Mark Helprin’s A Kingdom Far and Clear, a single book containing all three books of Helprin’s Swan Lake trilogy, the first of which is a retelling of Swan Lake (tragic mode), and the second and third of which are a continuation of the story based on the question, “But what if Rothbart wasn’t defeated at the end of Swan Lake? And also Rothbart wasn’t just a garden variety sorcerer, but a totalitarian dictator, but in a weirdly whimsical way where (for instance) our ten-year-old heroine spends an entire Joan Aiken-esque sequence working as a yam curler, wearing a special orange and black yam kitchen uniform to roll yams off the yam conveyor belts, and the yam kitchen is so gigantic it has 6000 employees?”
Bizarre. Bleak. Beautifully written! Beautiful but sometimes strangely static illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. As a retelling I felt this was this not so much engaging with the original as using it as a springboard to deal with its own thematic preoccupations. ( spoilers )
Conclusion: books two and three could have done with a LOT more swans.
I also read Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, translated by Takami Nieda. Like Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursdays, this is a warm, gentle book about a series of loosely linked characters, linked in this case by the fact that they recently moved into a new condominium development near a park with a concrete ride-on hippo named Kanahiko, the eponymous Healing Hippo. He probably doesn’t actually have healing powers (this book has less of a fantasy undercurrent than Hot Chocolate on Thursday), but even just hearing about these healing powers helps people reexamine the problems in their own lives.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m reading Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century. I got to the part where the whole army starts converging on Tampa for the invasion of Cuba (Tampa had only one railway line and no port, but an entrepreneur had suggested using it at a staging ground and Washington said “Yes” without actually checking into the details), and the officers are hanging out at the hotel with thirteen silver minarets… “I’ve been there!” I shrieked. This hotel is now the flagship building of the University of Tampa.
What I Plan to Read Next
Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, which looks similar to Aoyama’s other books in that it is about a bunch of loosely linked characters (connected in this case by a library) who figure out a way forward through their problems. Then I’ll be out of Aoyama books until Matcha on Monday comes out in July.
Read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which reads like how pressing on a bruise feels: poor doomed Giovanni, who you know from early in the first chapter to be fated "to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine" but not yet how he got there; the poor wretched narrator, who's rotting from the inside from internalized homophobia and willing to throw anyone and everyone else under the bus about it. Poor Hella, the narrator's girlfriend turned fiancée, whose brief period of being actually engaged to him reveals her to have such a nightmarish vision of midcentury heterosexual wedded bliss that it's almost a relief when the narrator's secrets blow up in their faces. An excellent novel, but HOO BOY.
In War and Peace, Nikolai Rostov— on facing the inherent contradiction of the top ranks of the Russian army being bosom buddies with the French now that peace has been negotiated between them, while wounded soldiers suffer in makeshift hospitals completely without resources, his friend Denisov faces a court martial for ""requisitioning"" a supply cart to feed his starving division, etc.; so many soldiers died fighting, and for what?— very nearly realizes that war is bad and unfair, but instead he gets drunk about it and insists that obviously whatever Emperor Alexander decides is best!!! So maybe we should all stop criticizing and complaining!!! (To the confusion of his drinking buddies, who literally did not mention the Emperor at all.) On the "paired scenes" theory of War and Peace, I had wondered if the parallel was between Nikolai getting goaded by Dolokhov into gambling himself into massive debt and Pierre getting himself talked out of his grand plans to liberate his serfs, etc., by self-serving estate managers; in fact, the parallel was that "all the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates—and constantly changing from one thing to another had never accomplished—were carried out by Prince Andrei without display and without perceptible difficulty."
A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, then we had better know it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “to act responsibly.” And yet we don’t. We encounter each other at points, as points, and promise each other timelines, denying our temporality, denying that time is the measure of change. In reality, the self making the choices at a point in time and the self living with their consequences across the timeline of life, the self avowing the promises and the self keeping or breaking them, are never the same person. To know this about oneself is the beginning of mercy. To embrace it in each other is one of the kindest, most loving things we can do.
In between laying out her resolutions for a life worth living and contemplating how two souls can interact with one another in friendship and love, she observes that “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:
A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.
With an eye to “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures” that would bedevil every love if we didn’t counter them with “a lot of tenderness and pity,” she considers the tenderness for change — in oneself and in the other — essential to love yet unaccounted for in the fundamental premise of marriage:
The horror of the definitive choice is that we engage not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Thus, we must try to determine which one repeats our changing self the most often. One must create a sort of abstract self and say to oneself: this is the state in which I find myself the most often; this is what I want the most often; thus, this is what suits me.
Already familiar with the singular suffering of regret — that punishing wish that the past self had made choices better suited to the values and needs of the present — she resolves:
No, no pity for my vanished past. Live in the present. It is beautiful enough if I know how to make it so.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance… To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.”
Evolution invented REM sleep, that ministry of dreams, to give us a safe way of practicing the possible into the real. The dreams of the night clarify our lives. The dreams of the day complicate them, charge them with the battery of fear and desire, quiver them with the urgency of our mortality and the fervor of our lust for life. To dream is to dare traversing the roiling ocean between what is and what could be on a ramshackle raft of determination and luck. The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life — that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail over the probable amid the cold austerity of eternal night.
But what may be even harder than getting what you dream of is knowing what to dream of, annealing your imagination and your desires enough to trust that your dreams are your own — not the second-hand dreams of your parents, not your heroes’ costumes of achievement, not your culture’s templates of success. “No one can acquire for another — not one,” Walt Whitman reckoned with how to own your life, “not one can grow for another — not one,” while two hundred miles north Thoreau was reckoning with the nature of success, concluding: “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
They are nothing less than patron saints of the human spirit, those who protect our dreams from the false gods of success.
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint. Half a lifetime before taking up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (public library) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for — Roy captured the crux of our confusion about the real metrics of our lives a passage from her 1999 book The Cost of Living (public library).
Recounting a conversation with an old friend in the wake of the disorienting success of her novel The God of Small Things, Roy finds herself suffocated by the intimation that “the trajectory of a person’s happiness… had peaked because she had accidentally stumbled upon ‘success'” — a notion “premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody’s dreams.” She tells her friend:
You’ve lived too long in New York… There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.
The people who are less successful “in the most vulgar sense of the word,” she observes, are often more fulfilled — like her beloved uncle, who had become one of India’s first Rhodes scholars for his work in Greek and Roman mythology but had chosen to give up his academic career in order to start a pickle, jam, and curry-powder factory with his mother and build balsawood model airplanes in his basement.
When Roy’s friend meets her point with raised eyebrows awning a look of slight annoyance, she takes a moment to distill her thoughts, then writes them on a paper napkin for her friend to hold on to, formulating with that rare and exultant combination of passion and rigor what success really means:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Our modern conception of human excellence is too often impoverished, cold, and bloodless. Success does not always come from thinking more rigorously or striving harder.”
Slingerland frames the paradoxical premise at the heart of his book with an illustrative example: a game called Mindball at his local science museum in Vancouver, in which two players sit opposite one another, each wearing an electrode-equipped headband that registers general activity in the brain, and try to mentally push a metal ball from the center of the table to the other player; whoever does this first wins. There is, of course, a rub:
The motive force — measured by each player’s electrodes, and conveyed to the ball by a magnet hidden underneath the table—is the combination of alpha and theta waves produced by the brain when it’s relaxed: the more alpha and theta waves you produce, the more force you mentally exert on the ball. Essentially, Mindball is a contest of who can be the most calm. It’s fun to watch. The players visibly struggle to relax, closing their eyes, breathing deeply, adopting vaguely yogic postures. The panic they begin to feel as the ball approaches their end of the table is usually balanced out by the overeagerness of their opponent, both players alternately losing their cool as the big metal ball rolls back and forth. You couldn’t wish for a better, more condensed illustration of how difficult it is to try not to try.
Our lives, Slingerland argues, are often like “a massive game of Mindball,” when we find ourselves continually caught in this loop of trying so hard that we stymie our own efforts. Like in Mindball, where victory only comes when the player relaxes and stops trying to win, we spend our lives “preoccupied with effort, the importance of working, striving, and trying,” only to find that the more we try to will things into manifesting, the more elusive they become. Slingerland writes:
Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive.
Some of the most elusive objects of our incessant pursuits are happiness and spontaneity, both of which are strikingly resistant to conscious pursuit. Two ancient Chinese concepts might be our most powerful tools for resolving this paradox — wu-wei (pronounced oooo-way) and de (pronounced duh). Slingerland explains:
Wu-wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not at all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. For a person in wu-wei, proper and effective conduct follows as automatically as the body gives in to the seductive rhythm of a song. This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind. If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like “effortless action” or “spontaneous action.” Being in wu-wei is relaxing and enjoyable, but in a deeply rewarding way that distinguishes it from cruder or more mundane pleasures.
This notion is remarkably similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s pioneering concept of flow — that precious state of consciousness where we feel a deep and total immersion in life or creative work, forgetting the passage of time and even such physical needs as hunger and thirst — and subsequent psychological theories that emphasize the value of “problem-creating” over problem-solving as a source of creative energy and fulfillment. It is also at the heart of Lewis Hyde’s famous distinction between work and creative labor. But wu-wei is also different its counterparts in Western psychology:
People who are in wu-wei have de typically translated as “virtue,” “power,” or “charismatic power.” de is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei. de comes in handy in a variety of ways. For rulers and others involved in political life, de has a powerful, seemingly magical effect on those around them, allowing them to spread political order in an instantaneous fashion. They don’t have to issue threats or offer rewards, because people simply want to obey them… If you have de, people like you, trust you, and are relaxed around you.
We’re drawn to people with wu-wei, Slingerland argues, because we inherently trust the automatic, unconscious mind due to a simple fact from the psychology of trust — because spontaneity is hard to fake, we intuit that spontaneous people are authentic and thus trustworthy. But Western thought has suffered from centuries of oppressive dualism, treating intuition and the intellect as separate and often conflicting faculties — a toxic myth that limits us as a culture and as individuals. Fortunately, Slingerland points out, recent decades have brought a more embodied view of cognition acknowledging the inextricable link between thought and feeling and debunking, as Ray Bradbury so eloquently did, the false divide between emotion and rationality. (We’ve seen, too, that metaphorical thinking is central to our cognitive development, and metaphor is itself rooted in emotion.) The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, has a millennia-long history of cultivating a more integrated model of the human experience:
For the early Chinese thinkers … the culmination of knowledge is understood, not in terms of grasping a set of abstract principles, but rather as entering a state of wu-wei. The goal is to acquire the ability to move through the physical and social world in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet fully in harmony with the proper order of the natural and human worlds (the Dao or “Way”). Because of this focus on knowing how rather than knowing this or that, the Chinese tradition has spent a great deal of energy over the past two thousand years exploring the interior, psychological feel of wu-wei, worrying about the paradox at the heart of it, and developing a variety of behavioral techniques to get around it. The ideal person in early China is more like a well-trained athlete or cultivated artist than a dispassionate cost-benefit analyzer.
Slingerland poses a pause-giving contrast:
The ideal person in Western philosophy is not only disembodied but also radically alone.
And yet this ideal runs counter to our biological and social truths:
In reality, we are not autonomous, self-sufficient, purely rational individuals but emotional pack animals, intimately dependent on other human beings at every stage of our lives. We get along, not because we’re good at calculating costs and benefits, but because we are emotionally bound to our immediate family and friends and have been trained to adopt a set of values that allows us to cooperate spontaneously with others in our society. These shared values are the glue that holds together large-scale human groups, and a key feature of these values is that they need to be embraced sincerely and spontaneously — in an wu-wei fashion — to do their job. This is why the tensions surrounding wu-wei and de are linked to basic puzzles surrounding human cooperation, especially in the anonymous, large communities we tend to inhabit today.
What wu-wei gives us, Slingerland argues, is “a sense of being at home in some framework of values, however vague or tenuous,” which allows us “to recover the crucial social dimension of spontaneity” — something else that distinguishes it from Western concepts like “flow.” Because contextual fuzziness is a central feature of human psychology, the barriers to spontaneity tend to vary among people and between situations, but the result is the same:
We have been taught to believe that the best way to achieve our goals is to reason about them carefully and strive consciously to reach them. Unfortunately, in many areas of life this is terrible advice. Many desirable states — happiness, attractiveness, spontaneity — are best pursued indirectly, and conscious thought and effortful striving can actually interfere with their attainment.
Page from Neurocomic, a graphic novel about how the brain works
One centerpiece of the paradox comes from an important cognitive duality: Our thinking is steered by two distinct systems, each beholden to its own rules and characteristics — the same two systems responsible for the marvels and flaws of our intuition. The first, known as System 1, is dominated by “hot cognition”; fast, automatic, and largely unconscious, it is primitive and significantly older in evolutionary terms, which means that, thanks to eons of practice and repeat use, it tends to be fairly fixed. The second kind, System 2, is characterized by “cold cognition” — slow, deliberate, rational, and conscious reasoning, which evolved more recently and is thus more flexible. The former is what we associate with the body, the latter with the mind. When System 1 takes over, with its impulsive and short-sighted reactivity, we often run into problems in the long run. Slingerland explains:
This isn’t because hot cognition doesn’t take future consequences into account. The problem is that this system’s conception of relevant consequences was fixed a long time ago, evolutionarily speaking, and is fairly rigid. “Sugar and fat: good” was for most of our evolutionary history a great principle to live by, since acquiring adequate nutrition was a constant challenge. For those of us fortunate enough to live in the affluent industrialized world, however, sugar and fat are so widely and freely available that they no longer represent unqualified goods — on the contrary, allowing ourselves to indulge in them to excess has a variety of negative consequences. The great advantage of cold cognition is that it is capable of changing its priorities in light of new information.
Slingerland points to two key theories that explain how “one (relatively) hairless ape managed the transition from tribe to state” and why the two systems of cognition arose. One holds that the development of external social institutions like laws, punishments, money, and rewards gradually came to keep our pre-wired, internal hot cognition in check as our cognitive control centers perpetually churn to override, repress, or redirecting it. Slingerland sums it up:
Civilization is about the triumph of cold cognition over hot.
But more recent work in Western philosophy and social science has pulled this theory into question for reasons more aligned with the concept of wu-wei, suggesting that cold cognition simply doesn’t have the strength and stamina to keep hot cognition under control 24/7. Instead, it’s something else that motivates our cooperative behavior — something not based on rewards as punishments but instead bridging the two systems through a deeper mechanism:
According to this view, the key to getting lots of strangers to work together is not to create an endless stream of new laws or institutions but to create a set of shared values. Laws are something you merely obey. Values are something you feel. Once internalized, values function just like other forms of hot cognition — fast, automatic, unconscious, wu-wei. Looked at this way, we can begin to see how the paradox of wu-wei emerges as a kind of natural consequence of our transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers and city dwellers.
Slingerland cites Cornell psychologist Robert Frank’s pioneering work on why we cooperate, which suggests that the most important lubricant of our social interactions are powerful emotions that keep us honest rather than cognitive evaluations of prospective rewards and punishments. In the long run, the payoffs of cooperation come only when we stop consciously trying to force them — a finding in stark contrast with the basic tenets of contemporary Western culture, which rewards cold cognition to an extreme and invariably pushes us to strive deliberately and systematically for things only attainable once we let go. Slingerland writes:
If you’re just using rewards and punishments — the rational, self-interested, cold-cognition strategy — it doesn’t matter what people feel on the inside. You set up the incentives, let people figure them out, and then judge them purely on their behavior. In the values model, on the other hand, what people are really feeling on the inside is crucial: if I can’t trust that you’re committed to the same ideals that I’m committed to, there’s no way we can work together.
That’s where “the paradox of wu-wei” arises — the conundrum of trying not to try. To be sure, this isn’t advocacy for passivity and resignation but for the mindful cultivation of those tendencies in ourselves that promise to bear fruit as behaviors and qualities we aspire to in the long run. Slingerland puts it elegantly:
You can cultivate your sprouts: try to identify incipient tendencies of desirable behavior within you, and then nurture and expand them until they are strong enough to take over. Or you can just go with the flow: forget about trying, forget about not trying, and just let the values that you want to embrace pick you up and carry you along.
There is also an ebb and flow of the two systems over the natural course of life: Cold-cognition strategies like “carving and polishing” tend to be more beneficial earlier in life as well as when we’re acquiring new skills, where deliberate practice is the key to mastery. But after a certain point of expertise, the very strategies that helped us make progress early on now lodge us into the “OK plateau” of autopilot and cold cognition starts hindering rather than powering progress. This, Slingerland notes, might also be true of morality:
A deeply ingrained moral disposition could become too rigid as you age, in which case you might need to shift to the sprout or letting-go approach.
On a social level, one solution to this paradox is what Slingerland calls “ethical bootstrapping” — the idea that the desirable behaviors and qualities we cultivate within ourselves emanate out to have a small but perceptible positive effect on others, “which causes them to act in an incrementally more morally positive way, which in turn feeds back on us.” Slingerland brings this back to the reality of our everyday lives, by way of the ancient Chinese:
This has immediate, practical implications for how you go about arranging your daily life. The early Confucians put an enormous amount of effort into modifying their immediate aesthetic environment — clothes, colors, layout of living spaces, music — so that it would reflect the values of the Confucian Way. Although most of us no longer embrace the Way, we can use the same techniques to foster our own particular set of values. If you can set up your home and workplace, to the extent you have control over it, to reflect your tastes and values, the things that make you feel good and at home, you’re going to be better off. You’ll have more wu-wei and more de.
[…]
The basic idea is simple. You choose a desirable model, then reshape your hot cognition to fit by immersing yourself in reminders and environmental cues. How this repetition eventually causes the new internal disposition to become sincere and self-activating is a bit of a mystery — intellectually, the paradox remains — but it seems to work in practice.
This disposition isn’t rooted in just philosophy. Recent findings in psychology and social science, Slingerland points out, have indicated that this is a central feature of our how our minds work:
A growing literature in the psychology of perception has demonstrated that, when it comes to certain difficult visual tasks — exercises where subjects are asked to locate a target shape in the midst of a large array—simply relaxing and letting the answer “pop out” works much better than actively trying. Similarly, when one is stymied by a problem, simply leaving it alone and doing something else is often the best way to solve it. Doing nothing allows your unconscious to take over, and, as we’ve seen, the unconscious is often better at solving certain types of particularly complex problems.
This, of course, is something nearly every model of the creative process accounts for, acknowledging the importance of an “incubation” phase, or what Lewis Carroll so memorably termed “mental mastication.” To create the conditions for this essential state, Slingerland advises that we do what we tend to intuit is important but rationally resist: “Sleep in, take a walk, go weed your garden.” He encapsulates the essence of this approach:
The sort of knowledge that we rely on most heavily is hot, emotionally grounded “knowing how” rather than cold, dispassionate “knowing that.” We’re made for doing, not thinking. This has significant implications for everything from how we educate people to how we conduct public debates, make public policy decisions, and think about our personal relationships.
[…]
Our modern conception of human excellence is too often impoverished, cold, and bloodless. Success does not always come from thinking more rigorously or striving harder.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.”
It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.
With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
After a lengthy hiatus, 100 Books That Influenced Me has returned! I reread Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, and it fit too perfectly into this series to be reviewed anywhere else.
When the urge to reread struck, I actually had a bit of trouble finding this book, because I had misremembered the title as Dare to Be Done. This was, after all, what the book allowed me to do: I was in despair over ever finishing The Sleeping Soldier, which had sprawled into ten massive, messy drafts. Bell’s methods helped me sort this enormous mass of material, organize the pieces, and at long, long last put them together in an order that actually functioned as a story.
These methods are the two strategies that Bell describes in part two of the book, the section about transforming your rough exploratory draft (discussed in part one) into a solidly plotted novel (which you will then polish, polishing techniques described in part three). The first is to make an outline of everything that you’ve already written.
It turns out that it’s much easier to deal with ten drafts worth of material when you’ve reduced all those thousands and thousands of words to outline form. You can see at a glance what scenes you already have, and which scenes must logically come before which other scenes, and which scenes you need to have but haven’t written yet. Then suddenly you’ve got a working outline, which has given you a ton of new interest and enthusiasm, because the project seems so much more possible that you’ve accidentally written a bunch of those new scenes into the outline and simply need to type them up!
The other strategy Bell describes is not to copy and paste from one draft to another, but to retype everything. I scoffed as I read this strategy, but since I was desperate, I decided to give it a try, and goldarnit if it didn’t work.
First of all, although you can copy-paste a scene that doesn’t quite work across ten drafts, if you retype it, you find that you have to fix it.
Second, since the outlining ended up moving a lot of scenes around, almost all the scenes needed some revision anyway, so they weren’t accidentally referencing scenes that now happened later on. Retyping the scenes in order following the outline made this work happen naturally, since I knew what I’d already retyped.
Third, this made it very obvious if there were scenes I still needed to write that I’d missed in the outlining stage.
Absolute convert. Never copy-pasting anything again. The method worked so well that I used it on Sage, similarly a wilderness of many messy sprawling drafts, and transformed it into Diary of a Cranky Bookworm.
I’ve used the second-draft tools in this book most extensively, but since those tools work so well… I mean, I have been having a bit of trouble with the first draft of The Paper Bird. Maybe I should poke through Bell’s first-draft suggestions and give a few of them a try.
This easy Chicken Fajita Rice Bake recipe is perfect for busy days! Just throw rice, chicken, onions, peppers, fajita seasoning, chicken stock and cheddar cheese into one pan, then let the oven do all the hard work. Better still, it’s high in protein and ideal for meal prep… and of course, there’s only one pan […]
@3weeks4dreamwidth is celebrating Dreamwidth's anniversary! Come join in for fun, memes, activities, and more ♥
Feeling a bit better, and wanting to get back into posting fun stuff, so here's a neat meme for 3weeks4dreamwidth that I saw at spiralicious -- originally from goodbyebird
Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing between YOUR PRECIOUS BABIES!
Note: My own favorite icon probably changes depending on the date, time, moon phase, what fandom I'm obsessed with, and a whim, but I'll pick one of my favs, anyway... Nah, heck with it. I'll use the one that will always be special to me -- my personal icon. I designed it a long time ago for the Moonlight forums I hung out on. I loved the design so much that I got it made into one of those custom license plates for my car (people in states that only require one license plate are able to get fun ones for the front). I wanted to get it on some other things too, like a mug or mouse pad, but never got around to it. I use it other places too, like at AO3.
“Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
In his wonderful contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, Yo-Yo Ma tells children about how books helped him survive his own childhood, listing King Arthur among his three great heroes; as a young boy born in France to Chinese parents, trying to find his mooring as an immigrant in America, he reaped great consolation and inspiration from the tales of the legendary medieval leader — stories of “adventure, heroism, human frailty and accidental destiny” that emboldened him to believe in the power of the quest for holy grails and improbable dreams — dreams as improbable as a small boy with no homeland growing up to be the world’s greatest cellist.
And, indeed, buried inside the adventure-thrill of these Arthurian tales are treasure troves of wisdom on fortitude, courage, and the art of honorable living, nowhere richer than in the novels by T.H. White (May 29, 1906–January 17, 1964), one particular passage in which offers a meta-testament to the potency of reading in the character-formation of King Arthur himself.
In White’s 1958 Arthurian classic The Once and Future King (public library) — one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s lifelong favorite books — the mystic-magician Merlyn, aware of the young not-yet-king Arthur’s destiny, endeavors to sculpt the boy’s moral fiber and to teach him what it means to be a strong, kindly leader through a series of lessons from the animal kingdom, transforming him by turns into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose, and a badger. One day, the young Arthur comes to Merlyn in his ordinary human incarnation, sulking with an ordinary human disappointment — that small, merciless mallet for our fragility. Merlyn offers his advice on the mightiest antidote to disappointment and sorrow:
The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletter
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“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”
“The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” Carl Jung wrote as he contemplated life and death. And the most astonishing part of it all is just how resourceful we can be in kindling that flame even amid the most oxygen-deprived and suffocating of circumstances — a kind of spiritual survival instinct the vitalizing beauty of which only the oppressed, the marginalized, and the otherwise banished from mainstream society have the painful privilege of knowing.
This painful privilege is what the great German writer and political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) explores in Men in Dark Times (public library) — a 1968 collection of essays that have grown all the more timely and radiant in the half-century since. (The book’s title, it bears pointing with a mixture of lamentation and delight, comes from an era when a great woman was a “he” — a paradox of which Arendt herself, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and the first woman to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures, was the epitome.)
Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth… Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter of secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.
From our vantage point as Arendt’s posterity, one thing is certain — her own ideas about freedom and justice and human nature are more blazing than ever. Half a century before Rebecca Solnit’s lucid and luminous case for hope in the dark, Arendt writes:
The world lies between people, and this in-between … is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe.
Arendt argues that in dark times — times of injustice, when certain groups are oppressed by certain other groups and personal liberty is imperiled — something magical happens to this in-between space, “a special kind of humanity develops,” a fierce fellowship between and among the oppressed. More than a century after Kierkegaard contemplated the power of the minority, she writes:
Humanity manifests itself in such brotherhood most frequently in “dark times.” This kind of humanity actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world. Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peoples and enslaved groups… This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah peoples; it is the advantage that the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have over others.
Arendt herself, in addition to being a female intellectual in a almost entirely male realm, belongs to one such pariah population — the group of Jews expelled from Germany by Hitler at an early age — and it is from this meeting point of the personal and the political that she adds:
The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it — starting with the common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others and going on to the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world — that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness.
But out of this worldless in-betweenness, Arendt observes, something else is born — a new sort of kindred humanism, which can’t be replicated or manufactured under any other circumstances:
It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world (and which of course existed between them before the persecution, keeping them at a distance from one another) has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as an almost physical phenomenon… In its full development it can breed a kindliness and sheer goodness of which human beings are otherwise scarcely capable. Frequently it is also the source of a vitality, a joy in the simple fact of being alive, rather suggesting that life comes fully into its own only among those who are, in worldly terms, the insulted and injured.
[…]
But … this kind of humanitarianism, whose purest form is a privilege of the pariah, is not transmissible and cannot be easily acquired by those who do not belong among the pariahs. Neither compassion nor actual sharing of suffering is enough.
There is something larger and more expansive at the heart of the matter, Arendt argues — “the question of selflessness, or rather the question of openness to others, which in fact is the precondition for ‘humanity’ in every sense of that word” — and this openness, in its highest form, is an openness to each other’s joy rather than only each other’s suffering:
It seems evident that sharing joy is absolutely superior in this respect to sharing suffering. Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say. What stands in the way of this gladness is envy, which in the sphere of humanity is the worst vice…
This sharing of gladness, Arendt notes with an eye to Aristotle’s ideas about friendship, is the glue for the most powerful of human bonds:
The ancients thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living. In holding this view they gave little consideration to the idea that we need the help of friends in misfortune; on the contrary, they rather thought that there can be no happiness or good fortune for anyone unless a friend shares in the joy of it. Of course there is something to the maxim that only in misfortune do we find out who our true friends are; but those whom we regard as our true friends without such proof are usually those to whom we unhesitatingly reveal happiness and whom we count on to share our rejoicing.
[…]
Humanity is exemplified not in fraternity but in friendship.
Therein lies Arendt’s most salient, most beautiful point — it is in this act of connecting that we create the world:
The world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows… We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletter
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Thanks to everyone who's send their well wishes! 🧡🧡 It's really appreciated. I'm feeling a bit less sore now. I don't have the spoons or function to respond to everyone, but I wanted to say thank you!
I'm putting an update on my issues under a cut, but please don't feel it necessary to read. This is just 1. for me to rant, and 2. for anyone who might be interested in the shit-show of dealing with the medical profession in the US.
I’ll be reading my translation of the short story “Francine (Draft for the September Lecture)” by Maria Antònia Martí Escayol at the Deep Dish reading at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 7, at The Book Loft, 1047 Lake Street, Oak Park, Illinois. Nine other outstanding writers will also present their work. The event, organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation, is free and open to the public.
Maria Antònia Martí Escayol is a science fiction writer and an environmental historian who teaches at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Her haunting tale investigates the death and posthumous life of Francine, the daughter of Renée Descartes.
Like The Empire Must Die, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s An American Girl in London is another book that I almost certainly read but didn’t actually mark as read on my Kindle, which is perhaps fortunate as this gave me the very great pleasure of rereading it.
The book was published in 1891, catching the zeitgeist of stories about the culture clash occasioned by Americans descending on England, sometimes as tourists and sometimes on the hunt for aristocratic husbands. (Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers is a late entry to this genre, but probably the most famous.)
In An American Girl in London, our heroine Mamie is the heiress to a baking powder fortune out of Chicago, who decides to travel to London on her own after her parents are unavoidably detained by political business in America. (Poppa is a senator, you see.) Indomitable and archly funny, she visits Madame Tussaud’s, goes to Ascot, and is presented at Court:
I liked going to Court better than any other thing I did in England, not excepting Madame Tussaud’s, or the Beefeaters in the Tower, or even “Our Flat” at the Strand. It did a great deal to reconcile me, practically, with monarchical institutions, although, chiefly on poppa’s account, I should like it to be understood that my democratic theories are still quite unshaken in every respect.
(The concern that contact with monarchical European institutions would corrupt American democratic principles is a recurrent one in 19th century American books, possibly because at that point American democracy was politically speaking a weird outlier in a monarchical world. At another point, Duncan assures us that “My democratic principles are just the same as ever, though – a person needn’t always approve what she likes.” You can enjoy the pomp of someone else’s monarchy without wanting to bring it home!)
Aside from being deliciously funny, the book is full of fascinating tidbits about the differences between American and British English in the 1890s, like Mamie’s shipboard exchange with a woman who inquires, “Have you been bad?” Mamie, after some hesitation, replies that she doesn’t think so, but after all the prayer book says that we’re all miserable sinners… The lady, startled, informs her that she was asking if Mamie had been seasick.
Or the bit where a man accuses Mamie of “pulling his leg,” an expression that was clearly not current in America at the time.
Or the entire subplot where Mr. Mafferton decides that he should like to marry Mamie, but neglects to inform her of this fact by so much as a single bouquet or box of chocolates, so that Mamie remains completely in the dark until she’s actually having dinner with his family and discovers that they think she will be joining the family on a permanent basis very shortly. Awkwardly, Mamie is already engaged to a fellow back in America.
Honestly just the perfect combination of business and pleasure. Some of the most delicious research material I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. I’m now overcome by the desire to reread the sequel, A Voyage of Consolation, in which Mamie takes Europe.
Almost every weekday for nearly 25 years, I walked approximately a mile along the same set of sidewalks and across the Monogahela River to and from my car. In all, I crossed the Smithfield Bridge more than ten-thousand times. As much as something material can be a part of someone, that bridge became a substantial part of me.
The span is a double-lenticular truss design and was built in 1883. I have newer photos of the bridge but this one was taken from a postcard back in 1909 (when Pittsburgh had no ”h” at the end of its name). To this day, it looks pretty much the same, except for a few adornment differences and a major change in the skyline behind it. In the years that I crossed it, I’ve read: love hopes scribbled along its railing, stickers of racial hate pasted on its trusses, poorly-drawn or sprayed graffiti on any accessible flat spot. I’ve seen the remnants of weekend parties left along the walk: broken bottles, sprays of vomit, condoms and even lacy underwear.
But most of all, I remember all the people: kids skittering across in fear with parents, skaters, business folk, art students, lovers, gang members, tourists and homeless people. There was also a stream of ”regulars” - but none had lasted for the entire time that I worked downtown. Without purpose or justifiable reason, I often wanted to stop and talk with some of them, especially those exchanging smiles, but I was shy -- and besides, we really we had shared little more than the commonality of the walk and the bridge.
One thing I'd wanted to do on this trip is make asaí (or in English we write it açai, from the Portuguese, because Brazil is the major exporter) juice. It's a good physical effort, but the whole thing went faster than I thought it would. It was me, my tutor's older brother, and her mom doing it, with her doing the videography and photos :-)
The first step is to soak the asaí berries. Here they are with hot water poured over them.
Then you pound them! The pounder was made by my tutor's mother from palo de sangre, bloodwood, which really does bleed red sap when you cut it (and is a lovely deep red color when carved). You pound until the pounder makes a sound like a boot pulling out of the mud when you lift it. At that point it's pounded enough. My tutor's brother and I took turns with this ;-)
“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?”
Few are those whose contribution to humanity — be it art, or music, or literature, or some other enchantment — fills the heart with uncontainable gratitude for their very existence. Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) — one of the greatest poets of all time, and perhaps the greatest of our time — is one such blessing of a writer. She, the patron saint of paying compassionate attention, has made a supreme art of bearing witness to our world — be it in her exquisite poems, or in the prose of that moving remembrance of her soul mate, or in her meditations on the craft of poetry itself.
In her immensely rewarding recent On Being conversation with Krista Tippett — triply magical because Oliver rarely gives interviews, and never ones this dimensional and revealing — she read several of her most beloved poems. While “Wild Geese” remains a favorite, I was especially taken with a four-part poem titled “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” found in Oliver’s sublime 2014 collection Blue Horses: Poems (public library). It is partly a bow to her recent triumph over cancer, and partly a score to the larger tango of life and death which we all, wittingly or not, are summoned to dance daily.
Like so much of her work, it is an uncommonly direct yet beguiling love letter to vitality itself, poured from the soul of someone utterly besotted with this world which we too are invited to embrace.
THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3)
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.
Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletter
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
The air is thick with it, the ponds covered in it.
In the dead calm, falling clumps of it have reminded me of jellyfish, gently drifting deeper in ocean waters.
The other day, when the wind was strong, it looked like a blizzard outside the kitchen window.
Today, when the breeze is soft and changeable, the pollen puts me more in the mind of an alien invasion. Small bits of fluff fly in every direction as if animated by intelligent life--left right up down swirling back forth--even switching direction and hovering. Their invasion looks rather chaotic, but I imagine they know what they are doing. Several times, I have seen particular bits doubling back to reassess something. Perhaps it is me, watching them through the window.
Seeing as how I don't feel willow pollen has a particular effect on my allergies, I observe them, too, amused and charmed, but not worried.
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