The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity

By Maria Popova

Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of a “workaholic,” often worn as a badge on the lapel of the modern ego, presupposes someone who makes work the central axis of life at the expense of living. The very question of “work/life balance,” inherited from the industrial model of labor, asks us to live in parts — a portion of the person doing the working, another doing the living. But culture is not made the way cars are made. We create — anything that is not mechanical, that is not a commodity, that touches anyone else in a meaningful way — with everything we are: every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read and every place we have ever walked, every elation and every shattering. The simplest poem pouring from the poet’s pen, the smallest wooden spoon taking shape in the carpenter’s hand, is the work of a lifetime.

André Gregory

On the cusp of turning seventy, as his lifelong friend Richard Avedon was dying, legendary theater director André Gregory took up drawing to his own surprise and found himself returned “to some very early state, a time before loneliness, abandonment, and fear” — that lovely feeling of breaking the template of oneself, leaving the comfort zone of competency on which reputations are built, and venturing into the vivifying firstness of something new. Such seemingly unproductive pastimes, Gregory realized, feed the life that is the raw material for the work, though we never know what will sprout from each lived seed.

Shortly after Avedon’s death, Gregory wrote to his friend the letter he “always intended to write but never did,” addressing their divergent views on life and work — the “one deep source of disagreement and friction” in their profound friendship. (Everyone who has lost a loved one knows that the conversations continue, knows what Hemingway knew: that “no one you love is ever dead.”)

In what might be the mightiest defense of the creative spirit since William Blake’s, Gregory writes:

Let’s face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.

Art by Balint Zsako from Bunny & Tree

In a passage evocative of Kurt Vonnegut’s magnificent poem-parable about the Shelter Island billionaire and the measure of enough, Gregory holds up a mirror to his departed friend — one from which every living person who wouldn’t know who they are without what to do averts their eyes:

You owned that exquisite house in Montauk, one of the loveliest I have seen anywhere, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. You designed it yourself. But you almost never went there. Did you yearn for another kind of life? Yes, you had friends—almost all driven and workaholic artists—but never a community. You saw each of us alone. In those lovely rooms of yours, over superb dinners, the talk would always be of work, work, and work.

Each time you stopped, you would descend into a depression, believing that you had hit a wall and lost the ability to work, that you would never work again.

The contrast Gregory paints is a miniature manifesto for the fundamental indivisibility of the self and the combinatorial nature of creativity:

You chose work. I have chosen the life. The work and the life.

At least I have done so in the last 30 years. Doesn’t the work on the self inform the Work? When we inch closer to ourselves, to who we originally were, who we’re meant to be, doesn’t that serve the work, doesn’t it connect us more deeply to others? Isn’t there value in spreading laughter, love, and compassion to the people around us? … The work changes the life, and the life changes the work.

Couple with Benedictine monk and philosopher David Steindl-Rast on the relationship between play and purposeful work, then revisit Lewis Hyde’s classic meditation on work vs. labor and how to sustain the creative spirit.

HT Letters Live

BP

The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted

By Maria Popova

The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her abiding insistence on choosing presence over productivity. But how do we really spend our days? In our era, the average human lifetime will contain two years of boredom, six months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy.

This devastating arithmetic of time wasted versus time meaningfully spent may seem like a modern problem, but while the nature of our cultural technologies has undeniably exacerbated the ratio, the equation itself stretches all the way to antiquity, with only the variables altered. (Lest we forget, books were derided as a dangerous distraction in 12th-century Japan.)

That equation, and how to balance it more favorably toward a life of substance and presence rather than one of waste and want, is what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined at the end of his life in Letters from a Stoic (public library) — a collection of 124 letters he composed to his friend Lucilius, which also gave us Seneca on true and false friendship, overcoming fear, and the antidote to anxiety.

seneca
Seneca

Fittingly, the first letter addresses the most urgent subject haunting human life: time, and more particularly, the existential calculus of how we spend or waste the sliver of time allotted us along the continuum of being. Fifteen years after he composed his timeless treatise on filling the shortness of life with wide living, Seneca, now in his final years, counsels his friend:

Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands… Certain moments are torn from us… some are gently removed… others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness.

The most perilous carelessness, Seneca argues eighteen centuries before Kierkegaard bemoaned the absurdity of busyness and Walt Whitman contemplated what makes life worth living, is that of sliding through life in a trance of expectancy, always vacating the present moment in order to lurch toward the next — a kind of living death. He writes:

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.

Therefore… hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, — time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

Art by Ohara Hale from Be Still, Life

Reflecting on how he himself practices what he is preaching, Seneca writes with Stoic self-awareness:

I confess frankly: my expense account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man… I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.

Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Complement this particular fragment of the timelessly rewarding Letters from a Stoic with Ursula K. Le Guin’s gorgeous ode to time, Bertrand Russell on the relationship between leisure and social justice, Margaret Mead on leisure and creativity, and Emerson on how to live with presence in a culture of busyness, then revisit Seneca on what it means to be a generous human being and his Stoic key to peace of mind.

BP

The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

By Maria Popova

The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about -173°C) at night. But these unique nooks, which are most likely collapsed lava tubes, are a cozy 63°F (17°C) inside — the feeling-tone of a crisp autumn day in Brooklyn, where I live. Images from the LRO suggested that these pits might unfold into caves that would make perfect sites for lunar exploration — campsites with a stable temperature, more protected from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micrometeorites.

There is something poetic in knowing that we evolved in caves and might one day inhabit caves on another celestial body, having invented the means to get there with the imagination that bloomed over millions of years in the lonely bone cave of the mind.

There is also something poetic in knowing that as we fantasize about leaving for the Moon, the Moon is leaving us.

The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this disquieting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. Nobody believed him — the Moon looked so steady, so unlosable. It took a quarter millennium for his theory to be vindicated: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the lunar surface and when laser beams were beamed at them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year — more than half the rate at which a child grows.

The Moon is leaving us because of the gravitational conversation between it and the Earth: the ocean tides. The drag they cause slows down the planet’s spin rate. Because gravity binds the Moon and the Earth, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us.

We know this thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the revelation that space is not flat, time is not absolute, and spacetime is a single fabric along the curvature of which everything, including light, moves.

I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.

Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote it, having always believed that every good children’s book is a work of philosophy in disguise, a field guide to the mystery we are a part of and the mystery we are — in the language of children, which is the language of curiosity and unselfconscious sincerity, such books speak the most timeless truths to the truest parts of us by asking the simplest, deepest questions to help us understanding the world and understanding ourselves so that we may be more fully alive.

By one of those wrinkles in time and chance that we call luck, shortly after I sent the manuscript to my friend Claudia at Enchanted Lion Books, I received a lovely note from a stranger named Sarah Jacoby in response to my essay about Margaret Wise Brown’s complicated love with Michael Strange. Sarah told me that she too had fallen under the spell of their singular love while illustrating a picture-book biography of Margaret. I ordered it and, enchanted by Sarah’s soulful watercolors and tender creatures, spontaneously invited her to illustrate my lunar story of loneliness and love on nothing more than an instinct of creative kinship. She must have felt it too because, felicitously, she said “yes.”

And so The Coziest Place on the Moon (public library) was born.

This is how it begins:

It was on a Tuesday in July that Re woke up feeling like the loneliest creature on Earth and decided to go live in the coziest place on the Moon.

At exactly 7:26 — a pretty number, a pretty hour — Re mounted a beam of light and sailed into space.

It took exactly 1.255 seconds, because light travels at the speed of dreams, to land exactly where Re wanted to land.

Across Sarah’s enchanted spacescapes, Re has a surprising encounter that takes the story to where it always wanted to go — a reckoning with how to bear our loneliness and what it really means to love.

BP

On Losing a Parent

By Maria Popova

We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma — losses painful precisely because it could be otherwise. We can lose people to death — losses painful because it can’t and never again will be otherwise.

Of all our possible losses, the loss of a parent is the least evitable and the most complicated, for it is the most primal, most charged with the complexities of attachment and individuation, the complexities that shaped how we move through the world, how we suffer, how we love.

But while Hemingway was right that “no one you love is ever dead,” something very real does die when a parent does — a biological tether, a memory storehouse, a fantasy of what the relationship could have been. And even if you know what to do when your parents are dying, even if you do do it with the utmost grace, nothing can brace you for the impact of that loss when it does come.

Still, there are ways you can move through it — things to hold in awareness, subtle kindnesses, small graces with the grief process — that can salve the pain.

One comes from Joan Didion in a fragment from her classic The Year of Magical Thinking (public library):

After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

Another, soulful and imaginative, comes from a team of young animators from French animation academy Gobelins:

Couple with Didion on the art of letting go, then revisit the most important thing to remember about your mother.

BP

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