The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

By Maria Popova

This essay was originally published as the cover story in the Summer 2025 issue of Orion Magazine.

“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

An organism, of course, is not a parable or a metaphor. An organism is a cathedral of complexity, both sovereign and interdependent. Although mushrooms have populated our myths and our medicine for millennia, they were only factored into our model of the living world less than a century ago. When Linnaeus devised his landmark classification system, he divided nature into three kingdoms: two living (plants and animals) and one nonliving (minerals). The scientists of his generation gave fungi no special attention, brushing them under the conceptual carpet of plants. Darwin ignored them altogether, even though we now know that fungi are the fulcrum by which evolution lifted life out of the ocean and onto the land — they greened the earth, helping aquatic plants adapt to terrestrial life by anchoring their primitive roots, not yet capable of acquiring nutrients on their own, in a mycorrhizal substrate of symbiosis.

Perhaps, then, it is not accidental that a marine biologist — Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland entered the world — proposed Protista as a new kingdom of life for primitive life-forms that are neither plants nor animals; after some hesitation, he moved fungi into it. But it would be another century before, just after my mother was born, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker gave fungi their own kingdom of life.

Among the hundreds of thousands of species now known, and probably millions not yet named, there are ones that crumble at the lightest touch and ones that can survive the assault of cosmic radiation in outer space. On the western edge of North America thrives a fungal colony older than calculus, older than Jesus, older than the wheel. In the mountains of East Asia blooms a bright blue mushroom that bleeds indigo. A bioluminescent agaric lights up the forests of Brazil and the islands of Japan. Across tropical Taiwan grows a pale blue mushroom whose button is smaller than a millimeter. In the old-growth forests of Oregon dwells an individual fungus spanning eighteen hundred football fields — Earth’s largest living organism.

Without fungi, we would never know Earth’s most beautiful flowers — orchid seeds have no energy reserve of their own and can only obtain their carbon through a fungal symbiont — or Earth’s most alien: white as bone, the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons to alchemize sunlight into sugar for life. Emily Dickinson considered the ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.” A painting of it graced the cover of her posthumously published poems. She was not wrong to think it “almost supernatural,” for it subverts the ordinary laws of nature: rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down so that its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — can entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae, sapping nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

These mycorrhizal relationships permeate every ecosystem, making fungi the enchanted subterranean loom on which the fabric of nature is woven. Perhaps this is why it was so hard for so long to classify them separately from other life-forms. Perhaps we never should have done so. Perhaps it was a mistake to segregate them into a separate kingdom, or to have kingdoms at all, as nonsensical as dividing a planet veined with rivers and spined with mountains into countries bounded by borders that cut across ecosystems with the blade of warring nationalisms. Beneath every battlefield in the history of the world a mycelial wonderland has continued to thrive, continued to turn death into life so that ghost pipes and orchids may rise from where the bodies fell. Fungi made Earth what it is and they will inherit it. They are not a kingdom of life — life is their kingdom.

Almost exactly one year before Charles Dodgson dreamed up Wonderland to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters while boating from Oxford to Godstow, a letter by someone who signed himself Cellarius was printed in a New Zealand newspaper under the heading “Darwin Among the Machines.” It would later be revealed as the work of twenty-seven-year-old English writer Samuel Butler. Epochs before the first modern computer and the golden age of algorithms, before we came to call the confluence of the two “artificial intelligence,” Butler prophesied the birth of a new “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation, which would take on a life of its own alongside the kingdoms of nature. “In these last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race,” he wrote. “We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation… daily giving them greater power… self-acting power.” With an eye to the evolution of consciousness, he asked: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?” More than a century and a half before our modern worries about artificial intelligence, Butler worried that this new kingdom of life would be parasitic upon us. He worried that although the human mind has been “moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years,” the mechanical kingdom evolved in a blink of evolutionary time. “No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward,” he cautioned. “Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”

Perhaps we are on the brink of living Butler’s prophecy because we modeled our machines on the wrong kingdom, modeled their intelligence on our own, only to find that they are as parasitic and predatory as we are, as they parasitize and prey upon us. What if the correct model was always there, hidden beneath our bipedal overconfidence — all this time we have been building and walking and warring over Earth’s original networked intelligence, this planetary übermind transmitting the signal of life via the hypertextual protocols of hyphae, through the mesh topology of mycelium. What if our worship of binary logic is what warped Wonderland? Who would we be if our “artificial” intelligence turned natural, built on the nonbinary logic of symbiosis, restoring the unity of life into a perfect circle with no sides to take?

Art by Ofra Amit from The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

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For more inspiration and illumination at the intersection of nature and culture, science and spirit, the ecological and the existential, give yourself the gift of a lifetime that is a subscription to Orion.

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The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

By Maria Popova

The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now. The astonishing thing is that even though we all have more or less the same perceptual apparatus, you and I can walk the same city block together and perceive entirely different pictures of reality, because what is salient to each of us is singular to each particular consciousness — a function of who we are and what we want, of the sum total of reference points that is our lived experience, beyond the locus of which we cannot reach. (This is what makes the Mary’s Room thought experiment so compelling and unnerving, and why the best we can do to understand each other is not explanation but translation.)

Perception, then, is not a door but a mirror, not an automated computation of raw input data but a creative act that marshals all that we are and reflects us back to ourselves. Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of being alive together is that none of us will ever know what another perceives.

René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

That is what Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) explores with his signature gift for bridging matter and meaning in the title essay of his altogether revelatory posthumous collection The River of Consciousness (public library), fusing his decades of medical practice as a neurologist studying how the brain works with a philosopher’s inquiry into what a mind is and a poet’s gift for rendering what it means to be alive.

Drawing on case studies of patients with peculiar neurological disorders and brain lesions that hurl them into “standstills” of consciousness — states in which time seems to freeze for them even though events and processes continue to unfold within and around them — he considers the temporal dimension of consciousness, most evident in our perception of motion — the change in spatial position over time.

Eadweard Muybridge: Animal Locomotion, Plate 62
Eadweard Muybridge: Running full speed (Animal Locomotion, Plate 62)

Drawing on Francis Crick and Christof Koch’s landmark work on qualia — those wholly subjective and deeply interior experiences of what it is like to be oneself — he writes:

We do not merely calculate movement as a robot might; we perceive it. We perceive motion, just as we perceive color or depth, as a unique qualitative experience that is vital to our visual awareness and consciousness. Something beyond our understanding occurs in the genesis of qualia, the transformation of an objective cerebral computation to a subjective experience. Philosophers argue endlessly over how these transformations occur and whether we will ever be capable of understanding them.

[…]

While the perception of a particular motion (for example) may be represented by neurons firing at a particular rate in the motion centers of the visual cortex, this is only the beginning of an elaborate process. To reach consciousness, this neuronal firing, or some higher representation of it, must cross a certain threshold of intensity and be maintained above it… To do that, this group of neurons must engage other parts of the brain (usually in the frontal lobes) and ally itself with millions of other neurons to form a “coalition.”

Such coalitions… can form and dissolve in a fraction of a second and involve reciprocal connections between the visual cortex and many other areas of the brain. These neural coalitions in different parts of the brain talk to one another in a continuous back-and-forth interaction. A single conscious visual percept may thus entail the parallel and mutually influencing activities of billions of nerve cells.

Finally, the activity of a coalition, or coalition of coalitions, if it is to reach consciousness, must not only cross a threshold of intensity but also be held there for a certain time — roughly a hundred milliseconds. This is the duration of a “perceptual moment.”

And yet it is because something immeasurable happens in those hundred milliseconds that we perceive the world not as it is but as we are.

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

Into the fourth wall he breaks a door to his qualia:

As I write, I am sitting at a café on Seventh Avenue, watching the world go by. My attention and focus dart to and fro: a girl in a red dress goes by, a man walking a funny dog, the sun (at last!) emerging from the clouds. But there are also other sensations that seem to come by themselves: the noise of a car backfiring, the smell of cigarette smoke as an upwind neighbor lights up. These are all events which catch my attention for a moment as they happen. Why, out of a thousand possible perceptions, are these the ones I seize upon? Reflections, memories, associations, lie behind them. For consciousness is always active and selective — charged with feelings and meanings uniquely our own, informing our choices and interfusing our perceptions. So it is not just Seventh Avenue that I see but my Seventh Avenue, marked by my own selfhood and identity.

To know this is to relinquish our habitual delusion of objective perception:

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity?

A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated the “moments of being” that make us who we are, he deepens the question and ventures an answer:

Our passing thoughts, as William James says (in an image that smacks of cowboy life in the 1880s), do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’s words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.” So it is not just perceptual moments, simple physiological moments — though these underlie everything else — but moments of an essentially personal kind that seem to constitute our very being… We consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

Complement with psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on attention as an instrument of love and cognitive philosopher Andy Clarke on the power of expectation in how the mind renders reality, then revisit Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, the healing power of gardens, and the three essential elements of creativity.

BP

Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and the Meaning of Aliveness

By Maria Popova

Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and the Meaning of Aliveness

“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.

Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything

A river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood.

This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? (public library) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive.

Extending an invitation to “imagine water otherwise” — and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise — he writes:

For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.

With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s vivifying notion of a “grammar of animacy,” he adds:

A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.

Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River?

As he travels the world to meet various rivers, he encounters and learns from their various defenders — an Indian teenage runaway from an abusive home turned steward and healer of all life, animated by a sense of equal kinship with millipede and mongoose and banyan tree; a “Chilean-Italian-British biologist-campaigner-filmmaker” covered in tattoos who is a kind of medium of mycology, sensing fungi by seemingly superhuman powers; an Innu poet and activist of slight build, decisive gestures, and oracular observations; an old friend with “a steel-trap intellect and a frankly supernatural memory,” capable of reciting a 400-line poem read in a newspaper twenty years earlier, “Leibniz in a hoodie, Pliny in sneakers.” They are all people who have chosen to give more the more they have lost, each of them fiercely devoted to their work of public service while navigating profound private sorrows and violations — the untimely death of a sister, the unjust death of a father, the plundering of a heritage, a room in the heart filled with clay where a beloved friend once lived.

With each encounter and experience, new questions quicken, deepen, ferment in Robert’s mind:

Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure.

These are serious questions, hard questions, but they rise from the page haloed with tenderness, with spaciousness, with humor. Recounting his conversation with the young man in Chennai about death, lensed through the opening line of The Epic of Gilgamesh, he writes:

Yuvan is silent for a while. Then he says: ‘There has been, I think, a narrowing of relatedness.’

I cannot tell if he is speaking of his sister’s death, or some vaster attenuation, or both.

‘To be is to be related,’ he says. ‘We must hugely widen the space of relations.’

He points skywards, out over the ocean. ‘The Pleiades. They’re my favourite constellation. It’s an open system, you see. Usually when stars form they do so in a globular cluster – there’s a main centre, and then smaller stars around. That’s how gravity works. But the Pleiades, well, the cluster has seven sisters and a weak centre, so it’s not concentrated around one point. It’s a differently political star system.’

I laugh. ‘An anti-hierarchical feminist assemblage?’

‘Exactly!’

This growing, glowing sense of relatedness builds upon itself, so that eventually everything comes to mirror everything else, to elucidate and illuminate the glimmering threads of consanguinity and kinship that hold the web of life together.

Art by Meredith Nemirov from her series Rivers Feed the Trees

And then there are the rivers themselves, rendered in prose so incandescent it leaves you lit up for the inside, the world shimmering in the golden beam of this vast and generous mind.

Kayaking down Quebec’s Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, and into the lake it feeds, he casts the enchantment cast upon him:

Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. House-sized boulders on the banks; time-falls from the rock faces above. Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls. Seen from above, from this height, the river appears static, and has the texture of impasto, gouache, as if smeared into place by a palette knife.

[…]

The vastness of scale is defeating to my English imagination, though. None of the metrics make sense. This lake’s length is the same distance as that between my home in Cambridge and central London. It holds a billion litres. It would take a year to drain. It holds a water-year.

[…]

We paddle all afternoon. As dusk approaches, we are all tiring. It is one of the tougher days I have known, physically speaking: a 4 a.m. start, then some twenty miles over flat water. Yet we seem barely to have moved within the vastness of the lake and its self-repeating patterns.

The high sky steadily fades to milk at its edges, blue in its arches, soot at its summit. The air close to us greys, then charcoals.

Life, in all its fragility and tenacity, comes fully alive as Robert finds himself a body in the body of a world both beautiful and brutal, insentient to the fate of any individual yet animated by a vast sentience that excludes nothing and holds in its broad open palm the destiny of everything:

The precipitous west coast of the lake, along which we are skirting, offers little hospitality. Vast scree-slopes fan beneath shattered cliffs, their run-outs rubbled with giant blocks that tumble down to the shoreline and into the lake… We paddle on.

Dark is falling. Wayne is far behind me now, invisible in the shadows. He is struggling. My own arms feel numb with use. I don’t know if I can make the next few miles… Then we round a promontory of rock and enter a new world.

Here, three-hundred-foot-high cliffs rise vertically from the water. They are thylacine-striped in rust and black, and lightning-struck by quartzite.

The wind suddenly drops to utter stillness. Water is sleek and calm as oil. Air is shocking in its silence after the day-long roar of the gale. The dusk is huge.

I follow the line of the cliffs, keeping thirty feet or so out into the lake in case of rockfall. The water now seems molasses-thick and black as treacle. My paddle stirs it into spirals. The water-whispers of my blade echo back at me from the cliff walls.

I feel the uncanny tranquillity that comes from a tired body and a tired mind. I feel I could paddle on into this never-ending dusk for ever.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from The River

It is often when the mind tires that it loosens its grip on those habitual ways of perceiving that keep us from truly seeing, that make us mistak the parts attention sieves as salient for the whole. Through extreme pain and fatigue, through a near-death experience amid the rapids, Robert is ejected from the cerebral into the creaturely and through it thrust into the transcendent:

Fifty yards ahead of me, the water is gold, and it is gold for as far as I can see down the lake. Just the light, surely? No, it can’t be the light, for the band of gold doesn’t correspond to the morning sun’s border with shadow.

I reach the band, pass into it and understand.

The gold is pollen. Billions and billions of pollen grains which have been knocked from the trees by the big southerly overnight and then blown out onto the water to form this gold-dust surface. Not light, then, but life.

[…]

Far above, the ongoing helical collision of the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies, which began 4.5 billion years ago, spreads across the dark sky like pollen on water.

Milky Way Starry Night by native artist Margaret Nazon from her series of celestial beadwork

He finds himself spun into the vortex of the question:

It’s the crux that needs solving… Not “Who speaks for the river?” but “What does the river say?” These are two distinct questions. And while it’s relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.

To this I would add a third: Who is listening to the river speak? To speak is to sound a personhood through to another. There is always a gorge between what is said and what is heard, because there is always an abyss between one person and another. The listener is implicated in the spoken, but can only explicate what is heard filtered through their particular consciousness, their singular experience of being alive. It is therefore no small task to be a skilled listener, which always means being a loving listener. Here is a virtuosic listener channeling what the river says to him so that we too may hear the song of life more clearly:

This is a place where ghost-realms of times past and future overlap with one another, each transparent to the other, and I try to peer right and left into these laminar worlds but the river-mouth and its river-voices hold me in this one here and the river’s tongue now is the tongue of tongues, and the river’s song is the song of songs, slipshifting and shapesliding and veering, sung in spirals and stars and roars and other notes beyond hearing, and the voice sings what I cannot understand, however much I long to, and my heart is full of flow and I sit because I can no longer stand and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense at the shatter-belt of my awareness of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels but not bears and angels, something that is always transforming, and in that moment it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river-being… the question of life, which is not a question at all but a world.

Couple Is a River Alive? with a kindred case for the life of a mountain by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd, whose forgotten and fiercely beautiful writing Robert Macfarlane resurrected, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.

BP

The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against the Curse of Not Enough

By Maria Popova

The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against the Curse of Not Enough

Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.

An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.

The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.

And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.

This inflicts no small identity crisis:

What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.

But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.

Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.

A little note of misery sounded in his mind.

What could possibly be wrong?

It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.

Suddenly, he wants the stream itself, shimmering so seductively in the sunlight that it has to be had.

As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with the stream’s water, Mr. Bishop perches to peek over the fence and begins “to twitch and prickle and hop around” with the restless desire for a pool of his own.

So goes the cascade of envy, that handmaiden of wanting, until pool by pool the streams begins to run dry.

Soon it was only a trickle.

The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped away, and the reeds withered and died.

Triumphant and drunk on its own power, the Wanting Monster now wonders how much more damage it can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who is gathering flowers in the field for her dear friend Maria, and whispers into her ear.

Mrs. Walton began to frown and fret.

She was irritated. Why was she picking flowers for Maria when it was really she herself who deserved them?

She should fill her own house with flowers.

Yes, she should have the most fragrant, the most colorful, the most stylish house in the whole village.

Everyone would admire it. Everyone would envy her.

The other women watch Mrs. Walton pick all the flowers she can carry, and suddenly they too are aflame with the mania for owning the flowers. Soon, no flowers are left and the bees are bereft of pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and finches have nowhere to nest.

The Wanting Monster stomps across the flowerless fields, gloating.

That night, it visits Mr. Newton — the town’s most passionate stargazer — and whispers into Mr. Newton’s ear.

Suddenly possessed with the desire to own the stars, he heads to the forest and cuts down a great old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes a star.

I am reminded here of this miniature etching by William Blake, which I suspect might have inspired Read’s art:

I Want! I Want! by William Blake, 1793. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Ms. Grimehart watches Mr. Newton and, unable to bear possessing no stars herself, she cuts down not one tree but two to make an even bigger ladder and snatches not one star but five.

More and more ladders rise up and the sky soon grows starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, with the birds silent and the bees still, this tranquil little world finds itself unworlded.

The village was quiet and colorless and gloomy. The children wept. They had loved their forest and their little stream. They missed the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.

People, unable to console the children, begin to leave. The Wanting Monster roars with self-congratulation.

This time, everyone hears the roar and begins to wonder about the menacing presence. It is Billie Ray who first sees it and, pointing, tells the townsfolk that there is a monster in their midst. Naming a hurt has a way of opening up the space for healing — as soon as the little girl names the menace, everyone sees it clear as daylight. Suddenly, the Wanting Monster grows “no bigger than a beetle.” It is only those things of which we are not fully conscious that have the power to possess us.

But when the grownups lurch to stomp the tiny monster, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the suddenly helpless creature if it needs a cuddle.

The Wanting Monster climbed into the palm of her hand. It was tired, after all, and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray cupped her other hand to make a roof, and then she wandered toward the dry river bed, where she sat on its banks and began to rock her hand and sing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her.

No one had ever sung to the Wanting Monster before. Nor had it ever been cared for. And the Wanting Monster didn’t know quite how those things felt — not really.

Listening to the lullaby, the Wanting Monster begins to weep. “There, there,” Billie Ray comforts it, “Oh, dearest heart.” The Wanting Monster doesn’t know how to bear all this tenderness — how many of us really do — and so it goes on weeping “sorrowful, endless tears” that begin replenishing the stream.

Everyone else, listening and watching, begins to weep too.

A great mournful lament filled the valley.

Tears swelled the little stream, and it rushed like a river…

What had been withheld was released; what had dried up, flowed.

What had hardened was becoming soft again.

People unpack their suitcases, take the stars out of their pockets, and set about collecting seeds, tilling the ground, and filling watering cans to replant the trees and flowers.

As the birds return and the night reconstellates, the Wanting Monster finally stops weeping and, looking up wonder-smitten at the stars lavishing the world with all that abundant beauty, feels, finally, slaked of want.

Couple The Wanting Monster with The Fate of Fausto — Oliver Jeffers’s kindred fable inspired by Vonnegut’s poem — then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

BP

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