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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 — 92-year-old artist Sheila Hicks on the key to creative vitality, how to manage heartbreak like Frida Kahlo, the elusive science of the present moment — 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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Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks of character and conduct, comporting themselves in a manner painfully inferior to what you know them to be capable of.
What to do?
The problem of whether and how people change is the eternal problem of being alive. Changing our own ways of being is difficult enough, prey enough to paradox and peril; changing another is nigh impossible and, if attempted harshly or self-righteously, dangerous to both parties. But if an honorable and loving relationship between two people is rooted in “refining the truths they can tell each other,” then holding up a mirror for course-correction is an act of love. And though this may be the tenderest and most enduring gift we can give one another, given the wrong way the gift can feel like a grenade against which the other person mounts defenses so steely the relationship itself can shatter in the collision.
How to ensure that our feedback falls on receptive ears is what the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) explores in a portion of his classic Hakagure (public library) — the posthumously published collection of his teachings, which also gave us his immortal guide to living fully by dying every day. 
Art by Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)
Considering the necessity of this feedback loop, the urgency with which we need each other in it, he writes:
 We cannot easily correct our defects and weak points as they are dyed deeply within us… To give a person one’s opinion and correct his faults is an important thing. It is compassionate and comes first in matters of service. But the way of doing this is extremely difficult.
An epoch before Joan Didion warned us not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, Tsunetomo cautions that it is not a kindness to flag faults with a stance of superiority:
To discover the good and bad points of a person is an easy thing, and to give an opinion concerning them is easy, too. For the most part, people think that they are being kind by saying the things that others find distasteful or difficult to say. But if it is not received well… [it] is completely worthless.
Observing that shaming is an especially ineffectual instrument of change, he offers a tactical field guide to fertile feedback:
To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood. Judge the occasion, and determine whether it is better by letter or at the time of leave-taking. Praise their good qualities and use every device to encourage them, perhaps by talking about your faults in a way that allows them to reflect on their own. Have them receive this the way a thirsty person takes to water, and it will be an opinion that will correct faults.
Couple with pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers on how to bridge breakdowns in communication, then revisit this paragon of constructive criticism in Margaret Fuller’s letter of rejection to the young Thoreau. 
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
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Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service opened with a reflection by her partner Alice — whose near-loss inspired one of the greatest poems ever written — that included what Elizabeth had always told her was “the only sensible advice she ever heard,” from a man she never met — one of her two favorite authors. 
Sydney Smith
By the time a friend’s teenage daughter begged his advice on how to cope with a visitation of the darkness we now call depression, the Anglican clergyman Sydney Smith (June 3, 1771–February 22, 1845) had established himself as one of England’s wisest and wittiest writers.
It is no small thing that a famous man of letters took time to comfort a young woman born into a world in which she would be denied education, that elemental torchlight for the mind: Epochs ahead of his time, Smith believed that knowledge is power and resented “the ignorance in which women are kept” by men “exclaiming against every species of power, because it is connected with danger.” But he also knew that the danger within can often outmenace the danger without. “The truly happy man,” he believed, “is he, who has early discovered, that he carries within his own bosom his worst enemies.” Although he was born into the preferred chromosomal arrangement and social station, Smith himself had grown up with the darkness as his constant companion as he helplessly watched his mother agonize with epilepsy.
In the final year of his fifties, Smith offered the 13-year-old girl his tips for combating the inner darkness — perhaps the advice he wished he had received when he was her age — entwining the playful and the poignant, the ironic and the earnest. Two centuries ahead of what modern science knows about nature and the default mode network of the brain, he urged her to spend time outdoors. Against the conventions of Victorian society, which made an art of repression and dissociation, he advocated for expressing feelings openly and unselfconsciously. In a country whose national sport remains self-deprecation, he encouraged her to be kind to herself. Even his signature — written in the style of Victorian epistolary etiquette — is numbered as one of his twenty prescriptions, this subtle insistence that reciprocity is part of what keeps us alive through the darkness, that to reach out for a friend and have them reach back is an act of light. 
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days — a book of cards. Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. More divinations here.
The letter, published in the 1956 volume Selected writings of Sydney Smith (public library) edited by W.H. Auden, reads:
Feb. 16th, 1820
Dear Georgiana,
Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have — so I feel for you. Here are my prescriptions.
- Live as well as you dare.
- Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.
- Amusing books.
- Short views of human life — not further than dinner or tea.
- Be as busy as you can.
- See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
- And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
- Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely — they are always worse for dignified concealment.
- Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
- Compare your lot with that of other people.
- Don’t expect too much from human life — a sorry business at the best.
- Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and every thing likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.
- Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
- Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
- Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.
- Struggle by little and little against idleness.
- Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
- Keep good blazing fires.
- Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
- Believe me, dear Georgiana, your devoted servant, Sydney Smith
But Smith’s mightiest antidote to unhappiness was something far simpler yet more difficult than all these pragmatisms combined.
In his popular sermons, published in two volumes a decade earlier, he had observed that “gratuitous happiness is never conceded to man at any period of life,” but we can cultivate it with our habits of being — though, paradoxically, the more we strive for it, the more it eludes us. “In seeking to be more than righteous,” he wrote, “we become less [in our] rash vows, over-strained, and heated resolutions, needless self-affliction, dread of happiness, and all that innumerable train of evils.” Over and over, he admonished against the grandiosity with which we approach the notion, the dream, the hallucination of happiness: “The causes of great happiness, and misery, rarely occur,” he wrote, but it is the “little circumstances, and events that appear trifling, singly considered, makeup the sum of human enjoyment, or misery.” Over and over, he insisted that the “great ingredient for the increase of happiness, and the proper use of life, is the cultivation of kindness and benevolence”; that mercy — for others, for the world, and perhaps for ourselves — is the only path to “rapturous happiness.” 
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days
This elemental truth is contoured most clearly by the negative space around it as we look back on our own lives. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” George Saunders would rue two centuries later in his tender meditation on kindness. In the rearview mirror, Smith knew, we come to realize “that the greatest misfortune we have suffered, is the sum total of useless vexation inflicted on ourselves, and others” by failing to incline toward benevolence. To be seen as benevolent — by others, but especially in the mirror of our own conscience — “is a firm barrier against the waves of chance, a lasting, solid happiness, which we bear about us, like strength, and health.”
Two hundred years hence, in a culture that has trained us to prefer being right over being kind, a culture perhaps not coincidentally menaced by a pervasive undercurrent of melancholy, Smith’s perspective is a lovely reminder that our greatest antidote to helplessness is always to help someone, that our strongest stay against despair is the simple knowledge that kindness is always within reach, that it is not a whim of our ethics but our evolutionary inheritance.
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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Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather than a natural function of being alive, of feeling life deeply and living it fully. All our sorrows have been wasted if we have not learned to suffer and to be surprised by the door at the end of our suffering, on the other wide of which is simply the world, which keeps on worlding. It is not healing that allows us to go on but integration, allowing our losses to live right alongside our joys for either to mean something, to jolt us from the stupor of indifference that is worse than death. 
Nick Cave
No one has articulated this more plainly and profoundly than Nick Cave in reflecting on the anniversary of his young son’s death:
It is early morning in Nîmes. I am waiting for coffee while looking out of the window of the small hotel where Susie and I are staying. The square below is waking up. There are a few cars, a woman walking a dog, a kid on a scooter, an old man smoking on a bench. Today, Susie and I plan to walk around the town for a bit, maybe visit a church, and maybe find the river that people say runs clean and cold. Later, I’ll play a show at the amphitheatre.
I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won’t be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.
This may be the most discomposing aspect of loss — how impartially the world goes on when your world has been shattered. And yet the great paradox is that it is precisely by surrendering to this ongoingness, both dispassionate and rife with wonder, that we are returned to life. 
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.. Available as a print and more.
Nick paints a gorgeous still life of this bright ongoingness:
Susie wakes now, and I sit beside her. She says she dreamt about Arthur. Arthur often comes to her in that way. The dreams are simple, poetic. She tells me she dreamt she was in a dark place, perhaps a wood, calling for him. But it was too dim, and she couldn’t find him.
These feelings of loss drift through our bodies like ghosts. They settle in our cells, in our blood, gathering around days like this like weather patterns, shaping us in ways we cannot understand. It is a sad day. I can see it in my wife’s eyes. But it is an ordinary day too, a beautiful day. The best day. Susie is already at the window, pulling back the curtain, looking out over the town, the sun shining on her face.
Couple with Hemingway’s moving letter of consolation to a couple who lost their son, then revisit Nick Cave on how to use your suffering, the two pillars of a meaningful life, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
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. |
|
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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BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
Available as a stand-alone print. Find the original deck of 100 bird divinations, along with my process and the story behind them, here.
A BOOK
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