The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations

By Maria Popova

Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations

The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by reason of demobilization of men.” When he received the discharge papers, he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER” on the envelope in big bold letters to signal that he was never willing for the job he was being fired from. The FBI took note and opened a file, to which they would later add the World Peace Movement he organized on his college campus, his acts of civil disobedience to protect old-growth forests from the corporate chainsaw, and his attendance of a Conference in Defense of Children in Vienna, deemed “communist initiated.”

Even as a teenager, Abbey understood that ideologies are only ever defeated not with guns but with ideas, so he decided to subvert the system by enrolling to study philosophy and literature at the University of New Mexico under the G.I. Bill. He spent the rest of his twenties traveling (he fell especially in love with Scotland, thinking about what makes life worth living, and dreaming of becoming a writer. It was when he took a job as a park ranger at thirty that he found the material for his first book: the ravishing Desert Solitaire, which went on to inspire generations of writers and environmental activists, among them Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Cheryl Strayed, and Rebecca Solnit.

Edward Abbey as an off-duty park ranger. (Photograph: Phillip Harrington.)

Throughout his life, Abbey kept a journal that stands as a crowning curio in the canon of notable diaries, selections from which were posthumously published as Confessions of a Barbarian (public library). In an entry penned just before his twenty-fifth birthday, when most of us move through the world feeling invincible and immortal, Abbey contemplates the end of life:

HOW TO DIE — but first, how not to:

Not in a smelly old bloody-gutted bed in a rest-home room drowning in the damp wash from related souls groping around you in an ocean heavy with morbid fascination with agony, sin and guilt, expiated, with clinical faces and automatic tear glands functioning perfunctorily and a fat priest on the naked heart.

Not in snowy whiteness under arc lights and klieg lights and direct television hookup. No never under clinical smells and sterilized medical eyes cool with detail calculated needle-prolonged agonizing, stiff and starchy in the white monastic cell, no.

Not in the muddymire of battle blood commingled with charnel-flesh and others’ blood, guts, bones, mud and excrement in the damp smell of blasted and wrung-out air; nor in the mass-packed weight of the cities atomized while masonry topples and chandeliers crash clashing buried with a million others, no.

Not the legal murder either — too grim and ugly such a martyrdom — down long aisled with chattering Christers chins on shoulders under bright lights again a spectacle an entertainment grim sticky-quiet officialdom and heavy-booted policemen guiding the turning of a pubic hair gently grinding in a knucklebone an arm hard and obscene fatassed policemen everywhere under the judicial — not to be murdered so, no never.

But how to:

Alone, elegantly, a wolf on a rock, old pale and dry, dry bones rattling in the leather bag, eyes alight, high, dry, cool, far off, dim distance alone, free as a dying wolf on a pale dry rock gurgling quietly alone between the agony-spasms of beauty and delight; when the first flash of hatred comes to crawl, ease off casually forward into space the old useless body, falling, turning, glimpsing for one more time the blue evening sky and the far distant lonesome rocks below — before the crash, before…

With none to say no, none.

Way off yonder in the evening blue, in the gloaming.

When he did die a lifetime later, alone in his desert home, Abbey left a winking note for anyone seeking his final words: “No Comment.” He requested that his useless body be used “to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.” Wishing to have no part in the funeral industry’s embalmments and coffins, he asked his friends to ignore the state laws, place him in his favorite blue sleeping bag, and bury him right into the thirsty ground. If a wake was to be held, he wanted it simple, brief, and cheerful, with bagpipe music, “lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,” and no formal speeches — “though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge.” When the wake was held at Arches National Park, where he had found his voice as a writer, Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams were among those who felt the urge.

Edward Abbey in his late fifties.

Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.

So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.

Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman’s spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.

BP

19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living

By Maria Popova

19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living

We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can’t control — the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of — how we choose to play the hand makes us who we are.

A lifetime before she looked back to contemplate how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, the teenage Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) began considering the choices before her in creating herself out of the raw material of her givens — the limiting horizons of her time and place, the vast vista of her mind. (“She thinks like a man,” her father boasted in a haunting testament to both.)

Simone de Beauvoir

At seventeen, she had passed her baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, then gone on to study math at the Catholic University in Paris before crossing over to the Sorbonne for a degree in philosophy. She would become only the eighth woman to ever pass the agrégation — the most rigorous exam in the French education system — narrowly losing first place in her class to Sartre.

It was at the Sorbonne where, still in her teens, she began bending her tensile and penetrating mind toward the kind of life she wanted to live and the kind of person she wanted to be. In her journal of that time, later published as the altogether magnificent Diary of a Philosophy Student (public library), she approaches these questions with the oscillation between determination and self-doubt inherent to any great endeavor — for there is no greater creative act than the making of a life.
Punctuating the diary are touching reminders that even exceptional people are not spared the ordinary perturbations of being human — she is in some ways a typical teenager (“My winter was occupied almost uniquely with love and suffering.”) and a typical person (“Unendingly I make resolutions that I never keep.”), and yet what she makes out of all that suffering, all that restlessness, all that yearning is what makes her — what makes anyone — extraordinary.

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

Finding herself “neither able to accept nor to refuse life,” she peers into her near and faraway future:

I will be twenty years old in a few months. My education will be almost finished. I will have learned, read, seen everything essential and well beyond. I will have lived with my intelligence and my heart and known a rather wide world. I will even have begun to think by myself; there will be no wasted time. But then it will be advisable to put myself to work. If I live, I must fully accept the game; I must have the most beautiful life. I don’t know why I am here, but since I remain here, I will construct a beautiful edifice.

Then she reaches for the building blocks. Deeming her suffering “useless,” she resolves to rise above it and aim her life toward “a written work that would say everything, that would analyze souls in minute detail while breathing life into each body.” Aware that this dream would demand of her absolute devotion and absolute discipline, she sets down a series of instructions to herself:

Take risks… Force myself to think for two pages per day… Don’t scatter myself… Don’t hurry, but work two hours per day, genius or not, even if I believe that it will come to nothing, and confide in someone who will criticize me and take me seriously.

[…]

I must… clarify my desire and proceed by trial and error in order to prepare what would eventually be a great written work… Analyze, understand, and descend more deeply into myself… It is imperative to begin. The questions that interest me must be studied in great depth… It would be necessary… to bring it together with the problems of the personality that love formulates so exactly — the problem of the act of faith that so closely touches the first two problems… It would be necessary to have the courage to write, not to expound ideas but to discover them, not to clothe them artistically but to animate them. The courage to believe in them.

Because there can never be great achievement without great despair, because demanding everything and more of yourself is always wormed with doubt that you might not have it to give, the pendulum keeps swinging between determination and despair. Just after deciding to devote her summer vacation to exploring “the subject of love” as a philosophical problem in “at least thirty condensed and coherent pages,” she plummets again:

What emptiness, what boredom! I hang on to some likable faces, but the too well loved face unendingly smiles at me with sorrow. For what indefinite crossing have I embarked at this precise point in time and space as though in the middle of an immense sea? A crossing whose goal is unknown.

Card fromAn Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

First she uses the lever of her formidable intellect to lift the heavy emotion:

I do not have the right to despair. [If] despair was justified… it demands to be demonstrated — to say, “nothing is worth it,” and to sit idly by with your arms crossed, to have the certainty that no certainty is possible; this is still dogmatism… I too am setting forth a postulate: it is first necessary to seek what is, then, I will see if I must still despair.

But one can never reason one’s way out of a powerful feeling-state — it simply has to be felt, suffered, endured “for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it.” All despair of life is at bottom despair of oneself — something Beauvoir channels with the heightened intensity of adolescent feeling and the lashing censure of ambition:

I have examined my conscience, and here is what I have found: prideful, selfish, and not very good… I often have disgust for myself… I have closed myself in my ivory tower, saying, “Who is worthy of entering here?” I would sometimes open the door and that is all, but there are some people profoundly better than me, and this haughty attitude is stupid. Egoist — I love others only inasmuch as they are me; I easily scorn, and scornful, I no longer try to do my best… How severely I judge and with what right?

In a momentary flash of self-compassion immediately clouded by the same sharp self-excoriation, she adds:

I should suffer with gentleness. I am hard, hard and proud. Become conscious of your own poverty, my girl, and of all of your cowardice!… I have covered my own cowardice with sophisms — oh!

She considers the steps to the courage of creating — a great work, or a great life:

Systematize my thoughts and believe in the value of thought. Read… Delve more deeply. Take all of this seriously. Be more pitiless towards myself and less skeptical with regards to others… Stop only in front of the evidence. Write conclusions once they are acquired… And above all: think for myself.

And yet she locates the key to a fulfilling life not in the mind alone but in the largeness, the fulness, the unabashed openness of the heart:

Life is so beautiful as long as I am creating it! So painful when it is a given that must be endured. Live, act, be wholeheartedly!

Half a century later — having proven these postulates with her life, having written not just one great work but several — she would approach the art of growing old with the same depth of thought and feeling.

Complement with her contemporary Albert Camus on the three antidotes to the absurdity of life and Walt Whitman’s timeless recipe for a vibrant and rewarding life, then revisit this omnibus of resolutions for a life worth living borrowed from some extraordinary lives.

BP

Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on the Art of Presence and the “Moments of Being” That Make You Who You Are

By Maria Popova

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of my favorite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his classic on anxiety that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity… the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.”

Given that nearly every cell in your body has changed since the time you were a child, given that nearly all of your values, desires, and social ties are now different, given that you are, biologically and psychologically, a different person from one moment to the next, what makes you and the child you were the same person — what makes a self — is nothing more than the thread of selective memory and internal narrative stringing together the most meaningful beads of experience into the rosary of meaning that is your personhood.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) called these beads “moments of being” — the “scaffolding in the background” of life, “invisible and silent” yet shaping the foreground of experience: our relationship to other people, our response to events, the things we make with our hands and our minds in our daily living. The most intensely felt of these moments, she believed, “have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence”; we don’t call them to memory — they call us into being. They are the antipode of what she called “non-being” — the lull of habit and mindless routine that drags us through our days in a state of near-living.

In Moments of Being (public library) — the posthumous collection of her autobiographical writings — she writes:

A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.

In her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway — part love letter to these moments of being, part lamentation about the proportion of non-being we choose without knowing we are choosing — she locates the key to righting the ratio in “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” Placing one of the characters in one such vivid moment of being — “coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand” — she writes him thinking:

Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

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

This question of life’s fullness — what fills it, what syphons it, how to live when it overflows beyond what we can hold — animates Woolf’s entire body of work. In the spring of 1928, while working on her trailblazing novel Orlando (“which is wretched,” she told her sister Vanessa in a letter, then wrote the relationship between creativity and self-doubt into the novel itself) — she reflected in her diary:

A bitter windy rainy day… Life is either too empty or too full. Happily, I never cease to transmit these curious damaging shocks. At 46 I am not callous; suffer considerably; make good resolutions — still feel as experimental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever… And I find myself again in the driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it?

In a sense, to live in the moment is always to live against time. Woolf captured his with uncommon splendor in another autobiographical fragment:

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it is pressed so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of house moving — causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters.

Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River.

As Woolf was thinking these beautiful thoughts and writing these beautiful sentences, she was enduring regular visitations the acute depression that would eventually lead her to fill her coat-pockets with stones and wade into the river, never to return. She had come to the brink once before, in her twenties. That she lived to fifty-nine despite such suffering, that she wrote the flashes of eternity she did, is an astonishing achievement of the spirit — a testament to her own power “of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”

It is through her protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway that Woolf best captures these luminous building blocks of personhood:

Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there — the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.

These moments, Woolf knew and devoted her life to having us know, are our best listening device for hearing the soul beneath the self — the soul that is little more than the quality of attention we pay to being alive.

It was one such almost painfully acute moment of being while walking through her garden that lifted what Woolf called “the cotton wool of daily life” and sparked her epiphany about why she became a writer — a lens on a larger truth about what it means to be an artist, a person of creative fire in the river of time — prompting her to exult in the revelation:

I reach… the idea… that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

BP

How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love

By Maria Popova

How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love

“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

It is a beautiful sentiment, beautiful and incomplete. Art is but one way of contacting that deeper reality. Science is another, with its revelations of truths so beyond sight that they seem inconceivable, from the billions of neutrinos passing through your body this very second to the hummingbird’s flight to the quantum bewilderment of the subatomic world.

But more than art, more than science, we have invented one implement to cut through the curtain of habit and render the world new. Love alone blues the sky and greens the grass and brightens all the light we see. It is the last irreducible reality, whose mystery no painting or poem can fully capture and no fMRI can fully explain.

In 1965, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) moved from Los Angeles, where he had just finished a graduate program at UCLA, to New York, where he was offered a post at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He found the city a place of “fantastic creative furor,” but his painful introversion and sense of difference left him feeling friendless.

Oliver Sacks as a UCLA graduate student, 1964. (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks Foundation.)

That summer, just before beginning his new job, he traveled home to London. While in Europe, he met Jenö Vincze — a charismatic Hungarian theater director living in Berlin. Oliver had been planning to go to a neurology conference in Vienna. Instead, he found himself in Paris, in Amsterdam, in love with Jenö. Here was a rigorous and original scientist, who would devote his life to illuminating the neurological underpinnings of our strangest mental states, suddenly subsumed in the strangest and most mysterious of them all. He would later look back on this time as one of “an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.”

When he reluctantly returned to New York, Oliver set about trying to bridge the abyss of physical absence by rendering his world alive in words, composing some of the greatest love letters I have read. In one of the treasures collected in his posthumously published Letters (public library), he writes:

My dearest Jenö:

I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is seven o’clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And soon there’ll be a billion lights.

He isn’t, of course, describing the city as it is but as he is. This, in the end, may be what love is — the billion lights inside that make the whole world luminous, an inner sun to render every dull surface and every dark space radiant:

I don’t feel the distance either, only the nearness. We’re together all the while. I feel your breath on the side of my neck… My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile.

[…]

I want to share my joys with you. To see the green crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg cases hung from seaweed. A little octopus, just hatched, jetting for joy in the salty water. Sea anemones. The soft sweet pressure if you touch their center. The chalky hands of barnacles. And polychaetes in their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), moving with insensate grace. And dive with me under the ocean, Jenö. Through fish, like birds, which accept your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the freedom, the complete and utter freedom of motion, second only to that of space itself.

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.

Oliver yearned to transport Jenö not only to the world he walked through but to the world within, the world he would always best access and best channel in writing. “The act of writing,” he would reflect a lifetime later, “is a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.” Now, he tells his beloved:

I read Psalms in profanity, for the joy they contain, and the trust and the love, and the pure morning language… I write so much. I want to catch everything and share it with you. You will be deprived of all your social life, your sleep, your food, condemned to read interminable letters. Poor Jenö, committed to a lover who’s never silent, who talks all day, and talks all night, and talks in company, and talks to himself. Words are the medium into which I must translate reality. I live in words, in images, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can’t help it.

Again and again, he keeps returning to this new quality of light suddenly revealed by love:

The weather has been of supernal beauty. The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love… I never saw that golden light before we met in Paris.

Perhaps it was this brush with the irreducible immensity of love that would later lead Oliver to write so presciently about the limits of artificial intelligence and so poignantly about the meaning of our human lives.

Two days later, he writes again:

I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through ten layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known… I believe we are both infinite, Jenö. I see the future as an endless expansion of the present, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves.

Like all people in love, Oliver was envisioning a life with Jenö, not once imagining that they would never see each other again, that he would spend the next thirty-five years celibate and afraid of love, afraid of himself in love.

But love would find him in the end — a beautiful and bright love that would hold him through dying with dignity.

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

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