|
|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — George Saunders on the 3 antidotes of your suffering and how to be an instrument of kindness, Tracy K Smith's antidote to fear, and the soul of strata — you can catch up right here; if you'd like the best of The Marginalian 2025 in one place, that is here; and if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
|
Time is the book we fill with the story of our lives. All great storytelling has the shape of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still enough and quiet enough to hear the story of our becoming, the song of life evolution encoded in our cells: "Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music," wrote the pioneering marine biologist Ernest Everett Just as he was revolutionizing our understanding of what makes life alive. Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) offers an uncommonly insightful meditation on how music can help us befriend the fundamental dimension of our lives in her 1941 masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (public library), which I hold to be one of the past century's great works of philosophy — her lyrical reckoning with art and survival lensed through three visits to Yugoslavia between the world wars, exploring what makes us and keeps us human.  Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) West recounts a painful moment of political tension at a restaurant table, suddenly interrupted by a Mozart symphony flooding in from the radio box, making "an argument too subtle and profound to be put into words" — an argument for the breadth of time, for how it can hold and heal our longings and losses. With the touching humility of acknowledging the limitations of one's gift and craft, she writes:  Music can deal with more than literature… Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe? Yet the music had promised us, as it welled forth from the magic box in the wall over our heads, that all should yet be well with us, that sometime our life should be as lovely as itself.
The greatest music offers something even greater than itself — an amelioration of the most subterranean struggle of human life: our anxiety about time. West writes: The major works of Mozart… never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust… It is, indeed, inadequate to call the means of creating such an effect a mere technical device. For it changes the content of the work in which it is used, it presents a vision of the world where man is no longer the harassed victim of time but accepts its discipline and establishes a harmony with it. This is not a little thing, for our struggle with time is one of the most distressing of our fundamental conflicts, it holds us back from the achievement and comprehension that should be the justification of our life.
One morning, West follows a waterfall up the river to its source across "a broad and handsome valley," toward a lake that splits into two streams linked by a dilapidated village nestled in flowering trees. There, she encounters music wholly different from Mozart's yet just as elemental, just as much a benediction of time in its syncopation of urgency and silence: From the latticed upper story of one of the houses that were rotting among their lilacs there sounded a woman's voice, a deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved… Later, standing on a bridge, watching water clear as air comb straight the green weeds on the piers, we heard another such voice… urgent in its desire to bring out beauty from the throat, urgent to state a problem in music. Both these women made exquisite, exciting use of a certain feature peculiar to these Balkan songs. Between each musical sentence there is a long, long pause. It is as if the speaker put her point, and then the universe confronted her with its silence, with the reality she wants to alter by proving her point. Are you quite sure, it asks, that you are right?
That may be what we can learn from music, what it means to have a harmonious relationship with time — training the mind to be unhurried, to halt the rush of certainty just enough to remain curious, to press an ear to the silence of the universe and listen for the clear sound of who and what we are.  Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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 it 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. |
|
The history of our species is the history of mistaking the limits of our imagination for the limits of the possible. It is salutary, I think, for us to be reminded regularly that this world is far wilder and more alien than we suppose it to be, that flowers are not what we supposed them to be, that eyes are not what we supposed them to be, that life and death are not what we supposed them to be, that a self is not what we supposed it to be. We come to know a world the way we come to know a person — by learning its depths and its limits. It has always tugged at the human imagination to touch these extremes — to reach its poles, to conquer its peaks, to balance life on its sharpest edges. But it is the depths that have enticed and eluded us the longest.  Previously unknown giant dragonfish (Bathysphaera intacta) circling the Bathysphere by artist Else Bostelmann, 1934 At the end of the nineteenth century, upending the long-held dogma that no life existed below 300 fathoms, a series of landmark oceanographic expeditions plunged deeper and discovered the magnificent creatures of the deep, discovered how magnificently deeper the deep really was than imagined. And then, in 1875, the Challenger expedition let a weighted piece of rope drop and drop and drop into the South Pacific, until it sounded a depth of 4,475 fathoms — 8,184 meters. They didn't realize the spot was part of an immense trench — an upside-down mountain range at the bottom of the world. Over the next century, more expeditions and better technologies continued and refined the measurements, until the bottom of the Mariana Trench was sounded at around 10,984 meters — half the Andes stacked atop Everest. To touch such depths with the mind was already staggering beyond measure. To touch them with our animal sensorium seemed unimaginable. As a human foot fell on the dusty surface of another planetary body, the deep ocean remained more mysterious than the Moon. "Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses," Rachel Carson wrote in her pioneering essay Undersea. And yet when William Beebe plunged his Bathysphere into the deep, the unimaginable became possible — this, too, is the history of our species.  William Beebe inside the Bathysphere (Wildlife Conservation Society Photo Collection) Nearly a century after Beebe, Scottish geoscientist Heather Stewart set a diving record with her 10-hour descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench with the Bakunawa submersible, one of the most impressive and costly technologies humankind has created. On a fascinating episode of BBC's In Our Time — my favorite radio program — she recounts, in words not dissimilar to astronaut Sally Ride's exuberant description of what it's like to launch into space, her experience: There is the moment you're sitting on the sea surface and get the clear-to-dive call, and that color change as you start to fall through the water column… the change from clear water on the sea surface through the brightest shades of blue down to absolute pitch-blackness… And all of that, you're sitting in silence, and that is so humbling as well as so very exciting, because after a few hours you start to come to the sea floor… That moment you turn on the lights of the submersible and start to see the sea floor coming up underneath you is absolutely fantastic.
All the while, she reflects, her brain is scrambling to parse this surreality and integrate it with her existing understanding of the world by putting it in a geological context, trying to form a working hypothesis of what kind of world might be the bottom of the world. But we are captives of our frames of reference and we habitually forget that the imagination of nature will always be greater than ours, because it imagined us: Suddenly, out of that blackest darkness — as in life — spring the most surprising colors: The colors that you can see on the sea floor can take your breath away… yellows and blues and all of these chemosynthetic bacteria that are living off the mineral content coming out of these vents, the cracks and fissures on the sea floor.
 Endpapers of the classic 1959 children's book Little Blue, Little Yellow by Leo Lionni. But one doesn't need a $30-million submersible to taste the sublime strangeness of the deep. We have invented another technology to take us to those places hardest to reach. In this fragment of her sweeping five-part poem "The Depths" (translated by my mother), Natalia Molchanova, considered the greatest free-diver of all time, invites our earth-bound senses into the most alien depths of this world: And I perceived
nonexistence. The speechlessness of eternal darkness
and its boundlessness. And I emerged from time,
it
poured into me,
And we grew
still. I lost my body between the waves.
And I reached emptiness,
peace,
touching the secret of the ocean —
a bottomless blue abyss I turn inward,
and remember
Self.
I — light.
And I gaze intently:
In the depths breath
is born.
I merge with it.
And I emerge into the world…
At the age of 53, Molchanova plunged into the sea off the coast of Spain and never emerged, touching, somewhere at the bottom of the world, the hardest thing for a human being to touch — peace, total and austere as pure spacetime. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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 it 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. |
|
Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity, common ground. This is why knowing whether you actually love somebody can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of a theorem, the definitional precision of a dictionary, and the courage to weather the depredations of time. In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein's Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I've encountered since Iris Murdoch's half a century ago: The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other — the one person who makes everything simple — a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society. Describing a couple united by this kind of love, Balle captures the essential qualities of a lasting relationship: They had a closeness which I could not help but notice. Not the sort of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love who need constantly to make contact by look or touch, nor the fragile intimacy which makes an outsider feel like a disruptive element and gives you the urge to simply leave the lovers alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them… [They] had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was as simple as that, so what could they do but see what the future would bring.
The future, however, can bring what the present can't foresee, can't bear to consider. People die. Lovers stop loving. Sudden and mysterious phase transitions of feeling take place without warning or explanation, they way the lava of one person's passion can turn to stone overnight, leaving the other entombed in painful and lonely confusion. Because of this, to live with the fundamental fear of loss and love anyway may be the purest measure of our aliveness. What makes it possible — the only thing that makes it possible — is to refuse the glass-half-empty view of life, to see that death is a token of the luck of having lived and every loss a token of the luck of having had, that these are miracles that weren't owed us but nonetheless prevailed over the laws of probability so we may live and love.  Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.) There are moments we remember this, moments that stagger us into this primal perspective — moments Balle describes as ones when "the ground under one's feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered." She writes: It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility… That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws. It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences… We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.
This, of course, is why to live is a probable impossibility and to love is to live against probability; it is why our moral obligation to the universe is to love one another while we are and because we are alive. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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 it 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. |
|
NEW BOOK (7 YEARS IN THE MAKING)
A SIDEWISE LABOR OF LOVE
|
| | |
