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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 — Chilean philosopher Humberto Maturana on love and Walt Whitman's field guide to being yourself — 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 twenty years, 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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The great danger is to stand motionless on the bank as the river of your life rushes by. It is not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; not easy not to waste your life; not easy knowing whether or not how you spend your time and mind and love is worthy of the improbable fact that you, against the vastly greater odds otherwise, exist.
And yet to the unnerving question pulsating beneath everything — Why you? — the only answer is your life, lived.
Emily Ogden hones the blade of that question in the very first sentence of one of the essays in her altogether wonderful collection On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays (public library):
 Is your boat also becalmed? I ask the authors of my books. Your commitments made, your loves chosen, did the wind drop? Did you wonder whether you were meant to wait for the next breeze, or whether you should row for your life?
With an eye to a fear the poet Mary Ruefle once named with her typical winking poignancy — “the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility” — Ogden observes the fractal nature of this fundamental fear, branching into every aspect of what and whom we devote ourselves to. She writes:
In my attitude to these loves of my life, I find the same mixture of conviction and shame. I am devoted. I am embarrassed by my devotion. I cannot help but envision the contemptuous face of the one who sees my idol as a lump of clay.
Suppose a life that might, or might not, be consecrated to an imbecility. What then? What answers are there, beyond trying to answer with a certainty that can never be secured?… To put mattering in the form of a question concedes too much. The question mark’s business with me will never be finished. It stands like a cow in the road, uncomprehending, unmoving.
For my part, I stand with the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska: “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she wrote in her splendid poem “Possibilities.” I prefer the absurdity of devotion to the absurdity of indifference.
At the heart of devotion is a recognition that the reality of the other — whether or not you understand it, that is, can extract personal meaning from it — matters. Iris Murdoch captured this in what remains the finest definition of love I have encountered: “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” 
Hummingbird divination from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
Ogden considers the poems of Emily Dickinson — those great love letters to reality — as a paragon of art that “evades the demand for ultimate meaning,” an opening something “that will not come to a point.” In Dickinson’s poem “A Bird, came down the Walk,” she observes, the bird is not the bird of the Romantics that sings and symbolizes, not the bird of divinations, but a creature occupied with the “prosaic things” of its own life met on its own terms: surviving, weighing its wants against its needs. Ogden writes:
John Keats’s nightingale warbles continuously across centuries. Walt Whitman’s thrush mourns Abraham Lincoln. Dickinson’s robin comes up close and gets about the work of surviving. This poem is about watching a series of alien troubles managed and dispatched. If poets are like birds, then on the view of this poem, it is not because they sing; it is because they mind their own business. The poem goes down the walk. It does not know I saw. It does not ask itself whether I think it matters. My doubt will not annihilate it.
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane
Each existence — yours, mine — is a living poem and every experience in it is, if we let it be, a bird. Its business is its own. Our business is not interpretation or rumination but observation, integration, devotion to what is — pure presence, without fear or judgment or the impulse for control, with reality and the infinities nested within it: all those realities different from our own, beyond it, never fully apprehended by means of reason, reachable only, and barely, by love.
This requires what Iris Murdoch so memorably termed “unselfing” — the same difficult practice that offers the best relief I know for the clutch of selfing that is most suffering.
Ogden writes:
The other day I watched a song sparrow perched on the topmost point of my arched bean trellis, feathers on his striped throat erect, his body the trumpet of his territorial call. The entirety of the tiny body became the huge sound. I rejoiced for him; I took a total interest in his interest in singing. In a similar way, I take comfort in walking my hound dog. His is a different world from mine, but one equally organized by keen preferences. Because of what he can smell, areas of grass that seem undifferentiated to me are intensely important to him. Rattled by the passing of another dog, he will carpet the affected area with his snuffling, pulling in the air so hard and quick that his whole snout shakes. Looking back at you from a wild face is striving and a wish for sequence; not, however, a striving or a wish for sequence that is like yours. You can follow along with a different mathematics; you still get to calculate, but not about yourself. It is only because the animal pursues a real project, and not an idle dream, that watching it is a relief.
We don’t know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, 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.
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A habit is a spell you cast upon yourself that only you can break. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil,” William James wrote in his pioneering treatise on the psychology of habit. What we habitually let in — ideas into the mind, people into the heart — shape what we become. In lives that begin as accidents of chance and go on being besieged by myriad chance events beyond our control, the choices that become habits are the most powerful instrument we have for being active agents in our destiny — none more transformative than the habits by which we govern our attention. 
Art by Ofra Amit for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.
Novelist Samantha Harvey considers how to best resist being turned into passive pawns in the attention economy in her conversation with my friend Natascha McElhone who, besides being a beloved actor in her primary life (and generously lending her time and talent to narrating the audiobooks of Figuring and Traversal), co-hosts the excellent podcast Where Shall We Meet — a guided tour of the minds and worlds of some of the most interesting and creative people alive, from writers and philosophers to astrophysicists and polar explorers.
With an eye to the great heist of mind that is social media — a system built to benefit the bottom line of companies by exploiting our psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, training us to be passive “users” of “content” rather than active participants in the co-creation of meaning that is literature — Harvey offers a compassionate way of meeting ourselves where we (like or or not) are, and beginning there in the project of striking a better balance between passive and active attention:
There are times when it’s incredibly active and pleasurable and generative to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. It can spark all sorts of thoughts and challenge things that you felt and give you new information… It’s a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself… I just get to call it research… We have at our disposal this amazing world of not just information but of other people’s thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that’s a great invitation, I think. [The question is] how do we stay active in that process when built into the structure is this imperative to become passive.
Art by Kenard Pak for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.
Responding to Natascha’s observation that active reading is not unlike dreaming — a kind of sustained and thrilling presence in another world by an act of unselfing that requires, as Natascha puts it, “being in one place for long enough to traverse into someone else’s psyche, to be interested enough to get out of your own head and into someone else’s” — Harvey reflects:
When I write, and also when I read, and probably in slightly different ways, dream-like spaces open up. And I think that is [what good books] invite — they ask for attention in a way that nothing else does, quite… The act of attention and of imagination takes work… but [books] also offer us something… spellbinding… [A great book] will have you enraptured, it will hold you in this dream space. That’s what you want as a writer — to arrest your reader, to to take them up in the spell and not let them down and not make them want to leave.
This, she observes, is the difference between reading, which demands the active imagination, and consuming “content” by scrolling passively through a “feed”; the difference between being compelled to stay, by means of a generous offering of another world, and being coerced to stay, by means of nervous system manipulation. It is also the difference between reading for information and reading for illumination. Harvey likens the former to “a corridor along which information is carried” that you passively pace, whereas the latter — the experience great books give us — opens doors on all sides of the corridor so inviting that you begin to actively and joyfully wander all the different rooms, spellbound by what you find there:
Fiction… opens up the possibility of other consciousnesses, other spaces, other ideas — and not just the ones that the author provides by telling you information, but the ones that are opened up in your own psyche through your own memories… multiple, countless rooms that you walk through, one to the other, and you never really know what’s in the next room or how many rooms there are, but it’s space — in a life that can sometimes feel rather breathless and and full and stressful and and distracted, suddenly you’re in something quite palatial that is only limited by your own imagination.
Art by Sophie Blackall for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.
This difference between passive consumption and active imagination sounds to me like the difference between a trance and a dream. In a trance, something other than ourselves is in possession of our minds. In a dream, parts of us — the shy, the unheard, the neglected, the wild — come to the fore and begin to live, boldly and imaginatively, returning us to reality a little more integrated, a little more awake to our own complexity. Dreaming, which evolved in the bird brain as a laboratory for practicing the possible, is a highly active and dynamic state in constant, if coded, conversation with the conscious self of our waking life. It is an act of unselfing in order to become more fully ourselves. To refuse to be entranced and choose to be enchanted may be the most important habit in that most important choice of investing our consciousness: to whom and what we gift our attention.
Couple with Doris Lessing on how to read a book and how to read the world, then revisit Virginia Woolf on why we read.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, 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. |
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one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
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| 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. |
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“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”
I have been thinking lately about words, the power of them and the prison of them, the way we task them with containing the inarticulable and then come to mistake them for the contents, the way they are still our best hope for bridging the abyss between us in order to be understood. And yet outside of music and mathematics, the dream of a common language is just a dream. We speak of language as if it were unitary, forgetting that within any one tongue are nested infinities — the slang of subcultures, the vernacular of different generations and heritages, the private lexicon of lovers. When the parts we live with try to speak to each other, they speak in different tongues we keep translating to discern the whole and articulate it to others, to say who we are and what we want, how we suffer and how we like to be loved. 
bell hooks, 1960s
bell hooks (September 25, 1952–December 15, 2021) takes on these infinities in one of the essays collected in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (public library). With an eye to a line from an Adrienne Rich poem that lodged itself in her soul and became the lever for her reckoning with language, she writes:
Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will… to challenge and assist.
“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” Rich wrote in her epochal collection The Dream of a Common Language. We speak our loves to make them true, to make them tender. To say “I want you” is to walk right up to the edge of the abyss and leap, hoping to be caught; it is to say “I want to live.” A generation after Pablo Neruda made words an object of desire, hooks makes desire the subject of words:
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.
[…]
To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book
We are not, however, merely the users of language — we are its makers. Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of our lives. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. We can bend ideas with words, we can even break them to make a mosaic of the pieces in the image of the world we want to live in, in the shape of our desires.
Reflecting on desire as the antidote to dualism, the most primal integration of the body and the mind, hooks writes:
To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular… There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do… liberating ourselves in language.
Couple with hooks on hove, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem and artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated love letter to words.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, 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. |
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one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
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| 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. |
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