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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 — how to help someone change: the samurai guide to giving feedback; Nick Cave on how to bear your sorrows; a 200-year-old recipe for raising low spirits — 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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Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, in a whisper that soon became a symphony, life arose to give us such ceaseless wonders as the ghost pipe and the ginkgo, the bowerbird and the eye of the scallop.
Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate the wonder of how we went from mitochondria to minds in The Forgotten Teachers: How Nature Wrote the Story of Life (public library) — a love letter to that place between knowledge and mystery, where science illuminates the spirituality of nature.
Beginning the story where nature began it, Isett writes in the opening chapter, “Ocean”:
 Once upon a time, Ocean taught life how to begin. The lesson began somewhere warm, like the shallow waters of a calm bay, or the billowing broth of a hydrothermal vent. In these places, warm water provided enough energy to link up chemicals that normally stayed apart. Rings of carbon, called “nucleotides,” clumped together just the way letters do to make words. And while most of the clumps formed nonsensical tangles, some formed babbling threads of an early genetic text called “RNA.” With Ocean’s encouragement, a chain reaction began: instead of dissolving back into the sea, chemicals began to fold into delicate structures that enabled even more chemical reactions to take place. These early molecules, many now called “ribozymes,” are thought to have sustained the first whispers of life. Our story had begun.
The story unfolds like an Eames powers-of-ten shot, moving up the orders of complexity until the first grainy pixels begin to form a recognizable picture of the living world — the first cells, inside which “our earliest ancestors drafted and composed”; the skeleton, the lung, the fin that became a foot; and, along the way, the emergence of photosynthesis and fungi, of symbionts and sleep.
Carrying the wonder of it all are Biçen’s vibrant illustrations, part fairy tale and part psychedelic dream.
Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature’s own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; page photographs by Maria Popova
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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Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that magnifies the concerns of the present, not through the telescope that squints at the distant reaches of the future, but through a periscope that rises above the surface of the mainstream to see past the horizon of the era’s givens, into the possibilities of times to come.
As a young man raised in a deeply religious era, homeschooled by his strict pastor father, George Forster (November 27, 1754–January 10, 1794) would write to his youngest sister that happiness is only to be found through proximity with God, that God is “boundless love that transcends all other love.” Over the course of his short and periscopic life, he would come to see that God is just another word for nature; he would come to see that nature in all its “active living power” as a “magic net of countless threads joined by countless knots, where each thing is connected to all and all to each” — the ultimate “system of divine concordance.” 
Left: barnacles on a crab shell. Right: Trifid and Lagoon nebulae (Vera Rubin Observatory).
By seeing the profound interleaving of life, he would also see the dangerous delusion of our artificial divisions — between the races and the sexes, between the body and the mind, between the observer and the observed. He would incubate these ideas — radical now, nothing less than revolutionary then — as a young unknown naturalist on James Cook’s voyages into the South Seas and would go on to seed them in the most fertile scientific mind of his epoch. “I have spent half a century, wherever a restless, eventful life has taken me,” Alexander von Humboldt would reflect at the end of his long and far-reaching life, ” telling myself and others what I owe to my teacher and friend Georg Forster.”
Andrea Wulf animates the life of this forgotten visionary in The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris (public library) — one of those rare books in which a single life, rendered with rigor and compassion in all its delicate particularity, becomes a lens for the best in human nature: our passion for the possible, our stubborn refusal to resign ourselves to the system, our bottomless capacity for kindness. 
George Forster
Nowhere was Forster more visionary, more ahead of his time and still ahead of ours, than in his defiance of Descartes, refusing to reduce intelligence to the workings of the rational mind, refusing to reduce wonder to a calculation. His long-ago lamentation rattles the bones of the modern mind still haunted by the Cartesian delusion that intelligence is a thing only of the mind:
Never before has there been a greater danger of elevating cold reason into a universally worshipped idol at the expense of feeling.
Wulf shades in the subtleties of his radicalism:
George Forster observed with both his mind and his heart, determined to “banish all rash hypotheses back into their small closet.” The emphasis he placed on feeling rather than reason and objectivity stood in contrast to many (but not all) Enlightenment thinkers who valued rational enquiry, repeatable experiments and empirical observation over emotions and subjectivity… He dismissed what he called the reliance on reason alone — these “aberrations of the mind.” He believed that “in the sharply defined forms of abstraction, all that is good, noble and great… is irretrievably lost.”
Forster yearned to know the inner life of nature, which is the crux of all science, but he came to know it with more than the mind. He moved through the world with the virtuosic noticing of a poet, opening his full creaturely sensorium to the breadth of wonder between the wildflowers and the stars. An epoch before quantum mechanics implicated the observer in the observed, bending the central dogma of science and its dream of objectivity, before philosopher Martha Nussbaum insisted that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” George Forster implicated himself, a reasoning creature of feeling, in the discoveries he recounted in A Voyage Round the World — his unprecedented rendering of nature not as a series of discreet portraits of particular features framed by particular disciplines but as a vast panorama of processes and phenomena inseparable from one another and from our participancy in them: humus and history, climate and culture.
Wulf writes:
George believed that you had to see the world in order to understand it. There was no point in trying to make sense of everything in your study, he explained, “because in the end, one has nothing else than what comes through these two small openings in your eyes and sets the vibrations of the brain in motion!” Individual experience was indispensable. “Two travellers,” he wrote, “seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and each reported the fact differently, according to his sensations, and his peculiar mode of thinking.” … Unlike most of his contemporaries, George believed that reason alone was not enough to understand the world. That didn’t mean that he diminished the value of observation, but he had no interest in simply collecting data — being “a mere compiler… that I cannot do.” Those thinkers who worshipped cold evidence alone “had their wish; facts were collected in all parts of the world, and yet knowledge was not increased.” Years later he would explain that “the first point from which all knowledge is gained is based on Empfindung” — a German term that can be translated as “sensations,” though it is more nuanced as it not only refers to the physical senses but also implies a capacity to feel and an awareness of a subjective experience of the world.
Emanating from his visionary book was the fundamental feature of his visionary life: his love of nature and his love of humanity, entwined beyond separation — a living testament to the single answer pulsating beneath all of our questions. Forster’s own exuberant words reveal a thinker unafraid to feel, a mind lucid enough to know that love is our highest form of knowledge:
I thank God that there is such a delicious thing as human love in this world; it lifts us up; it chains us to each other, no matter how distant we are; it is the most comforting, happiest feeling in the world!
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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In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance to learn from one of the world’s greatest storytellers.
After a decade as a struggling obscure writer, Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) — brilliant, strange, so frail and tubercular he was always on the brink of death — had just been catapulted into global fame by Treasure Island, published a year earlier. With her mother’s help, Adelaide procured an introduction to the author and his fierce wife Fanny. By the perfect balance of audacity, veneration, and kindness, she was eventually welcomed into the “enchanted palace” of the couple’s world — first as their affectionately nicknamed “game-keeper” (for looking after their menagerie of stray cats and pigeons), then as Stevenson’s scribe (the typewriter was still a clunky novelty), and eventually, to her disbelieving exhilaration, as his pupil.
Thirty-seven years later, with Stevenson long gone, she set down her memories of life at Skerryvore — the name the Stevensons had given their home, after a lighthouse built by the author’s uncle on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland — in the slender, utterly delightful 1926 gem R.L.S. and His Sine Qua Non, Flashlights from Skerryvore (public library | public domain). Punctuating her loving recollections is a series of invaluable writing lessons from one of the greatest storytellers our civilization has produced. 
Robert Louis Stevenson by Henry Walter Barnett, 1883.
Clad in his velvet coat and dark red tie, wrapped in a Kashmir shawl, perched on the edge of a suitcase, Stevenson would give the young woman assignments, then listen to her read them out loud and, with amicable brutality, offer his suggestions for improvement. In an era when women comprised less than 1% of published authors, often writing under initials or pseudonyms to guard from bias, Stevenson — a fierce feminist by the standards of his era, and even by the standards of ours — believed that women were not any lesser at writing than men, but that their writing suffered because they were too proud to edit, to accept any “suggestion at amendment,” to concede that the first attempt is rarely the best one can do. (Let us not be too proud to admit that he might be somewhat right.) His greatest gift to his young pupil was the humility and discipline of editing. She recounts:
Though as a critic absolutely merciless, nobody in the world rewarded more lavishly or with keener pleasure what he called “a good, honest piece of work.”
Her initiation into the craft began with listening — she would sit in on Stevenson reading his drafts of what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Fanny — his lifelong collaborator, editor, and caretaker, who carried her perennially sickly husband (“just an animated bundle of shawls and wraps, with long, thin hair and burning eyes,” Adelaide remembers) up and down the stairs between his bedroom and the Blue Room where he wrote. Fanny would in turn offer her own merciless feedback as Adelaide absorbed every word.
Eventually, Stevenson began giving her direct instruction. Because all originality begins in imitation, and because creativity is crippled without craftsmanship, he first tasked her with reading some of her favorite authors and attempting short pieces of writing in each of their style. To then discover her own voice, he assigned her a short description of something she loved, giving her a tight word count and a day to finish. She chose her garden. Despite her vivid feeling for its “unique charm,” attempt after attempt at a written description “ended in a passion of despair.” She stayed up all night until, by sunrise, she had arrived at a version to her satisfaction, even edged with pride. But when she presented it to Stevenson, he tore it apart. After doing some math on the language, dividing the word count by the word parts, he indicted her prose for containing a staggering 17% adjectives — “and mostly weak ones at that!” — then exhorted her to always choose descriptive verbs over them:
If you want me to see your garden, don’t, for pity’s sake, talk about ‘climbing roses’ or ‘green, mossy lawns.’ Tell me, if you like, that roses twined themselves round the apple trees and fell in showers from the branches. Never dare to tell me again anything about ‘green grass.’ Tell me how the lawn was flecked with shadows. I know perfectly well that grass is green. So does everybody else in England. What you have to learn is something different from that. Make me see what it was that made your garden distinct from a thousand others.
He then instructed her to read with a sensitive ear and listen for the one word that breaks “the rhythm of a sentence otherwise neatly balanced.” One well chosen word, he taught her, can “send the breath of life through a paralysed sentence,” can serve as a “landmark” amid “a featureless desert of words” to help the writer “get back home to the heart of things.”
Looking back on her experience, Adelaide synthesizes some of his most invaluable guardrails against bad writing:
- Keep it tight to keep it strong: “Never let a long sentence get out of hand. If it begins to run loose, tie it in a knot with a good strong inversion: swing it round on a pivot.”
- Don’t describe things by what they are not: “Never state a thing backwards.”
- Become a tuning fork for meaning: “Read every sentence aloud to yourself. If the sense is not limpidly clear, make it so before you pass on. If needs be, write it over and over again, but nothing with which your own ear is dissatisfied must ever be allowed to stand.”
- Use good language even when relaying bad speech: When recreating dialogue in writing, “never let the vulgar craze for realistic writing run away with you”: paraphrase “commonplace talk” in a way that remains “true to the spirit of a speaker” but elevates the style.
But perhaps the most potent advice on writing — that which emboldened Adelaide to actually become an author — came from Fanny Stevenson. When Adelaide first confided in her that she had been “only trying” at writing for years but often felt “hopeless,” Fanny took a long silence, then offered:
Whatever you have honestly tried to do well was worth doing. It always is.
Complement with other abiding wisdom on writing from Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, Rudyard Kipling, Octavia Butler, and Mary Oliver, then revisit Stevenson on what makes life worth living.
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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