The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change

By Maria Popova

The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change

To be human is to suffer from a peculiar congenital blindness: On the precipice of any great change, we can see with terrifying clarity the familiar firm footing we stand to lose, but we fill the abyss of the unfamiliar before us with dread at the potential loss rather than jubilation over the potential gain of gladnesses and gratifications we fail to envision because we haven’t yet experienced them. Emerson knew this when he contemplated our resistance to change and the key to true personal growth: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Rilke, too, knew it when he considered how great upheavals bring us closer to ourselves: “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

When faced with the most transformative experiences, we are ill-equipped to even begin to imagine the nature and magnitude of the transformation — but we must again and again challenge ourselves to transcend this elemental failure of the imagination if we are to reap the rewards of any transformative experience.

In Transformative Experience (public library), philosopher L.A. Paul illustrates this paradox and examines how we are to unbind ourselves from it in a simple, elegant thought experiment: If you were offered the chance to become a vampire — painlessly and without inflicting pain on others, gaining incredible superpowers in exchange for relinquishing your human existence, with all your friends having made the leap and loving it — would you do it?

Art by Edward Gorey from his special illustrated edition of Dracula

Paul writes:

The trouble is, in this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have.

This hypothetical situation, she points out, is an apt analogue for our most important life decisions:

When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it — by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

Our minds, lest we forget, are prone to misleading us — just as people’s confidence in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence upon which those beliefs are founded, the cost-benefit estimations we make of an as-yet unknown state reflect the suppositions drawn from our current state and not the actual features of the potential and wholly unfamiliar state. When faced with a choice on one side of which lies life as we know it and on the other a transformative experience, we can’t imagine what life on the other side would be like — what we are currently missing — until after we’ve undergone the transformation. (Interestingly, an intuitive awareness of this is at the root of the psychology of our fear of missing out.) Paul writes:

You know that undergoing the experience will change what it is like for you to live your life, and perhaps even change what it is like to be you, deeply and fundamentally.

It seems, then, that there is an equivalent to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem about the limits of logic in consciousness and its vassal, the imagination.

In consonance with psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s memorable assertion that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” Paul adds:

In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the end, the best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

In a sentiment that calls to mind the deaf-blind Helen Keller’s touching account of her first experience of dance and affirms the value of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s pioneering invitation to imagine Earth from the perspective of nonhuman creatures, Paul writes:

Unless you’ve had the relevant experiences, what it is like to be a person or an animal very different from yourself is, in a certain fundamental way, inaccessible to you. It isn’t that you can’t imagine something in place of the experience you haven’t had. It’s that this act of imagining isn’t enough to let you know what it is really like to be an octopus, or to be a slave, or to be blind. You need to have the experience itself to know what it is really like.

This brings out another, somewhat less familiar fact about the relationship between knowledge and experience: just as knowledge about the experience of one individual can be inaccessible to another individual, what you can know about yourself at one time can be inaccessible to you at another time.

How to access that invaluable perspective — what Seamus Heaney called “your own secret knowledge” — is what Paul explores in the remainder of her immensely insightful Transformative Experience.

BP

How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty

By Maria Popova

How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore.” Unlike her staunchly secularized contemporaries, who shuddered to speak of the soul for fear of being seen as anti-intellectual, Woolf devoted her life to communicating from and with “all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul,” which she knew lives on a level deeper than the self to make us who we are. It is what is left to us and of us in those volcanic times of darkness and uncertainty. It is what rebuilds the world, within and without, and what always has. It is the world. We still use Kepler’s laws of planetary motion to land rovers on Mars, but we are yet to catch up to his model of the world as an ensouled body — a notion dating back to Plato, whose political precepts we still use and whose concept of anima mundi, or “world soul,” we are yet to heed.

One of Hildegard of Bingen’s enchanted ecologies

Epochs after Plato and Kepler and Woolf, trauma therapist Francis Weller offers a field guide to fortifying the soul in his essay collection In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty (public library). Two centuries after Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” Weller insists that a correct view of human nature must be rooted in a recognition of “our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi,” of “how fully our lives are entangled with one another, with the stand of oaks, the night herons, the marginalized, the brokenhearted.”

Observing that “soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy,” he writes:

We have clearly entered the Long Dark… It is the realm of soul — of whispers and dreams, mystery and imagination, death and ancestors. It is an essential territory, both inevitable and required, offering a form of soul gestation that may gradually give shape to our deeper lives, personally and communally. Certain things can happen only in this grotto of darkness. Think of the wild network of roots and microbes, mycelia, and minerals, making possible all that we see in the day world, or the extensive networks within our own bodies, bringing blood, nutrients, oxygen, and thought to our corporeal lives. All of it happening in the darkness. We must become fluent in the manners and ways of soul.

[…]

We are tumbling through a rough initiation. Radical alterations are occurring in our inner and outer landscapes. It is simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and stationery cards)

A century after Bertrand Russell called for “a largeness of contemplation” in his wonderful calibration of perspective amid the darkness of the world’s first global war, Weller writes:

It is a time to become immense.

To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world — a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty. Everything we need is here. We only need to remember the wider embrace of our belonging to woodlands and prairies, marshlands, and neighborhoods, to the old stories and the tender gestures of a friend. To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being — weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear — everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.

This immensity, Weller insists, is singularly called forth by precisely those periods of darkness and uncertainty we feel too small to fathom, to fight, to break through — the times when the order of the world as we know it has turned to chaos, out of which a new world can’t but be born. He writes:

When the ordinary fades, when the familiar rhythms and patterns of shared living erode, something is activated within the soul. Hidden invitations and initiations arise in a time of uncertainty. The soul recognizes the markers of descent — darkness, sorrow, anxiety — as requiring radical change. The conditions of trouble and uncertainty activate some profound movement toward alterations in the psychic landscape. These are the precise times when the possibility for shifts in the collective field occurs.

Couple In the Absence of the Ordinary, in the remainder of which Weller goes on to offer “ways to foster an intimacy with the world of soul and the soul of the world.” with this lighthouse for dark times, then revisit Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through difficult times and Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser’s vision for the evolution of our civilizational consciousness.

BP

The Science of Waiting and the Art of Delay

By Maria Popova

“We never live; we are always in the expectation of living,” Voltaire famously lamented. This tension between anticipation and impatience, indeed, seems central to the human condition. In Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (public library), former investment banker turned writer and law educator Frank Partnoy shines a spotlight on it by bringing together four previously examined grand questions — what is time, how we decide, why we procrastinate, and what it means to be human — through hundreds of scientific studies and interviews with prominent thinkers across psychology, behavioral economics, philosophy, social science, anthropology, and more. What emerges is an important, if counterintuitive, perspective on delay in a culture obsessed with efficiency, speediness, and productivity that bleeds into the hasty and the rash.

Partnoy observes:

For centuries, leading thinkers …. have told us not to jump to firm conclusions about the unknown. Yet today we jump faster and more frequently to firm conclusions. We like to believe there is wisdom in our snap decisions, and sometimes there is. But true wisdom and judgment come from understanding our limitations when it comes to thinking about the future. This is why it is so important for us to think about the relevant time period of our decisions and then ask what is the maximum amount of time we can take within that period to observe and process information about possible outcomes. Asking questions about timing is crucial, even if we cannot arrive at an answer as specific as ’42.’

[ … ]

Thinking about the role of delay is a profound and fundamental part of being human. Questions about delay are existential: the amount of time we take to reflect on decisions will define who we are. Is our mission simply to be another animal, responding to whatever stimulations we encounter? Or are we here for something more?

Our ability to think about delay is a central part of the human condition. It is a gift, a tool we can use to examine our lives. Life might be a race against time, but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires pause. The converse of Socrates’s famous admonition is that the examined life just might be worth living.

BP

Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup

By Maria Popova

“A friend,” wrote the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue in his beautiful meditation on the Ancient Celtic notion of anam cara, “awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.” But what happens when a friendship ceases to magnify your spirit and instead demands that you be a smaller version of yourself? While David Whyte is absolutely right in that “all friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness,” there comes a point past which granting forgiveness yet again for the same hurtful behavior becomes not an act of moral strength but one of moral weakness — an exercise in self-mutilation in the unwillingness to relinquish what has metastasized into a draining or even abusive relationship.

That’s what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) confronted in his mid-thirties as his friendship with George Albee, another young writer, grew increasingly strained by Albee’s professional jealousy. Things came to a head in early 1938 when a young woman Steinbeck had known since childhood accused him of getting her pregnant; although the accusation appears false by biographical accounts, Steinbeck found himself in the midst of a maelstrom he described as one of the most trying times of his life.

When he was most in need of support from his loved ones, he learned that Albee had been speaking ill of him instead of sticking up for him. The disloyalty wounded Steinbeck deeply and he distanced himself from his former friend. Albee eventually sensed the cooling of the relationship and pressed for an answer.

In a masterwork of the friend breakup, found in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public library) — which also gave us the Nobel laureate’s terrific advice on falling in love in a missive to his teenage son — Steinbeck finally confronts Albee:

Dear George:

The reason for your suspicion is well founded. This has been a difficult and unpleasant time. There has been nothing good about it. In this time my friends have rallied around, all except you. Every time there has been a possibility of putting a bad construction on anything I have done, you have put such a construction.

Some kind friend has told me about it every time you have stabbed me in the back and that whether I wanted to know it or not. I didn’t want to know it really. If such things had been reported as coming from more than one person it would be easy to discount the whole thing but there has been only one source. Now I know that such things grow out of an unhappiness in you and for a long time I was able to reason so and to keep on terms of some kind of amicability. But gradually I found I didn’t trust you at all, and when I knew that then I couldn’t be around you any more. It became obvious that anything I said or did in your presence or wrote to you would be warped viciously and repeated and then the repetition was repeated to me and the thing was just too damned painful. I tried to sidestep, just to fade out of your picture. But that doesn’t work either.

I’d like to be friends with you, George, but I can’t if I have to wear a mail shirt the whole time. I wish to God your unhappiness could find some other outlet. But I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing. This has been the most difficult time in my life.

I’ve needed help and trust and the benefit of the doubt, because I’ve tried to beat the system which destroys every writer, and from you have come only wounds and kicks in the face. And that is the reason and I think you always knew it was the reason.

john

Apparently unsatisfied with having made the point too implicitly, Steinbeck sums it up in an explicit postscript:

And now if you want to quarrel, it will at least be an honest quarrel and not boudoir pin pricking.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Let’s Be Enemies by Janice May Udry

Some days later, still stewing over the situation, Steinbeck writes to his literary agent and lifelong friend Elizabeth Otis:

Unpleasant thing. I finally broke open the thing with George. At least now if he wants to quarrel it won’t be lady quarreling. I feel better about that, but I don’t like such things at all.

A few weeks later, Steinbeck writes in his diary in lamenting the dark side of his success:

People I liked have changed… I’m tired of the struggle against all the forces that this miserable success has brought against me.

When asked about the fallout, Richard Albee, George’s brother, reflects:

You may be sure that the basic cause was artistic jealousy, and of course it was on the part of George, not John.

Indeed, few things erode the mutual dignity of a friendship more effectively than the petty jealousies of competitiveness. But just a few weeks later, in a testament to Kierkegaard’s observation that creative work is the only antidote to the embitterment of such petty jealousies, Steinbeck embarked upon the greatest creative labor of his life, the fruits of which earned him his first Pulitzer Prize the following year and became the cornerstone of his Nobel Prize two decades later.

Complement Steinbeck: A Life in Letters — which is thoroughly satisfying in its totality, full of the beloved writer’s wisdom on literature and life — with Steinbeck on creative integrity, discipline and self-doubt, the joy of writing by hand, and his prophetic dream about how the commercial media machine is killing creative culture, then revisit Andrew Sullivan on why true friendship can be a greater gift than romantic love.

BP

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