The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree

By Maria Popova

How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree

Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” how we relate to anything is how we relate to everything. There is always a choice in the way we orient to any object of attention — a person, a practice, a song, a stone: the choice to consecrate or commodify the object, to routinize or ritualize the relationship.

Take the Christmas tree. Rooted in pagan solstice rituals that made the evergreen a symbol and a celebration of resilience and eternal life, the modern Christmas tree originated in present-day Germany, around the time Kepler was formulating the laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial — that liminal epoch between the age of superstition and the age of science, which, like all transitional times, confused humanity’s ability to understand itself and its place in the universe. In such times, the ready-made answers fall apart and reality itself becomes an arena for power struggles. The Catholic church began splintering along the fault lines of conflicting ideologies, hurling the Western world into endless religious wars. With the need to reaffirm the foundational biblical myths, the naked Christmas tree emerged as an analogue of the tree anchoring Adam and Eve’s story.

One of William Blake’s engravings for Paradise Lost.

It was Martin Luther who, with his genius for selling salvation that powered the Protestant Reformation, dressed the tree in the symbology of the immortal soul — legend has it that a walk through a starlit forest inspired him to adorn the Christmas tree with lights to symbolize the stars, thought to be immortal. (We would eventually lean on Kepler’s science to realize that we are only alive because stars die.)

Suddenly, here was something people could take into their homes to keep their faith and light up their harsh winter nights with the warmth of belonging, their war-torn lives with the promise of immortality.

But it took another quarter millennium and the birth of mass media for the Christmas tree to leave the religious realm and colonize secular life: In 1848, an engraving of the young Queen Victoria and her German cousband Albert appeared in The Illustrated London News — the world’s first illustrated weekly magazine — depicting the royal couple delighting in a lavishly decorated Christmas tree.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the royal Christmas tree. (The Illustrated London News, 1848.)

The image went, as it were, viral — papers across the British Empire reprinted it, sparking a craze for the bedazzled conifer, making it an emblem of the two things human nature most yearns for: love and power. Within a century, capitalism — the religion of our epoch, predicated on packaging our yearnings and selling them back to us at the price of the product — had made of the Christmas tree a commodity, grown like industrial corn and disposed of as garbage.

So here we find ourselves facing that choice of how to relate to the Christmas tree, nested within which is the choice of how to relate to our lives in this world we have not chosen for ourselves but must live in — the choice in which lie our power and our freedom. To find in this commodity the vestige of something ancient and true is to reclaim love as the counterweight to consumerism and the meaning of our mortality.

That is what Brian Doyle — who wrote so movingly about how to live a miraculous life just before death took him at the peak of his powers — invites in a short, splendid piece titled “Muttered Prayer in Thanks for the Under-Genius of Christmas,” part of his altogether wonderful Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary (public library). He writes:

Putting up ye old fir tree last night, and pondering why again we slay a perfectly healthy tree ten years of age, not even a teenager yet, and prop up the body, and drape it with frippery… I saw the quiet pleasure of ritual, the actual no-kidding no-fooling urge to pause and think about other people and their joy, the anticipation of days spent laughing and shouldering in the kitchen, with no agenda and no press of duty. I saw the flash of peace and love under all the shrill selling and tinny theater; and I was thrilled and moved. And then I remembered too that the ostensible reason for it all was the Love being bold and brave enough to assume a form that would bleed and break and despair and die; and I was again moved, and abashed; and I finished untangling the epic knot of lights, shivering yet again with happiness that we were given such a sweet terrible knot of a world to untangle, as best we can, with bumbling love. And so: amen.

Christmas Tree by Frances Hodgkins, New Zealand, 1940s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

This “bumbling love” that consecrates the commodified ritual is, in the end, what consecrates any relation, what returns us to the original responsibility of being alive — something Doyle addresses in another of his “uncommon prayers,” aimed at the Catholic Church and its “thirst for control and rules and power and money rather than the one simple thing the founder insisted on.” Centuries and civilizations after Rumi versed the art of choosing love over not-love, Doyle writes:

Granted, it’s a tough assignment, the original assignment. I get that. Love — Lord help us, could we not have been assigned something easier, like astrophysics or quantum mechanics? But no — love those you cannot love. Love those who are poor and broken and fouled and dirty and sick with sores. Love those who wish to strike you on both cheeks. Love the blowhard, the pompous ass, the arrogant liar. Find the Christ in each heart, even those. Preach the Gospel and only if necessary talk about it. Be the Word. It is easy to advise and pronounce and counsel and suggest and lecture; it is not so easy to do what must be done without sometimes shrieking. Bring love like a bright weapon against the dark… And so: amen.

This way of relating is, of course, a countercultural act of resistance, evocative of Leonard Cohen’s antidote to anger and of Walt Whitman’s instruction for life — resistance to cynicism and all the other species of despair, resistance to the power struggles that fray the cosmos of connection, resistance to anything and anyone who has forgotten and is trying to make us forget that the secret of life is simply to love anyway.

BP

A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality

By Maria Popova

A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality

“A persona is a portal we are not aware of passing through,” my beloved editor Dan Frank wrote in an unpublished poem shortly before the insentient atoms that composed him, this singular and unrepeatable person, disbanded to return to the universe. And yet despite everything we know about what happens to those atoms when we die, the question of how they cohered into a person — the question of what makes a person, of how the myriad personae within constellate the total personality that moves through the world — is still mired in mystery. It is perhaps the greatest mystery of being alive.

These are the questions that animated the English poet and philosopher Richard Lewis Nettleship (December 17, 1846–August 25, 1892), who believed that “the individuality of anything is an ultimate fact, behind which we cannot go,” but through which we must look in order to understand the sum total of human experience.

R.L. Nettleship

Personality, Nettleship cautioned an epoch before pop psychology flooded us with platitudes and simplistic personality type tests, “is probably the hardest of all subjects, and yet it is one upon which we are all ready to pronounce in the most easy-going way” — pronouncements “extraordinarily vague, confused, or inadequate” to the task of fathoming the dimensions of a person. He writes:

We generally assume [the personality] to be a definite, self-contained, unchanging thing, round and about which all sorts of more or less separable and changing appendages confusedly float.

Or it is something “inward,” the most inward of all things, that to which we think we should come if we stripped off all the coats of circumstances, custom, education.

But we soon realize, on thinking, that there is no circle to be drawn round any one, within which all is “personal,” and without which all is “impersonal.” We realize what may be called the continuity of things. What, for instance, is a triangle? A space bounded by three straight lines. Where does “it” stop ? At the lines, of course. But these lines are merely its contact with surrounding space, and the “personality” of the triangle is one thing if the surrounding space be limited to the page of a book, another thing if it be extended to the room where the book is, another thing if it be carried on to include the solar system, and so on. And though for particular purposes it is necessary to define the triangle in particular ways, it is, strictly speaking, quite true that it is continuously one with the spatial universe.

A recognition of this continuity undermines the commonsense definition of a person as “a body occupying a certain place, keeping out and otherwise acting on other bodies.” Nettleship writes:

Everybody is “continuous” with a good deal more than (say) the space six feet round him and the time an hour on each side of him. The simplest memories, hopes, associations, imaginations, inferences, are extensions of personality far greater than we can easily realize. Every “here” and every “now” is the centre of practically innumerable “theres” and “thens,” and the centres are absolutely inseparable from their circumferences.

Loss, separation, death, is failure of continuity. A being which was (so to say) always closing up with everything would change but would not die.

This, too, is why abandonment — the sudden rupture of continuity in a relationship of trust — is one of the most physiologically and psychologically devastating experiences a human being can have, for we love with everything we are. Perhaps the most psychologically complex human experience, love harmonizes the cacophony of parts we live with into a total experience. Its loss, its failure of continuity, therefore discomposes the total self — a stark reminder that we can never fully compartmentalize ourselves. Nettleship considers this fragmentary but indivisible totality:

The self, I, personality, or whatever we like to call that which experiences things, is one in all that it experiences: one in seeing, hearing, smelling, and in every modification of these, one in every combination of these, and in all more complex experiences as well; it is this oneness which makes the unanalyzable self-hood of any and every experience. On the other hand, the self in all its experience is one of or in many, an experience of distinctness in innumerable senses. In a word, it is always and everywhere a whole of parts, a combining and dividing activity, able to detach any part from any other part, and yet to be in them all.

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.” Maurice Sendak’s little-known 1960 illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit.

This paradox of parts parallels the nature of reality itself — to surrender to it is to contact, as physicist David Bohm observed in investigating the implicate order of the universe, “a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.” The self then becomes a portal for passing through to something else, something larger and truer. A generation before Iris Murdoch observed that the triumph of the personality is the act of unselfing, Nettleship writes:

The times when one feels one is most truly oneself are just those in which one feels that the consciousness of one’s own individuality is most absolutely swallowed up, whether in sym­pathy with nature or in the bringing to birth of truth, or in enthusiasm for other men. Thus, the secret of life is self-giving.

And so we arrive at the two great instruments of unselfing — death, the pinnacle of continuity that returns our borrowed stardust to the universe; and love, which is at bottom “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Not long before he died of exposure while attempting a climb of Mont Blanc, Nettleship observes:

Death is self-surrender… Love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender.

BP

Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More

By Maria Popova

Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More

Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time of such profound pain and profound transformation that it fused reading and writing into a single, surprising act of the unconscious: I began making bird divinations to clarify the confusion of living and refill my reservoir of trust in the cohesion of the world. This daily practice left a great deal less time for other reading, especially anything new: The written word today seems more and more resigned to commodified virtue signaling and hollow self-help, so I found myself returning more and more to trusted treasures that have stood the test of time and changing moral fashions. Of the few new books I did read, these are the ones I will keep returning to for substance and succor in the years ahead.

MARIE HOWE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

Here is my favorite poem from it (which is also one of my favorite poems of all time), and here is another.

SOMETHING IN THE WOODS LOVES YOU

Here is a taste.

THANK YOU, EVERYTHING

Here is a taste.

OLIVER SACKS: LETTERS

Here is a taste.

WEATHERING

Here is a taste.

JUNG VS. BORG

Here is a taste.

THE OTHER SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Here is a taste.

CONSOLATIONS II

Here is a taste.

THE WORK OF ART

Here is a taste.

WE ARE FREE TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Here is a taste.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY

Here is a taste.

FLOWERS FOR THINGS I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY

Here is a taste.

ON GIVING UP

Here is a taste.

THE LIGHT EATERS

Here is a taste.

KAMAU & ZUZU FIND A WAY

Here is a taste.

LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT

Here is a taste.

THERE’S A GHOST IN THE GARDEN

Here is a taste.

CLOUDSPOTTING FOR BEGINNERS

Here is a taste.

WE GO TO THE PARK

Here is a taste.

THE MIRACULOUS FROM THE MATERIAL

Here is a taste.

THE MESSAGE

THE ART OF CRYING

Here is a taste.

THE DICTIONARY STORY

Here is a taste.

(AND ONE I MADE)

Peek inside here.

(AND ONE COMING NEXT YEAR)

Peek inside here.

BP

How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love

By Maria Popova

How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more.

Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature — that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light.

To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough.

Art from The Fate of Fausto by Oliver Jeffers — a modern fable about the existential triumph of enoughness, inspired by Vonnegut

The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”

In the preface, Berry considers how nature calibrates expectation — even in the creative act itself, where inspiration is not a reach for more but a letting be of what is, a surrender to reality, which is miracle enough:

On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams… In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations — other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.

In how it thrives on the freedom from expectation, in how it demands a total surrender and breaks the moment it is demanded of, creativity has a lot in common with love. It may be that nature invented love to teach us the art of enoughness — to learn how to open the heart to another without condition or expectation, to be fully welcomed in another heart in order to learn the hardest axiom of being: that we are, and always were, enough.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

Love’s salutary alchemy of enoughness comes alive in the second part of Berry’s eight-part sabbath poem of 1994:

Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shapes of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shapes of flesh, ever-changing
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of the body for body,
unending light. You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.

Couple with John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — a lovely vintage illustrated fable about the meaning and measure of enough — then revisit this soulful animated adaptation of Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and his prose meditation on the nature of the universe lensed through a sunflower.

HT Cloud Appreciation Society

BP

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