The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A General Theory of Possibility: The Abstract Art of Otherwise and the Physics of Resilience

By Maria Popova

A General Theory of Possibility: The Abstract Art of Otherwise and the Physics of Resilience

“Everything that is possible is real,” Bach scribbled in the margins of his music three centuries ago, when the existence of other galaxies was unimaginable and hummingbirds were considered magic, when the fact of the atom was yet to trouble the young Emily Dickinson and the fact that it is mutable was yet to splinter the foundation of reality as we understood it.

“What will they think of my music on the star of Urania?” the young Beethoven wondered in his marginalia upon hearing of the discovery of Uranus, daring to imagine the unimaginable. In two centuries, his Fifth Symphony would sail past the seventh planet on a golden disc aboard a spacecraft launched into the unknown on the wings of laws discovered by a college student watching an apple fall on his illiterate mother’s orchard during a plague quarantine and a sickly brokenhearted mathematician defending his mother in a witchcraft trial.

The great gift of science is that it continually reveals to us what is real, unpeeling the wallpaper of our knowledge to reveal newer and newer layers of nature, deeper and deeper substrata of reality. The great peril of science — this eternal impulse of human nature — is that the human mind continually limits what is possible, erecting walls of assumption between itself and the reality of nature. And yet the entire fact of life — your individual life, and mine, and life itself as a feature of the universe — is a matter of probable impossibilities.

Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

This interplay, and how to liberate our search for truth from our craving for certainty, is what Italian physicist Chiara Marletto explores in The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals (public library) — part field guide to her particular realm of study, part manifesto for the countercultural courage to keep unmasoning the walls of the imaginable and bending the mind beyond the accepted horizons of the possible. What emerges is an impassioned, scrumptiously reasoned insistence that all breakthroughs in science require “as much imagination and perceptiveness as you need to write a good story or a profound poem.”

Counterfactuals — explanations about what could or could not be caused to happen in the physical universe, as distinct from the standard scientific theories about what is bound to happen based on what has happened in the past — are one such thrilling mode of rotating in the palm of the mind the unsolved mysteries of nature in order to examine them from revelatory new perspectives, perspectives blind-spotted by our present assumptions. Counterfactuals are the science of otherwise — the physics counterpart to Jane Kenyon’s excellent poem — shimmering with new ways of understanding everything from information to time to free will.

Double rainbow from Les phénomènes de la physique, 1868. Available as a print and face mask.

In the foreword, Marletto’s collaborator David Deutsch observes that the rate of scientific discovery over the past few centuries has been increasing exponentially, but the discovery of new fundamental truths about nature has stalled and an indolence about attempting new modes of explanation has set in. He writes:

There has never been a time when there have been more blatant contradictions, gaps, and unresolved vagueness in our deepest understanding of nature, or more exciting prospects to explore them. Sometimes this will require us to adopt radically different modes of explanation.

Illustrating the validity of counterfactuals as a mode of understanding, he gives the example of a computer, which could record and process nothing new if every change to the contents of its memory were pre-set in the factory — a computer “can hold information only if its state could have been otherwise.”

Marletto places at the heart of her case for counterfactuals the notion of resilience — not resilience in the creaturely sense, to which we aspire and which trees so perfectly embody, but a deeper kind of resilience, existing on the fundamental level of information yet giving rise to all the physical reality that makes the creaturely kind possible — resilience as the dazzling, rare feature of our universe, even within the no-design fundamental laws of which a system can continue existing in an ever-changing environment. With an eye to genes — those recipes for keeping a species in existence, peppered with mutation — she writes:

What distinguishes helpful changes in the recipe from unhelpful ones? It is a particular kind of information: information that is capable of keeping itself instantiated in physical systems. It is resilient information.

[…]

“Knowledge” merely denotes a particular kind of information, which has the capacity to perpetuate itself and stay embodied in physical systems — in this case by encoding some facts about the environment… Knowledge is the key to resilience… In fact, knowledge is the most resilient stuff that can exist in our universe.

Art by Deborah Marcero from The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble by Isabelle Marinov.

Leaning on Karl Popper’s famous pillar of sensemaking — “Knowledge consists in the search for truth… It is not the search for certainty.” — she adds:

There are no absolute sources of certain truth: any good solution to a problem may also contain some errors. This principle is based on fallibilism, a pillar of Popper’s explanation of rational thinking. Fallibilism makes progress feasible because it allows for further criticism to occur in the future, even when at present we seem to be content with whatever solution we have found. It leaves space for creating ever-improving theories, stories, works of art, and music; it also tells us that errors are extremely interesting things to look for. Whenever we try to make progress, we should hope to find more of them, as fast as possible.

She turns to the two ways in which nature and human nature generate new knowledge, the generative process we call creativity — “by conjecture and criticism, in the mind; by variation and natural selection, in the wild” — and considers the crucial difference between the two:

Natural selection, unlike conjecture and criticism, cannot perform jumps: each of the recipes that leads to a new resilient recipe must itself be resilient — i.e., it must code for a successful variant of a trait of the particular animal in question that permits the animal’s survival for long enough to allow replication of that recipe, via reproduction. But there may be viable, resilient recipes coding for useful traits that can never be realised because they would require a sequence of nonresilient recipes to be realised first, which is impossible, as those recipes produce animals that cannot survive and cannot pass on their genes.

The thinking process, in contrast, can perform jumps… The sequence of ideas leading to a good idea need not consist entirely of good, viable ideas. Nonetheless, knowledge creation in the mind, too, can enter stagnation and stop progressing. We must be wary of not entering such states both as individuals and as societies. Particularly detrimental to knowledge creation are the immutable limitations imposed by dogmas, as they restrain the ability to conjecture and criticise.

Woven into Marletto’s case for counterfactuals is her love letter to science and the art of explanation:

Physics is a dazzling firework display; it is profound, beautiful, and illuminating; a source of never-ending delight. Physics is about solving problems in our understanding of reality by formulating explanations that fill gaps in our previous understanding. The point of physics is not the particular calculation about the fall of an apple. It is the explanation behind it, which unifies all motions—that of the apple with that of a planet in the solar system, and beyond. The dazzling stuff consists of explanations: for they surprise us by revealing things that were previously unknown and very distant from our intuition, with the aim of solving a particular problem.

[…]

The appearance of the dark sky at night… can be explained in terms of unexpected underlying phenomena involving things like photons, the remarkable fact that the universe is expanding, and so on. None of those elements is apparent in the sky itself, but they are all part of the explanation for why it looks as it does, in terms of what is really out there. Explanations are accounts of what is seen in terms of mostly unseen elements.

“Spectra of various light sources, solar, stellar, metallic, gaseous, electric” from Les phénomènes de la physique by Amédée Guillemin, 1882. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)

“What we see, we see / and seeing is changing,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her ode to astrophysics. It is changing, however, only when we change the way we look, change our tools for looking, be they physical instruments — the microscope and the telescope, revealing unseen layers of reality — or the instrument of the mind, which devises the microscope and the telescope and the theory. I hear Thoreau bellowing his admonition down the hallway of time as he puzzled over what it takes to see reality unblinded by our preconceptions: “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.” Marletto writes:

The traditional conception of physics cannot possibly capture counterfactual properties, because it insists on expressing everything in terms of predictions about what happens in the universe given the initial conditions and the laws of motion only — in terms of trajectories of apples or electrons, forgetting the other levels of explanation. But these other levels of explanation are essential sometimes to grasp the whole of physical reality.

Drawing on the example of Neptune and the neutrino — both discovered not by direct observation of the previously unseen planet or particle but by observing curious contradictions in the surrounding system and deducing from them that something in the set of assumptions about what the system is and how it works must be revised. She writes:

As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give.

[…]

Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.

In one of the book’s many charming touches defying the segregation of science from its sensemaking twin — art — she gives an exquisite example of counterfactuals at work in one of humanity’s most abiding masterworks of storytelling and sensemaking: the Ancient Greek myth of Theseus (which also inspired the greatest thought experiment about the nature of the self and what makes you you).

Theseus and the Minotaur by Alice and Martin Provensen from their lovely 1956 illustrations for the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Marletto writes:

Theseus, son of Aegeus, king of Athens, went to Crete to kill the Minotaur. Theseus made an agreement with his aged father that if he defeated the Minotaur, on their return his crew would raise white sails on the ship; if he perished, they would raise black sails. So off went Theseus, and he defeated the Minotaur. But on his way back, distracted by all sorts of things (including, possibly, the presence of his fiancée, Ariadne, on the ship!), he forgot to tell the crew about the sails. The crew left the black sails on, and Aegeus, who from the highest tower of Athens could see the ship approaching, thought his son was dead. So he threw himself into the sea and drowned. This tragic story is why the sea is now called the Aegean.

Now suppose we asked our master storyteller to tell that story with the constraint that he can formulate statements only about what happens — that is, he must report the full story without ever referring to counterfactual properties. In particular, he cannot refer to properties that have to do with what could or could not be done to physical systems.

This task turns out to be impossible: for the story to make sense, and to convey fully its meaning, two attributes of the ship are essential: one, that it can be used to send a signal, by assuming one of two states — white sail showing or black sail showing; the other, that the state of having black or white sails can be copied onto other physical systems — such as Aegeus’s eyes and brain. The copiability property tells us that the flag contains information.

Without these two counterfactual properties, the myth would be robbed of sense and could not possibly produce in the mind of the reader the tragic feeling, the shift in understanding, that gives rise to its millennia-wide moral. The myth of Theseus — a sensical story of tangible things like continents and oceans, a story of profoundly human things like ships and sons — helps grasp the analogous counterfactuals at work in more abstract things. A bit — that unit of information powering our digital universe — may seem like an abstract thing, but it is essentially a Thesian ship’s sail: there are the two binary states that can switch from one to the other, there is the ability to be copied. Any system endowed with these two counterfactual properties is an information medium — a conduit of knowledge.
Marletto reflects:

Adopting counterfactuals brings entities that look superficially like immaterial abstractions into the domain of physics. Information and knowledge, for example, have been traditionally considered as mere abstractions — as things that do not belong to the physical world. However, by considering the counterfactual properties of physical systems that enable information and knowledge, one refutes this idea: because whether or not a physical system has those properties is set precisely by the laws of physics.

Art from Thomas Wright’s An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)

The ultimate promise of counterfactuals as portals to possibility comes most vibrantly abloom in one of the several short genre-bending vignettes Marletto composes to illustrate the scientific concepts — a story-upon-story set in the crucible of materialism, Ancient Greece. She imagines the childhood of the legendary conqueror Alexander the Great — who by his death at thirty-two would have created one of the vastest empires in the history of our species — and his time as an uncommonly broad-minded pupil of Aristotle: a boy asking the vastest unasked questions, hungry to fathom his own mind. In one of their conversations, Alexander wonders what it is in him that endows him with the capacity for wonder — with the ability to savor poetry and philosophy and the abstract art of mathematics — if he is made of the same material as concrete things like rocks and grass. Marletto’s Aristotle answers:

What’s clear is that the mind has characteristic properties that make it capable of relating to things that are abstract. I suspect that it obeys the same laws as rocks and grass, though we have yet to find these laws and understand how to apply them to the mind.

Complement The Science of Can and Can’t with physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic meditation on what makes our improbable lives worth living between the bookends of possibility, then revisit the story of Alan Turing, the world’s first digital music, and the poetry of the possible.

BP

Václav Havel on How to Hold Your Failure

By Maria Popova

Václav Havel on How to Hold Your Failure

Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your choices, your ideal self and your real self. It is without redemption, such failure. But it need not be without reward. Admitting failure, especially moral failure, is hard enough — to others, where the temptation to displace blame and make excuses seduces most, but most of all to oneself. Accepting it is even harder — but it is on the other side of acceptance that the true reward of failure is to be found.

That is what the great Czech playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) explores in an extraordinary feat of soul-searching and reckoning with the human condition, found in his Letters to Olga (public library), one of the most moving books I have ever read — the living record of his imprisonment after being found guilty on charges of “subversion” for his plays criticizing the communist regime and his human rights work defending the unjustly persecuted.

Václav Havel

In the summer of his forty-sixth year, Havel recounts a moment of moral failure that shaped the course of his life:

Dear Olga,

Five years ago something happened tome that in many regards had a key significance in my subsequent life. It began rather inconspicuously: I was in detention for the firs time and one evening, after interrogation, I wrote out a request to the Public Prosecutor for my release. Prisoners in detention are always writing such requests, and I too treated it as something routine and unimportant, more in the nature of mental hygiene: I knew, of course, that my eventual release or nonrelease would be decided by factors having nothing to do with whether I wrote the appropriate request or not. Still, the interrogations weren’t going anywhere and it seemed proper to use the opportunity to let myself be heard. I wrote my request in a way that at the time seemed extremely tactical and cunning: while saying nothing I did not believe or that wasn’t true, I simply “overlooked” the fact that truth lies not only in what is said, but also in who says it, and to whom, why, how and under what circumstances it is expressed. Thanks to this minor “oversight” (more precisely, this minor self-deception) what I said came dangerously close — by chance, as it were — to what the authorities wanted to hear. What was particularly absurd was the fact that my motive — at least my conscious and admitted motive — was not the hope that it would produce results, but merely a kind of professionally intellectualistic and somewhat perverse delight in my won — or so I thought — “honorable cleverness.” (I should add, to complete the picture, that when I read it some years later, the honor in that cleverness made my hair stand on end.) I sent the request off the following day and because no one responded to it and my detention was prolonged again, I assumed it had ended up where such requests usually end up, and I more or less forgot about it.

Havel was shocked to be told one day that he was most likely going to be released and “political use” would be made of his petition. He recounts:

Of course I knew right away what that meant: (1) that with appropriate “recasting,” “additions” and widespread publicity, the impression would be created that I had not held out, that I had given in to pressure and backed down from my positions, opinions and all my previous work; in short, that I had betrayed my cause, all for a trivial reason — to get myself out of jail; (2) no denial or correction on my part would alter that impression because I had undeniably written something that “met them halfway” and anything I could add would, quite rightly, seem like an attempt to worm my way out of it; (3) that the approaching catastrophe was unavoidable; (4) that the blot it would leave me on and everything I had taken part in would haunt me for years to come, that it would cause me measureless inner suffering, and that I would probably try to erase it with several years in prison (which in fact happened), but that not even that would rid me entirely of the stigma; (5) that I had no one but myself to blame: I was neither forced to do it, nor offered a bribe; I was not, in fact, in a dilemma and it was only because I’d unforgivably let down my moral guard that I’d given the other side — voluntarily and quite pointlessly — a weapon that amounted to a heaven-sent gift.

One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne

The haunting price of self-knowledge is that you always know, or some part of you always knows, exactly what your own moral failures would cost you. All Havel feared would happen is exactly what happened:

I came out of prison discredited, to confront a world that seemed to me one enormous, supremely justified rebuke. No one knows what I went through in that darkest period of my life… weeks, months, years in fact, of silent desperation, self-castigation, shame, inner humiliation, reproach and uncomprehending questioning. For a while I escaped from a world I felt too embarrassed to face into gloomy isolation, taking masochistic delight in endless orgies of self-blame. And then for a while I fled this inner hell into frantic activity through which I tried to drown out my anguish and at the same time, to “rehabilitate” myself somehow.

Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird

His only relative reprieve came when he was thrown into prison again. But it took him years to fully accept his moral failure and wrest from it something larger, something the dream of blamelessness and the performance of perfection could ever secure for the life of the soul. In a testament to the indivisible yin-yang of fortune and misfortune illustrated by the ancient parable of the Chinese farmer, he writes:

I’ve only now begun fully to realize that the experience wasn’t just — from my point of view, at least — an comprehensible lapse that caused me a lot of pointless suffering; it had a deeply positive and purgative significance, for which I ought to thank my fate instead of cursing it. It thrust me into a drastic but, for that very reason, crucial confrontation with myself; it shook, as it were, my entire “I,” shook out of it a deeper insight into itself, a more serious acceptance and understanding of my situation… my horizons, and led me, ultimately, to a new and more coherent consideration of the problem of human responsibility.

[…]

It is not hard to stand behind one’s successes. But to accept responsibility for one’s failures, to accept them unreservedly as failures that are truly one’s own, that cannot be shifted somewhere else or onto something else, and actively to accept — without regard for any worldly interests, no matter how well disguised, or for well-meant advice — the price that has to be paid for it: that is devilishly hard! But only thence does the road lead — as my experience, I hope, has persuaded me — to the renewal of sovereignty over my own affairs, to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning. And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called true “peace of mind,” to that highest delight, to genuine meaningfulness, to that “joy of Being.” If one manages to achieve that, then all one’s worldly privations cease to be privations, and become what Christians call grace.

In the years he spent in prison, Havel learned what it takes to turn suffering into strength and discovered the deepest meaning of hope. Upon his release, he threw himself with redoubled devotion into his political work. Not even a decade into his freedom, the Federal Assembly unanimously elected him president — the last president — of Czechoslovakia, after the dissolution of which a free people elected him the first president of the Czech Republic. Many survivors of communist dictatorships (myself included) lament that he was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the writing he left behind in his Letters to Olga is an eternal triumph of peacekeeping for the war within, the war we each wage against ourselves and in which there are no victors unless we arrive at the kind of peace of mind Havel found on the other side of facing, truly facing, his failure.

BP

The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree

By Maria Popova

The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree

“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees, “no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

But this century-old classic, part meditation and part manifesto, is far from Hesse’s only contribution to the reliquary of our species’ tender kinship with trees — those “slim sentinels” watching over our existence, recalibrating our sense of time, fomenting our richest metaphors and our finest poems, speaking deeply to every deep-thinking, deep-feeling person and enchanting every noticer (which is the other word for artist). Trees strew Hesse’s novels and essays, his letters and diaries, his poems and paintings — all that survives of a life so clearly and mirthfully animated by them, from his Black Forest childhood to the Swiss mountain village of his old age.

Hermann Hesse

After the heroism of editing the first-ever complete edition of Hesse’s writings writings, scholar Volker Michels has culled the finest sylvan musings from this immense body of work and curated thirty of Hesse’s own drawings to illustrate them in the slender gem of a book Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings (public library).

In a piece penned in the spring of 1905 — the year Hesse formulated his timeless prescription for living with presence — Hesse recounts a visit to a long narrow park in the city, full of sunny lawns and prim flower beds. Standing apart from the copse of young fir trees, apart from the “stately elm, maple, and plane trees,” he notices two trees “rising in the warm and cheerful freedom of the grass, conspicuous and alone” — a weeping willow and a “mighty copper,” both of which he serenades with the full force of his luscious prose. He writes of the willow:

The [willow’s] long delicate silky tired branches hung so dense and deep all around that being inside them was to be in a tent or temple, where despite the eternal shade and twilight a muted constant warmth brooded.

[…]

From a distance [the copper] looked dark brown, almost black. But when you got closer, or stood under it and looked up, all the leaves on the outer branches, penetrated by the sunlight, burned with a low warm purple fire shining with a solemnly subdued glow like a church’s stained-glass windows.

Hermann Hesse, Aquarelle no. 319, 1936.

It is through this portal of beauty that Hesse enters a realm of elemental truth that would take science two more human generations to catch up to. Nearly a century before Canadian forester Suzanne Simard’s epoch-making discovery of how trees communicate demonstrated the ecological reality beneath the poetic truth of Hesse’s existential reckoning, he considers our ambivalent relationship with nature — its punitive history and its possible future — through the lens of the urban park:

At one time, the regularly laid out pleasure garden had been a rigorous work of art. But a time came when people grew tired of arduous waiting and tending and pruning, and no one cared about laboriously planted grounds, and the trees were left to fend for themselves. They had struck up friendships with one another, they had forgotten their artificially isolated roles, they had remembered in their crisis their old forest homeland, leaned on one another, flung their arms around one another for support. They had covered the paths straight as arrows with thick foliage and drawn those paths to themselves, with their long, grasping roots, transforming them into nourishing forest floor; their crowns had clasped one another and grown tightly intertwined; and they saw an eagerly upward-striving population of new trees grow under their protection, filling the emptiness with smoother trunks and lighter-colored leaves, conquering the fallow soil, making the earth black and soft and rich with their shade and fallen leaves, so that mosses and grass could now thrive more easily too, and little shrubs.

Hermann Hesse, Grotto in the Forest, 1924.

Long before the modern concept of rewilding, he adds:

[Now] the people whose grandfathers had planted the plane trees in ramrod-straight lines, and pruned and shaped them with judgment and discretion, now visited those trees with their own children and were happy that the long period of desolation had turned the allées into a forest, where sun and wind could linger and birds could sing and people could indulge in their thoughts and dreams and desires.

To be human is to see in the rest of nature not what it is but what we are. If we are lucky enough, if we are wakeful enough, we might see both — but never only reality unselved. Because we are the seeing, we are also the seen — this is the price of consciousness. In another piece penned in another spring nearly half a century and a Nobel Prize later, in the winter of his life, Hesse sees in trees an analogue for his own experience of the final life-stage, looks to them for a model of the stubborn dignity he yearns for — we all yearn for — in facing death.

Hermann Hesse, Early Spring, 1925.

He describes a beech sapling that had somehow planted itself in the thorny hedge bordering his garden some years earlier — at first “a little shrub from a seed flown over from the woods,” intruding on his ideas about garden design, now a thriving young tree that brings him immense delight — delight now bittersweet as he realizes that the “old mighty beech” from which the seed most likely flew, his most beloved tree in the nearby forest, had been cut down.Heartache drips from his words — a heartache Thoreau too knew, and I have known, in seeing a beloved tree cut down — as he reflects on the fate of the mother-tree: “Massive segments of its trunk, sawn apart, still lie there heavy and oversized like rubble from an ancient column.”

And yet the loss only makes him love the little tree more.

An epoch before we understood the poetic science of why leaves change color and fall — itself a metaphor for how every loss reveals what we are made of — Hesse writes:

It always delighted and impressed me how stubbornly my little beech held on to its leaves. When everything else was long since bare, it still stood clad in its withered leaves — through December, January, February; storms tore at it, snow fell on it and dripped off again, and the dry leaves, at first dark brown, grew ever paler, thinner, silkier, but still the tree would not let them go, they were needed to shield the young buds. Then at some point or another every spring — and every time it was later than you expected — the tree would one day have changed. It would have lost its old foliage and instead put out tender new buds dabbed with moisture. This time, I was witness to the transformation. It was an afternoon hour around mid-April, soon after the rain had made the landscape fresh and green; I had still not heard the cuckoo that year, not seen any daffodils in the meadow. Only a few days earlier I had stood there in a hard north wind, shivering, raising my collar, and watched with amazement as the beech stood indifferent in the wrenching wind, dropping barely a leaf. Tough and brave, hard and stubborn, it kept hold of its old bleached leaves.

And now, today, as I broke pieces of wood by my fire in the gentle calm warm air, I saw it happen: a soft breeze blew up, just a breath really, and the leaves saved for so long simply drifted off, by the hundreds and thousands — noiselessly, easily, willingly, tired from their long perseverance, tired of their stubbornness and fortitude. What had resisted and endured for five or six months now succumbed to a puff of air, a nothing, because the time had come and their furious persistence was no longer needed. Away they flew and fluttered, smiling, without a struggle, ready. The tiny wind was much too weak to carry the little leaves far no matter how light and thin they were, so they drizzled down like a light rain and covered the path and the grass at the foot of the little tree, which was now showing a few buds already broken open and green.

Hermann Hesse, Easter Monday, 1924.

Intuiting what we now know — that trees are Earth’s emissaries of immortality, and that their wintering is our blueprint of resilience — he sees in the little tree the same lens on the meaning of life that Rachel Carson saw in the ocean, and adds:

What had this surprising and touching performance revealed to me? Was it death: the easy, willingly undergone death of the winter leaves? Was it life: the urgently striving, celebratory youth of the buds making space for themselves with a suddenly roused will? Was the performance sad or cheering? Was it a sign that I, an old man, should let myself flutter and fall as well, a warning that I might be taking up space needed by the younger and stronger? Or was it a call to hold on, like the beech leaves — to stay on my feet and brace myself and defend myself as tenaciously and as long as I could, because then, at the right moment, my farewell would be easy, serene, and joyful? No, like everything we see it was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing, was a call to nothing; or, rather, it meant everything — it meant the mystery of existence and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning, a gift and a discovery for anyone who saw it, like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne. These names and these interpretations were not part of the experience, they came later: the experience itself was nothing but appearance, miracle, mystery, as beautiful as it was serious, as fair and propitious as it was unrelenting and merciless.

And then he realizes that he is only rediscovering a truth he had discovered long ago, in one the poems he penned in the summer of life:

FLOWERING BRANCH

Constantly this way and that
The flowering branch flails in the wind,
Constantly up and down
My heart flails like a child
Between bright days and dark,
Between wanting and renouncing.
Until the flowers have blown away
And the branch is covered in fruit;
Until the heart, sated with childhood,
Has its rest
And confesses: it was full of pleasure, not for nothing,
This restless game of life.

Hermann Hesse, Flowers After a Storm, 1934.

Complement the cover-to-cover delight that is Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings with some defiantly delightful photographs of women in trees across Hesse’s homeland in the final years of his life, his compatriot Paul Klee on how an artist is like a tree, their no less visionary yet forgotten American contemporary Anna Botsford Comstock on winter trees as a portal to aliveness, and the Harlem Renaissance prodigy Helene Johnson’s poem “Trees at Night” read by Rebecca Solnit, then revisit Hesse on the wisdom of the inner voice, solitude and the courage to be yourself, and the timeless magic of the book in the age of technology.

BP

George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret

By Maria Popova

George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret

The price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening, the losses from lacerating, the galaxies from drifting apart.

Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the living flesh of is, sharp with sorrow, savage with self-blame — may be the supreme suffering of which we are capable. It poisons the entire system of being, for it feeds on the substance we are made of — time, entropic and irretrievable. It tugs at our yearning for, in James Baldwin’s perfect words, “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error” and stings with the reminder that eventually “one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”

Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird

There is, therefore, no mightier spell against unhappiness than moving through the present in a way that preempts regret in the future — with integrity, with humility, with wholeheartedness.

That is what George Saunders reckons with in some lovely passages from his prophetic 2007 essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (public library).

In one of those tangents that give the essay form its fractal splendor, he writes:

You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away… That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?

[…]

At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

In a sentiment he would later deepen in his moving 2013 Syracuse commencement address, he adds:

So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?

My mind, my limited mind.

The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.

In a wonderful aside from another essay, he offers what may be the best recipe for breaking out of the mind’s recursive and limiting stories:

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

Couple with artist Maira Kalman’s illustrated meditation on how to find joy on the other side of remorse and Ellen Bass’s superb poem “How to Apologize,” then revisit George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty.

BP

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