The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You

By Maria Popova

“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched,” Seneca told his mother in his extraordinary letter on resilience in the face of loss. One need not be a dry materialist to bow before the recognition that no heart goes through life unplundered by loss — all love presupposes it, be it in death or in heartbreak. Whether what is lost are feelings or atoms, grief comes, unforgiving and unpredictable in its myriad manifestations. Joan Didion observed this disorienting fact in her classic memoir of loss: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” And when it does come, it unweaves the very fabric of our being. When love is lost, we lose the part of ourselves that did the loving — a part that, depending on the magnitude of the love, can come to approximate the whole of who we are. We lose what artist Anne Truitt so poetically termed “the lovely entire confidence that comes only from innumerable mutual confidences entrusted and examined… woven by four hands, now trembling, now intent, over and under into a pattern that can surprise both [partners].”

But we also gain something — out of the burning embers of the loss arises an ashen humility, true to its shared Latin root with the word humus. We are made “of the earth” — we bow down low, we become crust, and each breath seems to draw from the magmatic center of the planet that is our being. It is only when we give ourselves over to it completely that we can begin to take ourselves back, to rise, to live again.

How to move through this barely survivable experience is what author and altogether glorious human being Elizabeth Gilbert examines with uncommon insight and tenderness of heart in her conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the inaugural episode of the TED Interviews podcast.

Rayya Elias and Elizabeth Gilbert (Photograph by Elizabeth Gilbert)

Gilbert reflects on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias — her longtime best friend, whose sudden terminal cancer diagnosis unlatched a trapdoor, as Gilbert put it, into the realization that Rayya was the love of her life:

Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.

With an eye to the intimate biological connection between the body and the mind (which is, of course, the seedbed of feeling), Gilbert adds:

There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.

Illustration from Cry, Heart, But Never Break, a Danish meditation on love and loss

Gilbert goes on to read a short, stunning reflection on love and loss she had originally published on Instagram:

People keep asking me how I’m doing, and I’m not always sure how to answer that. It depends on the day. It depends on the minute. Right this moment, I’m OK. Yesterday, not so good. Tomorrow, we’ll see.

Here is what I have learned about Grief, though.

I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.

When Grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, “Oh my god, this is happening RIGHT NOW,” and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of Grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.

The conversation of Grief, then, is one of prayer-and-response.

Grief says to me: “You will never love anyone the way you loved Rayya.” And I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “She’s gone, and she’s never coming back.” I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “You will never hear that laugh again.” I say: “I am willing.” Grief says, “You will never smell her skin again.” I get down on the floor on my fucking knees, and — and through my sheets of tears — I say, “I AM WILLING.” This is the job of the living — to be willing to bow down before EVERYTHING that is bigger than you. And nearly everything in this world is bigger than you.

I don’t know where Rayya is now. It’s not mine to know. I only know that I will love her forever. And that I am willing.

Onward.

Gilbert adds in the interview:

It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.

Rayya Elias and Elizabeth Gilbert (Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Gilbert)

Complement with life-earned wisdom on how to live with loss from other great artists, writers, and scientists — including Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Johannes Brahms, and Charles Dickens — and the Stoic cure for heartbreak from Epictetus, then revisit Gilbert on creative bravery and the art of living in a state of uninterrupted marvel.

BP

How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life

By Maria Popova

How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life

The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”)

In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart.

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

That is what Jeff Foster celebrates in one of the poems in his altogether wonderful collection of reckonings The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love (public library) — a prayerful invitation to “find a space in your heart for the unwanted, the unloved, the rejected aspects of experience” and to honor the sanctity of your doubts.

INDECISION
by Jeff Foster

Friend, please,
do not try to decide now.
Do not shut any possibility out of your heart. Honor this place of not knowing.

Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity.
Slow down. Breathe.
Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you stand.
Any decision will make itself, in time.
Any choice will happen when your defenses are down.
Answers will appear only when they are ready.
When the questions have been fully honored and loved.

Do not label this place “indecision.”
It is more alive than that.
It is a place where possibilities grow.
It is a place where uncertainty is sacred.
There is courage in staying close.
There is strength in not knowing.
There is power in doubt.

Friend, please know,
there is simply no choice now.
Except to breathe, and breathe again,
and trust this Intelligence beyond mind.

A decision will grow, but for today, nourish the ground.

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

In the introduction to The Way of Rest, Foster observes: “Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it’s not death we’re afraid of but too much life.” And perhaps this is why we are so eager to foreclose our conclusions — deciding is a way of containing what will otherwise spill into the unbearable infinity of possibility, which is in consequence a way of being less alive. But isn’t the whole point to be more alive, to stop waiting and start living in order not to waste your life?

BP

How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain

By Maria Popova

It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind — a stage on which, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed in his landmark work on consciousness, we often “use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.”

We do this on the personal level — out of such selective memory and by such exquisite exclusion, we compose the narrative that is the psychological pillar of our identity. We do it on the cultural level — what we call history is a collective selective memory that excludes far more of the past’s realities than it includes. Borges captured this with his characteristic poetic-philosophical precision when he observed that “we are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” To be aware of memory’s chimera is to recognize the slippery, shape-shifting nature of even those truths we think we are grasping most firmly.

Art by Cecilia Ruiz from The Book of Memory Gaps, inspired by Borges

Nearly a century after Nietzsche admonished that what we call truth is “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms… a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished,” the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910–September 6, 1998) created an exquisite cinematic metaphor for the slippery memory-mediated nature of truth in his 1950 film Rashomon, based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove” — a psychological-philosophical thriller about the murder of a samurai and its four witnesses, who each recount a radically different reality, each equally believable, thus undermining our most elemental trust in truth.

As researchers in the second half of the twentieth century came to shed light on the foibles of memory, Kurosawa’s masterpiece lent its name to the amply documented unreliability of eyewitness accounts. The Rashomon effect, detailed in this wonderful animated primer from TED-Ed, casts a haunting broader nimbus of doubt over our basic grasp of reality — we only exist, after all, as eyewitnesses of our own lives.

All of these psychological perplexities arise from the basic neurophysiological infrastructure of how memories form and falter in the brain — something the great neurologist Oliver Sacks explored in his classic medical poetics of memory disorders, and something South African biomedical scientist Catharine Young explores in another TED-Ed episode, animated by the prolific Patrick Smith:

Complement with Neurocomic — a graphic novel about how the mind works — and the animated science of how playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity, then revisit Virginia Woolf on how memory seams our lives, Sally Mann on how photographs can unseam memory, and neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin on how medicine’s most famous amnesiac illuminates the wonders of consciousness.

BP

Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World

By Maria Popova

Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World

Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may be long dead. The great wonder is that its light can traverse immense expanses of space and time to gladden the darkness of today, to cast wonder upon this lonely planet.

An idea is a signal that may travel across immense expanses of space and time before it touches the world. Transformative ideas can and often do fall on the closed eyes of their epoch. But, over and over, history hands us the glad assurance that it can take just one person awake enough to receive the signal so that others can then see it, to interpret it so that others can appreciate its singularity, its significance, its beauty. (See, for instance, Fanny Wright and atomism, Girolamo Mercuriale and fitness.)

Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Like a star, a good idea has a gravitational pull that attracts other bodies into its obit. Unlike a star, which invariably runs out of hydrogen fuel and dies, an idea cannot be unthought — once it exists, it is forever lodged in the collective conscience, however deep the recess. Some of humanity’s best ideas come from galaxies of thought so remote from the status quo that their light can take generations or civilizations to touch the world, the faint signal magnified and reflected by a handful of believers like a relay of mirrors across the dark sky of time until it becomes a beacon.

That is what David Byrne chronicles in Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up (public library) — a book masted with passion and ruddered with rigor, celebrating the lost history of creativity through the stories of the forgotten, neglected, and erased visionaries who from the margins of their time wrote the history of the future.

David — one of the most indiscriminately and ardently curious people I know, whose contagious enthusiasms will enchant you with everything from the geometry of trees to the dream culture of Malaysian tribal groups to the mating habits of eels — selects discoveries, inventions, and creations that traverse the vast spectrum of human ingenuity: from painting to astronomy, from music to microbiology, from literature to civil engineering. Some have only recently bubbled to public awareness (Vera Rubin and dark matter, Lynn Margulis and symbiotic life), some are unknown to most, perhaps precisely because they have become so plainly embedded in our model of the world, the model they helped build (Marie Tharp and plate tectonics, Peter Kropotkin and mutualism, the invention of hand-washing), some have transformed our lives in a very practical way (cement, perspective, inoculation), some in a spiritual way (the paintings of Caravaggio and Beauford Delaney, the writings of Melville, the music of Bach), and some have simply dusted our lives with delight (the wonders of lichen).

Reflecting on how such transformative ideas can go dormant for decades (solar panels), centuries (irrigation systems in South India), or millennia (the atom), David observes:

We’ve evolved to rely on whatever assumptions, models, and perception work for us — or at least work most of the time. If it’s right most of the time, or for the time being, then that’s held as proof that our assumptions must be valid and true, and we will be successful. Our faith in our assumptions often temporarily increases our odds of survival and success, until it doesn’t, until the curtain is pulled away and our assumptions are revealed to be just that, assumptions, not grounded in fact or reality.

Art by David Byrne from his illustrated history of the future.

One of our most reflexive and most limiting assumptions is that we are the pinnacle of creative and intellectual development, the past too distant and dumb to offer any ideas better than our own:

Our tendency as humans is often to imagine that the “story” of history leads us to where we are right now. We like to imagine ourselves as some sort of inevitable culmination — it all led to us. What we see, and what we judge as important and significant, viewed in the rearview mirror is determined by how we see ourselves at present.

Undermining the hubris of our own inevitability is the ease with which anything could dislodge us from our chosen course in a blink. An accident is simply our term for a moment in which chance intercedes into our lives to remind us that we are not in control, to remind us that all of our plans and predictions are just provisional models of the possible, which will always exceed our imagination because we ourselves are the possible’s wild bet against probability. Both in their generation and in their rediscovery, revolutionary ideas are often the product of lucky accidents. Observing that such serendipities happen to those who are both prepared and receptive, David offers a taxonomy:

Accidents come in different forms. Something was rediscovered when someone was actually looking for something else, someone realizes that forgotten past research covers similar or even identical ground to their own, or an unpredictable random event makes a discarded idea come into view. But for lucky accidents to be meaningful, the heart, mind, and eyes have to be open.

Looking over this orrery of good ideas, David considers what it takes to make a “sleeping beauty” — a term coined in a 2004 paper on the history of science — come awake: reaching beyond the bounds of your own discipline, welcoming the counterintuitive, using associative rather than analytical thinking, and resisting to the last “the hubris of modernity” by looking to the dusky recesses of the past for neglected ideas that might light up tomorrow.

What emerges from these stories is a reminder that history is not a record of the facts but of the feelings the dominant culture had about the happenings of its time; not a ledger of events but an impressionistic portrait of our collective selective memory, and it is those in power who do the selecting, those least interested in ideas that might change the status quo. Hovering above it all like the shadow of cloud is the awareness that history is happening right now, that we too may be putting good ideas to sleep — but by continually examining our blind spots and biases, we have a chance to keep them awake long enough for their light to blaze the way to the world we want to live in.

BP

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