The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.

Leonard Cohen (courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust)

In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.

In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.

Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.

BP

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives.

When relationships collapse under the weight of life, the crash is not merely psychological but physiological — something less and less surprising as we learn more and more about consciousness as a full-body phenomenon beyond the brain. A quarter century ago, the pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg began demonstrating how relationships affect our immune system. But there is no system they impact more profoundly than the limbic: our neurophysiological command center of emotion — something psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore throughout their revelatory book A General Theory of Love (public library), which also gave us their insight into music, the neural harmonics of emotion, and how love recomposes the brain.

Art by Maurice Sendak from a vintage children’s book by Janice May Urdy.

The profound disruption of relationship rupture, they observe, is related to our earliest attachments and the way our system processes separation from our primary caregivers — a primal response not singular to the human animal:

Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond — a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair.

A lone puppy first enters the protest phase. He paces tirelessly, scanning his surroundings from all vantage points, barking, scratching vainly at the floor. He makes energetic and abortive attempts at scaling the walls of his prison, tumbling into a heap with each failure. He lets out a piteous whine, high-pitched and grating. Every aspect of his behavior broadcasts his distress, the same discomfort that all social mammals show when deprived of those to whom they are attached. Even young rats evidence protest: when their mother is absent they emit nonstop ultrasonic cries, a plaintive chorus inaudible to our dull ape ears.

Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy — a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc — it unleashes a full-system somatic shock. Various studies have demonstrated that cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune response are all disrupted. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon capture the result unambiguously:

Relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain… Prolonged separation affects more than feelings. A number of somatic parameters go haywire in despair. Because separation deranges the body, losing relationships can cause physical illness.

But harrowing as this reality of intimacy and its ruptures may be, it also intimates something wonderfully assuring in its mirror-image — just like painful relationships can so dysregulate us, healthy relationships can regulate us and recalibrate our limbic system, forged in our earliest attachments.

The solution to the eternal riddle of trust emerges as both banal and profound — simply the practice of continually refining our discernment about character and cultivating intimate relationships of the kind life’s hard edges cannot rupture, with people who are the human equivalent not of poison but of medicine, and endeavoring to become such people ourselves for the emotional ecosystems of those we love.

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write:

A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.

[…]

Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them.

This might sound simple, almost simplistic, but it is one of the most difficult and redemptive arts of living — for, lest we forget, “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”

Complement with Alain de Botton on the psychological Möbius strip that keeps us in unhealthy relationships (and how to break it) and David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Hannah Arendt on what forgiveness really means.

BP

A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want

A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want

“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

In 1926, more than a decade before a team of Harvard psychologists commenced history’s longest and most revelatory study of human happiness and half a century before the humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm penned his classic on the art of living, the British psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner (February 1, 1900–May 29, 1998) undertook a seven-year experiment in living, aimed at unpeeling the existential rind of all we chronically mistake for fulfillment — prestige, pleasure, popularity — to reveal the succulent, pulsating core of what makes for genuine happiness. Along her journey of “doubts, delays, and expeditions on false trails,” which she chronicled in a diary with a field scientist’s rigor of observation, Milner ultimately discovered that we are beings profoundly different from what we imagine ourselves to be — that the things we pursue most frantically are the least likely to give us lasting joy and contentment, but there are other, truer things that we can train ourselves to attend to in the elusive pursuit of happiness.

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

In 1934, under the pen name Joanna Field, Milner released the results of her inquiry in A Life of One’s Own (public library) — a small, enormously insightful book, beloved by W.H. Auden and titled in homage to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published three years after Milner began her existential experiment. Milner would go on to fill her ninety-eight years with life of uncommon contentment, informed by her learnings from this intensive seven-year self-examination.

In the preface to the original edition, Milner admonishes:

Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought.

This disorienting yet illuminating task of turning the mind’s eye inward requires a practice of recalibrating our conditioned perception. Drawing on Descartes’s tenets of critical thinking, she set out to doubt her most fundamental assumptions about what made her happy, trying to learn not from reason alone but from the life of the senses. Half a century before Annie Dillard offered her beautiful lens on the two ways of seeing, Milner writes:

As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which quite altered my perception of whatever I saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of reason. If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very difficult not to approach sensation with the same concentrated attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it was the wide focus way that made me happy.

She reflects on the sense of extreme alienation and the terror of missing out she felt at the outset of the experiment, at twenty-six:

Although I could not have told about it at the time, I can now remember the feeling of being cut off from other people, separate, shut away from whatever might be real in living. I was so dependent on other people’s opinion of me that I lived in a constant dread of offending, and if it occurred to me that something I had done was not approved of I was full of uneasiness until I had put it right. I always seemed to be looking for something, always a little distracted because there was something more important to be attended to just ahead of the moment.

Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice in Wonderland

Throughout the book, Milner illustrates the trajectory of her growth with the living record that led to her insights, punctuating her narrative with passages from her diary penned during the seven years. One, evocative of eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath’s journal, captures the disquieting restlessness she felt:

I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink from the garden.

In another, she distills the interior experience of that achingly longed-for sense of belonging to with world:

I want… the patterns and colourings on the vase on my table took on a new and intense vitality — I want to be so harmonious in myself that I can think of others and share their experiences.

Looking back on the young self who penned those journal entries at the outset of the experiment, Milner reflects:

I had felt my life to be of a dull dead-level mediocrity, with the sense of real and vital things going on round the corner, out in the streets, in other people’s lives. For I had taken the surface ripples for all there was, when actually happenings of vital importance to me had been going on, not somewhere away from me, but just underneath the calm surface of my own mind. Though some of these discoveries were not entirely pleasant, bringing with them echoes of terror and despair, at least they gave me a sense of being alive.

Much of that aliveness, she notes, came from the very act of chronicling the process of self-examination, for attention is what confers interest and vitality upon life. Joining the ranks of celebrated authors who championed the benefits of keeping a diary, Milner writes:

Not only did I find that trying to describe my experience enhanced the quality of it, but also this effort to describe had made me more observant of the small movements of the mind. So now I began to discover that there were a multitude of ways of perceiving, ways that were controllable by what I can only describe as an internal gesture of the mind. It was as if one’s self-awareness had a central point of interest being, the very core of one’s I-ness. And this core of being could, I now discovered, be moved about at will; but to explain just how it is done to someone who has never felt it for himself is like trying to explain how to move one’s ears.

Art by Katrin Stangl from Strong as a Bear

This inarticulable internal gesture, Milner found, was a matter of recalibrating her habits of perceiving, looking not directly at an object of attention but taking in a fuller picture with a diffuse awareness that is “more like a spreading of invisible sentient feelers, as a sea anemone spreads wide its feathery fingers.” One morning, she found herself in the forest, mesmerized by the play of sunlight and shadow through the glistening leaves of the trees, which left her awash in “wave after wave of delight” — an experience not cerebral but sensorial, animating every cell of her body. Wondering whether such full-body surrender to dimensional delight could provide an antidote to her feelings of anger and self-pity, she considers the trap of busyness by which we so often flee from the living reality of our being:

If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of their own.

That tuning into one’s most elemental being, she came to realize, was the mightiest conduit to inhabiting one’s own life with truthfulness and integrity undiluted by borrowed standards of self-actualization. Nearly half a century before the poet Robert Penn Warren contemplated the trouble with “finding yourself,” Milner writes:

I had been continually exhorted to define my purpose in life, but I was now beginning to doubt whether life might not be too complex a thing to be kept within the bounds of a single formulated purpose, whether it would not burst its way out, or if the purpose were too strong, perhaps grow distorted like an oak whose trunk has been encircled with an iron band. I began to guess that my self’s need was for an equilibrium, for sun, but not too much, for rain, but not always… So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: “It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory.”

Distilling the essence of this reorientation of being, she adds:

I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.

Several decades later, Jeanette Winterson would write beautifully of “the paradox of active surrender” essential to our experience of art. As in art, so in life — Milner writes:

Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes.

Half a century after Nietzsche proclaimed that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Milner considers the difficulty — and the triumph — of recognizing that you are crossing life on someone else’s bridge:

I had at least begun to guess that my greatest need might be to let go and be free from the drive after achievement — if only I dared. I had also guessed that perhaps when I had let these go, then I might be free to become aware of some other purpose that was more fundamental, not self-imposed private ambitions but some thing which grew out of the essence of one’s own nature. People said: ‘Oh, be yourself at all costs’. But I had found that it was not so easy to know just what one’s self was. It was far easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one’s own.

Art from Kenny’s Window, Maurice Sendak’s forgotten philosophical children’s book about knowing what you really want

“One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her own diary in the same era. “Looked at, it vanishes.” Happiness, Milner found, was similarly elusive to direct pursuit. Rather, its attainment required a wide-open attentiveness to reality, a benevolent curiosity about all that life has to offer, and a commitment not to argue with its offerings but to accept them as they come, congruous or incongruous as they may be with our desires.

Looking back on the diary entires from the final stretch of her seven-year experiment, she reflects on the hard-earned mastery of this unarguing surrender:

It struck me as odd that it had taken me so long to reach a feeling of sureness that there was something in me that would get on with the job of living without my continual tampering. I suppose I did not really reach it until I had discovered how to sink down beneath the level of chattering thoughts and simply feel what it meant to be alive.

Having termed this nonjudgmental receptivity “continual mindfulness” in her journal from the time, Milner evokes Plato’s metaphor of the two charioteers of thought and reflects:

I came to the conclusion then that “continual mindfulness” could certainly not mean that my little conscious self should be entirely responsible for marshalling and arranging all my thoughts, for it simply did not know enough. It must mean, not a sergeant-major-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual readiness to look and readiness to accept whatever came…. Whenever I did so manage to win its services I began to suspect that thought, which I had always before looked on as a cart-horse, to be driven, whipped and plodding between shafts, might be really a Pegasus, so suddenly did it alight beside me from places I had no knowledge of.

Those interior unknowns, Milner discovered, were the recesses where insecurity lurked, in that ancient here-be-monsters way we humans have of filling unmapped territories with dread. She examines the vital relationship between inner security and happiness:

I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and detachment must depend on a fundamental sense of security, and yet that I could apparently never feel safe enough to do it, because there was an urge in me which I had dimly perceived but had never yet been able to face. It was then that the idea occurred to me that until you have, once at least, faced everything you know — the whole universe — with utter giving in, and let all that is “not you” flow over and engulf you, there can be no lasting sense of security.

Art by Vern Kousky from The Blue Songbird, an illustrated parable of belonging and finding one’s authentic voice

Looking back on her seven-year study of what her moments of happiness depended on and how her thought wrapped itself around her lived experience to extract from it a felt sense, Milner summarizes how she came to discover her most authentic existential needs as a human being:

By continual watching and expression I must learn to observe my thought and maintain a vigilance, not against “wrong” thoughts, but against refusal to recognize any thought. Further, this introspection meant continual expression, not continual analysis; it meant that I must bring my thoughts and feelings up in their wholeness, not argue about them and try to pretend they were something different from what they were.

I had also learnt how to know what I wanted; to know that this is not a simple matter of momentary decision, but that it needs a rigorous watching and fierce discipline, if the clamouring conflict of likes is to be welded into a single desire. It had taught me that my day-to-day personal “wants” were really the expression of deep underlying needs, though often the distorted expression because of the confusions of blind thinking. I had learnt that if I kept my thoughts still enough and looked beneath them, then I might sometimes know what was the real need, feel it like a child leaping in the womb, though so remotely that I might easily miss it when over-busy with purposes. Really, then, I had found that there was an intuitive sense of how to live. For I had been forced to the conclusion that there was more in the mind than just reason and blind thinking, if only you knew how to look for it; the unconscious part of my mind seemed to be definitely something more than a storehouse for the confusions and shames I dared not face.

[…]

It was only when I was actively passive, and content to wait and watch, that I really knew what I wanted.

Art by Jacqueline Ayer from The Paper-Flower Tree

That knowledge, Milner found, arises from breaking the inertia of mindless thought that governs much of our perception, which in turn shapes our entire experience of reality. She considers what it means, and what it takes, to apprehend the world with unclouded and receptive eyes:

Blind thinking… could make me pretend I was being true to myself when really I was only being true to an infantile fear and confusion of situations; and the more confused it was the more it would call to its aid a sense of conviction. Yet for all its parade there was as much in common between its certainties and the fundamental sense of my own happiness as between the windy flappings of a newspaper in the gutter and the poise of a hovering kestrel. And only by experience of both, by digging down deep enough and watching sincerely enough, could I be sure of recognizing the difference.

By keeping a diary of what made me happy I had discovered that happiness came when I was most widely aware. So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension…. Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs. And, by finding that in order to be more and more aware I had to be more and more still, I had not only come to see through my own eyes instead of at second hand, but I had also finally come to discover what was the way of escape from the imprisoning island of my own self-consciousness.

Complement the uncommonly penetrating A Life of One’s Own with Hermann Hesse on the most important habit for living with presence, E.E. Cummings on being unafraid to feel, and Maurice Sendak’s forgotten debut — a magnificent philosophical children’s book about knowing what you really want.

BP

Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’

This essay is adapted from Traversal.

“Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.”

In late 1791, as important men were sitting down in America to make ten amendments to the young country’s constitution, which they called a Universal Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was sitting down in England to complete A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects — the beacon of political philosophy, inspired by Paine’s treatise, that would expand the universal to include all chromosomal arrangements, “demanding justice for one half of the human race” and laying the foundation of women’s political power, not by shaming and blaming the oppressor but by painting a passionate portrait of possibility.

When Wollstonecraft’s publisher invited her to a dinner celebrating one of those important men — Thomas Paine, whose landmark insistence on the right of the people to overthrow their rulers had inspired Wollstonecraft’s treatise — another of the publisher’s most successful and controversial authors was also there: the radical political philosopher William Godwin.

William Godwin (portrait by James Northcote) and Mary Wollstonecraft (portrait by John Opie)

Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, who had never before met, had made their reputations on the bold denunciation of institutions, including the institution of marriage: Wollstonecraft in her Vindication and Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice, which issued a rigorously reasoned eight-book call for a society of equals, indicting government, religion, and marriage as oppressive forces that limit individual freedom and gape the abyss of inequality. Government and religion, Godwin argued, would be rendered obsolete with sufficient advancement of human knowledge and morality. “Marriage, as now understood,” he wrote, “is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.”

Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead — equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners — seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it — in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old — is the measure of our progress.

She had seen firsthand the moral, emotional, and bodily tyranny of an institution that considered the wife property of the husband, a creature owed as much sympathy and tenderness as a boot. As a child growing up in a house shaken by the cries of her own mother, regularly raped and beaten by her alcoholic husband, Wollstonecraft had stood sentinel before her mother’s door to keep her father from entering, which only aggravated his brutality. In a culture where just four women successfully obtained a divorce in the whole of a century, she came to see that to salvage the family, one had to revise the entire political foundations of society.

When the two philosophers met at their publishers’ dinner, the balding and reserved Godwin — a man so afraid of emotion that he never cared for music — found Wollstonecraft — a woman of symphonic intellect and unselfconscious passions — too eager to dominate the conversation with Paine. The middle child in a brood of thirteen, Godwin had always been introverted, awkward, and greatly challenged at attuning to the emotional states and needs of others. He regarded his peculiarity with both self-awareness and genuine bafflement:

I have a singular want of foresight on some occasions as to the effect what I shall say will have on the person to whom it is addressed. I therefore often appear rude, though no man can be freer from rudeness of intention and often get a character for harshness that my heart disowns.

Wollstonecraft was extroverted, her quick mind coupled with a kind of social magnetism, but the very capacity for large thought and feeling that made her so magnetic also made her capable of despair so fathomless that she came to regard herself as “a strange compound of weakness and resolution,” marked by a great “defect” of mind and a “wayward heart” that creates its own misery.

For the two philosophers, love did not barge through the barn door of animal passion — it entered slowly, quietly, through the sun porch of shared ideals and mutual respect. Respect begot friendship begot love. Wollstonecraft came to see the “tender affectionate creature” from which Godwin’s coolly reasoned idealism sprang — his pursuit of political justice was at bottom a philosophy of universal sympathies and unconditional kindness, impulses of which his own nature was woven. Godwin discovered above the gratifications of being admired the gladness of being seen:

After all one’s philosophy it must be confessed that the knowledge that there is some one that takes an interest in one’s happiness, something like that which each man feels for his own, is extremely gratifying.

There is something singularly endearing in his matter-of-fact account of how their relationship developed:

The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined kind of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each… When in the course of things the disclosure came there was nothing in the matter for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanations attendant upon the tale. It was friendship melting into love.

In his autobiography, never published in his lifetime, he would eventually acknowledge that “there is nothing that the human heart more irresistibly seeks than an object to which to attach itself.” When he did attach himself to Wollstonecraft, it was a molecular bond that staggered him, altered him.

In the first days of spring in 1797, in the small churchyard of St. Pancras, four months into her pregnancy, Mary and William entered a trailblazing marriage of equals, then took up residence together in a home where they shared a bed and a value system but kept separate studies, Wollstonecraft writing and receiving visitors in a room of her own, and Godwin in his. The choice to marry against their stated credos had puzzled both their public admirers and their private circle. It mattered little, even the response from Godwin’s mother, spiked with the fine quills of passive aggression of which only mothers are capable: “Your broken resolution in regard to matrimony encourages me to hope that you will ere long embrace the Gospel.”

Convinced that their child was to be a boy, the parents-to-be named him William. Wollstonecraft resumed work on a book of moral lessons for children, which William Blake would later illustrate. Godwin channeled their daily conversations about how to bring up happy, intelligent, and morally elevated children in a series of essays later published as The Enquirer his most timeless, if least known, book: an incisive inquiry into how we become who we are, laying out a radical new vision for optimal parenting and early childhood education.

“William” arrived on August 30, 1797, and was corrected, without fret or fanfare, to a Mary. After nine hours of labor and a difficult birth, the placenta and fetal membranes failed to leave Wollstonecraft’s uterus. A surgeon was summoned to extract it, rushing in from the street to plunge his hands into her flesh.

Within hours, the young mother was shivering with a savage fever.

* * *

Exactly fifty summers later, the Vienna General Hospital — one of the best teaching hospitals in the world — found itself the epicenter of a menacing medical mystery blackening the crucible of life with death: Young women were dying in agony by the legion shortly after giving birth.

The hospital had two maternity wards — one staffed by elite obstetricians and their medical students, the other by midwives with no formal medical training. (This was an era when the world’s university doors were closed to women.) Tenfold more mothers were dying of puerperal fever in the first.

The medical elders initially assumed that the students were treating the pregnant women too roughly. But retraining didn’t change the ratio. Baffled, these thoroughly trained scientists fell to superstition — a priest walked through the doctors’ ward ringing a bell for each death and a theory emerged that the haunting sound was terrifying the living mothers into dying.

A young Hungarian doctor by the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, in his first year as assistant professor at the hospital, wrote in his diary:

Even to me myself it had a strange effect upon my nerves when I heard the bell hurried past my door; a sigh would escape my heart for the victim that once more was claimed by an unknown power. The bell was a painful exhortation to me to search for this unknown cause with all of my might.

Ignaz Semmelweis

When the pastor was asked to stop making his bell rounds, the deaths continued and the sigh kept bellowing in the young doctor’s heart as he bent his mind around the mystery. He catalogued all the visible variables and pored over the data, but it told no discernible story. Because the unknown will always be greater than the sum of all our analyzable knowns, because the sum is always “simpler than its parts,” the history of science, the history of knowledge, is a rosary of breakthroughs that arrive through the side door of our reasoned theories. One day, Semmelweis’s mentor was teaching dissection at the morgue when a student accidentally nicked the professor’s finger with the scalpel while cutting open the cadaver on the table. Within days, he died a horrific death. A familiar death. It devastated Semmelweis, but it also pressed his face against the revelation — the doctors and medical students at the hospital were doing the exact same thing with the pregnant women: dissecting cadavers at the morgue, which none of the midwives did, and immediately going into the maternity ward to touch open flesh.

The young doctor realized that the men’s hands transferred some particle of death to the vulnerable living. He called them “cadaver particles” and set about devising ways to eradicate them, experimenting with various washing solutions and testing his results by smell alone — did his hands still have the putrid cadaver smell after washing them in the different agents. Eventually, he settled on a solution of chlorine and lime — bleach not strong enough to burn his hands, but strong enough to vanquish the other and, with it, the cadaver particles he theorized. When he implemented the protocol at his ward, the death count plummeted to that of the other ward.

That year, Louis Pasteur began his crystallography research that would lead to the birth of germ theory more than a decade later. The notion that some invisible unit of matter could unravel a body was still inconceivable. Semmelweis was a brilliant theorist and a fine empiricist, but a terrible communicator. He took the opposite of Mary Wollstonecraft’s approach, pouring polemics into letters to every major hospital and medical school, pummeling colleagues with that least effective of all behavioral change strategies: shaming. He went as far as calling doctors who didn’t wash their hands murderers and warned medical students that unless they adopted his protocol, they would be accomplices in an epochal crime.

Unsurprisingly, Semmelweis was largely dismissed; unsurprisingly, he grew increasingly cantankerous. By the time he was in his early forties, the idealistic young doctor had undergone a staggering physiological and psychological change — he looked at least sixty, had frequent detonations of temper, and suffered baffling lapses of memory in the midst of lectures. The mysterious malady — possibly early-onset Alzheimers, possibly tertiary syphilis, likely some parallel discomposure of body and spirit — made him unbearable to be around.

One day, a colleague lured him to an asylum on the pretext of seeing a new facility. When Semmelweis realized he was about to be committed against his will, he raged to get away, but was brutalized by the wardens and put into a straitjacket.

He died two weeks later from an infection contracted from the beating.

Haemolytic streptococcus

Four years later, two French scientists discovered the microbes en chainettes — “microbe chains” — of his hypothesized “cadaver particles,” which Pasteur would identify as the bacterium haemolytic streptococcus a decade later. It was ultimately a nurse — Florence Nightingale — whose extraordinary data diagrams and passionate advocacy persuaded the medical establishment to standardize hospital sanitization.

* * *

Just before eight on a late-summer morning ten days after giving birth, Mary Wollstonecraft drew her last breath, leaving behind a fragile baby girl, a baffled philosopher stony with heartache, and an angel-winged William Blake etching.

The Child Mary Shelley (at her Mother’s Death) by William Blake

For Godwin, who had spent his life sieging religion with the artillery of reason, the loss was total and irrevocable. The notions of personal immortality and reunion with loved ones in an imaginary afterlife were the pacifier of puerile minds. And yet loss unlatches an emotional trapdoor beneath our firmest cerebral convictions, plunging us into elemental questions that live beyond our reasoned beliefs, childlike in their disbelieving sincerity. It was such a question that sprang unbidden to my atheist engineer grandmother’s lips as she stood over the hospital bed holding the dead body of my atheist engineer grandfather, her love of half a century: Where did you go, my darling?

The guarded Godwin kept a diary more like a ship’s log than a discursive journal of an inner life:

“Seneca, Ep. 8, 9.”

“Call from Coleridge.”

“Queen dies.”

On the day of his beloved’s death, this man of factual records could not bring himself to name the fact. All he wrote in the ledger was “20 minutes before 8,” followed by an interminable sequence of dashes suturing the unspeakable.

“– — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ”

By evening, he was able to write to his oldest friend with a confused fusion of dissociation and disconsolation:

My wife is now dead. She died this morning at eight o’clock… I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. When you come to town, look at me, talk to me, but do not — if you can help it — exhort me, or console me.

In the corner, his baby daughter was sleeping in her crib. She would learn to read by tracing the letters on her her mother’s tombstone and would come to write, while still a teenager, an epochal reckoning with the eternal interplay of life and death.

The year her Frankenstein was published, Ignaz Semmelweis was born in a Hungarian hospital.

BP

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