The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

UPDATE: Tim has courageously shared the precipitate of his lifelong depression.

Most people know Tim Ferriss as the amicable, quick-witted, high-energy writer, adventurer, and interviewer, who has devoted his life to optimizing human performance across the full spectrum of physical and mental health. But few know that, in addition to nearly dying at birth and growing up with no material luxury, Tim survived a period of suicidal depression that nearly claimed his life — the kind of suffocating grimness which William Styron so unforgettably described.

Tim discusses that dark episode for the first time in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (public library) — his compendium of learnings from more than two hundred interviews with entrepreneurs, artists, writers, scientists, and other titans of achievement, including philosopher Alain de Botton, musician Amanda Palmer, mindfulness and meditation teacher Tara Brach, neuroscientist Sam Harris, writer Malcolm Gladwell, social scientist Brené Brown, and writer and former firefighter Caroline Paul. In a chapter dedicated to the darkest period of his life, he shares the most any of us ever can: his subjective experience and his personal coping strategies, in the hope that they might help others who are also struggling.

Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Benjamin Sklar)
Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Benjamin Sklar)

Reflecting on why he kept his suicidal depression a secret for many years, Tim distinguishes between two kinds of secrets — those we keep because we fear fleeting mortification, like accounts of embarrassing things we’ve done in sub-optimal moments, and dark secrets that paralyze us with deep shame, “the shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.”

Noting that a number of his closest friends in high school and college had killed themselves — and, lest we forget, there is perilous social contagion in suicide — Tim outlines the downward spiral which he himself barely escaped. He writes:

In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality.

Tim goes on to trace his downward spiral, precipitated by his failing senior thesis at Princeton — a pinnacle of education for which he had labored to transcend his humble beginnings since childhood. As it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to process the hundreds of pages of original Japanese research, in Japanese, in order to complete his ambitious East Asian Studies thesis in time, Tim realized that he wouldn’t graduate with his class — something his hostile thesis advisor made abundantly and abrasively clear. Feeling betrayed by the system he had worked so hard for, he spiraled into dejection.

Just then, his longtime girlfriend severed the relationship on account of his “neediness,” which she felt was compromising her varsity season. He rented a lonesome apartment off campus to continue working on his thesis as he watched his friends gleefully graduate. Trapped in isolation that only amplified his despair, he began to feel like a useless burden on the world and ceased to see a reason for being.

One day, wandering aimlessly through the bookstore, he chanced upon a book on suicide.

Tim picks up the story:

It’s important to mention that, by this point, I was past deciding. The decision was obvious to me. I’d somehow failed, painted myself into this ridiculous corner, wasted a fortune on a school that didn’t care about me, so what would be the point of doing otherwise? To repeat these types of mistakes forever? To be a hopeless burden to myself and my family and friends? … The world was better off… What would I ever contribute? Nothing. So the decision was made, and I was in full-on planning mode.

Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Martin Schoeller)
Tim Ferriss (Photograph: Martin Schoeller)

But despite his meticulous planning of the act, something thus far outside his scope of considerations occurred: He received an unexpected phone call from his mother, precipitated by a fortuitous mishap. He had ordered the suicide book from the Princeton library, but had forgotten that the address on file was still his parents’ home, which meant that as soon as the book became available, his parents received a postcard from the library announcing that the suicide book was available for pickup. His mother, alarmed, immediately called him. Tim transports us to what it was like to have that seemingly serendipitous conversation and considers its life-saving effect:

I am snapped out of my own delusion by a one-in-a-million accident. It was only then that I realize something: My death wouldn’t just be about me. It would completely destroy the lives of those I cared about most. I imagine my mom, who had no part in creating my thesis mess, suffering until her dying day, blaming herself.

Motivated by this momentary glimpse of the circle of love beyond his locus of personal agony, Tim decided to take a few months to restore his physical and mental health — perhaps the seedbed of his lifelong emphasis on the indivisibility of the two. In a sentiment that calls to mind Aldous Huxley’s insistence on mind-body integration — Tim is, after all, Huxley’s contemporary counterpart in certain ways — he recounts the vitalizing effect of this embodied approach to his sanity:

Months later, after focusing on my body instead of sitting around trapped in my head, things are much clearer. Everything seems more manageable. The “hopeless” situation seems like shitty luck but nothing permanent.

From this newfound place of perspective, Tim was able to find greater stability as he faced life’s fleeting perturbations. In a testament to Henry Miller’s notion that “on how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” he returned to Princeton and was able to withstand his advisor’s merciless takedown of the thesis on which he had worked so hard. In an aside that further demonstrates just how mutable even our bitterest resolves are, Tim notes that the thesis takedown made him vow to never write another word again; this 700-page tome is his fourth book.

With a sensitive and self-aware eye to the disconnect between how all-consuming such setbacks can seem to the depressed person and how trivial to someone judging from the outside, he writes:

Some of you might also be thinking “That’s it?! A Princeton student was at risk of getting a bad grade? Boo-fuckin’-hoo, man. Give me a break…” But … that’s the entire point. It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to think that your entire life hinges on one thing you’ll barely remember 5 or 10 years later. That seemingly all-important thing could be a bad grade, getting into college, a relationship, a divorce, getting fired, or a bunch of hecklers on the Internet.

Likening suicide to “wearing a suicide bomber’s vest of explosives and walking into a crowd of innocents,” Tim considers the far-reaching ripples of grief and sorrow which the act sets into motion:

Killing yourself can spiritually kill other people. Your death is not perfectly isolated. It can destroy a lot, whether your family (who will blame themselves), other loved ones, or simply the law enforcement officers or coroners who have to haul your death mask-wearing carcass out of an apartment or the woods. The guaranteed outcome of suicide is NOT things improving for you (or going blank), but creating a catastrophe for others…

A friend once told me that killing yourself is like taking your pain, multiplying it by 10, and giving it to the ones who love you. I agree with this, but there’s more to it. Beyond any loved ones, you could include neighbors, innocent bystanders exposed to your death, and people — often kids — who commit “copycat suicides” when they read about your demise. This is the reality, not the cure-all fantasy, of suicide.

Drawing on his own experience, Tim offers — only after covering the basic necessity of crisis hotlines and other resources for professional help — an arsenal of tools and tricks that he uses for “keeping the darkness at arm’s length” to this day. One strategy he suggests for those enduring intolerable psychic pain is making a “non-suicide vow” with a friend. He writes:

As silly as it might sound, it’s sometimes easier to focus on keeping your word, and avoiding hurting someone, than preserving your own life. And that’s totally okay. Use what works first, and you can fix the rest later. If you need to disguise a vow out of embarrassment … make it a “mutual non-self-hurt” vow with a friend who beats himself or herself up.

Make it about them as much as you. If you don’t care about yourself, make it about other people.

Another strategy revisits the importance of mind-body integration:

Go to the gym and move for at least 30 minutes. For me, this is 80% of the battle.

But his most powerful technique has to do not with the self but with other selves — or, rather, with mooring the self to the existence of goodness by modeling and extending it to others:

If you can’t seem to make yourself happy, do little things to make other people happy. This is a very effective magic trick. Focus on others instead of yourself. Buy coffee for the person behind you in line (I do this a lot), compliment a stranger, volunteer at a soup kitchen, help a classroom on DonorsChoose.org, buy a round of drinks for the line cooks and servers at your favorite restaurant, etc. The little things have a big emotional payback, and guess what? Chances are, at least one person you make smile is on the front lines with you, quietly battling something nearly identical.

In a passage that calls to mind Rilke’s abiding wisdom on how winter bolsters the tenacity of the human spirit, Tim concludes:

My “perfect storm” was nothing permanent. But, of course, it’s far from the last storm I’ll face. There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can warm yourself as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires — the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms you build — help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the lushest green of life (and you do), the gray is part of the natural cycle.

toolsoftitans_timferriss1

In the remainder of the voluminous Tools of Titans, Tim goes on to offer many more fire-building tools for resilience, productivity, happiness, and self-transcendence borrowed from such varied masters of achievement as filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, music renegade Derek Sivers, comedian Margaret Cho, investor Chris Sacca, tech legend Kevin Kelly, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, actor B.J. Novak, and dozens more. Complement this particular portion with Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul and Galway Kinnell’s beautiful poem “Wait,” written for a friend contemplating suicide.

Tim discusses his own story, including his struggle with depression and his life-tested strategies for overcoming fear, with unprecedented candor in this revelatory Design Matters interview by Debbie Millman:

It’s very hard to achieve goals if you have the emergency brake on, and the emergency brake is fear.

BP

Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful and Creative Predator

Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca.

The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony.

Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from what Rachel Carson called “those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss,” through the growling din of the engines that conduct consumerism between continents, orcas are communicating in their sonic hieroglyphics, speaking to each other in haunting and melodious voices that summon the most coordinated hunting strategy known in the animal kingdom.

Traveling in matrilineal groups, they search for seals across the frozen expanse, moving effortlessly through pack ice that sinks immense ships. As soon as they identify the prey, they swim together under the ice to shatter it with a sub-surface shock wave, then begin blowing bubbles beneath to push the broken pieces apart. Once the cracks are wide enough, they turn on their sides to create a synchronized surface wave so large its crest crashes onto the ice, pushing seals into the water, where the pod divides the bounty according to a complex calculus of social bonds.

All the while, they are teaching their young how to perform this collaborative symphony of physics and predation — a further testament to social learning as a key substrate of intelligence — and it is the females, particularly post-menopausal matriarchs, who are doing the teaching. Orcas have such strong maternal bonds that sons stay with their mothers for life — a phenomenon so well documented that the researchers behind one longitudinal study dubbed male orcas “mamma’s boys.”

Orca pod hunting a great blue whale. St. Nicholas magazine, 1920.

But while these bonds are the orcas’ great strength, they are also their great vulnerability.

In 2018, while secluded on a small mossy island in Puget Sound to finish my first book, I watched the world turn with shattering tenderness toward an unfolding local event — for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean, an orca mother carried her dead calf draped over her head, hardly eating, barely keeping up with her pod. NPR called it her “tour of grief.” When she lost another calf in early 2025 — two thirds of orca pregnancies result in either miscarriage or infant death — she did the same, this time seventeen days.

Such sights so chill us because they are emblems of the miracle and tragedy of consciousness. Orcas would not be capable of such staggering success as predators if they were not also capable of such shattering grief, both a function of their intricate bonds, their collaborative interdependence, their complex consciousness that differentiates and bridges the difference between self and other. In the human realm, we call this love — the aspect of consciousness subject to the cruelest evolutionary equation: As Hannah Arendt so poignantly articulated, loss is the price we pay for love. It seems almost unbearable as we watch the mother orca carry her dead calf, and yet we too must bear it, and do bear it, however long and however far we may have to carry the dead weight of our grief — because we must, if we are worthy of our own aliveness, love anyway. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” wrote Rumi. Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth any price, any price at all.

BP

The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence

Jeanne Villepreux-Power (September 24, 1794–January 25, 1871) was eleven when her mother died. Just before her eighteenth birthday, she set out for Paris from her home in rural France, on foot — a walk of more than 300 kilometers along the vector of her dream to become a dressmaker. On the way, the cousin assigned as her travel guardian assaulted her and fled with her identity papers. Jeanne made her way to a convent and, as soon as she managed to have new travel documents made by local police, kept going. But by the time she made it to Paris, the position she had been promised was already taken. The only job she could secure was as a seamstress’s assistant.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power

Four years and thousands of dresses later, Jeanne was tasked with outfitting a duchess for a royal wedding. At the ceremony, she met and fell in love with an English merchant, married him, and moved with him to the harbor city of Messina on the island of Sicily. There, she immersed herself in passionate reading about geology, archeology, and natural history — the closest a woman could get to a scientific education at the time — and set out to study the island’s ecosystem.

Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, she fell in love with one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small sepia-like octopus Argonauta argo, known as paper nautilus for the thin, intricately corrugated shell of its females and the sail-like membranes protruding from it like a pair of bunny ears.

Argonauta argo by Frederick Nodder, 1793. (Available as a print and as a bath mat, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

The argonaut had fascinated naturalists since Aristotle with the mystery of its spiral shell.

They wondered whether the animal made it, or, like the hermit crab, inherited as a hand-me-down.

They wondered why only the females had a shell, why its shape was so unlike that of the animal body it housed, and why the dweller could completely detach from the shell like no other mollusk did, yet never abandoned it.

They wondered how the shell managed to quadruple in size during the five-month reproductive period — an astonishing feat of on-demand engineering seen nowhere else in the animal kingdom.

In the memoir of her researches, Jeanne Villepreux-Power wrote:

Having for several years devoted to the natural sciences the hours that remained to me free from my domestic affairs, while I was classifying some marine objects for my study, the octopus of the Argonauta transfixed my attention above the rest, because naturalists have been of such various opinions about this mollusk.

Argonauta argo from an Italian natural history book, 1791. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Observing argonauts in the wild is incredibly difficult — the shy, skittish creatures flee the surface and plunge into the depths as soon as they feel they are being approached, puffing a cloud of ink between themselves and their perceived predator, even if she is only a scientist:

When the air is serene, the sea calm, and she believes herself unobserved, the Argonauta adorns herself with her beauties; but I had to be prudent enough to enjoy her rich colors and graceful pose, for this animal is very suspicious, and as soon as it perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees to the bottom of the cage or the sea, reemerging to the surface only when it thinks it is safe from all danger. It is at this time that we can observe its movements and its habits.

And so, for ten years, Jeanne Villepreux-Power made it her “duty” to do “serious research” on the most contested aspects of the physiology, morphology, reproduction, and habits of these tender cephalopods. A skilled self-taught artist, she made her own drawing of what she saw.

Argonauta argo by Jeanne Villepreux-Power, 1839.

Unlike other naturalists, who had studied preserved specimens, Jeanne realized that she could only discover the true origin of the shell if she observed living creatures. To bypass the evolution-mounted obstacle of their extreme shyness, she designed and constructed one of the world’s first offshore research stations — a system of immense cages she anchored off the coast of Sicily, complete with observation windows through which she could study the argonauts undisturbed. Every day, she prepared food for them, rowed her boat to the cages in her long skirts, and knelt at the platform, observing for hours on end.

But long skirts and long hours in cold water make not for a felicitous scientist. And so, in order to transfer her observations and experiments ashore, Jeanne Villepreux-Power pioneered the aquarium.

Her home became a marine biology lab, stacked with vast tanks, which she populated with living argonauts. Conducting experiment after experiment and observation after observation, magnifying eggs and shell fragments under her microscope, she set about illuminating the mysterious living realities of these otherworldly earthlings, following her intuition that — contrary to what her male peers believed — the females did make their own shells. She wrote:

I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.

In a series of groundbreaking experiments she began in 1833 — the final year of her thirties — the seamstress-turned-scientist solved the ancient nested mysteries of whether (yes), how (through a marvel of biochemistry), and when (within days of hatching) the argonaut makes its spiral home: With her elegant empiricism, Jeanne Villepreux-Power managed to “demonstrate, by unequivocal proofs, that the Argonauta octopus is the builder of its shell.”

She started with the obvious yet radical insight that you cannot understand the living morphology of a creature by studying dead specimens — to find out when and how the argonaut gets to have a shell, you must observe it from birth. And so she acquired three pregnant females, each housing thousands of eggs in its enlarged shell, and watched them hatch — tiny baby octopuses, naked in their gelatinous sacs. Every six hours, she visited the babies to observe them closely for three continuous hours.

One day, she carefully removed a nine-millimeter baby octopus from the mother and, upon examining it, noticed that it was in a position of self-embrace, its membranous arms enfolded around its sac, the end of which the baby had begun to fold into the shape of a spire. Not wishing to disturb the hatchling, she put it back under the mother and returned six hours later to examine it again. To her astonishment, the tiny octopus had already begun building its shell out of a thin film, following the geometry of the mother’s. Within hours, the thin film had begun to thicken into the signature furrows of the argonaut shell — here was living proof that the argonaut was the maker of its own shell, beginning almost at birth.

Extended morphology of a female argonaut with egg case by Giuseppe Saverio Poli. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

But her most revolutionary experiment demonstrated something no one else had even thought to wonder about — a living incarnation of Schopenhauer’s exquisite insight that “talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach [whereas] genius is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot even see.”

Jeanne made a small puncture in the shell of an adult female to see whether and how the animal would repair itself, and what that might reveal about its intelligence, in an era when science was yet to recognize the consciousness of non-human animals. She watched in marvel as the octopus protruded its front arms and, sweeping the silvery membranes previously thought to function as sails over the puncture like a windshield wiper, seal it back into cohesion with a glutenous substance, the chemical composition of which she analyzed and determined to be identical to the calcium carbonate of the original shell. The restored part, she observed, was more robust than the shell itself, “somewhat bumpy, puffy,” not following the regular furrows of the shell but corrugating sideways, almost perpendicularly to them — a sort of scar, the mollusk equivalent of what is known as “proud flesh” in horses.

In a wildly imaginative twist of the experiment, she decided to see whether the argonaut could repair its shell using not its own substance but spare parts, so to speak. She broke off a small piece of an adult’s shell, but this time she placed in the tank next to it fragments from other shells. To her astonishment, the argonaut rushed to the pieces and began feeling them out with its arms, searching for the suitable puzzle shape, then applied it to its own shell and, once again waving the membranes over it, began the work of welding, struggling to orient the furrows of the borrowed piece parallel to those of its existing shell.

She spent hours bent over the cage, watching this staggering feat of multiple intelligences. Naturalists before her, working only with dead specimens and theoretical conjecture, had declared this impossible. But after repeating her experiment for five years and obtaining the same result over and over, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated that the octopus is indeed this planet’s patron saint of the possible.

Since women were excluded from the scientific establishment, unable to attend universities or present at learned societies, her research traveled into the world by proxy. The week photography was born in 1839, Sir Richard Owen — England’s preeminent scientists in the era before Charles Darwin, with whom she had been in regular correspondence throughout her experiments — read one of her letters and presented her findings before the London Zoological Society. Her research was a revelation. Soon, it was being published in English, French, and German, and circulated widely across Europe. By the end of her long life, Jeanne Villepreux-Power belonged to more than a dozen scientific societies. Her research not only illuminated an enduring mystery about the physiology and biology of a particular species of octopus, but, through her experiments on shell repair, laid the groundwork for the study of octopus intelligence, which has forever changed our understanding of consciousness itself.

Complement with some stunning drawings of octopuses from the world’s first encyclopedia of deep-sea cephalopods, created a quarter century after Jeanne Villepreux-Power’s death, then savor Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent poem “Octopus Empire.”

BP

James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease — for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.

The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit — James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.

Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. (Photograph courtesy of Taschen.)

In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon — an old high school friend of his — to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book Nothing Personal (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits — of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age- and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope — are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:

Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.

It is a fearful speculation — or, rather, a fearful knowledge — that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.

Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds:

Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it — life — one more time?

Art from Trees at Night by Art Young, 1926. Available as a print

After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay — lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” — Baldwin continues:

I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.

That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life — to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.

In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes:

For, perhaps — perhaps — between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct — I believe — causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 English edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Available as a print.

And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith — so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM:

At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor — the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self — death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. — And many of us perish then.

What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers:

But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality — oneself — which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again.

Baldwin — whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death — wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try — we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.

Art by from Little Man, Little Man — James Baldwin’s only children’s book, written to foment his own young nephew’s self-regard.

Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours:

Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost.

More than half a century later, Nothing Personal remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book.

BP

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