The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

By Maria Popova

How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises.

False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust. But it is our true promises — those we have every intention of keeping — that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust.

Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake — not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves. Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be, not a prediction of who we will become. Nothing, therefore, is more fundamental to self-trust — which is the basis of self-respect, which is the basis of respect for others — than learning to make keepable promises.

The English philosopher of language J.L. Austin (March 26, 1911–February 8, 1960) offers a field guide to making promises and keeping them from breaking in How to Do Things with Words (public library) — the posthumously published adaptation of the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1955.

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

“Words are events, they do things, change things,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, whose praise for Austin led me to his wonderful book. “To say something is to do something,” he writes in it, “by saying or in saying something we are doing something.”

Austin terms the things our words do performatives and identifies five classes of them in language: verdictives (the pronouncement of a verdict by an arbiter of some sort, though the verdict may not be final and may be rather an open-ended reckoning or appraisal), exercitives (the exercise of power, rights, or influence, such as in voting or warning), behabitives (a miscellaneous group having to do with attitudes and social mores, such as apologizing, congratulating, condoling, and giving praise), expositives (the way we use words in arguments or conversation, with statements like “I agree” or “I assume”), and commissives (espousals or declarations of intention that commit us to something, of which promises are a prime example).

Of all the performatives, a promise is the most binding, the most revelatory of personhood. It is not, Austin argues, merely a mechanical act of utterance that bends language in a certain direction of thought — it is “an inward and spiritual act” that inclines the self toward a certain direction of action. He writes:

“I promise to…” obliges me — puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle.

This commitment begins with the simple prerequisite that “the person uttering the promise should have a certain intention” — namely, to keep their word, which doesn’t only represent something but does something. He illustrates the performative and its pitfalls:

For instance, the utterance “I do” (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something — namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying. And the act of marrying, like, say, the act of betting, is at least preferably (though still not accurately) to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign. That this is so can perhaps hardly be proved, but it is, I should claim, a fact.

Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat

Many things can go wrong with all performatives, can haunt our words and our promises, can breach the handshake of trust — they are what Austin calls the infelicities that infect language. He divides them into two classes: misfires (“acts purposeful but void”) and abuses (“acts professed but hollow”), insincerity being an instance of abuse that infects a promise with infelicity. He considers what it takes for a promise to be felicitous:

[When] promising I must certainly intend: but I must also think what I promise feasible (must intend to do it, not merely to try to do it) and think perhaps that the promisee thinks it to be to his advantage, or think that it is to his advantage.

[…]

To do or to say these things is to make plain how the action is to be taken or understood, what action it is. And so it is with putting in the expression “I promise that.” It is not a description, because (1) it could not be false, nor, therefore, true; (2) saying “I promise that” (if happy, of course) makes it a promise, and makes it unambiguously a promise. Now we can say that such a performative formula as “I promise” makes it clear how what is said is to be understood and even conceivably that the formula “states that” a promise has been made; but we cannot say that such utterances are true or false, nor that they are descriptions or reports.

Promises that are well made and well understood bind us in honorable human relationships. Austin writes:

Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.

Our word — the self-trust that we can keep it, the faith that it can holds us — is also a barometer of our relationship to ourselves. Today, in a world that has normalized overpromising and underdelivering, a world in which people habitually make plans and promises and commitments only to cancel them, the discipline of keeping our word is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. And when our word does break even on the finest point of our best intentions — we are, after all, human and therefore perennially imperfect predictors of ourselves — we are left to apprentice ourselves in the art of amends as we search for an apology large enough to blanket our self-betrayal.

BP

Virginia Woolf on Creativity

By Maria Popova

“Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow asserted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.” Pablo Neruda illuminated this notion from another angle in his magnificent metaphor for why we make art, but the questions of what compels artists to reach for that other reality and how they go about it remains one of the greatest perplexities of the human experience.

No one has addressed this immutable mystery with more piercing insight than Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941). In one of the most breathtaking passages ever written, found in her Moments of Being (public library) — the magnificent posthumous collection of Woolf’s only autobiographical writings — she considers what made her a writer and peers into the heart of the sensemaking mechanism we call art.

Virginia Woolf

Woolf writes:

As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. I will give a few instances. The first: I was fighting with Thoby [Woolf’s older brother] on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed. The second instance was also in the garden at St Ives. I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later. The third case was also at St Ives. Some people called Valpy had been staying at St Ives, and had left. We were waiting at dinner one night, when somehow I overheard my father or my mother say that Mr Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark — it was a moonlit night — in a trance of horror. I seemed to be dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape. My body seemed paralysed.

These were three instances of exceptional moments. I often tell them over, or rather they come to the surface unexpectedly. But now that for the first time I have written them down, I realise something that I have never realised before. Two of these moments ended in a state of despair. The other ended, on the contrary, in a state of satisfaction. When I said about the flower “That is the whole,” I felt that I had made a discovery. I felt that I had put away in my mind something that I should go back [to], to turn over and explore. It strikes me now that this was a profound difference. It was the difference in the first place between despair and satisfaction. This difference I think arose from the fact that I was quite unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other, that a man I had seen had killed himself. The sense of horror held me powerless. But in the case of the flower I found a reason; and was thus able to deal with the sensation. I was not powerless. I was conscious — if only at a distance — that I should in time explain it.

Illustration by Emily Hughes from Little Gardener

Woolf argues that the wellspring of the creative impulse lies in the crucial qualitative difference between the experiences that produced despair and the one that sparked satisfaction:

As one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer.

Befittingly, Woolf would later transmute this insight into a beautiful line from Mrs. Dalloway: “The compensation of growing old [is] that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” But, here, she continues digging deeper for the source of this seismic activity of the soul:

I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.

Woolf ends with an exquisite summation of her personal philosophy — the only direct articulation of it to appear in any of her writing:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that 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. And I see this when I have a shock.

Complement the wholly indispensable Moments of Being with Woolf on the elasticity of time, why the best mind is the androgynous mind, writing and self-doubt, and the consolations of growing older.

BP

On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran

By Maria Popova

On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran

In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to “make this world worthy of its children.” Today, as we face a world that treats its children as worthless, we are challenged like we have never been challenged to consider the deepest existential calculus of bringing new life into a troubled world — what is the worth of children, what are our responsibilities to them (when we do choose to have them, for it is also an act of courage and responsibility to choose not to), and what does it mean to raise a child with the dignity of being an unrepeatable miracle of atoms that have never before constellated and will never again constellate in that exact way?

Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from Song of Two Worlds by physicist Alan Lightman.

A century ago, perched between two worlds and two World Wars, the Lebanese-American poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) addressed these elemental questions with sensitive sagacity in a short passage from The Prophet (public library) — the 1923 classic that also gave us Gibran on the building blocks of true friendship, the courage to weather the uncertainties of love, and what may be the finest advice ever offered on the balance of intimacy and independence in a healthy relationship.

When a young mother with a newborn baby at her breast asks for advice on children and parenting, Gibran’s poetic prophet responds:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from Crescendo.

Complement with Susan Sontag’s 10 rules for raising a child and Crescendo — an Italian watercolor serenade to the splendid prenatal biology of becoming a being — then revisit Gibran on authenticity, why we make art, and his gorgeous love letters to and from the woman without whom The Prophet might never have been born.

BP

J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

By Maria Popova

J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collection that gave us his uncommonly insightful meditation on fairy tales, the language of fantasy, and why there is no such thing as writing “for children.” He did love the book, so he agreed. But after two years of uneasy work on it, he finally conceded it was a betrayal of his lifelong credo that editorial introductions are an intrusion on the reader’s joy in being confronted by the immediacy of the story itself, with no one to tell them how to feel about it. He decided to bow out of the assignment.

In his struggle with it, however, Tolkien had found it “necessary to deal with the problem of ‘fairy,'” as he later wrote to a friend. So he decided to tackle it by writing an actual fairy story, perhaps the way Mary Oliver wrote one of her greatest poems as an exercise in end-stop lines, to better understand the form.

Published in 1967 as Smith of Wootton Major (public library), it includes a postscript on “the problem,” which Tolkien chooses to spell “Faery,” to mean more broadly the enchanted world.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Among the many lovelinesses of the essay is his ready use of the old-fashioned word “ruth” — a feeling of pity, anguish, or grief, from the Old English hrēow, meaning “sorrow” — which also gives us the wonderful underused verb “to rue” and the far more common, even commodified adjective “ruthless.” Enchantment, Tolkien argues, is a fusion of ruth and delight — in other words, a capacity for feeling life deeply in its full range. It is decidedly not religious, though religious experiences may contain elements of it, because religion is one of many possible organizing principles of the ordinary world, but enchantment allows us to partake of extraordinary. He writes:

Faery represents at its weakest a breaking out (at least in mind) from the iron ring of the familiar, still more from the adamantine ring of belief that it is known, possessed, controlled, and so (ultimately) all that is worth being considered — a constant awareness of a world beyond these rings. More strongly it represents love: that is, a love and respect for all things, “inanimate” and “animate,” an unpossessive love of them as “other.” This “love” will produce both ruth and delight. Things seen in its light will be respected, and they will also appear delightful, beautiful, wonderful even glorious.

It is a moving point, a true point, which we must not forget: Enchantment — wherever we may find it (as in nature, poetry, music), or wherever it might find us (as in love) — is not escapism but a truer realism than cynicism, pessimism, or optimism. In allowing us to touch the extraordinary, enchantment — which asks of the courage of the encounter — returns us to our lives more in love with the so-called ordinary world, which, we must also not forget, is itself an extraordinary triumph against probability.

One of Tolkien’s a href=”https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/11/01/art-of-the-hobbit/”>original illustrations for the first edition of The Hobbit, 1936

Tolkien writes:

Faery might be said indeed to represent Imagination (without definition because taking in all the definitions of this word): esthetic: exploratory and receptive; and artistic: inventive, dynamic, (sub)creative. This compound — of awareness of a limitless world outside our domestic parish; a love (in ruth and admiration) for the things in it; and a desire for wonder, marvels, both perceived and conceived — this “Faery” is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.

Couple with Loren Eiseley (one of the poet laureates of loving the world by being in it) on how to touch the miraculous in the mundane, then revisit George Saunders’s modern prescription for how to love the world more.

BP

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