The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Purest Definition of Love, the Qualities of a Lasting Relationship, and the Salve for the Betrayals of Time

By Maria Popova

The Purest Definition of Love, the Qualities of a Lasting Relationship, and the Salve for the Betrayals of Time

Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity, common ground.

This is why knowing whether you actually love somebody can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of a theorem, the definitional precision of a dictionary, and the courage to weather the depredations of time.

In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein’s Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I’ve encountered since Iris Murdoch’s half a century ago:

The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other — the one person who makes everything simple — a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.

Describing a couple united by this kind of love, Balle captures the essential qualities of a lasting relationship:

They had a closeness which I could not help but notice. Not the sort of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love who need constantly to make contact by look or touch, nor the fragile intimacy which makes an outsider feel like a disruptive element and gives you the urge to simply leave the lovers alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them… [They] had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was as simple as that, so what could they do but see what the future would bring.

The future, however, can bring what the present can’t foresee, can’t bear to consider. People die. Lovers stop loving. Sudden and mysterious phase transitions of feeling take place without warning or explanation, they way the lava of one person’s passion can turn to stone overnight, leaving the other entombed in painful and lonely confusion. Because of this, to live with the fundamental fear of loss and love anyway may be the purest measure of our aliveness. What makes it possible — the only thing that makes it possible — is to refuse the glass-half-empty view of life, to see that death is a token of the luck of having lived and every loss a token of the luck of having had, that these are miracles that weren’t owed us but nonetheless prevailed over the laws of probability so we may live and love.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

There are moments we remember this, moments that stagger us into this primal perspective — moments Balle describes as ones when “the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered.” She writes:

It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility… That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences… We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.

This, of course, is why to live is a probable impossibility and to love is to live against probability; it is why our moral obligation to the universe is to love one another while we are and because we are alive.

BP

Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death

By Maria Popova

Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death

We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something — perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg, perhaps a poem — staggers us with the awful, awe-filled wonder of aliveness, the sheer luck of it against the overwhelming cosmic odds of nonexistence. But alloyed with the awe is always the half-conscious grief that one day the light of consciousness will be extinguished. It is a heavy gift to hold, this doomed delirium of aliveness. It is also a buoyant gladness, if we are limber enough to stretch into the cosmic perspective that does not come naturally to us small, Earth-bound bipeds corticed with tender self-importance.

Consider this.

For each of us, one thing is true: Had any one variable been ever so subtly different — had your parents mated on a different day or at a different altitude, had the early universe cooled a fraction of a second faster after the Big Bang, you would not exist as the particular constellation of atoms configuring the particular consciousness that makes you you. Because chance plays such dice with the universe, and because the die dictates that the vast majority of energy and matter never had the luck of cohering into this doomed delirium of aliveness, it is, in some profound and practical sense, a staggering privilege to die — one that betokens the privilege of having lived. To lament death, then, is to lament our luck, for any negation of the possibility of death is a negation of the improbable miracle of life, a wish for there to be nothing to do the dying — nothing to have partaken of the beautiful, bittersweet temporality of aliveness.

Possible Certainties. Photograph by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

It is easier to bend the intuitive mind into this correct but counterintuitive perspective while walking in a cemetery at the height of summer. Doing this very thing while thinking these very thoughts, I was reminded of a passage from one of the most lucid and lens-clearing books written this side of Darwin — Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (public library) by the visionary and often controversial (which is the social fate of every visionary) British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

A civilization after Marcus Aurelius celebrated mortality as the key to living fully, half a millennium after Montaigne observed that “to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” and a scientific epoch after Darwin contemplated the meaning of mortality in the wake of his beloved daughter’s death, Dawkins writes:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Complement with astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson’s exquisite “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” Nick Cave on grief as a portal to aliveness, and Christopher Hitchens on how to live with our mortality, then revisit the science of how alive you really are, examined through the curious lens of trees and Alan Turing.

BP

When Einstein Met Tagore: A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality

By Maria Popova

On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian poet, philosopher, and musician Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861–August 7, 1941) — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.

The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.

EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?

TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.

I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.

EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.

TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.

EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.

TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.

EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.

TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.

TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.

TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.

TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.

EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.

TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.

EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.

TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.

EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.

TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.

EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.

TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.

EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.

Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.

TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.

In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!

TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.

Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore is a sublime read in its entirety. Complement it with physicist Lisa Randall on the crucial differences between how art, science, and religion explain the universe, then revisit Einstein’s correspondence with Freud about violence, peace, and human nature, his little-known exchange with W.E.B. DuBois on race and racial justice, and his letter to a little girl in South Africa on whether scientists pray.

Thanks, Natascha

BP

Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96, on What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives

By Maria Popova

Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96, on What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives

“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot of a mountain. “By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in a cold cosmos, “we are here.”

And then we are not.

We die. All of us — atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea — you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales and poems, with general relativity and Nina Simone. It is what puts into perspective just how fleeting and vacant and self-embittering all of our angers and blames and resentments are in the end — what beckons us, instead, to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”

That is what the late, great Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) — one of the most original, deepest-seeing poets of our time — explores with great subtlety and profundity disguised as levity in the poem “Immortality” from her final poetry collection, the Pulitzer-winning masterpiece Alive Together (public library).

IMMORTALITY
by Lisel Mueller

In Sleeping Beauty’s castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
who don’t even rub their eyes.
The cook’s right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc
to the kitchen boy’s left ear;
the boy’s tensed vocal cords
finally let go
the trapped, enduring whimper,
and the fly, arrested mid-plunge
above the strawberry pie,
fulfills its abiding mission
and dives into the sweet, red glaze.

As a child I had a book
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how fear persists, and how
the anger that causes fear persists,
that its trajectory can’t be changed
or broken, only interrupted.
My attention was on the fly;
that this slight body
with its transparent wings
and lifespan of one human day
still craved its particular share
of sweetness, a century later.

(Two centuries earlier, William Blake explored the same eternal subject though the same creature in his short existentialist poem “The Fly.”)

In the front matter of this altogether miraculous book, where an epigraph would ordinarily appear, Mueller offers a short poem that becomes a kind of chorus line for the entire collection, but emerges as an especially harmonizing counterpart to “Immortality” in particular:

IN PASSING
by Lisel Mueller

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.

Complement these fragments of the wholly transcendent Alive Together with physicist Alan Lightman on our yearning for immortality in a universe governed by decay, Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence, and Marcus Aurelius on mortality as the key to living fully, then revisit Barbara Ras’s bittersweet, buoyant, perspective-calibrating poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent ode to how we fill our impermanence with importance, “Faster Than Light.”

BP

What It’s Like to Touch the Bottom of the World

By Maria Popova

The history of our species is the history of mistaking the limits of our imagination for the limits of the possible. It is salutary, I think, for us to be reminded regularly that this world is far wilder and more alien than we suppose it to be, that flowers are not what we supposed them to be, that eyes are not what we supposed them to be, that life and death are not what we supposed them to be, that a self is not what we supposed it to be.

We come to know a world the way we come to know a person — by learning its depths and its limits. It has always tugged at the human imagination to touch these extremes — to reach its poles, to conquer its peaks, to balance life on its sharpest edges. But it is the depths that have enticed and eluded us the longest.

Previously unknown giant dragonfish (Bathysphaera intacta) circling the Bathysphere by artist Else Bostelmann, 1934

At the end of the nineteenth century, upending the long-held dogma that no life existed below 300 fathoms, a series of landmark oceanographic expeditions plunged deeper and discovered the magnificent creatures of the deep, discovered how magnificently deeper the deep really was than imagined. And then, in 1875, the Challenger expedition let a weighted piece of rope drop and drop and drop into the South Pacific, until it sounded a depth of 4,475 fathoms — 8,184 meters. They didn’t realize the spot was part of an immense trench — an upside-down mountain range at the bottom of the world. Over the next century, more expeditions and better technologies continued and refined the measurements, until the bottom of the Mariana Trench was sounded at around 10,984 meters — half the Andes stacked atop Everest.

To touch such depths with the mind was already staggering beyond measure. To touch them with our animal sensorium seemed unimaginable. As a human foot fell on the dusty surface of another planetary body, the deep ocean remained more mysterious than the Moon. “Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in her pioneering essay Undersea. And yet when William Beebe plunged his Bathysphere into the deep, the unimaginable became possible — this, too, is the history of our species.

William Beebe inside the Bathysphere (Wildlife Conservation Society Photo Collection)

Nearly a century after Beebe, Scottish geoscientist Heather Stewart set a diving record with her 10-hour descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench with the Bakunawa submersible, one of the most impressive and costly technologies humankind has created. On a fascinating episode of BBC’s In Our Time — my favorite radio program — she recounts, in words not dissimilar to astronaut Sally Ride’s exuberant description of what it’s like to launch into space, her experience:

There is the moment you’re sitting on the sea surface and get the clear-to-dive call, and that color change as you start to fall through the water column… the change from clear water on the sea surface through the brightest shades of blue down to absolute pitch-blackness… And all of that, you’re sitting in silence, and that is so humbling as well as so very exciting, because after a few hours you start to come to the sea floor… That moment you turn on the lights of the submersible and start to see the sea floor coming up underneath you is absolutely fantastic.

All the while, she reflects, her brain is scrambling to parse this surreality and integrate it with her existing understanding of the world by putting it in a geological context, trying to form a working hypothesis of what kind of world might be the bottom of the world. But we are captives of our frames of reference and we habitually forget that the imagination of nature will always be greater than ours, because it imagined us: Suddenly, out of that blackest darkness — as in life — spring the most surprising colors:

The colors that you can see on the sea floor can take your breath away… yellows and blues and all of these chemosynthetic bacteria that are living off the mineral content coming out of these vents, the cracks and fissures on the sea floor.

Endpapers of the classic 1959 children’s book Little Blue, Little Yellow by Leo Lionni.

But one doesn’t need a $30-million submersible to taste the sublime strangeness of the deep. We have invented another technology to take us to those places hardest to reach. In this fragment of her sweeping five-part poem “The Depths” (translated by my mother), Natalia Molchanova, considered the greatest free-diver of all time, invites our earth-bound senses into the most alien depths of this world:

And I perceived
        nonexistence.

The speechlessness of eternal darkness
                and its boundlessness.

And I emerged from time,
                it
                        poured into me,
And we grew
        still.

I lost my body between the waves.
And I reached emptiness,
        peace,
touching the secret of the ocean —
a bottomless blue abyss

I turn inward,
        and remember
Self.
    I — light.
        And I gaze intently:
In the depths breath
        is born.
I merge with it.
        And I emerge into the world…

At the age of 53, Molchanova plunged into the sea off the coast of Spain and never emerged, touching, somewhere at the bottom of the world, the hardest thing for a human being to touch — peace, total and austere as pure spacetime.

BP

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