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|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — 3 kinds of loneliness, 4 kinds of forever, 20 ways to matter, and one peaceful bull — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting it with a donation — for nearly two decades, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to these small, immense kindnesses. If you already donate: It makes a real difference, and I appreciate you more than you know.
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Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order. In the extreme conditions of the kiln, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance converge to make a third glaze that may turn out to be infinitely more beautiful than either of the two, or disastrous, discolored, hideously cracked with exposed impurities and cratered with burst bubbles.  Consolations from the kiln. This, of course, is what happens in our most intimate relationships, themselves the product of chemistry and chance. Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself. A century after the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore observed that "relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance," physicist Carlo Rovelli traces the scientific path to that same truth in his excellent quantum primer Helgoland (public library), titled after the windswept North Sea island on which the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg arrived at the idea that became the mathematical blueprint for the staggering cathedral of quantum field theory: that revolutionary description of how one aspect of reality — one object, one entity, one part of nature — manifests itself to any other. Because every description of a thing is a claim about its nature, at the heart of the theory is the claim that interaction is the fundamental reality of the universe, that there are no entities as such — only dynamic manifestations of which we catch an evanescent glimpse and call that flashing image entity. Rovelli writes:  The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call "reality," is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other.
[…] The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions.
This is why objectifying — the impulse to reduce something or someone to a set of properties — always misses the point of the objectified, and why we always draw closer to reality when we instead "subjectify" the universe, as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her magnificent meditation on the interplay of poetry and science. The intersubjective — the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties — is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you — the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents. Observing that the "phantasmal world of quanta is our world," Rovelli writes: The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision. It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print. With an eye to quantum entanglement, he articulates what I learned at the kiln: Even if we know all that can be predicted about one object and another object, we still cannot predict everything about the two objects together. The relationship between two objects is not something contained in one or the other of them: it is something more besides.
The great paradox of this subject-object approach to modeling reality is that all of our descriptive models are inherently claims of an outside perspective on it, and yet they all arise from our mental activity, which is inherently interior. In a passage that calls to mind quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger's koan-like insistence that "this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole," Rovelli writes: If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world… is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based. If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no "outside" to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.
This fundamental axiom of being is, to me, the first and final proof that the measure of our lives is the light between us. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying "yes" to life. Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life. You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. "The gardener," Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, "digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer." This is why Debbie Millman (yes) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything. 
A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity — a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir's observation that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe," it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself. 
Page after painted page, Debbie's lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree. 
Seeds and flowers come to punctuate the story of her life — chapters ending, chapters beginning, the maelstroms of uncertainty, the discomposure of loss, the discomposure of love. They appear at auspicious moments, illustrating the vital difference between signs and omens: 
Walking by a few days later, she halts mid-stride upon seeing the peonies blooming once more — only to realize that another mourner had placed a posy of plastic flowers where the real ones had thrived. In the artifice, connection; in the simulacrum, a prayerful bow before the deepest reality we share — time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss. Half a lifetime later, living in a brownstone of her own, Debbie nurses herself back from heartbreak by making a small hopeful flower garden with a birdbath and tending to it daily with blind devotion. 
She falls in love again, marries her soul mate, moves to California for a season and begins growing vegetables. 
She navigates the terror and uncertainty of the pandemic by watching the smallest things grow. 
And when the world finally regains its precarious balance, she travels its jungles and gardens, orchards and forests, to kneel on the woolly moss of Ireland, to bow before Japan's sacred lotus, to savor Morocco's Sanguine oranges and Tuscany's Pesca Regina di Londa peaches, to run her hands over the elephantine trunks of Cambodia's banyan trees and her fingers along the fibonacci spines of Mexico's agave. 
Over and over, she returns to her own garden for consolation and calibration. She learns patience. She learns perspective. Watching things come alive after a long germination, she begins to befriend time — the time it takes for a heart to heal, for a world to heal, for an ending to end so that a beginning may begin. Watching things die despite her best efforts, she confronts her lifelong fear of doing anything she isn't good at — that is, she faces the abyss between the ego and the universe, the will and the world, the abyss in which we live. 
What emerges from her Love Letter to a Garden (public library) is a tender reminder that we are here to plant a garden in the abyss, and to trust time. 
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life that gasp you awake from the trance of near-living induced by the system of waste and want we call civilization. Inside the system, these opportunities for raw aliveness are not easily found — they must be sought, seized, and then surrendered to. At four-thirty in the afternoon of June 17th, 1914, a month before the outbreak of WWI and five years before his reckoning with the creative spirit and the meaning of life on a remote Alaskan island, the artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) boarded a small boat headed for Greenland. The crew consisted of him, a Parisian skipper named Cupid, and the young captain, whose father had built the boat and named it Direction after his credo that direction is the most essential thing one must have in life.  The Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Kent, who had just turned thirty-two and was struggling to make a living as an artist, was confounded to be assigned navigator of the expedition. But he took the duty of direction seriously — along with his drawing paper and inks, he packed a notebook into which he had studiously copied formulae from a spherical geometry textbook and his "beautiful and precious sextant," the box of which read NATIONAL PHYSICAL LABORATORY CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION CLASS A. Along the way, he would come to see in the science of navigation a philosophy for living consonant with the old boat-builder's credo — after narrowly escaping being crushed by icebergs, Kent would reflect: Even in the most dreary situation you keep your eyes on where you want to be.
Where he wanted to be was the unknown, guided not by an instrument but by the shimmering urge to break free from the chains of habit, to contact something vaster and more alive. He opens N by E (public library) — the exquisite account of his year in Greenland — with that ignition spark of the imagination exhilarated at the beckoning horizon as New York Harbor vanishes behind the stern: The bright sun shone upon us; the lake was blue under the westerly breeze, and luminous, how luminous! the whole far world of our imagination. How like a colored lens the colored present! through it we see the forward vista of our lives. Here, in the measure that the water widened in our wake and heart strings stretched to almost breaking, the golden future neared us and enfolded us, made us at last — how soon! — oblivious to all things but the glamour of adventure. And while one world diminished, narrowed and then disappeared, before us a new world unrolled and neared us to display itself. Who can deny the human soul its everlasting need to make the unknown known; not for the sake of knowing, not to inform itself or be informed or wise, but for the need to exercise the need to know? What is that need but the imagination's hunger for the new and raw materials of its creative trade? Of things and facts assured to us and known we've got to make the best, and live with it. That humdrum is the price of living. We live for those fantastic and unreal moments of beauty which our thoughts may build upon the passing panorama of experience.
 Art by Rockwell Kent from N by E. A decade later, Georgia O'Keeffe would locate the essence of being an artist in "making your unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you." The unknown is in some sense always beyond us because it is always inside us — that is what true solitude reveals, why it can be so clarifying and so terrifying at the same time. Kent touches this terrifying thrill on his first night swaddled by infinite horizons on every side: As it darkens and the stars come out, and the black sea appears unbroken everywhere save for the restless turbulence of its own plain, as the lights are extinguished in the cabin, then I am suddenly alone. And almost terror grips me for I now feel the solitude; under the keel and overhead the depths, — and me, enveloped in immensity.
 Bowsprit by Rockwell Kent from N by E. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) There amid the open sea, where "the solitude is unrelieved," Kent confronts the most elemental questions of existence — why are we here, how did we get here, what does it mean to be alive, to have purpose, to wield a will against the given of the universe? How strange to be here in a little boat! — and not by accident, not cast adrift here from a wreck, but purposely! What purpose, whose? And if I call to mind how I have read of Greenland and for years have longed to go there, how I have read and read again the Iceland sagas and been stirred by them, how I've been moved by the strange story of the Greenland settlements and their tragic end, by all the glamour and the mystery of those adventures, how I have followed in the wake of Leif and found America, and how by all of that I've come to need to know those countries, tread their soil, to touch the ancient stones of their enclosures, sail their seas to think myself a Viking like themselves, — then I may boast that purpose and my will have brought me here. And yet this very moment is the contradiction of it. The darkness and the wind! the imponderable immensity of space and elements! My frail hands grip the tiller; my eyes stare hypnotically at the stars beyond the tossing masthead or watch the bow wave as we part the seas. I hold the course. I have no thought or will, no power, to alter it. […] Dream? here is reality so real it nips the bone.
N by E is a ravishing read in its entirety. Couple it with Kent's later reflection on wilderness, solitude, and creativity drawn from the nine months he spent in Alaska with his young son, then revisit Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Hermann Hesse on how to be more alive, and Ellen Bass's superb ode to waking up from the stupor of near-living. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
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