The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day

By Maria Popova

How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day

The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” he wrote. Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time — knew this: “It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” she wrote as she approached her untimely death.

An epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne’s unnerving assertion that the subject, the substance, the very purpose of philosophy is to learn to die, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.

Samurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)

Born to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era’s life expectancy twofold, Tsunetomo grew up so sickly that the family doctor deemed him unlikely to live past twenty. And yet despite his precocious proximity to death — or perhaps precisely because of it — he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo came to see that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Sensing that strength springs from sinew and spirit entwined, he apprenticed with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took work as a scribe, fell under the spell of poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.

Anchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves — is the idea that death is the beating heart of bushido, the Way of the warrior, and yet we are wired to turn away from the very thing that makes us strong, constantly caging ourselves in denial. He writes:

We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

He offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease… And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

Our difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source — a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,” he writes:

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.

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

Centuries later, the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh — a modern samurai of the human spirit — would arrive at the same elemental truth in his surprising library epiphany about the meaning of life:

To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.

Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then let this poem teach you how to live and how to die.

BP

Simone de Beauvoir on How Chance and Choice Converge to Make Us Who We Are

By Maria Popova

Simone de Beauvoir on How Chance and Choice Converge to Make Us Who We Are

To be alive is to marvel — at least occasionally, at least with glimmers of some deep intuitive wonderment — at the Rube Goldberg machine of chance and choice that makes us who we are as we half-stride, half-stumble down the improbable paths that lead us back to ourselves. My own life was shaped by one largely impulsive choice at age thirteen, and most of us can identify points at which we could’ve pivoted into a wholly different direction — to move across the continent or build a home here, to leave the tempestuous lover or to stay, to wait for another promotion or quit the corporate day job and make art. Even the seemingly trivial choices can butterfly enormous ripples of which we may remain wholly unwitting — we’ll never know the exact misfortunes we’ve avoided by going down this street and not that, nor the exact magnitude of our unbidden graces.

Perhaps our most acute awareness of the lacuna between the one life we do have and all the lives we could have had comes in the grips of our fear of missing out — those sudden and disorienting illuminations in which we recognize that parallel possibilities exist alongside our present choices. “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live,” wrote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his elegant case for the value of our unlived lives. “But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”

The garland of those exemptions strews our sense of self — our constellating experience of personal identity which, as the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue so incisively observed, “is not merely an empirical process of appropriating or digesting blocks of life.”

No one has captured that ultimate existential awareness more beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than the trailblazing French existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her autobiography, All Said and Done (public library).

Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 (Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson)

From the fortunate rostrum of her own long life, Beauvoir reflects on this constellation of chance and choice:

Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement — why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?

With an eye to the element of chance and its myriad manifestations, she adds:

The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

But the most curious part of this perplexity, Beauvoir notes, is that despite the larger cosmic accident of all life and the chance nature of our particular lives within it, we experience ourselves and our existence as non-accidental — a disconnect that fringes on the free will paradox. She writes:

Tossed into the world, I have been subjected to its laws and its contingencies, ruled by wills other than my own, by circumstance and by history: it is therefore reasonable for me to feel that I am myself contingent. What staggers me is that at the same time I am not contingent. If I had not been born no question would have arisen: I have to take the fact that I do exist as my starting point. To be sure, the future of the woman I have been may turn me into someone other than myself. But in that case it would be this other woman who would be asking herself who she was. For the person who says “Here am I” there is no other coexisting possibility. Yet this necessary coincidence of the subject and his history is not enough to do away with my perplexity. My life: it is both intimately known and remote; it defines me and yet I stand outside it.

Considering the precise nature of this “curious object,” Beauvoir draws on the physics that revolutionized the human understanding of life and reality in her lifetime, and writes:

Like Einstein’s universe, it is both boundless and finite. Boundless: it runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.

[…]

And yet life is also a finite reality. It possesses an inner heart, a centre of interiorization, a me which asserts that it is always the same throughout the whole course. A life is set within a given space of time; it has a beginning and an end; it evolves in given places, always retaining the same roots and spinning itself an unchangeable past whose opening toward the future is limited. It is impossible to grasp and define a life as one can grasp and define a thing, since a life is “an unsummed whole,” as Sartre puts it, a detotalized totality, and therefore it has no being. But one can ask certain questions about it.

Of course, as De Beauvoir’s American peer and contemporary Susanne Langer has memorably pointed out, our questions invariably shape our answers. But to this central question of whether and to what degree we are contingent upon chance, De Beauvoir offers an answer that radiates the ultimate antidote to regret:

Chance … has a distinct meaning for me. I do not know where I might have been led by the paths that, as I look back, I think I might have taken but that in fact I did not take. What is certain is that I am satisfied with my fate and that I should not want it changed in any way at all. So I look upon these factors that helped me to fulfill it as so many fortunate strokes of chance.

Simone de Beauvoir, 1952 (Photograph: Gisèle Freund)

Complement this particular fragment of the wholly magnificent All Said and Done with philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of change, then revisit Beauvoir on freedom, busyness, and why happiness is our moral obligation, vitality and the measure of intelligence, and her daily routine.

BP

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

By Maria Popova

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.

Wonder, after all, is what we look for when we are looking and the richest recompense of learning how to look. G.K. Chesterton knew this when, in his wonderful meditation on the dandelion and the meaning of life, he observed that the object of the creative life, of the full life, is to dig for the “submerged sunrise of wonder.” Dylan Thomas knew it in the recognition that “children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.” Rachel Carson knew it when she insisted that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” Goethe knew it when he exclaimed: “I am here, that I may wonder!”

How to live into that knowledge with the full capacity of our creaturely potential is what Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) explores in a soulful century-old reflection included in Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse (public library).

Hermann Hesse

With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:

Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth

But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.

Complement with Nietzsche on the true value of education and the pioneering neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on our spiritual responsibility to wonder, then revisit Hesse on the wisdom of the inner voice, solitude and the courage to be yourself, and the day he discovered the meaning of life in a tree.

BP

A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

By Maria Popova

A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads is yet unwritten. Such moments come most readily at the beginning of something new.

To begin anything — a new practice, a new project, a new love — is to cast upon yourself a spell against stagnation. Beginnings are notation for the symphony of the possible in us. They ask us to break the pattern of our lives and reconfigure it afresh — something that can only be done with great courage and great tenderness, for no territory of life exposes both our power and our vulnerability more brightly than a beginning.

One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

How to leap into the thrilling and terrifying unknowns of the possible is what the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) explores in a chapter of his parting gift to the world, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (public library), which also gave us his luminous meditation on kindling the light between us and within us.

He begins by telescoping into deep time, reminding us that we are but a small and new part of something ancient and immense — a vast totality that holds us in our incompleteness, in our existential loneliness, in the vulnerability of our self-creation:

There are days when Conamara is wreathed in blue Tuscan light. The mountains seem to waver as though they were huge dark ships on a distant voyage. I love to climb up into the silence of these vast autonomous structures. What seems like a pinnacled summit from beneath becomes a level plateau when you arrive there. Born in a red explosion of ascending fire, the granite lies cold, barely marked by the millions of years of rain and wind. On this primeval ground I feel I have entered into a pristine permanence, a continuity here that knew the wind hundreds of millions of years before a human face ever felt it.

When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

[…]

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) by Caspar David Friedrich, circa 1817. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Just as our lives are shaped by those necessary endings — by what we choose to let go — they are shaped by what we choose to begin, however precarious the precipice of the new.

A century after Van Gogh exulted in risk as the crucible of the creative life and a decade after David Bowie urged young artists to “always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in,” O’Donohue adds:

Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

And yet we are homeostasis machines, our very organism oriented toward maintaining the status quo of comfort and predictability, which every beginning inevitably disrupts with its fulcrum of change and its brunt of uncertainty. O’Donohue considers what it takes to override our creaturely reflex for habituation:

Sometimes the greatest challenge is to actually begin; there is something deep in us that conspires with what wants to remain within safe boundaries and stay the same… Sometimes a period of preparation is necessary, where the idea of the beginning can gestate and refine itself; yet quite often we unnecessarily postpone and equivocate when we should simply take the risk and leap into a new beginning.

He renders the vulnerability and redemption of that leap in a poem — a kind of self-blessing to consecrate the courage of beginning:

FOR A NEW BEGINNING
by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to — an illustrated celebration of living with presence in uncertain times.

Sometimes — in fact, often — beginnings are tucked into endings. In consonance with his philosopher-poet friend David Whyte’s poignant reflection on ending love and beginning love, O’Donohue writes:

Often when something is ending we discover within it the spore of new beginning, and a whole new train of possibility is in motion before we even realize it. When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. Surrounding the intention and the act of beginning, there are always exciting possibilities.

Paying attention to those portals of possibility is both an act of self-respect and a reverence of life:

Part of the art of living wisely is to learn to recognize and attend to such profound openings in one’s life.

Complement with poet Pattiann Rogers’s stunning ode to our ongoing self-creation and the poetic psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on how people change, the revisit John O’Donohue on why we fall in love, the essence of friendship, and how we bless each other.

BP

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