Every great book, whatever its subject or genre or style, is about one thing only: the eternal question of what gives meaning to our tiny, transient lives. And every answer given, however faintly whispered, points to one thing only: the quality of attention we pay to those lives.
If attention is the lever of love, the particular — the sacred specificity of something small and singular, something easy to overlook — is its fulcrum. “Love quells fear,” Octavia Butler wrote in contemplating creativity, “and a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.” Our highly clinical culture, with its tendency to pathologize the tendrils of personality that make us who we are, regards obsession as unambiguously negative — something that kidnaps us from the actuality of life. And yet all the creative energy that has given us our greatest works of art and most revolutionary breakthroughs in science has sprung from such a “powerful positive obsession.”
When she asks her protagonist what it is about orchids he finds so irresistible, how it is they are the animating passion of his life, he shrugs:
Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose… I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody’s always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.
Often, it is not we who find that unusual something but it that finds us, jolts us awake from the stupor of near-living. Considering her own obsession with telling the story of the orchid thief, which had begun with a random article she read in a newspaper on a random day and ended up consuming years of her life, she observes how these obsessions take hold of us:
[It begins with] some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can’t believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water.
As Susan finds herself traveling through the vastness of Florida in the footsteps of the orchid thief, she comes to see these obsessions as our most powerful antidote to the hollow feeling of meaninglessness that visits upon every life — against the overwhelming bigness of life, we have the saving grace of smallness:
The land was marble-smooth and it rolled without a pucker to the horizon. My eyes grazed across the green band of ground and the blue bowl of sky and then lingered on a dead tire, a bird in flight, an old fence, a rusted barrel. Hardly any cars came toward me, and I saw no one in the rearview mirror the entire time. I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
Nothing counterbalances our helpless givens and shapes our lives more powerfully than our relationship to possibility. To be overwhelmed is to be paralyzed by possibility. To be obsessed it to be catalyzed by it. Whatever the obsession is one of collecting or creating, whatever form it takes — orchids or oboe, birds or baking, writing or trapeze — it is a way of centering into our only task here: to fill our allotted days with maximum aliveness.
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”
Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.
That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.
Viktor Frankl
A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning.
As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame — these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered — as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past — they are now published in English for the first time as Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library).
Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes:
We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this.
Liminal Worlds by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.
Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims:
Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!
How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity.
Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:
What remained was the individual person, the human being — and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.
In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds:
Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.
Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless — the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:
Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.
He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked — and behold,
duty was joy.
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation — an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity — Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point:
So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.
At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?
Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.
Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance — triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization:
The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.
We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?
What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms — terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:
One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.
The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.
In the remainder of the slender and splendid Yes to Life, Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival.
Like Alice James — the brilliant diarist who lived and wrote in the shadow of her brothers, Henry and William James — Jane Welsh Carlyle (January 14, 1801–April 21, 1866), unpublished and shadowed by her famous husband, was a literary genius whose private letters stand as masterpieces of prose in their own right. Virginia Woolf admired her as “so brilliant, so deeply versed in life and scornful of its humbugs… the most caustic, the most concrete, the most clear-sighted of women.” Charles Dickens considered her a greater storyteller, with a superior talent for observation and character development, than any of the published women novelists of her day. For a time, she was rumored to have authored the pseudonymously published Jane Eyre.
What lent her letters their shimmering intensity of insight was Jane’s uncommon openness to and insight into the complex, often confusing inner workings of the human heart and is maddening contradictions.
Jane Welsh Carlyle (Portrait by Samuel Laurence, 1952)
Shortly after her twentieth birthday, Jane Welsh met Thomas Carlyle — the essayist, mathematician, historian, and philosopher, who was then a struggling young writer of lower social stature, with no stable income and no intellectual achievement to his name, but would later become Scotland’s most esteemed polymath. At first, she spurned his courtship with the adamant insistence — perhaps out of self-knowledge, perhaps out of self-protection and fear — that she is constitutionally incapable of romantic love, uninterested in marriage at the expense of her intellectual ambitions, and would only hurt him if she consented to a relationship. In a letter from early 1823, found in the devastatingly titled I Too Am Here: Selections from the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle (public library), she pushes him away with equal parts magnanimity toward his needs and uncompromising clarity about hers:
To cause unhappiness to others, above all to those I esteem, and would do anything within my duties and abilities to serve, is the cruelest pain I know — but positively I can not fall in love — and to sacrifice myself out of pity is a degree of generosity of which I am not capable — besides matrimony under any circumstances would interfere shockingly with my plans.
Carlyle, conflicted in his own right at the prospect of getting hurt but besotted nonetheless, plays into this game of push and pull, charging that it is “useless and dangerous” for him to love her and that she has made his “happiness wrecked” by letting him fall in love with her and then rejecting him. Jane responds by insisting that her love for him is true, but not the kind he yearns for. In the last week of summer, she grows even more resolute in her dual pledge that she will never leave him as a friend but will never be with him as a romantic partner:
My Friend I love you — I repeat it tho’ the expression a rash one — all the best feelings of my nature are concerned in loving you — But were you my Brother I would love you the same, were I married to another I would love you the same — and is this sentiment so calm, so delightful — but so unimpassioned enough to recompense the freedom of my heart, enough to reconcile me to the existence of a married woman the hopes and wishes and ambitions of which are all different from mine, the cares and occupations of which are my disgust — Oh no! Your Friend I will be, your truest most devoted friend, while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife! never never!
But then, having issued this most vehement of self-protective disclaimers, she adds:
Write to me and reassure me — for God’s sake reassure me if you can! Your Friendship at this time is almost necessary to my existence. Yet I will resign it cost what it may — will, will resign it if it can only be enjoyed at the risk of your future peace — …
They continued this conflicted dance for more than a year, until it became clear they had to make a choice. In a letter penned in the first days of 1825, a week before Jane’s twenty-fourth birthday, she confronts the abiding question of how you know whether you are in love, as opposed to merely infatuated:
I love you — I have told you so a hundred times; and I should be the most ungrateful, and injudicious of mortals if I did not — but I am not in love with you — that is to say — my love for you is not a passion which overclouds my judgement; and absorbs all my regards for myself and others — it is a simple, honest, serene affection, made up of admiration and sympathy, and better perhaps, to found domestic enjoyment on than any other — In short it is a love which influences, does not make the destiny of a life.
Jane Welsh Carlyle (from the miniature by Kenneth Macleay, painted July 1826)
Jane had two primary reservations about marrying Carlyle: that their differences — of class, of means, of ambitions — were too vast, and that a life of domesticity would keep her from actualizing herself as a writer. Asserting that “the idea of a sacrifice should have no place in a voluntary union,” she suggests that marrying him would be a self-sacrifice — a form of settling for a life smaller than the life she wants. And yet she also acknowledges that her choice is not between marrying him and marrying someone else, but between marrying him and not marrying at all. She writes:
I should have goodsense enough to abate something of my romantic ideal, and to content myself with stopping short on this side idolatry — At all events I will marry no one else — This is all the promise I can or will make. A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth: it is either altogether useless or altogether miserable; if the parties continue faithfully attached to each other it is a mere ceremony — if otherwise it comes a galling fetter riveting them to wretchedness and only to be broken with disgrace.
She presents him with her take-it-or-leave-it proposition: If their love is to endure, it must not be rushed into marriage but allowed to grow organically, its rightness and resilience tested in the garden of time:
Such is the result of my deliberations on this very serious subject. You may approve of it or not; but you cannot either persuade me or convince me out of it — My decisions — when I do decide — are unalterable as the laws of the Medes & Persians — Write instantly and tell me that you are content to leave the event to time and destiny and in the meanwhile to continue my Friend and Guardian which you have so long and so faithfully been — and nothing more —
Jane struggles with the choice between her heart’s desire, with its conflicted factions of deep love and vibrating doubt, and what she believes is best for her beloved. Unwilling to err on the side of selfishness, she fears that in asking him to go on with their relationship while she wades through her own uncertainties would keep him from pursuing a relationship with someone else better suited for him and would thus stand between him and his happiness. She articulates her ambivalence with exquisite self-awareness:
It would be more agreeable to etiquette, and perhaps also to prudence, that I should adopt no middle course in an affair such as this — that I should not for another instant encourage an affection I may never reward and a hope I may never fulfill; but cast your heart away from me at once since I cannot embrace the resolution which would give me a right to it for ever. This I would assuredly do if youwere like the generality of lovers, or if it were still in my power to be happy independent of your affection but as it [is] neither etiquette nor prudence can obtain this for me.
Unsure whether she can give him the kind of love and kind of life he wants, Jane places the difficult decision — the choice of whether to part ways or carry forth toward an alluring but uncertain future — into her beloved’s hands. After “a sleepless night, with an aching head, and an aching anxious heart,” she writes:
If there is any change to be made in the terms on which we have so long lived with one another; it must be made by you not me — I cannot make any.
When a hurt and angry Carlyle, no doubt himself sundered by the intensity of love and the fear of its loss, accuses her of insensitively causing him unhappiness by framing the choice before them as so binary, she defends its validity as rooted in the respective realities of their two hearts:
I have refused my immediate, positive assent to your wishes; because our mutual happiness seemed to require that I should refuse it; but for the rest I have not slighted your wishes, on the contrary, I have expressed my willingness to fulfill them, at the expense of every thing but what I deem to be essential to our happiness: and so far from undervaluing you, I have shown you, in declaring I would marry no one else, not only that I esteem you above all the men I have ever seen; but also that I am persuaded I should esteem you above all the men I may ever see — What, then, have you to be hurt or angry at?
Returning to the fear that in choosing to be together, either of them might be settling for a lesser life than their ideal, Jane elects to be a realist rather than a romantic in steering love’s course:
My heart is capable (I feel it is) of a love to which no deprivation would be a sacrifice — a love which would… carry every thought and feeling of my being along with it — But the all-perfect Mortal, who could inspire me with a love so extravagant, is nowhere to be found — exists nowhere but in the Romance of my own imagination! Perhaps it is better for me as it is — A passion, like the torrent in the violence of its course, might perhaps too, like the torrent, leave ruin and desolation behind. In the mean time, I should be very mad, were I to act as if from the influence of such a passion, while my affections are in a state of perfect tranquility. I have already explained to you the nature of my love for you; that it is deep and calm, more like the quiet river, which refreshes and beautifies where it flows, than the torrent which bears down and destroys.
Two years into their relationship, she reminds him how much her feelings have evolved from the initial insistence that she is too closed down to love — strong evidence, though not a perfect guarantee, that they might evolve further still. She writes:
From the change which my sentiments towards you have already undergone, during the period our acquaintance; I have little doubt but, that, in time, I shall be perfectly satisfied with them. One loves you…. in proportion to the ideas and sentiments which are in oneself; according[ly,] as my mind enlarges, and my heart improves, I become capable of comprehending the goodness and greatness which are in you, and my affection for you increases. Not many months ago, I would have said it was impossible that I should ever be your wife; at present I consider this the most probable destiny for me; and in a year or so, perhaps, I shall consider it the only one. “Die Zeit ist noch nicht da!” [“The time is not yet here!”]
With an eye to these sentiments, she maps out the only responsible course forward — they must each endeavor to heal, grow, and refine their separate selves before they can unite their lives:
From what I have said, it is plain (to me, at least), what ought to be the line of our future conduct. Do you what you can to better you external circumstances; always, however, subordinately to your own principles, which I do not ask you to give up, which I should despise you for giving up, whether I approved them or no — While I on the other hand do what I can, subordinately to nothing, to better myself which I am persuaded is the surest way of bringing my wishes to accord with yours. (And let us leave the rest to Fate, satisfied that we have both of us done what lies with [us] for our mutual happiness.)
Jane takes issue with one particular passage of Carlyle’s accusatory letter, in which he narrowed the choices before them as marrying immediately or parting for good. Recognizing in it an insincere and defensive ultimatum based not on his true wishes but on fear and a desire for control in the face of uncertainty, she challenges him:
I will not believe that you have seriously thought of parting from me, of throwing off a heart, which you have taught to lean upon you, till it is no longer sufficient for itself! You could never be so ungenerous! you, who for years have shown and professed for me the most [selfless], most noble affection! How could I part from the only living soul that understands me? I would marry you tomorrow rather! but then,– our parting would indeed need to be brought about by death or some dispensation of uncontrollable Providence — were you to will it, to part would no longer be bitter, the bitterness would be in thinking you unworthy.
If Carlyle were to break things off with her because she stands in the way of his happiness, Jane concedes with “the weight of a millstone” at her heart that she could never begrudge his decision. But she reminds him that he had entered into this courtship willingly, in full awareness of her initial reservations, which she had transparently and repeatedly offered. And so if he has found himself hurt and unhappy, it is on account of unprocessed pain that predates her. In an astute sentiment which the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh would echo nearly two centuries later in his assertion that “to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” Jane writes:
If indeed your happiness was to suffer from your intercourse with me in our present relation, I would not blame you for discontinuing it; tho’ I should blame you, perhaps, for not examining yourself better before you entered into it — But how can that be? Your present situation is miserable; it must be altered; but is it with reference to me that it must be altered? Is it I who have made it miserable? No! you were as unhappy before we met as ever you have been since: the cause of your unhappiness then must lie in other circumstances of your destiny, which I have no connection with — no real connection, however much I may seem to have, from being frequently associated with them in your mind. It is an alteration in these circumstances which your duty and happiness require from you; and not an alteration in your relation with me.
Jane and Thomas did not part ways. Having voiced, faced, and surmounted their respective fears and reservations, they moved closer and closer toward each other in the coming months. They told each other difficult truths. Jane confesses that she had been minimizing her feelings for another man — her engaged former tutor, with whom she knew she could never be but whom she had indeed loved, “once passionately,” even. Imploring Carlyle for forgiveness, she writes:
Woe to me then if your reason be my judge! … Never were you so dear as at this moment when I am in danger of losing your affection or what is still more precious to me your respect.
Jane finds herself “the forlornest, most dispirited of creatures” as she awaits his response. Awash in gladness and relief when an assuring letter from Carlyle finally arrives, she exults:
What is love if it can not make all rough places smooth!
Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle were married on October 17, 1826. Only four people attended the wedding — three of her family and one of his. Although shortly after the ceremony she wrote to a relative that her new husband possessed all the qualities she deemed essential in a mate — “a warm true heart to love me, a towering intellect to command me, and a spirit of fire to be the guiding star-light of my life” — the romantic fantasy soon gave way to the reality of their contrasting natures. For the remaining forty years of Jane’s life — she died considering herself an unrealized woman — they proceeded to have a tortured relationship that syphoned her creative aspiration and relegated her increasingly to the role of her husband’s helpmate. They had no children. Carlyle’s official biographer argued that the relationship was never consummated. Both Thomas and Jane went on to have romantic, though by all evidence not sexual, entanglements with other people — most notably, Jane’s intense relationship with the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. Jane met Geraldine, as Virginia Woolf would write a century later, with “that uneasy sense that old relationships had shifted and that new ones were forming themselves,” and she became her most significant intimate attachment for the last quarter century of her life.
“When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in one of his least known, most beautiful essays, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
To be ourselves is rooted in the recognition that, rather than a tree, a self is a forest; to be at home in the world is rooted in the recognition that a forest is a self. While indigenous cultures have known this since the dawn of knowledge, we are only just beginning to unlearn everything we have been taught by the erasure of our creaturely belonging that we call civilization in order to remember what we were born knowing: Life and its rights are not something we can claim for ourselves unless we accord them to everything else that exists, bound to us by the mesh of mutuality that makes this drifting rock a living world.
In 2021, Ecuador led the way in this great unlearning by granting the Los Cedros Cloud Forest legal rights of personhood: the right to exist and flourish in the future.
The Los Cedros Cloud Forest
Five years later, four pioneers of the rippling rights-of-nature movement have joined forces with the forest itself to celebrate the landmark decision, as Copernican in the history of our civilization as the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness: Robert Macfarlane (who has asked the urgent, self-answering question “Is a river alive?” and who remains the closest thing to a Rachel Carson of our time), Giuliana Furci (who has changed not only how we think about nature with her Fungi Foundation work but the very container of our thoughts, language, coining the word funga, now inducted into the Cambridge Dictionary, to stand alongside flora and fauna in our classification of the living world), César Rodríguez-Garavito (whose legal scholarship and activism have anchored the rights-of-nature movement), and Cosmo Sheldrake (who has devoted his life to turning the soundscapes of the living world into music). That they have named the Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself as co-author is both a radical gesture — a first in the history of literature — and a kind of homecoming to an elemental reality our sciences are only just beginning to confirm: that we think not with the brain but with the world, that place and personhood are indelibly entwined, that life is a song singing us back to ourselves so that when we die we may be sung across the threshold into the rhizomatic everythingness of everything.
It is a project breathtakingly beautiful in spirit and in matter, the song sung along the river that carries the ecosystem and unfolds like a paper harmonica to carry the words that break the civilizational spell of indifference with enchantment.
Trees speak in your leaves please
And streams tell me your dreams
Birds sing me your rhymes please
And stones teach me your times
Earth cover my limbs now
And mold thrive on my skin
Clouds deepen my sight please
And storms lend me your light
The back matter, following five short essays by the different contributors, is a painted encounter with the cloud forest’s wonderland of flora, fauna, and funga — 81 creatures each identified by their common and Linnaean names, occupying every niche and scale of existence, from the fierce ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) to the tender rosy flannel moth (Trosia neigropunetigera), from the air plant hovering ethereal midway between the canopy and the ground to the lichen clinging to the rocks more tenaciously than gravity itself.
Beholding this loving song of life, I am struck by what a rare achievement it is in this culture to teach without preaching, to protest not with militancy but with tenacious tenderness, to remember that care is a stronger and longer lever of change than complaint, that how we show up for the summons of conscience, as individuals and as a civilization, is the deepest measure of who and what we are.
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