The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak

By Maria Popova

Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak

“Future love does not exist,” Tolstoy wrote in contemplating the paradoxical demands of love. “Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.” It is a difficult concept to accept — we have been socialized to believe in and grasp after the happily-ever-after future of every meaningful relationship. But what happens when love, whatever its category and classification, dissolves under the interminable forces of time and change, be it by death or by some other, more deliberate demise? In the midst of what feels like an unsurvivable loss, how do we moor ourselves to the fact that even the most beautiful, most singularly gratifying things in life are merely on loan from the universe, granted us for the time being?

Two millennia ago, the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. 55–135 AD) argued that the antidote to this gutting grief is found not in hedging ourselves against prospective loss through artificial self-protections but, when loss does come, in orienting ourselves to it and to what preceded it differently — in training ourselves not only to accept but to embrace the temporality of all things, even those we most cherish and most wish would stretch into eternity, so that when love does vanish, we are left with the irrevocable gladness that it had entered our lives at all and animated them for the time that it did.

Epictetus

In The Discourses of Epictetus (public library), under the heading That we ought not to be moved by a desire of those things which are not in our power, the Stoic sage writes:

Who is good if he knows not who he is? and who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to be with another always?

Epictetus — a proponent of the wonderful practice of self-scrutiny applied with kindness — proceeds to offer a meditation on loosening the grip of grief in parting permanently from someone we have loved:

When you are delighted with anything, be delighted as with a thing which is not one of those which cannot be taken away, but as something of such a kind, as an earthen pot is, or a glass cup, that, when it has been broken, you may remember what it was and may not be troubled… What you love is nothing of your own: it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year. But if you wish for these things in winter, you are a fool. So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter.

“How Long Is Now” (Photograph by Maria Popova)

In a sentiment addressing the corporeal mortality of our loved ones, but equally applicable to the loss of love in a non-physical sense, Epictetus adds:

At the times when you are delighted with a thing, place before yourself the contrary appearances. What harm is it while you are kissing your child to say with a lisping voice, “To-morrow you will die”; and to a friend also, “To-morrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again”?

When we are able to regard what we love in such a way, Epictetus argues, its inevitable loss would leave in us not paralyzing devastation but what Abraham Lincoln would later term “a sad sweet feeling in your heart.” To retain the memory of love’s sweetness without letting the pain of parting and loss embitter it is perhaps the greatest challenge for the bereaved heart, and its greatest achievement.

Complement this particular fragment of Epictetus’s abidingly insightful Discourses with computing pioneer Alan Turing on love and loss and other great artists, scientists, and writers on how to live with loss, then revisit more of the Stoics’ timeless succor for the traumas of living: Seneca on resilience in the face of loss, the antidote to anxiety, and what it means to be a generous human being, Marcus Aurelius on living through difficult times and how to motivate yourself to rise each morning and do your work.

HT Aeon

BP

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

Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours

By Maria Popova

Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours

One of the most important things I have learned about living is that, in any life of purpose and creative vitality, you must be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as about your work. And yet one of the great self-betrayals of our culture is the way it wears the lack of sleep as a badge of honor on the lapel of the ego of achievement — the cult of productivity gone past the sacrifice of presence, sacrificing even that precious nightly absence of conscious thought and metabolic urgency necessary to recover, to reset, to recalibrate so that we may begin again, in the deepest sense, in the new day.

Trouble sleeping both troubles living and signals a troubled life — because sleep is how most of the body’s physical systems recover; because, ever since evolution invented REM in the bird brain, it has been helping us regulate our negative emotions; because sleep goes beyond the physical, the mental, and the emotional to touch the existential.

No one has written more passionately or more perceptively about that existential dimension of sleep than the Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) throughout The Book of Disquiet (public library) — the posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a good explorer in the lifelong expedition to yourself, the trouble with love, and how to unself into who you really are.

Pessoa recognizes that, more than a biological impediment, all those unsolved disquietudes and subtle estrangements from ourselves that keep the eyelids from closing the curtain on the day are emissaries of our existential angst. Wrestling with his own, he writes:

I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, like two tides in the black night where the destinies of nostalgia and desolation meet.

While Kafka is reverencing the creative power of insomnia a dozen degrees of latitude north, Pessoa discovers in his sleeplessness a strange metaphysical power:

The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel. Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, consisting of nocturnal negations. Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching — with the awareness of my body — a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things.

Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud from David the Dreamer: His Book of Dreams, 1922.

The portal into that mystery, Pessoa realizes, is the cessation of selfing that marks waking life:

To cease, to sleep, to replace this intermittent consciousness with better, melancholy things, whispered in secret to someone who doesn’t know me! … To cease, to be the ebb and flow of a vast sea, fluidly skirting real shores, on a night in which one really sleeps! … To cease, to be unknown and external, a swaying of branches in distant rows of trees, a gentle falling of leaves, their sound noted more than their fall, the ocean spray of far-off fountains, and all the uncertainty of parks at night, lost in endless tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness! … To cease, to end at last, but surviving as something else: the page of a book, a tuft of dishevelled hair, the quiver of the creeping plant next to a half-open window, the irrelevant footsteps in the gravel of the bend, the last smoke to rise from the village going to sleep, the wagoner’s whip left on the early morning roadside… Absurdity, confusion, oblivion — everything that isn’t life…

Behind me, on the other side of where I’m lying down, the silence of the house touches infinity.

Art by Ishita Jain from Midnight Motorbike — a South Indian lullaby for the sleepless

It is sleep, Pessoa comes to believe, that most readily allows us to empty ourselves of our selves and touch the infinite:

There are moments when the emptiness of feeling oneself live attains the consistency of a positive thing. In the great men of action, namely the saints, who act with all of their emotion and not just part of it, this sense of life’s nothingness leads to the infinite. They crown themselves with night and the stars, and anoint themselves with silence and solitude. In [them] the same feeling leads to the infinitesimal; sensations are stretched, like rubber bands, to reveal the pores of their slack, false continuity… And in these moments both types of men love sleep, as much as the common man who doesn’t act and doesn’t not act, being a mere reflection of the generic existence of the human species. Sleep is fusion with God, Nirvana, however it be called. Sleep is the slow analysis of sensations, whether used as an atomic science of the soul or left to doze like a music of our will, a slow anagram of monotony.

Pessoa eventually experiences one such moment himself — a moment of profound unselfing, on the other side of which he comes to feel that one is most awake to life, to its essence and its mystery, when asleep:

It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was. And now I’m sleepy, because I think — I don’t know why — that the meaning of it all is to sleep.

Illustration by Judith Clay from Thea’s Tree

This may be so because meaning is so often muddled by interpretation, but sleep disables the whipping hand of the analytical mind, quells all the rationalizations that pass for reason, returns us to a state of pure being before the storying of identities and opinions. Pessoa writes:

When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and the most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they’re sleeping.

[…]

All life is a dream. No one knows what he’s doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That’s why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything.

Art by Maurice Sendak from Where the Wild Things Are
BP

From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

By Maria Popova

From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, in a whisper that soon became a symphony, life arose to give us such ceaseless wonders as the ghost pipe and the ginkgo, the bowerbird and the eye of the scallop.

Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate the wonder of how we went from mitochondria to minds in The Silent Teachers: How Nature Wrote the Story of Life (public library) — a love letter to that place between knowledge and mystery, where science illuminates the spirituality of nature.

Beginning the story where nature began it, Isett writes in the opening chapter, “Ocean”:

Once upon a time, Ocean taught life how to begin. The lesson began somewhere warm, like the shallow waters of a calm bay, or the billowing broth of a hydrothermal vent. In these places, warm water provided enough energy to link up chemicals that normally stayed apart. Rings of carbon, called “nucleotides,” clumped together just the way letters do to make words. And while most of the clumps formed nonsensical tangles, some formed babbling threads of an early genetic text called “RNA.” With Ocean’s encouragement, a chain reaction began: instead of dissolving back into the sea, chemicals began to fold into delicate structures that enabled even more chemical reactions to take place. These early molecules, many now called “ribozymes,” are thought to have sustained the first whispers of life. Our story had begun.

The story unfolds like an Eames powers-of-ten shot, moving up the orders of complexity until the first grainy pixels begin to form a recognizable picture of the living world — the first cells, inside which “our earliest ancestors drafted and composed”; the skeleton, the lung, the fin that became a foot; and, along the way, the emergence of photosynthesis and fungi, of symbionts and sleep.

Carrying the wonder of it all are Biçen’s vibrant illustrations, part fairy tale and part psychedelic dream.

Pulsating beneath it all is an insistence that it is not too late to change the catastrophic course of ecology, that it can only be done by listening closely and creatively to nature’s own silent lessons, intimating that our mightiest instrument of resilience is rapturous wonder.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; page photographs by Maria Popova

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.)