The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

By Maria Popova

This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

Light distribution on soap bubble from the 19th-century French physics textbook Le monde physique. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure.

A century of upheavals ago, suspended between two World Wars, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the strange power and possibility of such societal phase transitions in his novel Steppenwolf (public library). He writes:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

We too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.

Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. A century before Toni Morrison, living through another upheaval, insisted that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work,” Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”

The Dove No. 1 by Hilma af Klint, painted during World War I. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Often, they do the nourishing at great personal cost. He considers what it means, and what it takes, to be an artist:

You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

Most people, Hesse laments while watching his contemporaries, are instead “robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings” by the newspapers they read daily — the social media of his time — through which the world’s power-mongers manipulate our imagination of the possible. “The end and aim of it all,” he prophecies, “is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last.”

That is what happened. The next war did come, the world’s grimmest yet — a phase transition that nearly destroyed every particle of humanity. And yet something was left standing, stirring — that same creative force that made of the chaos a new era of possibility never previously imagined: civil rights and women’s liberation, solar panels and antibiotics, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nina Simone.

On the other side of that war’s ruins, another thinker of uncommon depth and sensitivity considered the role of the artist and of art in the collapse and reconfiguring of civilizations. In a 1949 address before the American Academy of Arts and Letters, later included in his lifeline of a collection Two Cheers for Democracy (public library), the English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) celebrates the stabilizing power of art in times of incoherence and discord:

A work of art… is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a mess — but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess — but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess — but there was Macbeth. Louis XIV — but there was Phèdre. Art… is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.

Art by Nina Cosford from the illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf, who wrote To the Lighthouse in a transitional time.

Because art is the antipode to the destructive forces sundering society, the artist — endowed with the personal and political power of the sensitive — will invariably tend to be an outsider to the society in which they are born. A decade before Auden observed that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,” before Iris Murdoch observed that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Forster writes:

If our present society should disintegrate — and who dare prophesy that it won’t? — [the figure of the artist] will become clearer: the Bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat — one of those figures which have at present no function either in a warring or a peaceful world. It may not be dignified to be a rat, but many of the ships are sinking, which is not dignified either — the officials did not build them properly. Myself, I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship — at all events I can look around me for a little longer — and I remember how one of us, a rat with particularly bright eyes called Shelley, squeaked out, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators df the world,” before he vanished into the waters of the Mediterranean… The legislation of the artist is never formulated at the time, though it is sometimes discerned by future generations.

This, he assures us, is not a pessimistic view — it is a kind of faith in the future, made of our creative devotion to the present. (I am reminded here of his contemporary Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” and of C.S. Lewis, who reckoned with our task in troubled times from the middle of a World War to remind us that “the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”) Forster writes:

Society can only represent a fragment of the human spirit, and that another fragment can only get expressed through art… Looking back into the past, it seems to me that that is all there has ever been: vantage-grounds for discussion and creation, little vantage-grounds in the changing chaos, where bubbles have been
blown and webs spun, and the desire to create order has found temporary gratification, and the sentinels have managed to utter their challenges, and the huntsmen, though lost individually, have heard each other’s calls through the impenetrable wood, and the lighthouses have never ceased sweeping the thankless seas.

BP

No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear: Toni Morrison on the Artist’s Task in Troubled Times

By Maria Popova

“Only an artist can tell … what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it,” James Baldwin asserted in contemplating how the artist’s struggle illuminates the common human struggle. “War and chaos have plagued the world for quite a long time,” wrote a forgotten defender of E.E. Cummings and the artist’s duty to challenge the status quo, “but each epoch creates its own special pulse-beat for the artists to interpret.” Often, the pulse-beats of chaos that feel most unsurvivable are those which artists must most urgently interpret in order for us to indeed survive.

That task of the artist as a grounding and elevating force in turbulent times is what Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931–August 5, 2019) explores in a stunning essay titled “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” included in the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation.

Toni Morrison (Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf)
Toni Morrison (Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf)

Morrison writes:

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine — and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election…” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

With an eye to the various brokennesses of the world, past and present, Morrison writes:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.

Complement with Morrison on how to be your own story and George Saunders on the artist’s task, then revisit JFK’s spectacular speech on the artist’s role in society.

BP

The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

By Maria Popova

The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter, what makes life alive? A generation later, the Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman answered with a deeply original proposition: that life is best defined as freedom, that freedom is the boundary between inanimate matter and animacy.

To me, freedom is the boundary condition where matter reaches for meaning — life, after all, is the only component of the universe free to comprehend the rest. And yet all of our technologies of thought have so far failed to discern what life actually is, how it emerged from non-life, and what to look for when we are looking for it in our laboratories and in the great unfolding experiment that is the universe itself. We have sequenced the human genome and discovered the “God particle,” yet genetics and particle physics have found no common language for communicating and harmonizing their respective discoveries to address the complex question the single answer to which is life.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrote. Watching her mathematician brother — the number theory pioneer André Weil — try to reduce the problem of reality to his own science, watching the founding fathers of quantum mechanics do the same, she lamented: “The state of science at a given moment is nothing else but… the average opinion of the village of scientists [who] affirm what they believe they ought to affirm.”

An epoch later, the villages have drifted so far apart as to grow foreign to each other. Gravitational waves, radioactivity, and DNA belong to the same reality — the reality that made life possible — and yet cosmology, chemistry, and biology are too mute to each other to make sense of the deeper meaning behind their respective discoveries. We are still left wondering how reality happens unto life and how life becomes reality.

Art by Komako Sakai for a modern Japanese interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit

Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker takes up these complex and abiding questions in Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (public library).

Trained as a theoretical physicist and disenchanted with her discipline’s insistence that life is a conceptually banal scientific problem subservient to the fundamentals of space, time, energy, and matter, she holds modern physics accountable for providing “a fundamental description of a universe devoid of life” — that is, a description of the universe that negates the very existence of its describers, we who are very much alive. She writes:

We cannot see ourselves clearly because we have not built a theory of physics yet that treats observers as inside the universe they are describing.

Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In this quest to understand ourselves and the universe that made us, she argues, the vitalists of the eighteenth century — who believed that a concrete non-physical element, a “vital spark,” grants life its aliveness — were no more misguided than the modern materialists who believe that life — that poetry, that whale song, that love — is just a property of physical matter. Reckoning with a colleague’s startling remark that “life does not exist,” she considers the deeper logic beneath this koan-like formulation of the great scientific blind spot of our time:

What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter… There is no magic transition point where a molecule or collection of molecules is suddenly “living.” Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience — that we are living — is nonexistent when you look at our parts. If life is not a property of matter, and material things are what exist, then life does not exist.

(And of course, none of it had to exist at all. Life seems to be the imperative of the unnecessary. Long before modern physics, Darwin marveled at how, on this planet shaped by unfeeling forces and moved by fixed laws, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Here was a biologist trained as a geologist shining a sidewise gleam on a cosmological question — a rare vagabond between the villages of science, from a time before they had become separate continents of thought.)

At the heart of the book is the rigorous, passionate insistence that we need a softer and more elastic explanatory membrane between the three hard problems of reality: the hard problem of consciousness (rooted in the mystery of qualia, that inarticulable essence of what it feels like to be oneself, the felt interiority of being alive in a particular embodiment and enmindment), the hard problem of matter (the fact that everything observable arises from the interaction of particles and forces), and the hard problem of life (sculpted of information and an observer of information). Sara writes:

Cast in this way, all three hard problems become one more fundamental problem we cannot seem to avoid any more than we can seem to answer it: Why do some things exist (or experience existence) and not others? It is perhaps the most perplexing question of our existence that anything should exist at all. And if something exists, then why not everything?

By contracting the pinhole of our scrutiny to the question of life, she intimates, we might be able to begin extrapolating an answer to this largest of questions — something that calls not only for new principles but for a new theory of physics and a dismantling of disciplinary boundaries. A century after Weil, Sara points to the same paradox standing between the life of science and the science of life in our own time:

We don’t yet have a general understanding of the category of things that we should group together and call “life.” Therefore either our categorization is wrong or life is not something to be categorized.

[…]

We cannot always see this clearly because of the arbitrary boundaries we set between the current classification of disciplines we think are needed to solve the problem, which are based on paradigms not suited for solving what life is.

Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Observing that “the boundary between the phenomena we want to think of as life and not life is fuzzy at best and may not exist at all,” she considers the present state of our disciplinary parochialism:

Biologists approach the problem by defining life in terms of observed features of life on Earth, which is not especially useful when you’re looking for life’s origins or for life elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiologists need guiding principles to inform how they conduct their search, but they, too, end up being overly anthropocentric in their reasoning: their search is most often directed at signs of life that would indicate biology exactly as we observe it here on Earth. Chemists either think life does not exist or that it is all chemistry (probably these are equivalent views). Computer scientists tend to focus too much on the software — the information processing and replicative abilities of life — and not enough on the hardware, i.e., the fact that life is a physical system that emerges from chemistry, and that the properties of chemistry literally matter. Physicists tend to focus too much on the physical — life is about thermodynamics and flows of energy and matter — and miss the informational and evolutionary aspects that seem to be the most distinctive features of the things we want to call life. Philosophers focus too much on the need for a definition or the flaws of providing one, and not enough on how we can move as a community beyond the definitional phase into a new paradigm.
Nature does not share these boundaries between disciplines. They are artifacts of our human conception of nature, our need to classify things, and historical contingencies in how our understanding of the reality around us has evolved over the last few centuries. That is, they are the product of paradigms established in the past. We are in part pre-paradigmatic in understanding life as a general phenomenon in the universe because there is no defined discipline that can fully accommodate the intellectual discussion that needs to be had about what life is.

1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

The solution to the unsolved problem of life, she argues, may not be one of new evidence but one of new explanation, just as we watched the planets move for eons before we discerned the laws of their motion to concede a heliocentric universe. Without a clear explanatory model for life here on Earth, she argues, we might never be able to detect life on other worlds — the central task of her own science. With an eye to how the new science of plant intelligence deepens the mystery of what a mind is, Sara considers what kindred blind spots may be afflicting astrobiology:

Plants are just one example that makes clear how the boundary of our imagination does not even intersect with what it is to be among the other multicellular life that surrounds us on this planet.

If we cannot even shift our reference frame enough to understand what it is like to be other inhabitants of our own planet, how could we possibly imagine the truly alien? “Truly alien” here should be understood as other life that does not share any ancestry with our own: that is, that has an entirely unique history with an independent origin. There are no aliens on Earth because as far as we know, all the life we have encountered shares a common history. Even artificial intelligences — sometimes described as alien, are not alien; they are trained on human data, which is itself the product of nearly four billion years of evolution on Earth. AI is as much a part of life on Earth as any of the biological organisms that have evolved here.

Art by Pepita Sandwich from The Art of Crying

A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler presaged the emergence of a new “mechanical kingdom” extending the kingdoms of biological life into our machines, Sara argues that our mechanical and algorithmic creations may not only alter the definition of life but help illuminate its origins:

The emergence of a technosphere may be precisely what is required for a biosphere to solve its own origins and therefore to discover others like it. To make this transition and make first contact, it may be critical to where we sit now in time that we recognize how thinking technologies are the next major transition in the planetary evolution of life on Earth. It is what we might expect as societies scale up and become more complex, just as life simpler than us has done in the past. The functional capabilities of a society have their deepest roots in ancient life, a lineage of information that propagates through physical materials. Just as a cell might evolve along a specific lineage into a multicellular structure (something that’s not inevitable but has happened independently on Earth at least twenty-five times), the emergence of artificial intelligences and planetary-scale data and computation can be seen as an evolutionary progression — a biosphere becoming a technosphere.

“Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in one of her finest, least known poems. A proper understanding of life, Sara argues, must account for that fact — for the tenacity with which life not only continues to exist despite the infinitely greater odds of nonexistence (which anchored Richard Dawkins’s wonderful counterintuitive insistence on the luckiness of death) but continues to exist in its particularity despite the infinitely many other possible configurations. She writes:

If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to — and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.

Out of this arises a crucial distinction between life and being alive (highlighted in the biological fact that most of you is dead). Nearly a century after cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener made the then-radical assertion that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” Sara adds:

DNA cannot exist unless there is a physical system (e.g., a cell) with memory of the steps to assemble it. All objects that require information to specify their existence constitute “life.” Life is the high-dimensional combinatorial space of what is possible for our universe to build that can be selected to exist as finite, distinguishable physical objects. Being “alive,” by contrast, is the trajectories traced through that possibility space. The objects that life is made of and that it constructs exist along causal chains extended in time; these lineages of information propagating through matter are what it is to be “alive.” Lineages can assemble individual objects, like a computer, a cup, a cellular membrane, or you in this very instant, but it is the temporally extended structure that is alive. Even over your lifetime you are alive because you are constantly reconstructing yourself — what persists is the informational pattern over time, not the matter.

[…]

The fundamental unit of life is not the cell, nor the individual, but the lineage of information propagating across space and time. The branching pattern at the tips of this structure is what is alive now, and it is what is constructing the future on this planet.

One of computing pioneer Alan Turing’s little-known diagrams of morphogenesis

In the remainder of Life as No One Knows It, Sara goes on to explore assembly theory — a new framework for understanding the complexity of living organisms by discerning the minimal number of steps required to assemble them from the most fundamental building blocks — as a possible solution to the abiding problem of what we are. Complement it with pioneering biologist Ernest Everett Just — one of the first scientists to consider this question holistically — on what makes life alive, then revisit Meghan O’Gieblyn on our search for meaning in the age of AI and Alan Turing’s favorite boyhood book about the strange science of how alive you really are.

BP

The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

By Maria Popova

The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called “the art of living.”

That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sandwich explores in The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears (public library) — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence.

She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body’s cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those “custodians of the heart,” as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal).

Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can’t produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs.

The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way.

She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were “the humors of the heart,” to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin’s studies of emotional expressions, which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation.
We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world’s largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle.

This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only came into popular use in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.)

This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes:

It doesn’t matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human.

It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris’s death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories.

Because every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita’s interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the beach, crying “with pure love at the grocery store line.”

She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships.

Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions (which makes a cameo in The Art of Crying as one of many celebrations of other artists’ art), then savor the fascinating evolutionary history of dreaming — our other complex language for reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are.

BP

Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for These Luminous Liminal Days Today)

By Maria Popova

For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment to those unbidden days in it when summer seems to make a brief and bright return — as if to assure us that time is not linear but planar, that life will always recompense loss, that in the liminal we find the immanent and in the ephemeral the eternal.

No one has captured that enchantment more vividly than Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) in a rhapsodic entry from his journal penned one late and luminous October day in his thirties.

Emerson writes:

On this wonderful day when heaven and earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their glittering seats and come to visit us with all their shining hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes.

He would later draw on this journal entry for the opening passage of his landmark book-length essay Nature (public library), considered the founding document of Transcendentalism (a term his visionary friend Elizabeth Peabody coined). Following a short poem, the essay begins:

There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely.

The phrase “Indian summer” entered the lexicon in Emerson’s lifetime, peaked a century and a half later, and has since been falling out of use in the slow repair work of culture. But we have failed to replace it with a new term for those golden echoes of summer that harmonize the hymn of letting go that is fall. Perhaps “the halcyons” can do.

Complement with ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn, in nature and in life, as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Emerson on how to trust yourself, how to live with presence, how we become our most authentic selves.

BP

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