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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 — olkien on how to fall in love with life, regret vs. remorse and how to reconcile your most painful mistakes, and more — 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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Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tells us back to ourselves, and like every story, it can be true or false.
Love is the most powerful enchantment we know, the most transformative if true and the most dangerous if false.
“When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it,” W.H. Auden observed in one of the most insightful things I have ever read, adding the haunting admonition: “All true enchantments fade in time… A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.”
False enchantments are those we cast upon ourselves — by confusing love and longing, by mistaking the myths of our culture for our own truths, by replaying the patterns that keep breaking our hearts. True enchantments come unbidden, take us by surprise, defy wish and will. True love, then, is a kind of enlightened enchantment — haunted, yes, by the fundament of loss, but redeemed by how it sharpens and magnifies our contact with life, how it allows us, paradoxically, to touch the bare skin of reality and tremble with bewilderment that such a wonder is possible. 
Art from Reweaving the Rainbow
In Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (public library), anthropologist and ecological philosopher Patrick Curry offers a field guide to the difficult discernment of the true from the false, treating love as both a special case of and a fulcrum for our arts, both love and art being a way of “adding to, while partaking of, the creative processes of life itself.”
In a sentiment that conjures up that lovely line from The Velveteen Rabbit — “Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.” — he writes:
 Enchantment is not something you do; it’s something that happens to you. Its opposite is thus will and all its relations… When and where you are trying to make something happen, or make someone (including yourself) do something — or when you are the object of those desires — enchantment is absent.
It is absent because then you are in projection, in a transactional paradigm, exerting an effort in order to be repaid by a desired end. Curry writes:
Enchantment is fundamentally relational. It is wonder at, or enchantment by, another… Apprehending the enchanting other, one is apprehended by them.
[…]
The other party in this process can be anyone or anything: a human being, another animal, a plant, a place, a sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, or even an idea. But we are a particular kind of being — not random, infinitely variable or, in that self-flattering delusion, universal – so enchantment tends to happen in certain domains: principally love, art, religion, food and drink, learning, sport, humour, and nature.
Paradoxically, the engine of enchantment is not similarity but complementarity, which implies difference. It is the hand that touches another across the abyss between us. A generation after Mary Oliver contemplated how differences bring couples closer together, Curry observes:
Enchanted relationship takes place as an encounter, typically across a gap of difference. The boundaries remain, but in being bridged they cease to matter… transcended in connection. When that happens, you are in enchantment’s realm: the more-than-human, which includes but also exceeds the human. However, friendship — less showy than erotic love — can run just as deep, and is often more enduring.
With an eye to Wallace Stevens’s koan-like pronouncement that “in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of reality,” Curry reflects:
William James once asked of a scenario where Jack is deeply in love with Jill, whom everyone else sees as perfectly ordinary: who sees her more as she truly is? He answered, surely it is Jack; he apprehends a truth about Jill which is inaccessible to the rest of us. That is why enchantment doesn’t have the qualities of a dream, or a spell, but rather of reality. Indeed, enchanted reality is more real than either ordinary reality or dreams, which are daylight reason’s inversion but not its opposite. In this sense, enchantment is our baseline natural condition while, as Stevens says, so-called realism “is a corruption of reality.”
This dreamlike quality also means that enchantment is impervious to the workings of the will, untouchable by the commands and petitions of our ordinary waking consciousness:
Because no one is in charge, enchantment is wild, unbiddable. That inconvenient truth means that although it can be invited, it cannot be created, commanded, or managed.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
This aspect of enchantment may be the supreme reminder that we are children of chance, a felicitous accident of atoms. We may have the illusion of choice — an illusion Adrienne Rich so poignantly ventriloquized in her insistence that “no one’s fated or doomed to love anyone” — but it is only ever an illusion, one James Baldwin so poignantly annihilated when he observed that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.” Unable to bear that something as indifferent as chance may steer the course of our lives, we give it a valence and call it fate. But the feeling of fatedness is simply a measure of our hunger for meaning. Curry writes:
In the sharpest possible contrast with the boredom, despair and ultimately nihilism of serious disenchantment… experiences of enchantment are intensely meaningful. On that account, they are also fateful… Even refusing the enchantment — difficult, but possible — is fateful, because you always do it too late; you have already been affected, so the refusal too will prove momentous… When one is enchanted, and the world therefore overflows with fateful meaning, we could say that one is living mythically.
This is where Amy Lowell’s taxonomy of myths, facts, and poetic truth is useful — because in enchantment, while living mythically, one is also living more truthfully; in enchanted love — which Curry defines as “the unpossessive love of another” — one is loving more truly.
In such love, “the movement starts with delight but exceeds it” — something it shares with music. The parallel is apt, for the etymology of the word itself — from the Latin, then Old French en chantment — means “to be in a song.” This may be why a musician’s relationship to the music offers the finest field guide to the unpossessive love at the heart of true enchantment. Curry quotes the virtuosic Irish fiddler Martin Hayes:
To get to the essence of music, I more often spend time talking about it and hoping for it than achieving it… It’s when I finally accept that I’ve completely missed the point, and that I don’t really get it, that I have this moment when I get it. And of course I want to put my arms around it, I want to put it in a bottle, I want to keep it, I want to store it, I love it, and I can’t. And I have to let go of it again.
Nick Cave — whose three-decade relationship with his wife Susie may be the truest love I know — echoes this in his breathtaking book-length love letter to her:
Through the countless words I have written about Susie, in song and prose… Susie remains as much a mystery to me now as when I first saw her.
All true enchantment may be just this — an ongoing encounter with the mystery of the other, which can never be possessed in words or ideas, only held in wonder.
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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“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most passionate letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”
Because we are social apes who descended from the trees and invented language to tell each other what we see, saying is a way of seeing. To name something is to instate it in the family of things, to make it a node in the relational web we call reality. A word can be a pinhole, pinching a vista of complexity to a narrow point, but it can also be a magnifying glass for the invisible processes and nuances that tessellate that complexity. Few things in this world are more complex, more dazzling and dynamic, more irreducible and irrepressibly alive, and therefore more needful of proper naming, than a forest and its fractal, the tree.
In A Forest Language: Words That Illuminate the Astonishing World of Trees (public library), Hannah Fries — a poet of uncommon potency and a passionate naturalist who reverences the crossing point of science and spirit — rewilds the imagination with words you’ve never heard and words you know in different contexts, from nautical engineering to music theory, that mean something entirely different in the arboreal realm. Together, they constellate a lexicon of wonder that invites you to eavesdrop on ancient silent conversations with gravity, time, and light in the language of hormones and motor cells, revealing a universe of symmetries and deviations, mathematical yet sensual, full of its self-healing wounds and chemical whispers, resinous with metaphors for resilience and self-reliance, for belonging and love, for the art of letting go and the meaning of enough. 
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book
Hannah writes:
Although recent research has opened up fascinating new realms of possibility regarding the embodied intelligence of the plant world, there is much we don’t know. Trying to understand, we are tempted to compare their way of being to our own, but if we’re not careful, these comparisons can blind us to the mystery of never truly knowing another species. As humans, however, we apply language, our great meaning-making tool, to describe what we’ve learned of their world as best we can. How we do so often says as much or more about us than it does about that of which we speak.
[…]
At their heart, so many of these words and concepts seemed to reflect a blurring of the line between life and death, between the individual and the whole. Forest time operates on a scale indifferent to the rush of human time; it is slower and wider, riding the waves of geologic time, reaching toward spacetime. Always in flux — always already growing, dying, changing, and regenerating — the forest embodies the truth that impermanence is a constant state of being.
A glimpse into this other world requires a shift in thinking. With each glimpse, each shift, a wild ecology of wonder grew up around me. I believe we have to be open to these shifts — to seeing forests
in a context that is thrillingly different from the one we are used to — if we are to be better stewards of these ecosystems in our uncertain future. After all, in the end, we are all part of the same great unfolding mystery.
Art by Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali from The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi
Each of the sixty-one words comes alive in a essay with the feeling-tone of a prose poem, weaving together science and memoir, etymology and ecology, fact and poetic truth. Some of my favorites are samara (the winged seed of the maple), preforest (“the time and space between forest and forest,” when a devastation opens up the space for a rush of light that summons dormant seeds into new growth), rhizosphere (the subterranean ecosystem laced with rhizomes, “a world that hums, pulses, nearly glows with activity… both a microcosm and an intimate, specialized place unique to itself”), whorl (“a group of branches radiating from the same level on a conifer’s trunk, making a springy resting place for fresh snow”), lenticels (the pores through which bark breathes), gallery (the curly hieroglyphics made by the beetle larvae as they feed on the soft phloem between bark and wood), gemel (“when two separate trees become joined together in a process akin to natural grafting,” sharing a Latin root with gemini), and bud break (the moment when the first fragile leaves unfurl in the early spring light that “comes like a shiver of knowledge — that, yes, it’s worth it all, everything to come.”)
What emerges from this lovely book is a reminder that wording is an instrument of worlding; that if “the word for world is forest,” as Ursula K. Le Guin so prophetically wrote, then to word the forest — to name its majesty and its mystery, the subtlety and vehemence of the phenomena pulsating through it — is to reclaim the world.
If you find yourself in Manhattan, which was once a lush and biodiverse temperate deciduous forest, join me and Hannah for a conversation about words as an instrument of wonder:
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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At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college. On October 23, 2006, I began sharing my discoveries — passages from books, links to neuroscience studies, reproductions of 16th-century Japanese woodcuts — in an office email to seven colleagues. They in turn began sharing it with friends, who began sharing it with friends. The fractal spread and, within a few years, the Library of Congress had included it in its permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. It changed shape (the essays grew longer, the questions deeper) and name (Brain Pickings became The Marginalian) but continued beating with the same heart, reckoning with the ongoing bewilderment of being alive — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder, always offered freely: no advertising, no AI, not even an assistant, a thoroughly one-woman labor of love sustained by the love of strangers.
To celebrate twenty years of it, I am inviting friends from various walks of life — poets and physicists, musicians and actors, artists and historians of science — to read fragments of the writings, poetry and prose, that have most touched me over the years as I introduce each with a short reflection on its resonance to the eternal questions we live with: what do we make of our suffering, why did the world have to be beautiful, how do we see more clearly and love more purely. With the format of The Universe in Verse and the feeling-tone of my Marginalian essays, the evening will feature live appearances and special contributions across spacetime by a constellation of beloved humans who have made my own life more livable over the years, among them Krista Tippett, Marie Howe, Diane Ackerman, James Gleick, Natascha McElhone, Debbie Millman, Sophie Blackall, Stephon Alexander, Natalie Batalha, Willow Defebaugh, Paola Prestini, Wendy MacNaughton, Zoë Keating, Joan As Police Woman, Nick Cave, The Young People’s Chorus of New York, and surprise guests. Come join us at breathtaking Saratoga Performing Arts Center — a state-of-the-art outdoor amphitheater in Upstate New York, surrounded by waterfalls and hot springs, awned by old-growth trees in full autumnal glory.
Accompanying the show will be a curated bookstore, featuring my twenty favorite books of all time and signed copies of my own, as well as a pop-up Museum of Delight (housed in an airstream from the 1950s), where some of my ceramics and serpentine creations will be given away by the impartial hand of chance in a raffle.
To honor the spirit by which The Marginalian has endured over the years, tickets are offered on a pay-what-you-please basis, ranging from basic operating costs to the extremes of appreciation. (To those who need them, free tickets are available by request.)
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 print and more. Find the full set of 100 bird divinations, along with the story and process behind them, here.
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