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A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with one partner and not another, values binding you to one culture and not another. Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you.  Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce's Ulysses In her extraordinary manifesto for seeing more clearly, Iris Murdoch observed:  The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.
For millennia, the whole of Eastern philosophy and myriad other ancient traditions have made the dissolution of that illusion — painful, perplexing, disorienting dissolution — the great achievement of existence. For those of who chanced by birth into the modern West, where the self roils with its grandiose claims of authorship, to keep questioning the story of who we are — this handful of unchosen stardust on short-term loan from the universe — is an act of countercultural courage requiring exceptional devotion and discipline. Long before probability theory, before the discovery of gravity and genetics and general relativity, before the overwhelm of two trillion galaxies housing innumerable worlds, the visionary Blaise Pascal, who didn't live past forty but touched the epochs with his clarity of thought, modeled that courage by cutting through the veil of illusion with uncommon precision: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and am amazed that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.
There is no reason for you to be here, to be you. But perhaps what is left in the wake of reason is love — the matter, the substance of us that over and over outweighs the antimatter of chance to make life tremble with aliveness. Like life itself, love is an affirmation of the improbable nested, always nested, in the possible. "What will survive of us is love," wrote Philip Larkin. No — love is simply how we survive the cosmic helplessness of being born ourselves.  Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.) 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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Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of feeling and time. When the vessel becomes too small to hold what we pour into it, language spills into poetry. In this respect, poetry serves the same function as prayer: to give shape and voice to our unspoken and often unspeakable hopes, fears, and inner tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and passed from hand to compassionate hand. Poetry thus becomes an instrument of self-transcendence — an instrument that, in Adrienne Rich's abiding words, "can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire." That function of poetry as the language of the unsaid is what the Canadian poet and Native American culture scholar Robert Bringhurst explores in the final pages of his altogether fascinating book The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (public library).  Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by poet Ruth Krauss A century after William James placed the ineffable atop his list of the four features of transcendence, Bringhurst reflects on the differences between English and the native language of the Haida people of British Columbia, and writes: It is not necessary that the same things should be ineffable in all languages. It is only necessary that in each language plenty of things should be so: unsayable, or, at the very least, unsaid. It seems to me that a kind of speechlessness — the inability to say a quite significant number of things — is actually built into every language. But language itself is a self-transcending mechanism. It tries, and lets us try, to say what it can't. The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language. The reason language exists, it seems to me, is that poetry — the resonance of being — needs it. If you live in a place that hasn't been pillaged and ruined, the silence of language's failure, and of poetry's success, is present and vivid almost everywhere you listen, almost everywhere you look.
Complement with Muriel Rukeyser on what poetry does for us, David Whyte on the power of poetry and silence as a portal to presence, and this wonderful story of how poetry saves lives, then savor three life-giving poems: "Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower" by Rainer Maria Rilke, "Singularity" by Marie Howe, and "Antidotes to Fear of Death" by Rebecca Elson. 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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Traversal broadens and deepens the questions raised in Figuring, the questions we live with: the relationship between chance and choice in becoming who we are, between chemistry and consciousness in being what we are, the tension between our love of truth and our lust for power, the restlessness of our longings and the redemption of our losses. Our various instruments of reckoning with these questions — telescopes and treatises, postulates and poems — are revealed in their power and limitation through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads — the world's first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue — to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. Here is the prelude, Chapter 0, as it appears in the book, framing the 565 pages to come: Bigger than Manhattan, Earth's largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia: Posidonia australis — a species of seagrass that, unable to flower, clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it has been cloning itself since before the pyramids were built — a kind of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the fresh-cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it goes on cloning itself as we go on dying and passing between our lips the heat of our mortality. Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, between the time of mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose, matter yearning for meaning on a planet capable of trees and tenderness, a world on which every living thing abides by the same dumb resilience through which we rose from the oceans to compose the Benedictus and to build the bomb. All of our models and our maps, all of our poems and our love songs, all the conjectures chalked on the blackboard of the mind in theorems and scriptures, spring from the same elemental restlessness to locate ourselves in the cosmos of being, to know reality and to know ourselves. Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we go on searching for an organizing principle to fathom the ultimate questions: What is life? What is death? What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? Over and over, we discover that it is all one question, that there might just be a single answer: love. Our love of knowledge. Our love of mystery. Our love of beauty transcending the vanity of ambition. Our love of truth prevailing over the howling hunger for power. Our love for each other — each of us a festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and chance.
Traversal is out in the U.S. on February 17 from FSG and in the U.K. on March 12 from Canongate. Boundless gratitude to James Gleick for persuading me to publish it, to Eric Chinski for making that a joy, and to Sarah McNally for cross-pollinating that joy. 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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A SIDEWISE LABOR OF LOVE
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