The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

By Maria Popova

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the great love, the day we finally find ourselves — awaiting something or someone to deliver us from the tedium of life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of life-as-it-could-be, all the while vacating the only sanctuary from the storm of uncertainty raging outside the frosted windows of the here and now.

It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living.

If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.

The Tiger by Franz Marc, 1912. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) explores in his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, found in his collection The Better Sort (public library | public domain) — the story of a man whose entire life, from his earliest memory, has been animated by “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” something fated “sooner or later to happen” and, in happening, to either destroy him or remake his life. He calls it “the thing,” imagines it as a “beast in the jungle” lying in wait for him, and spends his life lying in wait for it, withholding his participation in the very experiences that might have that transformative effect — leaping after some great dream, risking his life for some great cause, falling in love.

It is, of course, a dramatized caricature of our common curse — the treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enoughness, to render our lives worthy of having been lived.

Art by Salvador Dalí for a rare 1946 edition of the essays of Montaigne

James writes:

Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

When the protagonist meets a woman to whom his entire being pulls him, he begins spending time with her but ultimately keeps her heart at arm’s length, too afraid to love her, telling himself that he is protecting her from his fatalistic fate, failing to recognize that love itself is that great force of self-annihilation and transformation, “rare and strange” even as the most commonplace human experience.

Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

When Time forecloses possibility, as Time always ultimately does, he arrives at his final reckoning at her tombstone:

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself… The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips… This was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened — it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

Complement with Anaïs Nin on how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living and Mary Oliver on the key to living with maximum aliveness, then revisit Henry James’s equally brilliant sister Alice on how to live fully while dying.

BP

Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself Across the Sweep of Life

By Maria Popova

The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe. Joan Didion knew this when she observed that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Jane Ellen Harrison knew it when, in her superb meditation on the art of growing older, she cautioned that “you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet.

Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait

In his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.

In a sentiment consonant with the aging Walt Whitman’s reckoning with what makes life worth living, he traces his path:

In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.

But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.

But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,

And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.

But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.

In a lovely metaphor rooted in the evolutionary history of life, he contrasts the spirit of youth to that of our later years:

The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.

A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.

But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,

Though life has been bitter upon his lips.

Passionflower and passionfruit by Étienne Denisse from Flore d’Amérique, 1846. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

With an eye to the restlessness of youth, Gibran echoes his earlier reflections on befriending time as he contemplates what might be the supreme reward of growing older — our widening capacity for patience, for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms and becomes one with the unfolding mystery:

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.

But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.

Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.

In a poignant reminder that our aversive reactions reveal not the nature of the things we abhor but the nature of our blinders and the limits of our understanding, he adds:

In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.

But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;

And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.

A century before science illuminated the poetics of wintering trees as a lens on renewal, Gibran writes:

In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”

But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.

Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

Touching on a concept known in Eastern spiritual traditions as non-identification — the ability to inhabit our vaster nature beyond transient circumstances and conditions — he writes:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

He ends the poem by looking back on the sad alienation of his youth as the rudiment of his fruition, indispensable and sacred:

Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.

And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.

Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.

And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.

In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.

Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.

Complement with Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older and how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, then revisit Gibran’s luminous wisdom on the courage to know yourself, the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, how to weather the uncertainties of love, and the secret to a lasting relationship.

BP

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author

By Maria Popova

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author

In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance to learn from one of the world’s greatest storytellers.

After a decade as a struggling obscure writer, Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894) — brilliant, strange, so frail and tubercular he was always on the brink of death — had just been catapulted into global fame by Treasure Island, published a year earlier. With her mother’s help, Adelaide procured an introduction to the author and his fierce wife Fanny. By the perfect balance of audacity, veneration, and kindness, she was eventually welcomed into the “enchanted palace” of the couple’s world — first as their affectionately nicknamed “game-keeper” (for looking after their menagerie of stray cats and pigeons), then as Stevenson’s scribe (the typewriter was still a clunky novelty), and eventually, to her disbelieving exhilaration, as his pupil.

Thirty-seven years later, with Stevenson long gone, she set down her memories of life at Skerryvore — the name the Stevensons had given their home, after a lighthouse built by the author’s uncle on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland — in the slender, utterly delightful 1926 gem R.L.S. and His Sine Qua Non, Flashlights from Skerryvore (public library | public domain). Punctuating her loving recollections is a series of invaluable writing lessons from one of the greatest storytellers our civilization has produced.

Robert Louis Stevenson by Henry Walter Barnett, 1883.

Clad in his velvet coat and dark red tie, wrapped in a Kashmir shawl, perched on the edge of a suitcase, Stevenson would give the young woman assignments, then listen to her read them out loud and, with amicable brutality, offer his suggestions for improvement. In an era when women comprised less than 1% of published authors, often writing under initials or pseudonyms to guard from bias, Stevenson — a fierce feminist by the standards of his era, and even by the standards of ours — believed that women were not any lesser at writing than men, but that their writing suffered because they were too proud to edit, to accept any “suggestion at amendment,” to concede that the first attempt is rarely the best one can do. (Let us not be too proud to admit that he might be somewhat right.) His greatest gift to his young pupil was the humility and discipline of editing. She recounts:

Though as a critic absolutely merciless, nobody in the world rewarded more lavishly or with keener pleasure what he called “a good, honest piece of work.”

Her initiation into the craft began with listening — she would sit in on Stevenson reading his drafts of what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Fanny — his lifelong collaborator, editor, and caretaker, who carried her perennially sickly husband (“just an animated bundle of shawls and wraps, with long, thin hair and burning eyes,” Adelaide remembers) up and down the stairs between his bedroom and the Blue Room where he wrote. Fanny would in turn offer her own merciless feedback as Adelaide absorbed every word.

Eventually, Stevenson began giving her direct instruction. Because all originality begins in imitation, and because creativity is crippled without craftsmanship, he first tasked her with reading some of her favorite authors and attempting short pieces of writing in each of their style. To then discover her own voice, he assigned her a short description of something she loved, giving her a tight word count and a day to finish. She chose her garden. Despite her vivid feeling for its “unique charm,” attempt after attempt at a written description “ended in a passion of despair.” She stayed up all night until, by sunrise, she had arrived at a version to her satisfaction, even edged with pride. But when she presented it to Stevenson, he tore it apart. After doing some math on the language, dividing the word count by the word parts, he indicted her prose for containing a staggering 17% adjectives — “and mostly weak ones at that!” — then exhorted her to always choose descriptive verbs over them:

If you want me to see your garden, don’t, for pity’s sake, talk about ‘climbing roses’ or ‘green, mossy lawns.’ Tell me, if you like, that roses twined themselves round the apple trees and fell in showers from the branches. Never dare to tell me again anything about ‘green grass.’ Tell me how the lawn was flecked with shadows. I know perfectly well that grass is green. So does everybody else in England. What you have to learn is something different from that. Make me see what it was that made your garden distinct from a thousand others.

Art from The Forgotten Teachers

He then instructed her to read with a sensitive ear and listen for the one word that breaks “the rhythm of a sentence otherwise neatly balanced.” One well chosen word, he taught her, can “send the breath of life through a paralysed sentence,” can serve as a “landmark” amid “a featureless desert of words” to help the writer “get back home to the heart of things.”

Looking back on her experience, Adelaide synthesizes some of his most invaluable guardrails against bad writing:

  • Keep it tight to keep it strong: “Never let a long sentence get out of hand. If it begins to run loose, tie it in a knot with a good strong inversion: swing it round on a pivot.”
    • Don’t describe things by what they are not: “Never state a thing backwards.”
    • Become a tuning fork for meaning: “Read every sentence aloud to yourself. If the sense is not limpidly clear, make it so before you pass on. If needs be, write it over and over again, but nothing with which your own ear is dissatisfied must ever be allowed to stand.”
    • Use good language even when relaying bad speech: When recreating dialogue in writing, “never let the vulgar craze for realistic writing run away with you”: paraphrase “commonplace talk” in a way that remains “true to the spirit of a speaker” but elevates the style.

But perhaps the most potent advice on writing — that which emboldened Adelaide to actually become an author — came from Fanny Stevenson. When Adelaide first confided in her that she had been “only trying” at writing for years but often felt “hopeless,” Fanny took a long silence, then offered:

Whatever you have honestly tried to do well was worth doing. It always is.

Complement with other abiding wisdom on writing from Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Marianne Moore, Rudyard Kipling, Octavia Butler, and Mary Oliver, then revisit Stevenson on what makes life worth living.

BP

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

By Maria Popova

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

What an astrophysicist might have the perspective to eulogize as “the incredibly improbable trip that we’re on” the rest of us might, and often do, experience as simply and maddeningly absurd — so uncontrollable and incomprehensible as to barely make sense. What are we to make of, and do with, the absurdity of life that swarms us daily? Oliver Sacks believed that “the most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time.” And yet parsing the what-it-is-like can itself drive us to despair. Still, parse we must.

More than a decade before Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for work that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times,” he contemplated the relationship between absurdity and redemption in a 1945 interview by the French journalist Jeanine Delpech, included at the end of his Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library) — the superb posthumous collection that gave us Camus on how to strengthen our character in difficult times and happiness, despair, and the love of life.

Albert Camus

Three years before the interview, twenty-eight-year-old Camus had stunned the world with his revolutionary philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins with one of the most powerful opening sentences in all of literature and explores the paradox of the absurd in life. “I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” he writes — something that prompted his interviewer to ask whether a philosophy predicated on absurdity might incline people to despair.

Camus — who years earlier had asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life” — answers:

All I can do is reply on my own behalf, realizing that what I say is relative. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.

Speaking at the close of the meaningless brutality of World War II, six years before he formulated his ideas on solidarity and what it really means to be a rebel, Camus considers the only act of courage and rebellion worth undertaking:

In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.

I have often wondered whether Camus had read W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written in 1940, which includes this searing stanza so kindred to Camus’s sentiment:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Complement this particular fragment of Camus’s endlessly rewarding Lyrical and Critical Essays with Albert Einstein on our mightiest counterforce against injustice and Naomi Shihab Nye on choosing kindness over fear, then revisit Camus’s abiding ideas on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, the most important question of existence, the lacuna between truth and meaning, and the touching letter of gratitude he sent to his boyhood teacher shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize.

BP

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