We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history contributes to this willful blindness, obscuring the tremendous personal cost behind some of humanity's most triumphant achievements — the great discoveries, the great symphonies, the great paradigm shifts. This is not to say that suffering is a prerequisite for greatness — I don't subscribe to the dangerous myth of the tortured genius. But because the engine of all creative energy is connection, suffering can serve as a mighty instrument of unselfing, of contacting that place where the spirit meets the bone of being, that common core of human experience. "It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical," a gifted young poet who wouldn't live past 30 wrote to Emily Dickinson, "that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain." People of uncommon creative vision have often touched the soul of humanity not because of their suffering but through it. Perhaps the supreme mark of greatness is leaving something of substance and sweetness in the mouth of the world despite the bitter disappointments and heartbreaks you suffer. (I wrote Figuring largely as an ode to seven such people.)
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) was eighteen when he arrived alone in America with a fake passport, fleeing conscription in Napoleon's army. Born Jean-Jacques Rabin, he was the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner and a Creole mother who had died in a slave rebellion when he was a small boy. The love of birds that had buoyed him through a lonely childhood became the guiding passion of his new life. Despite having only rudimentary portraiture training, he taught himself to draw nature and set out "to complete a collection not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person." He winced at his first attempts — "My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples." — but her persisted. Every year, he would burn entire batches of bird drawings that didn't satisfy him and start all over, often spending fourteen continuous hours on a single bird.
All the while, struggling to support his family, he tried his hand at various businesses — indigo, a saw mill, a steamer — all ending catastrophically, costing him more than he had put in. Accepting that he had no gift for business, Audubon leaned on his creative gifts: He gave dance lessons, drew portraits in black chalk for $5 each, wrote to President Monroe in the hope of getting an appointment as artist and naturalist on a government expedition. (He never heard back.)
The hardships kept coming. While traveling down the Mississippi, a bottle of gunpowder exploded in his chest, damaging 200 of his bird drawings. He had left another 200 in storage with a friend, only to discover upon his return that "a pair of Norway rats had taken possession of the whole, and reared a young family among gnawed bits of paper, which but a month previous, represented nearly one thousand inhabitants of the air!"
19th-century Japanese woodblock depicting Audubon's discovery of the rat-savaged drawings.
Despite the biochemical blessing of a bright disposition, Audubon felt at times that his spirit would break from the weight of disappointment, and yet his passion for the work buoyed him, saved him. From the fortunate platform of his old age, he would look back on one especially dispiriting period early in the project:
The world was with me as a blank, and my heart was sorely heavy, for scarcely had I enough to keep my dear ones alive; and yet through these dark ways I was being led to the development of the talents I loved, and which have brought so much enjoyment to us all.
Throughout the struggle, Audubon kept at his vision. He worked tirelessly, with fiery passion bordering on possession. In the journal later edited by his grand-daughter Maria, he writes during on particularly flaming stretch in the autumn of 1829:
I wish I had eight pairs of hands… still I am delighted at what I have accumulated in drawings this season. Forty-two drawings in four months, eleven large, eleven middle size, and twenty-two small, comprising ninety-five birds, from Eagles downwards, with plants, nests, flowers, and sixty different kinds of eggs. I live alone, see scarcely any one, besides those belonging to the house where I lodge. I rise long before day and work till nightfall, when I take a walk, and to bed.
When he pitched his book of birds to publishers, he got only rejections. And so, like Whitman would a quarter century later, Audubon decided to self-publish his magnum opus, relying on subscribers, asking for a pledge of $1,000 for the full body of work. It took him four years to complete the first volume, by which point he had lost more than a third of his subscribers.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
America, too unrefined in its art and too young in its science, did not seem ready for him. So Audubon headed to Europe in search of subscribers, painting the ship's cabins to pay his passage, drawing portraits of a shoemaker and his wife to acquire proper shoes. The trip was his wife's idea. While his friends thought him a madman to keep laboring at something doomed to failure, Lucy's encouragement sustained him. "My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant," he would later reflect.
An American born in England, Lucy had helped Jean-Jacques become John James not only on paper but in his mastery of the new language that eventually made him one of the most lyrical nature writers humanity has produced, writing about birds the way he felt about them: with reverence, tenderness, and poetic ardor.
To assist with the publication of her husband's work, Lucy began teaching — tirelessly, taking on more and more students, until she was earning a staggering $3,000 per year: more than $100,000 today. An epoch before Arthur Rackham revolutionized the business of book art with his Alice in Wonderland illustrations, printing books with text and color images was an expensive and laborious process. By the time Audubon completed his Birds of America, the final work — an immense four-volume "Double Elephant Folio" — had cost him $115,640 to print: more than $2,000,000 today. It had taken him fourteen years. "Few enterprises, involving such labour and expense, have ever been carried through against such odds," the great naturalist John Burroughs exulted in his short and splendid biography of Audubon.
John James Audubon by John Syme (White House Historical Association)
Adding his voice to the chorus of beloved writers who salved their suffering with nature and those who found solace in solitude, Audubon looks back on what saved him in those challenging years:
One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush's melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.
This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.
In the end, every artist's art is their coping mechanism for the soul-aches of living, and what we make of our creative potential is largely a matter of how we bear our suffering, of learning to save ourselves by finding and feeding those things that most reliably nourish our strength and our sanity — friendships and forests, song and sea, and above all the tug of wonder.
We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. There is a strange and sorrowful loneliness to this, to being a creature that carries its fragile sense of self in a bag of skin on an endless pilgrimage to some promised land of belonging. We are willing to erect many defenses to hedge against that loneliness and fortress our fragility. But every once in a while, we encounter another such creature who reminds us with the sweetness of persistent yet undemanding affection that we need not walk alone.
Such a reminder radiates with uncommon tenderness from Big Wolf & Little Wolf (public library) by French author Nadine Brun-Cosme, illustrated by the always magical Olivier Tallec and translated by publisher Claudia Zoe Bedrick, the visionary founder of Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion. With great subtlety and sensitivity, the story invites a meditation on loneliness, the meaning of solidarity, the relationship between the ego and the capacity for love, and the little tendrils of care that become the armature of friendship.
We meet Big Wolf during one of his customary afternoon stretches under a tree he has long considered his own, atop a hill he has claimed for himself. But this is no ordinary day — Big Wolf spots a new presence perched on the horizon, a tiny blue figure, "no bigger than a dot." With that all too human tendency to project onto the unknown our innermost fears, Big Wolf is chilled by the terrifying possibility that the newcomer might be bigger than he is.
But as the newcomer approaches, he turns out to be Little Wolf.
Big Wolf saw that he was small and felt reassured. He let Little Wolf climb right up to his tree.
"It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar," Anaïs Nin wrote, and it is precisely the stark contrast between Big Wolf's towering stature and his vulnerable insecurity that lends the story its loveliness and profundity.
At first, the two wolves observe one another silently out of the corner of their eyes. His fear cooled by the smallness and timidity of his visitor, Big Wolf begins to regard him with unsuspicious curiosity that slowly warms into cautious affection. We watch Big Wolf as he learns, with equal parts habitual resistance and sincerity of self-transcendence, a new habit of heart and a wholly novel vocabulary of being.
Night came.
Little Wolf stayed.
Big Wolf thought that Little Wolf went a bit too far.
After all, it had always been his tree.
When Big Wolf went to bed, Little Wolf went to bed too.
When Big Wolf saw that Little Wolf was shivering at the tip of his nose, he pushed a teeny tiny corner of his leaf blanket closer to him.
"That is certainly enough for such a little wolf," he thought.
When morning breaks, Big Wolf goes about his daily routine and climbs up his tree to do his exercises, at first alarmed, then amused, and finally — perhaps, perhaps — endeared that Little Wolf follows him instead of leaving.
Once again, Big Wolf at first defaults to that small insecure place, fearing that Little Wolf might outclimb him. But the newcomer struggles, exhaling a tiny "Ouch" as he thuds to the ground on his first attempt before making it up the tree, leaving Big Wolf both unthreatened and impressed with the little one's quiet courage.
Silently, Little Wolf mirrors Big Wolf's exercises. Silently, he follows him back down. On the descent, Big Wolf picks his usual fruit for breakfast, but, seeing as Little Wolf isn't picking any, grabs a few more than usual. Silently, he pushes a modest plate to Little Wolf, who eats it just as silently. The eyes and the body language of the wolves emanate universes of emotion in Tallec's spare, wonderfully expressive pencil and gouache illustrations.
When Big Wolf goes for his daily walk, he peers at his tree from the bottom of the hill and sees Little Wolf still stationed there, sitting quietly.
Big Wolf smiled. Little Wolf was small.
Big Wolf crossed the big field of wheat at the bottom of the hill.
Then he turned around again.
Little Wolf was still there under the tree.
Big Wolf smiled. Little Wolf looked even smaller.
He reached the edge of the forest and turned around one last time.
Little Wolf was still there under the tree, but he was now so small that only a wolf as big as Big Wolf could possibly see that such a little wolf was there.
Big Wolf smiled one last time and entered the forest to continue his walk.
But when he reemerges from the forest by evening, the tiny blue dot is gone from under the tree.
At first, Big Wolf assures himself that he must be too far away to see Little Wolf. But as he crosses the wheat field, he still sees nothing. We watch his silhouette tense with urgency as he makes his way up the hill, propelled by a brand new hollowness of heart.
Big Wolf felt uneasy for the first time in his life.
He climbed back up the hill much more quickly than on all other evenings.
There was no one under his tree. No one big, no one little.
It was like before.
Except that now Big Wolf was sad.
"The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation," Simone Weil wrote in contemplating the paradox of closeness, "we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be." But Big Wolf feels only the bitterness of having lost what he didn't know he needed until it invaded his life with its unmerited grace.
That evening for the first time Big Wolf didn't eat.
That night for the first time Big Wolf didn't sleep.
He waited.
For the first time he said to himself that a little one, indeed a very little one, had taken up space in his heart.
A lot of space.
By morning, Big Wolf climbs his tree but can't bring himself to exercise — instead, he peers into the distance, his forlorn eyes wide with sorrow and longing.
He bargains the way the bereaved do — if Little Wolf returns, he vows, he would offer him "a larger corner of his leaf blanket, even a much larger one"; he would give him all the fruit he wanted; he would let him climb higher and mirror all of his exercises, "even the special ones known only to him."
Big Wolf waits and waits and waits, beyond reason, beyond season.
And then, one day, a tiny blue dot appears on the horizon.
For the first time in his life Big Wolf's heart beat with joy.
Silently, Little Wolf climbs up the hill toward the tree.
"Where were you?" asked Big Wolf.
"Down here," said Little Wolf without pointing.
"Without you," said Big Wolf in a very small voice, "I was lonely."
Little Wolf took a step closer to Big Wolf.
"Me too," he said. "I was lonely too."
He rested his head gently on Big Wolf's shoulder.
Big Wolf felt good.
And so it was decided that from then on Little Wolf would stay.
Complement the immeasurably lovely Big Wolf & Little Wolf with Seneca on true and false friendship and astronomer Maria Mitchell on how we co-create each other in relationship, then revisit other thoughtful and touching treasures from Enchanted Lion: Cry, Heart, But Never Break, The Lion and the Bird, Bertolt, The Paper-Flower Tree, and This Is a Poem That Heals Fish
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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