By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing.

But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love (the kind we feel for siblings, children, parents, and friends), eros (the love of lovers), and agape (the deepest, purest, most impersonal and spiritual love). After the Enlightenment discounted all love as a malfunction of reason, the Romantics reclaimed it and revised the ancient taxonomy into a hierarchy, under the tyranny of which we still live, placing eros at the pinnacle of human existence. And yet our deepest relationships — the ones in which we both become most fully ourselves and are most emboldened to change — tend to elude the commonplace classifications and to shape-shift across the span of life.

Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 (Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson)

Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) was only nineteen when she wielded her uncommon intellect at these questions on the pages of her journal, later published as Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library). In between composing her resolutions for a life worth living, Beauvoir began thinking seriously about the nature of love, its dialogue with her own nature, what she may want of it and what it may demand of her — “in brief, how souls can interact with one another.” In the midst of an intellectual infatuation with a young man who would go on to become an eminent philosopher himself — not the one she would eventually marry in a convention-breaking union of minds — she examines the substance of the feeling:

To say that I love him, what does that mean? Does the word itself have a meaning?

Questioning the tangle of idolization and desire that masquerades as love, she grows suspicious of the very concept of personal love as an absurdity against the backdrop of the largest love we can carry:

When you love beings… not for their intelligence, etc., but for what they have in their very depths, for their soul… you love them equally: they are entireties, perfect inasmuch as they are (to be = perfection). Why then is there this desire to get closer? To know them, and thus to love them more perfectly for what they really are. What is surprising is not that we love them all, but rather that we prefer one of them.

Invoking the love she feels for her friends, the sum total of them, she writes:

Something sharp runs through me which is my love for them… This is not intellectual love. This is a love for souls, from all of me towards all of them in their entirety.

Over and over she returns to the elemental question:

What then is love? Not much, not much; I come back to this idea. Sensitivity, imagination, fatigue, and this effort to depend on another; the taste for the mystery of the other and the need to admire… What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme — a poignant modern fable about how friendship anchors and transforms us.

Drawing on Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, in which for any conscious subject to be free means freeing the other, she arrives at a “formula” for the ideal friendship: “absolute reciprocity and the identity of consciousness.” The cultural ideal of romantic love, on the other hand, replaces this “absolute reciprocity” with engulfment and sublimation of one self into the other. She writes:

It seems to me that love should not make all else disappear but should simply tint it with new nuances; I would like a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life.

This, of course, is Rilke’s model of a perfect relationship — one in which “the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other” — consonant with Octavio Paz’s lovely definition of love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

Beauvoir ultimately found it not in romantic love but in the deepest friendship of her life — that with Zaza, her childhood best friend.

A year older than her and also enamored of books, Zaza was the only one with whom the young Simone could have “real conversations.” In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (public library) — the first volume of her autobiography, largely a loving memorial to this formative relationship — she would write of talking to Zaza:

My tongue was suddenly loosened, and a thousand bright suns began blazing in my breast; radiant with happiness.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

When Zaza’s dress caught fire and charred her leg to the bone, she endured the long convalescence valiantly, then went on to climb trees and do cartwheels, to play the piano and the violin. Beauvoir relays a moment radical in the context of early twentieth-century French bourgeoise society, emblematic of Zaza’s defiant spirit and playful disdain for convention:

One year at a music recital [Zaza] did something while she was playing the piano which was very nearly scandalous. The hall was packed. In the front rows were the pupils in their best frocks, curled and ringleted and beribboned, who were awaiting their turn to show off their talents. Behind them sat the teachers and tutors in stiff black silk bodices, wearing white gloves. At the back of the hall were seated the parents and their guests. Zaza, resplendent in blue taffeta, played a piece which her mother thought was too difficult for her; she always had to scramble through a few of the bars: but this time she played it perfectly, and, casting a triumphant glance at [her mother], put out her tongue at her! All the little girls’ ringlets trembled with apprehension and the teachers’ faces froze into disapproving masks. But when Zaza came down from the platform her mother gave her such a light-hearted kiss that no one dare reprimand her. For me this exploit surrounded her with a halo of glory. Although I was subject to laws, to conventional behaviour, to prejudice, I nevertheless liked anything novel, sincere, and spontaneous. I was completely won over by Zaza’s vivacity and independence of spirit.

This strength of spirit, this defiance of the givens, is what the young Simone most admired about her friend — it emboldened her to defy convention in her own life.

Part of the unexamined convention Beauvoir had internalized growing up was the belief that “in a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honourable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendour of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion.” And yet through her relationship with Zaza, she came to question this limiting “hierarchy of the emotions” and to see friendship as the deepest stratum of connection. “I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions,” she would reflect decades later.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

It was only in Zaza’s absence — absences inflicted by their families and school schedules and the general fractures of continuity that life presents — that Beauvoir came to grasp the importance, the consolation, the salvation of her friend’s presence:

So total had been my ignorance of the workings of the heart that I hadn’t thought of telling myself: ‘I miss her.’ I needed her presence to realize how much I needed her. This was a blinding revelation. All at once, conventions, routines, and the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was overwhelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.

In her diary, she recounts one such reunion during her freshman year as a philosophy student:

I found Zaza again! All last year and during this vacation, I believed that she was far, very far from me. And there she was infinitely close by and now we are going to be true friends. Oh! What a beautiful meaning this word has! Never have we spoken so, and I was not even hoping that it could happen — but why, too, never believe in happiness… Let us bring our two solitudes together!… When I had left her, I experienced one of the most beautiful hours of my life, my love and my friendship both greater from their union.

Beauvoir was discovering deep friendship as safer and more resilient than romance, free from “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures,” never “introducing jealousy, demands, and doubts.” To have what the ancient Celts called anam cara — “soul friend” — asks everything of us, invites all the parts we live with and urges us to show up whole, yet demands nothing.

Looking back on her life, Beauvoir reflects:

I didn’t require Zaza to have any such definite feelings about me: it was enough to be her best friend. The admiration I felt for her did not diminish me in my own eyes. Love is not envy. I could think of nothing better in the world than being myself, and loving Zaza.

Midway through Beauvoir’s sophomore year, Zaza died suddenly and mysteriously — an illness swift and merciless as an owl. She was 21. Amid the savage grief, Beauvoir turned even more sharply toward philosophy, seeking its eternal consolations. Across the sweep of the years and decades, Zaza’s inextinguishable presence never left her life. (“No one you love is ever dead,” Ernest Hemingway wrote around that time in a letter of consolation to an inconsolable friend.) Loving Zaza had ignited Beauvoir’s becoming, setting her on the course of who she would become — one of humanity’s most daring breakers of convention, her ideas reaching into the depths of her time, shaping the times to come, touching the lives of generations of strangers the way a true friendship does. Touching mine. Perhaps touching yours.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Complement with Seneca on true vs. false friendship and Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on losing a friend, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are and the art of growing older.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple: everything. We bring everything we are and everything we have lived to every smallest creative act — every experience, every dream, every memory, every unremembered impression, every unconsciously absorbed influence. The great bewilderment is that we can only access a fraction of our own everythingness — most of it dwells in the recesses of the mind and the psyche, below the level of our surface awareness. Creativity is the periscope through which the unconscious looks out onto the world and renders what it sees. The rendering is what we call art, and it is as much a picture of the seer as of the seen.

In the middle of the world’s most destructive war, Carl Jung took up this elemental mystery of the creative spirit in a chapter of his 1939 book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (public library).

Living in that liminal epoch between the age of mysticism, when creativity was considered a divine gift superintended by muses and shamans, and the age of science, which aimed its forceps and fMRIs at regions of the brain hoping to locate the mind and microscopize the soul, Jung believed that “the human psyche is the womb of all the sciences and arts,” that the unconscious is “the necessary undercurrent of all creativity,” and that to understand how a work of art comes into being is to behold “the warp and weft of the mind in all its amazing intricacy.” Though rigorous and systematic in his approach, he was never seduced by the reductionism science often tends toward, including his own young science of psychology, once writing to a colleague:

The creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality… All other realities are derived from and indirectly revealed by it, actually with the artificial aid named science.

Carl Jung

Long before psychologist Jerome Bruner itemized the six pillars of creativity and neurologist Oliver Sacks contemplated its three essential elements, Jung foregrounds his perspective with a lucid caveat about the limitations of reason in comprehending the unconscious. In a sentiment evocative of Virginia Woolf’s astute observation that “one can’t write directly about the soul [because] looked at, it vanishes,” Jung writes:

The creative aspect of life, which finds its clearest expression in art, baffles all attempts at rational formation. Any reaction to stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped.

Jung approaches this acausal mystery of creativity by delineating two distinct modes of creation — the psychological and the visionary — each drawing on different aspects of existence and making different demands on us. He considers the first:

The psychological mode deals with materials drawn from the realm of human consciousness — for instance, with the lessons of life, with emotional shocks, the experience of passion and the crises of human destiny in general — all of which go to make up the conscious life of man, and his feeling life in particular. This material is psychically assimilated by the poet, raised from the commonplace to the level of poetic experience, and given an expression which forces the reader to greater clarity and depth of human insight by bringing fully into his consciousness what he ordinarily evades and overlooks or senses only with a feeling of dull discomfort. The poet’s work is an interpretation and illumination of the contents of consciousness, of the ineluctable experiences of human life with its eternally recurrent sorrow and joy. He leaves nothing over for the psychologist… Such themes go to make up the lot humankind; they repeat themselves millions of times… No obscurity whatever surrounds them, for they fully explain themselves.

Jung contrasts this with the visionary mode of creation, in which the conditions are reversed:

[In the visionary mode] the experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind — that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding, and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing. The value and the force of the experience are given by its enormity. It arises form timeless depths… that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension [which] makes quite other demands upon the powers of the artist than do the experiences of the foreground of life. These never rend the curtain that veils the cosmos; they never transcend the bounds of the humanly possible, and for this reason are readily shaped to the demands of art, no matter how great a shock to the individual they may be. But the primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince

While the psychological mode reflects and reckons with the realities of everyday life, the visionary mode is closer to the realm of dreams, which Jung considered “eclipses of consciousness” — those bewilderments that confuse our sense of reality and beckon interpretation, the way a great poem might, effecting “the frightening revelation of abysses that defy the human understanding.” He writes:

In dealing with the psychological mode of artistic creation, we never need ask ourselves what the material consists of or what it means. But this question forces itself upon us as soon as we come to the visionary mode of creation. We are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or even disgusted — and we demand commentaries and explanations. We are reminded in nothing of everyday, human life, but rather of dreams, nighttime fears and dark recesses of the mind that we sometimes sense with misgiving.

[…]

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: “You ought,” or: “This is the truth.” It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.

Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud from David the Dreamer: His Book of Dreams, 1922.

The psychological mode of creation concerns itself with an overt rendering of human emotion as we know it and experience it, but the visionary reaches beyond the horizon of our self-knowledge and into those depths that only the tendrils of our intuitions every touch. Because what we find there may so alarm us, may so contradict our conscious self-image, we tend to doubt our discoveries and retreat behind “the armor of reason” to dismiss them. Jung writes:

Human passion falls within the sphere of conscious experience, while the subject of the vision lies beyond it. Through our feelings we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden — that by their very nature are secret. If ever they become conscious, they are intentionally kept back and concealed, for which reason they have been regarded from earlier times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive.

Holding up the poet in that Baldwinian sense (“The poets (by which I mean all artists),” Baldwin wrote, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.”), Jung adds:

In our midst, the poet now and then catches sight of the figures that people the night-world — the spirits, demons and gods. He knows that a purposiveness out-reaching human ends is the life-giving secret for man; he has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the pleroma.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

It is not only great artists, he observes, who can access those hidden places but also “the seers, prophets, leaders and enlighteners.” A year after science split the atom and a century before it began intimating that consciousness may be as old as the universe and fundamental to it, Jung writes:

Is there something more purposeful than electrons? Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and command our own souls? And is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon man and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more than personal vocation?

That more-than-personal aspect of visionary work is what Jung calls “the collective unconscious.” It is where his views began to radically diverge from those of Freud, who had once been his mentor. Opposing Freud’s conception of creativity as the product of purely personal forces and experiences, particularly traumatic experiences early in life and the subsequent neuroses they produce, Jung came to see such “reductive analysis” as “the most virulent poison imaginable for the attitude of the artist and the creative person in general.” Instead, he insisted that although all artistic creation draws on the personal experience of the artist — “the pregnant chaos” inside that defies “our picture of a well-ordered cosmos” — it is at bottom impersonal because its raw material is the collective unconscious:

Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living in that age. A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations… Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects — whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction.

The creative person, therefore, is always living with the paradox of being a person and being an impersonal channel for the mystery beyond. Jung writes:

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense — he is “collective man” — one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Although Jung detested the myth of the tortured genius — he called the idea that suffering is essential for creation “a failure and a bungling,” “part of the general lunacy of our time” — he recognized that there is inherent suffering in the creative life itself, for the psyche is sundered by this tension between the personal and the impersonal:

The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him — on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire…. A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire [because] each of us [is] endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy [and] a special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

[…]

Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, behind nothing more than a helpless observer.

From this arises a sobering antidote to the current moral fashion of renouncing works of art because the artist’s personal life has been found wanting by our current moral standards. Jung writes:

The secret of artistic creation and of the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to… that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual, and at which the weal or woe of a single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to but at most a his art — but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Jung adapted this chapter on creativity in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (public library) from an essay he had published a decade earlier in an obscure journal that had left him feeling defeated by the signal-to-noise ratio of the social media of his time: “These days the voice of the single individual is almost completely drowned out in the chaos of newspapers and the flood of books,” he had then lamented in a letter to a colleague, not knowing that he himself would become one of the great visionaries to touch the life of humankind for epochs to come — assurance for all the half-defeated visionaries languishing in some quiet Substack, their voices muffled by the noise of now but bound to bellow into the centuries.

Couple with a glimpse inside the creative process of great artists, then revisit Jung on how to navigate uncertainty, Mary Oliver on the “third self” of the creative life, and Gary Snyder on how to harness the creative force.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Imagine what life would be like if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.” That is what Beethoven imagined, and invited humanity to imagine, two centuries ago in the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony, known as “Ode to Joy” — an epochal hymn of the possible, half a lifetime in the making.

In the spring of 2012, the Spanish city of Sabadell set out to celebrate the 130th anniversary of its founding with a most unusual, electrifying, and touchingly human rendition of Beethoven’s masterpiece, performed by a flashmob of 100 musicians from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l’Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs. Watching the townspeople — children with kites, elders with walkers, couples holding hands — gather to savor the unbidden music in a succession of confusion, delight, and ecstasy is the stuff of goosebumps: living proof that “music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”

Couple with the remarkable story of the making of “Ode to Joy,” then revisit the neurophysiology of enchantment and how music casts its spell on us.

Sunday, April 13th, 2025 (schwartzreport.net)

Author:     Zhen Troy Chen, PhD, FHEA , Dr. Calogero Giametta, PhD , Dr. Jacob Johanssen, PhD & Dr. Irida Ntalla, PhD
Source:     Nature
Publication Date:     13 April 2025 (used)
Link: The manosphere and networked misogyny

Stephan:  

One of the many negative effects of social media is the rise of the manosphere. I had no idea until I began to research this the weaponization of misinformation how many American men, particularly young men, are weak, psychologically disturbed, insecure about their manhood, and threatened by women. In the United States right now women are better educated, and more psychologically stable than men.

The “manosphere” refers to a heterogenous group of online communities that broadly promotes anti-feminism, misogyny, and hateful ideas about women, trans, and non-binary people. These communities attract, among other others, involuntary celibates (Incels), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and Men’s Rights Activists (MRA). Although these communities are different, they share a broad ideology that women are to blame for a society in which men are victims, and that feminism is the cause of societal ills. These communities frequently endorse pseudo-science to justify male supremacy and produce hateful and violent narratives, which can lead to extremist behaviour with dangerous and fatal real-world consequences. 

First appearing in social media in the late 2000s-early 2010s, these groups are broadly understood to have historical roots from movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the numbers of individuals who frequent these online spaces are hard to determine, the communities they have come to represent have become more prominent in the mainstream due to well-publicised violent (and often tragic) actions undertaken by self-proclaimed members. Additionally, some prominent influencers, who share overlapping ideologies with the manosphere, find audiences beyond the online community in […]

Read the Full Article

“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing . . . I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”

–Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788 – April 19, 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Wikipedia

Wood engineered for strength and safety offers architects an alternative to carbon-intensive steel and concrete

By Kurt Kleiner 10.08.2024 (knowablemagazine.org)

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At the University of Toronto, just across the street from the football stadium, workers are putting up a 14-story building with space for classrooms and faculty offices. What’s unusual is how they’re building it — by bolting together giant beams, columns and panels made of manufactured slabs of wood.

As each wood element is delivered by flatbed, a tall crane lifts it into place and holds it in position while workers attach it with metal connectors. In its half-finished state, the building resembles flat-pack furniture in the process of being assembled.

The tower uses a new technology called mass timber. In this kind of construction, massive, manufactured wood elements that can extend more than half the length of a football field replace steel beams and concrete. Though still relatively uncommon, it is growing in popularity and beginning to pop up in skylines around the world.

Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023.

Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Though experts are still debating mass timber’s role in fighting climate change, many are betting it’s better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource.

Mass timber also offers a different aesthetic that can make a building feel special. “People get sick and tired of steel and concrete,” says Ted Kesik, a building scientist at the University of Toronto’s Mass Timber Institute, which promotes mass timber research and development. With its warm, soothing appearance and natural variations, timber can be more visually pleasing. “People actually enjoy looking at wood.”

Same wood, stronger structure

Using wood for big buildings isn’t new, of course. Industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries led to a demand for large factories and warehouses, which were often “brick and beam” construction — a frame of heavy wooden beams supporting exterior brick walls.

As buildings became ever taller, though, builders turned to concrete and steel for support. Wood construction became mostly limited to houses and other small buildings made from the standard-sized “dimensional” lumber you see stacked at Home Depot.

But about 30 years ago, builders in Germany and Austria began experimenting with techniques for making massive wood elements out of this readily available lumber. They used nails, dowels and glue to combine smaller pieces of wood into big, strong and solid masses that don’t require cutting down large old-growth trees.

Engineers including Julius Natterer, a German engineer based in Switzerland, pioneered new methods for building with the materials. And architects including Austria’s Hermann Kaufmann began gaining attention for mass timber projects, including the Ölzbündt apartments in Austria, completed in 1997, and Brock Commons, an 18-story student residence at the University of British Columbia, completed in 2017.

In principle, mass timber is like plywood but on a much larger scale: The smaller pieces are layered and glued together under pressure in large specialized presses. Today, beams up to 50 meters long, usually made of what’s called glue-laminated timber, or glulam, can replace steel elements. Panels up to 50 centimeters thick, typically cross-laminated timber, or CLT, replace concrete for walls and floors.

These wood composites can be surprisingly strong — stronger than steel by weight. But a mass timber element must be bulkier to achieve that same strength. As a building gets higher, the wooden supports must get thicker; at some point, they simply take up too much space. So for taller mass timber buildings, including the Ascent skyscraper, architects often turn to a combination of wood, steel and concrete.

Historically, one of the most obvious concerns with using mass timber for tall buildings was fire safety. Until recently, many building codes limited wood construction to low-rise buildings.

Though they don’t have to be completely fireproof, buildings need to resist collapse long enough to give firefighters a chance to bring the flames under control, and for occupants to get out. Materials used in conventional skyscrapers, for instance, are required to maintain their integrity in a fire for three hours or more.

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To demonstrate mass timber’s fire resistance, engineers put the wood elements in gas-fired chambers and monitor their integrity. Other tests set fire to mock-ups of mass timber buildings and record the results.

These tests have gradually convinced regulators and customers that mass timber can resist burning long enough to be fire safe. That’s partly because a layer of char tends to form early on the outside of the timber, insulating the interior from much of the fire’s heat.

Mass timber got a major stamp of approval in 2021, when the International Code Council changed the International Building Code, which serves as a model for jurisdictions around the world, to allow mass timber construction up to 18 stories tall. With this change, more and more localities are expected to update their codes to routinely allow tall mass timber buildings, rather than requiring them to get special approvals.

There are other challenges, though. “Moisture is the real problem, not fire,” says Steffen Lehmann, an architect and scholar of urban sustainability at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

All buildings must control moisture, but it’s absolutely crucial for mass timber. Wet wood is vulnerable to deterioration from fungus and insects like termites. Builders are careful to prevent the wood from getting wet during transportation and construction, and they deploy a comprehensive moisture management plan, including designing heat and ventilation systems to keep moisture from accumulating. For extra protection from insects, wood can be treated with chemical pesticides or surrounded by mesh or other physical barriers where it meets the ground.

Another problem is acoustics, since wood transmits sound so well. Designers use sound insulation materials, leave space between walls and install raised floors, among other methods.

Potential upsides of mass timber

Combating global warming means reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector, which is responsible for 39 percent of emissions globally. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, an environmental scientist at the Central European University in Vienna, says mass timber and other bio-based materials could be an important part of that effort.

In a 2020 paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, she and colleagues cite an estimate from the lumber industry that the 18-story Brock Commons, in British Columbia, avoided the equivalent of 2,432 metric tons of CO₂ emissions compared with a similar building of concrete and steel. Of those savings, 679 tons came from the fact that less greenhouse gas emissions are generated in the manufacture of wood versus concrete and steel. Another 1,753 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent were locked away in the building’s wood.

“If you use bio-based material, we have a double win,” Ürge-Vorsatz says.

But a lot of the current enthusiasm over mass timber’s climate benefits is based on some big assumptions. The accounting often assumes, for instance, that any wood used in a mass timber building will be replaced by the growth of new trees, and that those new trees will take the same amount of CO₂ out of the atmosphere across time. But if old-growth trees are replaced with new tree plantations, the new trees may never reach the same size as the original trees, some environmental groups argue. There are also concerns that increasing demand for wood could lead to more deforestation and less land for food production.

Studies also tend to assume that once the wood is in a building, the carbon is locked up for good. But not all the wood from a felled tree ends up in the finished product. Branches, roots and lumber mill waste may decompose or get burned. And when the building is torn down, if the wood ends up in a landfill, the carbon can find its way out in the form of methane and other emissions.

“A lot of architects are scratching their heads,” says Stephanie Carlisle, an architect and environmental researcher at the nonprofit Carbon Leadership Forum, wondering whether mass timber always has a net benefit. “Is that real?” She believes climate benefits do exist. But she says understanding the extent of those benefits will require more research.

In the meantime, mass timber is at the forefront of a whole different model of construction called integrated design. In traditional construction, an architect designs a building first and then multiple firms are hired to handle different parts of the construction, from laying the foundation, to building the frame, to installing the ventilation system and so on.

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In integrated design, says Kesik, the design phase is much more detailed and involves the various firms from the beginning. The way different components will fit and work together is figured out in advance. Exact sizes and shapes of elements are predetermined, and holes can even be pre-drilled for attachment points. That means many of the components can be manufactured off-site, often with advanced computer-controlled machinery.

A lot of architects like this because it gives them more control over the building elements. And because so much of the work is done in advance, the buildings tend to go up faster on-site — up to 40 percent faster than other buildings, Lehmann says.

Mass timber buildings tend to be manufactured more like automobiles, Kesik says, with all the separate pieces shipped to a final location for assembly. “When the mass timber building shows up on-site, it’s really just like an oversized piece of Ikea furniture,” he says. “Everything sort of goes together.”

10.1146/knowable-100824-2

Kurt Kleiner is a freelance writer living in Toronto.

 April 9, 2025 (menalive.com)

By  Jed Diamond

Sam Keen was a philosopher, scholar, and author of life-changing books including Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1986), Your Mythic Journey (1990), and Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (1991). He was also a mentor, friend, and colleague. The April 4, 2025 obituary in The New York Times, headlined: Sam Keen, Philosopher of the Men’s Movement, Is Dead at 93.

                “Only men understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity,”

                Keen was quoted saying and the obituary went on to say,

“His message resonated: His book Fire in the Belly was a best seller.”

                The article went on to say,

“Mr. Keen, who described himself as having been ‘overeducated at Harvard and Princeton’, fled academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books.”

                Sam and I lived in the same area of northern California and were both in long-standing men’s groups, which I wrote about recently, “Why Joining a Men’s Group May Be the Most Important Decision of Your Life.” In my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, I said,

“The acceptance of weakness and strength is a crucial part of the warrior’s journey home.”

                In his book, Fire in the Belly, Sam Keen gives a magnificent description of this phase of a man’s hero’s journey:

                “This isn’t the fun part of the part of the trip. It’s spelunking in Plato’s cave, feeling our way through the illusions we have mistaken for reality, crawling through the drain sewers where the forbidden ‘unmanly’ feelings dwell, confronting the demons and dark shadows that have held us captive from their underground haunts. At this stage of the journey, we must make use of the warrior’s fierceness, courage, and aggression to break through the rigidities of old structures of manhood, and explore the dark and taboo negative emotions that make up the shadow of modern manhood.”

                One of the most honest and revealing aspects of the modern male shadow that we discuss and explore in the groups that Sam and I were involved with is our ambivalence towards women. In my most recent book, Long Live Men! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Men, Close the Lifespan Gap, and Offer Hope to Humanity, I shared Sam’s revealing insights in section I titled, “Males Feel Engulfed by WOMAN.”

                I said,

“I’ve known Sam for many years, and I believe he offers insights into why men are the way they are that can help us better understand men’s hunger for women, along with our anger and fear of women.”

                In Fire in the Belly, Sam says,

“It was slow in dawning on me that WOMAN had an overwhelming influence on my life and on the lives of all the men I knew. I’m not talking about women, the actual flesh-and-blood creatures, but about WOMEN, those larger-than-life shadowy female figures who inhabit our imaginations, inform our emotions, and indirectly give shape to many of our actions.”

                If you knew Sam, who was tall, good-looking, and successful, you might be as surprised as I was when he shared the deeper truth about his life.

“From all outward appearances, I was a successfully individuated man. I had set my career course early, doggedly stuck to the discipline of graduate school through many years and degrees, and by my mid-thirties was vigorously pursuing the life of a professor and writer. Like most men, I was devoting most of my energy and attention to work and profession.”

                I could identify with Keen’s early experience. My own life trajectory was similar as was “the rest of the story.”  Sam continues saying,

“But if the text of my life was ‘successful independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’ All the while I was advancing in my profession, I was engaged in an endless struggle to find the ‘right’ woman, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a good marriage.”

                Sam went on to say,

“I agonized over sex — was I good enough? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I always potent? What should I do about my desires for other women? The more troubled my marriage became, the harder I tried to get it right. I worked at communication, sex, and everything else until I became self-obsessed. Divorce finally broke the symbiotic mother-son, father-daughter pattern of my first marriage.”

                Sam’s story is like my own and that of millions of men. When we are engulfed by WOMAN, we are out of touch with our true selves. We project all our hopes for a life of passion, joy, and meaning on to this or that woman, but it never works out because we are really longing for the mythical WOMAN of our dreams. Yet, we continually deny the reality and the power that this mythical female figure exerts in our lives.

                “I would guess,” says Keen, “that a majority of men never break free, never define manhood by weighing and testing their own experience. And the single largest reason is that we never acknowledge the primal power WOMAN wields over us. The average man spends a lifetime denying, defending against, trying to control, and reacting to the power of WOMAN. He is committed to remaining unconscious and out of touch with his own deepest feelings and experience.”

                It took a long time for me to understand my anger and fear of women and to begin the journey of becoming my own man. Sam’s experiences and his words have helped me.

“We begin to learn the mysteries unique to maleness only when we separate from WOMAN’s world,” says Keen. “But before we can take our leave, we must first become conscious of the ways in which we are enmeshed, incorporated, inwombed, and defined by WOMAN. Otherwise we will be controlled by what we haven’t remembered.”

                As long as we are controlled by what we haven’t remembered, we will continue to hate and love women, to hunger for them and also be afraid of them, to touch them tenderly and also want to hurt them. We don’t all have to get a divorce to separate ourselves from the hold that WOMAN has on us, but I do think that we need to be in a men’s group where we can, in the words of another friend and colleague, Robert Bly,

“Men need to be with other men in order to hear the sounds that male cells sing.”

                My own men’s group lasted 46 years. My wife, Carlin, says that one of the main reasons we have had a successful 45-year marriage is because I have been in a men’s group for 46 years. I would add two additional words of wisdom. First, it should be noted that my wife has also been in a number of women’s groups over the years, which I believe have helped her deal with her own issues as well as contributing to our successful marriage.

                Second, most men get themselves to a men’s group because someone cares enough to guide them to one. I was lucky to have found Sam’s books and gotten mentoring from older men. Other men find a men’s group because their wives, girlfriends, or other caring women have suggested, (or sometimes highly suggested, as in “if you don’t get in a men’s group this relationship is over”) that we go.

                Unfortunately, my men’s group came to an end last year. Four of the seven members have died and the group needs more than three to be viable. I believe I have at least twenty good years ahead of me and I have a lot I’d like to share with other guys. I’ve put the word out and have gotten a number of responses, but I’m still talking with men who would like to join. I describe what I’m looking for here. Take a look and reach out if you’re interested.

                Sam Keen will always be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit may be flying. Thank you, my friend.

Previous Article

Best Wishes,

Jed Diamond

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Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive

In “Unshrunk,” Laura Delano chronicles her struggles with mental illness — and the endless parade of pills meant to treat it.

By Casey Schwartz (NYTimes.com)

Casey Schwartz is the author of “Attention: A Love Story.”

March 20, 2025BUY BOOK ▾

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance, by Laura Delano

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Laura Delano was 13, a studious, budding squash champion in Greenwich, Conn., when she looked in the mirror one night and felt her world dissolve. The life of pressure and privilege to which she belonged — she is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt — became unreal to her, meaningless, “a performance.”

Lashing out at her parents, begging to be sent away, led to the first of many mental health professionals, then to her first psychiatric diagnosis: bipolar disorder. Soon after, she would swallow her first mind-altering prescription pill.

Though she went on to Harvard — and made her debut at the Plaza in a floor-length white gown — she did so while binge-drinking, cutting and burning her flesh and wrestling with her sense that her life was hollow.

After college, as her friends soared, her life became an endless round of psychiatrists, institutionalizations and outpatient programs. An incomplete list of the drugs she has been prescribed: Depakote, Prozac, Ambien, Abilify, Klonopin, Lamictal, Provigil, Lithium.

Delano was the subject of a 2019 profile in The New Yorker, on the cascading effects of prescription pills and the challenge of getting off them. In “Unshrunk,” she tells her own story, and she tells it powerfully. Her memoir evokes “Girl, Interrupted” for the age of the prescription pill, a time when more and more Americans are on at least one medication for their mental health, including millions of children and teenagers.

Delano nearly didn’t live to tell this story: After years of treatment, she hid behind a boulder near the ocean in Maine and swallowed three bottles of pills. Somehow, miraculously, her father found her before it was too late.

Recently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and being treated by a male psychiatrist whom she experienced as misogynistic and tyrannical, she had an epiphany.

In a bookstore, she ran across Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” Although the meds she was on made her foggy and reading was a challenge, she bought it, and saw her own experience vividly and alarmingly reflected. “I’d been confronted with something I’d never considered before: What if it wasn’t treatment-resistant mental illness that had been sending me ever deeper into the depths of despair and dysfunction, but the treatment itself?” she writes. There is a technical term for this, she tells us: “iatrogenic harm.”

Delano’s story is compelling, important and even haunting, but plenty of readers will chafe at her lack of interest in those who have actually been helped by these medications — especially today, when they’re facing criticism from some quarters. Writing about the effects of lithium, still considered the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder, she analyzes the writer Jaime Lowe’s powerful 2015 article “I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium.” Lowe, living with bipolar disorder, wrote of the mania that came on when, feeling better, she experimented with coming off her lithium

But Delano sees this testimony through a different lens. Rather than take Lowe’s story at face value, Delano instead wonders whether Lowe has ever asked herself if these manic episodes were actually brought on by lithium withdrawal, rather than by bipolar disorder itself.

One wonders about this assertion, and whether Delano is looking at the treatment of mental illness, and mental illness itself, through a particular lens, one that can feel reductionist in its own right, even as she accuses American psychiatry of doing the same.

But Delano becomes more and more unapologetic about her views. She meets Robert Whitaker and begins to write blog entries on his website, spurred by the emails she receives from readers describing similar experiences. When she writes about her suicide attempt, she definitively breaks from the Greenwich code of discretion and perfection, and her mother and sisters cut off contact.

By the end of the book, Delano has become an advocate for those hoping to get off their meds, speaking at conferences and helping to develop a schedule for safe withdrawal. She gets married and has a baby. She assures the reader from the outset that she is not against psychiatry, but that when it comes to the D.S.M., American psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, “I no longer view this textbook as a legitimate or relevant source of information about myself.”

She does not pretend to be cured; she does not claim that her mind is an easy or comfortable place to live. She knows that her immense privilege helped provide the scaffolding that ultimately enabled her to get off the medications.

But she makes a more universal point, one that bears repeating and applies not only to mental illness but to the struggles of daily life: “We’re built for tribes and villages and neighborhoods and potluck dinners. We’re meant to feel it all and bear it all, together.”

UNSHRUNK: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance | By Laura Delano | Viking | 337 pp. | $30

A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Page 9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lessons in Chemistry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

(Contributed by Michael, Kelly, H.W.)

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American Minister

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

The Ten of Disks The Lord of Wealth is a card which talks about the manifestation of the fruits of our labours, in whatever area they have been directed. When we have aimed all our energies in a single stream of force toward one end, there comes a point, inevitably, where we shall attain our objective. And that is what the Ten of Disks indicates.Often, commentaries on this card warn that once sufficient wealth has been attained, you should make sure you distribute excess fairly and generously. This is because energy which remains unused eventually corrupts and dissipates.But there’s another aspect to the right use of energy which is not so often addressed. This is to do with the way the Will works. There’s a common misunderstanding about the use of Will among us – we tend to think that applying Will is something that we only do consciously. This is incorrect. The human Will works all the time. It runs around happily creating whatever seems most pressing in your mind.This has a rather unfortunate side effect. For many people, the most pressing emotions and responses in their minds are connected to fear, pain, unhappiness or deprivation. Once seized by feelings such as these, it can be very difficult indeed to keep your mind off them, and engage in positive thoughts, affirmations and actions.You know the feeling – something comes along and hurts you. Then you suffer. You keep circling the issue in your mind. You build up a nice collection of fears. You make a lot of (often wildly illogical) painful associations. And you do not find a relevant affirmation and repeat it with extraordinary fervour until you have your feelings back under control. You do not go and do something nice for yourself. You do not deliberately force your thoughts and feelings onto a more positive track.All the time that cycle is taking place, your Will is wildly scampering after all those negative feelings and channelling your energy out into life, attempting to create the things it thinks you want!DOH!!! Dissipation of power causing chaos!The Lord of Wealth teaches us the invaluable lesson… by bringing our thoughts and emotions to a conscious level, and by making positive choices about how we direct those energies, we create our world. So we need to decide what we what, and then think about that… not linger on the things that we don’t want. And we need to trust our own energy to fly out into the Universe and come back to us completed.Then we are endlessly wealthy. Affirmation: “I am endlessly wealthy.”

(Angelpaths.com)