The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Power of a Thin Skin

By Maria Popova

The Power of a Thin Skin

Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The boundary is so difficult to discern because, when all the stories fall away, there is no boundary — only a fluid, permeable membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and where we belong. Lynn Margulis captured this in ecological and evolutionary terms when she observed that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.” Dr. King captured the sociological equivalent in his insistence that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Whitman captured its most elemental and most existential dimensions in that immortal line: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.

How to unblind ourselves to this cosmos of connection and its attendant forcefield of consequence is what Jenn Shapland explores in her essay collection Thin Skin (public library) — “a corporeal account of how thin the membrane is between each of us and one another, between each of us and the world outside,” fomented by the medical reality of her epidermis missing a layer: a diagnosis of literally thin skin.

Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse.

With an eye to the embodied metaphor of her condition, Shapland writes:

There is no “outside”… The world is a part of our cellular makeup… we impact it with every tiny choice we make.

[…]

I began to see what I now think of as literalized metaphors for my entanglement, my complicity, all over my life: in my dermatological diagnosis of “thin skin,” in my friends’ having babies as the world burned, in the crystals cropping up everywhere to heal us of something, in my own sense of vulnerability and my desire to feel safe. I began to question the idea of myself as a being in need of protection, indeed as something that could be protected. Nothing can protect us… It struck me as I wrote that I was utterly vulnerable to every other person, every other creature on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me… I began to seek other ways of understanding the self that might be more useful than this shivering, weak thing we must shore up against the world.

And yet out of that singular vulnerability comes a singular strength — liberated from the standard boundaries between self and world, which serve as culture’s safety valve constricting what is possible and permissible, one is free to imagine “alternatives to our limited narratives about family, love, labor, longing, pleasure, safety, and legacy.” A century after D.H. Lawrence reverenced the strength of sensitivity, Shapland writes:

To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.

What she notices above all are the connections between things, the Rube Goldberg machine of consequences that binds past and future, self and other, here and everywhere else. She writes about Los Alamos and Rachel Carson, about the traps of parenthood and the paradoxes of self-compassion, about mending clothes and mending hearts. Emerging from the essays is a reminder, both haunting and assuring, that in this increasingly fractured and fragmented world, life remains defiantly indivisible.

Art by Violeta Lópiz from At the Drop of a Cat

There is power in such porousness — a heightened ability to question the structures that make for fragmentation, perhaps none more tyrannical than the idea that the nuclear family is the optimal unit of belonging and connection, an idea rooted in our touching yearning for immortality despite our creaturely finitude: passing on our genes and values as a way of perpetuating ourselves beyond our mortal limits. Watching her friends freeze their eggs and go through rounds of IVF, Shapland reflects:

If we extend our idea of family beyond the individual to the wider world of creatures and ecosystems, we can begin to ask what we want for them. From them. We can begin to see ourselves in relation. Acknowledging and reckoning with death — with the limit on our existence, with the fact that we are temporary — can reframe what it means to live. What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to support, maintain, in the limited time we are here?

A beautiful answer comes from Shapland’s conversation with Marian Naranjo — a Native antinuclear activist from Santa Clara Pueblo, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of the atomic bomb. With an eye to the ancestral knowledge of how to live in peace and harmony — knowledge that has suffered the erasures of colonialism and capitalism — Naranjo envisions a new epoch of remembering what we have forgotten: how to be caretakers of connection. Sitting across from Shapland in the embodied space of mutuality, she echoes Ursula K. Le Guin’s passionate case for the transformative power of real human conversation and reflects:

That’s the next circle, that circle of balance. Where we do put back our heaven and earth, our heaven back on earth. Get it back. How do we do that? It’s this, it’s talking face-to-face. It’s doing more of this.

But somewhere along the arc of so-called progress, we forgot what indigenous cultures have known for millennia: that truth is a tapestry, no single thread of which can survive the wear and tear of reality in isolation, the reality against which truth must be continually tested in order to be true. This damaging isolationism haunts even the history of our understanding of the basic building blocks of life — the chemical elements that compose it, or discompose it.

The Radium Dance, 1904.

With an eye to the discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie’s epochal work on radium, Shapland writes:

Soon after its discovery, radium became a multimillion-dollar business. For four decades, you could buy rejuvenating radium skin cream, lipstick, tea, bath salts, hair growth tonic, “a bag containing radium worn near the scrotum” that “was said to restore virility.” There was radium toothpaste to boost whitening. Radium therapy, called Curietherapy in France, began to be used to treat cancer. It was first inserted by fifty needles into breast tissue, or by radon “seeds” that caused serious reactions. There existed a “vaginal radium bomb consisting of a lead sphere supported by a rod for insertion” for cancer treatment. Marie and her daughter Irene took a radiological car to the front in World War I to X-ray soldiers. Later, she supplied radium bulbs to the French health service to treat the military and civilian wounded and sick with radium therapy.

The discovery of radioactivity is a story of willful ignorance, of knowing but longing not to know, pretending not to know, how powerful and damaging it was. Scientists and salespeople alike believed in its power to cure, to heal. Radium was damaging enough to kill cancer, to burn Pierre’s skin through the glass vial in his vest pocket, but somehow not thought to be damaging enough to kill the scientists handling it all day, the people brushing their teeth with it. Marie kept a vial on her nightstand to bask in its glow as she slept. She called it her child.

[…]

This scientific refusal to believe what is obvious because it cannot be proven, because it is technically uncertain, accompanies our understanding of toxic substances to this day.

This blindness to connection, causality, and the consequences of radioactivity is hardly surprising: To achieve what she achieved, against the odds of her time and place, Marie Curie had to be thick-skinned. Perhaps a thinner skin, with its attendant power of seeing the permeability and interdependence of things, would have saved her life, would have spared her the tragedy Adrienne Rich captured so poignantly in the final words of her magnificent tribute to Curie:

She died    a famous woman    denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

Complement with Marie Howe’s poem “Singularity” — a stunning antidote to our illusion of separateness — and the young poet Marissa Davis’s inspired echo of it, serenading our elemental bond with nature and each other.

BP

Nature and Creativity: The Science of “Soft Fascination” and How the Natural World Resets the Brain

By Maria Popova

Nature and Creativity: The Science of “Soft Fascination” and How the Natural World Resets the Brain

“In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean,” Thoreau wrote in contemplating nature as a form of prayer — a clarifying force for the mind and a purifying force for the spirit, a lever for opening up the psyche’s civilization-contracted pinhole of concerns.

A generation later, in a different corner of Massachusetts, William James pioneered the study of attention with his then-radical (at least to the Western mind) declamation: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

James distinguished between two kinds of attention: “voluntary,” in which we willfully aim our focus at a particular object or activity with concerted effort, and “passive,” which approximates the Eastern notion of mindfulness — an effortless noticing of sensations and phenomena as they naturally arise within and around us, our focus drifting by its own accord from one stimulus to another as they emerge. James listed this “passivity” as one of the four qualities of mystical experiences. But it is also the most direct valve between the mystical and the mundane — the type of attention that places us in our most creative states.

Aurora Borealis, observed March 1, 1872, 9:25 P.M.
One of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s pioneering astronomical paintings. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

In the epochs since James, scientists have termed this effortless attention “soft fascination.” It is at the root of our mightiest antidote to depression and our most generative mindsets, and it comes to us — or we to it — most readily in nature.

Whitman knew this as he was recovering from a paralytic stroke and observing how infallibly nature can “bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” He intuited what science has since measurably demonstrated — that these affinities hold the key to what is brightest and most creative in us, for they are at bottom affinities with the freest parts of ourselves.

In nature, we go unfettered from the world’s illusory urgencies that so easily hijack the everyday mind and syphon our attention away from its best creative contribution to that very world and its needs. When we surrender to “soft fascination,” we are not running from the world but ambling back to ourselves and our untrammeled multitudes, free to encounter parts of the mind we rarely access, free to acquaint different parts with one another so that entirely novel connections emerge.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English editionof Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Annie Murphy Paul devotes a portion of The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (public library) — her wonderful inquiry into the art-science of thinking with the whole world — to the science of this peculiar and singularly fertile state of mind, into which communion with the non-human world deposits us:

Scientists theorize that the “soft fascination” evoked by natural scenes engages what’s known as the brain’s “default mode network.” When this network is activated, we enter a loose associative state in which we’re not focused on any one particular task but are receptive to unexpected connections and insights. In nature, few decisions and choices are demanded of us, granting our minds the freedom to follow our thoughts wherever they lead. At the same time, nature is pleasantly diverting, in a fashion that lifts our mood without occupying all our mental powers; such positive emotion in turn leads us to think more expansively and open-mindedly. In the space that is thus made available, currently active thoughts can mingle with the deep stores of memories, emotions, and ideas already present in the brain, generating inspired collisions.

Zarathustra and His Friends by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

“Soft fascination” has an active counterpart in another state we experience most readily in nature: awe — that ultimate instrument of unselfing.

Citing the work of the Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner — our epoch’s William James of awe — Paul writes:

[Keltner] calls it an emotion “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear.”

One of the pleasurably fearsome things about awe is the radically new perspective it introduces. Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit, and we must work to accommodate the new information that is streaming in from the environment.

Awe strikes the human animal indiscriminately of its age or era, its biometrics or identities. Its interleaving of pleasure and fear is at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s arresting account of a total solar eclipse, at the heart of the young Hans Christian Andersen’s climb of Vesuvius during an eruption, at the heart of the middle-aged Rachel Carson’s quiet, rapturous encounter with the moonlit tide, at the heart of what impelled Rockwell Kent toward “the cruel Northern sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins,” at the heart of “the overview effect” that staggers astronauts in orbit.

Total eclipse of the sun, observed July 29, 1878, at Creston, Wyoming Territory
Total eclipse of the sun by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Paul writes:

The experience of awe, Keltner and other researchers have found, prompts a predictable series of psychological changes. We become less reliant on preconceived notions and stereotypes. We become more curious and open-minded. And we become more willing to revise and update our mental “schemas”: the templates we use to understand ourselves and the world. The experience of awe has been called “a reset button” for the human brain. But we can’t generate a feeling of awe, and its associated processes, all on our own; we have to venture out into the world, and find something bigger than ourselves, in order to experience this kind of internal change.

North Wind by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

It is hardly surprising that in such states of awe, even the most nonreligious among us find the closest thing to spirituality. Without this reset button, how would we ever look at a dandelion and see the meaning of life?

BP

20 Ways of Surfacing from the Blues: Sydney Smith’s 200-year-old Strategies for Raising Low Spirits in a Letter of Advice to a 13-year-old Girl

By Maria Popova

Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service opened with a reflection by her partner Alice — whose near-loss inspired one of the greatest poems ever written — that included what Elizabeth had always told her was “the only sensible advice she ever heard,” from a man she never met — one of her two favorite authors.

Sydney Smith

By the time a friend’s teenage daughter begged his advice on how to cope with a visitation of the darkness we now call depression, the Anglican clergyman Sydney Smith (June 3, 1771–February 22, 1845) had established himself as one of England’s wisest and wittiest writers.

It is no small thing that a famous man of letters took time to comfort a young woman born into a world in which she would be denied education, that elemental torchlight for the mind: Epochs ahead of his time, Smith believed that knowledge is power and resented “the ignorance in which women are kept” by men “exclaiming against every species of power, because it is connected with danger.” But he also knew that the danger within can often outmenace the danger without. “The truly happy man,” he believed, “is he, who has early discovered, that he carries within his own bosom his worst enemies.” Although he was born into the preferred chromosomal arrangement and social station, Smith himself had grown up with the darkness as his constant companion as he helplessly watched his mother agonize with epilepsy.

In the final year of his fifties, Smith offered the 13-year-old girl his tips for combating the inner darkness — perhaps the advice he wished he had received when he was her age — entwining the playful and the poignant, the ironic and the earnest. Two centuries ahead of what modern science knows about nature and the default mode network of the brain, he urged her to spend time outdoors. Against the conventions of Victorian society, which made an art of repression and dissociation, he advocated for expressing feelings openly and unselfconsciously. In a country whose national sport remains self-deprecation, he encouraged her to be kind to herself. Even his signature — written in the style of Victorian epistolary etiquette — is numbered as one of his twenty prescriptions, this subtle insistence that reciprocity is part of what keeps us alive through the darkness, that to reach out for a friend and have them reach back is an act of light.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days — a book of cards. Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards. More divinations here.

The letter, published in the 1956 volume Selected writings of Sydney Smith (public library) edited by W.H. Auden, reads:

Feb. 16th, 1820

Dear Georgiana,

Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have — so I feel for you. Here are my prescriptions.

  1. Live as well as you dare.
  2. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold.
  3. Amusing books.
  4. Short views of human life — not further than dinner or tea.
  5. Be as busy as you can.
  6. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
  7. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
  8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely — they are always worse for dignified concealment.
  9. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
  10. Compare your lot with that of other people.
  11. Don’t expect too much from human life — a sorry business at the best.
  12. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and every thing likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.
  13. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
  14. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
  15. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant.
  16. Struggle by little and little against idleness.
  17. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
  18. Keep good blazing fires.
  19. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
  20. Believe me, dear Georgiana, your devoted servant, Sydney Smith

    But Smith’s mightiest antidote to unhappiness was something far simpler yet more difficult than all these pragmatisms combined.

    In his popular sermons, published in two volumes a decade earlier, he had observed that “gratuitous happiness is never conceded to man at any period of life,” but we can cultivate it with our habits of being — though, paradoxically, the more we strive for it, the more it eludes us. “In seeking to be more than righteous,” he wrote, “we become less [in our] rash vows, over-strained, and heated resolutions, needless self-affliction, dread of happiness, and all that innumerable train of evils.” Over and over, he admonished against the grandiosity with which we approach the notion, the dream, the hallucination of happiness: “The causes of great happiness, and misery, rarely occur,” he wrote, but it is the “little circumstances, and events that appear trifling, singly considered, makeup the sum of human enjoyment, or misery.” Over and over, he insisted that the “great ingredient for the increase of happiness, and the proper use of life, is the cultivation of kindness and benevolence”; that mercy — for others, for the world, and perhaps for ourselves — is the only path to “rapturous happiness.”

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

    This elemental truth is contoured most clearly by the negative space around it as we look back on our own lives. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” George Saunders would rue two centuries later in his tender meditation on kindness. In the rearview mirror, Smith knew, we come to realize “that the greatest misfortune we have suffered, is the sum total of useless vexation inflicted on ourselves, and others” by failing to incline toward benevolence. To be seen as benevolent — by others, but especially in the mirror of our own conscience — “is a firm barrier against the waves of chance, a lasting, solid happiness, which we bear about us, like strength, and health.”

    Two hundred years hence, in a culture that has trained us to prefer being right over being kind, a culture perhaps not coincidentally menaced by a pervasive undercurrent of melancholy, Smith’s perspective is a lovely reminder that our greatest antidote to helplessness is always to help someone, that our strongest stay against despair is the simple knowledge that kindness is always within reach, that it is not a whim of our ethics but our evolutionary inheritance.

    BP

    Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife

    By Maria Popova

    Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife

    Few people have enchanted the popular imagination with science more powerfully and lastingly than physicist Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988) — the “Great Explainer” with the uncommon gift for bridging the essence of science with the most human and humane dimensions of life.

    Several months after Feynman’s death, while working on what would become Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (public library) — the masterly biography plumbing the wellspring of Feynman’s genius — James Gleick discovered something of arresting strangeness and splendor.

    “My heart stopped,” Gleick tells me. “I have never had an experience like that as a biographer, before or since.”

    In a mass of unread papers sent to him by Feynman’s widow, Gweneth, Gleick found a letter that discomposed his most central understanding of Feynman’s character. A generation after computing pioneer Alan Turing tussled with the binary code of body and spirit in the wake of loss, Feynman — a scientist perhaps uncommonly romantic yet resolutely rational and unsentimental in his reverence for the indomitable laws of physics that tend toward decay — penned a remarkable letter to a physical nonentity that was, for the future Nobel-winning physicist, the locus of an irrepressible metaphysical reality.

    Richard Feynman as a youth

    In high school, the teenage Richard spent summers at the beach in his native Far Rockaway. There, he grew besotted with a striking girl named Arline — a girl he knew he would marry. Both complement and counterpoint to his own nature, Arline met Richard’s inclination for science with ardor for philosophy and art. (The art class he took just to be near her would lay the foundation for his little-known, lifelong passion for drawing.) By his junior year, Richard proposed. Arline accepted. With the eyes of young love, they peered into a shared future of infinite possibility for bliss.

    Richard and Arline, 1940s

    But they were abruptly grounded when a mysterious malady began afflicting Arline with inexplicable symptoms — a lump would appear and disappear on her neck, fevers would roil over her with no apparent cause. Eventually, she was hospitalized for what was believed to be typhoid.

    Gleick writes:

    Feynman began to glimpse the special powerlessness that medical uncertainty can inflict on a scientific person. He had come to believe that the scientific way of thinking brought a measure of calmness and control in difficult situations — but not now.

    Just as Feynman began bombarding the doctors with questions that steered them toward a closer approximation of the scientific method, Arline began to recover just as mysteriously and unpredictably as she had fallen ill. But the respite was only temporary. The symptoms returned, still shorn of a concrete explanation but now unambiguously pointing toward the terminal — a prognosis Arline’s doctors kept from her. Richard refused to go along with the deception — he and Arline had promised each other to face life with unremitting truthfulness — but he was forced to calibrate his commitment to circumstance.

    Gleick writes:

    His parents, Arline’s parents, and the doctors all urged him not to be so cruel as to tell a young woman she was dying. His sister, Joan, sobbing, told him he was stubborn and heartless. He broke down and bowed to tradition. In her room at Farmingdale Hospital, with her parents at her side, he confirmed that she had glandular fever. Meanwhile, he started carrying around a letter — a “goodbye love letter,” as he called it — that he planned to give her when she discovered the truth. He was sure she would never forgive the unforgivable lie.

    He did not have long to wait. Soon after Arline returned home from the hospital she crept to the top of the stairs and overheard her mother weeping with a neighbor down in the kitchen. When she confronted Richard — his letter snug in his pocket — he told her the truth, handed her the letter, and asked her to marry him.

    Arline and Richard, 1940s

    Marriage, however, proved to be a towering practical problem — Princeton, where Feynman was now pursuing a Ph.D., threatened to withdraw the fellowships funding his graduate studies if he were to wed, for the university considered the emotional and pragmatic responsibilities of marriage a grave threat to academic discipline.

    Just as Feynman began considering leaving Princeton, a diagnosis detonated the situation — Arline had contracted a rare form of tuberculosis, most likely from unpasteurized milk.

    At first, Feynman was relieved that the grim alternative options of Hodgkin’s disease and incurable cancers like lymphoma had been ruled out. But he was underestimating, or perhaps misunderstanding, the gravity of tuberculosis — the very disease which had taken the love of Alan Turing’s life and which, during its two-century heyday, had claimed more lives around the globe than any other malady and all wars combined. At the time of Arline’s diagnosis in 1941, immunology was in its infancy, the antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections practically nonexistent, and the first successful medical application of penicillin a year away. Tuberculosis was a death sentence, even if it was a slow death with intervals of remission — a fact Richard and Arline faced with an ambivalent mix of brave lucidity and hope against hope.

    Meanwhile, Richard’s parents met the prospect of his marriage with bristling dread. His mother, who believed he was marrying Arline out of pity rather than love, admonished him that he would be putting his health and his very life in danger, and coldly worried about how the stigma attached to tuberculosis would impact her brilliant young son’s reputation. “I was surprised to learn such a marriage is not unlawful,” she scoffed unfeelingly. “It ought to be.”

    But Richard was buoyed by love — a love so large and luminous that he found himself singing aloud one day as he was arranging Arline’s transfer to a sanatorium. Determined to go through with the wedding, he wrote to his beloved:

    I guess maybe it is like rolling off of a log — my heart is filled again & I’m choked with emotions — and love is so good & powerful — it’s worth preserving — I know nothing can separate us — we’ve stood the tests of time and our love is as glorious now as the day it was born — dearest riches have never made people great but love does it every day — we’re not little people — we’re giants … I know we both have a future ahead of us — with a world of happiness — now & forever.

    On June 29, 1942, they promised each other eternity.

    Richard and Arline on their wedding day

    Gleick writes:

    He borrowed a station wagon from a Princeton friend, outfitted it with mattresses for the journey, and picked up Arline in Cedarhurst. She walked down her father’s hand-poured concrete driveway wearing a white dress. They crossed New York Harbor on the Staten Island ferry — their honeymoon ship. They married in a city office on Staten Island, in the presence of neither family nor friends, their only witnesses two strangers called in from the next room. Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline’s new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

    Meanwhile, WWII was reaching its crescendo of destruction, dragging America into the belly of death with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now one of the nation’s most promising physicists, Feynman was recruited to work on what would become the Manhattan Project and soon joined the secret laboratory in Los Alamos.

    Feynman’s Los Alamos badge

    Arline entered the nearby Albuquerque sanatorium, from where she wrote him letters in code — for the sheer fun of it, because she knew how he cherished puzzles, but the correspondence alarmed the military censors at the laboratory’s Intelligence Office. Tasked with abating any breaches to the secrecy of the operation, they cautioned Feynman that coded messages were against the rules and demanded that his wife include a key in each letter to help them decipher it. This only amplified Arline’s sense of fun — she began cutting holes into her letters, covering passages with ink, and even mail-ordered a jigsaw puzzle kit with which to cut up the pages and completely confound the agents.

    But the levity masked the underlying darkness which Richard and Arline tried so desperately to evade — Arline was dying. As her body failed, he steadied himself to her spirit:

    You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a reservoir for your strength — without you I would be empty and weak… I find it much harder these days to write these things to you.

    In every single letter, he told her that he loved her. “I have a serious affliction: loving you forever,” he wrote.

    Richard and Arline at the Albuquerque sanatorium

    In early 1945, two and a half years into their marriage, Richard and Arline made love for the first time. He had been too afraid of harming her frail health somehow, she too afraid of infecting him with the deadly bacterium consuming her. But Arline insisted that this pent up desire could no longer be contained and assured Richard that this would only bring them closer — to each other, and to the life they had so lovingly dreamt up for themselves:

    I’ll always be your sweetheart & first love — besides a devoted wife — we’ll be proud parents too… I am proud of you always Richard –[you are] a good husband, and lover, & well, coach, I’ll show you what I mean Sunday.

    But heightened as their hopes were by this new dimension of shared experience, Arline’s health continued to plummet. Her weight dropped to eighty-four pounds. Exasperated by the helplessness of medicine, which Feynman had come to see not as a manifestation but as a mutilation of the scientific method, he invested all hope in an experimental drug made of mold growths. “Keep hanging on,” he exhorted Arline. “Nothing is certain. We lead a charmed life.” She began spitting blood.

    At twenty-seven, on the precipice of a brilliant scientific career, he was terminally in love.

    On June 16, 1945, while working at the computing room at Los Alamos, Feynman received a call from the sanatorium that Arline was dying. He borrowed a colleague’s car and sped to the hospital, where he found her immobile, her eyes barely tracing his movement. Early in his scientific career, he had been animated by the nature of time. Now, hours stretched and contracted as he sat at her deathbed, until one last small breath tolled the end at 9:21PM.

    The wake of loss has a way of tranquilizing grief with the pressing demands of practical arrangements — a tranquilizer we take willingly, almost gratefully. The following morning, Feynman arranged for his beloved’s cremation, methodically collected her personal belongings, and on the final page of the small spiral notebook in which she recorded her symptoms he wrote with scientific remove: “June 16 — Death.”

    And so we arrive at Gleick’s improbable discovery in that box of letters — improbable because of the extreme rationality with which Feynman hedged against even the slightest intimation of metaphysical conjectures untestable by science and unprovable by reason. During his courtship of Arline, he had been vexed by her enthusiasm for Descartes, whose “proof” of God’s perfection he found intellectually lazy and unbefitting of Descartes’s reputation as a champion of reason. He had impishly countered Arline’s insistence that there are two sides to everything by cutting a piece of paper and half-twisting it into a Möbius strip, the ends pasted together to render a surface with just one side.

    Everything that appeared mystical, Feynman believed, was simply an insufficiently explained mystery with a physical answer not yet found. Even Arline’s dying hour had offered testing ground for conviction. Puzzlingly, the clock in the room had stopped at exactly 9:21PM — the time of death. Aware of how this bizarre occurrence could foment the mystical imagination in unscientific minds, Feynman reasoned for an explanation. Remembering that he had repaired the clock multiple times over the course of Arline’s stay at the sanatorium, he realized that the instrument’s unwieldy mechanism must have choked when the nurse picked it up in the low evening light to see and record the time.

    How astonishing and how touchingly human, then, that Feynman penned the letter Gleick found in the box forty-two years later — a letter he wrote to Arline in October of 1946, 488 days after her death:

    D’Arline,

    I adore you, sweetheart.

    I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

    It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.

    But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

    I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

    When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

    I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

    My darling wife, I do adore you.

    I love my wife. My wife is dead.

    Rich.

    And then, with the sole defibrillator for heartache we have — humor — Feynman adds:

    PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.

    Complement this particular portion of the altogether magnificent Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman with Rachel Carson’s stunning deathbed farewell to her beloved and Seneca on resilience in the face of loss, then revisit Feynman on science and religion and the meaning of life.

    BP

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