Tag Archives: Maria Popova

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Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on the Creative Power of Uncertainty

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects. “One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going,” the artist Ann Hamilton wrote a generation later in her magnificent meditation on the generative power of not-knowing. “In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know.”

What is true of art is even truer of life, for a human life is the greatest work of art there is. (In my own life, looking back on my ten most important learnings from the first ten years of The Marginalian [formerly Brain Pickings], I placed the practice of the small, mighty phrase “I don’t know” at the very top.) But to live with the untrammeled openendedness of such fertile not-knowing is no easy task in a world where certitudes are hoarded as the bargaining chips for status and achievement — a world bedeviled, as Rebecca Solnit memorably put it, by “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate.”

That difficult feat of insurgency is what the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) explored in 1996 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for capturing the transcendent fragility of the human experience in masterpieces like “Life-While-You-Wait” and “Possibilities.”

In her acceptance speech, later included in Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006 (public library) — which also gave us the spectacular speech on the power of language Toni Morrison delivered after becoming the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize — Szymborska considers why artists are so reluctant to answer questions about what inspiration is and where it comes from:

It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself.

Noting that she, too, tends to be rattled by the question, she offers her wieldiest answer:

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In a sentiment of chilling prescience today, as we witness tyrants drunk on certainty drain the world of its essential inspiration, Szymborska considers the destructive counterpoint to this generative not-knowing:

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Such surrender to not-knowing, Szymborska argues as she steps out into the cosmic perspective, is the seedbed of our capacity for astonishment, which in turn gives meaning to our existence:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Twenty years before she received the Nobel Prize, Szymborska explored how our contracting compulsion for knowing can lead us astray in her sublime 1976 poem “Utopia,” found in her Map: Collected and Last Poems (public library):

UTOPIA

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

Purely for the fun of it, I found myself drawing Szymborska’s poetic island in a map inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia:

Complement with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in the age of knowledge, then revisit Szymborska on why we read, our cosmic solitude, how artists humanize our history, and the importance of being scared.

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The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter to Life

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we long for — tenderness to salve our bruising contact with reality, to warm us awake from the frozen stupor of near-living.

Tenderness is what permeates Platero and I (public library) by the Nobel-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (December 23, 1881–May 29, 1958) — part love letter to his beloved donkey, part journal of ecstatic delight in nature and humanity, part fairy tale for the lonely.

Healer on a Donkey by Niko Pirosmani, early 1900s.

Living in his birthplace of Moguer — a small town in rural Andalusia — Jiménez began composing this uncommon posy of prose poems in 1907. Although it spans less than a year in his life with Platero, it took him a decade to publish it.

At its heart is a simple truth: What and whom we love is a lens to focus our love of life itself.

The tenderness with which Jiménez regards Platero — whom he addresses by name over and over, like an incantation of love — is the tenderness of living with wonder and fragility. He celebrates Platero’s “big gleaming eyes, of a gentle firmness, in which the sun shines”; he reverences him as “friend to the old man and the child, to the stream and the butterfly, to the sun and the dog, to the flower and the moon, patient and pensive, melancholy and lovable, the Marcus Aurelius of the meadows.” He beckons him: “Come with me. I’ll teach you the flowers and the stars.”

And so he does:

Look, Platero, so many roses are falling everywhere: blue, pink, white, colorless roses… You’d think the sky was crumbling into roses… You’d think that from the seven galleries of Paradise roses were being thrown onto the earth… Platero, it seems, while the Angelus is ringing, that this life of ours is losing its everyday strength, and that a different strength from within, loftier, more constant, and purer, is causing everything, as if in fountain jets of grace… Your eyes, which you can’t see, Platero, and which you are mildly raising skyward, are two beautiful roses.

Together, poet and donkey traverse the Andalusian countryside in a state of rapturous harmony with each other and the living world:

Through the low-lying roads of summer, draped with tender honeysuckle, how sweetly we go! I read, or sing, or recite poetry to the sky. Platero nibbles the sparse grass of the shady banks, the dusty blossoms of the mallows, the yellow sorrel. He halts more than he walks. I let him.

[…]

Every so often Platero stops eating and looks at me. Every so often I stop reading and look at Platero.

There are echoes of Whitman in Jiménez’s exultations:

Before us are the fields, already green. Facing the immense, clear sky, of a blazing indigo, my eyes — so far from my ears! — open nobly, welcoming in its calm that indescribable placidity, that harmonious, divine serenity which dwells in the limitlessness of the horizon.

Art by Ryōji Arai from Every Color of Light

This longing for the infinite accompanies the young man and the old donkey as they cross the hills and valleys on their daily pilgrimages:

The evening extends beyond its normal limits, and the hour, infected with eternity, is infinite, peaceful, unfathomable.

Again and again, Platero’s presence magnifies the poet’s relishing of beauty, deepens his contact with the eternal:

I remain in ecstasy before the twilight. Platero, his black eyes scarlet with sunset, walks gently to a puddle of crimson, pink, and violet waters; he softly immerses his lips into the mirrors, which seem to liquefy as he touches them.

Punctuating these ecstasies are the inevitable spells of melancholy stemming from the fact that the price of being awake to life is being also awake to mortality. Aware that this enchanted life with his beloved Platero is only for the time being, Jiménez reaches into the sorrow of the future to consecrate it with joy:

Platero. I shall bury you at the foot of the large, round pine in the orchard at La Piña, which you like so much. You will remain alongside cheerful, serene life. The little boys will play and the little girls will sew beside you on their little low chairs. You will get to hear the verses that the solitude will inspire in me. You’ll hear the older girls singing when they wash clothes in the orange grove, and the sound of the waterwheel will be a joy and a solace to your eternal peace. And all year long the goldfinches, greenfinches, and vireos, in the perennial freshness of the treetop, will create for you a small musical ceiling between your tranquil slumber and Moguer’s infinite, ever-blue sky.

I read these pages thinking how everything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. So too the donkey becomes a mirror for the poet’s own soul:

Every so often Platero stops drinking and raises his head, like me, like the women in Millet’s paintings, to the stars, with a soft, infinite yearning.

Art by Ryōji Arai from Every Color of Light

Emanating from these vignettes is a reminder that the art of poetry, like the art of living, is a matter of the quality of attention we pay to things — a living affirmation of Simone Weil’s insistence that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Jiménez exults:

What a morning! The sun poses its silver-and-gold cheerfulness on the earth; butterflies of a hundred colors play everywhere, among the flowers, through the house (now inside, now out), on the fountain. All over, the countryside opens up into crackings and creakings, into a boiling of healthy new life.

It’s as if we were inside a huge honeycomb of light which was also the interior of an immense, flaming-hot rose.

One clear blue morning, the poet and the donkey come upon a gang of “treacherous boys” who have spread a net to catch birds from the nearby pinewood. Overcome by compassion for Platero’s “brethren of the sky,” Jiménez sets out to warn the birds in a scene that, once again, ends with the infinite sympathy that flows between him and his donkey:

I mounted Platero and urged him onward with my legs, and at a sharp trot we ascended to the pinewood. When we arrived below the shady leafy cupola, I clapped my hands, sang, and shouted. Platero, catching the mood, brayed roughly a couple of times. And the deep, resonant echoes replied, as if from the depths of a large well. The birds flew away to another pinewood, singing.

Platero, amid the distant curses of the violent little boys, was brushing his big shaggy head against my heart, thanking me until he hurt my chest.

Art by Spanish artist Roc Riera Rojas from a rare edition of Don Quixote

Jiménez’s bright sympathy with living things extends beyond the world of animals. It is in these bonds of sympathy, of interbeing, that he finds the portal to the eternal:

Whenever I halt, Platero, I seem to be halting beneath the pine of La Corona… spreading green plentitude below the broad blue sky with white clouds… How strong I always feel when I rest beneath its memory! When I grew up, it was the only thing that didn’t cease to be big, the only thing that became bigger all the time. When they cut off that bough which the hurricane had broken, I thought a limb of my own had been pulled out; and at times, when some pain seizes on me unexpectedly, I imagine that it hurts the pine of La Corona.

[…]

The word “great” befits it as it does the sea, the sky, and my heart. In its shade many generations have rested, looking at the clouds, for centuries, as if on the water, beneath the sky, and in the nostalgia of my heart. When my thoughts wander freely and the arbitrary images settle whenever they wish, or in those moments when there are things that are seen as if by second sight, apart from that which is distinctly perceived, the pine of La Corona, transfigured into some picture of eternity, comes to my mind, more rustling and more gigantic yet, amid my doubts, beckoning me to repose in its peace, as if it were the true and eternal terminus of my journey through life.

Trees figure amply in Jiménez’s poetic imagination:

This tree, Platero, this acacia which I planted myself, a green flame that went on growing, spring after spring, and which now covers us with its abundant free-growing foliage, shot through with the setting sun, was the best support of my poetry as long as I lived in this house, now shut. Any one of its boughs, adorned with emerald in April or gold in October, cooled my brow if I just looked at it a moment, like the purest hand of a Muse.

Art by Art Young from Trees at Night, 1924. (Available as a print.)

Pulsating beneath all the vignettes is a deep sense of the poet’s unbroken solitude — even in the company of his donkey, even in his absolute presence with the living world. On a late-summer Sunday, reading Omar Khayyam under a pine tree “full of birds that don’t fly away” while the rest of town goes to church, he writes:

In the silence between two peals, the inner seething of the September morning acquires presence and resonance. The black-and-gold wasps fly around the grapevine laden with healthy bunches of muscat, and the butterflies, which are confusedly mingled with the flowers, seem to be renewed, in a metamorphosis of bright colors, as they flutter about. The solitude is like a great thought of light.

It is in this wakeful solitude amid nature that he finds what so longs for — beauty, serenity, eternity:

How beautiful the countryside is on these holidays when everyone abandons it! At most, in a young vineyard, in an orchard, some old man may be leaning against an unripe vine, above the pure stream… And one’s soul, Platero, feels like the true queen of what it possesses by virtue of its feelings, of the large healthy body of nature, which, when respected, gives the man who deserves it the submissive spectacle of its resplendent, eternal beauty.

Alongside Jiménez’s reverence of the eternal is his elegy for the passage of time, for the aching beauty of our mortal transience. When autumn comes, he writes:

Platero, the sun is already starting to feel too lazy to get out of its sheets, and the farmers are up earlier than he is… On the broad, moist path the yellow trees, sure that they’ll be green again, brightly light our rapid journey on both sides, like soft bonfires of clear gold.

[…]

These are the instants in which life is entirely contained in the departing gold…. Beauty makes eternal this fleeting moment without heartbeat, as if everlastingly dead while still alive.

Over and over, Jiménez syncopates between exultation and lament:

See how the setting sun, manifesting itself large and scarlet, as a visible god, draws to itself the ecstasy of all things and, in the strip of sea behind Huelva, sinks into the absolute silence that the world — that is, Moguer, its countryside, you, and I, Platero — pay to it in homage.

Over and over, he returns to the elemental truth of being, found in every flower and in every star — that to be alive just this moment, any moment, is enough, is eternity:

Platero, Platero! I’d give my whole life and I’d long for you to want to give yours, in exchange for the purity of this deep January night, lonely bright, and firm.

When Platero does eventually give his life, the poet meets his death with the same largehearted longing for the eternal that lives in everything ephemeral. Visiting Platero’s grave with the village children that had so loved him, he writes:

“Platero, my friend!” I said to the earth. “If, as I believe, you are now in a meadow in heaven, carrying adolescent angels on your shaggy back, can you perhaps have forgotten me? Platero, tell me: do you still remember me?”

And, as if in reply to my question, a weightless white butterfly, which I had never seen before, fluttered persistently, like a soul, from iris to iris.

The closing pages become part rhapsody and part requiem, concentrating and consecrating the tenderness that had scored the poet’s life with his donkey:

Sweet trotting Platero, my little donkey who carried my soul so often — only my soul! — over those low-lying roads of prickly pears, mallows, and honeysuckles; to you I dedicate this book which speaks of you, now that you can understand it.

Art by Ivan Bilibin, 1906. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Couple the soul-slaking Platero and I with the bittersweet story of Civilón — the real-life Spanish bull who inspired the beloved children’s book Ferdinand.

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The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths — and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge.

A recent brush with those limits reminded me of a short, stunning essay by Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) titled “The Mirror of Enigmas,” found in his Labyrinths (public library) — the 1962 collection of stories, essays, and parables that gave us his timeless parable of the divided self and his classic refutation of time.

Titling the essay after St. Paul’s famous cryptic statement Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate — loosely translated as We now see through a mirror, enigmatically — Borges considers the tribe of thinkers who have perched their efforts to reconcile knowledge and mystery, the scientific and the spiritual, on the assumption that “the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — has an incalculable, symbolical value.” With his characteristic poetic precision, he condenses this common and somewhat tired hypothesis:

The outer world — forms, temperatures, the moon — is a language humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish.

No one, Borges argues, has taken this precarious hypothesis to more surefooted ground than the French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917).

Digging through the surviving fragments of Bloy’s written thought, he surfaces a passage emblematic of Bloy’s uncommon physics of the metaphysical — an 1894 passage fomented by his interest in the teachings of St. Paul. Translated by Borges himself, Bloy writes:

[St. Paul’s statement] would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived “in a mirror.” We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart… If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.

Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750 — the first book to describe the spiral shape of the Milky Way. (Available as a print.)

A century before Milan Kundera considered the eternal challenge of knowing what we really want in his classic novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Bloy shines a sidewise gleam on the elemental self-opacity with and within which we live:

Everything is a symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our sleep. We do not know whether the things afflicting us are the secret beginning of our ulterior happiness or not.

These ideas haunted Bloy, animated his pamphlets, his poems, his novels, then culminated in his 1912 book-length essay The Soul of Napoleon — a philosophical prose poem that sets out, as Borges puts it, “to decipher the symbol Napoleon, considered as the precursor of another hero — man and symbol as well — who is hidden in the future.” Bloy, translated again by Borges, writes in this uncommon work:

Every man* is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God.

[…]

There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light… History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one and the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.

But as you contemplate these existential immensities, you face the limits of contemplation — the limits of meaning-making in relation to elemental truth.

Borges recognized this, closing the essay with by acknowledging “it is doubtful that the world has a meaning… even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning.”

I recognized this upon sitting down in for morning meditation in my garden after a nightlong storm and watching an almost otherworldly deposit roll onto the cushion: a tiny, perfect robin egg, improbable and sorrowful in its displaced blue beauty.

Singing Only Is by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

I considered climbing the neighbor’s colossal tree to find the storm-shaken nest and reinstate the egg. (Perfectly, the tree is an Ailanthus altissima, known as “tree-of-heaven” in its native China — a migrant now rooted in Brooklyn, like me.)

But then I considered this chance-event as the product of the same impartial forces that deposited the exact spermatozoid of my father’s onto my mother’s ovum at the exact moment to produce the chance-event of my particular configuration of atoms animated by this particular consciousness that just is, the consciousness mourning the robin that will never be. To call one expression of chance good and another bad is mere human hubris — the hubris of narrative and interpretation superimposed on an impartial universe devoid of why, awash in is.

No one knows the meaning of why anything comes to be, or doesn’t. Here is this pale blue orb, dropped from the tree-of-heaven onto a tiny Brooklyn point on the face of this Pale Blue Dot, itself a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” within an immense and impartial universe, conceived in the creation myths and early scientific theories of our meaning-hungry ancestors as a great cosmic egg.

Art from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750, illustrating Thomas Wright’s model of the cosmos as an egg-like structure of nested infinities. (Available as a print.)

Here I am, and here you are, and here is the robin’s egg in its near-life collision with chance. To ask for its meaning is as meaningless a question as to demand the meaning of a color or the meaning of a bird. On this particular day, at this particular moment — the only locus of aliveness we ever have — the contour of meaning comes in shades of blue, singing only is.

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What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Decades into his long life, the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.” A generation later, the poetic playwright Tom Stoppard defined it as “knowledge of each other… knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.” This unmasked fact is the antidote to the most dangerous fiction the Romantics bequeathed us — their model of love as union between lover and beloved, a kind of fusion of selves, with its connotation of mutual completion rather than mutual recognition of and rejoicing in two parallel completenesses.

Such gladsome recognition of the other’s otherness is the foundation of love and the foundation of morality — both requiring not a bridging of selves but an unselfing, both vulnerable to same fundamental misconception that fissures the very foundation upon which they rest. Almost every religious, spiritual, and contemplative tradition in the history of our species, when stripped of its mystical and counterscientific aspects, holds at its center an ethic of love. But also central to almost every tradition, especially of the West, is a dangerous warping of love in the hands of the self.

Most commonly known as the Golden Rule, it mistakes the reality of the self for the only reality, taking one’s own wishes, desires, and longings as universal and presuming that the other shares those precisely — negating the sovereign reality of the other, negating the possibility that a very different person might want something very different done unto them.

The remedy for this malady of selfing is to remember that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, each with its singular longings for and visions of beauty, goodness, and gladness. Nothing reminds us of this more readily than art, with its invitation to step into the intimate realities of other lives — the word “empathy,” after all, originated in the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art — and no one has irradiated that reminder more luminously than the uncommon philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999).

Dame Iris Murdoch by Ida Kar (National Portrait Gallery)

Long before her 1970 classic The Sovereignty of the Good, with its lovely conception of art as “an occasion for unselfing,” Murdoch began developing these ideas in an essay titled “The Sublime and the Good,” originally published in the Chicago Review in 1959 and later included in the altogether superb posthumous collection Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (public library).

She writes:

Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

In the same era when, across the Atlantic, Alan Watts was cautioning that “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others” as he was introducing Eastern teachings in the West, Murdoch builds on the parallels between art and morality through the multiple dimensions of love — the personal and the political, the individual and the communal:

The enemies of art and of morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual… because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we may fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination… The exercise of overcoming one’s self, of the expulsion of fantasy and convention… is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly which we hardly ever do, painful.

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.” Maurice Sendak’s little-known 1960 illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit.

In a sentiment that calls to mind James Baldwin’s reflection on love and his haunting observation that “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” Murdoch adds:

The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves… Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.

Complement this fragment of Existentialists and Mystics — which also gave us Murdoch on art as a force of resistance and the key to great storytelling — with her almost unbearably beautiful love letters, then revisit Tolstoy on love and morality.

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Tenacity, the Art of Integration, and the Key to a Flexible Mind: Wisdom from the Life of Mary Somerville, for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

This essay is adapted from my book Figuring

A middle-aged Scottish mathematician rises ahead of the sun to spend a couple of hours with Newton before the day punctuates her thinking with the constant interruptions of mothering four children and managing a bustling household. “A man can always command his time under the plea of business,” Mary Somerville (December 26, 1780–November 28, 1872) would later write in her memoir; “a woman is not allowed any such excuse.”

Growing up, Somerville had spent the daylight hours painting and playing piano. When her parents realized that the household candle supply had thinned because Mary had been staying up at night to read Euclid, they promptly confiscated her candles. “Peg,” she recalled her father telling her mother, “we must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a strait jacket one of these days.” Mary was undeterred. Having already committed the first six books of Euclid to memory, she spent her nights adventuring in mathematics in the bright private chamber of her mind.

Mary Somerville (Portrait by Thomas Phillips)

Despite her precocity and her early determination, it took Somerville half a lifetime to come abloom as a scientist — the spring and summer of her life passed with her genius laying restive beneath the frost of the era’s receptivity to the female mind. When Somerville was forty-six, she published her first scientific paper — a study of the magnetic properties of violet rays — which earned her praise from the inventor of the kaleidoscope, Sir David Brewster, as “the most extraordinary woman in Europe — a mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a woman.” Lord Brougham, the influential founder of the newly established Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge — with which Thoreau would take issue thirty-some years later by making a case for “the diffusion of useful ignorance,” comprising “knowledge useful in a higher sense” — was so impressed that he asked Somerville to translate a mathematical treatise by Pierre-Simon Laplace, “the Newton of France.” She took the project on, perhaps not fully aware how many years it would take to complete to her satisfaction, which would forever raise the common standard of excellence. All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.

As the months unspooled into years, Somerville supported herself as a mathematics tutor to the children of the wealthy. One of her students was a little girl named Ada, daughter of the mathematically inclined baroness Annabella Milbanke and the only legitimate child of the sybarite poet Lord Byron — a little girl would would grow to be, thanks to Somerville’s introduction to Charles Babbage, the world’s first computer programmer.

When Somerville completed the project, she delivered something evocative of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s wonderful notion of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original” In The Mechanism of the Heavens, published in 1831 after years of work, Somerville hadn’t merely translated the math, but had expanded upon it and made it comprehensible to lay readers, popularizing Laplace’s esoteric ideas.

Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, begun in 1869 and completed in 1876 to teach women astronomy when they were barred from higher education in science. Available as a print and a face mask. (Smithsonian)

The book was an instant success, drawing attention from the titans of European science. John Herschel, whom Somerville considered the greatest scientist of their time and who was soon to coin the word photography, wrote her a warm letter she treasured for the rest of her days:

Dear Mrs. Somerville,

I have read your manuscript with the greatest pleasure, and will not hesitate to add, (because I am sure you will believe it sincere,) with the highest admiration. Go on thus, and you will leave a memorial of no common kind to posterity; and, what you will value far more than fame, you will have accomplished a most useful work. What a pity that La Place has not lived to see this illustration of his great work! You will only, I fear, give too strong a stimulus to the study of abstract science by this performance.

Somerville received another radiant fan letter from the famed novelist Maria Edgeworth, who wrote after devouring The Mechanism of the Heavens:

I was long in the state of the boa constrictor after a full meal — and I am but just recovering the powers of motion. My mind was so distended by the magnitude, the immensity, of what you put into it!… I can only assure you that you have given me a great deal of pleasure; that you have enlarged my conception of the sublimity of the universe, beyond any ideas I had ever before been enabled to form.

Edgeworth was particularly taken with a “a beautiful sentence, as well as a sublime idea” from Somerville’s section on the propagation of sound waves:

At a very small height above the surface of the earth, the noise of the tempest ceases and the thunder is heard no more in those boundless regions, where the heavenly bodies accomplish their periods in eternal and sublime silence.

Years later, Edgeworth would write admiringly of Somerville that “while her head is up among the stars, her feet are firm upon the earth.”

Milky Way Starry Night by Native artist Margaret Nazon, part of her stunning series of astronomical beadwork.

In 1834, Somerville published her next major treatise, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences — an elegant and erudite weaving together of the previously fragmented fields of astronomy, mathematics, physics, geology, and chemistry. It quickly became one of the scientific best sellers of the century and earned Somerville pathbreaking admission into the Royal Astronomical Society the following year, alongside the astronomer Caroline Herschel — the first women admitted as members of the venerable institution.

When Maria Mitchell — America’s first professional female astronomer and the first woman employed by the U.S. government for a professional task — traveled to Europe to meet the Old World’s greatest scientific luminaries, her Quaker shyness could barely contain the thrill of meeting her great hero. She spent three afternoons with Somerville in Scotland and left feeling that “no one can make the acquaintance of this remarkable woman without increased admiration for her.” In her journal, Mitchell described Somerville as “small, very,” with bright blue eyes and strong features, looking twenty years younger than her seventy-seven years, her diminished hearing the only giveaway of her age. “Mrs. Somerville talks with all the readiness and clearness of a man, but with no other masculine characteristic,” Mitchell wrote. “She is very gentle and womanly… chatty and sociable, without the least pretence, or the least coldness.”

Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell — then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum — wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word scientist to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point — “man of science” — clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist — she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more — Whewell unified them all into scientist. Some scholars have suggested that he coined the term a year earlier in his correspondence with Coleridge, but no clear evidence survives. What does survive is his incontrovertible regard for Somerville, which remains printed in plain sight — in his review, he praises her as a “person of true science.”

Phases of Venus and Saturn by Maria Clara Eimmart, early 1700s. Available as a print.

Whewell saw the full dimension of Somerville’s singular genius as a connector and cross-pollinator of ideas across disciplines. “Everything is naturally related and interconnected,” Ada Lovelace would write a decade later. Maria Mitchell celebrated Somerville’s book as a masterwork containing “vast collections of facts in all branches of Physical Science, connected together by the delicate web of Mrs. Somerville’s own thought, showing an amount and variety of learning to be compared only to that of Humboldt.” But not everyone could see the genius of Somerville’s contribution to science in her synthesis and cross-pollination of information, effecting integrated wisdom greater than the sum total of bits of fact — a skill that becomes exponentially more valuable as the existing pool of knowledge swells. One obtuse malediction came from the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who proclaimed that Somerville had never done anything original — a remark that the young sculptor Harriet Hosmer, herself a pioneer who paved the way for women in art, would tear to shreds. In a letter defending Somerville, she scoffed:

To the Carlyle mind, wherein women never played any conspicuous part, perhaps not, but no one, man or woman, ever possessed a clearer insight into complicated problems, or possessed a greater gift of rendering such problems clear to the mind of the student, one phase of originality, surely.

Somerville’s uncommon gift for seeing clearly into complexity came coupled with a deep distaste for dogma and the divisiveness of religion, the supreme blinders of lucidity. She recounted that as religious controversies swirled about her, she had “too high a regard for liberty of conscience to interfere with any one’s opinions.” She chose instead to live “on terms of sincere friendship and love with people who differed essentially” in their religious views. In her memoir, she encapsulated her philosophy of creed: “In all the books which I have written I have confined myself strictly and entirely to scientific subjects, although my religious opinions are very decided.”

Above all, Somerville possessed the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being — the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers, remaining receptive to novel theories and willing to change one’s mind in light of new evidence. Her daughter recounted:

It is not uncommon to see persons who hold in youth opinions in advance of the age in which they live, but who at a certain period seem to crystallise, and lose the faculty of comprehending and accepting new ideas and theories; thus remaining at last as far behind, as they were once in advance of public opinion. Not so my mother, who was ever ready to hail joyfully any new idea or theory, and to give it honest attention, even if it were at variance with her former convictions. This quality she never lost, and it enabled her to sympathise with the younger generation of philosophers, as she had done with their predecessors, her own contemporaries.

Shortly after the publication of Somerville’s epoch-making book, the education reformer Elizabeth Peabody — who lived nearly a century, introduced Buddhist texts to America, and coined the term Transcendentalism — echoed the sentiment in her penetrating insight into middle age and the art of self-renewal.