The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How Not to Be a Victim of Time: Rebecca West on Music and Life

By Maria Popova

How Not to Be a Victim of Time: Rebecca West on Music and Life

Time is the book we fill with the story of our lives. All great storytelling has the shape of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still enough and quiet enough to hear the story of our becoming, the song of life evolution encoded in our cells: “Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music,” wrote the pioneering marine biologist Ernest Everett Just as he was revolutionizing our understanding of what makes life alive.

Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) offers an uncommonly insightful meditation on how music can help us befriend the fundamental dimension of our lives in her 1941 masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (public library), which I hold to be one of the past century’s great works of philosophy — her lyrical reckoning with art and survival lensed through three visits to Yugoslavia between the world wars, exploring what makes us and keeps us human.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

West recounts a painful moment of political tension at a restaurant table, suddenly interrupted by a Mozart symphony flooding in from the radio box, making “an argument too subtle and profound to be put into words” — an argument for the breadth of time, for how it can hold and heal our longings and losses. With the touching humility of acknowledging the limitations of one’s gift and craft, she writes:

Music can deal with more than literature… Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe? Yet the music had promised us, as it welled forth from the magic box in the wall over our heads, that all should yet be well with us, that sometime our life should be as lovely as itself.

The greatest music offers something even greater than itself — an amelioration of the most subterranean struggle of human life: our anxiety about time. West writes:

The major works of Mozart… never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust… It is, indeed, inadequate to call the means of creating such an effect a mere technical device. For it changes the content of the work in which it is used, it presents a vision of the world where man is no longer the harassed victim of time but accepts its discipline and establishes a harmony with it. This is not a little thing, for our struggle with time is one of the most distressing of our fundamental conflicts, it holds us back from the achievement and comprehension that should be the justification of our life.

One morning, West follows a waterfall up the river to its source across “a broad and handsome valley,” toward a lake that splits into two streams linked by a dilapidated village nestled in flowering trees. There, she encounters music wholly different from Mozart’s yet just as elemental, just as much a benediction of time in its syncopation of urgency and silence:

From the latticed upper story of one of the houses that were rotting among their lilacs there sounded a woman’s voice, a deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved… Later, standing on a bridge, watching water clear as air comb straight the green weeds on the piers, we heard another such voice… urgent in its desire to bring out beauty from the throat, urgent to state a problem in music. Both these women made exquisite, exciting use of a certain feature peculiar to these Balkan songs. Between each musical sentence there is a long, long pause. It is as if the speaker put her point, and then the universe confronted her with its silence, with the reality she wants to alter by proving her point. Are you quite sure, it asks, that you are right?

That may be what we can learn from music, what it means to have a harmonious relationship with time — training the mind to be unhurried, to halt the rush of certainty just enough to remain curious, to press an ear to the silence of the universe and listen for the clear sound of who and what we are.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
BP

How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty

By Maria Popova

How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore.” Unlike her staunchly secularized contemporaries, who shuddered to speak of the soul for fear of being seen as anti-intellectual, Woolf devoted her life to communicating from and with “all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul,” which she knew lives on a level deeper than the self to make us who we are. It is what is left to us and of us in those volcanic times of darkness and uncertainty. It is what rebuilds the world, within and without, and what always has. It is the world. We still use Kepler’s laws of planetary motion to land rovers on Mars, but we are yet to catch up to his model of the world as an ensouled body — a notion dating back to Plato, whose political precepts we still use and whose concept of anima mundi, or “world soul,” we are yet to heed.

One of Hildegard of Bingen’s enchanted ecologies

Epochs after Plato and Kepler and Woolf, trauma therapist Francis Weller offers a field guide to fortifying the soul in his essay collection In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty (public library). Two centuries after Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” Weller insists that a correct view of human nature must be rooted in a recognition of “our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi,” of “how fully our lives are entangled with one another, with the stand of oaks, the night herons, the marginalized, the brokenhearted.”

Observing that “soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy,” he writes:

We have clearly entered the Long Dark… It is the realm of soul — of whispers and dreams, mystery and imagination, death and ancestors. It is an essential territory, both inevitable and required, offering a form of soul gestation that may gradually give shape to our deeper lives, personally and communally. Certain things can happen only in this grotto of darkness. Think of the wild network of roots and microbes, mycelia, and minerals, making possible all that we see in the day world, or the extensive networks within our own bodies, bringing blood, nutrients, oxygen, and thought to our corporeal lives. All of it happening in the darkness. We must become fluent in the manners and ways of soul.

[…]

We are tumbling through a rough initiation. Radical alterations are occurring in our inner and outer landscapes. It is simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and stationery cards)

A century after Bertrand Russell called for “a largeness of contemplation” in his wonderful calibration of perspective amid the darkness of the world’s first global war, Weller writes:

It is a time to become immense.

To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world — a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty. Everything we need is here. We only need to remember the wider embrace of our belonging to woodlands and prairies, marshlands, and neighborhoods, to the old stories and the tender gestures of a friend. To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being — weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear — everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.

This immensity, Weller insists, is singularly called forth by precisely those periods of darkness and uncertainty we feel too small to fathom, to fight, to break through — the times when the order of the world as we know it has turned to chaos, out of which a new world can’t but be born. He writes:

When the ordinary fades, when the familiar rhythms and patterns of shared living erode, something is activated within the soul. Hidden invitations and initiations arise in a time of uncertainty. The soul recognizes the markers of descent — darkness, sorrow, anxiety — as requiring radical change. The conditions of trouble and uncertainty activate some profound movement toward alterations in the psychic landscape. These are the precise times when the possibility for shifts in the collective field occurs.

Couple In the Absence of the Ordinary, in the remainder of which Weller goes on to offer “ways to foster an intimacy with the world of soul and the soul of the world.” with this lighthouse for dark times, then revisit Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through difficult times and Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser’s vision for the evolution of our civilizational consciousness.

BP

Strata: The Consolations and Invitations of Deep Time

By Maria Popova

Strata: The Consolations and Invitations of Deep Time

“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite… and I know the amplitude of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time.

It tempers your sorrows to know that the striking red pebble you pick up at the beach is hematite — the oxidation of iron in sedimentary rock, the same iron composing the hemoglobin that oxygenates your red blood cells; to know that some distant day across the eons, someone else will bend down wonder-smitten on some other beach to pick up a striking pebble laced with red that was once your blood. It is more than a comfort — it is a consecration. The word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the notion of the interleaving of all things. This is the sacred, this the holy. To feel part of the implicate order of the whole. To touch for a moment the wrist of the world, feel the pulse of life’s bloodstream coursing through it, feel yourself a corpuscle and a miracle.

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth,” wrote Rachel Carson. To know that you carry sediment in your cells and that you will return to sediment is to be a living poem.

Rock formation in Patagonia

Laura Poppick offers a wondrous portal into this deeper dimension of time in Strata: Stories from Deep Time (public library) — a fine belated addition to my favorite books of 2025.

Recounting a revelatory shift in perspective while hiking Wyoming’s Bighorn Canyon under the weight of the world’s ecological and political tumult, she writes:

As I sat on that pale plateau with my legs beneath me… I remembered that stability has come and gone and returned so many times before now. That geologic timescales arc too wide to witness in a single human lifetime, but have always spun toward some sort of new stasis. I knew this didn’t let us off the hook, or mean that it was time to stop righting our wrongs to the environment. The changes we have unleashed today are unfolding far faster than past periods of change, and they were not geologically inevitable. We are the agents of this geologic moment. But the strata reminded me that we are also part of the Earth system, this much larger web of connections that thread between the atmosphere, continents, water, ice, and life. That these threads slacken and tighten over time and accommodate for one another with more brilliance than the human mind can easily grasp. That we live within this system, and the system lives within us. We carry its iron in our blood and its stardust in our bones, and its strength is our strength because we are it.

We are it, but we are not a given. The only given is the change and the sphere that contains it.

To apprehend the sphere stills the suffering of separateness. Echoing John Muir’s insistence that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Poppick paints the sphere in its dazzling, tessellated completeness:

Air, rock, water, life, and ice all interact in the web of feedback loops that geoscientists call the Earth system. Together, the five facets of this system — the atmosphere (air), lithosphere (rock), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), and cryosphere (ice) — orchestrate the global climate and, in turn, the underpinnings of our lives. It’s by coming to understand this system that I have grown to see the physical world not as the static backdrop of our daily experience but as an ever-changing vessel that ripples and responds to innumerable changes, and has been doing so for billions of years. Over time, these subtle transformations build, erode, and rebuild the world anew. We live our lives within recycled landscapes and those recycled landscapes live within us.

I mean this literally, not figuratively. The science is the poem and the poem is the science. Everything on this planet connects with everything else, from the microscopic contents of the air we breathe to the macroscopic movements of continents and ocean currents. You can’t build a mountain range without changing the atmosphere, at least a little (because freshly sculpted mountains pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and you can’t change the atmosphere without changing the chemistry of the ocean (because oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide), and you can’t change the ocean without affecting the life within it.

Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print.)

Paradoxically, to contact all this change, to see in silt the memorial of mountains and in mountains the memory of the Earth, is to remember the eternity in you. Recounting a rainy visit to a “golden spike” — an outcrop whose strata represent the transition from one geological period to another — Poppick writes:

The traces of the early Cambrian sat unblinking beneath the rain, telling us with a wordless wisdom that there are beginnings and that there are ends and that the fibers of the planet will always harden and soften and dissolve and re-form anew. That our own legacy will, some day, erode back into the sea.

[…]

The gift of geology is the chance to seek refuge in this constancy, in the gravity of the arc of time. When I walk the rocky shoreline near my home, I don’t see random stones thrown about but a montage of stories and events that intertwine directly with our present and our future.

[…]

If there’s one thing we can say with certainty has remained constant since at least the Archean, it’s the persistent tug of water against rock and the erosion that comes with it. The breaking down of Earth’s skin and bones to make room for something new. The motion is at once unchanging and the most persistent force of change. It is carving down boulders into cobbles into pebbles into sands, silts, clays. It is turning land into dust and sending its debris back to the sea it came from. By the time the seafloors of today rise up above the oceans as cliffsides or mountaintops, our individual lives will be specks of dust, imperceptible to the naked eye. The iron in our blood will have pooled back into the earth, all our remains melting within the mantle where we will meet, again, as one.

Complement Strata with geologist turned psychologist Ruth Allen on the twelve kinds of time and geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s love letter to the wisdom of rocks, then revisit Oliver Sacks on deep time and the interconnectedness of the universe.

BP

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

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