The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

By Maria Popova

A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gravity, could have never compacted those first few atoms into a common center to bud the first star, could have never bloomed with billions of them. But here we are, circling a middling star in a modest solar system on a rocky planet replete with mountains and music, lichen and love, and on it the mirror the universe invented to contemplate itself: this shimmering consciousness.

It can be hard to bear, the weight of wonder, hard to hold all this bright improbability, hard to do laundry and email while reckoning with how the cosmos forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb.

Luckily, a species of mind has evolved to be the weight-bearer of wonder: the poet.

In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:

P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].

I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”

Phases of Venus and Saturn by Maria Clara Eimmart, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)

What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:

How can any system
observe itself?

And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.

Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, begun in 1869 and completed in 1876 to teach women astronomy when they were barred from higher education in science. (Available as a print.)

Long available only as a lucky find in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (public library) is now resurrected under Marginalian Editions. To celebrate its second life, I asked Diane, now approaching eighty, what has most surprised her about the universe, and the microcosm of the universe that is this life, since she wrote those dazzling poems in her twenties — a span of time in which we sequenced the human genome, invented the Internet, discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson and the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star, and then ten thousand more as the horizon of the observable universe spilled 93 billion light-years away from the awed eye that took 500 million years to go from trilobite to telescope.

Diane’s answer is nothing less than a prose poem:

Once, I thought the universe’s greatest gift was scale — those vaulting immensities of gas and dust, planets flaring like thoughts inside a skull of stars. But time, that sly astronomer, has shown me something subtler: how much of the same splendor hums within us and all of nature. The pulse of a leaf opening to sun, the quiet veer of a child’s attention, my own heartbeat a small percussion in ancient starlight — all are galaxies folded inward, universes in miniature.

What surprises me now is not just the infinite, but the intimate. That carbon dust became breath and laughter. That our cells remember ancient oceans. That every discovery, no matter how remote, begins with the same feral impulse: our roving curiosity reaching outward, hoping to belong to a larger story of life seeding itself throughout the universe. The Cosmos expands and so does our vertiginous curiosity, an old companion who still finds fresh ways to excite, comfort, teach, and inspire.

1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In the author’s note to our new edition, Diane reflects on what had animated her when she wrote these eternal poems a lifetime ago:

I hoped that when readers closed the book they would feel a blend of rapture and responsibility — the sense that our little lives and the vast lives of other worlds are made of the same dust, bound by the same laws, and therefore implicated in one another’s fate. I hoped for a lingering awareness that the “cosmic” is not elsewhere: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the mold on bread, the storms on Jupiter, and the quiet in deep space are all chapters of a single ancestral story, and once you feel that kinship it becomes harder to treat other lives or other landscapes as expendable scenery.

I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.

BP

The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison

By Maria Popova

The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison

The great paradox of personhood is that the sum is simpler than its parts. We move through the world as a totality, fragmentary but indivisible, clothed in a costume of personality beneath which roil parts perpetually fighting for power, perpetually yearning for harmony. The person making the choices, the person bearing their consequences, and the person taking responsibility for them are rarely the same person. There is no pain like the pain of watching oneself overtaken by one’s most shameful parts — the chaotic, the compulsive, the ungenerous, the needy, governed by fear and lack, splattering confusion and distress over anyone who comes near.

To live with consciousness is to own all the parts but not be owned by any of them, to choose with clarity and composure which ones to act from. To love fully — oneself, or another — is to accept all the parts and cherish the totality.

D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) captures this with poetic precision in his personal credo, composed in response to the thirteen qualities Benjamin Franklin identified as the wisest parts of personhood — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.

D.H. Lawrence

“The soul has many motions, many gods come and go,” Franklin had observed in recognition of our composite nature. “Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest.” Lawrence writes in response:

Here’s my creed, against Benjamin’s. This is what I believe:

“That I am I.”
“That my soul is a dark forest.”
“That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.”
“That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.”
“That I must have the courage to let them come and go.”
“That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.”

There is my creed.

Art by the 16th-century Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

It is not easy living with those constant visitations from conflicting gods, each with a different dictate, impelling you toward a different path. What makes it all bearable is seeing this constellation of parts as a part of something greater still — a vast and coherent universe governed by immutable laws and immense forces that vanquish the grandiose smallness of the self and its warring fragments, that render life too great and total a miracle to be met with anything but a resounding “yes yes — please.”

Lawrence channels this perspectival consolation in his 1930 book Apocalypse (public library) — a reflection on The Book of Revelation, composed as he lay dying from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, not yet midway through his forties.

Observing that what we most long for is our “living unison,” he writes:

The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the conciliation of our inner conflicts and Scottish philosopher John Macmurray on the key to wholeness, then revisit Lawrence on the strength of sensitivity and the key to fully living.

BP

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

By Maria Popova

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”

Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same life-stage in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year and later published in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (public library).

bertrandrussell3
Bertrand Russell

Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:

The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Portraits from Memory and Other Essays is an uncommonly potent packet of wisdom in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with Nobel laureate André Gide on how happiness increases with age, Ursula K. Le Guin on aging and what beauty really means, and Grace Paley on the art of growing older — the loveliest thing I’ve ever read on the subject — then revisit Russell on critical thinking, power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation.

BP

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

By Maria Popova

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

UPDATE: Tim has courageously shared the precipitate of his lifelong depression.

Most people know Tim Ferriss as the amicable, quick-witted, high-energy writer, adventurer, and interviewer, who has devoted his life to optimizing human performance across the full spectrum of physical and mental health. But few know that, in addition to nearly dying at birth and growing up with no material luxury, Tim survived a period of suicidal depression that nearly claimed his life — the kind of suffocating grimness which William Styron so unforgettably described.

Tim discusses that dark episode for the first time in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (public library) — his compendium of learnings from more than two hundred interviews with entrepreneurs, artists, writers, scientists, and other titans of achievement, including philosopher Alain de Botton, musician Amanda Palmer, mindfulness and meditation teacher Tara Brach, neuroscientist Sam Harris, writer Malcolm Gladwell, social scientist Brené Brown, and writer and former firefighter Caroline Paul. In a chapter dedicated to the darkest period of his life, he shares the most any of us ever can: his subjective experience and his personal coping strategies, in the hope that they might help others who are also struggling.

Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Benjamin Sklar)
Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Benjamin Sklar)

Reflecting on why he kept his suicidal depression a secret for many years, Tim distinguishes between two kinds of secrets — those we keep because we fear fleeting mortification, like accounts of embarrassing things we’ve done in sub-optimal moments, and dark secrets that paralyze us with deep shame, “the shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.”

Noting that a number of his closest friends in high school and college had killed themselves — and, lest we forget, there is perilous social contagion in suicide — Tim outlines the downward spiral which he himself barely escaped. He writes:

In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality.

Tim goes on to trace his downward spiral, precipitated by his failing senior thesis at Princeton — a pinnacle of education for which he had labored to transcend his humble beginnings since childhood. As it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to process the hundreds of pages of original Japanese research, in Japanese, in order to complete his ambitious East Asian Studies thesis in time, Tim realized that he wouldn’t graduate with his class — something his hostile thesis advisor made abundantly and abrasively clear. Feeling betrayed by the system he had worked so hard for, he spiraled into dejection.

Just then, his longtime girlfriend severed the relationship on account of his “neediness,” which she felt was compromising her varsity season. He rented a lonesome apartment off campus to continue working on his thesis as he watched his friends gleefully graduate. Trapped in isolation that only amplified his despair, he began to feel like a useless burden on the world and ceased to see a reason for being.

One day, wandering aimlessly through the bookstore, he chanced upon a book on suicide.

Tim picks up the story:

It’s important to mention that, by this point, I was past deciding. The decision was obvious to me. I’d somehow failed, painted myself into this ridiculous corner, wasted a fortune on a school that didn’t care about me, so what would be the point of doing otherwise? To repeat these types of mistakes forever? To be a hopeless burden to myself and my family and friends? … The world was better off… What would I ever contribute? Nothing. So the decision was made, and I was in full-on planning mode.

Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Martin Schoeller)
Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Martin Schoeller)

But despite his meticulous planning of the act, something thus far outside his scope of considerations occurred: He received an unexpected phone call from his mother, precipitated by a fortuitous mishap. He had ordered the suicide book from the Princeton library, but had forgotten that the address on file was still his parents’ home, which meant that as soon as the book became available, his parents received a postcard from the library announcing that the suicide book was available for pickup. His mother, alarmed, immediately called him. Tim transports us to what it was like to have that seemingly serendipitous conversation and considers its life-saving effect:

I am snapped out of my own delusion by a one-in-a-million accident. It was only then that I realize something: My death wouldn’t just be about me. It would completely destroy the lives of those I cared about most. I imagine my mom, who had no part in creating my thesis mess, suffering until her dying day, blaming herself.

Motivated by this momentary glimpse of the circle of love beyond his locus of personal agony, Tim decided to take a few months to restore his physical and mental health — perhaps the seedbed of his lifelong emphasis on the indivisibility of the two. In a sentiment that calls to mind Aldous Huxley’s insistence on mind-body integration — Tim is, after all, Huxley’s contemporary counterpart in certain ways — he recounts the vitalizing effect of this embodied approach to his sanity:

Months later, after focusing on my body instead of sitting around trapped in my head, things are much clearer. Everything seems more manageable. The “hopeless” situation seems like shitty luck but nothing permanent.

From this newfound place of perspective, Tim was able to find greater stability as he faced life’s fleeting perturbations. In a testament to Henry Miller’s notion that “on how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” he returned to Princeton and was able to withstand his advisor’s merciless takedown of the thesis on which he had worked so hard. In an aside that further demonstrates just how mutable even our bitterest resolves are, Tim notes that the thesis takedown made him vow to never write another word again; this 700-page tome is his fourth book.

With a sensitive and self-aware eye to the disconnect between how all-consuming such setbacks can seem to the depressed person and how trivial to someone judging from the outside, he writes:

Some of you might also be thinking “That’s it?! A Princeton student was at risk of getting a bad grade? Boo-fuckin’-hoo, man. Give me a break…” But … that’s the entire point. It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to think that your entire life hinges on one thing you’ll barely remember 5 or 10 years later. That seemingly all-important thing could be a bad grade, getting into college, a relationship, a divorce, getting fired, or a bunch of hecklers on the Internet.

Likening suicide to “wearing a suicide bomber’s vest of explosives and walking into a crowd of innocents,” Tim considers the far-reaching ripples of grief and sorrow which the act sets into motion:

Killing yourself can spiritually kill other people. Your death is not perfectly isolated. It can destroy a lot, whether your family (who will blame themselves), other loved ones, or simply the law enforcement officers or coroners who have to haul your death mask-wearing carcass out of an apartment or the woods. The guaranteed outcome of suicide is NOT things improving for you (or going blank), but creating a catastrophe for others…

A friend once told me that killing yourself is like taking your pain, multiplying it by 10, and giving it to the ones who love you. I agree with this, but there’s more to it. Beyond any loved ones, you could include neighbors, innocent bystanders exposed to your death, and people — often kids — who commit “copycat suicides” when they read about your demise. This is the reality, not the cure-all fantasy, of suicide.

Drawing on his own experience, Tim offers — only after covering the basic necessity of crisis hotlines and other resources for professional help — an arsenal of tools and tricks that he uses for “keeping the darkness at arm’s length” to this day. One strategy he suggests for those enduring intolerable psychic pain is making a “non-suicide vow” with a friend. He writes:

As silly as it might sound, it’s sometimes easier to focus on keeping your word, and avoiding hurting someone, than preserving your own life. And that’s totally okay. Use what works first, and you can fix the rest later. If you need to disguise a vow out of embarrassment … make it a “mutual non-self-hurt” vow with a friend who beats himself or herself up.

Make it about them as much as you. If you don’t care about yourself, make it about other people.

Another strategy revisits the importance of mind-body integration:

Go to the gym and move for at least 30 minutes. For me, this is 80% of the battle.

But his most powerful technique has to do not with the self but with other selves — or, rather, with mooring the self to the existence of goodness by modeling and extending it to others:

If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick. Focus on others instead of yourself. Buy coffee for the person behind you in line (I do this a lot), compliment a stranger, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help a classroom on DonorsChoose.org, buy a round of drinks for the line cooks and servers at your favorite restaurant, etc. The little things have a big emotional payback, and guess what? Chances are, at least one person you make smile is on the front lines with you, quietly battling something nearly identical.

In a passage that calls to mind Rilke’s abiding wisdom on how winter bolsters the tenacity of the human spirit, Tim concludes:

My “perfect storm” was nothing permanent. But, of course, it’s far from the last storm I’ll face. There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can warm yourself as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires — the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms you build — help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the lushest green of life (and you do), the gray is part of the natural cycle.

toolsoftitans_timferriss1

In the remainder of the voluminous Tools of Titans, Tim goes on to offer many more fire-building tools for resilience, productivity, happiness, and self-transcendence borrowed from such varied masters of achievement as filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, music renegade Derek Sivers, comedian Margaret Cho, investor Chris Sacca, tech legend Kevin Kelly, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, actor B.J. Novak, and dozens more. Complement this particular portion with Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul and Galway Kinnell’s beautiful poem “Wait,” written for a friend contemplating suicide.

Tim discusses his own story, including his struggle with depression and his life-tested strategies for overcoming fear, with unprecedented candor in this revelatory Design Matters interview by Debbie Millman:

It’s very hard to achieve goals if you have the emergency brake on, and the emergency brake is fear.

BP

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