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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 — Simone de Beauvoir on marriage and the freedom to change, the mysterious botanical origin of the heart symbol, and a Chilean artist's stunning embroideries for the world's first scientific book about alien life — 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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Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:
Learn something.
Help someone.
Feel it all.
We need our sciences to learn how the universe works, to know what we don’t yet know and to comprehend it. We need our arts to learn how the heart works, to feel what we are unwilling or unable to feel and hold it without apprehension. We need both — knowledge and feeling, intelligent comprehension and emotional intelligence — to be capable of empathy, as well as self-compassion.
The damage of our time is that it pragmatizes everything, reducing the wonder of curiosity to the practical application of discoveries, reducing the symphony of feeling to the hold music of self-help, reducing human beings to data points in a log of user statistics and political polls. It is not only an insult but a violence to our humanity, the only antidote to which is a passionate defense of the irreducible things that make us human — those things useless as moonlight, unnecessary as music, as love: There is no practical value to apprehending the magnificent eye of the scallop or the mystery of the ghost pipe, no practical value to Leaves of Grass, yet these are the things that mediate the worst propensities of our kind — our capacity for despair, which is the price of consciousness, and our capacity for war, which is the cost of despair.
A century ago, as the world was recovering from its first global war, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) foresaw another unless humanity could find a way to resist this dehumanizing cult of utility. We didn’t then, but maybe, just maybe, we can now with the prescription Russell offers in his wonderful essay “‘Useless Knowledge,'” later included in the altogether revelatory collection In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (public library). 
Bertrand Russell
Observing that the Renaissance was so transformative because its “main motive” was delight — “the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers” — and that the Enlightenment was so transformative because it probed the workings of the universe without expectation of practical gain, he writes:
 Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, men have questioned more and more vigorously the value of “useless” knowledge, and have come increasingly to believe that the only knowledge worth having is that which is applicable to some part of the economic life of the community… Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill… This is part and parcel of the same movement which has led to compulsory military service, boy scouts, the organisation of political parties, and the dissemination of political passion by the Press.
In a sentiment he would soon develop in his excellent essay on the value of idleness, he adds:
We do not like to think of anyone lazily enjoying life, however refined may be the quality of his enjoyment. We feel that everybody ought to be doing something to help on the great cause (whatever it may be), the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not leisure of mind, therefore, to acquire any knowledge except such as will help us in the fight for whatever it may happen to be that we think important.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss
But while the usefulness of “useful” knowledge in making the modern world cannot be denied — here we are, with our computers and airplanes and ever-growing life-expectancies — we need its “useless” counterpart to make life not longer, not more productive, but wider and deeper and more present. Russell writes:
There is indirect utility, of various different kinds, in the possession of knowledge which does not contribute to technical efficiency. I think some of the worst features of the modern world could be improved by a greater encouragement of such knowledge and a less ruthless pursuit of mere professional competence… When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder… Narrowness of outlook has caused oblivion of some powerful counteracting force.
Several years before the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga composed his revelatory treatise on how play made us human, Russell adds:
Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment. But if play is to serve its purpose, it must be possible to find pleasure and interest in matters not connected with work.
And yet play is an active rather than passive form of leisure. In a prophetic sentiment anticipating the menacing mesmerism of social media, the way it would turn the human animal into a screen zombie, he observes:
The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others… If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a solo print and more.
Half a lifetime before he looked back to reflect on the key to growing old contentedly — “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life” — he writes:
[Such useless] knowledge, when it is successfully assimilated, forms the character of a man’s thoughts and desires, making them concern themselves, in part at least, with large impersonal objects, not only with matters of immediate importance to himself. It has been too readily assumed that, when a man has acquired certain capacities by means of knowledge, he will use them in ways that are socially beneficial. The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill… It must be admitted that highly educated people are sometimes cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are less often so than people whose minds have lain fallow. The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to the average. When a lynching takes place, the ring-leaders are almost invariably very ignorant men. This is not because mental cultivation produces positive humanitarian feelings, though it may do so; it is rather because it gives other interests than the ill-treatment of neighbours, and other sources of self-respect than the assertion of domination.
Even Bertrand Russell did not foresee that within a century bullies and lynchers with fallow minds would take the reins of superpowers, waging wars by whims and feeding the fragile ego’s lust for power by terrorizing the powerless. But he did give us, as plainly and precisely as possible, a prescription for prevention:
Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction… Hamlet is held up as an awful warning against thought without action, but no one holds up Othello as a warning against action without thought… For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion. A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.
Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat
Describing what Iris Murdoch would later term “unselfing,” which she identified as the chief reward of engaging with art and nature, he adds:
A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.
These contemplative acts of unselfing, Russell notes, have “advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound, [from] minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates [to] the difficulty of securing international co-operation.” In passage evocative of physicist Richard Feynman’s classic Ode to a Flower, he reflects:
Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word “precocious,” because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.
[…]
But while the trivial pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial worries of practical life, the more important merits of contemplation are in relation to the greater evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind march of nations into unnecessary disaster. For those to whom dogmatic religion can no longer bring comfort, there is need of some substitute, if life is not to become dusty and harsh and filled with trivial self-assertion.
In a passage of overwhelming prescience, he adds:
The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote. The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.
Complement with Russell on the secret of happiness, the two pillars of human flourishing, how to heal an ailing and divided world, then try an astronaut’s antidote to despair.
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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I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends. 
Emily Levine (Portrait by John Keatley)
Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.
When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.
But it was the first poem Emily ever read to me, to break me in, that stands as eternal testament to her spirit, to the playfulness with which she approached even the most poignant aspects of this life. 
Marianne Moore (Photograph: George Platt Lynes)
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887–February 5, 1972) was in her early thirties and the world had just come undone by its first global war when, reckoning with the eternal question of what the point of art is in these matters of life and death, she composed this perfect poem — a vindication, a consecration, and, perhaps above all, an invitation:
POETRY
by Marianne Moore
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us — that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
ball fan, the statistician — case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” — above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion —
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then savor Emily reading the ravishing “You Can’t Have It All.”
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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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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MY NEW BOOK
BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
Available as a print and more. Find the original deck of 100 bird divinations, along with my process and the story behind them, here.
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