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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 — the bird that is your life; rehabilitating the active imagination in the age of fractured attention; bell hooks on language and desire — 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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We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.
 THE WILDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET
by Maria Popova
You wouldn’t have bet on it,
the battered rock
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
wouldn’t have guessed
that it would bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it would mushroom
mountains and minds,
and the hummingbird wing
whirring a hundred times faster
than your eye can blink,
and your eye that took
five hundred million years
from trilobite to telescope,
and the unhurried orange lichen
growing on the black boulder
two hundred times more slowly
than the tectonic plates beneath
are drifting apart
and the marbled orca
carrying her dead calf
down the entire edge
of the continent,
carrying the weight
of consciousness
and consciousness
how it windows
this tenement
of breath and bone
with wonder,
how it hovers over everything,
gigantic and unnecessary,
like music,
like love.
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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“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of the possible.
Everything that is possible is in some sense real, because behind every “what if” is the “if/then” of a causality tethered back to the first thing that ever happened — the inception of this particular universe with its particular set of permissions — and dominoing forward to what has not yet happened but is happenable in this very universe. Hope is the potential energy of reality. But it takes trust in the possible to release it. 
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
Alongside physics and poetry, fairy tales may be our best instrument for discerning the axioms of reality and building from them scale models of possibility. (“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”)
In her revelatory reckoning with how fairy tales reveal us to ourselves, found in her posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) examines the relationship between the hope and trust, and the dangers of confusing them, in our quest for the possible. She writes:
The impossible awaits the hero of a fairy tale. But how is a person to reach the impossible if not, precisely, by means of the impossible?
[…]
The fairy-tale hero… must forget all his* limits when he contends with the impossible and pay constant attention to these limits when he performs the impossible.
Art by Stanislav Kolíbal from The Fairy Tale Tree
The great appeal of the fairy tale and its ultimate payoff, Campo argues, is “victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships” — that is, a new organizing principle that is not deterministic but possibilistic. “I said to my soul,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Addressing the soul of the person who wishes to be the hero of their own fate — that is, to refuse to be a victim of the myth of the impossible — Campo writes:
Whom does a marvelous fate befall in fairy tales? He who trusts hopelessly in what is beyond hope. Hope and trust must not be confused. They are different things, as the expectation of fortune here on earth is different from the second theological virtue. He who blindly, obstinately repeats “let us hope” does not trust; he is really only hoping for a lucky break in the momentarily propitious game governed by the law of necessity. Those who trust, on the other hand, do not count on particular events, for they are sure there is an economy that encompasses all events and surpasses their meaning the way a tapestry, a symbolic carpet, surpasses the flowers and animals that compose it.
Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)
The great paradox of real life — this social contract so trammeled by permissions as to be blind to possibilities — is that those who see the tapestry are often seen as mad. (This, of course, has always been the case — take Kepler, take Blake, take Dickinson.) An epoch after G.K. Chesterton contemplated how we stay sane in a mad world and offered his insightful taxonomy of life as a poem, a novel, or a fairy tale, Campo writes:
In the fairy tale, the victor is the madman who reasons backward, who reverses the masks, who discerns the secret thread in the fabric, the inexplicable play of echoes in a melody; he who moves with ecstatic precision in the labyrinth of formulas, numbers, antiphons, and rituals common to the Gospels, fairy tales, and poetry. He believes, like the saint, that a person can walk on water, that a fervent spirit can leap over walls. He believes, like the poet, in the word, from which he can conjure concrete wonders.
Couple with Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope and J.R.R. Tolkien on fairy tales and the psychology of fantasy.
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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This essay is adapted from Traversal.
 “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to read the poetry of nature, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.”
When the first European colonists made landfall on New Zealand’s shores in Humboldt’s lifetime, the cats and rats that descended from their ships began decimating the native population of black robins — sparrow-sized birds with yellow-soled feet that had evolved without mammalian predators, mate for life in monogamous pairs, and raise only two chicks per year in cuplike nests close to the ground.
Bird by bird, claw by claw, there were only seven survivors within a century. 
Black robin among other native birds (John Gerrard Keulemans, 1907)
Desperate to encourage the survivors to breed, conservationists moved them to Mangere Island, where twenty thousand trees were planted just to provide a hospitable habitat for the robins. But they would not pair — mysterious are the ways of even a bird’s heart, for it is all a single mystery.
Two of the seven died.
Among the five survivors there was a sole female capable of laying fertile eggs — a robin so aged that she came to be known as Old Blue. At eight, she had outlived the average black robin twofold. With the survival of the species resting on Old Blue’s near flightless wings, scientists thought that if her offspring were raised by surrogate parents, she would be able to lay more eggs.
Warblers were the first designated foster parents, but they failed to feed the chicks enough.
Tomtits were tried next, but they were too successful as foster parents — the black robin chicks grew up perceiving themselves as tomtits and wanted to mate only with other tomtits.
Finally, the chicks were returned to Old Blue, in whose care they thrived as black robins.
A single mother brought a whole species back from the brink of extinction.
Old Blue lived to be fourteen and raised eleven chicks. All the black robins in the world today, numbering around 250, are fractal emissaries of her genes — a winged reminder that immensities of harm can be undone by a single act of tenacious tenderness.
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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