Tag Archives: Maria Popova

Books

The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Wonderfully Untranslatable Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it spills outside what language can hold. And yet we live in language — narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of personhood and emotions are how the brain interprets bodily sensations, an interpretation achieved largely by naming. We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture’s parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel.

It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.

That is what cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith offers in The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust (public library) — a linguistic ledger of feeling exploring the cultural histories and psychosocial nuances behind the words we use to name our most confounding, complex, yet common experiences, partway between The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (that lovely lexicon of invented words for real things we feel but cannot name based on real etymologies from around the world) and David Whyte’s Consolations (that passionate unfastening of everyday words to reveal the deeper strata of their emotional nuances).

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

Punctuating the entries in English, from anger to loneliness to delight, are some wonderfully untranslatable words from around the world for very specific affective states and emotional reactions with no equivalent in English — partly because our culture holds no space for them, partly because our model of human nature factors out the reality and dignity of those experiences, partly simply because the English language is not pliant enough to mold itself around such irregularly shaped objects of feeling.

Here are ten of my favorites:

ABHIMAN
Sanskrit

The literal meaning of abhi-man is “self-pride.” Abhiman evokes the pain and anger caused when someone we love, or expect kind treatment from, hurts us. Sorrow and shock are at its root, but it quickly flourishes into a fierce, bruised pride. To recognize abhiman as an inevitable part of our emotional life is to know that breaking the unspoken contracts of love and respect between families and allies is an extremely serious betrayal.

ACEDIA
Greek

A distracting, creeping feeling. Like the tickle of a gnat crawling up your arm. A short-lived but disastrous emotional crisis, usually striking between 11AM and 4PM. Its first signs are listlessness and irritability, but it doesn’t take long to turn into desolation and despair.

AMAE
Japanese

The sensation of temporary surrender in perfect safety when you crumple into the arms of a loved one to be coddled and comforted. In Japan, amae is commonly acknowledged as part of all kinds of relationships, felt not only between family members, but with friends and in the workplace too. According to the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi, amae is “an emotion that takes the other person’s love for granted,” there when we depend on another’s help with no obligation to be grateful in return. You can even be encouraged to show amae to yourself. For Doi, surrendering to amae is important because it represents a return to the indulgences and unconditional nurturing of infancy. It’s the glue which allows stable relationships to flourish, an emblem of the deepest trust… this combination of vulnerability and belonging.

BASOREXIA
20th-century English derivative of Latin and Greek

The sudden urge to kiss someone.

GRENG JAI
Thai

The feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer to help because of the bother it would cause them.

KAUKOKAIPUU
Finnish

Feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been to. From kauko — faraway, and kaipuu — a yearning.

MALU
Indonesian

The sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward around people of higher status.

SAUDADE
Portuguese

A melancholic yearning for someone, or something, which is far away or lost. It’s always there, pulsing between the surface with its hopefulness tinged with grief. There is a vague yearning, yet it is interlaid with resignation and the pleasure of remembering past joys.

VIRAHA
Sanskrit

Viraha is usually translated as longing or the particular kind of love felt during separation or abandonment. An aspect of sringara rasa (erotic and romantic love), one of the nine rasas or themes that shape human experience, viraha is a feeling of incompleteness without a loved one, and a fixation on the ecstasy of the longed-for reunion. Viraha recalls the formulations of romantic infatuation, not only the erotic — the poetry of the Occitan troubadours, or the inconsolable longing expressed in Portuguese fado music. The difference is that viraha is also a religious feeling — the soul’s quest to find it’s spiritual home. [See John Donne’s “Batter My Heart”.]

ŻAL
Polish

Żal (pronounced jal) is melancholy felt at an irretrievable loss. This is not straightforward dejection. Żal is fickle, and shifts its shape, one moment resigned, the next rebellious. It combines the disappointment, regret and even violent fury which comes when some part of our lives has been taken away for good. It is most of all a kind of anger at recognizing the end of things.

Couple with Pablo Neruda’s love letter to language, then revisit artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated ode to words and the meanings between them.

Books

The Tree and the River: A Wordless Love Letter to How Nature Always Wins

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one of the rear wheels. A sapling has growth through the glassless windshield. Bright orange fungi have colonized the driver’s seat. Lichen and moss cover nearly every inch of the chipped blue body. It is a living, wildly alive metaphor for the fate of every civilization, for the sinuous tenacity by which nature always prevails.

That is what Aaron Becker celebrates in his wordless wonder The Tree and the River (public library).

The story opens with the bucolic scene of a child climbing a tree on a river bend while across the shore sheep are grazing at the foot of rising scaffolding. As you turn the page to find the exact same frame of space but with the house now a village and the child a gaggle of children, you realize this is the river of time.

With each page, the growth of so-called civilization — this enterprise of collective conscience born on the banks of rivers — subsumes the tree, which nonetheless keeps also growing. Horse-carts become trains become cars, medieval fortresses morph into copper-capped industrial towers into neon-lit metropolises, the river quietly meandering through the monstrosity all along.

We come then to see the cruel equivalence — the tree slowly becomes denuded of leaves amid the concrete jungle, boughs down, begins dying.

But when the city goes the way of every civilization, when the ruins of cisterns and spires come to rise from the bog around the bend, a single acorn drops from the dying tree. The river takes it and carries it down to plant a sapling at the next bend, and somehow Borges rushes to mind: “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.”

The last page opens into a bucolic landscape once more, the stump of the old tree in the background, the young tree blazing green in a lush meadow with no trace of beast-built monuments to waste and want — a silent, all-telling reminder that a river is not only alive but a life-force greater than that of anything we can make, for it is a fractal of the mystery that made us.

Couple The Tree and the River with the also wordless, also wondrous Bunny and Tree, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.

Books

Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“And don’t ever imitate anybody,” Hemingway cautioned in his advice to aspiring writers. But in this particular sentiment, the otherwise insightful Nobel laureate seems to have been blind to his own admonition against the dangers of ego, for only the ego can blind an artist to the recognition that all creative work begins with imitation before fermenting into originality under the dual forces of time and consecrating effort.

Imitation, besides being the seedbed of empathy and our experience of time, is also, paradoxically enough, the seedbed of creativity — not only a poetic truth but a cognitive fact, as the late, great neurologist and poet of science Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) argues in a spectacular essay titled “The Creative Self,” published in the posthumous treasure The River of Consciousness (public library).

Oliver Sacks captures a thought in his journal at Amsterdam’s busy train station (Photograph by Lowell Handler from On the Move)

In his impressive handwritten notes on creativity and the brain, which became the basis of the essay, Sacks had enthused about — in two colors, underlined — the “buzzing, blooming chaos” of the mind engaged in creative work. But, contrary to the archetypal myth of the lone genius struck with a sudden Eureka! moment, this chaos doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Rather, it coalesces from a particulate cloud of influences and inspirations without which creativity — that is, birthing of something meaningful that hadn’t exist before — cannot come about.

With the illustrative example of Susan Sontag — herself a writer of abiding wisdom on the art of storytelling — Sacks traces the inevitable trajectory of creative development from imitation to originality:

Susan Sontag, at a conference in 2002, spoke about how reading opened up the entire world to her when she was quite young, enlarging her imagination and memory far beyond the bounds of her actual, immediate personal experience. She recalled,

When I was five or six, I read Eve Curie’s biography of her mother. I read comic books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias indiscriminately, and with great pleasure…. It felt like the more I took in, the stronger I was, the bigger the world got…. I think I was, from the very beginning, an incredibly gifted student, an incredibly gifted learner, a champion child autodidact…. Is that creative? No, it wasn’t creative…[but] it didn’t preclude becoming creative later on…. I was engorging rather than making. I was a mental traveler, a mental glutton…. My childhood, apart from my wretched actual life, was just a career in ecstasy.

[…]

I started writing when I was about seven. I started a newspaper when I was eight, which I filled with stories and poems and plays and articles, and which I used to sell to the neighbors for five cents. I’m sure it was quite banal and conventional, and simply made up of things, influenced by things, I was reading…. Of course there were models, there was a pantheon of these people…. If I was reading the stories of Poe, then I would write a Poe-like story…. When I was ten, a long-forgotten play by Karel Čapek, R.U.R., about robots, fell into my hands, so I wrote a play about robots. But it was absolutely derivative. Whatever I saw I loved, and whatever I loved I wanted to imitate — that’s not necessarily the royal road to real innovation or creativity; neither, as I saw it, does it preclude it…. I started to be a real writer at thirteen.

Sontag’s experience, Sacks argues, reflects the common pattern in the natural cycle of creative evolution — we learn our own minds by finding out what we love; these models integrate into a sensibility; out of that sensibility arises the initial impulse for imitation, which, aided by the gradual acquisition of technical mastery, eventually ripens into original creation. He writes:

If imitation plays a central role in the performing arts, where incessant practice, repetition, and rehearsal are essential, it is equally important in painting or composing or writing, for example. All young artists seek models in their apprentice years, models whose style, technical mastery, and innovations can teach them. Young painters may haunt the galleries of the Met or the Louvre; young composers may go to concerts or study scores. All art, in this sense, starts out as “derivative,” highly influenced by, if not a direct imitation or paraphrase of, the admired and emulated models.

When Alexander Pope was thirteen years old, he asked William Walsh, an older poet whom he admired, for advice. Walsh’s advice was that Pope should be “correct.” Pope took this to mean that he should first gain a mastery of poetic forms and techniques. To this end, in his “Imitations of English Poets,” Pope began by imitating Walsh, then Cowley, the Earl of Rochester, and more major figures like Chaucer and Spenser, as well as writing “Paraphrases,” as he called them, of Latin poets. By seventeen, he had mastered the heroic couplet and began to write his “Pastorals” and other poems, where he developed and honed his own style but contented himself with the most insipid or clichéd themes. It was only once he had established full mastery of his style and form that he started to charge it with the exquisite and sometimes terrifying products of his own imagination. For most artists, perhaps, these stages or processes overlap a good deal, but imitation and mastery of form or skills must come before major creativity.

A page from Dr. Sacks’s wild and wondrous handwritten notes on creativity and the brain.

Curiously, Sacks points out, many creators don’t make the leap from mastery to such “major creativity” — something Schopenhauer considered in his incisive distinction between talent and genius. Often, creators — be they artists or scientists — content themselves with reaching a level of mastery, then remaining at that plateau for the rest of their careers, comfortably creating more of what they already know well how to create. Sacks examines what set those who soar apart from those who plateau:

Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement — such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind?

It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.

Much of the gamble, Sacks argues, is a kind of patient gestation at the unconscious level — something Einstein touched upon in explaining how his mind worked. Echoing T.S. Eliot’s insistence on the necessity of “a long incubation” in creative work, Sacks adds:

Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own…. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and personal involvement.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss

He illustrates the detrimental absence of such a gestational period with an example from his own experience:

Early in 1982, I received an unexpected packet from London containing a letter from Harold Pinter and the manuscript of a new play, A Kind of Alaska, which, he said, had been inspired by a case history of mine in Awakenings. In his letter, Pinter said that he had read my book when it originally came out in 1973 and had immediately wondered about the problems presented by a dramatic adaptation of this. But, seeing no ready solution to these problems, he had then forgotten about it. One morning eight years later, Pinter wrote, he had awoken with the first image and first words (“Something is happening”) clear and pressing in his mind. The play had then “written itself” in the days and weeks that followed.

I could not help contrasting this with a play (inspired by the same case history) which I had been sent four years earlier, where the author, in an accompanying letter, said that he had read Awakenings two months before and been so “influenced,” so possessed, by it that he felt impelled to write a play straightaway. Whereas I loved Pinter’s play — not least because it effected so profound a transformation, a “Pinterization” of my own themes — I felt the 1978 play to be grossly derivative, for it lifted, sometimes, whole sentences from my own book without transforming them in the least. It seemed to me less an original play than a plagiarism or a parody (yet there was no doubting the author’s “obsession” or good faith).

In a testament to his uncommon empathic might and his endearing generosity of interpretation in regarding others, Sacks reflects on the deeper phenomena at play:

I was not sure what to make of this. Was the author too lazy, or too lacking in talent or originality, to make the needed transformation of my work? Or was the problem essentially one of incubation, that he had not allowed himself enough time for the experience of reading Awakenings to sink in? Nor had he allowed himself, as Pinter did, time to forget it, to let it fall into his unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts.

The unfortunate playwright seems to have embodied the lamentation which poet Mary Oliver so beautifully articulated in her meditation on the creative life: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Sacks points to three essential elements in a creative breakthrough, be it a great play or a deep mathematical insights: time, “forgetting,” and incubation. More than a century after Mark Twain declared that “substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,” Sacks — who had previously written at length about our unconscious borrowings — adds:

All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue is not the fact of “borrowing” or “imitating,” of being “derivative,” being “influenced,” but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own.

Complement this fathom of The River of Consciousness, thoroughly resplendent in its totality, with physicist and poet Alan Lightman on the psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science, then revisit Bill Hayes’s loving remembrance of Oliver Sacks and Sacks himself on what the poet Thom Gunn taught him about creativity.

Books

The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother’s voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving. They are the necessary losses that make us who we are, our training ground for mastering the art of losing by which we apprentice ourselves to love.

Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise — philosophy being, in Montaigne’s perfect definition, the art of learning to die, which is of course the key to learning to live, just as learning to lose is the key to learning to love. Odds and Ends (public library) by Finnish author and artist Maija Hurme is one such book — a tender illustrated catalogue of losses, from the everyday to the existential, that is at bottom a love letter to what we have, to the bittersweet knowledge that we have none of it for the keeping, calling to mind poet Lisel Mueller’s poignant line: “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.”

Taxonomized by type, there are the “late lasts” (“the last rays of the sun, spreading color across the sky”), the “hopeful lasts” (“the last migrating bird to arrive might still find a mate”), the “last chances” (“a lost toy is always found in the very last place you look”), the “lasts that are firsts” (a baby’s “last wobbly moment before she starts walking”), the “lingering lasts” (“watching the last snowflake of winter drift slowly and silently down”), the “lonely lasts” (“the last tree standing”).

Page after page we come to feel that we are rehearsing for the final act, the “very last last” that awaits every living thing.

Everything ends with a last:
the very last thought,
the very last breath,
the very last heartbeat.
And the very last goodbyes.

Pulsating beneath it all is an invitation to practice the art of letting go, which, paradoxically, is what allows us to go on living.

When we look up at the night sky, we see a star suddenly twinkle and then go out.

Maria tells me that this star died hundreds or millions of years ago, long before we were even born. The last rays of its light are reflected in our eyes.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books

Books

The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. This is the paradox we live with: We crave certainty, only to discover over and over that it is a mirage, that the love of life is rooted in the courage of uncertainty — because certainty doesn’t allow for surprise, but everything we know of life is the product of the wildest bet that prevailed against the odds of otherwise so we may exist; because certainty thrives on clear category and neat classification, but the most meaningful experiences we have inhabit the liminal spaces between the common categories of what we can name.

NASA engineer Lisa Rosenberg offers a lovely ode to the life-force of uncertainty in the title poem from her altogether ravishing collection Weeds and Stars (public library) — the finest reverie of reality since Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, with the feeling-tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the sensibility of astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe:

WEEDS AND STARS
by Lisa Rosenberg

Weeds and stars and everything between,
from ocean dwellers to accretion disks —
resilient, intact, or wholly fragmented —
recall the transience of clouds.

The ocean dwellers and accretion disks,
the finest river stones and faintest moons
recall the transience of clouds,
of harmonies at work in gorgeous noise.

The faintest moon, the finest river stone,
the lucid silences at play in dreams
find harmony at work in gorgeous noise.
Let night and day be open quandaries

in play with silences and lucid dreams.
Forget the cries for certainty, the heft
of night and day and open quandaries,
the pitch-perfected music of the spheres.

The case for certainty forgets the weft
of wholes, of fragments and resiliency,
imperfect music of imperfect spheres,
the weediest of stars, the in-betweens.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

In our yearning for certainty, we have tried to reduce the cosmos to clockwork, to side with probability over surprise, and yet again and again it is the break in the pattern, the chaos in the order, that creates the conditions for possibility. The most brutal benediction of life is that every experience is unrepeatable, every organism irreplicable, every existence a singular phenomenon that has never before occurred and will never again occur in the entire history and future of the universe — something Rosenberg channels in another poem from the book, reverencing the most poetic of numbers:

PRAISE ON PI DAY
by Lisa Rosenberg

To praise the nonrepeating, I will praise
the universe: each smooth circumference,
each jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face
of life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look.

The universe, each smooth circumference
of our daily mess, won’t fit in simple bins
of life and not-life. They’re everywhere
and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not

our daily mess, unfit for simple bins,
but each repeated lesson learned anew
and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not
that we forget, but that our learning shifts

with each repeated lesson learned anew.
The aster blooms. The supernova cools.
We might forget that all our learning shifts
into the pupil of the coming day.

The aster blooms. The supernova cools
its jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face
into the pupil of a coming day
where praise is nonrepeating, and we praise.

Couple with another poem of praise for the improbable, then revisit The Universe in Verse.

Relationships

How to Bear Your Desolations

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy.

And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open.

Breaking alive.

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

It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.

Ellen Bass reckons with all of this in her splendid poem “Any Common Desolation,” originally published in The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day newsletter and later included in James Crews’s lifeline of an anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (public library), shared here with Ellen’s blessing.

ANY COMMON DESOLATION
by Ellen Bass

can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein —
that sudden rush of the world.

Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Hermann Hesse on how to be more alive, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poem “How to Apologize.” And if you are looking to break your poetry open, I couldn’t recommend her Living Room Craft Talks more heartily.

Books

From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, in a whisper that soon became a symphony, life arose to give us such ceaseless wonders as the ghost pipe and the ginkgo, the bowerbird and the eye of the scallop.

Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate the wonder of how we went from mitochondria to minds in The Forgotten Teachers: How Nature Wrote the Story of Life (public library) — a love letter to that place between knowledge and mystery, where science illuminates the spirituality of nature.

Beginning the story where nature began it, Isett writes in the opening chapter, “Ocean”:

Once upon a time, Ocean taught life how to begin. The lesson began somewhere warm, like the shallow waters of a calm bay, or the billowing broth of a hydrothermal vent. In these places, warm water provided enough energy to link up chemicals that normally stayed apart. Rings of carbon, called “nucleotides,” clumped together just the way letters do to make words. And while most of the clumps formed nonsensical tangles, some formed babbling threads of an early genetic text called “RNA.” With Ocean’s encouragement, a chain reaction began: instead of dissolving back into the sea, chemicals began to fold into delicate structures that enabled even more chemical reactions to take place. These early molecules, many now called “ribozymes,” are thought to have sustained the first whispers of life. Our story had begun.

The story unfolds like an Eames powers-of-ten shot, moving up the orders of complexity until the first grainy pixels begin to form a recognizable picture of the living world — the first cells, inside which “our earliest ancestors drafted and composed”; the skeleton, the lung, the fin that became a foot; and, along the way, the emergence of photosynthesis and fungi, of symbionts and sleep.

Carrying the wonder of it all are Biçen’s vibrant illustrations, part fairy tale and part psychedelic dream.

Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature’s own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; page photographs by Maria Popova

Uncategorized

The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the Andes towered over me like the stone thrones of gods, snow-capped over the oracle eye of the glacial lake, blue as Uranus, their scale so incomprehensible you are no longer a person but a particle, a mote of dust in the eye of eternity; the trees are no longer trees but moss carpeting the slopes all the way down to the water’s edge, as if to test the limits of their world. I had come to test the limits of mine.

As soon as I settled into the house where I was going to be living, I headed out for a walk along the dirt road so dry it felt like a lunar landscape. Cars swarmed me in cloud after cloud of gas and dust. I closed my eyes to let them pass, picturing the Pillars of Creation — that famous Hubble photograph of the Eagle Nebula, whose gas and dust are always in the process of creating new stars while at the same time being consumed by the light of nearby newborn stars.

Pillars of Creation (Hubble Space Telescope / NASA)

I hadn’t been walking an hour when the sky turned to steel. Without a flash of warning, the clouds opened their mute mouths and out poured rain so cold that time seemed to have reversed course, hurling the hemisphere back into winter.

It rained all night and all through the next day. Eventually, unable to stand my indoor captivity, I donned all the clothes I had packed on top of each other, squeezed myself into the raincoat now two sizes too small, and ventured out again. But when I stepped onto the street, I found it completely transformed, all the dust washed away to reveal a carpet of stones so shiny they were almost luminous.

Suddenly, my eye fell upon a striking stone unlike all the rest — swirling shades of green, resembling the skin of some exotic serpent.

That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.

As soon as I returned to the house, I turned to the geological database to learn that it is a type of stone called serpentine, special not only in its aesthetics but in its origin: Serpentine forms at the bottom of the ocean, in the hydrothermal vents along mid-oceanic ridges, where life on Earth most probably began. Under the the extreme temperature and pressure, water compacts four minerals into metamorphic rock that combine to give it this striking green color.

There I was, atop this massive mountain, holding a tiny fragment from the bottom of the world — a beautiful souvenir from the beginning of life, a bright reminder that time makes and remakes worlds.

I started seeing serpentine everywhere.

About a week in, I came home to astonishing news: For about a decade, NASA had been studying the asteroid Bennu, which orbits the Sun a hundred million miles away from it, between Jupiter and Mars, and passes close to Earth every six years. One of the first asteroids to have dust and rock samples collected and returned to Earth, Bennu’s mineral composition turned out to be dominated by serpentine, containing not only all amino acids essential for DNA and RNA but water-soluble phosphates — fundaments of biochemistry for all known life on Earth.

Bennu sample return capsule (NASA)

The most astonishing part is that because an asteroid has no atmosphere, no liquid water can cling to its surface, but serpentine requires water to form — Bennu must be a fragment of a water world that formed in the outer reaches of the Solar System in the infant universe, when the building blocks of life as we know it were being forged. A giant piece of serpentine encoding the entire evolutionary history of the universe.

Suddenly, against this immense backdrop of the majesty and mystery of the universe, I was no longer in the wound — I was in wonder. It is the self that suffers by the story that cinches the moment. Every act of unselfing — of contacting the interconnectedness of everything that ever was and ever will be, the wondrous totality held in time — is a salve for suffering, a way of being reborn.

Somehow, I found myself thinking about the cosmic egg concept present in many indigenous origin myths — the idea that the universe was hatched into being by a giant bird — and pictured the egg made of serpentine, a newborn world made of time and trust in life.

And so, enlisting a rock tumbler and my ceramics practice, I made it — a translucent sphere of serpentine with a small yellow ceramic bird perched atop it, winged with the words TRUST and TIME.

Because a daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time, I began making one serpentine birdworld each day for forty-two days, with the intention of giving them away on my forty-second birthday (which is today) by the same impartial hand of chance that made this world, to people who have made my life more livable — some to pillars of my private world, and the rest to you: Support from readers makes my life literally livable by putting food on my table and books on my shelves, yes, but also contributes to what makes it worth living — that lifeline of connection that punctures the isolation of our personal suffering.

To enter the raffle, make a donation by the astronomical end of summer in any amount that is right for you, but end it with the decimal .42, whether it is $1.42 or $1,000.42. (This will help me separate the serpentine raffle from the regular donations.) Let us favor morality over mathematics — no manipulation of probability by making multiple entries: just one per person, so we may remember that we are all equals as children of chance.

As to my daily practice of learning to trust time, somewhere along the way of making these serpentine birdworlds, I crossed the threshold between wound and wonder, and my heart began healing. We don’t choose our wounds. But we can choose to wing ourselves with wonder. It is what makes this rocky planet a world and this existence a life.

Books

The Man Who Thought with His Heart: George Forster and the Birth of Sensitive Science

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that magnifies the concerns of the present, not through the telescope that squints at the distant reaches of the future, but through a periscope that rises above the surface of the mainstream to see past the horizon of the era’s givens, into the possibilities of times to come.

As a young man raised in a deeply religious era, homeschooled by his strict pastor father, George Forster (November 27, 1754–January 10, 1794) would write to his youngest sister that happiness is only to be found through proximity with God, that God is “boundless love that transcends all other love.” Over the course of his short and periscopic life, he would come to see that God is just another word for nature; he would come to see that nature in all its “active living power” as a “magic net of countless threads joined by countless knots, where each thing is connected to all and all to each” — the ultimate “system of divine concordance.”

Left: barnacles on a crab shell. Right: Trifid and Lagoon nebulae (Vera Rubin Observatory).

By seeing the profound interleaving of life, he would also see the dangerous delusion of our artificial divisions — between the races and the sexes, between the body and the mind, between the observer and the observed. He would incubate these ideas — radical now, nothing less than revolutionary then — as a young unknown naturalist on James Cook’s voyages into the South Seas and would go on to seed them in the most fertile scientific mind of his epoch. “I have spent half a century, wherever a restless, eventful life has taken me,” Alexander von Humboldt would reflect at the end of his long and far-reaching life, ” telling myself and others what I owe to my teacher and friend Georg Forster.”

Andrea Wulf animates the life of this forgotten visionary in The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris (public library) — one of those rare books in which a single life, rendered with rigor and compassion in all its delicate particularity, becomes a lens for the best in human nature: our passion for the possible, our stubborn refusal to resign ourselves to the system, our bottomless capacity for kindness.

George Forster

Nowhere was Forster more visionary, more ahead of his time and still ahead of ours, than in his defiance of Descartes, refusing to reduce intelligence to the workings of the rational mind, refusing to reduce wonder to a calculation. His long-ago lamentation rattles the bones of the modern mind still haunted by the Cartesian delusion that intelligence is a thing only of the mind:

Never before has there been a greater danger of elevating cold reason into a universally worshipped idol at the expense of feeling.

Wulf shades in the subtleties of his radicalism:

George Forster observed with both his mind and his heart, determined to “banish all rash hypotheses back into their small closet.” The emphasis he placed on feeling rather than reason and objectivity stood in contrast to many (but not all) Enlightenment thinkers who valued rational enquiry, repeatable experiments and empirical observation over emotions and subjectivity… He dismissed what he called the reliance on reason alone — these “aberrations of the mind.” He believed that “in the sharply defined forms of abstraction, all that is good, noble and great… is irretrievably lost.”

Forster yearned to know the inner life of nature, which is the crux of all science, but he came to know it with more than the mind. He moved through the world with the virtuosic noticing of a poet, opening his full creaturely sensorium to the breadth of wonder between the wildflowers and the stars. An epoch before quantum mechanics implicated the observer in the observed, bending the central dogma of science and its dream of objectivity, before philosopher Martha Nussbaum insisted that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” George Forster implicated himself, a reasoning creature of feeling, in the discoveries he recounted in A Voyage Round the World — his unprecedented rendering of nature not as a series of discreet portraits of particular features framed by particular disciplines but as a vast panorama of processes and phenomena inseparable from one another and from our participancy in them: humus and history, climate and culture.

Wulf writes:

George believed that you had to see the world in order to understand it. There was no point in trying to make sense of everything in your study, he explained, “because in the end, one has nothing else than what comes through these two small openings in your eyes and sets the vibrations of the brain in motion!” Individual experience was indispensable. “Two travellers,” he wrote, “seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and each reported the fact differently, according to his sensations, and his peculiar mode of thinking.” … Unlike most of his contemporaries, George believed that reason alone was not enough to understand the world. That didn’t mean that he diminished the value of observation, but he had no interest in simply collecting data — being “a mere compiler… that I cannot do.” Those thinkers who worshipped cold evidence alone “had their wish; facts were collected in all parts of the world, and yet knowledge was not increased.” Years later he would explain that “the first point from which all knowledge is gained is based on Empfindung” — a German term that can be translated as “sensations,” though it is more nuanced as it not only refers to the physical senses but also implies a capacity to feel and an awareness of a subjective experience of the world.

Emanating from his visionary book was the fundamental feature of his visionary life: his love of nature and his love of humanity, entwined beyond separation — a living testament to the single answer pulsating beneath all of our questions. Forster’s own exuberant words reveal a thinker unafraid to feel, a mind lucid enough to know that love is our highest form of knowledge:

I thank God that there is such a delicious thing as human love in this world; it lifts us up; it chains us to each other, no matter how distant we are; it is the most comforting, happiest feeling in the world!

Mind

20 Ways of Surfacing from the Blues: Sydney Smith’s 200-year-old Strategies for Raising Low Spirits in a Letter of Advice to a 13-year-old Girl

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service opened with a reflection by her partner Alice — whose near-loss inspired one of the greatest poems ever written — that included what Elizabeth had always told her was “the only sensible advice she ever heard,” from a man she never met — one of her two favorite authors.

Sydney Smith

By the time a friend’s teenage daughter begged his advice on how to cope with a visitation of the darkness we now call depression, the Anglican clergyman Sydney Smith (June 3, 1771–February 22, 1845) had established himself as one of England’s wisest and wittiest writers.

It is no small thing that a famous man of letters took time to comfort a young woman born into a world in which she would be denied education, that elemental torchlight for the mind: Epochs ahead of his time, Smith believed that knowledge is power and resented “the ignorance in which women are kept” by men “exclaiming against every species of power, because it is connected with danger.” But he also knew that the danger within can often outmenace the danger without. “The truly happy man,” he believed, “is he, who has early discovered, that he carries within his own bosom his worst enemies.” Although he was born into the preferred chromosomal arrangement and social station, Smith himself had grown up with the darkness as his constant companion as he helplessly watched his mother agonize with epilepsy.

In the final year of his fifties, Smith offered the 13-year-old girl his tips for combating the inner darkness — perhaps the advice he wished he had received when he was her age — entwining the playful and the poignant, the ironic and the earnest. Two centuries ahead of what modern science knows about nature and the default mode network of the brain, he urged her to spend time outdoors. Against the conventions of Victorian society, which made an art of repression and dissociation, he advocated for expressing feelings openly and unselfconsciously. In a country whose national sport remains self-deprecation, he encouraged her to be kind to herself. Even his signature — written in the style of Victorian epistolary etiquette — is numbered as one of his twenty prescriptions, this subtle insistence that reciprocity is part of what keeps us alive through the darkness, that to reach out for a friend and have them reach back is an act of light.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days — a book of cards. Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. More divinations here.

The letter, published in the 1956 volume Selected writings of Sydney Smith (public library) edited by W.H. Auden, reads:

Feb. 16th, 1820

Dear Georgiana,

Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have — so I feel for you. Here are my prescriptions.

  1. Live as well as you dare.
  2. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.
  3. Amusing books.
  4. Short views of human life — not further than dinner or tea.
  5. Be as busy as you can.
  6. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
  7. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
  8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely — they are always worse for dignified concealment.
  9. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
  10. Compare your lot with that of other people.
  11. Don’t expect too much from human life — a sorry business at the best.
  12. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and every thing likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.
  13. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
  14. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
  15. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.
  16. Struggle by little and little against idleness.
  17. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
  18. Keep good blazing fires.
  19. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
  20. Believe me, dear Georgiana, your devoted servant, Sydney Smith

But Smith’s mightiest antidote to unhappiness was something far simpler yet more difficult than all these pragmatisms combined.

In his popular sermons, published in two volumes a decade earlier, he had observed that “gratuitous happiness is never conceded to man at any period of life,” but we can cultivate it with our habits of being — though, paradoxically, the more we strive for it, the more it eludes us. “In seeking to be more than righteous,” he wrote, “we become less [in our] rash vows, over-strained, and heated resolutions, needless self-affliction, dread of happiness, and all that innumerable train of evils.” Over and over, he admonished against the grandiosity with which we approach the notion, the dream, the hallucination of happiness: “The causes of great happiness, and misery, rarely occur,” he wrote, but it is the “little circumstances, and events that appear trifling, singly considered, makeup the sum of human enjoyment, or misery.” Over and over, he insisted that the “great ingredient for the increase of happiness, and the proper use of life, is the cultivation of kindness and benevolence”; that mercy — for others, for the world, and perhaps for ourselves — is the only path to “rapturous happiness.”

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

This elemental truth is contoured most clearly by the negative space around it as we look back on our own lives. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” George Saunders would rue two centuries later in his tender meditation on kindness. In the rearview mirror, Smith knew, we come to realize “that the greatest misfortune we have suffered, is the sum total of useless vexation inflicted on ourselves, and others” by failing to incline toward benevolence. To be seen as benevolent — by others, but especially in the mirror of our own conscience — “is a firm barrier against the waves of chance, a lasting, solid happiness, which we bear about us, like strength, and health.”

Two hundred years hence, in a culture that has trained us to prefer being right over being kind, a culture perhaps not coincidentally menaced by a pervasive undercurrent of melancholy, Smith’s perspective is a lovely reminder that our greatest antidote to helplessness is always to help someone, that our strongest stay against despair is the simple knowledge that kindness is always within reach, that it is not a whim of our ethics but our evolutionary inheritance.