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Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay something other than ourselves and hate is the veil of not understanding ourselves, then loving the world more — the other word for which is kindness — is largely a matter of deepening our awareness and sharpening our attention on both sides of the skin that membranes the self. George Saunders — whose gorgeous novels and essays are a kind of jungle gym for playing with your assumptions rigorously and sensitively enough to grow the agility of perspective called empathy — explores this equivalence with his characteristic precision of mind and grandeur of heart in a wonderful interview on The Daily.  Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.) A practicing Buddhist and a writer whose core subject is how to love the world more, Saunders considers the parallels between Buddhism and writing as instruments of kindness honed on awareness and attention:  We have thoughts and they self-generate and dominate us. We mistake those thoughts for us. In both Buddhist practice and writing, you have a chance to go, Oh, those are just brain farts. They're just happening spontaneously, and I didn't actually create them, and I'm not sure I really want to take ownership of them. At the same time, they're affecting my body. So you have to just get clear for long enough to recognize them as being separate from who you actually are.
Kindness, he observes in reconsidering his now-classic 2013 meditation on the subject, is something both greater than and simpler than niceness — a stilling of that "monkey mind" just long enough to consider what is most helpful to the other in a given situation. (Few things are more moving in this culture of opinions tattooed on the skin of the self than to see a person change their mind or evolve their perspective in public.)  Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days Literature, Saunders insists, can quiet our habitual thoughts just enough to invite "a little more empathy, a little more engagement, a little more patience," effecting "incremental changes of consciousness on the part of the writer and the reader" — changes that have to do with unclenching the fist of story and certainty that is the self and hold out to the world the open palm of curiosity. He identifies three awarenesses we must eventually attain in order to wake up from the core delusions that keep our lives clenched, that stand between us and kindness: You're not permanent. You're not the most important thing. You're not separate.
There are Buddhist precepts, but they are also the rewards of great literature — something Saunders captures beautifully in his introduction to the collected stories, essays, and poems of one of his own favorite writers, Grace Paley: A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is as about as close as we can get to modeling pure empathy. […] The world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.
Showing us how has been his life's work, whether or not Saunders realized it along the way — we are always insensible to our own becoming, bud blind to blossom. Two decades before he came to the question of kindness directly, he shone a sidewise gleam at its substrate — the relationship between storytelling and unselfing — in his prescient 2007 essay collection The Brainded Megaphone.  Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce's Ulysses Given that narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are comes to shape who we act ourselves into being, who we become in relation to the world. This fundamental vulnerability of consciousness, Saunders observes, can be and is exploited, but it is also what gives storytelling its transformative power: In the beginning, there's a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media's job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There's another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.
The point, of course, is that beneath the constructed idea is the world itself, just as beneath the self — the scaffolding of ideas upon which we construct our experience of reality — is the soul, that loose and baggaged word we use to hold something immense and pure: the elemental essence of being. In our culture, there is no greater courage than to strip the armor of ready-made answers and face the world as naked soul, blank as a question; to discover rather than dictate who we are and what this is — this brief burst of astonishment and anguish that we share before we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, wasted if seduced by certainty, wasted if shorn of kindness.  Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Saunders offer the simple, intensely difficult remedy: Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.
The great writer's gift to the reader are not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a mechanism of transmuting confusion into kindness, and at the same time a way of seeing the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply. I find Saunders's generous words about Grace Paley to apply perfectly to his own writing: Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa. […] What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking. […] Paley's model advises us to suffer less by loving more — love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.
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"What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?" asked the Proust Questionnaire. "Living in fear," answered David Bowie. The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry. An inquiry, an invocation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter into the unknowns of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, into the desolate haunts of our own interior that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a kind of prayer: for presence, for understanding, for seeing the world more closely in order to cherish it more deeply. To name, to understand, to dignify and hold — these are the gifts of poetry, and these too are the antidotes to just about every form of fear. In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is essentially a field guide to loving life more, anchored in the recognition that "the opposite of love is not hatred or rancor but fear" and in a passionate insistence on "how important is it — how critical — to understand there is and has always been, for each of us, a wilderness within."  Tracy K. Smith reading from her Pulitzer-winning collection Life on Mars at the inaugural Universe in Verse She writes: Vulnerability, uncertainty, and even desperation are not only signs of life, but tools for moving forward toward courage, hope, and purpose. […] It is curiosity, not foreknowledge, that leads a reader (and a poet, and a poem) beyond the limits of habitual understanding — questions, rather than answers, being the building blocks of insight. Questions, which spring from the unconscious mind's ability to remember, intuit, and speculate (Was he desperate? Alone? Did he do it out of grief?), are capable of bridging distances of time, place, allegiance, belief, and any other supposed border used to separate people from one another. Moreover, to form a question is an active creative stance, a way of announcing: I'm paying attention! I'm ready to observe, remember, intuit! Curiosity is, at heart, courage; readiness not for a fixed or foretold outcome, but rather a type of uncharted encounter — an adventure.
Poetry's essential "de-emphasizing of answers and certainty" invites "a productive form of introspection," the recompense of which is the wonderful capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying into a template of ourselves: We surprise ourselves. We defy pat summary. Poetry is an art form through which we might better recognize and appreciate the circumstances under which you and I remain — even to ourselves — a kind of mystery… Occasional barriers to certainty and resolution in a poem and in a life are an invitation to exercise different faculties of discernment and perception. […] In life, when mystery, doubt, and quiet fear rear up, our habit is to seek the assurance of answers, strategies, expert advice. We hedge our bets, make contingency plans, cleave to platitudes. We do what it takes to stay materially and emotionally afloat. But poetry is a different kind of enterprise, one engaged with the deep reserves of wisdom, memory, and emotional wherewithal every one of us possesses. And so rather than neatening up a state of quandary or denying inevitability, a poem might seek to operate from within these very circumstances.
 One of Alice and Martin Provensen's vintage illustrations of Homer These very circumstances are also what that most often incite fear. In making them something to be "pondered, grappled with, marveled at," poetry offers a mighty antidote to that internal flinch at the unknown. A generation after Audre Lorde insisted that poetry affords us a kind of intimacy with ourselves by which "those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us," Smith writes: Fear stuns, blurs out our options, convinces us it is better to fall silent and still, to consent, to go along and trust that eventually everything will feel normal again. Fear, running its course long enough, convinces us that the moral disequilibrium in which we find ourselves is normalcy. Fear dissuades us from believing our bodies, our hearts, our deepest memories. Fear is an isolating, alienating technology. At its most dangerous, fear keeps us from facing or even fully contemplating what, for our own survival, we must endeavor to change. But a poem can mitigate fear by facilitating a form of dialogue with it. A poem might ask its author, What wakes you up in the middle of the night? What do you cower from? And when the poet answers, the poem will likely brighten, inviting: Sit down here in this chair where you are perfectly safe. Now, let's approach it together.
 Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.) Fear, Smith observes, often stems from the "fissure widening between us and ourselves," the remedy for which is attention, is awareness, is an active curiosity about what dwells in that gaping abyss — a curiosity that begins with finding the words to name what we feel, to hold what we don't want to feel. She writes: Our relationship to language has great bearing upon our capacity to be wide awake and at home both in the imperfect world and in the dimensions of our full selves. Our ability to ask and grapple with difficult questions. Our willingness to accept uncertainty, to withstand discomfort. The curiosity with which we approach another person's perspective. These things fortify us to recognize and celebrate the complex feelings to which we and others are susceptible. And while engaging with poetry isn't the only way to strengthen our powers of listening and responding, asking and offering, poems are remarkable in their ability to augment our stamina for such tasks. Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention. Can we attend more rigorously, more compassionately to ourselves and others? […] To create new patterns of language, as poems and poets exist to do, is to alter or correct course on our story of reality. To move from a state of fear to one of understanding, or from the sense that you are small and bound by the circumstances in your life to an acknowledgement that you are large and your purpose eternal — that kind of transformation begins in language, in talking and listening to yourself, to others, to a voice on a page. Language is the engine for our sense of the possible, and poetry fosters a productive impatience with the notion that things as they are cannot or must not be made to change.
In the remainder of Fear Less, Smith offers a guided tour of some of her favorite poems — among them treasures by Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Mark Doty, and Joy Harjo — and a glimpse of her own process to explore the mastery of craftsmanship behind the mystery of poetry's singular power. Couple it with Audre Lorde on poetry as an instrument of change and feeling as an antidote to fear, then revisit this luminous animation of Smith's masterpiece "My God, It's Full of Stars." 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. | | | |
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"My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite… and I know the amplitude of time," wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time. It tempers your sorrows to know that the striking red pebble you pick up at the beach is hematite — the oxidation of iron in sedimentary rock, the same iron composing the hemoglobin that oxygenates your red blood cells; to know that some distant day across the eons, someone else will bend down wonder-smitten on some other beach to pick up a striking pebble laced with red that was once your blood. It is more than a comfort — it is a consecration. The word "holy" shares its Latin root with "whole" and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things. This is the sacred, this the holy. To feel part of the implicate order of the whole. To touch for a moment the wrist of the world, feel the pulse of life's bloodstream coursing through it, feel yourself a corpuscle and a miracle. "The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth," wrote Rachel Carson. To know that you carry sediment in your cells and that you will return to sediment is to be a living poem.  Rock formation in Patagonia Laura Poppick offers a wondrous portal into this deeper dimension of time in Strata: Stories from Deep Time (public library) — a fine belated addition to my favorite books of 2025. Recounting a revelatory shift in perspective while hiking Wyoming's Bighorn Canyon under the weight of the world's ecological and political tumult, she writes: As I sat on that pale plateau with my legs beneath me… I remembered that stability has come and gone and returned so many times before now. That geologic timescales arc too wide to witness in a single human lifetime, but have always spun toward some sort of new stasis. I knew this didn't let us off the hook, or mean that it was time to stop righting our wrongs to the environment. The changes we have unleashed today are unfolding far faster than past periods of change, and they were not geologically inevitable. We are the agents of this geologic moment. But the strata reminded me that we are also part of the Earth system, this much larger web of connections that thread between the atmosphere, continents, water, ice, and life. That these threads slacken and tighten over time and accommodate for one another with more brilliance than the human mind can easily grasp. That we live within this system, and the system lives within us. We carry its iron in our blood and its stardust in our bones, and its strength is our strength because we are it. We are it, but we are not a given. The only given is the change and the sphere that contains it.
To apprehend the sphere stills the suffering of separateness. Echoing John Muir's insistence that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe," Poppick paints the sphere in its dazzling, tessellated completeness: Air, rock, water, life, and ice all interact in the web of feedback loops that geoscientists call the Earth system. Together, the five facets of this system — the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (rock), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), and cryosphere (ice) — orchestrate the global climate and, in turn, the underpinnings of our lives. It's by coming to understand this system that I have grown to see the physical world not as the static backdrop of our daily experience but as an ever-changing vessel that ripples and responds to innumerable changes, and has been doing so for billions of years. Over time, these subtle transformations build, erode, and rebuild the world anew. We live our lives within recycled landscapes and those recycled landscapes live within us. I mean this literally, not figuratively. The science is the poem and the poem is the science. Everything on this planet connects with everything else, from the microscopic contents of the air we breathe to the macroscopic movements of continents and ocean currents. You can't build a mountain range without changing the atmosphere, at least a little (because freshly sculpted mountains pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and you can't change the atmosphere without changing the chemistry of the ocean (because oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide), and you can't change the ocean without affecting the life within it.
 Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print.) Paradoxically, to contact all this change, to see in silt the memorial of mountains and in mountains the memory of the Earth, is to remember the eternity in you. Recounting a rainy visit to a "golden spike" — an outcrop whose strata represent the transition from one geological period to another — Poppick writes: The traces of the early Cambrian sat unblinking beneath the rain, telling us with a wordless wisdom that there are beginnings and that there are ends and that the fibers of the planet will always harden and soften and dissolve and re-form anew. That our own legacy will, some day, erode back into the sea. […] The gift of geology is the chance to seek refuge in this constancy, in the gravity of the arc of time. When I walk the rocky shoreline near my home, I don't see random stones thrown about but a montage of stories and events that intertwine directly with our present and our future. […] If there's one thing we can say with certainty has remained constant since at least the Archean, it's the persistent tug of water against rock and the erosion that comes with it. The breaking down of Earth's skin and bones to make room for something new. The motion is at once unchanging and the most persistent force of change. It is carving down boulders into cobbles into pebbles into sands, silts, clays. It is turning land into dust and sending its debris back to the sea it came from. By the time the seafloors of today rise up above the oceans as cliffsides or mountaintops, our individual lives will be specks of dust, imperceptible to the naked eye. The iron in our blood will have pooled back into the earth, all our remains melting within the mantle where we will meet, again, as one.
Complement Strata with geologist turned psychologist Ruth Allen on the twelve kinds of time and geologist Marcia Bjornerud's love letter to the wisdom of rocks, then revisit Oliver Sacks on deep time and the interconnectedness of the universe. 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. | | | |
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