The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Dostoyevsky in Love

Dostoyevsky in Love

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) was twenty-seven when he was arrested for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime and sentenced to death. His sentence was repealed at the last moment, prompting him to pen an ecstatic letter about the meaning of life that evening. But he was not set free — instead, he served four years in a hard labor camp in Siberia.

Upon his release, the thirty-three-year-old Fyodor remained in Siberia, destitute and directionless, trying to restart his life. He befriended a Russian expatiate working as a minor local official — a painful alcoholic who was nonetheless “an intelligent, educated, and good man,” and whom he came to love as a brother. He had a wife, Maria, and a seven-year-old son. They welcomed him into their home as part of the family while he struggled to find his footing. Maria took a lively interest in his conversation and a great pity in his fate, this young and desperate man heavy with unhappiness and savaged by epilepsy.

By the following spring, ready to reenter the world and find a means of subsistence, he joined the Siberian Army Corps as a soldier. Leaving the family, he found parting with them harder “than parting with life.”

But as soon as he left, his friend’s alcoholism finally caught up with him and felled him. Suddenly widowed and with no means of providing for her son, Maria plummeted into the depths of despair — in her time and place, a woman with no husband and no property was, as Mary Shelley put it in the same epoch, “the world’s victim.” Fyodor was moved to see “with what selflessness, with what strength” Maria bore her misfortune. Dangerously in debt himself, he borrowed some money and immediately sent it to her, then spent months petitioning to get her son admitted into a good school.

What he dared not tell her was that he was deeply in love with her. But Maria — a woman of bright intelligence and passionate curiosity — had already guessed it.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871

They remained in weekly correspondence. A hope swelled in his heart that he might have his chance at hers.

It came as a shock when, a year later after her husband’s death, Maria announced that she was to marry a Siberian schoolteacher five years her junior, poor and uneducated. Immediately, Fyodor cobbled together some money to make the 1,700-mile journey across the tundra to see her. He recounted what happened in an electric letter to his closest friend, writing the summer before his thirty-fifth birthday:

I saw her! What a noble, what an angelic soul! She cried, and kissed my hands, but she loves another. I spent two days here. In those two days she remembered the past and her heart was again turned towards me.

He was unsure whether he could trust what he felt to be true, but when she beckoned him not to be sad, not to cry, because “not everything is decided yet,” he clung to her words like a drowning man. For two days, he was plunged into “unbearable bliss and torment.” He left with “complete hope.”

But by the time he arrived home, a letter awaited him. Maria loved the other man more than him. He was crushed. “I don’t know what will become of me without her,” he told his friend, then added: “I am done for, but she is too.”

Mixing a jilted lover’s sorrowful unreason with reasonable concerns, he worried that the young schoolteacher was unsuited for Maria, intellectually and spiritually, and unable to provide for her and her son. He wrote to his friend:

She is 29 years old; she is educated, a bright girl who has seen the world, knows people, has suffered, has been tormented, ill from the last years of her life in Siberia, who is searching for happiness, is self-willed, strong, she is now ready to marry a 24-year-old youth, a Siberian who hasn’t seen anything, doesn’t know anything, who is barely educated, who is beginning the first idea of his life… without significance, without a place in the world, with nothing, a teacher in a provincial school… Who knows how far the discord, which I unavoidably foresee in the future, will go; for even if he were an ideal youth, he’s nevertheless not a strong person. And he’s not only not ideal, but… Anything might happen later on.

He proceeded to catastrophize with a panoply of possible hurts the young man could inflict on Maria’s way. “My God — my heart is breaking,” he wailed on the page, extolling her worthiness to his friend, intimating the other man’s unworthiness of her:

If you knew what an angel she is… every minute something original, sensible, witty, but paradoxically too, infinitely good, truly noble — she has a chivalrous heart: she will do herself in.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

But then, in an act of extraordinary moral grandeur — “I love her happiness more than my own,” he wrote — he asked his friend, who was also his sometime-patron and a man of influence, to intercede on the young schoolteacher’s behalf and push forward his application for a raise that would double his salary. “She must not suffer. If she marries him, then let there be at least some money.” Later, Dostoyevsky would transmute this gesture into a story-line in his 1861 novel The Insulted and the Injured. “This is all for her, for her alone. If only so that she wouldn’t be impoverished,” he told his friend.

Despite being deeply in debt himself, he kept cobbling together funds to go visit Maria, hoping she would change her mind. The long journeys worsened his epileptic attacks, which leveled him bodily and mentally, leaving him in “despondency and a state of psychic abasement.”

The seasons turned, but his resolve was only growing stronger. On the cusp of winter, living up to the drama of the nineteenth-century Russians, he was writing to his friend again:

I love her madly, more than before. My longing for her would have driven me to my grave and literally reduced me to suicide, if I hadn’t seen her… I know that I’m acting imprudently in many ways in my relations with her, since I have almost no hope — but whether there’s hope or not — it’s all the same to me. I don’t think about anything else. If only I could see her, hear her! I’m an unfortunate madman!

And then, with helpless self-awareness, he added:

Love in such a guise is an illness. I sense that.

Lone Man by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Throughout his courtship, Fyodor had been troubled by one glaring gap in his reasoning. A decent man, a practical man, he was aware that he too had no way of providing for Maria and her son on his meager soldier’s salary — if she married him instead of the young schoolteacher, she would still suffer the privations of poverty. But then, in the final weeks of 1856, everything changed: He was promoted to officer and, immediately, he made a formal proposal. Just before the Christmas holidays, after keeping the entire tortuous story of the romance from his family, he finally wrote to his sister:

I’ve loved this woman for a long time, insanely, more than my own life. If you knew her, this angel, then you wouldn’t be surprised. She has so many wonderful, excellent qualities. She is intelligent, sweet, educated, as women rarely are, with a meek character… My friend, dear sister! Don’t object, don’t be sad, don’t worry about me. I couldn’t have done anything better. We make a good couple… We understand each other, we are of the same inclinations, rules. We have been friends for a very long time. We respect each other, I love her.

Maria said “yes.”

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Fyodor wrote to his friend, in whom he had first confided of his love:

I am getting married… Nobody but this woman will be able to make me happy. She still loves me… She loves me. That I know for certain. I knew it then, too, when I wrote my letter to you last summer. She soon lost faith in her new attachment… Oh, if only you knew what this woman is!

They were married on February 7, 1857, and remained together until her untimely death of tuberculosis seven years later. Under the auspices of Maria’s love, Fyodor Dostoyevsky became the eternal voice singing in the cathedral of literature.

BP

Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Existential Tremors

Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Existential Tremors

It is our biological wiring to exist — and then not; it is our psychological wiring to spend our lives running from this elemental fact on the hamster wheel of busyness and the hedonic treadmill of achievement, running from the disquieting knowledge that the atoms huddling for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will one day disband and return to the “aloof stars” that made them. If we still ourselves for a moment, or are bestilled by circumstance, we glimpse that fact, then hasten to avert our gaze. We go on holding it as an abstraction, an unproven theorem; go on casting spells against the proof in stone and wood and promises; go on building houses and egos, signing thirty-year mortgages, trading the forged mint of forever as contractual currency in marital vows. And then one day, some certitude fissures — in the broken surface of a split lip, a split love, a split in Earth’s quaked crust; in the slow-burning wildfire of a pandemic, smoking its way across the globe until it blazes into a shared inferno; in the cold blade of a terminal diagnosis, sudden and close to the bone. We wake up to unalloyed reality with a scream, a silence, a hollow hallelujah.

The astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999) was twenty-nine when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma — a blood cancer that typically invades people in their sixties and seventies. Throughout the bodily brutality of the treatment, throughout the haunting uncertainty of life in remission, she met reality on its own terms — reality creaturely and cosmic, terms chance-dealt by impartial laws — and made of that terrifying meeting something uncommonly beautiful.

Rebecca Elson, 1987

When she returned her atoms to the universe, not yet forty, Elson bequeathed to this world 56 scientific papers and a slender, stunning book of poetry titled A Responsibility to Awe (public library) — verses spare and sublime, drawn from a consciousness pulling the balloon string of the infinite through the loop of its own finitude, life-affirming the way only the most intimate contact with death — which means with nature — can be.

Elson’s crowning achievement in verse is the poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” beautifully brought to life here as a trailer of sorts for the 2020 Universe in Verse — our annual charitable celebration of the science and splendor of nature through poetry — by astrophysicist, novelist, Pioneer Works Director of Sciences, and devoted enchantress of poetry Janna Levin, with music by cellist, composer, and music revolutionary Zoë Keating based on her original soundtrack for The Edge of All We Know — the forthcoming documentary about the Event Horizon Telescope, which in 2019 captured humanity’s historic first glimpse of a black hole. (Janna works on black holes; Elson was among the select scientists tasked with studying the first images returned by the Hubble Space Telescope, that pioneering emblem of our most ambitious tool-making and our longing for intimate contact with the nature of reality.)

Janna prefaces her reading with a Bohrsian reflection on the relationship between science and poetry, between the objective and the subjective, concluding with an exquisitely insightful and exquisitely phrased observation of how the tension between these seeming dipoles can dissolve upon closer inspection:

We are all navigating an external world — but only through the prism of our own minds, our own subjective experience… The majesty of the universe is only ever conjured up in the mind.

Please enjoy:

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Couple with Regina Spektor reading Elson’s “Theories of Everything” at the 2019 Universe in Verse and Janna reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity at the 2018 Universe in Verse, then join us for the livestream of the 2020 show for more beauty and consolation by calibration of perspective, featuring Neil Gaiman premiering another original poem, Patti Smith bringing Emily Dickinson to life, astronaut Leland Melvin reading Neruda’s love letter to Earth’s forests, and thirty other magnificent constellations of atoms celebrating the majesty of the universe and the irreplicable splendor of our Pale Blue Dot.

BP

Carl Jung on Creativity

Carl Jung on Creativity

The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple: everything. We bring everything we are and everything we have lived to every smallest creative act — every experience, every dream, every memory, every unremembered impression, every unconsciously absorbed influence. The great bewilderment is that we can only access a fraction of our own everythingness — most of it dwells in the recesses of the mind and the psyche, below the level of our surface awareness. Creativity is the periscope through which the unconscious looks out onto the world and renders what it sees. The rendering is what we call art, and it is as much a picture of the seer as of the seen.

In the middle of the world’s most destructive war, Carl Jung took up this elemental mystery of the creative spirit in a chapter of his 1939 book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (public library).

Living in that liminal epoch between the age of mysticism, when creativity was considered a divine gift superintended by muses and shamans, and the age of science, which aimed its forceps and fMRIs at regions of the brain hoping to locate the mind and microscopize the soul, Jung believed that “the human psyche is the womb of all the sciences and arts,” that the unconscious is “the necessary undercurrent of all creativity,” and that to understand how a work of art comes into being is to behold “the warp and weft of the mind in all its amazing intricacy.” Though rigorous and systematic in his approach, he was never seduced by the reductionism science often tends toward, including his own young science of psychology, once writing to a colleague:

The creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality… All other realities are derived from and indirectly revealed by it, actually with the artificial aid named science.

Carl Jung

Long before psychologist Jerome Bruner itemized the six pillars of creativity and neurologist Oliver Sacks contemplated its three essential elements, Jung foregrounds his perspective with a lucid caveat about the limitations of reason in comprehending the unconscious. In a sentiment evocative of Virginia Woolf’s astute observation that “one can’t write directly about the soul [because] looked at, it vanishes,” Jung writes:

The creative aspect of life, which finds its clearest expression in art, baffles all attempts at rational formation. Any reaction to stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped.

Jung approaches this acausal mystery of creativity by delineating two distinct modes of creation — the psychological and the visionary — each drawing on different aspects of existence and making different demands on us. He considers the first:

The psychological mode deals with materials drawn from the realm of human consciousness — for instance, with the lessons of life, with emotional shocks, the experience of passion and the crises of human destiny in general — all of which go to make up the conscious life of man, and his feeling life in particular. This material is psychically assimilated by the poet, raised from the commonplace to the level of poetic experience, and given an expression which forces the reader to greater clarity and depth of human insight by bringing fully into his consciousness what he ordinarily evades and overlooks or senses only with a feeling of dull discomfort. The poet’s work is an interpretation and illumination of the contents of consciousness, of the ineluctable experiences of human life with its eternally recurrent sorrow and joy. He leaves nothing over for the psychologist… Such themes go to make up the lot humankind; they repeat themselves millions of times… No obscurity whatever surrounds them, for they fully explain themselves.

Jung contrasts this with the visionary mode of creation, in which the conditions are reversed:

[In the visionary mode] the experience that furnishes the material for artistic expression is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind — that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding, and to which he is therefore in danger of succumbing. The value and the force of the experience are given by its enormity. It arises form timeless depths… that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension [which] makes quite other demands upon the powers of the artist than do the experiences of the foreground of life. These never rend the curtain that veils the cosmos; they never transcend the bounds of the humanly possible, and for this reason are readily shaped to the demands of art, no matter how great a shock to the individual they may be. But the primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince

While the psychological mode reflects and reckons with the realities of everyday life, the visionary mode is closer to the realm of dreams, which Jung considered “eclipses of consciousness” — those bewilderments that confuse our sense of reality and beckon interpretation, the way a great poem might, effecting “the frightening revelation of abysses that defy the human understanding.” He writes:

In dealing with the psychological mode of artistic creation, we never need ask ourselves what the material consists of or what it means. But this question forces itself upon us as soon as we come to the visionary mode of creation. We are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or even disgusted — and we demand commentaries and explanations. We are reminded in nothing of everyday, human life, but rather of dreams, nighttime fears and dark recesses of the mind that we sometimes sense with misgiving.

[…]

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: “You ought,” or: “This is the truth.” It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions.

Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud from David the Dreamer: His Book of Dreams, 1922.

The psychological mode of creation concerns itself with an overt rendering of human emotion as we know it and experience it, but the visionary reaches beyond the horizon of our self-knowledge and into those depths that only the tendrils of our intuitions every touch. Because what we find there may so alarm us, may so contradict our conscious self-image, we tend to doubt our discoveries and retreat behind “the armor of reason” to dismiss them. Jung writes:

Human passion falls within the sphere of conscious experience, while the subject of the vision lies beyond it. Through our feelings we experience the known, but our intuitions point to things that are unknown and hidden — that by their very nature are secret. If ever they become conscious, they are intentionally kept back and concealed, for which reason they have been regarded from earlier times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive.

Holding up the poet in that Baldwinian sense (“The poets (by which I mean all artists),” Baldwin wrote, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.”), Jung adds:

In our midst, the poet now and then catches sight of the figures that people the night-world — the spirits, demons and gods. He knows that a purposiveness out-reaching human ends is the life-giving secret for man; he has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the pleroma.

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

It is not only great artists, he observes, who can access those hidden places but also “the seers, prophets, leaders and enlighteners.” A year after science split the atom and a century before it began intimating that consciousness may be as old as the universe and fundamental to it, Jung writes:

Is there something more purposeful than electrons? Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and command our own souls? And is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon man and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more than personal vocation?

That more-than-personal aspect of visionary work is what Jung calls “the collective unconscious.” It is where his views began to radically diverge from those of Freud, who had once been his mentor. Opposing Freud’s conception of creativity as the product of purely personal forces and experiences, particularly traumatic experiences early in life and the subsequent neuroses they produce, Jung came to see such “reductive analysis” as “the most virulent poison imaginable for the attitude of the artist and the creative person in general.” Instead, he insisted that although all artistic creation draws on the personal experience of the artist — “the pregnant chaos” inside that defies “our picture of a well-ordered cosmos” — it is at bottom impersonal because its raw material is the collective unconscious:

Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living in that age. A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations… Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects — whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction.

The creative person, therefore, is always living with the paradox of being a person and being an impersonal channel for the mystery beyond. Jung writes:

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense — he is “collective man” — one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.

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

Although Jung detested the myth of the tortured genius — he called the idea that suffering is essential for creation “a failure and a bungling,” “part of the general lunacy of our time” — he recognized that there is inherent suffering in the creative life itself, for the psyche is sundered by this tension between the personal and the impersonal:

The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him — on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire…. A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire [because] each of us [is] endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy [and] a special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

[…]

Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, behind nothing more than a helpless observer.

From this arises a sobering antidote to the current moral fashion of renouncing works of art because the artist’s personal life has been found wanting by our current moral standards. Jung writes:

The secret of artistic creation and of the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to… that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual, and at which the weal or woe of a single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to but at most a his art — but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Jung adapted this chapter on creativity in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (public library) from an essay he had published a decade earlier in an obscure journal that had left him feeling defeated by the signal-to-noise ratio of the social media of his time: “These days the voice of the single individual is almost completely drowned out in the chaos of newspapers and the flood of books,” he had then lamented in a letter to a colleague, not knowing that he himself would become one of the great visionaries to touch the life of humankind for epochs to come — assurance for all the half-defeated visionaries languishing in some quiet Substack, their voices muffled by the noise of now but bound to bellow into the centuries.

Couple with a glimpse inside the creative process of great artists, then revisit Jung on how to navigate uncertainty, Mary Oliver on the “third self” of the creative life, and Gary Snyder on how to harness the creative force.

BP

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).

“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”

Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age (public library).

Simone de Beauvoir by Barbara Klemm. (Städel Museum)

Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:

Old age is not a necessary end to human life.

[…]

A particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals — women in ancient China, for instance — it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it… The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.

And indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.

Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, she cautions, is not a project — not something one can endeavor to do industriously, to ace. It is a fact — something to be met on its own terms, something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control for surrender.

Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett

She writes:

Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope and the artist’s task to liberate the present from the past.

BP

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