|
|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's special edition — Annie Dillard on how to live, Alain de Botton on friendship, and a Gnostic gospel of wholeness — 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 — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
|
"Let me not seem to have lived in vain," the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours. Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser's shimmering words, in the living moment that "we touch life and all the energy of the past and future"; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti's shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive. The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with "a lament for life's wasted sunshine."  Nathaniel Hawthorne Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of "great, genial, comprehending silences," Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can't afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful. In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:  All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that "no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life," Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our "own aspect" in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than "a mortal symptom of a person." We can't, he cautions, "use other people's experience." But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a "feeling within" of "what is true and what is false" without in order to have "the right perception of things." Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era's equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes: The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.
(This is precisely why learning something is the best way to lift yourself up when the world gets you down.)  Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life: Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one's genius.
In his time, the word "genius" retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one's creative talent or intellectual prowess but one's essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within. Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes: My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven. […] I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.
A century later, George Orwell would embody the same truth about the spirit, growing a rose garden while dismantling totalitarianism.  Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.) Couple with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Hawthorne on how to look and really see. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, 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. |  | |  |
|
| 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. |
|
We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation and destruction is the price we pay for our own complexity. We live with it and die by it and make poems and paintings and psalms to transform the constant tension between the two into meaning, into something of beauty and substance that outlasts the dust of power — these are the shoreless seeds and stardust that survive us. In a world teetering on the event horizon of its third global war, Italian artist Alessandro Sanna set out to paint to life his favorite poems from the time of the first. It all began with a single poem — a splendid addition to the small, surprising canon of stone poems for trusting time — written in the sweltering trenches of the third summer of WWI: I AM A CREATURE
by Giuseppe Ungaretti
translated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock Like this stone
on San Michele
this cold
this hard
this arid
this impervious
this utterly
spiritless
like this stone
is my
unseen grief We pay down
death
by living
But as Sanna tried to paint the work of his favorite wartime poets, he found himself unable to shake off the mental images of all that ruin, the emotional atmosphere of all that grief. In the author's note to what became Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War (public library) — his extraordinary wordless reckoning with humanity and war — he echoes artist Ann Hamilton's moving manifesto "Making Not Knowing" and writes: I could already feel my hands thinking along other lines… I have always put my faith in my hands — in their manner of working, and in how they seek to capture the best gesture with which to solve the challenge of depicting a sky, a mountain, or a wind-tossed sea. Hands think differently from our minds; hands are more daring and audacious. When hands work, they are strangely farsighted and free of preconceptions, constantly opening scenes, erasing them, starting over from scratch — as if they never work from a plan.
When his hands parted the mind's curtain of preconception and dilated the aperture of the present, he began seeing the bigger picture stretching like a tapestry all the way back to the dawn of our species, to the birth of our lust for domination, and all the way forward to a placid universe that survives us. 
In consonance with Rachel Carson's parting insistence that humanity has reached a point where it must "prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself," Sanna writes: Ever since the dawn of time, the stars sparkling in the sky have looked down upon us with indifference, as we strain in the age-old, tormented contest to dominate all things that can be named. For glimpsed from that distance, the Earth is no more than a luminous, watery pearl that appears just as immutable as immovable stone.
There are echoes in these words of Auden's timeless poem "The More Loving One," with its "stars that do not give a damn," with its central antidote to the human impulse for destruction and domination in the simple, immense vow: "Let the more loving one be me." With the feeling-tone of an epic myth and the chill of a mirror held up to reality, the story begins with a single stone that rolls down from the cloud-crowned top of a mountain into a valley where two humans, each wanting to possess it, invent the first weapon: want. The men become clans that become armies that set out to defeat each other, to conquer the elements, to own the other animals, with fists that become sticks that become bows that become guns that become the mushroom cloud. 
All the while, the Sun and the Moon and the stars look on indifferent, watching us forget what Dante called the love that moves them, watching us turn this improbable world, this one and only heaven we will ever know, into a living hell. 
What emerges from Sanna's pages is a bittersweet yet hopeful meditation on the choices that stand between our predilections and our possibilities, intimating that peace is not only possible, not only our moral imperative, but our creaturely inheritance from star and stone; that perhaps we are here simply to learn how to be more loving creatures. 
Couple Old as Stone, Hard as Rock with Einstein and Freud's little-known correspondence about war and human nature, then revisit Sanna's magnificent alternative origin story of humanity. Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, 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. | | | |
|
| 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. |
|
We are the only animal captive in a cage of its own making. Its bars can look like many things — the screen, the self, the scintillation of being right — but it is from within it that we look out and call our little view the world, forgetting that to recover our wildness is to recover our humanity, to waste it is to waste our aliveness. Few have offered a more powerful key to the cage than William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — the Audubon of the pampas, who discovered his gift for channeling the beating heart of nature amid the ruin of his best laid plans and went on to influence generations of writers, from Henry James and Ernest Hemingway to Barry Lopez and Robert Macfarlane.  William Henry Hudson All visionaries, even the farthest seers, are still a product of their time and place. In an era when hunting was the most popular sport and science studied living species as dead specimens, Hudson recounts how he first approached nature as "a sportsman and collector, always killing things." But he was haunted by the uneasy sense that he was paying a high price for this violent negation of his kinship with other creatures, relinquishing some essential part of his own creatureliness. Eventually, he traded the gun for the binoculars and the field notebook, determined to understand living beings on their own terms, collecting not bodies but observations, hunting not for game but for the play of ideas in a mind restless to apprehend the world. Although he called himself a field-naturalist, Hudson wrote about what he observed with a scientist's thirst for truth, a philosopher's hunger for meaning, and a poet's tenderness for the complicated miracle of being alive. In his moving 1919 memoir The Book of a Naturalist (public domain), he looks back on what he gained by giving up his era's givens: Abstention from killing had made me a better observer and a happier being, on account of the new or different feeling towards animal life which it had engendered. And what was this new feeling — wherein did it differ from the old of my shooting and collecting days, seeing that since childhood I had always had the same intense interest in all wild life? The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years!
These echoes of Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" are echoes of Hudson's childhood — he had devoured On the Origin of Species as a boy in the wake of his mother's death and had been deeply moved by its revelation of life as a ceaseless conversation between organisms and their environment, of the human animal as part of a vast and complex system, a part neither central and nor inevitable. Like most adults, he had unlearned the elemental truths we touch for a moment as children before culture and civilization slap our hand. Unlike most adults, he devoted his life to remembering what he had been bamboozled into forgetting — the wild wonder of life, the lavish otherness of its "endless forms," so unbidden in their variousness: The world didn't have to be beautiful, didn't owe us three hundred species of hummingbirds, the needless blue extravagance of the bowerbird, the Fibonacci perfection of the argonaut.  Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy. Reflecting on this awakening to the wonder of wildness and how it consecrates the world, Hudson writes: The main thing was the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human. Nay, the very fact that the forms were unhuman but served to heighten the interest; — the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.
Couple with Seamus Heaney's magnificent poem "Death of a Naturalist," then revisit Hudson on how to be a happier creature and Darwin on the spirituality of nature. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, 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. | | | |
|
| 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. |
|
OUT TUESDAY The Coziest Place on the Moon 
An illustrated fable about how to live with loneliness and what it means to love
CERAMICS RAFFLE
|
| | |
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar