The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: AI Prophet Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity

By Maria Popova

Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: AI Prophet Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of raw material to feed the “combinatory play” Einstein considered the crux of creativity.

The first comes from experience — intuition is what we call the pattern recognition unconsciously honed in the act of living. The third also comes from experience — everything we have ever read and seen, everyone we have ever loved, everything we have suffered becomes a building block for the combinatorial alchemy of creation. The second is the fault line between genius and madness — a creative revelation, be it the heliocentric model of the universe or the Goldberg Variations, is seeing something no one else has seen, which has acute relevance to the world as we know it, touches it, transforms it; a hallucination is seeing something no one else can see without the ability to evaluate its irrelevance to the real world.

A quarter millennium after Lovelace, we face the question of whether AI can achieve all three, and therefore originate truly new ideas, or remain in the straitjacket of binary logic — a disembodied intellect without the lived experience, in all its embodied and ambiguous wildness, on which true creativity draws. Out of this arises the far more disquieting question of whether we, as a species, are being trained by this “mechanical kingdom” of our own creation to mistake the simulacrum of life for life itself, to reduce our aliveness to algorithms. Given that creativity is a hallmark of our species, questions about the nature of creativity in human and non-human minds are ultimately questions about what it means to be — and remain — human.

Operators at the MANIAC I (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model I), 1952.

Few have reckoned with these questions more deeply, or more durationally, than British philosopher Margaret Boden (November 26, 1936–July 18, 2025), who composed her revelatory book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (public library) when the Internet was just a few years old and computational models still in their infancy. At its heart is an investigation of how the human mind can surpass itself, how our intuition works, and how it is possible for us to think new thoughts, anchored in the insight that “a computational approach gives us a way of coming up with scientific hypotheses about the rich subtleties of the human mind,” that AI-concepts are valuable not because they can (which they very well could) originate new ideas but because they can help us do so, because “both their failures and their successes help us think more clearly about our own creative powers.”

All of this requires a clear definition of those powers — not the ancient cop-out of divine inspiration, not the Romantic conceit of the chosen few gifted with special talents, but a model that accounts for both the immense range of creativity and the wide variations across that range, for its fundamentally mysterious nature and for the possibility of comprehending the mystery without reducing it to code.

An epoch after Einstein observed that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious” because there is always “something deeply hidden… behind things,” after Carl Sagan insisted that “bathing in mystery… will always be our destiny [because] the universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it,” Boden considers the mystery of the universe within:

If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science. Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. How it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious.

[…]

A science of creativity need not be dehumanizing. It does not threaten our self-respect by showing us to be mere machines, for some machines are much less “mere” than others. It can allow that creativity is a marvel, despite denying that it is a mystery.

Margaret Boden, 1990.

Defining creativity as “the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable,” Boden argues that it permeates every aspect of human life, is not a special “faculty” of the mind but “grounded in everyday abilities such as conceptual thinking, perception, memory, and reflective self-criticism,” and is not binary — the question that should be asked is not whether an idea is creative but how creative it is, which allows us to assess both the subtleties of the idea itself and the “subtle interpretative processes and complex mental structures” through which it arose in the mind.

Drawing on everything from Euclid’s revolutionary geometry to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” she distinguishes between two types of creativity — personal creativity, which “involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it” no matter how many other people have come up with it, and historical creativity, in which the idea is completely new in the whole of human history. Both are axoned in a substrate of surprise — “the astonishment you feel on encountering an apparently impossible idea. It just couldn’t have entered anyone’s head, you feel — and yet it did.”

Boden identifies three aspects of creativity: First there is tessellating familiar ideas into unfamiliar combinations. Arthur Koestler, who greatly influenced Boden, termed this “bisociation” in his pioneering model of creativity. Gianni Rodari echoed in his notion of “the fantastic binomial” key to great storytelling. For such a combination to be truly novel, Boden observes, it requires “a rich store of knowledge in the person’s mind, and many different ways of moving around within it.”

The other two aspects of creativity both involve the conceptual spaces in people’s minds — those structured styles of thought we absorb unconsciously from our peers, our parents, our culture, the fashions and fictions of our time and place: styles of writing and dress, social mores and manners, existing theories about the nature of reality, ideological movements. One creative approach to conceptual space is exploration. Boden writes:

Within a given conceptual space many thoughts are possible, only some of which may actually have been thought… Exploratory creativity is valuable because it can enable someone to see possibilities they hadn’t glimpsed before.

Exploratory creativity discovers novel ideas within an existing conceptual space and, in the process, invites others to consider the limits and potential of the space. But one can go even further, beyond exploring and toward transforming the conceptual space:

A given style of thinking, no less than a road system, can render certain thoughts impossible — which is to say, unthinkable… The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they couldn’t have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the preexisting style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are now possible which previously (within the untransformed space) were literally inconceivable.

This, of course, is the paradox of all transformation, best illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — because our imagination is the combinatorial product of past experience, we are fundamentally unable to imagine a truly altered future state and deem such states impossible, chronically mistaking the limits of our imagination (which transformative experience expands) for the limits of the possible.

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

Boden picks up where Koestler left off to explore what it takes for an idea to be truly transformative. “Bisociation” alone, she argues, is not enough to originate such ideas:

Combining ideas creatively is not like shaking marbles in a bag. The marbles have to come together because there is some intelligible, though previously unnoticed, link between them which we value because it is interesting — illuminating, thought-provoking, humorous — in some way… We don’t only form links; we evaluate them.

This question of value is where the central paradox of creativity resides, because our values are largely inherited conceptual spaces, making it difficult to assess or even recognize the value of a transformative idea whose originality overflows and overwhelms the conceptual space. In consonance with Bob Dylan’s observation that “people have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” Boden writes:

Our aesthetic values are difficult to recognize, more difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to state really clearly. (For a computer model, of course, they have to be stated really, really clearly.) Moreover, they change… They vary across cultures. And even within a given “culture,” they are often disputed: different subcultures or peer groups value different types of dress, jewellery or music. And where transformational creativity is concerned, the shock of the new may be so great that even fellow artists find it difficult to see value in the novel idea.

She returns to the most crucial element of creativity — surprise so intense it has an edge of shock: Something previously unthinkable has entered your mind. To be surprised is to watch your calculus of probability crumble in the face of the possible, to find the locus of your expectations too small to encompass what you have just encountered. (This is why societies and epochs, such as ours, that prioritize certainty and self-righteousness over exploration and surprise are shackling their own creativity.) Boden writes:

A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar, ideas. A radically original, or creative, idea is one which cannot.

[…]

To be fundamentally creative, it is not enough for an idea to be unusual — not even if it is valuable, too. Nor is it enough for it to be a mere novelty, something which has never happened before. Fundamentally creative ideas are surprising in a deeper way. Where this type of creativity is concerned, we have to do with expectations not about probabilities, but about possibilities. In such cases, our surprise at the creative idea recognizes that the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could.

We are animated by this creative urge to bridge the actual and the possible because it matters to us what world we live in — it matters because we are made of matter, because while a computer’s generative flow is, as Boden puts it, “implemented rather than embodied,” ours streams in through through the sensorium of our bodily aliveness. A quarter century after the publication of Boden’s seminal book, months after the emergence of transformer-based large language models, Cambridge University endowed a lecture series in her honor. In her inaugural address, she reflected:

Homo sapiens is an intensely social species. Our needs for what Maslow called “love and belonging” (which includes collaboration and conversation) and “esteem” (which includes respect and dignity) are not mere trivialities, or optional extras. They matter. They must be satisfied if we are to thrive. Their degree of satisfaction will influence the individual’s subjective experience of happiness (and others’ measurements of it).Computers have no such needs.

It is out of this mattering, out of our creaturely neediness, that we originate anything of substance, value, and surprise. It is because things matter to us that we suffer, and it is because we suffer that we are impelled to transmute our suffering into art.

In the remainder of The Creative Mind, Boden goes on to explore the complementary role of chaos and constraint in creativity and how, despite their limitations, AI models can help us better understand the mystery of human intuition. Complement it with Oliver Sacks, writing three decades before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning, then revisit his own take on the three essential elements of creativity.

BP

Uncoding Creativity in the Age of AI: What Makes a Great Poem, What Makes a Great Storyteller, and What Makes Great Person

By Maria Popova

I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s — and yet Whitman could conjure up cosmoses of feeling with a single line, could sculpt from the commonest words an image so dazzlingly original it stops you up short, spins you around, leaves the path of your thought transformed.

An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.

Illustration by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

We call this suffering.

Suffering is the price we pay for a consciousness capable of love and the loss of love, of hope and the devastation of hope. Because suffering, like consciousness itself, is a full-body phenomenon — glands secreting fear, nerves conducting loneliness, neurotransmitters recoiling with regret — a disembodied pseudo-consciousness is fundamentally incapable of suffering and that transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art: An algorithm will never know anything beyond the execution of its programmed plan; it is fundamentally spared the failure of its aims because failure can never be the successful execution of the command to fail.

We create — poems and paintings, stories and songs — to find a language for the bewilderment of being alive, the failure of it, the fulness of it, and to have lived fully is not to have spared yourself.

Falling Star by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884. (Available as a print.)

In his exquisite reckoning with what makes life worth living, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captures this in a diary entry from the late spring of 1942. Under the headline “very necessary qualifications for a good Persian storyteller,” he copies out a passage from an unidentified book he is reading:

In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.

A generation before Canetti, the philosopher-poet Rainer Maria Rilke articulated the same essential condition for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but speaking to what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance, anything drawn from one life to touch another:

For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Couple with Carl Jung on the relationship between suffering and creativity, then revisit Annie Dillard on creativity and what it takes to be a great writer and Oliver Sacks, writing thirty years before ChatGPT, on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning.

BP

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

By Maria Popova

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

How to Delight in Your Days: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay’s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness

By Maria Popova

How to Delight in Your Days: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay’s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness

“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy,” Hermann Hesse wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century in trying to course-correct the budding consumerist conscience toward the small triumphs of attentive presence that make life worth living, adding: “My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.” Delights, we may call them. And that is what poet Ross Gay does call them as he picks up, a century and a civilizational failure later, where Hesse left off with The Book of Delights (public library) — his yearlong experiment in learning to notice, amid a world that so readily gives us reasons to despair, the daily wellsprings of delight, or what Wendell Berry, in his gorgeous case for delight as a countercultural force of resistance, called the elemental pleasures “to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them at all.”

Ross Gay in his beloved community garden

Each day, beginning on his forty-second birthday and ending on his forty-third, Gay composed one miniature essay — “essayettes,” he calls them, in that lovely poet’s way of leavening meaning with makeshift language — about a particular delight encountered that day, swirled around his consciousness to extract its maximum sweetness. (Delight, he tells us, means “out from light,” sharing etymological roots with delicious and delectable.) What emerges is not a ledger of delights passively logged but a radiant lens actively searching for and magnifying them, not just with the mind but with the body as an instrument of wonder-stricken presence — the living-gladness counterpart to Tolstoy’s kindred-spirited but wholly cerebral Calendar of Wisdom.

Page after page, small joy after small joy, one is reminded — almost with the shock of having forgotten — that delights are strewn about this world like quiet, inappreciable dew-drops, waiting for the sunshine of our attention to turn them into gold.

Photograph by Maria Popova

He writes:

Patterns and themes and concerns show up… My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.

In a passage evocative of those delicious lines from Mary Oliver’s serenade to life — “there is so much to admire, to weep over / and to write music or poems about” — he adds:

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study… I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows — much like love and joy — when I share it.

Art by Cindy Derby from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.

And so we learn, as passengers on Gay’s delightcraft, that it is not just a matter of paying attention, but of taking attention, of deliberately shifting it, of diverting the glycogen that pumps our despair muscle and clenches the fist scanning for danger, for that selfsame glycogen is needed to pump our delight muscle and open the palm to hold joy.

He writes:

When I began this gathering of essays, which, yes, comes from the French essai, meaning to try, or to attempt, I planned on writing one of these things — these attempts — every day for a year. When I decided this I was walking back to my lodging in a castle (delight) from two very strong espressos at a café in Umbertide (delight), having just accidentally pilfered a handful of loquats from what I thought was a public tree (but upon just a touch more scrutiny was obviously not — delight!), and sucking on the ripe little fruit, turning the smooth gems of their seeds around in my mouth as wild fennel fronds wisped in the breeze on the roadside, a field of sunflowers stretched to the horizon, casting their seedy grins to the sun above, the honeybees in the linden trees thick enough for me not only to hear but to feel in my body, the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.

Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener.

To be sure, this capacity for drinking in the glorious everythingness of the world is rooted in recognizing the immense and improbable elemental delight of one’s own existence — the consequence of what Gay calls “the many thousand — million! — accidents — no, impossibilities! — leading to our births,” that miracle of chance he had contemplated a decade earlier in a wondrous poem. He marvels at the improbable origin of his own delight:

For god’s sake, my white mother had never even met a black guy! My father failed out of Central State (too busy looking good and having fun, so they say), got drafted, and was counseled by his old man to enlist in the navy that day so as not to go where the black and brown and poor kids go in the wars of America. And they both ended up, I kid you not, in Guam. Black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination. Comes some babies, one of them me.

One of the readiest sources of daily delight comes — predictably, given the well documented physiological and psychological consolations of nature — from his beloved community garden. (Gay is as much a poet as he is a devoted gardener, though perhaps as Emily Dickinson well knew, the two are but a single occupation.) In an early-August essayette titled “Inefficiency,” he writes:

I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden (spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness — staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb—and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions — did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.

Illustration by Ashleigh Corrin from Layla’s Happiness by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie

Perhaps the most charming category of delights Gay encounters throughout the year are what he terms “unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers.” One September day, wandering through a small town in Indiana where he had just given a poetry reading at the local college and where “Make America Great Again” signs glare from an auto-shop selling foreign cars, he records this:

While I was working, headphones on, swaying to the new De La Soul record (delight, which deserves its own entry), I noticed a white girl — she looked fifteen, but could’ve been, I suppose, a college student — standing next to me with her hand raised. I looked up, confused, pulled my headphones back, and she said, like a coach or something, “Working on your paper?! Good job to you! High five!” And you better believe I high-fived that child in her preripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens. For I love, I delight in, unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. What constitutes pleasant, it’s no secret, is informed by my large-ish, male, and cisgender body, a body that is also large-ish, male, cisgender, and not white. In other words, the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal. We all should understand this by now.

A few months ago, walking down the street in Umbertide, in Italy, a trash truck pulled up beside me and the guy in the passenger’s seat yelled something I didn’t understand. I said, “Como,” the Spanish word for “come again,” which is a ridiculous thing to say because even if he had come again I wouldn’t have understood him. He knew this, and hopping out of the truck to dump in a couple cans, he flexed his muscles, pointed at me, and smacked my biceps hard. Twice! I loved him! Or when a waitress puts her hand on my shoulder. (Forget it if she calls me honey. Baby even better.) Or someone scooting by puts their hand on my back. The handshake. The hug. I love them both.

Art by Simona Ciraolo from Hug Me

And then there are his parenthetical meta-delights — parentheses applied, in proper Lewis Thomas fashion, as containers of delight, wherein the container itself is delightful. For instance, this:

(A delight that we can heal our loved ones, even the dead ones.) Oh broken. Oh beautiful.

Or this, nestled into his Indiana-small-town experience:

(A feature of the small-town Midwest: a city-hallish building in the center, always with some sad statue trumpeting one war or another. This one had a guy in one of those not-very-protective-looking hats they called a helmet during WWI. He’s carrying, naturally, a gun. Jena Osman’s book Public Figures alerted me to the ubiquity of the gun, the weapon, in the hands of our statues. A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one’s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas — we could go on like this for a while. But never again — never ever — guns. I decree it, and also decree the removal of the already extant guns. Let the emptiness our war heroes carry be the metaphor for a while.)

Illustration by Olivier Tallec from What If… by Thierry Lenain

This transmutation of terror into transcendence haunts the book as a guiding spirit. In an early-autumn essayette, drawing on Zadie Smith’s elegant reflections on joy, and on Rilke, and on Edmund Burke and the Romantics, Gay offers the daring theory that joy is “not a feeling or an accomplishment: it’s an entering and a joining with the terrible.” He then tests it in the only laboratory we have for our life-theories — our own being-in-the-world:

I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.

[…]

Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute.

[…]

It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse. Available as a print.

Complement the infinitely delightful Book of Delights with poet Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie’s lovely picture-book about happiness as a daily practice of noticing and Michael McCarthy’s meditation on nature and the serious work of joy, then revisit Bill T. Jones’s spellbinding Universe in Verse performance of one of Ross Gay’s poems.

BP

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)