The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother

By Maria Popova

The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother

One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.

It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact, and a life’s triumph to accept it not with bitterness but with love.

How to make that liberating shift of perspective is what the playwright, suffragist, and psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell (September 14, 1883–March 6, 1979) considers in a passage from her 1968 autobiography The Measure of My Days (public library).

Kinship by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

She writes:

A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Kahlil Gibran’s insight into the delicate balance of intimacy and independence essential for romantic love — which is always an echo of our formative attachments — she adds:

It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from Crescendo

With a wary eye to the brunt of parental expectation under which all children live, well into adulthood, she writes:

No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.

Perhaps that glimpse is what Maurice Sendak meant when he observed that life is largely a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”

Complement with Kahlil Gibran’s advice on children, the pioneering psychologist Donald Winnicott on the mother’s contribution to society, and Alison Bechdel’s superb Winnicott-inspired Are You My Mother?, then savor My Mother’s Eyes — a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love — and Mary Gaitskill’s poignant advice on how to move through life when your parents are dying.

BP

How to Handle Provocation: Bertrand Russell’s Remarkable Response to a Fascist

By Maria Popova

How to Handle Provocation: Bertrand Russell’s Remarkable Response to a Fascist

“To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high,” the Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf wrote in his timeless, increasingly timely reflection on how to disagree. It is in times as divisive as ours and as sundered by conflicting perspectives that the mastery of such intelligent, kind-hearted, and considered disagreement emerges as a supreme art of living. To respond in a reactive culture, to marry firm moral conviction with a spirit of goodwill and the porousness necessary for appraising other perspectives in order to evolve one’s own, is a Herculean feat of character.

And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so antithetical to one’s own that the collision is bound to shatter one’s sanity rather than build common ground. To recognize those rare instances and choose to stand down is an act of moral courage rather than moral weakness, and no one has articulated that difficult courage with more intellectual elegance and moral grace than the great English philosopher Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) — a formidable intellect animated by an extraordinary generosity of spirit, awarded the Nobel Prize for “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

bertrandrussell3
Bertrand Russell

In January of 1962, Russell received a series of letters from an unlikely correspondent — Sir Oswald Mosley, who had founded the British Union of Fascists thirty years earlier. Mosley was inviting — or, rather, provoking — Russell to engage in a debate, in which he could persuade the moral philosopher of the merits of fascism. Russell’s considered and morally unflinching response, included in Ronald Clark’s excellent biography The Life of Bertrand Russell (public library), stands as a manifesto for the right not to engage in a debate with a counterpart so morally misaligned with oneself as to guarantee not only the self-defeating futility of such engagement but its detrimental cost to one’s own sanity.

Shortly before his 90th birthday, Russell writes:

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

The Life of Bertrand Russell remains an invaluable portrait of one of the greatest intellects and largest spirits our civilization has produced. Complement this particular fragment with Blaise Pascal on how to change minds, Daniel Dennett on how to criticize with kindness, and Susan Sontag on the three steps to refuting any argument, then revisit Russell on freedom of thought, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, the nature of time, and the four motives driving all human behavior.

BP

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

By Maria Popova

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her short, stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives.

To become precious — that is the work of love, the task of love, the great reward of love. The recompense of death. The human miracle that makes the transience of life not only bearable but beautiful.

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late. We write poems and pop songs about our self-made tragedy — “The art of losing isn’t hard to master“; “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” — and we go on living it.

Eight centuries before Mueller lived and died, an impassioned invitation to transcend our self-made tragedy took shape in another short, stunning poem by another poet of uncommon contact with the deepest strata of life-truth: Rumi (September 30, 1207–December 17, 1273), who believed that you must “gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.” Rumi, ancient and eternal. Magnetic in his eloquent devotion and his soulful intelligence. Majestic in his whirling silk robe and his defiant disdain for his culture’s worship of status. Volcanic with poetry.

Rumi (detail from a 16th-century Persian illuminated manuscript, Morgan Library & Museum)

In his sixty-six years, Rumi composed nearly sixty-six thousand verses, animated by an ecstatic devotion to living more fully and loving more deeply. Having mastered the mathematical musicality of the quatrain, he became a virtuoso of the ghazal with its series of couplets, each invoking a different poetic image, each crowned with the same refrain — a kind of kinetic sculpture of surprise, rapturous with rhythm.

A dazzling selection of his poetry, including some never previously alive in English, appears in Gold (public library), newly translated and inspirited by poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori.

Reflecting on the creative challenge of invoking the poetic truth of one epoch and culture into another, she writes:

The languages of Farsi and English possess quite different poetic resources and habits. In English, it is impossible to reproduce the rich interplay of sound and rhyme (internal as well as terminal) and the wordplay that characterize and even drive Rumi’s poems. Meanwhile, the tropes, abstractions, and hyperbole that are so abundant in Persian poetry contrast with the spareness and concreteness characteristic of poetry in English, especially in the modern tradition. I have sought to honor the demands of contemporary American poetry and conjure its music while, I hope, carrying over the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poetry… I have chosen poems that seem to me beautiful, meaningful, and central to Rumi’s vision, poems that I felt I could successfully translate and that speak to our times.

Haleh Liza Gafori

What emerges is a testament to the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lovely notion of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original.”

Here is Haleh Liza Gafori reading for us her translation of Rumi’s lens-clearing invitation to step beyond our self-made tragedy and into the deepest, perhaps the only, truth of life:

LET’S LOVE EACH OTHER
by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)

Let’s love each other,
let’s cherish each other, my friend,
before we lose each other.

You’ll long for me when I’m gone.
You’ll make a truce with me.
So why put me on trial while I’m alive?

Why adore the dead but battle the living?

You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave.
Look, I’m lying here still as a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!

Complement this fragment of Gold with James Baldwin on how separation illuminates the power of love and Thich Nhat Hanh on the art of deep listening — a practice also central to Rumi’s life — as the root of loving relationship, then revisit poet Jane Hirshfield’s timeless hymn to love and loss.

BP

The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the Anti-structures of Possibility

By Maria Popova

The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the Anti-structures of Possibility

“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a great spaciousness and sobriety of spirit to be vitalized rather than paralyzed by uncertainty. Most of the time, we brace behind structures of certainty to keep the native chaos of the universe, the fundamental indeterminacy and unpredictability of life, from drowning us in helplessness. But each time we part the bars of conviction and opinion to step out from this cell of certitude, or are evicted from it by some existential cataclysm, we discover that the most interesting parts of life, the most fulfilling experiences, the richest relationships, are found in the spaces between categories, in the unclassifiable, the unnameable, the deliriously disorienting.

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

In 1969, after nearly two decades of living among the Ndembu people of Zambia, the Scottish cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (May 28, 1920–December 18, 1983) took up the question of how we classify and declassify life in his classic The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (public library).

Terming these fertile in-between spaces liminality — a word coined a generation earlier by the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep from limen, Latin for “threshold” — Turner observes that all rites of passage have liminality at their center: the moment between renouncing the familiar fixed point and reincorporating into the transformed state. This is why in every society those who live in liminality — those who either choose to or are forced to exist in the margins — are those most likely to be catalysts for transformation.

Half a century before Rebecca Solnit insisted in her epochal manifesto for active hope that “power comes from the shadows and the margins,” Turner writes:

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention… Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.

Liminality is a function of, and made possible by, what Turner terms communitas — the recognition of “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society.” Different from community in that it doesn’t necessarily involve “an area of common living,” communitas is a kind of social anti-structure — an alternative organizing principle to the standard model of society as “a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating [people] in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.'”

Ursula K. Le Guin, whose daring defiance of gender, race, and class structures was greatly influenced by Turner’s work, captures the contrast perfectly:

Structure in society… is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.

Turner writes:

Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency… Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these processes.

Intuition — what we call these “instinctual energies” — may indeed be nothing more than those rare moments when we break the rim of our structured reality and glimpse, however briefly, a truth larger and more fluid than any container can hold, touching within it the sacred liminality of life itself.

BP

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