“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.”
And yet we do go back, over and over. The tragic flaw of our species is the price we pay for the mind’s magnificent ability to move in time: the superpower of prospection that makes us capable of making a plan and making a promise comes bundled with the singular suffering of retrospection: the remorse, the regret, the past romanticized and voided of its own consequence.
It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity.
The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence. That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).
“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and separation. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in silence, by choice or by circumstance — is a singularly discomposing experience. It takes a tremendous effort of the psyche to keep oneself from feeling abandoned, and we know from fMRI studies that every abandonment is experienced as a miniature death because the brain registers a loved one’s death — the ultimate abandonment — simply as a sudden and inexplicable separation.
The wives of whalers had it when their husbands left on perilous voyages of months or years — faith that time and chance would smile upon that particular precious life adrift on the turbulent waters. Parents have it when their child takes those first steps, runs that first errand, goes to college — faith that across the developmental stages of individuation and separation, some unbroken bond of love will remain. Friends and lovers have it each time they embrace goodbye — faith that it will not be the last embrace.
But no one in the history of the world has had more faith in the face of separation and uncertainty than the penguin.
Penguins mate for life and lay one egg per year, which the parents take turns incubating and nursing for long stretches as each ventures into the sea hunting for food. The separation can last for months, during which the starving parent protecting the egg must retain unfaltering faith in the mate’s return — for if they too leave the nursery and go in search of food, the egg will perish.
The extraordinary extent of that faith and the heroic patience it requires of the penguin come alive on the pages of Voyage Through the Antarctic (public library) — a collaboration between ornithologist and conservationist Ronald Lockley and novelist Richard Adams, who traveled together through the polar regions a decade after Adams wrote the repeatedly rejected manuscript turned modern classic Watership Down.
The King Penguin by Thomas Waterman Wood, 1871. (Available as a print.)
Celebrating the emperor penguin as “a miracle of antarctic evolution” — its six-month courtship, its immense single-file march to remembered nursery sites far from the sea, its devoted co-parenting — Adams writes:
On the frozen breeding-grounds no food is accessible. The sea steadily retreats — perhaps for as much as 125 miles — as the winter ice extends outwards from Antarctica.
When at last, in May, the female lays the single large (about 0.5 kg) egg, there is much excitement and mutual “talk.” The male awaits its appearance intently, and with his curved beak at once rolls it over his feet and up into a kind of pouch between his legs, where it is protected by a large flap of feathered belly skin and warmed by contact with the naked, hidden brood patch. If he did not do this, the egg would freeze within one minute. Exhausted by her efforts, and starving, having lost much weight during the long fast of mating and egg-building, the female now waddles seaward, tobogganing down slopes and now and then sleeping for short periods among the ice-hills.
It takes her days, even weeks to reach open water, where she sets about restoring her body fat — a long recovery of vitality before she can return to the nursery at the end of the two-month incubation period. During that time, the males survive by crowding together in a solid shield known as testudo, which allows them to maximize body heat and keep from being blown away by the ferocious polar gales. It is only when the female returns to take over parenting duties that the male, weak and famished, can set out to sea to restore himself, having persevered through his mate’s long absence with total trust in her return.
Adams marvels at this unparalleled act of faith:
The male’s stoic, heroic devotion to his duty as incubator and nurse must be unique in nature, involving that almost incredibly long fast under conditions of exposure to intense frost that would kill most other living creatures. It is at last rewarded, while the rookery is still sunless in July, by the return of his mate, fat an full-bellied from her long sojourn amid the krill and small fishes. She has had an even longer walk back to the rookery, since water ice is still forming far at sea. She usually arrives a few days after the chick is born at the time when, getting hungry, it begins to poke its head into the air and whine for food. The male, by an unusual provision of nature, manufactures sufficient nourishing fluid from bile and stomach secretions to keep the infant alive until the female arrives.
When the female returns, she calls to and recognizes her mate by voice. This is a kind of ceremony, which may take some time, since after two months of testudo and other movement the mate is not likely to be where she left him nursing the precious egg. Once the ceremony of vocal recognition is over, the female persuades her mate to yield the chick to her. Within seconds it is transferred to her pouch. The male, in his turn, is now free to set out on the long walk to the ocean feeding-grounds… And here we rind another remarkable and unusual natural provision: the mother is able not only to live off her body fat but also to conserve the contents of her stomach to dole out enough daily food to keep the chick going until the male returns.
That penguins have survived by an act of faith since they first diverged from albatrosses 71 million years ago is not only a miracle of evolution — there alongside such improbable and astonishing things as the eye of the scallop, the periodicity of the cicada, and REM — but a living testament to patience as the guardian of love and the engine of the possible, a model for refusing to experience absence as abandonment, that miniature of death. For only love — the tenacity of it, the faith in it, the infinity of shapes it can take — makes life more stubborn than death.
The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether or not we believe in them — is pocked with myriad subjective realities, each lensed through the particular qualia of the perceiver, each a function not of the mind alone but of the entire organism and the whole of its lived experience, embodied and enacted by the total creature. What we call truth, and how we arrive at it, has more to do with that tessellated totality than with the mind’s rational analysis of reality.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) explores this with her characteristic rigor of thought and passion for language in a wonderful essay about the Ancient Greeks later included in The Common Reader (public library) — the classic collection that also gave us Woolf on how to hear your soul.
Virginia Woolf
With an eye to “the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth” that made Socrates such a timeless fulcrum of wisdom (which, I suppose, is the ultimate use of the truth), and in fiery defiance of Descartes, she insists that we arrive at the truth — about the world, about ourselves, about the substance life is made of — with more than the mind:
What matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of reaching it… Truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it… Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things are permanently more valuable than others.
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art. 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.
“Live as if you were living already for the second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 masterwork on the human search for meaning, “and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise — a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us, in the sublime words of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “ill-prepared for the privilege of living.” All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become. “Our lived lives,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his magnificent manifesto for missing out, “might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.” We perform this existential dance of yeses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to want?
Czech-French writer Milan Kundera (March 31, 1929–July 11, 2023) examines our ambivalent amble through life with unparalleled grace and poetic precision in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library) — one of the most beloved and enduringly rewarding books of the past century.
Because love heightens all of our senses and amplifies our existing preoccupations, it is perhaps in love that life’s central ambivalences grow most disorienting — something the novel’s protagonist, Tomáš, tussles with as he finds himself consumed with the idea of a lover he barely knows:
He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger.
[…]
But was it love? … Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? … Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
The woman eventually becomes Tomáš’s wife, which only further affirms that even the rightest choice can present itself to us shrouded in uncertainty and doubt at the outset, its rightness only crystallized in the clarity of hindsight. Kundera captures the universal predicament undergirding Tomáš’s particular perplexity:
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
[…]
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
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