The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Violinist Who Solved the Ancient Riddle of How the World Holds Together

By Maria Popova

This essay is adapted from Traversal.

She is looking at the staff lines of a strange symphony in blue, her cautious disbelief punctured by a burst of delirious wonderment. Brushes and tubes of paint are scattered about her — paint she has spent years mixing into the perfect shades of blue to color a world’s worth of oceanic depths inside the contours of her enormous maps in the making. But now she is not looking at the blues. She is not looking at the maps. She is looking at the staff lines. Except they are staff lines only to her, a violinist since girlhood. To any other geologist, to her colleagues at the Lamont Geological Observatory high on the banks of the Hudson River, to the geochemists in the observatory basement carbon-dating rock samples trying to prove that the Earth was created in 4004 BCE, this object of disbelief and wonderment is an ordinary fathogram plotting the undulations of the ocean floor across five horizontal lines, evenly spaced along thousand-fathom increments of depth — the data output of a fathometer, an echo-sounding instrument pioneered in 1490 when Leonardo da Vinci dipped a tube into open water to gauge the distance of vessels, then perfected centuries later into the sonar technology used for detecting enemy submarines during the world’s first global war. Four centuries after Magellan conducted the first single-spot sounding by plunging a weighted line into the blue Pacific waters and declared the ocean fathomless when the line reached 410 fathoms, the invention of the fathometer in the early 1920s, with its ability to measure depths as immense as 3,000 fathoms, revolutionized the human sense of the world below the surface of the world — a world then more mysterious than the Moon. “Prais’d be the fathomless universe,” Whitman had exulted in Leaves of Grass, plunging the same exultant imagination into the unfathomed universe residing right here on Earth, in what he reverenced as “the world below the brine.”

A century after Whitman, with still only a fraction of one percent of that world studied in detail, with three-quarters of the planet appearing on any map as a homogenous and featureless blue background to terrestrial topography, with the bottom of the world imagined as an enormous bathtub, this violinist trained in spherical trigonometry is hearing with her mind’s ear something never heard before, something unspeakable — anathema to every accepted theory of how this rocky blue planet holds together as a world. Humming beneath it is the answer to the ancient mystery of how a tremor in a mountain can dismantle a town, a life, a world.

Marie Tharp at work. (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.)

She has unrolled nearly a kilometer of paper stacked in the corner of her office — fathograms from soundings her boss and his graduate students have conducted on several Atlantic expeditions over the course of five years, expeditions not one of which she, any she, was permitted to join. She has spliced together a composite portrait of the ocean from the partial data sounded along the vessel’s various routes, recorded on blue linen paper with a crow quill pen and India ink. She has glued together strips of this blue linen paper into an enormous sheet sprawled across several drafting tables, magnified by a fortyfold scale of exaggeration to render the subtleties of the data legible; one of those subtleties would be the spark of revolution. On this enormous sheet, she has plotted the various depth measurements — the underwater peaks and troughs, the smooth slopes and the sudden plunges. She has marked each depth reading as a dot on the graph. A note on the staff. Dots spaced about an inch apart, to be connected into a melody of meaning.

And there in that void of data, in that inch of silence, is where the computational mind reaches its limit and the compositional mind begins, demanding a virtuosity of interpretation.

She has filled in the gaps with dotted hypotheses, sensical chords connecting the notes. And now, with the strange score before her, skeptical as a scientist, hopeful as a hymnodist, she is sight-reading the record of Earth’s largest geologic feature — undiscovered and unbelievable, singing there in the data without counterpoint: a rift valley at the bottom of the ocean, extending forty thousand continuous miles around the globe in jagged lines contouring something that cannot be, if what the world believes about the planet is true.

She is about to paint that revolutionary line in blazing red across her perfect blues. The tectonic record of a great inhale splitting Earth’s solar plexus apart.

Marie Tharp in her early thirties.

The year is 1952. Marie Tharp is thirty-two. One of a handful of oceanographic cartographers in the world, she has spent four years drafting the ocean floor, mapping and remapping the vast majority of the planet’s surface, composing coherence out of strobing data — data that would confirm the highly controversial notion that the Earth is not a static planet but a dynamic, ever-changing world; that continental drift — the fringe theory the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener had proffered half a century earlier and paid for with his reputation, then his life — is true.

Half a century later, in the final years of her life, Marie Tharpe will look back on her discovery in its wider context with the same wonder-stricken disbelief:

Not too many people can say this about their lives: The whole world was spread out before me (or at least, the 70 percent of it covered by oceans). I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor. It was a once-in-a-lifetime—a once-in-the-history-of-the-world—opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1950s. The nature of the times, the state of the science, and events large and small, logical and illogical, combined to make it all happen.

Marie had grown up messy-haired and mud-covered, cartwheeling on dirt roads, collecting snake skeletons, searching for arrowheads that she mounted like stone butterflies, getting sent home from school for wearing trousers, riding into the mossy rockscapes and sunlit forests of the American Midwest in a boxy 1920s truck, the green government truck her father drove and taught her to drive when she was eleven — her father, the publicly funded soil surveyor and poet without a public, whom she adored and who adored her. She would later joke that he took her on those field trips mostly to use her as a living metric, photographing the small girl next to various large geologic objects he wished to size up.

Under the demands of government geology, the tribe of three moved constantly—Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, D.C., more than two dozen miniature migrations before Marie graduated from adolescence, not minding the life of perennial nomads. When her father had saved up enough, he bought a farm in Ohio to fix up and settle the roaming band. Within a year, her mother was dead. Her mother was dead, and all Marie could do was play the violin. She played it into college, into the college symphony orchestra, into a life-plan that was about to get entirely remapped. But it never left her, the music, even after she grew enraptured by geology, pivoting toward it but still completing her majors in music and English, along with four minors across the visual arts. And now — a graduate degree in geology and a second baccalaureate in mathematics later — she is looking at the lines of the fathometer and seeing the symphony of the Earth.

The plate tectonics model that would arise from her discovery would go on to change our understanding of life itself: Tectonic activity mixes surface and ocean chemistry, recycling elements to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature stable, and is what allowed Earth’s waters to remain liquid for the billions of years that complex life needed to evolve. Without it, we would have never risen from the oceans to measure the universe and fill the world with music.

Marie Tharp and her collaborator Bruce Heezen’s historic map of the ocean floor. (Library of Congress.)

The story of Marie Thrape’s life and her discovery — entwined with those of Alfred Wegener, Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley, Frederick Douglass, and other visionaries who changed our understanding of what makes a planet a world and what makes matter a mind capable of music and mathematics, of justice and love — comes alive in Traversal, the cover of which features her revolutionary map of the ocean floor.

BP

How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

By Maria Popova

“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”

But we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we, the conflicted species, spend our lives resisting it yet craving its liberations.

Anaïs Nin

Nin herself — a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness — took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (public library), composed when she was still in her twenties.

With an eye to D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) and his “philosophy that was against division,” his “plea for whole vision,” she writes:

When the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion… Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.

In a sentiment central to my own animating ethos, she adds:

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

It was Lawrence’s own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness — the way “livingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.”

In his 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all — the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment:

All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.

D.H. Lawrence

This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrence’s worldview — the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo, reckoning with the most universal reality of life — the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitman’s defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when every woman was a “man” purely as a matter of linguistic convention:

If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.

In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended the wisdom of the inner voice, Lawrence’s protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence:

I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life.

Complement with Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness and Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Nin on the meaning of maturity and how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living.

BP

Tolkien Reads from “The Hobbit” in Rare Archival Audio from His First Encounter with a Tape Recorder

By Maria Popova

J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) firmly believed that there is no such thing as writing “for children” and that creative fantasy serves to set the ageless human imagination free. Nowhere was Tolkien’s ethos more perfectly enacted than in his 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit (public library), a book so beloved that Tolkien’s own little-known illustrations for the original edition have been reimagined by great artists around the world in the decades since its publication.

In August of 1952, having just finished the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien took a vacation in Worcestershire, where he stayed with his friend George Sayer, an English Master at the local college. To entertain his guest one evening, Sayer pulled out an early portable tape recorder. Although the technology had been around for some time, it was only just becoming commercially available and Tolkien hadn’t seen one before. Intrigued by how it worked, he joked that he “ought to cast out any devil that might be in it” by recording himself reading the Lord’s Prayer in his beloved ancient Gothic language. The result delighted him, and he went on to read from his own work.

In this rare archival recording from that serendipitous summer evening, sixty-year-old Tolkien reads from The Hobbit, doing a magnificent impression of Gollum in the ancient accent he so loved — please enjoy:

Complement with Mary Oliver reading from Blue Horses, Frank O’Hara reading his “Metaphysical Poem,” Susan Sontag reading her short story “Debriefing,” Dorothy Parker reading her poem “Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom,” and Chinua Achebe reading his little-known poetry, then revisit the forgotten children’s book Tolkien wrote and illustrated for his own kids.

BP

Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are

By Maria Popova

Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time.

“Fearlessness is what love seeks [which] exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in another of them, “hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

But upon closer inspection, now — this elementary particle of eternity, this tiny and total locus of the living moment, this constant that is never the same — turns out to be more elusive than a neutrino, passing through us ghostly and ungraspable, yet leaving in its wake the purest sum of what we are.

Like love, now is an entirely subjective experience built on a meaningful interaction between systems. Like love, it is not a state but a process — a dynamic creation that enlists all of our past experience and the entire pattern of predictive perceptions we call reality. Like love, it is more like music than like mathematics.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Jo Marchant takes up this elemental mystery in her excellent investigation In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment (public library), weaving together physics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural anthropology to expose the warp and weft of our aliveness, locating in the living now “the origins of both life and mind, the driving force that powers behaviours, perceptions, choices and decisions, that ultimately carves out self and time.”

She writes:

It isn’t a location within time at all, but what makes time possible. Now is nature itself: the experienced, evolving universe within which all time, and all life, is held.

Two centuries after the vitalism debate sundered science into warring camps over the search for a “vital spark” that makes matter alive, we are finding that conscious minds — that crowning achievement of matter — are made of time and bodies undone by it, that it is the fundamental substrate of our aliveness. If the moment is the vital spark of time, the science of now — divisive, thrilling, inconclusive — is the vitalism debate of our time.

It began when Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate. Relativity rendered the flow of time, and the immediacy of the moment nested within it, not a given of physical reality but a function of the vantage you take. “The baggage of consciousness,” Einstein himself called our sense of time in a letter to his best friend. Like all radical ideas, relativity sent the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction and the ancients’ notion of eternalism — the idea that time is absolute, the same in all directions, and all existence simply is, without dynamic being that flows from past to present to future — was revived in the modern model of the block universe, configuring spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional block. Marchant describes the implications of that model:

Our lives aren’t unfurling plots or stories; they are intricate paths already mapped out in four dimensions… Every cell within your body — your neurons, muscle cells, the blood cells pulsing through your arteries, capillaries and veins — has its own intricate, interconnecting life path carved out through the block. And not just every cell, but every atom. Each of us is made up of trillions of strands in space-time, all with their own complex trajectory. Your whole life might look like a sort of tree carved into the block, with disparate strands coming together at one end, representing your conception and birth; gradually thickening into a trunk; and then at the other end splaying out into finer and finer branches before disintegrating completely at the point of your death and decomposition… There is no room for movement, flow or happening. Reality doesn’t become. It just is.

If the physicists are right, our attachment to the specialness of the present moment is just another example of how our limited perception deceives us, like thinking the sky turns or the Earth is flat.

Causality, this model implies, is simply an interpretation based on our limited perception: “The flow from past to future… rather than being a fundamental feature of the universe… emerges as a secondary consequence of our inability to see the full picture.”

Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

Then there is the predictive coding model, under which “what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’… a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.”

It is worth remembering here that what gives science its loveliness and potency, and what distinguishes it from philosophy, is the passion for building models of how nature works calibrated by the rigor of testing them against reality. And yet time may be the only region where the models are truly and fundamentally untestable because the modeler is a captive of time. Einstein’s equations gave us the mathematical foundation for the Big Bang, but not even Einstein could travel back to the beginning of time to see if the model was true. This may be why, to me, the most compelling — as well as the most poetic — portion of Merchant’s investigation is the most empirical: an fMRI study that analyzed the patterns of brain activity in people watching a movie, which has a built-in timeline, or simply resting, capturing one image per second and comparing how these images — these portraits of the moment — differ from one another in order to render the experience of time’s passage. Marchant details the astonishing revelation:

There isn’t a simple progression from one brain state to the next as time passes, with each moment most similar to its nearest neighbour. Our “brain patterns are not simply counting off the seconds,” says [study author Dan] Lloyd. Hidden within the sequences was an organised temporal structure, with regular patterns in the way that subjects’ brains moved back and forth between a small number of states. In fact, the structure he found is very like that of music. Lloyd identified short, repeating motifs, or themes: sequences of states, between 4 and 11 seconds long, that look similar to each other. Often these themes recurred at constant time intervals: he called that “rhythm.” These rhythms appeared at a range of different timescales, and sometimes these frequencies were related to each other, so that they nested within one another perfectly. Lloyd called this structure “harmony” because it is analogous to the harmonic vibrations that give musical instruments, from violins to saxophones, their rich, resonant sound.

What this “harmony” means is that at any single moment, our spontaneous brain activity is made up of multiple, overlaid patterns and rhythms, which are related yet change over different timescales: just like our experience of Now. Each moment of neural activity is influenced by what’s happened in both the near and further past, and in turn influences what will happen in the near and further future. The results “suggest a human capacity to spread out from the immediate present tense of sensation, towards an overall temporal landscape,” Lloyd concludes. This explains how we can navigate fast-changing events yet at the same time hold on to stable threads of where we’re going and who we are.

An epoch before neuroimaging, Virginia Woolf intuited this truth when she considered the “moments of being” that make us who we are, intuited the musicality of being alive: “The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art,” she wrote in her breathtaking epiphany in the middle of the garden, “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.

Looking through the kaleidoscope of the various models, Marchant considers the essence of the light:

It seems our perception of Now is a combination of two crucial factors: the ability to bind a hierarchy of different timescales together within each moment; and the inexorable progression from one moment to the next. This highly ordered temporal composition underpins our flowing stream of consciousness. Passing time is not just a characteristic we perceive: it is the underlying frame or structure through which we experience reality.

And yet it may be more important even than that, underpinning not just our world but who we are.

Our lives, Marchant argues, are only really alive, only ever real, as the moment lives itself through us:

The perceptions and sensations themselves — the call and response, the meeting or thwarting of predictions — these are reality. These are what existence is made of… Our perceptions or experiences — the melancholy of raindrops on a window, the exhilaration of diving into an icy pool — are real in themselves. There is no separate, enduring landscape beyond that they’re based on, no solid reference point against which our sensations can be judged.

[…]

Now has objective meaning as the expanding boundary at which reality is continually created. What’s coming into being includes not just the contents of the universe but its very structure. As new events occur, new universe — new space-time — is being born.

With an eye to all the different models of physics she examines in the book — relativity, the block universe, enactivism, and predictive coding among them — she ends where we ought to always begin: the discipline of not mistaking the model for the thing itself:

Do we exist as frozen snapshots or mathematical braids? Are we logic-bound computers or dynamic hurricanes? Are we living in a mental realm of shadows, separated from true reality by impenetrable, iron-like walls? Or are our perceptions real, while the familiar things of our world — even time and space themselves — are mere statistical structures, predictions that help us to manage our flow of sensations and stay alive?… Perhaps with all these possibilities there’s no way even to approach what lies beyond us, beyond our senses, beyond this point in time… All any of us can ever really know is that this moment exists. Maybe that’s enough. What we’re sensing and feeling, right here, right now, is real and undeniable, precisely because we are experiencing it.

Because there is no commons of now, the moment is the measure of our loneliness in time, but also the only region of space where we flower into being fully ourselves in a constant bloom of becoming.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.

Marchant writes:

What we perceive or experience in any moment is so personal, so utterly bound up in our individual history and biology, that it doesn’t make sense to speak of any “true,” definitive way of things outside that process… Our inner worlds — from feeling ownership of our bodies to experiencing emotions or recalling our life stories — are complex webs of probabilistic inferences, ever-changing depending on our circumstances, and recreated in each moment. There are no separate, enduring “selves” sitting behind… [We] exist as dynamic, living patterns of personal experiences, not stand-alone things. There’s no external stage on which we’re acting, no pre-existing terrain into which we’ve been parachuted. And, on the other side of the coin, there’s no pre-existing “us” either: no floating essences or souls ready to cast their gaze on the world.

This is not a negation of our being but an affirmation of it — a liberation from the tyranny and tedium of selfing we mistake for being:

What if instead of enduring entities — you and me, Earth and Sun — there are only the instants, the interactions? Only the burgeoning, interconnected, multilayered meshwork of creative sparks? From those sparks emerge selves and worlds — our private worlds of perception but also shared frameworks and structures: social, cultural, historical, scientific. Each instant, all of it is born and reborn.

[…]

Our experience of Now, I’m convinced, is not a hallucination. With every detail we choose to attend to, to breathe life into, we’re helping to write into existence both ourselves and the world… What if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but, as Wheeler put it, “in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us”? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.

Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .

Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.

BP

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