The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Hold on to the Light of the World

By Maria Popova

The light was always there — our star is a hundred million years older than our planet — but it was learning to see it, to harness it, to transform it, that made this rocky planet a living world: photoreceptors converting sunlight to sugar to green the Earth, eyes co-evolving with consciousness to give us books and beauty and blue.

Divination for the First Light. (Available as a print and a postcard.)

On the smallest daily scale of our tiny transient lives, our experience of life still hinges on how we see the light of the world and how we refract it through the lens of the mind.

The light of sunrise streaming through the rustling leaves of the maple to cast a dancing flame on your kitchen floor.

The glowing blade of grass backlit by the late-morning light.

The light of sunset on the smiling face of the person you don’t yet know, yet know, will become your lover.

The ten thousand flickering lights you see when you are landing home, each a human life both unaware of and indivisible from all the others.

Art by Sarah Jacoby from The Coziest Place on the Moon.

Midway through the lyrical record of her pioneering expedition to Labrador, Mina Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) breaks into what can best be described as part prose poem reverencing the light, part prayer for a way of seeing that never loses sight of it:

Sometimes towards evening in dreary November, when the clouds hang heavy and low, covering all the sky, and the hills are solemn and sombre, and the wind is cold, and the lake black and sullen, a break in the dark veil lets through a splash of glorious sunshine. It is so very beautiful as it falls into the gloom that your breath draws in quick and you watch it with a thrill. Then you see that it moves towards you. All at once you are in the midst of it, it is falling round you and seems to have paused as if it meant to stay with you and go no farther. While you revel in this wonderful light that has stopped to enfold you, suddenly it is not falling round you any more, and you see it moving steadily on again, out over the marsh with its bordering evergreens, touching with beauty every place it falls upon, forward up the valley, unwavering, without pause, till you are holding your breath as it begins to climb the hills away yonder. It is gone. The smoke blue clouds hang lower and heavier, the hills stand more grimly solemn and sombre, the wind is cold, the lake darker and more sullen, and the beauty has gone out of the marsh. Then — then it is night. But you do not forget the Light. You know it still shines — somewhere.

Couple with a blind hero of the French resistance on how to live in light, then revisit Oliver Sacks on how love gilds the light of life.

BP

The Trouble with Love

By Maria Popova

The Trouble with Love

Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled young people trembling with the unprocessed traumas of their childhoods laid in their poems and letters and journals the foundational modern mythos of love. Although none but one of them lived past their thirties, they touched the lives of generations to come with their art and their ideas about life.

We call them the Romantics, keep quoting their poems in our vows and keep paging through their textbook for suffering.

Pulsating through our culture as unexamined dogma is their idea that there is a hierarchy of the affections and that romantic love sits at the top as the organizing principle of our emotional lives, the aim and the end of our existential longing. It is a religion that even people with extraordinary capacity for critical thinking in other domains of life tend not to question. And yet when we let our hearts be large enough and real enough, we discover that there is but a porous and permeable membrane between friendship and passion, that collaboration is a form of intimacy, that family can mean many different things and look many different ways; we discover that romantic love is overwhelmingly a relation not between complete human beings but between idealized selves and mutual projections — the most powerful prompt for fantasy the creative imagination has invented.

Illustration from An ABZ of Love

The Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) offers a sobering antidote to the cult of romantic love in a passage from The Book of Disquiet (public library) — the posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a good explorer in the lifelong expedition to yourself and how to unself into who you really are. He writes:

Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along.

But every suit, since it isn’t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we’ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through.

Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion, accepted from the start, decides to vary the ideal constantly, constantly sewing new suits in the soul’s workshops so as to constantly renew the appearance of the person they clothe.

The standard romantic model is in this sense a warping of the deepest, truest kind of love — the kind Iris Murdoch so perfectly defined as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real… the discovery of reality.” Romantic love, Pessoa observes, is the flight from reality into fantasy, the projection of oneself onto the other:

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept — our own selves — that we love.

[…]

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say “I love you” or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

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.

Couple with Iris Murdoch on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Martha Nussbaum’s superb litmus test for how to know whether you really love a person and Simone de Beauvoir on how two souls can interact with one another in a meaningful way.

BP

Saved by Wonder: The Ziegler Polar Expedition and the Aurora Borealis

By Maria Popova

In August 1905, while Mina Hubbard was mapping Labrador in her pioneering expedition, the Brooklyn Eagle reported one of the most “remarkable exploits in Arctic work” — a relief expedition to rescue the American explorer Anthony Fiala and his crew, who had been stranded in the icy expanse for nearly two years, attempting to reach the North Pole.

Bankrolled by the American industrialist William Ziegler, who had made his fortune on baking powder and vowed to spend it on funding as many efforts as it takes to reach the North Pole, Fiala’s three-masted ship was crushed by polar ice just four months after sailing from Norway. Although the America could no longer sail, the ice was so think that the ship didn’t sink but froze in place.

The America in its icy clench.

The men scrambled to salvage the cargo, but when another storm finally swallowed the wreck in January, most of their provisions and coal vanished with it.

They fled onto the ice cap, built a camp, and undertook the daily task of survival, but not before erecting an observatory and setting up all of their scientific instruments.

The days bled into weeks, into months, into seasons as they kept hoping for rescue. The few remaining provisions ran out. They subsisted on walrus and bear. All the while, they kept making observations. It kept their spirits from sinking, this stubborn, steadfast work of painting a portrait of that alien world in numbers and figures in order to reveal the full face of this one.

In what seems like a miracle in the history of polar exploration, only one of the thirty-five men would die in the twenty months they spent as captives of the ice.

The Ziegler expedition at latitude 82°N, March 1905

Although their time in the Arctic was relegated to the sidelines of history as a failed expedition by the measure of its patron’s stated goal of reaching the North Pole, I see it as a triumph of both science and the human spirit. While conquest is a finite game, played for the pleasure of the win, curiosity is an infinite game, played for the pleasure of finding things out, in Richard Feynman’s lovely phrase. Exploration in the service of learning is always far greater and more enduring than exploration in the service of at staking a flag in the name of a potentate, for the task of knowledge is unfinishable and endlessly rewarding. (“The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power!” wrote the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell the year Anthony Fiala was born. “We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”)

Two years after their rescue, the expedition’s chief scientist — William J. Peters, whose groundbreaking studies of geomagnetism shaped the present understanding of Earth’s magnetosphere — published a 630-page report of their scientific findings. Fiala himself wrote the introduction, urging the reader to imagine the conditions, unimaginable to most of us, under which the work was done — a beckoning that feels like a miniature manifesto for the animating spirit of science:

The difficulties encountered in the execution of work in the Polar Regions must be experienced in order to be properly appreciated. Storms are frequent in the winter, and observers, in going to and from observatories and instrument shelters, have often to crawl upon hands and knees in the face of high winds, whirling snow particles, low temperatures, and in the darkness of winter. The hearty and unselfish cooperation of all concerned is amply indicated by the execution of the great amount of detail work that is reported upon in this volume.

Among the endless tables of astronomical, meteorological, and tidal data is a series of meticulous observations of the aurora borealis spanning several months — a landmark contribution to the poetic science of our planet’s most magical phenomenon. Three of the nights — December 23, 1903, January 2, 1904, and January 23, 1904 — appear as a series of breathtaking plates that capture both the drama and its subtlety of the Northern Lights.

Aurora borealis, December 23, 1903
Aurora borealis, January 2, 1904
Available as a print.
Aurora borealis, January 23, 1903
Aurora borealis sequence, January 23, 1903. Available as a print and a clock.

Couple with Frederick Cook’s moving account of surviving the icy captivity of the other pole, then revisit the science of how the aurora borealis casts its spell.

HT Romance of Books

BP

Traversal: New Year, New Book (Seven Years in the Making)

By Maria Popova

Traversal (FSG) broadens and deepens the questions raised in Figuring, the questions we live with: the relationship between chance and choice in becoming who we are, between chemistry and consciousness in being what we are, the tension between our love of truth and our lust for power, the restlessness of our longings and the redemption of our losses.

Our various instruments of reckoning with these questions — telescopes and treatises, postulates and poems — are revealed in their power and limitation through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads — the world’s first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue — to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

Here is the prelude, Chapter 0, as it appears in the book, framing the 565 pages to come:

Bigger than Manhattan, Earth’s largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia: Posidonia australis — a species of seagrass that, unable to flower, clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it has been cloning itself since before the pyramids were built — a kind of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the fresh-cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it goes on cloning itself as we go on dying and passing between our lips the heat of our mortality.

Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, between the time of mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose, matter yearning for meaning on a planet capable of trees and tenderness, a world on which every living thing abides by the same dumb resilience through which we rose from the oceans to compose the Benedictus and to build the bomb.

All of our models and our maps, all of our poems and our love songs, all the conjectures chalked on the blackboard of the mind in theorems and scriptures, spring from the same elemental restlessness to locate ourselves in the cosmos of being, to know reality and to know ourselves. Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we go on searching for an organizing principle to fathom the ultimate questions:

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

Over and over, we discover that it is all one question, that there might just be a single answer: love. Our love of knowledge. Our love of mystery. Our love of beauty transcending the vanity of ambition. Our love of truth prevailing over the howling hunger for power. Our love for each other — each of us a festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and chance.

BP

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