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"Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy," Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live? Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new pope. Only life itself. Only what Seamus Heaney called "your own secret knowledge," which you may spend your life learning, but which is always whispering to you if you get still enough and quiet enough to discern its voice through the clangor of confusion and the din of shoulds. In this sense, Nietzsche was right to caution that "no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life." In another, he was wrong in depicting life as a river you stand on the banks watching and waiting to cross without getting wet. No: You are the water. You are a molecule afloat among all the other molecules of everything else alive, the flow of life living itself through you, an answer complete unto itself. This is why I'll take, over all the world's philosophy combined, Marie Howe's spare and stunning poem "The Maples," found in her New and Selected Poems (public library) — that benediction of a book that won her the Pulitzer Prize — read here by sapling-poet Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy: 
 THE MAPLES
by Marie Howe
I asked the stand of maples behind the house,
How should I live my life? They said, shhh shhh shhh… How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam. A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,
And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered. A squirrel scrambled up a trunk
then along the length of a branch. Stand still, I thought,
See how long you can bear that. Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,
drinking light breathing
Couple with two kindred answers to the same question in the same medium — Mary Oliver's "I Go Down to the Shore" and Anna Belle Kaufmann's "Cold Solace" — then revisit Marie's timeless hymn to being human. 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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Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the "fail better" of startup culture, not the "fail forward" of self-help, not the failure that is childhood's fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your choices, your ideal self and your real self. It is without redemption, such failure. But it need not be without reward. Admitting failure, especially moral failure, is hard enough — to others, where the temptation to displace blame and make excuses seduces most, but most of all to oneself. Accepting it is even harder — but it is on the other side of acceptance that the true reward of failure is to be found. That is what the great Czech playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) explores in an extraordinary feat of soul-searching and reckoning with the human condition, found in his Letters to Olga (public library), one of the most moving books I have ever read — the living record of his imprisonment after being found guilty on charges of "subversion" for his plays criticizing the communist regime and his human rights work defending the unjustly persecuted.  Václav Havel In the summer of his forty-sixth year, Havel recounts a moment of moral failure that shaped the course of his life: Dear Olga, Five years ago something happened tome that in many regards had a key significance in my subsequent life. It began rather inconspicuously: I was in detention for the firs time and one evening, after interrogation, I wrote out a request to the Public Prosecutor for my release. Prisoners in detention are always writing such requests, and I too treated it as something routine and unimportant, more in the nature of mental hygiene: I knew, of course, that my eventual release or nonrelease would be decided by factors having nothing to do with whether I wrote the appropriate request or not. Still, the interrogations weren't going anywhere and it seemed proper to use the opportunity to let myself be heard. I wrote my request in a way that at the time seemed extremely tactical and cunning: while saying nothing I did not believe or that wasn't true, I simply "overlooked" the fact that truth lies not only in what is said, but also in who says it, and to whom, why, how and under what circumstances it is expressed. Thanks to this minor "oversight" (more precisely, this minor self-deception) what I said came dangerously close — by chance, as it were — to what the authorities wanted to hear. What was particularly absurd was the fact that my motive — at least my conscious and admitted motive — was not the hope that it would produce results, but merely a kind of professionally intellectualistic and somewhat perverse delight in my won — or so I thought — "honorable cleverness." (I should add, to complete the picture, that when I read it some years later, the honor in that cleverness made my hair stand on end.) I sent the request off the following day and because no one responded to it and my detention was prolonged again, I assumed it had ended up where such requests usually end up, and I more or less forgot about it.
Havel was shocked to be told one day that he was most likely going to be released and "political use" would be made of his petition. He recounts: Of course I knew right away what that meant: (1) that with appropriate "recasting," "additions" and widespread publicity, the impression would be created that I had not held out, that I had given in to pressure and backed down from my positions, opinions and all my previous work; in short, that I had betrayed my cause, all for a trivial reason — to get myself out of jail; (2) no denial or correction on my part would alter that impression because I had undeniably written something that "met them halfway" and anything I could add would, quite rightly, seem like an attempt to worm my way out of it; (3) that the approaching catastrophe was unavoidable; (4) that the blot it would leave me on and everything I had taken part in would haunt me for years to come, that it would cause me measureless inner suffering, and that I would probably try to erase it with several years in prison (which in fact happened), but that not even that would rid me entirely of the stigma; (5) that I had no one but myself to blame: I was neither forced to do it, nor offered a bribe; I was not, in fact, in a dilemma and it was only because I'd unforgivably let down my moral guard that I'd given the other side — voluntarily and quite pointlessly — a weapon that amounted to a heaven-sent gift.
 One of Salvador Dalí's illustrations for the essays of Montaigne The haunting price of self-knowledge is that you always know, or some part of you always knows, exactly what your own moral failures would cost you. All Havel feared would happen is exactly what happened: I came out of prison discredited, to confront a world that seemed to me one enormous, supremely justified rebuke. No one knows what I went through in that darkest period of my life… weeks, months, years in fact, of silent desperation, self-castigation, shame, inner humiliation, reproach and uncomprehending questioning. For a while I escaped from a world I felt too embarrassed to face into gloomy isolation, taking masochistic delight in endless orgies of self-blame. And then for a while I fled this inner hell into frantic activity through which I tried to drown out my anguish and at the same time, to "rehabilitate" myself somehow.
 Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird His only relative reprieve came when he was thrown into prison again. But it took him years to fully accept his moral failure and wrest from it something larger, something the dream of blamelessness and the performance of perfection could ever secure for the life of the soul. In a testament to the indivisible yin-yang of fortune and misfortune illustrated by the ancient parable of the Chinese farmer, he writes: I've only now begun fully to realize that the experience wasn't just — from my point of view, at least — an comprehensible lapse that caused me a lot of pointless suffering; it had a deeply positive and purgative significance, for which I ought to thank my fate instead of cursing it. It thrust me into a drastic but, for that very reason, crucial confrontation with myself; it shook, as it were, my entire "I," shook out of it a deeper insight into itself, a more serious acceptance and understanding of my situation… my horizons, and led me, ultimately, to a new and more coherent consideration of the problem of human responsibility. […] It is not hard to stand behind one's successes. But to accept responsibility for one's failures, to accept them unreservedly as failures that are truly one's own, that cannot be shifted somewhere else or onto something else, and actively to accept — without regard for any worldly interests, no matter how well disguised, or for well-meant advice — the price that has to be paid for it: that is devilishly hard! But only thence does the road lead — as my experience, I hope, has persuaded me — to the renewal of sovereignty over my own affairs, to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning. And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called true "peace of mind," to that highest delight, to genuine meaningfulness, to that "joy of Being." If one manages to achieve that, then all one's worldly privations cease to be privations, and become what Christians call grace.
In the years he spent in prison, Havel learned what it takes to turn suffering into strength and discovered the deepest meaning of hope. Upon his release, he threw himself with redoubled devotion into his political work. Not even a decade into his freedom, the Federal Assembly unanimously elected him president — the last president — of Czechoslovakia, after the dissolution of which a free people elected him the first president of the Czech Republic. Many survivors of communist dictatorships (myself included) lament that he was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the writing he left behind in his Letters to Olga is an eternal triumph of peacekeeping for the war within, the war we each wage against ourselves and in which there are no victors unless we arrive at the kind of peace of mind Havel found on the other side of facing, truly facing, his failure. 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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 Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York's most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists' lives to remind them that art, at its best, is "an occasion for unselfing"? And yet who could fault them: Not just their generation, but our entire culture seems to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people — ripples on the surface of the ocean of the soul, shimmering but shallow, pervious to every windsweep, irrelevant to the depths.
I was suddenly reminded of an essay by Annie Dillard from her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (public library), which won her the Pulitzer Prize and which I revisit frequently as basic irrigation for the soul. Its subject is Dillard's experience of "stalking" a muskrat at Tinker Creek. Its object — like that of every Annie Dillard essay, of any great essay — is what it means to be alive.  Muskrat (Photograph: Tom Koerner/USFWS) An epoch before it was imaginable that any fragment of the self could instantly face a worldwide mirror of millions, that any experience could be photographed and instantly become not only "a commemoration of itself" (as Italo Calvino so presciently put it) but a commodification of an inner world traded for likes, Dillard writes: In the forty minutes I watched [the muskrat], he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. […] I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly; it is second nature to me now. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.
After some passages bridging Heraclitus and Heisenberg in the virtuosic way that makes a piece of writing a symphony of thought and feeling, Dillard goes on to quote Martin Buber quoting an old Kabbalah teacher: When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.
A decade later, speaking at Portland's wonderful Literary Arts, she would hold up this passage as her favorite in her entire book. But I find her own words just as clarifying, just as sanctifying: It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still. I could not, or would not, hold still for thirty minutes inside, but at the creek I slow down, center down, empty.
 Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss Long before neuroscience revealed how such moments quiet the activity of the brain's Default Mode Network and put us in a salutary state termed "soft fascination," Dillard describes that state from the inside: I am not excited; my breathing is slow and regular. In my brain I am not saying, Muskrat! Muskrat! There! I am saying nothing. If I must hold a position, I do not "freeze." If I freeze, locking my muscles, I will tire and break. Instead of going rigid, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find a balance and repose. I retreat — not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone.
This, perhaps, is what Willa Cather meant in her perfect definition of happiness as being "dissolved into something complete and great" that "comes as naturally as sleep" — a dissolution of the self into the totality of Being, or what Transcendentalist queen Margaret Fuller called "the All" in her own exquisite account of one such experience a century and a half earlier. This, too, is the pulsating truth at the heart of Dillard's own oft-quoted insight — an indictment, today — that "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." Couple this small fragment of the infinitely soul-slaking Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with Loren Eiseley — another of humanity's greatest essayists — on the muskrat and the meaning of life, then revisit Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self and Annie Dillard's classic meditation on the meaning of life lensed through a total solar eclipse. 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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