The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty

By Maria Popova

How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty

Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.

How to love the world more by negotiating our hunger for certainty and our gift for story is what George Saunders explores in some lovely passages from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library) — the boundlessly wonderful and layered book in which he reckoned with the key to great storytelling and the way to unbreak our hearts.

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

In consonance with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s insight into narrative as the pillar of personal identity, Saunders examines the elemental impulse for storytelling as the basic organizing principle by which we govern our lives:

The instant we wake the story begins: “Here I am. In my bed. Hard worker, good dad, decent husband, a guy who always tries his best. Jeez, my back hurts. Probably from the stupid gym.”

And just like that, with our thoughts, the world gets made.

Or, anyway, a world gets made.

This world-making via thinking is natural, sane, Darwinian: we do it to survive. Is there harm in it? Well, yes, because we think in the same way that we hear or see: within a narrow, survival-enhancing range. We don’t see or hear all that might be seen or heard but only that which is helpful for us to see and hear. Our thoughts are similarly restricted and have a similarly narrow purpose: to help the thinker thrive.

All of this limited thinking has an unfortunate by-product: ego. Who is trying to survive? “I” am. The mind takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating from that point of view. Just like that, that entity (George!) becomes real, and he is (surprise, surprise) located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie, so to speak; it is all, somehow, both for and about him. In this way, moral judgment arises: what is good for George is… good. What is bad for him is bad. (The bear is neither good nor bad until, looking hungry, it starts walking toward George.)

So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world. Evil and dysfunction (or at least obnoxiousness) occur in proportion to how solidly a person believes that his projections are correct and energetically acts upon them.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Over time, our stories harden into certainties that collide with each other every time we engage with another person, who is another story — another embodiment of the unreliable first-person narration known as skaz that permeates classic Russian literature. With an eye to the inescapable fact that “there is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see,” Saunders contours the commonplace tragicomedy of colliding in the mind-made world of skaz:

I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.

[…]

The entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves as the center of the universe, thinking highly of themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything.

Trying to communicate across this fissure of understanding yields results sometimes comical and sometimes tragic, always affirming that reality is not singular but plural, not a point of view but a plane of possible vantages. With an eye to Chekhov — who was a physician by training and an excellent one, but an even better writer because a diagnosis is a forced conclusion of curiosity but art is the eternal sandbox of doubt — Saunders writes:

In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.

After a close reading of Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries,” he reflects:

It’s hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system of belief can be a great relief.

[…]

As long as we don’t decide, we allow further information to keep coming in. Reading a story like “Gooseberries” might be seen as a way of practicing this. It reminds us that any question in the form “Is X right or wrong?” could benefit from another round of clarifying questions. Question: “Is X good or bad?” Story: “For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more.”

Art by Paloma Valdivia from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions

This openness to more — to truth beyond story, to beauty beyond certainty — is precisely what teaches us how to love the world more. With a deep bow to Chekhov as the master of this existential art, Saunders writes:

This feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination. (“Am I sure? Is it really so? Is my preexisting opinion causing me to omit anything?”) He has a gift for reconsideration. Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it. In other words, we have to stay open (easy to say, in that confident, New Age way, but so hard to actually do, in the face of actual, grinding, terrifying life). As we watch Chekhov continually, ritually doubt all conclusions, we’re comforted. It’s all right to reconsider. It’s noble — holy, even. It can be done. We can do it. We know this because of the example he leaves in his stories, which are, we might say, splendid, brief reconsideration machines.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain remains one of my all-time favorite books. Complement these fragments from it with Virginia Woolf on finding beauty in the uncertainty of time, space, and being and Kurt Vonnegut on uncertainty as the crucible of creativity, then revisit some thoughts on figuring forward in an uncertain world.

BP

How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

By Maria Popova

If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone.

Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock.

Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain.

Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.

A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”

Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.

Hawk Tower

OH, LOVELY ROCK
by Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

             We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

A generation later, another great poet displaced from the bedrock of belonging by another world war tried to make sense of being human by turning to stone:

STONE
by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill —
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.

And although we are “creatures shaped by the planet’s rocky logic,” we are also creatures shaped by the myriad mercies of time, saved over and over by the leap beyond logic that is trusting time.

FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova

May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
         as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.

BP

The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment

By Maria Popova

The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment

Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character. Joan Didion captured this with searing lucidity in defining character as “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life” and locating in that willingness the root of self-respect.

A century before Didion, Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900) composed the score for harmonizing our choices and our contentment with the life they garner us. Nietzsche, who greatly admired Emerson’s ethos of nonconformity and self-reliant individualism, wrote fervently, almost frenetically, about how to find yourself and what it means to be a free spirit. He saw the process of becoming oneself as governed by the willingness to own one’s choices and their consequences — a difficult willingness, yet one that promises the antidote to existential hopelessness, complacency, and anguish.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J. Kaag explores in Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (public library) — part masterwork of poetic scholarship, part contemplative memoir concerned with the most fundamental question of human life: What gives our existence meaning?

The answer, Kaag suggests in drawing on Nietzsche’s most timeless ideas, challenges our ordinary understanding of selfhood and its cascading implications for happiness, fulfillment, and the building blocks of existential contentment. He writes:

The self is not a hermetically sealed, unitary actor (Nietzsche knew this well), but its flourishing depends on two things: first, that it can choose its own way to the greatest extent possible, and then, when it fails, that it can embrace the fate that befalls it.

At the center of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea of eternal return — the ultimate embrace of responsibility that comes from accepting the consequences, good or bad, of one’s willful action. Embedded in it is an urgent exhortation to calibrate our actions in such a way as to make their consequences bearable, livable with, in a hypothetical perpetuity. Nietzsche illustrates the concept with a simple, stirring thought experiment in his final book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself…”

Art from The Magic Boat — a vintage “interactive” children’s book by Freud’s eccentric niece Tom Seidmann-Freud

Like the demon in Kepler’s visionary short story The Dream — the first work of genuine science fiction, which occupies the opening chapter of Figuring and which the great astronomer used as an allegorical tool for awakening the superstition-lulled medieval mind to the then-radical reality of the Copernican model of the universe — Nietzsche’s demon is not a metaphysical extravagance but a psychological gauntlet, an alarm for awakening to the most radical existential reality. At the heart of the thought experiment is the disquieting question of whether our lives, as we are living them, are worth living. Kaag writes:

Nietzsche’s demon… is a challenge — or, better, a question — that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

Are we, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “content to live it all again”? Being content in this sense is not being distracted from, or lulled to sleep by, or resigning oneself to a fate that cannot be avoided. It is to live to your heart’s content with the knowledge that you will do this, and everything, again, forever. We made our last turn into the Waldhaus driveway and came to rest beneath its canopied entryway. Nietzsche suggests that the affirmation of the eternal return is possible only if one is willing and able to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself. To be well-adjusted, for Nietzsche, is to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning. The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to assume absolute responsibility: if one’s choices are to be replayed endlessly, they’d better be the “right” ones.

There is a beautiful meta-layer to the book — Kaag is writing after returning to Piz Corvatsch, where he had first hiked as a tortured nineteen-year-old on the brink of suicide, hoping to find sanity and salvation in the footsteps of his brilliant, half-demented hero. Revisiting “Nietzsche’s mountain” as an adult cusping on middle age, with his beloved — also a philosopher, though of the warring Kantian camp — and their young daughter, Kaag is performing a real-life enactment of the eternal return. He is thrust into the deepest, most disquieting, yet ultimately buoyant evaluation of the choices he has made in the decades since and their combinatorial consequence in the life he is now living — a life, in the end, well worth living.

He considers the power of Nietzsche’s thought experiment as a tool for calibrating our lives for true contentment:

It might be tempting to think that the “rightness” of a decision could be affixed by some external moral or religious standard, but Nietzsche wants his readers to resist this temptation. Nietzsche’s demon, after all, comes to us when we are all alone, his question can be heard only in one’s “loneliest loneliness,” and therefore the answer cannot be given by consensus or on behalf of some impersonal institutions. It is, indeed, the most personal of answers — the one that always determines an individual choice. Of course you can choose anything you want, to raise children or get married, but don’t pretend to do it because these things have some sort of intrinsic value — they don’t. Do it solely because you chose them and are willing to own up to them. In the story of our lives, these choices are ours and ours alone, and this is what gives things, all things, value. Only when one realizes this is he or she prepared to face the eternal recurrence, the entire cycle, without the risk of being crushed. Only then is one able to say with Yeats, “[A]nd yet again,” and truly mean it.

Art from Creation by Bhajju Shyam — a collection of illustrated origin myths from Indian folklore

With an eye to Hermann Hesse’s wisdom on the difficult art of taking responsibility, Kaag adds:

Perhaps the hardest part of the eternal return is to own up to the tortures that we create for ourselves and those we create for others. Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are is an incandescent read in its entirety. Complement it with Walt Whitman on what makes life worth living and Bertrand Russell on how to grow old with contentment, then revisit Nietzsche himself on the journey of becoming who you are, the true value of education, depression and the rehabilitation of hope, the power of music, and how we use language to both conceal and reveal reality.

BP

What Makes a Soul Mate: Roxane Gay on Loving vs. Being in Love

By Maria Popova

What Makes a Soul Mate: Roxane Gay on Loving vs. Being in Love

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” Baldwin cautioned a generation later as he himself reckoned with the work of love.

Because the stakes are so high, because we are so overwhelmed by both the power and the fragility of love, we regularly find ourselves catatonic with confusion about what it all means and what it asks of us. We mistake much for love — admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love — an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies — and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.

How to bridge the abyss and see clearly through all the confusion is what Roxane Gay explores in one of the pieces collected in Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business (public library — her astute commentary on popular culture and politics, punctuated by reflections on the deepest and most timeless strata of our experience.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

A century and a half after Jane Welsh Carlyle so brilliantly rendered the difference between loving and being in love, an exasperated 43-year-old reader turns to Roxane with the same perplexity, signing herself Where the hell is the love of my life? With an eye to the tyrannical myth of “the one,” Roxane responds:

We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. You may never know if you have made the right choice. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless.

Having “lived and loved long enough to recognize that there is a difference between the idea of love and the reality of love,” she adds:

You never really know if a marriage or relationship will last a lifetime. You can want that. You can work hard to make a relationship work and have the best of intentions and still, things might not work out but that doesn’t mean you have wasted your time or failed.

[…]

When you meet someone and start dating, you have no idea where things will lead…. It is so very important to know what you want from a relationship but you also have to create space for a relationship to develop without worrying about what the relationship will or won’t become.

To look for the love of one’s life, she observes, requires an understanding of and a commitment to what it takes — the immensity it takes — to love someone for a lifetime. This cannot be done without arriving at a personal definition of love that we live up to and into. (My favorite definitions come from Iris Murdoch, Robert Graves, and Tom Stoppard.)

Art by Charles M. Schulz from Love Is Walking Hand in Hand, 1965

Professing herself to be “a passionate, foolish romantic,” Roxane offers her own definition, anchored in the difference between loving and being in love:

Loving someone is recognizing the role they play or have played in your life and honoring that presence. Sometimes, love feels like an obligation but it is one you are willing to fulfill. Sometimes it takes hard work but you are willing to put in that work. Love is the constant you hold on to when you don’t particularly like the one you love. Love is recognizing the ways in which, for better and worse, someone has contributed to your life.

Being in love is wild, breathtaking, infuriating. It is butterflies in your stomach when you think about your person, when you see them, when you hold them. It’s the electricity when your skin meets. It’s smiling at your person with wide eyes and an open heart and seeing them smile back at you in the same way. It’s wanting to hold someone’s hand, even when your hand is hot, a little sweaty. It’s lust and the heat of wanting, wanting, wanting. It’s seeing who someone truly is, the best and most terrible parts of them, and choosing not to look away from everything you see, actively embracing everything you see… It’s wanting to be the best version of yourself for your person but also for yourself, especially for yourself… It’s the pride you feel in their accomplishments and being as happy for their successes as you are for your own, if not more. It’s their hurts becoming your hurts… It’s a gut instinct. You just feel it. You know it in your bones. It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.

To this taxonomy she adds the most culturally mythologized manifestation of love — the idea of the soul mate, so slippery precisely because it is intimately tied to the elusive notion of the soul. She writes:

A soul mate is someone so deeply part of you that they feel like a vital organ, living outside of your skin. They are the hottest part of the sun, your true north, your home, the one from whom you will never walk away, no matter what the material conditions of your relationship might be. Your soul mate is the one you wait for knowing no matter what happens, that they are worth the wait. Your soul mate is the person you choose because you look at them always and think, “You… there you are.”

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme

She ends her advice with the sage and sensitive disclaimer that, ultimately, we are each responsible for our own definition of love, our own private understanding of what it means and what it feels like to love and be loved — a difficult triumph of self-knowledge amid the perpetual confusion of knowing what we really want.

Complement with poet Donald Hall on the secret to lasting love, philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to know if you really love somebody, and David Whyte’s stunning poem “The Truelove,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on the courage to weather the uncertainties of love and Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of loss at the heart of love.

BP

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)