The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Comet & Star: A Cosmic Fable about the Rhythms and Consolations of Friendship

By Maria Popova

Comet & Star: A Cosmic Fable about the Rhythms and Consolations of Friendship

People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they change us all the same.

The great consolation of the cosmic order is the constancy of its laws, indiscriminate across the immensity of space, unchanged since the beginning of time. That we can predict an eclipse centuries into the future with precision down to the second but not the outcome of an election, that we can foretell the return of a comet but not the return of a friend, is a strange oasis of sanity amid the chaotic uncertainty of life. It is also a mirror — we see ourselves reflected in universe, covet its organizing principles for the chaos of our own lives.

In this respect, comets — the most erratic of cosmic denizens, with their irregular orbits, fickle periodicity, and mysterious origins in the outermost reaches of space — offer a singular lens on human relationships, that most unpredictable phenomenon in the universe.

Korean musician Lee Juck and artist Lee Jinhee take up these deep and often heavy questions with great levity and loveliness in Comet & Star (public library) — the story of a little star whose cosmic loneliness is interrupted by a visit from humanity’s most beloved comet: Halley’s comet, which has inspired poems and auguries. (“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835,” a grown wrote in his 1909 autobiography. “It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And so he did — Halley’s comet, which blazes across Earth’s skies once every 76 years, was visible on November 30, 1835, when Samuel Clemens was born, and again on April 21, 1910, when he died as Mark Twain.)

As the comet passes, the little star calls out timorously, “Will you… be my friend?” But the comet blazes past.

Loneliness descends again, grey and dim — 76 years of it (which is but a blink in the life of a star, but it is also eternity to wait even a day for a loved one who has left).

And then, to the star’s great and glad surprise, the comet returns, this time ready to connect.

In the fleeting encounter, a beautiful friendship comes aglow. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe memorably wrote — but there is also, if you are lucky enough and openhearted enough, that rare miracle of knowing another only a short time yet seeing their naked soul, seeing yourself seen and deeply cherished in their eyes.

And so, when the comet leaves again to complete its next orbit, the star is no longer lonely — there is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any true bond, which nothing but indifference can break. (“Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good,” Simone Weil wrote to a faraway friend. “Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.”)

The star and the comet
each glowed with joy
because they knew
they would meet again.
And they both shone
brighter than ever
in our vast universe.

Complement Comet & Star with the story of the comet behind Earth’s most transcendent celestial spectacle (which might one day destroy us) and these wonder-smiting medieval paintings of comets, then revisit Big Wolf & Little Wolf — another tender illustrated parable about loneliness and how friendship transforms us, which remains one of my favorite books of all time.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

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Don’t Waste Your Wildness

By Maria Popova

Don’t Waste Your Wildness

Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles into golf courses.

I watched waves taller than factory chimneys break into cliffs black as spacetime, making mansions look like a maquette of life.

I beheld the ancient indifferent faces of turtles older than the light bulb hatching their young under the NO TRESPASSING sign on a billionaire’s private beach.

I looked into the open mouth of the volcano taunting the sky in the language of time.

I kept thinking about how those fault lines between the elemental and the ephemera of human life most readily expose our gravest civilizational foible: regarding nature as something to conquer, to neuter, to tame, “forgetting that we are nature too,” forgetting that we are taming our own wildness, neutering our very souls.

Jay Griffiths offers a mighty antidote in her 2006 masterpiece Wild: An Elemental Journey (public library) — the product of “many years’ yearning” pulling her “toward unfetteredness, toward the sheer and vivid world,” learning to think with the mind of a mountain and feel with the heart of a forest, searching for “something shy, naked and elemental — the soul.” What emerges is both an act of revolt (against the erasure of the wild, against the domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (for the irrepressible in nature, for landscape as a form of knowledge, for life on Earth, as improbable and staggering as love.)

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

A century and a half after Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately” (omitting from his famed chronicle of spartan solitude the fresh-baked doughnuts and pies his mother and sister brought him every Sunday), Griffiths spent seven years slaking her soul on the world’s wildness, from the Amazon to the Arctic, trying “to touch life with the quick of the spirit,” impelled by “the same ancient telluric vigor that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky.” She writes:

I was looking for the will of the wild… The only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self.

I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else.

[…]

The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.

It all began by getting lost in “the wasteland of the mind, in a long and dark depression” that left her unable to walk or write, “pathless, bleak and bewildered, not knowing which way to turn.” (A decade later, Griffiths would write an entire book about that discomposing yearlong episode of manic depression.) Searching for “the octaves of possibilities,” reckoning with “the maybes of the mind,” yearning for release from the supermarket aisles of the psyche, she set out to find the savage antipode to “this chloroform world where human nature is well schooled, tamed from childhood on, where the radiators are permanently on mild and the windows are permanently closed.” She writes:

I felt an urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my eyes yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

She lived for months with a hill tribe in the forests of the Burmese border, lost all her toenails climbing Kilimanjaro, met “cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelized them,” felt “what it is like to whimper with sheer loneliness on a Christmas Day in a jungle on the other side of the world,” learned to live in the seasons and the elements, “right within nature because there is nothing that is not nature.”

She reflects:

To me, humanity is not a strain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon… We are — every one of us — a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.

Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Pulsating beneath the passionate poetics is an indictment and a beckoning. A decade after Maya Angelou channeled the selfsame polarity of human nature in her staggering space-bound poem “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Griffiths writes:

There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.

Reclaiming our wildness emerges as an act of courage and resistance amid the conspicuous consumption by which late-stage capitalism drugs us into mistaking having for being, anesthetizing the urgency of our mortality — that wellspring of everything beautiful and enduring we make. What Griffiths offers is a wakeup call from this near-living, a spell against apathy, against air con and asphalt, against our self-expatriation from our own nature:

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness… sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who willfully goes their own way.

Complement Wild — a vivifying read in its entirety — with Wendell Berry’s timeless poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and artist Rockwell Kent, writing a century earlier, on wilderness and creativity, then revisit Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s magnificent rewilding of the human spirit.

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The Unphotographable: Richard Adams on the Singular Magic of Autumn

By Maria Popova

The Unphotographable: Richard Adams on the Singular Magic of Autumn

There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living metaphor for the necessary losses that shape our human lives: What falls away reveals the imperative beneath the superfluous, making what remains all the more precious — the fleeting colors, the fading light, the embering warmth. It is a teacher in the art of letting go — what has ceased to nourish, what has lost its vital spark, what no longer serves.

Hardly anyone has captured the singular, unphotographable magic of autumn more vividly than Richard Adams (May 10, 1920–December 24, 2016) in this passage from his 1973 classic Watership Down (public library), painting “a fine, clear evening in mid-October”:

Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man’s beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.

Complement with the poetic ornithologist and wildlife ecologist J. Drew Lanham on autumn and the sensual urgency of aliveness and Colette on the autumn of life as a beginning rather than a decline, then revisit Richard Adams on moonlight and the magic of the unnecessary and the penguin as a teacher in patience and faith.

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Octavia Butler (and Whitman’s Ghost) on America

By Maria Popova

Octavia Butler (and Whitman’s Ghost) on America

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,” Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words remain a haunting reminder that our rights are founded upon our responsibilities: “To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” There are few terrors greater than the knowledge that we are free to change the world with our choices.

Two years earlier, Butler fleshed out this reckoning with our personal responsibility to the political in a 1996 interview for the magazine Science Fiction Studies included in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (public library).

The Oracle

Considering her Earthseed series “fundamentally about social power,” she reflects on the disquieting forces tearing American society apart:

Some people insist that all civilizations have to rise and fall — like the British before us — but we have brought this on ourselves. What you see today has happened before: a few powerful people take over with the approval of a class below them who has nothing to gain and even much to lose as a result. It’s like the Civil War: most of the men who fought to preserve slavery were actually being hurt by it. As farmers they could not compete with the plantations, and they could not even hire themselves out as labor in competition with the slaves who could be hired out more cheaply by their owners. But they supported the slave system anyway.

A century and a half after Walt Whitman insisted that you must “always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote” and admonished that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,” Butler reflects on the self-destructive psychological underpinnings beneath divisive politics and adds:

Many people just need someone to feel superior to to make themselves feel better. You see Americans doing it now, unfortunately, while voting
against their own interests. It is that kind of shortsighted behavior that is destroying us.

While this perilous inner rupture seems only magnified in the America of our day, Whitman, far-seeing and unafraid to challenge the will of the world, warned about it an epoch earlier, at a time when most of us were not rightful citizens and were denied the power to shape fate with our vote. In his enduring reckoning with democracy predicated on a truly feminist society, he wrote:

Of all dangers to a nation… there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.

Couple with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy, then revisit Butler on the spirituality of symbiosis and how we become who we are.

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