The Marginalian
The Marginalian

What It’s Like to Be a Panda

By Maria Popova

What It’s Like to Be a Panda

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of everything — a complete and final explanation of the universe, a universe only rendered real in the mind.

Around the same time, on another landmass, watching finches cling to the swaying branches in the wind, a scientist as original and unrelenting in his own quest was wondering about the “internal fires that fuel these wisps of feather and bone,” recognizing that each mind is itself a universe, that inside every skull, even the smallest, is a place black and fathomless as pure spacetime, housing an umwelt of which an outside observer can only ever have an incomplete theory.

Considered by many the most effective conservationist of the past century, George Schaller — the first researcher to walk among wild gorillas unarmed and be rewarded with unprecedented insight into their universe, the first to take a photograph of the elusive snow leopard, rigorous and sensitive biographer of the lives of species as varied as the African lion and the Tibetan antelope, and now himself the subject of Miriam Horn’s rigorous and sensitive biography Homesick for a World Unknown (public library) — has spent the better portion of his days in wild places where “one settles at times for mere survival,” bitten and blistered and burnt, often haunted by his sense of “terrible loneliness” and “utter insignificance,” yet determined to prevail over parasites and bureaucrats and armed rebels to bring us a little bit closer to the abiding mystery of that unreachable otherness dwelling inside every consciousness, every sensorium, every animal body nerved with the history of its habitat and its habits.
Out of his life arises the unnerving, redemptive intimation that all the whys of our theology and philosophy are dwarfed by a single how honed to the point of revelation on the whetstone of observation and interpretation we call science; that the most interesting question about life is not why it exists but how it coheres, how it sings, what it is like to be alive — a question only ever answerable through what Horn calls “sustained intimacy” with the other via our own animal bodies, only answered with a “willingness to confess bafflement.”

Of all the baffling creatures whose universes Schaller entered with his torch of thought and tenderness, none was a greater mystery than the giant panda — doubly so for having be so rampantly Disneyfied and Instagrammed into a stuffed toy for the modern mind, shorn of its creaturely reality, all the more unknown for being so voyeuristically objectified.

Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.

Born uncommonly vulnerable — a pink handful of hairless flesh one nine-hundredth of the weight they would grow to, entirely dependent on the mom that must carry the infant in her mouth or paw continuously until it has grown to what Schaller described as a “panda-colored beanbag with legs” — pandas, even in their full-grown gigantism, remain one of our planet’s most vulnerable creatures, dealt a cruel hand by evolution, displaced and enslaved in our own hands. Schaller saw that what was needed was not merely better science but a restitution of these creatures’ dignity by meeting them, with curiosity and empathy, on their own terms — not as a symbol, not as a plaything, but as a living mystery with a sensorium and umwelt all its own.

Contextualizing the alien world he entered when he began his work with the giant panda, Horn writes:

A wild panda… doesn’t announce its presence like gorillas with big, noisy families, nor does it roam like a tiger. Instead, it stays mostly alone and mostly still, inside a world that seems designed to hide it: of bamboo screens all around made still more opaque by near-constant mists and rains. There it sits, just quietly eating, day and night. It must, because in one of the clumsier turns of evolution, it has become wholly dependent on a food it can barely digest. Though the purest of herbivores, eating only bamboo, a panda still has its carnivorous ancestors’ gut. Lacking the internal fermentation vat and symbiotic microbes that enable cows, giraffes, and other grass and leaf eaters to access the nutrients in cellulose and lignin, a panda can assimilate just 17 percent of the bamboo it eats. It can’t build enough fat to hibernate or even to sleep all night, but can survive only (like the orbiting humans in WALL-E) by combining gluttony with sloth.

Horn observes that the qualities we find most endearing in pandas — those traits most emblematic of their commodified cuteness — are an evolutionary consequence of this metabolic dictum:

Their sweet, broad head provides a strong anchor for jaws powerful enough to snap, strip, crush, and grind woody stalks. Their roly-poly body serves as a big, bamboo-holding barrel: George calculated that his favorite panda ate on average eighty-five pounds a day, half her body weight. Their famous pseudothumb, an elongated wrist bone, allows them to grab and hold even the slenderest stem, and to eat with exceptional efficiency. As George counted, one big male bit into 3,481 stems, rhythmically feeding each into the side of his mouth like a pencil into a sharpener, levering it Bugs Bunny–style into pieces, and reaching for the next before the last was swallowed. Most passes right through: Schaller weighed a single scat pile at seventeen pounds.

Taking in such meager energy, pandas must spend just as little. Most barely budge in a day, traveling no farther than a few hundred meters. Like Roman emperors, they eat slouched or reclined; George watched one lie on his back and use his hindpaws to bend stems toward his mouth, saving both forepaws for shoveling in the leaves. They don’t build beds, their plush bodies serving as both mattress and comforter. More than once, George saw a sated panda abruptly flop over onto its side or belly like a wound-down toy, fall promptly to sleep, then wake like Winnie-the-Pooh: raising arms overhead to yawn, rubbing their back end against a tree, even (when fed) licking a porridgy paw clean. Yet for all that adorableness, they were the most truly solitary animal George had ever known.

Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.

But despite how closely and patiently he observed the pandas, Schaller felt the cold edge of their otherness. “Her being eludes me,” he wrote after countless hours observing a particular female he saw as “complete in herself… final and preordained,” finding himself “hopelessly separated by an immense space.” An epoch after Kepler invented science fiction with his imaginative parable about life on other worlds, Schaller turned to that most ancient of storytelling forms to imagine life in other worlds — the inner world of a panda — in a parable serving a moving reminder of just how alien this planet’s life-forms ultimately are to one another. Reaching across the immense space, he channeled the voice of the panda warning about her own unknowability:

You cannot divide me into… fragments of existence… I am, like any other being, infinite in complexity, indivisible. [Even] time is not the same for all living things. This fir lives more slowly than you, and I more quickly… Some of you… hold that language is necessary before one can think, and that makes me and all others — except you — unthinking creatures. What frivolous nonsense!… I think mainly with smells… Forget science now and then.”

Recognizing that we can only ever perceive other creatures the way we perceive one another — in fragmentary glimpses of a remote reality stitched together into a coherent picture by tenuous threads of theory and speculation — Schaller added in the urgent voice of his parable-panda:

Look at each other. Your ways of thinking are vastly different, yet you belong to the same species.

Exposing the weft of science’s warp, he wrote:

What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

In a sentiment part Emily Dickinson, part Wittgenstein, part Zen kaon, he captured the central mystery of aliveness:

The panda is the answer. But what is the question?

Chinese watercolor from George Schaller’s 1993 book The Last Panda.

Complement this fragment of the wholly magnificent Homesick for a World Unknown with a taste, delicious and incomplete, of what it’s like to be an orca, what it’s like to be an owl, and what it’s like to be a falcon.

BP

How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment

By Maria Popova

“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.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

We may call that tremendous effort faith.

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.

In a testament to voice as the fingerprint of the soul, Adams adds:

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.

BP

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

By Maria Popova

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

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.

The great paradox is that truth — the truth — is at once multifarious and unitary, something Woolf captures in her altogether exquisite meditation on creativity as the antipode to the “non-being” that slips over reality like cotton wool, at the end of which she writes:

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.

BP

How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love

By Maria Popova

“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?

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it bears repeating, is one of the most life-magnifying books one could ever read. Complement this particular point of inflection with Donald Barthelme on the art of not-knowing and Adam Phillips on the rewards of the unlived life.

BP

Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother

By Maria Popova

Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion observed in her classic meditation on loss. Abraham Lincoln, in his moving letter of consolation to a grief-stricken young woman, wrote of how time transmutes grief into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart.” But what, exactly, is the mechanism of that transmutation and how do we master it before it masters us when grief descends in one of its unforeseeable guises?

Long before Didion, before Lincoln, another titan of thought — the great Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca — addressed this in what might be the crowning achievement in the canon of consolation letters, folding into his missive an elegant summation of Stoicism’s core tenets of resilience.

In the year 41, Seneca was sentenced to exile on the Mediterranean island of Corsica for an alleged affair with the emperor’s sister. Sometime in the next eighteen months, he penned one of his most extraordinary works — a letter of consolation to his mother, Helvia.

Helvia was a woman whose life had been marked by unimaginable loss — her own mother had died while giving birth to her, and she outlived her husband, her beloved uncle, and three of her grandchildren. Twenty days after one the grandchildren — Seneca’s own son — died in her arms, Helvia received news that Seneca had been taken away to Corsica, doomed to life in exile. This final misfortune, Seneca suggests, sent the lifelong tower of losses toppling over and crushing the old woman with grief, prompting him in turn to write Consolation to Helvia, included in his Dialogues and Letters (public library).

Although the piece belongs in the ancient genre of consolatio dating back to the fifth century B.C. — a literary tradition of essay-like letters written to comfort bereaved loved ones — what makes Seneca’s missive unusual is the very paradox that lends it its power: The person whose misfortune is being grieved is also the consoler of the griever.

seneca
Seneca

Seneca writes:

Dearest mother,

I have often had the urge to console you and often restrained it. Many things have encouraged me to venture to do so. First, I thought I would be laying aside all my troubles when I had at least wiped away your tears, even if I could not stop them coming. Then, I did not doubt that I would have more power to raise you up if I had first risen myself… Staunching my own cut with my hand I was doing my best to crawl forward to bind up your wounds.

But what kept Seneca from intervening in his mother’s grief was, above all, the awareness that grief should be grieved rather than immediately treated as a problem to be solved and done away with. He writes:

I realized that your grief should not be intruded upon while it was fresh and agonizing, in case the consolations themselves should rouse and inflame it: for an illness too nothing is more harmful than premature treatment. So I was waiting until your grief of itself should lose its force and, being softened by time to endure remedies, it would allow itself to be touched and handled.

[…]

[Now] I shall offer to the mind all its sorrows, all its mourning garments: this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife.

Art by Charlotte Pardi from Cry, Heart, But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved, a remarkable Danish illustrated meditation on love and loss

In consonance with his strategy for inoculating oneself against misfortune, Seneca considers the benefits of such a raw confrontation of sorrow:

Let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness.
Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.

In a sentiment of uncompromising Stoicism, he adds:

All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.

Observing the particular difficulty of his situation — being both his mother’s consoler and the subject of her grief — Seneca finds amplified the general difficulty of finding adequate words in the face of loss:

A man lifting his head from the very funeral pyre must need some novel vocabulary not drawn from ordinary everyday condolence to comfort his own dear ones. But every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often stifles the voice itself.

Instead of mere words, Seneca proceeds to produce a rhetorical masterpiece, bringing the essence of Stoic philosophy to life with equal parts logic and literary flair. He writes:

I decided to conquer your grief not to cheat it. But I shall do this, I think, first of all if I show that I am suffering nothing for which I could be called wretched, let alone make my relations wretched; then if I turn to you and show that your fortune, which is wholly dependent on mine, is also not painful.

First I shall deal with the fact, which your love is longing to hear, that I am suffering no affliction. I shall make it clear, if I can, that those very circumstances which you think are crushing me can be borne; but if you cannot believe that, at least I shall be more pleased with myself for being happy in conditions which normally make men wretched. There is no need to believe others about me: I am telling you firmly that I am not wretched, so that you won’t be agitated by uncertainty. To reassure you further, I shall add that I cannot even be made wretched.

We are born under circumstances that would be favourable if we did not abandon them. It was nature’s intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself.

Art by Maurice Sendak from We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy

Echoing his animating ethos of deliberate preparation for the worst of times, he adds:

Fortune … falls heavily on those to whom she is unexpected; the man who is always expecting her easily withstands her. For an enemy’s arrival too scatters those whom it catches off guard; but those who have prepared in advance for the coming conflict, being properly drawn up and equipped, easily withstand the first onslaught, which is the most violent. Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me — money, public office, influence — I relegated to a place whence she could claim them back without bothering me. I kept a wide gap between them and me, with the result that she has taken them away, not torn them away.

Seneca makes a sobering case for the most powerful self-protective mechanism in life — the discipline of not taking anything for granted:

No man has been shattered by the blows of Fortune unless he was first deceived by her favours. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own for ever, who wanted to be admired on account of them, are laid low and grieve when the false and transient pleasures desert their vain and childish minds, ignorant of every stable pleasure. But the man who is not puffed up in good times does not collapse either when they change. His fortitude is already tested and he maintains a mind unconquered in the face of either condition: for in the midst of prosperity he has tried his own strength against adversity.

For this reason, Seneca points out, he has always regarded with skepticism the common goals after which people lust in life — money, fame, public favor — goals he has found to be “empty and daubed with showy and deceptive colours, with nothing inside to match their appearance.” But the converse, he argues, is equally true — the things people most commonly dread are as unworthy of dread to the wise person as the things they most desire are of wise desire. The very concept of exile, he assures his mother, seems so terrifying only because it has been filtered through the dread-lens of popular opinion.

With the logic of Stoicism, he goes on to comfort his mother by lifting this veil of common delusion. Urging her to “[put] aside this judgement of the majority who are carried away by the surface appearance of things,” he dismantles the alleged misfortune of all the elements of exile — displacement, poverty, public disgrace — to reveal that a person with interior stability of spirit and discipline of mind can remain happy under even the direst of circumstances. (Nearly two millennia later, Bruce Lee would incorporate this concept into his famous water metaphor for resilience and Viktor Frankl would echo it in his timeless assertion that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”)

Seneca then comes full-circle to his opening argument that grief is better confronted than resisted:

It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad, or spend a lot of time carefully going through your accounts and administering your estate, or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it.

Art from Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch, an uncommonly tender illustrated meditation on life and death

Seneca points unwaveringly to philosophy and the liberal arts as the most powerful tools of consolation in facing the universal human experience of loss — tools just as mighty today as they were in his day. Commending his mother for having already reaped the rewards of liberal studies despite the meager educational opportunities for women at the time, he writes:

I am leading you to that resource which must be the refuge of all who are flying from Fortune, liberal studies. They will heal your wound, they will withdraw all your melancholy. Even if you had never been familiar with them you would have need of them now. But, so far as the old-fashioned strictness of my father allowed, you have had some acquaintance with the liberal arts, even if you have not mastered them. If only my father, best of men, had been less devoted to ancestral tradition and had been willing that you be steeped in the teaching of philosophy and not just gain a smattering of it: you would not now have to acquire your defence against Fortune but just bring it forth. He was less inclined to let you pursue your studies because of those women who use books not to acquire wisdom but as the furniture of luxury. Yet thanks to your vigorously inquiring mind you absorbed a lot considering the time you had available: the foundations of all formal studies have been laid. Return now to these studies and they will keep you safe. They will comfort you, they will delight you; and if they genuinely penetrate your mind, never again will grief enter there, or anxiety, or the distress caused by futile and pointless suffering. Your heart will have room for none of these, for to all other failings it has long been closed. Those studies are your most dependable protection, and they alone can snatch you from Fortune’s grip.

He concludes by addressing the inevitability of his mother’s sorrowful thoughts returning to his own exile, deliberately reframeing his misfortune for her:

This is how you must think of me — happy and cheerful as if in the best of circumstances. For they are best, since my mind, without any preoccupation, is free for its own tasks, now delighting in more trivial studies, now in its eagerness for the truth rising up to ponder its own nature and that of the universe. It seeks to know first about lands and their location, then the nature of the encompassing sea and its tidal ebb and flow. Then it studies all the awesome expanse which lies between heaven and earth — this nearer space turbulent with thunder, lightning, gales of wind, and falling rain, snow and hail. Finally, having scoured the lower areas it bursts through to the heights and enjoys the noblest sight of divine things and, mindful of its own immortality, it ranges over all that has been and will be throughout all ages.

The full letter was later included as an appendix to the Penguin edition of On the Shortness of Life (public library) — Seneca’s timeless 2,000-year-old treatise on busyness and the art of living wide rather than long. Complement it with these unusual children’s books about navigating grief, a Zen teacher on how to live through loss, and more masterworks of consolation from such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, and Albert Einstein, then revisit the great Stoics philosophers’ wisdom on character, fortitude, and self-control.

BP

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