The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live

By Maria Popova

How to Be a Sea: Albert Camus on Learning to Die and Learning to Live

The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my parents were aware and unconcerned — to go sit on the edge of the Black Sea and watch the blue horizon, to touch its infinite loneliness and infinite happiness. I have watched many horizons in the lifetime since, and always they shimmer with the same strange duality, the same absolute awareness of mortality and of aliveness — the crest and trough of the same wave lapping at the essence of being.

Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) was forty when he articulated this with uncommon splendor in his essay “The Sea Close By,” found in his Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library) — the altogether ravishing collection that also gave us his meditations on happiness and despair, the three antidotes to the absurdity of life, and how to live whole in a broken world.

Albert Camus

Conjuring up a long sea voyage halfway around the world, Camus writes:

We are setting sail at daybreak. The moment we leave the harbor a short, gusty wind vigorously brushes the sea, which curls backward in small, foamless waves. A little later, the wind freshens and strews the sea with swiftly vanishing camellias. Thus, throughout the morning, we hear our sails slapping above a cheerful pond. The waters are heavy, scaly, covered with cool froth. From time to time the waves lap against the bow; a bitter, unctuous foam, the gods’ saliva, flows along the wood and loses itself in the water, where it scatters into shapes that die and are reborn, the hide of some white and blue cow, an exhausted beast that floats for a long time in our wake.

Finding himself “alone with the horizon,” he touches into the infinite loneliness from which everything we know of love is born:

The waves come from the invisible East, patiently, one by one; they reach us, and then, patiently, set off again for the unknown West, one by one. A long voyage, with no beginning and no end … Rivers and streams pass by, the sea passes and remains. This is how one ought to love, faithful and fleeting. I wed the sea.

When the engine dies in the middle of the Atlantic, the sky opens into the sea:

The curious austral moon, looking slightly pared, keeps us company for several nights and then slides rapidly from the sky into the sea, which swallows it. The Southern Cross, the infrequent stars, the porous air remain. At the same instant, the wind ceases. The sky rolls and pitches above our immobile masts… There are days like this when all is accomplished; we must let ourselves flow with them.

Marie Tharp’s revolutionary map of the ocean floor. (Library of Congress.)

Eventually, South America emerges on the horizon like a postcard from paradise as they curl around the coast and into the Pacific:

Our sails are like iron under the imperious wind. The coast drifts at full speed before our eyes, forests of royal coconut trees whose feet are bathed by emerald lagoons, a quiet bay, full of red sails, moonlit beaches… At night, the ice from Tierra del Fuego comes and beats for hours against our hull, the ship hardly loses speed and tacks about. In the morning, the single wave of the Pacific, whose cold foam boils green and white for thousands of kilometers along the Chilean coast, slowly lifts us up and threatens to wreck us. The helm avoids it, overtakes the Kerguelen Islands. In the sweetish evening the first Malayan boats come out to meet us.

And then, one morning, the voyage comes to an end and the metaphor cracks open:

We drop anchor in a bay filled with a strange silence, beaconed with fixed sails. A few sea birds are quarrelling in the sky over scraps of reeds. We swim ashore to an empty beach; all day plunging into the water and drying off on the sand. When evening comes, under a sky that turns green and fades into the distance, the sea, already calm, grows more peaceful still. Short waves shower vaporous foam on the lukewarm shore. The sea birds have disappeared. All that is left is space, open to a motionless voyage.

Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us die. Great sea, ever in motion, ever virgin, my religion along with night! It washes and satiates us in its sterile billows, frees us and holds us upright. Each breaker brings its promise, always the same. What does each say? If I were to die surrounded by cold mountains, ignored by the world, an outcast, at the end of my strength, at the final moment the sea would flood my cell, would lift me above myself and help me die without hatred.

Painting by Oliver Jeffers from his series Measuring Land and Sea
Painting by Oliver Jeffers from his series Measuring Land and Sea

The sea then becomes a shimmering reminder of the hardest, simplest truth — that we spend our lives learning to die, which is the same thing as learning to live:

At midnight… the sky itself has weighed anchor, with all its stars, like the ships covered with lights which at this very hour throughout the world illuminate dark harbors. Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistible charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know… I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

Camus never reached the horizon of fifty. Not long after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, he died in a car crash traveling back to Paris from a winter holiday, an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket.

Couple with this oceanic poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life and Alan Watts on the wisdom of water.

BP

The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty

By Maria Popova

The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty

It is strange how, in a universe governed by relentless change, human beings hunger for constancy — our bodies wired for homeostasis, our minds hooked on habit, our hearts yearning for everlasting love. We live as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves, our aching resistance to change reflected in the routines and rituals and relationship formulae out of which we build the superstructure of belief that houses all of our actions, reactions, and choices.

It is not easy, reconfiguring this superstructure to fit something new — a new practice, a new person, a new way of being. The more transformative the new element, the more challenging it is to figure it into the pattern of life as we know it — a pattern shaped by what we believe about love, that deepest sinew of the self.

This delicate, difficult, wildly rewarding reconfiguration is what Terry Tempest Williams explores in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (public library) — a soaring meditation on life, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, sparked by an unexpected revelation: When Williams opened the journals her mother had bequeathed her, she was staggered to find them all blank — a kind of “second death” that catalyzed a profound reckoning with the meaning of voice, of words, of how we write the story of who we are and how we revise it, lensed through the love of birds she shared with her mother.

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth

Two decades later, at the exact age her mother was when she died, Williams writes:

Love is to life what life is to death. And so we risk everything trying to touch the ineffable by touching each other. Over and over. Again and again… Patterned behavior alternates like shadow and light… We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing.

Because we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation — a blindness brilliantly illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — it is often chance, not choice, that brings about the profoundest change. Life sweeps us off course — a terrible diagnosis arrives, an unimagined opportunity emerges, an unexpected person enters the heart — and suddenly we must begin again, rebuilding the superstructure of being on this new terrain. (“It could happen any time…”)

Williams finds improbable consolation for the challenge of change in her encounter with a bird out of place. The painted bunting — the most exuberantly colored bird north of Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its exotic plumage that he falsely classified it as native to India; a species now thought to orient by the pole star during migration — “had flown in on the tail of a blizzard, been blown off course, and stayed,” making a new life in Maine, a new pattern of being: Each day just before dawn, the painted bunting alighted to a neighbor’s bird feeder like clockwork.

Painted bunting by Mark Catesby, 1729-1731. (Available as an art print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Watching the bird one snowy morning, Williams writes:

At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the crease of shadow and light. His silhouette grew toward color for the seven short minutes he stayed. And when dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue, and green.

[…]

The bunting got caught in a storm and stayed. I have been seized in a storm of my own making. Whirlwind. World-wind. Distracted and displaced. In the wounding of becoming lost, I can correct myself.

Echoing Emerson’s indictment that “people wish to be settled [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Williams adds:

We can take flight from our lives in a form other than denial and return to our authentic selves… Accidental sightings, whether witnessed in a brain or on a winter dawn, remind us there is no such thing as certainty.

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated finding beauty in the uncertainty of being in the interlude between two world wars, Williams adds:

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.

Complement these fragments of the entirely wonderful When Women Were Birds with Milan Kundera on life’s central ambivalence of knowing what we really want, Rebecca Solnit on how we find ourselves by getting lost, and George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, then revisit Williams on our responsibility to awe.

BP

Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing

By Maria Popova

Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing

In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different, complementary lens on the art of seeing through his now-famous monologue known as “Ode to a Flower.”

Before Feynman, before Woolf, another titan of the creative spirit found a powerful metaphor for how we experience the world — how we see it, and how we don’t — in a flower.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Canna, 1924 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

“I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way things that I had no words for,” Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) wrote in the foreword to a catalog for an exhibition of her work two decades before she became the first female artist honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — a triumph largely predicated on her arresting large-scale paintings of flowers, magnified and abstracted to radiate uncommon emotional intensity haloed by awe. Although art critics consistently insisted that O’Keeffe’s depictions of flowers were her commentary on women’s sexuality, the artist herself resolutely denied these interpretations. For her, they were her commentary on seeing — a magnifying lens for the attention. Painting these close-ups was a way of learning to look, a way of removing the blinders with which we gallop through the world, slowing down, shedding our notions and concepts of things, and taking things in as they really are.

Georgia O’Keeffe by Rufus Holsinger, 1915 (Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library)

In a passage originally published in the exhibition catalog An American Place — which also gave us O’Keeffe’s serenade to blue — and later cited in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things (public library), she writes:

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.

So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don’t.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

Complement with O’Keeffe on setting priorities, success, public opinion, and what it means to be an artist, and her passionate love letters to Alfred Stieglitz, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on the art of looking, Annie Dillard on the secret to seeing, philosopher Martin Buber on what a tree can teach us about seeing others as they truly are, John Ruskin on how drawing trains you to see more clearly and live with greater presence, and Emily Dickinson’s astounding herbarium — a forgotten masterpiece of attention at the intersection of poetry and science.

BP

Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing

By Maria Popova

Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing

“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with a fleeting symphony of life before the final silence.

Each summer, cicadas arrive by the billions with their strange red eyes, their mysterious prime-shaped periodic cycles, and their haunting nocturnal emergence, sudden and synchronized. For years they have lived underground, soft milky-white nymphs nursed by endosymbiotic bacteria through their long helpless infancy. And then, as if by some divine signal, when the soil temperature reaches exactly 17.9 °C (64 °F), an obsidian exoskeleton encases their bodies in a flash to accompany them through the brief weeks of maturity as they rise from the underworld in singing search of a mate.

In consonance with pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell’s insistence that “every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” we now have a formula for predicting when this massive music festival of yearning will begin: E = (19.465 – t)/0.5136, where E denotes the emergence start date in May and t is the average April temperatures in Celsius.

By early June, they have all emerged, more of them than all the humans who have ever lived; by late July, they have all died.

Transformation of the periodical Cicada Septemdecim. Illustration by Lillie Sullivan, 1898. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

While annual cicada species cover the globe, periodical cicadas — the seven known species of the genus Magicicada, which emerge from the ground every 13 or 17 years in broods defined by geography and periodicity — are native only to North America. The English were staggered to encounter them when they first arrived. In 1633, the the governor of the young Plymouth Colony in New England marveled at the “numerous company of Flies which were like for bigness unto wasps or Bumble-Bees” that rose from the ground to feast on the trees and “made such a constant yelling noise as made the woods ring of them, and ready to deafen the hearers.”

Cicada by Edward Donovan, 1800. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Despite having no voice — no vocal chords, no lungs — cicadas are the loudest male chorus on Earth, their courtship serenades approaching the decibel level of a jet engine thanks to some of the most extraordinary acoustics in nature.

The body of a male cicada resembles a wood instrument. On each side of the hollow abdomen is a tymbal — a mesh of miniature ribs woven into a hard membrane, strummed whenever the singer flexes his synchronous flight muscles. Unlike locusts, which make sound by rubbing their legs against their wings and with which they were long conflated — it was only in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae that Linnaeus named the cicada as a different insect — cicadas sing the way humans do: with their whole body.

Art from A Monograph of Oriental Cicadidæ by William Lucas Distant, 1889. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Some find their music menacing, some mesmerizing. The Greeks considered it almost divine. When Pythagoras discovered the mathematics of harmony, a cicada sitting on a harp came to symbolize the science of music. Homer’s highest praise for orators was to compare them to cicadas. Anacreon, celebrated as the finest lyric poet of his civilization, reverenced them in verse:

Sweet prophet of summer, loved of the Muses,
Beloved of Phoebus who gave thee thy shrill song,
Old age does not wear upon thee;
Thou art earth-born, musical, impassive, without blood.
Thou art almost a god.

Epochs later, Lord Byron — poet laureate of the grandiose, otherwise blind to the grandeur of smallness — rhapsodized about these tiny “people of the pine” that “make their summer lives one ceaseless song.”

But no one has written more poetically about the biological reality of the cicada than the artist, naturalist, philosopher, entomologist, and educator Anna Botsford Comstock (September 1, 1854–August 24, 1930) — the forgotten pioneer who planted the seed for the youth climate action movement by introducing nature study to school curricula at the dawn of the twentieth century, making wonder a public good.

Anna Botsford Comstock circa 1900

In 1903, Comstock wrote and illustrated Ways of the Six-Footed (public library | public domain) — a lyrical field guide to the world of insects, doing for entomology what Carl Sagan would do for astronomy two generations later. Celebrating the commonest male cicada of summer as the greatest of “the insect troubadours,” Comstock writes:

This musician… is an interesting-looking fellow, with a stout body and broad, transparent wings quite ornately veined… The cicada whose song is the most familiar to us is the “dog-day harvest-fly” or “Lyreman.” It resembles the seventeen-year species, except that it is larger and requires only two or three years in the immature state, below ground, instead of seventeen. The Lyreman when seen from above is black, with dull-green scroll ornamentation; below he is covered with white powder. He lives in trees; hidden beneath the leaves, this arboreal wooer sends forth a high trill, which seems to steep the senses of the listener in the essence of summer noons. If you chance to find a Lyreman fallen from his perch and take him in your hand, he will sing and you can feel his body vibrate with the sound. But it will remain a mystery where the musical instrument is situated, for it is nowhere visible to the uninitiated. However, if you place him on his back, you may see directly behind the base of each hind leg a circular plate, nearly a quarter of an inch in diameter; beneath each of these plates is a cavity across which is stretched a partition made up of three distinct kinds of membranes for the modulation of the tone; at the top of each cavity is a stiff, folded membrane which acts as a drumhead; but it is set In vibration by muscles instead of drumsticks, and these muscles move so rapidly that we cannot distinguish the separate vibrations. Thus, our Lyreman is provided with a very complicated pair of kettledrums, which he plays with so much skill that his music sounds more like that of a mandolin than of a drum.

[…]

Surely a new interest attaches to this summer-day song when we realize that it has pleased the human ear since the dim age of Homer. The cicada’s kettledrums are perhaps the only musical instruments now in use that have remained unchanged through a thousand centuries since they were first mentioned.

Cicada speciosa by Charles Dessalines d’Orbigny, 1861. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music as a property of the universe and this lovely vintage parable about another music-making insect, then revisit Anna Botsford Comstock’s beautiful meditation on winter trees as a portal to aliveness.

BP

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