“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live?
Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new pope. Only life itself. Only what Seamus Heaney called “your own secret knowledge,” which you may spend your life learning, but which is always whispering to you if you get still enough and quiet enough to discern its voice through the clangor of confusion and the din of shoulds.
In this sense, Nietzsche was right to caution that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.” In another, he was wrong in depicting life as a river you stand on the banks watching and waiting to cross without getting wet. No: You are the water. You are a molecule afloat among all the other molecules of everything else alive, the flow of life living itself through you, an answer complete unto itself.
This is why I’ll take, over all the world’s philosophy combined, Marie Howe’s spare and stunning poem “The Maples,” found in her New and Selected Poems (public library) — that benediction of a book that won her the Pulitzer Prize — read here by sapling-poet Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy:
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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This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.
Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.
We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure.
A century of upheavals ago, suspended between two World Wars, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the strange power and possibility of such societal phase transitions in his novel Steppenwolf (public library). He writes:
Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.
We too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.
Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. A century before Toni Morrison, living through another upheaval, insisted that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work,” Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”
The Dove No. 1 by Hilma af Klint, painted during World War I. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Often, they do the nourishing at great personal cost. He considers what it means, and what it takes, to be an artist:
You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.
Most people, Hesse laments while watching his contemporaries, are instead “robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings” by the newspapers they read daily — the social media of his time — through which the world’s power-mongers manipulate our imagination of the possible. “The end and aim of it all,” he prophecies, “is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last.”
That is what happened. The next war did come, the world’s grimmest yet — a phase transition that nearly destroyed every particle of humanity. And yet something was left standing, stirring — that same creative force that made of the chaos a new era of possibility never previously imagined: civil rights and women’s liberation, solar panels and antibiotics, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nina Simone.
On the other side of that war’s ruins, another thinker of uncommon depth and sensitivity considered the role of the artist and of art in the collapse and reconfiguring of civilizations. In a 1949 address before the American Academy of Arts and Letters, later included in his lifeline of a collection Two Cheers for Democracy (public library), the English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) celebrates the stabilizing power of art in times of incoherence and discord:
A work of art… is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a mess — but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess — but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess — but there was Macbeth. Louis XIV — but there was Phèdre. Art… is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.
If our present society should disintegrate — and who dare prophesy that it won’t? — [the figure of the artist] will become clearer: the Bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat — one of those figures which have at present no function either in a warring or a peaceful world. It may not be dignified to be a rat, but many of the ships are sinking, which is not dignified either — the officials did not build them properly. Myself, I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship — at all events I can look around me for a little longer — and I remember how one of us, a rat with particularly bright eyes called Shelley, squeaked out, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” before he vanished into the waters of the Mediterranean… The legislation of the artist is never formulated at the time, though it is sometimes discerned by future generations.
This, he assures us, is not a pessimistic view — it is a kind of faith in the future, made of our creative devotion to the present. (I am reminded here of his contemporary Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” and of C.S. Lewis, who reckoned with our task in troubled times from the middle of a World War to remind us that “the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”) Forster writes:
Society can only represent a fragment of the human spirit, and that another fragment can only get expressed through art… Looking back into the past, it seems to me that that is all there has ever been: vantage-grounds for discussion and creation, little vantage-grounds in the changing chaos, where bubbles have been blown and webs spun, and the desire to create order has found temporary gratification, and the sentinels have managed to utter their challenges, and the huntsmen, though lost individually, have heard each other’s calls through the impenetrable wood, and the lighthouses have never ceased sweeping the thankless seas.
Art by Caldecott-winning children’s book author and artist Sophie Blackall
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.
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“In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism.”
I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction.
But cross it we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity necessary for improving our shortcomings, instead berating and belittling ourselves for our foibles with a special kind of masochism.
The undergirding psychology of that impulse is what the English psychoanalytical writer Adam Phillips explores in his magnificent essay “Against Self-Criticism”, found in his altogether terrific collection Unforbidden Pleasures (public library).
In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire; and in which we praise whatever we can.
Our masochistic impulse for self-criticism, he argues, arises from the fact that ambivalence is the basic condition of our lives. In a passage that builds on his memorable prior reflections on the paradox of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance, Phillips considers Freud’s ideological legacy:
In Freud’s vision of things we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we love; wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize when we are frustrated — or when we are trying to describe our frustration, however obliquely — and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa. Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings.
[…]
Love and hate — a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us… Where there is devotion there is always protest… where there is trust there is suspicion.
[…]
We may not be able to imagine a life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in play.
But we have become so indoctrinated in this conscience of self-criticism, both collectively and individually, that we’ve grown reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured this pathology perfectly: “There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”) Phillips writes:
Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves.
[…]
Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.
But this self-critical part of ourselves, Phillips points out, is “strikingly unimaginative” — a relentless complainer whose repertoire of tirades is so redundant as to become, to any objective observer, risible and tragic at the same time:
Were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.
Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:
We are continually, if unconsciously, mutilating and deforming our own character. Indeed, so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we are like without it. We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic). Or, to put it differently, we can judge only what we recognize ourselves as able to judge. What can’t be judged can’t be seen. What happens to everything that is not subject to approval or disapproval, to everything that we have not been taught how to judge? … The judged self can only be judged but not known. [We] think that it is complicitous not to stand up to, not to contest, this internal tyranny by what is only one part — a small but loud part — of the self.
The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation as an accurate and complete representation of reality:
Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself.
[…]
We consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being.
With an eye to Freud’s legacy and the familiar texture of the human experience, Phillips makes his central point:
You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature — by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however apparently compelling it is. Indeed, the implication is — and here is Freud’s ongoing suspicion, or ambivalence, about psychoanalysis — that the more persuasive, the more compelling, the more authoritative, the interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should be. The interpretation might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no limit can be set.
Here, the ideological wink at Sontag becomes apparent. Indeed, the Sontag classic would’ve been better titled “Against an Interpretation,” for the essence of her argument is precisely that a single interpretation invariably warps and flattens any text, any experience, any cultural artifact. (How tragicomical to see, then, that a reviewer who complains that Phillips’s writing is too open to interpretation both misses his point and, in doing so, makes it.)
What Phillips is advocating isn’t the wholesale relinquishing of interpretation but the psychological hygiene of inviting multiple interpretations as a way of countering the artificial authority of the superego and loosening its tyrannical grip on our experience of ourselves:
Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and indeed interpretation itself.
Illustration by Kate Beaton from To Be or Not To Be, a choose-your-own-adventure reimagining of Hamlet
Cuing in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “genius of self-reproach,” Phillips considers the cowardice of self-criticism:
Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea.
[…]
The first quarto of Hamlet has, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” while the second quarto has, “Thus conscience does make cowards.” If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we are all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience simply makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they are clearly different, conscience makes something of us; it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves. It is an internal artist, of a kind… The superego … casts us as certain kinds of character: it, as it were, tells us who we really are. It is an essentialist: it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions (when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation; no apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive; no good is purely and simply that).
The superego is the sovereign interpreter… [It] tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the way it makes us suffer [and] take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment. That every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from.
Under this docile surrender to self-criticism, Phillips cautions, our conscience slips into cowardice:
Conscience … it is the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being. So when Richard III says, in the final act of his own play, “O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”, a radical alternative is being proposed. That conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and punitively forbidding part of ourselves; and yet this supposedly authoritative part of ourselves is itself a coward.
The most virulent and culturally contagious form of this cowardice, I would argue, is the resignation of cynicism — a resignation Phillips traces to the punitive system at the root of our culture’s moral framework, in which good behavior is incentivized largely through fear of punishment for bad behavior. This effort to foster the constructive by the destructive, he suggests, ends up turning us on ourselves as our fear of punishment metastasizes into self-criticism. (The cynic bypasses the constructiveness — that is, refuses to do anything about changing a situation for the better — and rushes straight to inflicting punishment, be it by insult or condemnation or that most cowardly and passive-aggressive fusion of the two, the eyeroll.)
Phillips returns to the central paradox, arguing for the importance of overinterpreting our self-critical conscience:
How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy… We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation.
Our self-criticism, to be sure, couldn’t be entirely eradicated — nor should it, for it is our most essential route-recalculating tool for navigating life. But by nurturing our capacity for multiple interpretations, Phillips suggests, self-criticism can become “less jaded and jading, more imaginative and less spiteful.”
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.
Above an open valley, knowing always to the place where I can’t change what is or bring back a single event to re-live exactly and erase a single tear, whether spoken or not. In the inexorable recreation of life, inexactly I am determined to honor these soft places where horses and men have failed. But I will not attempt to do what they could not. Yet surely I will line the path with ground-pine leaves of oak, ever-blooming iris and daffodil
All of which are much older and wiser than my life and all I could ever hope to be and simply knowing this is touching and what a cemetery is to me.
Again, we go on longer as early daffodils do today next to, well - next to nothing because the house is gone and the wall has crumbled into an indistinct pile of rock Every spring where the front steps once were this yellow reminds me of the unending life here
I stayed put at my computer from when I finished my entry here at 1pm to now (4pm) finishing my scheduling and opening appts, all done. I sat on a heating pad to soothe my aching back and my neck has relaxed a little bit and my headache has decreased. I decided to skip a 3rd coffee and instead sprinkled matcha powder into my lunch, this feels like it was the right choice for my body, today.
Anything that happens here on out is bonus, I'd say.
Going to grab more snacks and see what else feels right to do, today. I love leisurely chore days, after getting all my work done, this is nice. So grateful.
Sunday, a free day in the house without the husband, a cherished rarity. We love each other so much and spend so much time together, it's good, but the peacefulness of being alone in the house is a special sacred feeling all its own.
I wanted to get so much done today - open up my March appointments, pay bills, send measurements to our friend who wants to help me install a rig point for silks in the house, try to make some progress setting up my entirely-neglected bedroom, bathroom, and office space, chip away at taxes, dust and wipe down surfaces, bake more cookies and maybe a pizza or two, finalize cat-sitting details, send some notes about air conditioning installation bids, try to get an air tag set up and attached to Avalanche's new collar, shower, dye my hair - but my headache is threatening to become a migraine, so I need to go slowly and pick and choose carefully what I want to accomplish, and primarily rest.
Work all day tomorrow, moving the studio back to my original room after, then Tuesday silks and packing for our trip.
Avi is asleep on my bed next to me. Velcro kitten. She looks soooo adorable in her collar and new name tag I got engraved for her yesterday. I got a purple heart as is my default, but in retrospect maybe pink would have suited her better (and matched the collar). It's okay, it's still cute.
Put away my light up snowman finally, nestled into a bin until next winter. It's almost warm today. What happened to "In Like A Lion?" 6 more weeks of winter my ass, Phil.
Tulip leaves poked out of the ground in the front flowerbed today.
There is one daffodil about to bloom in the front, and a dozen or so about a week behind it out back. Tulips are also coming in, and maybe some other mystery bulbs?
It's fun watching the yard decide what it's going to be.
Maybe I'll put the leaf birdbath from Hanne out today, if I have the energy for it.
There was a discarded light up deer on the side of the road like plastic roadkill in the cemetery when Josh and Cynthia and I were riding our bikes through, yesterday. I am tempted to go there and collect it and try to repair it. I want a light up deer, but I don't want to pay for it.
Josh and I were having a disagreement in the car on the way to ride bikes with Cynthia, and I broke the tension by acting goofy in the middle of it, and he was so not amused or impressed and also a bit confused, it was pretty funny. Welcome to the inside of my head. I love you no matter what.
He was anxious to buy me a special pair of shoes for our trip, that there was only one pair of, with his dividend from REI which was first available today, so we had to go to REI this morning right when it opened. (The mission was a success and I now have a fancy pair of approach shoes that fit perfectly at a steep discount - these are a halfway point between hiking and rock climbing shoes, which will be perfect for our hiking/climbing/scrambling adventures in Red Rock Canyon next week.) When we got to the parking lot, my headachey body didn't want to move. I picked up my coffee cup and asked if I should take it in or leave it in the car, and before Josh could answer I just started chugging it, and he broke into laughter at my desperation over my coffee consumption and my inability to leave without my coffee, and the panicked look on my face at the prospect of being separated from my coffee. I scolded him for laughing because it was making me laugh and I couldn't finish my coffee, and we ended up both laughing so hard we were in tears.
...
spring is revealing what flowers we have at this new home, and this star magnolia is such a magical little surprise. I've never had one.
...
Last night Cynthia invited us over for a delightful dinner, and because Josh's mom reminded him that today is Purim, I suggested hamentaschen. Josh and I stopped at the grocery store on the way home for prunes and poppyseeds and a few other items (and to collect on a free pint of ice cream offer), and when we got home he napped and I made strawberry, prune, and poppyseed fillings and a half portion of hamentaschen dough. I have learned over the years that if I use whole spelt flour, the dough will still work, but it helps to use honey instead of sugar as the sweetener for it. I used no sugar in the fruit fillings so the strawberry was especially tart, being as they are not in season, but there is a little sugar in the poppyseeds so that one was sweet enough for anyone to enjoy.
I brought the dough and fillings, a rolling pin, and extra flour for dusting, a jar for cutting rounds, and had Cynthia and anyone who wanted try their hand at folding the cookies - it's harder than it looks! We had so much fun playing with the cookies. A half portion was perfect, everyone was able to make one or two, and we all got to taste them, but didn't overdo it at all. I left them four cookies and took home two, and I have plenty of filling left for another couple batches. Hopefully I'll do at least one more round, today. We can also use the fillings for yogurt or oatmeal or on toast like jam, whatever we want :)
...
Avalanche looks sooooo adorable in her collar and new name tag I got engraved for her yesterday, I am so glad she's tolerating the collar. It's still too loose and she scratches at it sometimes but she's adjusting well, she's so fluffy it gets pretty lost in her fur lol. Next step is to open my air tag and see if I can figure out how to use/charge it and get the holder onto her collar to see if she'll tolerate that.
The backyard is enclosed and she is not free-roaming, but in case she were to somehow escape, at least she'll have obvious ID (she is also chipped), and the airtag would be critical for finding her if she somehow ever got lost.
I have been locking her in at night, I worry about owls, but in general I think she's pretty safe out there. I bought a little canopy for the side yard to put above her cat door so she'll have a protected place on that side, I might try to put that up today, headache willing.
...
Depression has its claws sunk deep and my morning wakeup time is pretty unbearable lately. I don't sleep well enough, and my vaginal pain returned with a vengeance last night, despite the fact that I've been consistent with my estrogen cream, ovules, and patch. I am on the lowest doses of all these things but with my breast health scare, I am afraid to increase anything. And with these headaches, I'm starting to contemplate backing off the progesterone, which would mean backing off of everything. I won't go on blockers like the doctors want, but maybe it's time to just accept the ravages of age and menopause on my 50-something yo body, and stop fighting the natural course of things. :( My body has never tolerated pharmaceuticals well, maybe this includes hormones after all.
I don't know why, but Sunday is the day when I have to sit down and take a few minutes to curate my Tumblr dash. Blocking spam posts, sometimes porn, often TERFs and other undesirables, fandom wank, etc. I do wonder why there is always an influx of that kinda stuff on Sundays. Regularly pruning makes the Tumblr experience just the way I want it.
Also, I currently seem to be unable to reply to a comment on AO3. I keep getting a time out error. Squidge is also down for maintenance, FYI.
Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.
Hey, all -- while I was searching for movies/TV shows in the same vein as the Donald Strachey Mysteries (didn't find any), I came across a TV series (London Spy) that was on a streaming service I've never heard of before, called Xumo Play. And guess what I found while I was browsing?
Broadchurch! Back when I watched it a year or so ago, I could only see the first season (without paying for Britbox). Now this site has all three! I'm very happy to have stumbled across it. Can't wait to watch the rest of it.
Read Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice, an absolutely delightful 1944 murder mystery in which the three precocious children of a widowed detective novelist go meddling in the murder investigation next door, while - as a side project - trying to set their mother up with the lead detective on the case.
Read Beowulf! I just saw Beowulf, A Retelling, a one-man show in a pop-up bar at a local arts center, which was a very good introduction to Beowulf, since it was literally just a guy telling the story in his own (conversational, compelling) words, weaving in references to modern heroes and villains* as a sort of touchstone for how parts of the story would have resonated in ye olde days and using instruments for sound effects (e.g., a violin bow across the strings of an electric guitar for Grendel's dying screech). It was very cool! Obviously then had to actually read Beowulf (the Francis Gummere translation; it was the first one available) and I'm glad I had the crash-course version first; it helped to know the shape of the story and have something to mentally translate it back to. (Plus, if I'd had to figure out how to mentally pronounce Healfdene and Ecgtheow on my own, I think I simply would have not.) What really struck me was the sheer sense of time of it all— the oldest known Old English poem, and possibly a story that was hundreds of years old by the time it was written down, and still there were recurring mentions of "heirlooms", which might be a quirk of translation but does suggest the weight of history behind this story that's already really, really old!, and also I found myself reading/listening to it like, okay, yes, I can see what Tolkien got from this.
“If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.”
Few things are more disheartening to witness than the bile which small-spirited people of inferior talent often direct at those endowed with genius. And few things are more heartening to witness than the solidarity and support which kindred spirits of goodwill extend to those targeted by such loathsome attacks.
In 1903, Marie Curie (November 7, 1867–July 4, 1934) became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. It was awarded jointly to her and her husband, Pierre, for their pioneering research on radioactivity. On April 19, 1906, she was widowed by an accident all the more tragic for its improbability. While crossing a busy Parisian street on a rainy night, Pierre slipped, fell under a horse-drawn cart, and was killed instantly. Curie grieved for years. In 1910, she found solace in Pierre’s protégé — a young physics professor named Paul Langevin, married to but separated from a woman who physically abused him. They became lovers. Enraged, Langevin’s wife hired someone to break into the apartment where the two met and steal their love letters, which she promptly leaked to the so-called press. The press eviscerated Curie and portrayed her as “a foreign Jewish homewrecker.”
Upon returning from a historic invitation-only science conference in Brussels, where she had met Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18 1955), Curie found an angry mob in front of her home in Paris. She and her daughters were forced to stay with a family friend.
At the 1911 Solvay Conference. Curie leaning on table. Einstein second from right. Also in attendance: Max Planck, Henri Poincaré, and Ernest Rutherford.
Einstein considered Curie “an unpretentious honest person” with a “sparkling intelligence.” When he got news of the scandal, he was outraged by the tastelessness and cruelty of the press — the tabloids had stripped a private situation of all humanity and nuance, and brought it into the public realm with the deliberate intention of destroying Curie’s scientific reputation.
Einstein, who would later remark that “Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted,” writes:
Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.
With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,
A. Einstein
Shortly after the scandal, Curie received her second Nobel Prize — this time in chemistry, for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. To this day the only person awarded a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, she endures as one of humanity’s most visionary and beloved minds. The journalists who showered her with bile are known to none and deplored by all.
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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“Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”
There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warning. This is the price of consciousness, which makes living both difficult and urgent. “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,” Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) writes in her almost unbearably wonderful 1972 masterpiece The Summer Book (public library), written in the wake of her mother’s death.
Jansson’s observation here is literal: Her protagonist — a little girl named Sophia, who is living on a small Nordic island with her elderly grandmother after her mother’s death — finds herself thinking about what it’s like to be a worm, fabled to go on living two new lives when split in half.
Worms — those humblest of creatures, which Darwin regarded with absolute amazement and celebrated as the unsung sculptors of the biosphere, having tilled and fertilized the Earth as we know it — dwell in the popular imagination as a living metaphor for regeneration, for turning trauma into redoubled life. (Here, poetic truth and scientific fact diverge — in reality, most earthworms, of which there are more than 1,800 species, have a distinct head and tail; if cut in the middle, some species can regrow a new tail from the head half and go on living, but the tail half dies. Perhaps the planarium flatworm — a tiny invertebrate belonging to the phylum Platyhelminthes, separate from earthworms — is the more scientifically accurate metaphor, for it can regrow its entire body from the smallest cut fragment.)
Still, the poetic image of the cleaved worm that goes on living is a fertile thought experiment for how we may think about those most sundering experiences.
Wondering about what it may be like for the worm to be cut in half, Sophia discovers one of life’s elemental truths — that the price of all growth is pain, but the pain passes and the growth remains:
The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts. And we don’t know, either, if the worm is afraid it’s going to hurt. But anyway, it does have a feeling that something sharp is getting closer and closer all the time. This is instinct. And I can tell you this much, it’s not fair to say it’s too little, or it only has a digestive canal, and so that’s why it doesn’t hurt. I am sure it does hurt, but maybe only for a second.
It always hurts to grow twice as alive. And the question is always what are you going to do with your new uncharted life. Jansson imagines this is the ultimate challenge of the worm halves as they come to live as reborn wholes:
They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.
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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An elegy for the triumph of commodity over creativity.
At its dawn, every technology — like every new love — is aglow with the exhilaration of endless possibility. Its dark sides and eventual demise are unfathomable to the wildly optimistic psyche of the besotted, and besotted we invariably are with each new medium that sweeps across the landscape of culture with the forceful promise of a revolution.
The polymath John Herschel, nephew of the trailblazing astronomer Caroline Herschel, coined the word photography in 1839 in his correspondence with Henry Fox Talbot — a onetime aspiring artist turned amateur inventor. (The invention of photography and how the new technology revolutionized both art and science occupies Chapter 14 of Figuring, titled “Shadowing the Light of Immortality,” from which this essay is adapted.) For several years, Talbot had been experimenting with techniques for transmuting the impermanence of light and shadow into permanent prints on paper coated with receptive chemicals. But his images failed to last — exposed to natural light, the prints faded over time. Just as he finally perfected the process with help from Herschel, who had proposed using a sodium thiosulfate coating to make the images more permanent, Talbot got word that a French rival by the name of Louis Daguerre had devised an image-making process, which he had named after himself and was planning on presenting at a joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris on January 7.
Talbot realized that the revolution he had spent years planning was already afoot and might have another leader. He wrote to Herschel frantically in the last week of January that he must present his own findings before the Royal Society, for “no time ought to be lost, the Parisian invention having got the start of 3 weeks.” He scrambled to rally excitement for his “art of photogenic drawing.”
John Herschel. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867.
In a letter of February 28, 1839, Herschel objected to the term “photogeny” to describe Talbot’s new image-making process, noting that it “recalls Van Mons’s exploded theories of thermogen & photogen.” This associative defect, Herschel argued, is amplified by the word’s poetic deficiencies: “It also lends itself to no inflexions & is not analogous with Litho & Chalcography.” Instead, Herschel proposed “photography.” On March 12, he read before the Royal Society a paper titled “Note on the Art of Photography or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Representation” — the first public utterance of the word photography.
A quarter century later, an Indian-born Englishwoman by the name of Julia Margaret Cameron pioneered soft-focus photographic portraiture after receiving a camera as a fiftieth-birthday gift from her son. Cameron photographed some of the most prominent figures of her day, including Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Alice Liddell (the real-life girl who inspired Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland), and Herschel himself. In 1926, Virginia Woolf — whose mother was Cameron’s cousin and favorite photographic subject — published a posthumous volume of Cameron’s photographs under her own independent Hogarth Press imprint. She prefaced the monograph with a biographical sketch of her great-aunt, who had died before Woolf’s birth and whom she had gotten to know primarily through family anecdotes and letters.
Julia Jackson (later Julia Stephen, mother of Virginia Woolf). Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867.
The Victorian age killed the art of letter writing by kindness: it was only too easy to catch the post. A lady sitting down at her desk a hundred years before had not only certain ideals of logic and restraint before her, but the knowledge that a letter which cost so much money to send and excited so much interest to receive was worth time and trouble. With Ruskin and Carlyle in power, a penny post to stimulate, a gardener, a gardener’s boy, and a galloping donkey to catch up the overflow of inspiration, restraint was unnecessary and emotion more to a lady’s credit, perhaps, than common sense. Thus to dip into the private letters of the Victorian age is to be immersed in the joys and sorrows of enormous families, to share their whooping coughs and colds and misadventures, day by day, indeed hour by hour.
Woolf’s point applies not only to letter writing but to the very medium celebrated by the book in which her essay appears, and in fact to every technology that ever was and ever will be. She couldn’t have — or could she have? — envisioned what would become of photography as the technology became commonplace over the coming decades, much less what digital photography would bring. But her insight holds true — the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next). Letters about lunch items have been supplanted by Instagram photographs of lunch items, to which we apply the ready-made filters that have purported to supplant the artistry of light, shadow, and composition. The art of photography, too, is being killed by kindness.
Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron to illustrate Tennyson’s poems.
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.
Put a collar on Avalanche this morning, she couldn’t care less. Yay! Target has an air tag holder, I’ll grab one today.
Going to the desert next week and so nervous about leaving her, even though this house is so much nicer to be left in than the little apartment was. But now that she’s used to the cat door, I’m nervous she’ll bolt when she’s locked in for days, but I don’t feel ready to leave her with access to the backyard unsupervised for several days. Sigh. She can’t get out but something could happen, other animals could get in, or maybe the fence could fail (there are spots of weakness).
An air tag would make me feel better about leaving the cat door open. Still not sure if I will.
I left it unlocked last night but she came in and slept with me all night until the birds started singing.
(I don’t sleep soundly past my first couple hours anymore, it’s been this way for months, I’m constantly half awake, despite the hormones, so I know she was with me all night. I do sleep more if I get hard exercise, but my body hasn’t tolerated that recently. Tomorrow might be a day for dog mountain, to try to fix that, and my mood, and this nausea. That mountain fixes everything.)
I love how she walks on the kitchen counters when Josh isn’t home lol. She’s smrt. (I don’t care to discipline her unless I’m actively cooking, but Josh always does.)
…
I need to stop reading the grief book I started, there’s only about an hour left but it’s detailing the end of someone’s glioblastoma (brain cancer) and I don’t think I should continue.
One of my favorite customers, a friend who survived breast cancer 8 years ago - one of the ladies who was forced to take estrogen blockers (which my team wants me on) so I saw first hand what it does to someone’s body and skin and hair and joints - got a totally different kind of cancer, a lung cancer that she had to do more chemo and radiation for. She’s 71 and had been such an inspiration to me, she does absolutely everything right, she exercises every day and has a robust social life and eats healthy anti-inflammatory food, it’s just shocking and I’m so messed up over it. They caught it before it spread but her tumor is large. This is the most common kind of lung cancer (non-smoking) and it’s the deadliest because it has zero symptoms. The only reason she had a chest x-ray and caught it was due to a cold she got back in December that was lingering. I’m just so terrified for her. She still has hair but she cut it short, she’s only ever had long hair so she is “adjusting” :((((((
…
Cannot shake this nausea. I should eat but can’t. Pretty sure it’s depression and not any sort of illness. Also poor eating habits, but saltiness and an apple for dinner has never resulted in nausea the next morning.
Maybe food and a bike ride with Cynthia will shake me out of it. If I can just get a little down.
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