“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denial of the end, until the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of helplessness and humiliation, that we may discover the greater dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride — the dignity of opening the heart fully and offering it completely, even as it is being flayed by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the blunt edge of an unrequited passion for the possible. (Though, of course, a heart is never broken.)
It is this kind of dignity, the kind found beyond despair, that emanates from Frida Kahlo’s letters to the lover who took her most famous photograph — the Hungarian refugee Miklós Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray upon landing at Ellis Island in the final year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of four dozen words and the unassailable determination to be an artist. He would go on to become a pilot, a pioneer of color photography, and a fencing champion, photographing some of the twentieth century’s greatest luminaries and competing twice for the U.S. Olympic team.
Nick and Frida. (Catalina Island Museum)
She was in her early twenties when she met him while traveling through the United States with Diego in the first years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained epistolary friends, but as he spent more and more time in Mexico throughout the 1930s, they became lovers.
Although the love letter was her first great art, Frida’s letters to Nick are the most playful and most passionate of all her letters, and also the tenderest. She signed them Xóchitl — “flower” in the indigenous Náhuatl language — and it was at the peak of their love that she began painting her electrically erotic Flower of Life.
Frida Kahlo: Flower of Life, 1938-1943
In a fierce and winking letter penned from Paris, where she had just been introduced to André Breton and his coterie (“you have no idea what kind of bitches these people are”) trying to get her paintings exhibited, she writes to Nick in the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as “kid” despite his being twenty-five years her senior:
Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.
He did.
By the end of spring, Nick was engaged to the other woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Shattered, she wrote to him, first thanking him “a million times” for sending what would become her most iconic photograph, encoded with the bittersweet memory of a morning in the spring of their love, then pouring out her devastation without pride or pretense:
When I received your letter, few days ago, I didn’t know what to do. I must tell you that I couldn’t help weeping. I felt that something was in my throat, just as if I had swallowed the whole world. I don’t know yet if I was sad, jealous or angry, but the sensation I felt was in first place of a great despair. I have read your letter many times, too many, I think, and now I realize things that I couldn’t see at first. Now, I understand everything perfectly clearly, and the only thing I want, is to tell you with my best words, that you deserve in life the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts… No matter what happens to us in life, you will always be, for myself, the same Nick I met one morning in New York in 18th E. 48th St.
And then she adds a list of requests for how to honor her broken heart, touchingly human and almost childlike in its underlying wish for an undo button:
I want to ask from you a great favour, please, send by mail the little cushion, I don’t want anybody else to have it. I promise to make another one for you, but I want that one you have now on the couch downstairs, near the window… Take down the photo of myself which was on the fireplace, and put it in Mam’s room in the shop, I’m sure she still likes me as much as she did before. Besides, it is not so nice for the other lady to see my portrait in your house. I wish I could tell you many many things but I think it is no use to bother you. I hope you will understand without words all my wishes.
[…]
About my letters to you, if they are on the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don’t want to be a trouble in your life in any case. Please forgive me for acting just like an old-fashioned sweetheart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don’t have any interest in having those papers with you.
As she was writing this very letter, she was interrupted by a phone call from a mutual friend informing her that Nick had just gotten married. Frida acknowledges this plainly and adds:
I have nothing to say about what I felt. I hope you will be happy, very happy… Thanks for the magnificent photo, again and again. Thanks for your last letter, and for all the treasures you gave me.
Love,
Frida
Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray (Brooklyn Museum)
By that autumn, Nick was already having troubles in his new marriage as Frida’s relationship with Diego was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce process began as Diego pummeled her with “the worst things you can imagine and the dirtiest insults,” she wrote to Nick:
I have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering… I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems to me that nobody in the world has suffer the way I do, but of course it will be different, I hope, in a few months.
Still addressing him as “darling” and “baby,” she adds:
Thanks Nickolasito for all your kindness, for the dreams about me, for your sweet thoughts, for everything. Please forgive me for not writing as soon as I received your letters, but let me tell you kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one can live thru it… Don’t forget me and be a good boy.
I love you,
Frida
He never did forget her. She never stopped wishing the world for him, which may be the deepest measure of love — continuing to desire the other’s greatest happiness, their best possible life, even if it excludes you. It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Frida and Nick remained lifelong friends, on tender terms until the end.
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time.
“Fearlessness is what love seeks [which] exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in another of them, “hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
But upon closer inspection, now — this elementary particle of eternity, this tiny and total locus of the living moment, this constant that is never the same — turns out to be more elusive than a neutrino, passing through us ghostly and ungraspable, yet leaving in its wake the purest sum of what we are.
Like love, now is an entirely subjective experience built on a meaningful interaction between systems. Like love, it is not a state but a process — a dynamic creation that enlists all of our past experience and the entire pattern of predictive perceptions we call reality. Like love, it is more like music than like mathematics.
Jo Marchant takes up this elemental mystery in her excellent investigation In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment (public library), weaving together physics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural anthropology to expose the warp and weft of our aliveness, locating in the living now “the origins of both life and mind, the driving force that powers behaviours, perceptions, choices and decisions, that ultimately carves out self and time.”
She writes:
It isn’t a location within time at all, but what makes time possible. Now is nature itself: the experienced, evolving universe within which all time, and all life, is held.
Two centuries after the vitalism debate sundered science into warring camps over the search for a “vital spark” that makes matter alive, we are finding that conscious minds — that crowning achievement of matter — are made of time and bodies undone by it, that it is the fundamental substrate of our aliveness. If the moment is the vital spark of time, the science of now — divisive, thrilling, inconclusive — is the vitalism debate of our time.
It began when Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate. Relativity rendered the flow of time, and the immediacy of the moment nested within it, not a given of physical reality but a function of the vantage you take. “The baggage of consciousness,” Einstein himself called our sense of time in a letter to his best friend. Like all radical ideas, relativity sent the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction and the ancients’ notion of eternalism — the idea that time is absolute, the same in all directions, and all existence simply is, without dynamic being that flows from past to present to future — was revived in the modern model of the block universe, configuring spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional block. Marchant describes the implications of that model:
Our lives aren’t unfurling plots or stories; they are intricate paths already mapped out in four dimensions… Every cell within your body — your neurons, muscle cells, the blood cells pulsing through your arteries, capillaries and veins — has its own intricate, interconnecting life path carved out through the block. And not just every cell, but every atom. Each of us is made up of trillions of strands in space-time, all with their own complex trajectory. Your whole life might look like a sort of tree carved into the block, with disparate strands coming together at one end, representing your conception and birth; gradually thickening into a trunk; and then at the other end splaying out into finer and finer branches before disintegrating completely at the point of your death and decomposition… There is no room for movement, flow or happening. Reality doesn’t become. It just is.
If the physicists are right, our attachment to the specialness of the present moment is just another example of how our limited perception deceives us, like thinking the sky turns or the Earth is flat.
Causality, this model implies, is simply an interpretation based on our limited perception: “The flow from past to future… rather than being a fundamental feature of the universe… emerges as a secondary consequence of our inability to see the full picture.”
Then there is the predictive coding model, under which “what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’… a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.”
It is worth remembering here that what gives science its loveliness and potency, and what distinguishes it from philosophy, is the passion for building models of how nature works calibrated by the rigor of testing them against reality. And yet time may be the only region where the models are truly and fundamentally untestable because the modeler is a captive of time. Einstein’s equations gave us the mathematical foundation for the Big Bang, but not even Einstein could travel back to the beginning of time to see if the model was true. This may be why, to me, the most compelling — as well as the most poetic — portion of Merchant’s investigation is the most empirical: an fMRI study that analyzed the patterns of brain activity in people watching a movie, which has a built-in timeline, or simply resting, capturing one image per second and comparing how these images — these portraits of the moment — differ from one another in order to render the experience of time’s passage. Marchant details the astonishing revelation:
There isn’t a simple progression from one brain state to the next as time passes, with each moment most similar to its nearest neighbour. Our “brain patterns are not simply counting off the seconds,” says [study author Dan] Lloyd. Hidden within the sequences was an organised temporal structure, with regular patterns in the way that subjects’ brains moved back and forth between a small number of states. In fact, the structure he found is very like that of music. Lloyd identified short, repeating motifs, or themes: sequences of states, between 4 and 11 seconds long, that look similar to each other. Often these themes recurred at constant time intervals: he called that “rhythm.” These rhythms appeared at a range of different timescales, and sometimes these frequencies were related to each other, so that they nested within one another perfectly. Lloyd called this structure “harmony” because it is analogous to the harmonic vibrations that give musical instruments, from violins to saxophones, their rich, resonant sound.
What this “harmony” means is that at any single moment, our spontaneous brain activity is made up of multiple, overlaid patterns and rhythms, which are related yet change over different timescales: just like our experience of Now. Each moment of neural activity is influenced by what’s happened in both the near and further past, and in turn influences what will happen in the near and further future. The results “suggest a human capacity to spread out from the immediate present tense of sensation, towards an overall temporal landscape,” Lloyd concludes. This explains how we can navigate fast-changing events yet at the same time hold on to stable threads of where we’re going and who we are.
An epoch before neuroimaging, Virginia Woolf intuited this truth when she considered the “moments of being” that make us who we are, intuited the musicality of being alive: “The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art,” she wrote in her breathtaking epiphany in the middle of the garden, “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
Looking through the kaleidoscope of the various models, Marchant considers the essence of the light:
It seems our perception of Now is a combination of two crucial factors: the ability to bind a hierarchy of different timescales together within each moment; and the inexorable progression from one moment to the next. This highly ordered temporal composition underpins our flowing stream of consciousness. Passing time is not just a characteristic we perceive: it is the underlying frame or structure through which we experience reality.
And yet it may be more important even than that, underpinning not just our world but who we are.
Our lives, Marchant argues, are only really alive, only ever real, as the moment lives itself through us:
The perceptions and sensations themselves — the call and response, the meeting or thwarting of predictions — these are reality. These are what existence is made of… Our perceptions or experiences — the melancholy of raindrops on a window, the exhilaration of diving into an icy pool — are real in themselves. There is no separate, enduring landscape beyond that they’re based on, no solid reference point against which our sensations can be judged.
[…]
Now has objective meaning as the expanding boundary at which reality is continually created. What’s coming into being includes not just the contents of the universe but its very structure. As new events occur, new universe — new space-time — is being born.
With an eye to all the different models of physics she examines in the book — relativity, the block universe, enactivism, and predictive coding among them — she ends where we ought to always begin: the discipline of not mistaking the model for the thing itself:
Do we exist as frozen snapshots or mathematical braids? Are we logic-bound computers or dynamic hurricanes? Are we living in a mental realm of shadows, separated from true reality by impenetrable, iron-like walls? Or are our perceptions real, while the familiar things of our world — even time and space themselves — are mere statistical structures, predictions that help us to manage our flow of sensations and stay alive?… Perhaps with all these possibilities there’s no way even to approach what lies beyond us, beyond our senses, beyond this point in time… All any of us can ever really know is that this moment exists. Maybe that’s enough. What we’re sensing and feeling, right here, right now, is real and undeniable, precisely because we are experiencing it.
Because there is no commons of now, the moment is the measure of our loneliness in time, but also the only region of space where we flower into being fully ourselves in a constant bloom of becoming.
What we perceive or experience in any moment is so personal, so utterly bound up in our individual history and biology, that it doesn’t make sense to speak of any “true,” definitive way of things outside that process… Our inner worlds — from feeling ownership of our bodies to experiencing emotions or recalling our life stories — are complex webs of probabilistic inferences, ever-changing depending on our circumstances, and recreated in each moment. There are no separate, enduring “selves” sitting behind… [We] exist as dynamic, living patterns of personal experiences, not stand-alone things. There’s no external stage on which we’re acting, no pre-existing terrain into which we’ve been parachuted. And, on the other side of the coin, there’s no pre-existing “us” either: no floating essences or souls ready to cast their gaze on the world.
This is not a negation of our being but an affirmation of it — a liberation from the tyranny and tedium of selfing we mistake for being:
What if instead of enduring entities — you and me, Earth and Sun — there are only the instants, the interactions? Only the burgeoning, interconnected, multilayered meshwork of creative sparks? From those sparks emerge selves and worlds — our private worlds of perception but also shared frameworks and structures: social, cultural, historical, scientific. Each instant, all of it is born and reborn.
[…]
Our experience of Now, I’m convinced, is not a hallucination. With every detail we choose to attend to, to breathe life into, we’re helping to write into existence both ourselves and the world… What if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but, as Wheeler put it, “in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us”? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.
Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .
Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.
Here are some things we’ve been talking about in the Literary Hub office lately: Is Holden Caulfield a tragic hero or an unbearable whiny teen? Is he misunderstood? Is he relevant to youth today? Is The Catcher in the Rye even any good? Does it matter, if it has meant something to generations of readers? Do we only like it because our parents did? Why do we talk about it so much more than Nine Stories, which is objectively superior? (To each his own, is my take—but I, having never liked The Catcher in the Rye or its deeply phony narrator, also don’t think we should keep things in the canon just because they’ve always been there.)
If nothing else, we can all at least agree that Holden Caulfield is still (though decreasingly) a cultural touchstone in this country, in part because parents keep giving the book to their children and in part because so many students are still required to read it in school. Accordingly, over the years there have been hundreds, and maybe thousands, of critical essays written about Salinger’s work in general, and The Catcher in the Rye in particular, and Holden Caulfield in even more particular. The critics, much like the population at large, do not come to much of a consensus. For instance, some have compared Holden to Jesus. Some, on the other hand, have argued that the book is about his desire to have sex with his little sister. Some consider Holden a model for American youth. Some fear he is its downfall. We will all have to decide for ourselves, but for a little guidance, below you can look through what some writers and critics have said about Holden, organized roughly from most glowing to least impressed.
Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, in The Fiction of J. D. Salinger:
After the reader recovers from the releasing of Holden’s invective (e.g., “Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school”) and of his exposé of phoniness (e.g., a Radio City Christmas complete with what has been identified as the movie of James Hilton’s Random Harvest), he goes on to appreciate the pathos of Holden’s loneliness and frustration.
But nervous cynicism and neurosis are not enough for fiction in depth, and the next step for a reader should be to realize that Holden Caulfield is actually a saintly Christian person (there is no need to call him a Christ-figure). True, he has little notion of the love of God, and he thinks that “all the children in our family are atheists.” But (1) he himself never does a wrong thing: instead of commandments, Holden breaks only garage windows (when his brother dies), and the no-smoking rule in the Pencey dormitory. (2) He sacrifices himself in a constant war against evil, even though he has a poignantly Manichean awareness of its ubiquity (“If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the [ubiquitously scrawled dirty words] in the world.”) And more importantly, (3) his reward is to understand that if one considers humanity, one must love it. The text for Holden’s behavior is his insistence — oddly enough, to his Quaker friend Childs on absolute primitive Christianity: “Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. . . . I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.
For Jesus and Holden Caulfield truly love their neighbors, especially the poor in goods, appearance, and spirit.
[Holden]’s a very, very funny fellow. And he’s very acute in spotting phonies. The problem with Holden is that, to him, everyone, after a while, seems phony. As funny the book as it is, and reading through it again recently, I found it devastatingly sad.
. . .
His younger brother who he has idolized for his innocence -the way he now does his sister Phoebe – has died. And he ruminates on the – on going to his grave and being caught in a downpour and thinking of leaving his brother there underground in this terrible day. And later, he himself is walking along the street in New York. And it should be festive. It’s around Christmastime. The shoppers are out. And he is broken into a sweat. Every time he steps off the curb, he thinks I’m going to go down and down forever. No one will ever see me again. This kind of calls up that image of his brother in his grave. And he starts praying to his brother – Allie, don’t let me disappear. Don’t let me disappear. There’s such terror there. The humor that has sustained so much of this novel begins to unravel at the end and you’re left with this naked soul in pain and in conflict. Finally, you see not with the world but with himself.
. . .
When I first read it, I felt as if [Holden was] a confederate of mine, you know, a teammate in this skepticism about the worthiness of adult life, and now I look at him, in a way, like his old teacher, Mr. Antolini, who pats his head while he’s asleep. Then Holden wakes up from that and imagines that the man has made a pass at him he can’t even accept that, that avuncular affection that the man is overcome by. And I have that avuncular affection for Holden and I have a degree of sorrow, really, that I couldn’t possibly have felt at that time.
Verdict: Our Great American Teenager.
William Faulkner, in a 1958 address to the English Club of the University of Virginia:
I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.
Supposedly, kids respond to The Catcher in the Rye because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book.
. . .
Holden talks like a teenager, and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teenager as well. But like all the wise boys and girls in Salinger’s fiction—like Esmé and Teddy and the many brilliant Glasses—Holden thinks like an adult. No teen-ager (and very few grownups, for that matter) sees through other human beings as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of verbal incision. . . .
”You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.” The secret to Holden’s authority as a narrator is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. That’s why he’s so funny. But The New Yorker’s editors were right: Holden isn’t an ordinary teenager—he’s a prodigy. He seems (and this is why his character can be so addictive) to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life.
. . .
Holden, after all, isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing that makes Hamlet’s feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief. Holden is meant, it’s true, to be a kind of intuitive moral genius. (So, presumably, is Hamlet.) But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it.
Verdict: Holden as sorrow king; not a mirror but a model.
Alfred Kazin, from “J. D. Salinger: Everybody’s Favorite,” 1961:
I am sorry to have to use the word “cute” in respect to Salinger, but there is absolutely no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-conscious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters.
Holden Caulfield is also cute in The Catcher in the Rye, cute in his little-boy suffering for his dead brother, Allie, and cute in his tenderness for his sister, “Old Phoebe.” But we expect that boys of that age may be cute—that is, consciously appealing and consciously clever. To be these things is almost their only resource in a world where parents and schoolmasters have all the power and the experience. Cuteness, for an adolescent, is to turn the normal self-pity of children, which arises from their relative weakness, into a relative advantage vis-à-vis the adult world. It becomes a role boys can play in the absence of other advantages, and The Catcher in the Rye is so full of Holden’s cute speech and cute innocence and cute lovingness for his own family that one must be an absolute monster not to like it.
An introduction to the essentials of The Prosperos approach to Ontological practice written by Thane of Hawaii published in 1993. This book presents a new therapeutic and transformative philosophy called “Ontology”. It was originally written as a series of correspondence lessons for The Prosperos students. Please Note, this is an original stock source from the 1993 and as such pages are aged looking with some yellowing.
In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them. Entangled Minds sets the stage for a rational, scientific understanding of psychic experience.
The overwhelming majority of mediums today cannot do what they claim. Some are frauds, others are inexperienced, and many delude themselves into believing that they have such ability. These practitioners have no business sitting with the bereaved and they can do great harm. On the other hand, there are some mediums that truly can speak to the dead, do so at a very high level of accuracy, and provide an invaluable service to those who have suffered the loss of a loved one. This book provides a guide for all those who have either sat with a medium or intend to do so. You will learn what to expect, how to evaluate the information that you are told, and how mediums operate.
Ever since the human mind awoke to its own existence, it has wondered about its cosmic significance. This book chronicles an ongoing paradigm shift affecting physics and philosophy. Consciousness is rediscovered at the core of existence, expressing an intrinsic yearning for cosmic complexity, while the fabric of reality is woven from threads of information.
The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” he wrote. Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time — knew this: “It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” she wrote as she approached her untimely death.
An epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne’s unnerving assertion that the subject, the substance, the very purpose of philosophy is to learn to die, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.
Samurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
Born to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era’s life expectancy twofold, Tsunetomo grew up so sickly that the family doctor deemed him unlikely to live past twenty. And yet despite his precocious proximity to death — or perhaps precisely because of it — he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo came to see that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Sensing that strength springs from sinew and spirit entwined, he apprenticed with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took work as a scribe, fell under the spell of poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.
Anchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves — is the idea that death is the beating heart of bushido, the Way of the warrior, and yet we are wired to turn away from the very thing that makes us strong, constantly caging ourselves in denial. He writes:
We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.
He offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease… And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
Our difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source — a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,” he writes:
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.
Not a day goes by without our being called upon to help one another —at home, at work, on the street, on the phone…. We do what we can. Yet so much comes up to complicate this natural response: “Will I have what it takes?” “How much is enough?” “How can I deal with suffering?” “And what really helps, anyway?”
Here is a book involving alien contact, ancient Egyptian religion, and an interesting metaphysical premise — consistent with the mystical teachings of every age — that we are connected intimately with the whole universe. This is material that fascinated the late parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, and has been discussion previously on New Thinking Allowed.
The extraordinary mystic Neville Goddard (1905-1972) is one of today’s most influential metaphysical voices — and spiritual writer Mitch Horowitz is widely acknowledged as the leading interpreter of the teacher’s ideas and life story. Now, in an unparalleled effort, Mitch combs through Neville’s extensive body of work to distill the master’s most practical and effective methods and techniques for operating the creative powers of your mind.
In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn’t expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s [Franklink]. This is what I believe:
“That I am I.” “That my soul is a dark forest.” “That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.” “That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.” “That I must have the courage to let them come and go.” “That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”
There is my creed.”
–D.H. Lawrence
The great paradox of personhood is that the sum is simpler than its parts. We move through the world as a totality, fragmentary but indivisible, clothed in a costume of personality beneath which roil parts perpetually fighting for power, perpetually yearning for harmony. The person making the choices, the person bearing their consequences, and the person taking responsibility for them are rarely the same person.
To live with consciousness is to own all the parts but not be owned by any of them, to choose with clarity and composure which ones to act from. To love fully — oneself, or another — is to accept all the parts and cherish the totality.
D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) captures this with poetic precision in his personal credo, composed in response to the thirteen qualities Benjamin Franklin identified as the wisest parts of personhood — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
D.H. Lawrence
“The soul has many motions, many gods come and go,” Franklin had observed in recognition of our composite nature. “Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest.” Lawrence writes in response:
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:
“That I am I.” “That my soul is a dark forest.” “That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.” “That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.” “That I must have the courage to let them come and go.” “That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”
It is not easy living with those constant visitations from conflicting gods, each with a different dictate, impelling you toward a different path. What makes it all bearable is seeing this constellation of parts as a part of something greater still — a vast and coherent universe governed by immutable laws and immense forces that vanquish the grandiose smallness of the self and its warring fragments, that render life too great and total a miracle to be met with anything but a resounding “yes yes — please.”
Lawrence channels this perspectival consolation in his 1930 book Apocalypse (public library) — a reflection on The Book of Revelation, composed as he lay dying from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, not yet midway through his forties.
Observing that what we most long for is our “living unison,” he writes:
The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
Page from Lewis Carroll’s handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864), the early version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Image: British Library / Wikimedia
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Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.
We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.
Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe: