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|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Pablo Neruda on how to hold time; the figments of love and the hallucinations of reason; the aurora borealis and the polar expedition saved by wonder — you can catch up right 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.
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Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer — the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light — recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment. The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut's eyes may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian.  View from inside the ISS. (Image: NASA) While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:  I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I've done, and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism — it is your life to tinker with, learn from, live and love.
This ongoingness of creation — the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten — is nowhere more visible, life's ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective: It's endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths.
A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. "They should have sent a poet," gasps Jodie Foster's astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan's novel Contact, and it is with a poet's sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair — the Bahamas, seen from space in all their "huge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists."  The Bahamas seen from the ISS. (Image: NASA) Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself — the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century. Many died to know the unknown. Many sank into "soul-despairing depression" during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime. Over and over, they were saved by wonder.  Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900. In the first year of the twentieth century — that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration — the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis — that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun's corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth's magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic.  Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.  Harald Moltke (left) with his companions. Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth's most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. ("I realized that it had to be oil paint," he wrote, "that could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.") He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter. Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these "huge, luminous beams with folds… now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere… like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth." He writes in his memoir: The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like "supernatural," "divine," "miraculous." I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that… I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding.
 Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1901. It is not unimportant that the word "holy" shares its Latin root with "whole" and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things — the only perspective, available in every act of unselfing with wonder right here on Earth, that hallows a broken world whole. 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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"There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it," Adam Philips wrote in his superb meditation on our ambivalent desire for change — ambivalence brilliantly rendered in the Vampire Problem thought experiment, illustrating the paradoxical psychology of why we have such a hard time changing, breaking the patterned ways of being by which we hedge against the fear of not knowing who we are, what we want, and how to be safe. Our paradox is that we are the pattern-seeking animal — a kind of superpower conferred upon us by our complex consciousness, which came with a high price. Like the hero of the Greek myths eternally bedeviled by his tragic flaw, we pay for our power with our vulnerability. The patterns we discover — fractals, the harmonic scale, the laws of planetary motion — give us a firmer foothold on reality, set us free to contact the world as it really is, place in our open palm precious pebbles of knowledge chipped from the fearsome monolith of the unknown. But the patterns we invent — in our habits, in our relationships, in our myths and power structures and organizing principles of civilization — cage us, stiffen us with certainty until we grow too ossified to change.  Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print. In a world doing its best to make us mistake being sure for being safe, living with the courage of uncertainty — the courage to break the pattern of the familiar in order to release the possible — is a radical act, an act not only of resistance but of redemption. The building blocks and practice of that courage, as an antipode to the reflex of fear, are what therapist, teacher, and organizer Prentis Hemphill reflects on in the inaugural episode of trauma therapist Mariah Rooney's wonderful MOVD podcast: The fear is absolutely there, and the fear is often the driver toward isolation, toward my old patterning, toward the thing I think will keep me comfortable and alleviate the fear. But what changes our patterns, ultimately, is the courage to feel that fear and do something different anyway. You step into the unknown and you don't know what is going to happen — that is the act of courage.
This reorientation is not merely a cerebral decision but an embodied action — something that renders the courage to change, or simply the courage to get real, all the more difficult and all the more urgent in a neo-Cartesian culture that keep driving us further and further away from the lush life of the body as disembodied artificial intelligences make more and more decisions for us and the real world — the world of fireflies and owls and lichen, trembling with aliveness — takes up less and less space in our mental model of reality. Hemphill celebrates this necessary reclamation of the body as the instrument of transformation: Everything that we do towards recovering aspects of ourselves that we have disowned or parts of our body that we have vacated, every act that we take where we work through and with the fear rather than succumb to the isolation that fear recommends — those are the moments where we start to change our patterning.
 Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse In What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (public library), Hemphill considers the psychophysiology that makes fear such a powerful default: When what we face overwhelms our ability to respond and/or to escape unscathed, or when we are given the message to suppress the body's reactions, our nervous systems don't know that the traumatic experience has ended, and our survival response continues to exist in our bodies. We live then in a near-constant state of reaction, either scanning for an indication that the threat has returned or reproducing aspects of the experience in our relationships and lives in what many understand to be an attempt to complete the threat we feel. It is alive in our tissues, our muscles, our thoughts, and our moods. It lives on in our behavioral patterns, our habits, what we do and don't do, what we say and what we are afraid to say… You can have a region of your body living out of time, out of step, with the rest of you… A physiological memory from ten or twenty years earlier can be lodged in the structure of your fasciae, and therefore in your actions and relationships… Trauma stays… lingers long past its welcome in our bodies.
Against this backdrop, courage may just be the refusal to partition ourselves, to vacate our embodiment or cede it to our ideas about what life should look like, ideas programmed by our unexamined and uncontested defaults. Insisting that "every inch of progress, every ounce of love, every truly meaningful action from here on out will happen through courage, not comfort," Hemphill writes: Courage changes things and courage changes us. It's how we become. I have found that there is a "right-sized" fear inside any vision for change, and in taking courageous action we develop a part of ourselves that can talk back to and hold the fear without letting it lead… The courage we need is the courage to fail and stay… The courage to exit the safety of our dying delusions… The courage to surrender… The courage to love and be loved.
Complement with George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty and how to unbreak our hearts by breaking our patterns, then revisit Charlie Mackesy's wondrous watercolor meditation on how to bear your fear and what it means to love. 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 a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so miraculous.) The more complex and tessellated the concept, the emotion, the experience, the more deficient the word for it and the more urgent the yearning to speak it with the tongue of the mind, to give it shape in sound and meaning in metaphor. Over and over, we have struggled to name that quality of being, that state of mind, that orientation of the spirit which "the good life" asks of us. Edith Wharton called its rudiment "an unassailable serenity." Bertrand Russell called it "a largeness of contemplation." Iris Murdoch termed it, simply and perfectly, "unselfing." In one of the marvelous essays in her posthumous collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) offers the 16th-century Italian term sprezzatura for that ineffable quality of being upon which our deepest emotional, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic longings tremble.  Art by Margaret C. Cook With an eye to the various definitions of the word, "all very beautiful and very imprecise" — among them "frankness, fluency, the opposite of mannerism or affectation," "service to beauty," and "a casual manner of speech or action… typical of a self-assured master" — Campo considers the reductionism of a descriptive definition: Sprezzatura is in reality a whole moral attitude that, like the word itself, requires a context that is almost gone from the contemporary world, and, like the word itself, is at risk of disappearing. Or rather, since nothing that's real ever disappears, it is at risk of languishing in those oubliettes where, in savage and more honest times, they used to chain up princes who'd provoked the ire of the people until their very names were forgotten. […] Sprezzatura is a moral rhythm, it is the music of an interior grace; it is the tempo, I would like to say, in which the perfect freedom of any given destiny is made manifest, although it is always delineated by a secret ascesis. Two lines hide it, like a ring in a case: "With a light heart, with light hands, / to take life, to leave life."
 Illustration by Italian artist Mimmo Paladino We might find sprezzatura, Campo observes, in the lives of the Trappist monks, in the "ferocious geometry behind the Dance of the Dragonflies," in "the études of Frédéric Chopin, by which tenderness and turbulence, rubati and turbati, ecstasy itself and piercing premonition were mercilessly measured," and in fairy tales, of course. Across its different manifestations, she considers its defining orientation of the spirit: Above all else, sprezzatura is in fact an alert and amiable imperviousness to the violence and baseness of others, an impassive acceptance — which to unperceiving eyes may look like callousness — of unchangeable situations that it tranquilly "decrees nonexistent" (and in so doing ineffably modifies). But beware. Sprezzatura is not kept alive or passed on for very long if it isn't founded, like religious vows, on an almost total detachment from earthly goods, a constant readiness to give them up if one happens to possess them, an evident indifference to death, a profound reverence for what is higher than oneself and for the impalpable, courageous, inexpressibly precious forms that are its emblems here below. Beauty (interior before becoming visible) above all, the generosity of spirit at its root, and a joyful way of being in the world. This means, among other things, the ability to fly in the face of criticism with smiling good grace and a dignified eloquence born of total forgetfulness of self… an immense, unceasing invitation to the interior liberation that is utter forgetfulness of self — of the ego magnetized by the sideways mirrors of psychology and the social — stripping off what hinders and deceives the spirit in order to acquire the light step and radiant rhythm that disburses the happiness of the saints… "With a light heart, with light hands…" A pure life is given its rhythm by this light and vehement music, composed entirely of forgetfulness and solicitude.
This "ineffable rhythm," she writes, is found in "the elegance of the living flame," in "the crash of interstellar silences," in encounters with "supernatural beauty," "where living and leaving are an ecstasy, one and the same." Couple with Campo on fairy tales as a lens on the paradox of knowing who you are and what you want, then revisit Marie Howe's poem "The Maples," which offers its own spare, splendid answer to the abiding question of how we should live our lives. 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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