For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see; thinking life impossible below 300 fathoms, because that was as far as we could reach — only to discover, as we wield our minds to develop prosthetic extensions of our senses, scales of complexity infinitely wider and vaster than we had imagined, full of wonders we could not conceive with our self-referential imagination.
“I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration,” Galileo reported after converting his telescope into a compound microscope to reveal a cosmos inside the world, an exponent of life never before imagined.
“I examined water in which I had steeped the pepper,” the artist turned scientist Robert Hooke wrote a generation later in his pioneering 1665 book Micrographia, “and as if I had been looking upon a Sea, I saw infinite of small living Creatures swimming and playing up and down in it, a thing indeed very wonderful to behold.”
Within two centuries, Darwin had drawn a link of kinship between us and these tiny wonders. “Each living creature,” he wrote, “must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”
Today, we know that there are more bacteria in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way, more in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people living in Europe. In the body of the Earth itself, there are microbes that breathe rock rather than oxygen and live for millions of years — a mysterious intraterrestrial universe that may have sculpted the continents we live on. Microbes touch every aspect of our planet’s history and health, from climate change to the origin of life. They are the golden threads in the tapestry connecting everything alive.
Centuries after it enchanted the early microscopists, their strange and subtle wonder comes aglow magnified by our modern tools and thinking on the pages of Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse (public library) by synthetic biologist Tal Danino.
Multiple colonies of E. coli cultivated in a petri dish
Against the backdrop of bacteria’s billions of years of evolutionary history, here is a young art (photography, born in 1839) drawing on a young science (bacteriology, established in the 1860s) and using an even younger canvas (the petri dish, devised in 1887) to capture the primordial, eternal beauty of Earth’s first life-forms.
Samples of Proteus mirabilis and Paenibacillus dendritiformis isolated from soil and printed on handmade washi paper
Part artist and part futurist, Danino runs a lab working on microbial programming that aims to turn these ancient organisms into futuristic aids for human life, ranging from living environmental sensors to bespoke probiotics that target specific diseases.
Two of 100 samples of bacteria collected from different women
Centuries after the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used saffron to stain the cells he was observing in order to reveal their intricate structure, Danino’s dazzling array of samples — bacteria from the sands of Venice Beach in California and the rocks of Breakneck Ridge in New York; bacteria from a man’s foot, a woman’s bellybutton, and a baby’s hand; bacteria from the soil of South Korea and of New York City — are stained with vibrant dyes that render their enchantment partway between expressionist painting and psychedelic vision.
A strain of bacteria isolated from a cracked probiotic capsule
Multiple bacterial colonies in two different communal samples, stained, dried, and embedded in resin
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.
This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal — not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read — so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)
On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s — the most challenging and most transformative of my life.
18. How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.
17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.
14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.
12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
And here, drawn from the archive, are 18 pieces consonant with these learnings — readings and writings that have fomented these reckonings with how to live.
“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting our wildness, insisting on the “primal allegiance” the human spirit has to the wild.
A decade after artist Rockwell Kent headed to a remote Alaskan island “to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness,” a young German woman headed to an even smaller island on the opposite side of the globe to face a wilderness even more fierce and fathomless, living out her primal allegiance to the undomesticated soul, searching for the fruition of her spiritual ideals.
Having grown up with the haunting sense that she was “somehow not like other children,” feeling a “special intimacy” with wild nature not usually seen in those born and raised in cities, Dore Strauch (1900–1943) was eighteen and training to be a teacher when she fell under the spell of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and felt the calling to some higher purpose, though she could not discern what it might be.
Watching the world come aflame with its first global war, moved by “the frightful distress” of the working classes, she grew convinced that the higher development of humanity “can never come from the outside” — that no prophet can promise it and no demagogue can deliver it; that it is the inner work of each individual. She was determined to do her part, “whatever the cost.”
Dore Strauch
Dore decided to become a doctor and enrolled in night school to prepare for the university entrance exam. She might have withstood the seventeen-hour workdays had she not decided to live on fruit alone after reading Schopenhauer and finding herself moved by his “discountenancing the destruction of life for human nourishment,” eventually reducing her diet to figs only. After a year and a half of this morally cloaked eating disorder, her body started giving way.
Just as Dore was trying to decide what to do next, she met a “cheerless bachelor” twice her age and married him, determined “to thaw him out with sunshine,” only to learn one of the hardest lessons in life — that unless we love who a person is and not whom we wish them to be or hope to make them, it is not love but projection destined for heartbreak. At twenty-three, she found herself “the wife of an elderly schoolmaster” who repulsed her with his conjugal demands and his desire to make of her an accessory to appear on his arm at social functions high-heeled and gowned — the perfect housewife, “her horizon bounded by the four walls of a few stuffy rooms, her mind stunted to the scope of her husband’s paltry opinions.” She would later reflect:
With all the strength and obstinacy in me, I defended myself against being turned into something I had always passionately despised… The emptiness and frustration of such an existence poisons the spirit, however one may strive to counterbalance it.
The poison hit deep. Dore fell gravely and mysteriously ill. After a seventeen-month hospitalization, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and told her illness was incurable. “This was a blow,” she later wrote, “but it shocked me less than the realization that my marriage was a failure, and beyond repair.”
People come into our lives when we need a way out of them, out of self-erected prisons and back to ourselves. Dore found herself falling in love with her attending physician, Dr. Frederick Ritter — with his love of Nietzsche, with “his astonishing blond mane, his youthful bearing, and his steel- blue eyes that looked out from under his furrowed forehead so compellingly,” with the little black notebook he showed her, in which he had logged some of the world’s remotest islands as possible destinations for realizing “his great ideal of solitude.”
They were in love — a Rilkean love in which the highest task of each is to “stand guard over the solitude of the other” — and they set out to find those ideal solitudes together as far from the bourgeois traps of their culture as they could get on this planet.
It was pioneering oceanographer William Beebe’s landmark volume on the Galapagos that persuaded them to seek their idyll on the islands where Darwin had first conceived the evolutionary cohesion of nature, originally known as the Enchanted Islands — a land so alien that it had never been inhabited by native tribes. “I believe that these islands are in truth one of those places of the earth where humans are not tolerated,” Dore would later write, having lived the proof.
Five species of Galapagos ground finches from William Beebe’s Galapagos: World’s End, 1924. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
The lovers buried themselves in the stacks of the Berlin Public Library, reading everything they could get their hands on about the Galapagos in order to choose a particular island.
They settled on Floreana — a volcanic burp smaller than Brooklyn, favored by the whalers of the previous century for its flat terrain and ample supply of freshwater.
In a living antidote to the dangerous myth that contemplation is a luxury of the privileged — here was a woman of humble means, ailing with multiple sclerosis, having survived a World War and a suffocating marriage — Dore reflects in her striking memoir Satan Came to Eden: A Survivor’s Account of the “Galapagos Affair” (public library):
How few, if any, of the millions struggling along the world’s ways, have ever had or sought the opportunity to find themselves. The leisure after the day’s work is not devoted to this higher learning. Time that the wise would spend in meditating on these things is spent at movies, cafes and theaters, created as if by malicious design to hinder contemplation.
Frederick and I rejected all these things and were determined to fight our way to inner freedom in spite of all the hindrances of civilized life.
They were not trying to be modern Crusoes. This was not be a mere experiment in “Puritan self-denial, of repudiation of the flesh in a search for higher spiritual values.” They were going to Floreana not to escape life but to contact the substratum of its deepest meaning, “to try and found an Eden not of ignorance but of knowledge.”
And so, in the first week of summer in 1929, with Dore disguised as a man to avoid identification, they headed for Ecuador. Packed in alongside mosquito netting and matches were Dore’s Greek and Latin textbooks, a small volume of animal fables, and what she considered her “greatest treasure”: her heavily underlined, marginalia-laden copy of Zarathustra. She didn’t tell her mother that she intended never to come back. She didn’t formally divorce her husband. She made no will.
Dore reflects in her memoir:
I felt, in spite of all my deep affection for those dear to me, that in leaving them forever I was not uprooting my real self but only an outward part of me that did not count.
Dore and Frederick on the way to the Galapagos
In consonance with Wendell Berry’s insistence that “in the wild places… one’s inner voices become audible,” Dore could feel even before she set foot on Floreana how the part of her that counts the most, the wild and true voice of the soul, was about to come alive in a way it never could have in so-called civilization:
I shall never forget the first view of Ecuador as we sailed slowly into the deep bay of Guayaquil. The coast is fringed with dense thickets of mangrove interrupted by settlements where groves of cocoanut palms waved over the heads of the other trees, amidst which cows, donkeys and goats seemed to find plentiful pasture.
[…]
A brilliant early morning sun shone down on our departure from the haunts of men, as we set out upon the final stage of our long journey to the solitudes of our desire. We thought and hoped that we should never recross the broad six-hundred miles of ocean that lay between our island and the mainland. As we moved out of the little harbor and watched it receding slowly from our sight, we felt a oneness with each other which we had never felt before, and if we thought about the past at all, then it was with an utter absence of regret, and with a feeling of deep happiness and gratitude to the fate which had permitted us to approach our goal at last.
Upon arrival, they discovered that an oil leak in the ship’s hull had ruined all their books and writing paper, all the bedding, and a box of clothes. But the captain — a questionable character who had been a German spy in WWI and who frequently docked on Floreana — dropped them off with the remains of their belongings and went on his way.
Alone on the desolate beach, with the dark silhouette of an extinct volcano rising above them, they took comfort in the half-demolished stone wall, rusty water tanks, and remnants of a chicken coop left behind by the Norwegian settlers who had tried living there long ago, then given up. Dore writes:
An atmosphere of extreme desolation enfolded this scene, and was increased by the almost completely dried-up, lifeless vegetation round about it. It was impossible not to think, with a qualm of fear, of all the disappointed hopes of our predecessors on this island, who probably had come there with confidence no less than ours that they would be able to make their lives according to their hearts’ desire.
Common Galapagos fish from William Beebe’s Galapagos: World’s End, 1924. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
She paints the alien world that was suddenly their home, beautiful and menacing:
The landscape spread out at its feet had the gray-blue shimmer of all the Galapagos vegetation. What looked like dense thickets at the crater’s edge was much greener and fresher than the growth below. Thin streamers of clouds floated low down among the smaller craters towards the interior of the island, and at the water’s edge more volcanoes stood up straight out of the sea, steeply, though to no great height. Their rocky flanks were full of deep clefts which caught the incoming surf, so that the island was encircled by a tossing white girdle of the breaking sea. As the waves receded they revealed huge boulders of pitch-black lava.
[…]
The red rays of the setting sun gilded the ocean at our feet. The sharp black fins of sharks cut through the water; a thousand wild voices of unseen creatures mingled with the soft roar of the surf. With the terrifying suddenness to which I, the Northerner, never grew accustomed, the equatorial night rushed down upon us and the moon came up.
Filled as she was with “golden anticipation” at the prospect of building Eden on Earth, almost immediately Dore collapsed with an attack of her multiple sclerosis. Dr. Ritter, despite his medical training, held some dangerously antiscientific views: He believed that willpower alone could prevail over any physical condition, including her illness, and with “sheer intensity of consciousness” one could erect a wall of defense against any danger or pathogen. He had therefore refused to bring even basic medication — a decision for which Dore would later pay bitterly: teeth extracted without anesthesia, severe lacerations from the sharp lava rocks, a fire burn almost to the bone, a crippling blood infection by Floreana’s vampiric sand fleas carried by the wild swine.
Galapagos eels from William Beebe’s Galapagos: World’s End, 1924. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Over and over, Floreana surprised them and challenged them beyond anything they had imagined:
Our aim was to lead a life of contemplation, but we soon learned that this was something we should have to earn at the expense of arduous and protracted manual toil.
They surprised themselves and each other, this nation of two, thousands of miles from the nearest human being, having crossed the globe to discover that all true companionship is made of two parallel solitudes. Dore writes:
There could be no such thing as loneliness, for each must be complete within himself, and companionship is only perfect when it is not dependent.
The story goes on to take a strange and ominous turn when a newspaper gets a hold of their letters home and makes of them the era’s equivalent of clickbait, sending the world’s wealthy voyeurs on their trail. An American yachting party arrives, then a polyamorous Austrian Baroness (the Satan in the title of Dore’s memoir) declares herself Empress of the Galapagos. Dore’s life is suddenly enfolded in a human drama that far exceeds the ills and artifices of civilization she had fled, culminating with a murder mystery and Frederick’s death.
Having gone to Floreana to find the purest light of being amid the wildest nature, Dore left having seen the darkest recesses of human nature. And yet there is no wasted experience — looking back on her idealistic experiment, she reflects on its deepest lesson:
Life in the wilderness is rich in lessons most of us never have a chance to learn. It was a source of continual amazement to me to realize how civilization falsifies the lives of men and women, making it forever impossible, even for those who know each other best, to see each other as they really are.
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
This is why I love diaries, with their rare glimpse of the inner worlds that lavish our own with beauty and truth, with nourishment of substance and sweetness that endures for epochs after the lives that made it are no more.
Of all the writers and artists who have kept a journal as a means of creative catalysis and a salve for self-doubt, no one has confronted the internal saboteur of creativity — those psychic hindrances that stand between the talented and the fruition of their talent — more pointedly than Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924).
Franz Kafka
“I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can,” he vows at the outset of his Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal that became part creative sandbox, part metronome of discipline, part exorcism for self-doubt as Kafka was trying to live into his creative calling while working as an insurance salesman. “I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead,” he declares, and yet over and over he indicts himself for falling short of his desire, for thwarting his talent with insecurity and lack of discipline. “Wrote nothing,” he laments in entry after entry. “Have written nothing for three days,” he sulks as his creative block consumes him. “Bad,” he declares a perfect spring day for having produced no writing. By early summer, he is in despair:
Nothing written for so long. Begin tomorrow. Otherwise I shall again get into a prolonged, irresistible dissatisfaction; I am really in it already. The nervous states are beginning. But if I can do something, then I can do it without superstitious precautions.
The reasons for Kafka’s creative block are various: By turns he finds himself drowning in loneliness, enraged by distraction, physically fatigued and pained by the tuberculosis that would soon take his life, tortured by his era’s version of an overflowing inbox: heaps of unanswered letters. He feels his powers being wasted, feels himself “wretched, wretched, and yet with good intentions,” feels the “absolute despair” of trying and failing to write. The diary itself becomes his watering hole through the dry spells:
Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
On its pages, universal patterns emerge: In his private and particular turmoils, Kafka touches again and again on what I consider the four great perils standing between us and our gifts — those psychic hindrances of which we may not always be consciously aware, but we which experience palpably and painfully as creative block.
Savaged by shame at his writing, Kafka regularly winces at his sentences, then reasons:
I explain it to myself by saying that I have too little time and quiet to draw out of me all the possibilities of my talent.
Baldwin would have had something to say about that excuse, which Kafka himself sees crumble: During a rare respite from his ordinary time-lament — that his day job at the insurance company is taking too much energy away from writing — he finds himself not using the windfall gain to write:
This month, which, because of the absence of the boss, could have been put to exceptionally good use, I have wasted and slept away without much excuse… Even this afternoon I stretched out on the bed for three hours with dreamy.
Such is the bi-polar nature of time-anxiety in creative work: Alongside the feeling of not having enough time is also the time-dilating experience of procrastination — the paradoxical paralysis many gifted people feel at the prospect of living up to and into their gifts. Kafka writes:
Idled away the morning with sleeping and reading newspapers. Afraid to finish a review for the Prager Tagblatt. Such fear of writing always expresses itself by my occasionally making up, away from my desk, initial sentences for what I am to write, which immediately prove unusable, dry, broken off long before their end, and pointing with their towering fragments to a sad future.
“Wasted day,” he groans in another entry. And yet he has the wisdom to recognize that procrastination — “the shameful lowlands of writing” — has a purpose:
Stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, ‘I’ve been writing until now.’ The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in… I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.
Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace
3. WORLD-ANXIETY
To be an artist is to feel life deeply, to tremble with the terrors of everything that trembles. As the first global war is painting the world around him black, Kafka sinks into an inner darkness, his anxiety rising to untenable heights:
The thoughts provoked in me by the war… devour me from every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it.
The writing stalls again as he sorrows with the world’s sorrow:
Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn’t it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing.
Kafka would die of tuberculosis while the war is still raging.
Few things maim an artist’s confidence more savagely than self-comparison, which breeds the two most pernicious species of despair in creative work: insecurity and envy, always entwined in a singularly damaging form of learned helplessness. While working on what would become his first published short story, Kafka acquires a volume of Goethe’s conversations and finds himself completely blocked:
So passes my rainy, quiet Sunday, I sit in my bedroom and am at peace, but instead of making up my mind to do some writing, into which I could have poured my whole being the day before yesterday, I have been staring at my fingers for quite a while. This week I think I have been completely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influence and have therefore become useless.
Nearly a month later, he is still immersed in and paralyzed by Goethe. After yet another “wrote nothing,” he records:
The zeal, permeating every part of me, with which I read about Goethe (Goethe’s conversations, student days, hours with Goethe, a visit of Goethe’s to Frankfort) and which keeps me from all writing.
“I cannot believe that I shall really write something good tomorrow,” Kafka forebodes in one entry. In another, he declares himself “an almost complete failure in writing.” He is torn between determination and despair:
I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing? At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been compelled — without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion — to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.
With his characteristic drama for metaphor, he writes in the winter of his twenty-eighth year:
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones. Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other… My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odour of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader’s face.
Toupet tit / Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
Like Audubon did with his bird paintings, Kafka regularly destroyed writing that dissatisfied him. With an eye to all he disavowed one particular year — a great deal more writing than he kept — he is suddenly seized by anxious self-doubt:
That hinders me a great deal in writing. It is indeed a mountain, it is five times as much as I have in general ever written, and by its mass alone it draws everything that I write away from under my pen to itself.
Preparing to visit his siblings and parents, and heavy with shame for having written nothing, he consoles himself grimly:
I shall, since I have written nothing that I could enjoy, not appear stranger, more despicable, more useless to them than I do to myself.
When his best friend does a reading of one of Kafka’s stories at a salon, Kafka finds himself feeling bitterly “isolated from everyone,” chin down in shame at the “disordered sentences” of his “story with holes into which one could stick both hands.” He agonizes:
If I were ever able to write something large and whole, well shaped from beginning to end, then in the end the story would never be able to detach itself from me and it would be possible for me calmly and with open eyes, as a blood relation of a healthy story, to hear it read, but as it is every little piece of the story runs around homeless and drives me away from it in the opposite direction.
He feels unable to write, and the little he does write feels “wrong.” In yet another dramatic metaphor — “metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing,” he would later rue — he reflects:
My feeling when I write something that is wrong might be depicted as follows: In front of two holes in the ground a man is waiting for something to appear that can rise up only out of the hole on his right. But while this hole remains covered over by a dimly visible lid, one thing after another rises up out of the hole on his left, keeps trying to attract his attention, and in the end succeeds in doing this without any difficulty because of its swelling size, which, much as the man may try to prevent it, finally covers up even the right hole. But the man — he does not want to leave this place, and indeed refuses to at any price — has nothing but these appearances, and although — fleeting as they are, their strength is used up by their merely appearing — they cannot satisfy him, he still strives, whenever out of weakness they are arrested in their rising up, to drive them up and scatter them into the air if only he can thus bring up others; for the permanent sight of one is unbearable, and moreover he continues to hope that after the false appearances have been exhausted, the true will finally appear.
And then, swift as a whip, his self-doubt meta-flagellates the metaphor itself:
How weak this picture is. An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between the actual feeling and the metaphor of the description.
He doubts not only his talent but his motivation to manifest it:
I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me.
Within months, he had published The Metamorphosis. And this indeed is the great consolation of his diaries: Over and over, Kafka discovers — as every artist eventually must — that the remedy for writer’s block is writing. A generation before Steinbeck observed in his own diary of self-doubt that “just a stint every day does it,” Kafka writes with an eye to the 1911 comet visible in the night sky above him:
Every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets… Then I should appear before that sentence once, lured by that sentence.
Over and over, he discovers that he writes to save himself:
I feel helpless and an outsider. The firmness, however, which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful.
He discovers that writing, for him, is not a matter of art but of survival:
I have now… a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely. This is no artistic yearning.
At its best, it is not merely survival, not salvation, but self-transcendence:
Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours considering what I overcame this afternoon while writing.
[…]
I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.
He relishes “the strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing… a seeing of what is really taking place.” What buoys him through all the doubt and despair is the deeper knowledge — a kind of profound self-trust — that writing is his calling, the great spiritual reward for which he would give up — and did give up — every earthly pleasure:
When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even half-way serve the purpose of my writing. Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely. In any case I shouldn’t complain that I can’t put up with a sweetheart, that I understand almost exactly as much of love as I do of music.
[…]
My development is now complete and, so far as I can see, there is nothing left to sacrifice; I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life in which, with the progress of my work, my face will finally be able to age in a natural way.
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