s birthplace and backed onto another street where her family had moved, just a block away from where Mansfield herself had been educated.
Does death fasten an imaginative idea more firmly to the mind, I wonder? I think in my case it might.
The Gardens were across the road from my sixth-form building, and as senior girls we were allowed to have periods off to go study and read there in the summer term. I remember precisely the feeling of hitching up our blue linen summer uniform dresses, socks rolled down and bare legs stretched out in the sun; tubes of Coppertone and baby oil being fished out of PE satchels while preparing for exams in Advanced Level English Lit; going through stories by Katherine Mansfield that were set just down the road and yet also seemed to be full of London and France. Art and life, life and art. The here and the there.
My mother would have loved the way both realities conjoined, the story and the experience, the fictions and the facts; how both seemed to be versions of each other in the Memorial Gardens that year. By the time exams came round and I was writing essays on “Bliss” and “Sun and Moon” and “The Voyage” that she’d read to me as a child, she’d been dead for nearly a year and I thought I was used to her absence. Her way of interpreting the world, though—that had stayed with me. The stories, after all, were still there.
Does death fasten an imaginative idea more firmly to the mind, I wonder? I think in my case it might. For try as I have over the years, I can’t help shift this notion of here and there thinking. It’s part of how I see a place, experience it, remember it, even. When my mother used to read aloud to me a Mansfield story set in a French Jardins Publiques, which seems to draw upon the Wellington Botanical Gardens, also in Thorndon, about a quarter mile from the much smaller Memorial Gardens, I can’t help but retain the impression that both real and invented parks are indeed one and the same. To arrive, as a child, at the big iron gates at the entrance of these and to make my way down the wide path with flowerbeds on either side to the rotunda was to follow Miss Brill to her seat to listen to the band play in the story named after her and to go where Mansfield herself had walked before her.
Reading about a place can be to feel as though one knows it, in the same way that to be in the place can remind us of its fictional counterparts. I remember my first time in New York, going through Central Park at dusk while the buildings lit up behind the winter trees: the exact color of that twilight; the lights coming on in apartments and offices; the view through the taxi window. How I seemed to be as much in a novel set in New York as I was in the backseat of a yellow cab. There are lots of places in the world that bring this sort of two-way vision.
Mansfield’s Thorndon is as real in her stories as it is also a part of the world I know so well. I walk down Tinakori Road, Thorndon’s main shopping street that still retains its 19th-century outlines despite the motorway that rushes alongside, and I might be a character in a section of “Juliet,” a very early draft of a story that might have become a novel. I might be in step with Mansfield herself as she and her brother in “The Wind Blows” “zigzag” down the path to the Pohutukawa tree that once stood at the water’s edge but is now on the reclaimed land where the bus stopped to take me home sometimes after school. In the photo of my parents on their wedding day, my mother’s hand rests on my father’s dark sleeve just as Leila imagines “the bolster on which her hand rested felt like the sleeve of an unknown young man’s dress suit” in “Her First Ball.” I wonder if my mother thought the same as she laid her hand there, all those years ago. I wonder who she was, that bride, that woman—and will never really know.
Yet reading about Katherine Mansfield helps me get just a little closer to my mother, her mind and imagination. Thinking about Mansfield’s work makes me understand again how literature is never just a story, a narrative, an event on the page to be read aloud to a child or silently to oneself alone. It is also an experience, caught up with the here and now along with memory and the past. For where were we when we read this novel or that one? Who were we talking with when we discovered this poet’s work or another’s set of short stories? Details of personal history are caught up and captured in the texts and pages and screens before us, and they become part of the story, part of who we are. Like the shadows cast upon the lawns and gardens of Mansfield’s stories, reminding us, as her stories always do, that presence and absence go together.
This January, the month of Mansfield’s death, is the August of Paris and New York in the southern hemisphere. Businesses close, schools are off, city streets are deserted, everyone is at the beach or away. Katherine Mansfield wrote her story “At the Bay” to capture exactly that feeling of time off—a family’s escape to its summer cottage, or “bach” as it is called in New Zealand—a story “full of sand and seaweed and dresses hanging over verandahs and sandshoes on windowsills,” a fiction based on family holidays that went on to influence Woolf’s famous novel To the Lighthouse.
Reading about Katherine Mansfield helps me get just a little closer to my mother, her mind and imagination.
When Mansfield died Woolf wrote in her diary, “At that one feels—what? A shock of relief? —a rival the less! Then confusion at feeling so little—then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it.”
In February and March—the beginning of the academic year in New Zealand—the schools will open up again and the girls in blue uniforms will return to my old College in Thorndon; they’ll lounge in the Memorial Gardens just as we used to do. Another year ahead, what will it bring? For Katherine Mansfield, this was always an exciting time, even in the depths of a northern hemisphere winter. Towards the end of 1922, she’d joined the esoteric Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon in an attempt to understand herself, bring all the scattered “bits” of herself together and make peace with her illness.
The last diary entries describe her final acts of “here and there” thinking, as she put the small realities of her restricted life into a sort of dictionary she was creating. As O’Sullivan writes in his introduction to the last volume of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, “There is no detail so poignant and so simply indicative of the life she was attempting to remake, as the list of Russian words and phrases she was trying to learn: “I was late because my fire did not burn. The sky was blue as in summer…The trees still have apples. Apple…”
The word, the Russian equivalent—the fact and the kind of fiction that is also the fact of language, the imaginative gesture of Mansfield’s writing, turning one thing into another, seems—it really does seem in these last moments as I am reading them—to save her. “When I pass the apple stalls,” she had written to her friend Dorothy Brett back in 1917, “I cannot help stopping and staring until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple too—and that at any moment I may produce an apple, miraculously, out of my own being like the conjurer produces an egg,” a process, she finishes, “of becoming…so thrilling that I can hardy breathe.”
Like all writers who have left something behind them—a place or a person, a country, a home—the counterfeit, the version on the page, can become the real. I guess my mother, unknowingly, taught me that, but I don’t know that the idea would have stayed with me as powerfully and as long if she had not been taught it first by a writer she loved.
Bloomsbury Group Katherine Mansfield Kirsty Gunn modernism mothers New Zealand Thorndon Virginia Woolf
Kirsty Gunn
Kirsty Gunn’s new collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly, is due out this summer.
Katherine Mansfield on the Thrilling Joy of Creation
“When you paint apples do you feel that your breasts
and your knees become apples, too?”
Emily Temple October 11, 2017 (lithub.com)
One hundred years ago today, Katherine Mansfield wrote a letter to her friend, the painter Dorothy Brett. In it, Mansfield waxed poetic on the beautiful day (it’s a cardinal rule that every letter must begin with the weather) and wrote about how deeply and instantly she connected with the subjects of her art, and how much she loved writing (including how much she loved getting positive feedback). “It’s not a case of keeping the home fire burning for me. It’s a case of keeping the home fire down to a respectable blaze and little enough. If you don’t come and see me soon there’ll be nothing but a little heap of ash and two crossed pens upon it.”
If you haven’t read her work, I think this letter might convince you to give her a try, but what I really can’t get over is how effusive she is; how in love with the world, how happy to be able to reflect it in prose. Only two months after this letter was written, when she was just barely 30 (her birthday is October 14th, by the way), Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It would kill her before she was 35. But for now, she will write about ducks and swear she is a duck, and look at the shiny apples with such joy that she feels herself transforming. I have to admit, I feel a little bit transformed too.
My dear Brett,
It is a cold sharp day—I can see the sun flying in the sky like a faint far-away flag—My Japanese doll has gone into boots for the winter and the studio smells of quinces. I have to write all day with my feet in the fringe of the fire—and Oh Alas! it is sad to think that I shall be warm in front and cold behind from now until next June. It seems to me so extraordinarily right that you should be painting Still Lives just now. What can one do, faced with this wonderful tumble of round bright fruits, but gather them and play with them—and become them, as it were. When I pass the apple stalls I cannot help stopping and staring until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple, too—and that at any moment I may produce an apple, miraculously, out of my own being like the conjurer produces the egg. When you paint apples do you feel that your breasts and your knees become apples, too? Or do you think this is the greatest nonsense. I don’t. I am sure it is not. When I write about ducks I swear that I am a white duck with a round eye, floating in a pond fringed with yellow blobs and taking an occasional dart at the other duck with the round eye, which floats upside down beneath me. In fact this whole process of becoming the duck (what Lawrence would, perhaps, call this ‘consummation with the duck or the apple’) is so thrilling that I can hardly breathe, only to think about it. For although that is as far as most people can get, it is really only the ‘prelude’. There follows the moment when you are more duck, more apple or more Natasha than any of these objects could ever possibly be, and so you create them anew. Brett (switching off the instrument): ‘Katherine I beg of you to stop. You must tell us all about it at the Brotherhood Church one Sunday evening.’ K: Forgive me. But that is why I believe in technique, too (you asked me if I did.) I do, just because I don’t see how art is going to make that divine spring into the bounding outlines of things if it hasn’t passed through the process of trying to become these things before recreating them.
I have left your letter unanswered for more days than I could have wished. But don’t think it was just because I am so careless & faithless. No, really not. I enjoyed keeping silent with the letter just as one enjoys walking about in silence with another until a moment comes when one turns and puts out a hand and speaks.
I threw my darling to the wolves and they ate it and served me up so much praise in such a golden bowl that I couldn’t help feeling gratified. I did not think they would like it at all and I am still astounded that they do. What form is it? you ask. Ah. Brett, its so difficult to say. As far as I know its more or less my own invention. And how have I shaped it? This is about as much as I can say about it. You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born. Oh, I out-Chili Chili any day! Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at beam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops—(When you ran over the dewy grass you positively felt that your feet tasted salt.) I tried to catch that moment—with something of its sparkle and its flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again… Its so difficult to describe all this and it sounds perhaps overambitious and vain. But I don’t feel anything but intensely a longing to serve my subject as well as I can—But the unspeakable thrill of this art business. What is there to compare! And what more can one desire. It’s not a case of keeping the home fire burning for me. It’s a case of keeping the home fire down to a respectable blaze and little enough. If you don’t come and see me soon there’ll be nothing but a little heap of ash and two crossed pens upon it.
Are you coming to London soon—Let me know. Let us meet. Shall I see you float across my window upon a chariot of bright umbrellas?
Venus Laughing From the Skies. Isn’t it a beautiful title, when all is said and done—Goodbye goodbye goodbye. It is all too wonderful.
Katherine.
(From The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 1: 1903-1917. Edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. London: Oxford University Press, 1984. Text via The American Reader.)
art Correspondence Dorothy Brett Katherine Mansfield letter painting short stories writing life
Emily Temple
Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
Brain, think on thyself
What the science of self-awareness can tell us about confident decision-making
By Tim Vernimmen 02.25.2026 (knowablemagazine.org)
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Steve Fleming’s research is definitely “meta” — a Greek prefix indicating self-reference. He’s a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London who studies metacognition: what we know about what we know, think about what we think, believe about what we believe. While this may seem quite philosophical and well-nigh impossible to study in the lab, he has made it his mission to measure and model it and understand where in the brain it manifests itself.
Fleming explored these issues in his 2021 book, Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. In the 2024 Annual Review of Psychology, he further examined the link between metacognition and confidence: our sense of whether we have made the right decision, whether we are successful at the tasks presented to us, and whether our worldview is likely correct.
CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND)
Cognitive neuroscientist Steve Fleming
University College London
Fleming’s work is casting new light on why some people seem chronically underconfident even when they’re doing just fine, and why others are entirely convinced they’re right about everything, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In the following discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity, Fleming shared his thoughts on some of the questions that inevitably come up when our brains assess their own activity.
Metacognition is quite an uncommon research topic. How did you end up studying this?
I studied experimental psychology in Oxford, where I had the opportunity to work with psychologist Paul Azzopardi. He studies blindsight, a condition where, due to certain types of brain damage, people are subjectively blind but still able to perform various tasks using visual information. This presents a fascinating dissociation between conscious experience and actual functionality.
At that point, I hadn’t figured out how to connect the more philosophical ideas about conscious experience to something we can actually measure and study in the lab. But ever since then, my career has been inching towards achieving the original goal of using mathematical models from psychology to explain aspects of self-awareness. These are things that psychologists and philosophers have always been interested in, but that are quite difficult to pin down in practice.
How do you measure something like metacognition in the lab?
The standard approach is to measure people’s objective performance on a task as well as their subjective assessment of their own performance, usually in the form of confidence ratings. For example, we might be asking whether a visual stimulus known as a grating is tilted to the left or to the right, or to compare the brightness of two gratings shown one after the other. That would be a judgment about the outside world. We can then also ask them a metacognitive question, to evaluate their confidence in their decision about the world.
When we have lots of these kinds of judgments over time, we can observe the extent to which confidence is tracking performance, on a trial-by-trial basis. If someone has high confidence when they’re right and lower confidence when they’re wrong, they can be ascribed a high degree of what we call metacognitive efficiency. We can use that as a way of quantifying differences in metacognition between individuals or groups.
Can you link these differences to what is happening in people’s brains?
One popular way of doing this has been to look at differences in brain activity and structure between people, using brain imaging techniques like fMRI and magnetoencephalography to try and find out what aspects of brain function gives some people better metacognition than others. But we’ve realized that approach is limited.
So the field has shifted. More recently, we’re instead looking at the relationship between patterns of brain activity and trial-by-trial variation in how confident individual people feel about decisions we ask them to make in experiments.
Essentially, what’s been found is that there are different stages of tracking uncertainty about our own performance when we’re performing a particular task.
For example, if you’re trying to discriminate the orientation of a line, neurons in the part of the brain that are sensitive to different possible line orientations will be firing to different extents, reflecting any uncertainty in what you see. Studies show that if there is conflicting information at that level, that affects people’s confidence estimates in the tests.
There are also data suggesting another higher-level stage of assessment: There are brain areas in the prefrontal cortex signaling confidence in a more general fashion, one that is not tied to the specific input we receive when conducting a particular task. This process continues after you’ve made a decision, and the brain is then also considering information that wasn’t initially available. It’s as if it is still trying to figure out whether it got it right or wrong.
That seems to happen pretty much automatically. It doesn’t require any external instruction or conscious effort. When we do ask people to consciously engage in metacognition and report how they feel about their performance, they seem to engage yet another stage of processing, which involves the frontopolar areas of the human brain: regions right towards the front of the cortex that are particularly well-developed in humans compared to other primates. These areas are activated when metacognitive estimates are used to communicate to others or to consciously control behavior, like we asked them to do in these experiments.
What happens if metacognition does not work the way it should?
A pervasive sense of underconfidence has been regularly linked to symptoms of anxiety and depression. We know that individuals who suffer from this general sense of underconfidence are not necessarily performing the tasks any worse than the next person. So one of the puzzles we are interested in trying to solve is why some people are not learning from their own performance. Why is it that they’re unable to realize that they’re actually doing quite well, and then update their beliefs about their skills and abilities appropriately?
What we’ve found is that at a trial-by-trial level, people with anxiety and depression are just as likely as others to show instances of high confidence. But there is an asymmetry in how they learn from these. They sometimes are very confident that they are doing well, but they don’t incorporate those signals into their more global estimates of how well they are doing in these experiments, and presumably daily life as well. At the same time, they are perfectly able to incorporate evidence from trials in which they weren’t very confident about performing well.
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Interestingly, this isn’t the case when we give them explicit feedback about their performance. When we tell them that they are right, they realize that they are actually performing quite well.
How could this be applied to help people who struggle with underconfidence?
In a recent study, we’ve shown that underconfidence in people with greater anxiety symptoms is exacerbated with time. If we probe their confidence immediately after they make a decision, they’ll be a bit underconfident. But if we wait a few seconds, they’re even more underconfident about that previous decision, everything else being equal. And it only gets worse.
What we think is happening is that they’re engaging all these brain mechanisms that I talked about earlier to reflect on their own decisions and actions. Now, as time elapses, if you tend to be a more anxious person, those processes lead you to become even more underconfident than you would otherwise be. You’re spending too much time ruminating on your performance.
So one concrete piece of advice that we can extract out of those findings is that if you know that you are prone to that kind of bias, it’s better not to think too much after you’ve made a choice. If immediately after, you think, “All right, yeah, that was a reasonable thing to do,” leave it be.
What about people who are, perhaps, a bit more confident than they should be? It appears that can be quite helpful in today’s society.
It’s very interesting to think about what is adaptive, on a societal level, for future success. One hypothesis I advance in the book is that if you have a slightly overconfident worldview as well as good metacognitive sensitivity that helps you realize when you’re really wrong, that can be quite a powerful mix. Because, as you say, there is a lot of research suggesting that people who are perhaps a little overconfident do well socially. People tend to like them and want them in positions of power because they seem decisive.
At the same time, you don’t want someone without proper self-awareness to be able to bluff their way to the top and reach a position of power.
So I think there is a sweet spot where you do need to project a bit of overconfidence to be perceived as competent, yet you also want to make sure you’re not too seduced by self-confidence, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.
We’ve found that people with a more open-minded worldview, who are willing to acknowledge that their view might not be the only valid one and believe it’s important to listen to the views of people who disagree with them, also tend to have more accurate metacognition in the kinds of tasks we can study in the lab. Accurate metacognition prompts them to seek out new information and update their beliefs if they might be inaccurate. There is a solid body of evidence to suggest that in this way, these signals can help us, over time, to develop a more accurate worldview.
“There is a sweet spot where you do need to project a bit of overconfidence to be perceived as competent, yet you also want to make sure you’re not too seduced by self-confidence.”
— STEVE FLEMING
Might it be possible to train metacognition using these kinds of tasks, and do you think that might help us to reduce the societal tensions we experience today?
I think a lack of metacognition is far from the only reason we see polarization in society today. But our research does offer some tools that we could use to try and cultivate people’s ability to think critically about their own thinking, knowledge and decisions, without getting into politics.
The obvious place to do this would be in education, which I believe has a lot of potential. Parents and teachers implicitly encourage children to be more self-aware, but they rarely do so explicitly.
We don’t teach metacognition in the same way we teach math or history or physics. I think that might be a really powerful way of developing more open-minded ways of thinking.
Tim Vernimmen is a freelance science journalist based near Antwerp, Belgium. His metacognition really let him down when his laptop slipped out of his backpack on the bus on the way to this interview. It was thankfully recovered.