The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity

By Maria Popova

Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity

Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional regulation, and creativity. But the price we have paid for these crowning curios of consciousness has been savage self-consciousness, thought turned in on itself, nowhere more maddening in its mania for rumination than in insomnia — that awful moment when, facing the fissure between your conscious wishes and your unconscious will, you realize that you are helpless against yourself, that there is not a single you pulling the strings of the mind but a tangle of thought and feeling rendering you a troupe of marionettes.

Against this already discomposing backdrop, insomnia foregrounds an added cruelty: the more you think about not being able to sleep, the less able to sleep you are, spiraling into anxiety about how the night’s helpless wakefulness will compromise your day. But while lack of sleep does diminish basic functions like reflexes and recall, paradoxically, the brink of sleep can be salutary to creativity: In that liminal space between restlessness and rest, the mind’s organizing principles begin to fray with the fatigue of the day’s conscious labors and unbidden thoughts begin to emerge from the recesses of the unconscious, begin to collide with one another in the seething cauldron of the insomniac’s angst, begin to form the unexpected combinations we call originality.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) — one of history’s most prolific insomniacs — knew this, celebrated it, relished it.

Franz Kafka

Throughout his struggles with creative block, Kafka regularly found himself sleepless. Like Patti Smith, who fights insomnia with an imaginative visualization, he would cross his arms and lay his hands over his shoulders, visualizing himself laying as heavy as possible “like a soldier with his pack.” On his good days, he saw his insomnia as a badge of honor for a mind ablaze with thought: “I can’t sleep because I write too much,” he writes in his diary. On his bad days, he felt in it the tension between “the vague pressure of the desire to write” and “the nearness of insanity,” feared it left him too tired for creative work. On one such day, he records:

Because of fatigue did not write and lay now on the sofa in the warm room and now on the one in the cold room, with sick legs and disgusting dreams. A dog lay on my body, one paw near my face.

But another part of him realized that sleeplessness, rather than a hindrance to his creative vitality, is a function of it, honed on the edges of the night:

Sleeplessness comes only because… I write. For no matter how little and how badly I write, I am still made sensitive by these minor shocks, feel, especially towards evening and even more in the morning, the approaching, the imminent possibility of great moments which would tear me open, which could make me capable of anything, and in the general uproar that is within me and which I have no time to command, find no rest.

Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud from a philosophical 1922 children’s book about dreaming

In a passage that suggests the creative impulse may just be our best way of calibrating how much reality we can hold, how much of the pain and rapture of being alive we can bear — what Virginia Woolf called “the shock-receiving capacity” that makes one an artist — Kafka adds:

In the end this uproar is only a suppressed, restrained harmony, which, left free, would fill me completely, which could even widen me and yet still fill me. But now such a moment arouses only feeble hopes and does me harm, for my being does not have sufficient strength or the capacity to hold the present mixture, during the day the visible word helps me, during the night it cuts me to pieces unhindered.

It is in the liminal times bookending the sleepless night that he discovers the fount of his creative powers:

In the evening and the morning my consciousness of the creative abilities in me is more than I can encompass. I feel shaken to the core of my being and can get out of myself whatever I desire.

If you are not yet ready to embrace your sleeplessness as a fulcrum of creativity, try Maurice Sendak’s antidote to insomnia; if you are ready to live into your creative powers, take heed in Kafka’s insight into the four psychological barriers between the talented and their talent.

BP

Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

By Maria Popova

Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.

The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life’s meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters (public library).

Oliver Sacks by his partner, Bill Hayes.

In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead’s concept in an anthology of their own, even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)” — offers his own perspective:

I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.”

[…]

I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe.

It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:

I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.

I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”

Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take issue with the idea that there are two “magisteria” — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing:

Talk of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “another,” as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a “higher” domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).

Art by Ariana Fields from What Love Knows by poet Aracelis Girmay

A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:

When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.

I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

As if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love, he adds:

I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).

Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s wide and wonderful Letters with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth, and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on what makes life worth living, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself.

BP

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

By Maria Popova

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before her in his beautiful letter to a bereaved father.

We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.

And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.

“Broken/hearted” by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

That is what Judith Viorst explores in her 1987 consolation of a book Necessary Losses (public library) — an inquiry into the profound and far-reaching relationship between our losses and our gains, revealing renunciation as a fulcrum of growth. She paints the vast landscape of loss upon which life plays out:

When we think of loss we think of the loss, through death, of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety — and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.

[…]

These necessary losses… we confront when we are confronted by the inescapable fact… that we are essentially out here on our own; that we will have to accept — in other people and ourselves — the mingling of love with hate, of the good with the bad;… that there are flaws in every human connection; that our status on this planet is implacably impermanent; and that we are utterly powerless to offer ourselves or those we love protection — protection from danger and pain, from the in-roads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death; protection from our necessary losses.

These losses are a part of life — universal, unavoidable, inexorable. And these losses are necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.

As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives. Viorst writes:

The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose… It is only through our losses that we become fully developed human beings.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a soulful illustrated elegy for loss and our search for light

We enter the realm of loss the moment the umbilical cord is cut to sever what Viorst calls the “blurred-boundary bliss of mother-child oneness” — the primal loss that sets off the ongoing task of becoming ourselves. From this origin point, she traces the lifelong vector of losses and gains:

Exchanging the illusion of absolute shelter and absolute safety for the triumphant anxieties of standing alone… we become a moral, responsible, adult self, discovering — within the limitations imposed by necessity — our freedoms and choices. And in giving up our impossible expectations, we become a lovingly connected self, renouncing ideal visions of perfect friendship, marriage, children, family life for the sweet imperfections of all-too-human relationships. And in confronting the many losses that are brought by time and death, we become a mourning and adapting self, finding at every stage — until we draw our final breath — opportunities for creative transformations.

In a sentiment the poet Mark Doty would echo — “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” he wrote in his beautiful reckoning with love and loss — she adds:

We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.

Complement Necessary Losses, which goes on to explore the many regions of loss in human life and how they can become frontiers of growth, with Hannah Arendt on learning how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, Thoreau on living through a loss, and Alan Watts on learning not to think of gain and loss, then explore two uncommon lenses on loss: fractals and chlorophyll.

BP

The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up

By Maria Popova

The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up

It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today.

One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest measure — may be the courage to put our arms around those former selves and pull them close, to take tender responsibility for their missteps and confusions, refusing denial, refusing despair. Without compassion for who we used to be, we can never fully own who we are or open to who we can become. This compassion is the fulcrum of maturity, and if imagination the fulcrum of compassion, then maturity is not a point we reach along the vector of intellectual development but an ongoing process of the active imagination.

That is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores in a fragment of her wholly fantastic 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library), which also gave us her abiding wisdom on the meaning of life.

Ursula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed

Long before Maurice Sendak insisted that “the child is the best part of the human self” and that the measure of a well-formed adult is “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” Le Guin writes:

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.

There is no greater freedom than the self-permission to be entirely ourselves, an entirety we must go on embracing as it goes on expanding, goes on revealing its edges and its shadows. In consonance with Joan Didion’s searing assertion that “character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Le Guin writes:

Our job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can’t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we’re led to think there isn’t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.

This is the paradox we must live with as we go on dying: that we are finite but unfinished, that maturity is not the prelude to mortality but the discovery of the immortal in us.

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

Couple with beloved Italian storyteller Cristina Campo on the work of knowing who you are and the meaning of maturity, then revisit Le Guin on how to live fully and the art of growing older.

BP

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