“Literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have.

The most useful

guide to the country we’re visiting, life.”

“The imagination,” wrote the trailblazing philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in a 1794 letter, “is the true
fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that
lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to
calculate how many comforts society affords.” And yet somehow, in the centuries since, we have
increasingly lost sight of the imagination’s rapturous rewards and come to see it as a commodity of what
we now call “the creative industry” — something calculable and efficient, useful in maximizing society’s
comforts and business’s profits. Much as today’s archetypal Silicon Valley characters are pragmatizing
Eastern philosophy and ancient meditation practices as tools for “optimizing” their “performance,” the
imagination — that pinnacle of our cognitive evolution and seedbed of our core humanity — is being co-
opted for purposes that have little to do with animating our sympathies and expanding our hearts.

More than two centuries after Wollstonecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, another woman of extraordinary
intellect and imaginative prowess, sets out to redeem the imagination from the grip of consumerist
commodification in a magnificent 2002 lecture titled “Operating Instructions,” later included in Le Guin’s
altogether fantastic nonfiction collection Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–
2016, with a Journal of a Writer’s Week (public library).

Urs
ula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed

Le Guin writes:

In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out
of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and
other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read
the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It
beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.

I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in
business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean
the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone
on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to
capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination.

Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not
a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all
tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an
indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.

Le Guin observes that like any tool, the imagination requires that we first learn how to use it — or,
rather, that we unlearn how to squander it. Storytelling, she argues, is the sandbox in which we learn to
use the imagination:

Children have imagination to start with, as they have body, intellect, the capacity for language: things
essential to their humanity, things they need to learn how to use, how to use well. Such teaching,
training, and practice should begin in infancy and go on throughout life. Young human beings need
exercises in imagination as they need exercise in all the basic skills of life, bodily and mental: for growth,
for health, for competence, for joy. This need continues as long as the mind is alive.

When children are taught to hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures,
to read and understand it, their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs.

Nothing else does quite as much for most people, not even the other arts. We are a wordy species.
Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all
are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to
train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new
strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.

Illustration by Olivier Tallec from

This Is a Poem That Heals Fish by Jean-Pierre Simeón
Virginia Woolf considered memory the seamstress that threads our lives together, but it is story — our
inner storytelling — that orders memory into a coherent thread; it is story that, as Susan Sontag
memorably observed, can “reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a
path.” Our life-paths are paved with story — stretching back, the stories we tell ourselves about what
happened to us, why it did, and how it made us who we are; stretching forward, the stories we tell
ourselves about what is possible, what we want to achieve, and who we want to become.

In consonance with Rebecca West’s assertion that “art is not a plaything, but a necessity… a cup into
which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted,” Le Guin considers this essential function of
story in sculpting our ability to be at home in the world and its formative role in our becoming:

Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of
their people.

[…]

A child who doesn’t know where the center is — where home is, what home is — that child is in a very
bad way.

Home isn’t Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at
all. Home is imaginary.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your
people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They
may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be
nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home.
They are your human community.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught
these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other
people.

Illustration by Dasha Tolstikova for ‘The Jacket’ by Kirsten Hall

But that self-invention, Le Guin cautions, is not a solitary act — it takes place at the communal campfire
where our essential stories of being are co-created and told. Building on the ideas in her exquisite earlier
meditation on telling and listening, she writes:

Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out
the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need,
what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and
teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.

[…]

Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines
that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.

Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

Reading is a means of listening.

Seven decades after Hermann Hesse made his beautiful case for why we read and always will, however
technology may evolve, Le Guin adds:

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of
imagination through the reading of words.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have.
The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Words Are My Matter is a tremendous read in its totality, exploring questions of art, storytelling,
gender, freedom, dignity, and what happens when we go to sleep. Complement this particular portion
with William Blake’s searing defense of the imagination and Ada Lovelace on its two core faculties, then
revisit Le Guin on being a “man,” the sacredness of public libraries, imaginative storytelling as a force of
freedom, what beauty really means, where good ideas come from, and writing as falling in love.
“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be
wretched.”

“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.

Sene
ca

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.

A
rt 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.
“Joy … follows rightly confronted despair. Joy is the experience of possibility, the
consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny… After despair, the
one thing left is possibility.”

“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus observed as he contemplated the
relationship between happiness and despair shortly before his compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre penned his
famous line that “human life begins on the far side of despair.” And yet we tend to relate to despair with
extreme aversion, perceiving it as a source of suffering rather than a vitalizing force.

Few experiences spur despair more readily than the assault on freedom and the loss of agency — our
sense that life, circumstance, or some other external actor is thwarting our desired outcomes.

But freedom and despair, argues the great existential psychologist Rollo May (April 21, 1909–October
22, 1994) in his 1981 book Freedom and Destiny (public library), are not the two poles of our spectrum
of desire — rather, they are complementary forces that counterbalance each other. By recalibrating our
relationship to despair, we stand to know freedom more intimately and completely.

Rollo May

May examines the centrality of freedom in our value system and our elemental experience of life:

The capacity to experience awe and wonder, to imagine and to write poetry, to conceive of scientific
theories and great works of art presupposes freedom. All of these are essential to the human capacity to
reflect.

[…]

Freedom is also unique in that it is the mother of all values. If we consider such values as honesty, love,
or courage, we find, strangely enough, that they cannot be placed parallel to the value of freedom. For
the other values derive their value from being free; they are dependent on freedom.

[…]

Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity
to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of the disintegration of
concern for public weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of values, our recovery — if we are
to achieve it — must be based on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom.
 Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of
the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm

But because the concept of freedom is so multifaceted, so dimensional, and so entwined with
everything we hold dear, it is also difficult to capture its complete meaning. May offers an insightful and
inspired definition:

Freedom consists of how you confront your limits, how you engage your destiny in day-to-day living.

[…]

Human dignity is based upon freedom and freedom upon human dignity. The one presupposes the
other.

And yet we often lose sight of this daily self-creating aspect of freedom — May laments that we seem to
have “too easily and readily seized upon freedom as our birthright and forgotten that each of us must
rediscover it for ourselves.” Therein lies the central paradox of freedom — its indelible interplay with
destiny, which Simone de Beauvoir captured beautifully a decade earlier in contemplating how chance
and choice converge to make us who we are. Freedom, in this sense, lies in what we choose to do with
the cards we’ve been dealt — but the cards are the cards.

May writes:

Freedom owes its vitality to destiny, and destiny owes its significance to freedom. Our talents, our gifts,
are on loan, to be called in at any moment by death, by illness, or by any one of the countless other
happenings over which we have no direct control. Freedom is that essential to our lives, but it is also
that precarious.
Art Jacques Goldstyn by from Bertolt

When this precariousness plunges freedom to the existential bottom — when life hurls us into
undesirable circumstances and razes us on the loss of agency — we succumb to despair. But here, in one
of the book’s most revelatory parts, May makes a counterintuitive point — he frames despair as a
constructive emotion, “often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement.” When despair pins us to
rock bottom and forces us to let go of everything we’ve clung to, including our own neuroses and illusory
hopes, it allows us to build ourselves up anew in a way not possible within the comfortable parameters
of life unperturbed by the unexpected.

May examines this fertile despair:

I am speaking of despair not as a “cosmic pout” nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put
on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair.

Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great
enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It is a demand to face the reality of one’s life… Despair is
the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a
necessary preparation for freedom… Reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway
measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our naked
lives.

In a sentiment of sobering pertinence to our own cultural climate, May adds:

The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic
morality… It is important to remind ourselves of these points since there are a number of signs that we
in America may be on the threshold of a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to
camouflage or repress our despair.

Art
work by Lisbeth Zwerger from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Much like boredom can serve as the seedbed of creativity, despair, May argues, not only isn’t the enemy
of joy but levels the ground so that joy may bloom. Three decades before Toni Morrison made her
beautiful case for building from the ground of despair, May writes:

Those who can feel healthy despair are often those who also can at the same time experience the most
intense pleasure and joy… We believe more firmly in the dignity and the nobility of being human after
seeing a performance of tragedy rather than comedy: the characters and the tragic downfall of Hamlet,
Macbeth, Lear, or even of Harry in The Iceman Cometh give us a conviction of the significance of life. As
we leave the theater, we are not only relieved, we are inspired. The despair we have felt in the drama
highlights its opposite, the nobility of life.

[…]

The worst condition of all is to boast about never having been in despair, for that means that the person
has never been authentically conscious of himself.

But because despair, as anyone who has experienced it knows, seeds a state of profound unhappiness,
May draws a vital distinction between happiness and joy, while noting that the good life invariably
includes both at different times:

Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims… Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell,
by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy
is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but
stimulates one for exploration. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience.
Happiness depends generally on one’s outer state; joy is an overflowing of inner energies and leads to
awe and wonderment. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to
“let go.” Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human
spirit… Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the razor’s edge; happiness
promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the thrill of new
continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life.

A generation after Anaïs Nin extolled the generative power of inviting the unknown, May argues that
what differentiates joy from happiness, above all, is their respective orientation to the familiar and the
possible:

Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our fathers
did them. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown before. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the
edge of boredom. Happiness is success. But joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents
emerging within oneself.

Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher harmonies.
Happiness is finding a system of rules which solves our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary
to break new frontiers.

[…]
Joy … follows rightly confronted despair. Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s
freedom as one confronts one’s destiny. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy.
After despair, the one thing left is possibility. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising
that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open.

Complement the abidingly insightful Freedom and Destiny with James Baldwin on freedom and how we
limit ourselves, Friedrich Nietzsche on why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from
difficulty, and Albert Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, then revisit May
on love and will in turbulent times.
“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night
and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that
miracle.”

In his beautiful 1948 manifesto for breaking the tyranny of technology and relearning to be nourished by
nature, Henry Beston lamented: “What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled
in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity.” And yet his
admonition fell on ears increasingly unhearing as the decades rolled on with their so-called progress.
The poet Jane Hirshfield captured this in her stirring anthem against the silencing of nature: “The silence
spoke loudly of silence, / and the rivers kept speaking, / of rivers, of boulders and air.”

How to undeafen ourselves to the song of reality and redeem our humanity from alienation is what the
great anthropologist, philosopher of science, poet, and natural history writer Loren Eiseley (September
3, 1907–July 9, 1977) explores with tremendous insight in a portion of his 1960 book The Firmament of
Time (public library), which gave us Eiseley’s perceptive and poetic exploration of the relationship
between nature and human nature.
 Lore
n Eiseley (Photograph: Bernie Cleff)

Recounting a revelatory experience he had under a New England boat dock, amid the roar of motor
boats and the bustle of rampant tourism, Eiseley writes:

As I sat there one sunny morning when the water was peculiarly translucent, I saw a dark shadow
moving swiftly over the bottom. It was the first sign of life I had seen in this lake, whose shores seemed
to yield little but washed-in beer cans. By and by the gliding shadow ceased to scurry from stone to
stone over the bottom. Unexpectedly, it headed almost directly for me. A furry nose with gray whiskers
broke the surface. Below the whiskers green water foliage trailed out in an inverted V as long as his
body. A muskrat still lived in the lake. He was bringing in his breakfast.

I sat very still in the strips of sunlight under the pier. To my surprise the muskrat came almost to my feet
with his little breakfast of greens. He was young, and it rapidly became obvious to me that he was
laboring under an illusion of his own, and that he thought animals and men were still living in the
Garden of Eden. He gave me a friendly glance from time to time as he nibbled his greens. Once, even, he
went out into the lake again and returned to my feet with more greens. He had not, it seemed, heard
very much about men. I shuddered. Only the evening before I had heard a man describe with
triumphant enthusiasm how he had killed a rat in the garden because the creature had dared to nibble
his petunias. He had even showed me the murder weapon, a sharp-edged brick.
 Mus
krat (Photograph: Tom Koerner/USFWS)

With an eye to the assault on nature we call civilization — that perilous human impulse driven by what
Bertrand Russell termed “power-knowledge,” as distinct from “love-knowledge” — Eiseley writes:

On this pleasant shore a war existed and would go on until nothing remained but man. Yet this creature
with the gray, appealing face wanted very little: a strip of shore to coast up and down, sunlight and
moonlight, some weeds from the deep water. He was an edge-of-the-world dweller, caught between a
vanishing forest and a deep lake pre-empted by unpredictable machines full of chopping blades. He eyed
me nearsightedly, a green leaf poised in his mouth. Plainly he had come with some poorly instructed
memory about the lion and the lamb.

“You had better run away now,” I said softly, making no movement in the shafts of light. “You are in the
wrong universe and must not make this mistake again. I am really a very terrible and cunning beast. I can
throw stones.” With this I dropped a little pebble at his feet.

He looked at me half blindly, with eyes much better adjusted to the wavering shadows of his lake bottom
than to sight in the open air. He made almost as if to take the pebble up into his forepaws. Then a
thought seemed to cross his mind — a thought perhaps telepathically received, as Freud once hinted, in
the dark world below and before man, a whisper of ancient disaster heard in the depths of a burrow.
Perhaps after all this was not Eden. His nose twitched carefully; he edged toward the water.

As he vanished in an oncoming wave, there went with him a natural world, distinct from the world of
girls and motorboats, distinct from the world of the professor holding to reality by some great snowshoe
effort in his study. My muskrat’s shoreline universe was edged with the dark wall of hills on one side and
the waspish drone of motors farther out, but it was a world of sunlight he had taken down into the
water weeds. It hovered there, waiting for my disappearance. I walked away, obscurely pleased that
darkness had not gained on life by any act of mine. In so many worlds, I thought, how natural is
“natural” — and is there anything we can call a natural world at all?

Art by
Alessandro Sanna from Pinocchio: The Origin Story

Eiseley considers how this miraculous encounter with the “natural” world illuminates the nature of life
itself:

Whatever may be the power behind those dancing motes to which the physicist has penetrated, it
makes the light of the muskrat’s world as it makes the world of the great poet. It makes, in fact, all of the
innumerable and private worlds which exist in the heads of men. There is a sense in which we can say
that the planet, with its strange freight of life, is always just passing from the unnatural to the natural,
from that Unseen which man has always reverenced to the small reality of the day. If all life were to be
swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able
to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in
the moon’s airless craters, or in the road before our door.

Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as
life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming
future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing.

Winking at his work as a field scientists — a self-described “man who has spent a great deal of his life on
his knees, though not in prayer” — Eiseley reflects on what such encounters with the miraculous in
nature reveal about the real object of science and the ultimate meaning of human life:

Since, as we have seen, the laws of nature have a way of being altered from one generation of scientists
to the next, a little taste for the miraculous in this broad sense will do us no harm. We forget that nature
itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us
in his personal life repeats that miracle.

The Firmament of Time remains a transformative read in its entirety. Complement this excerpt with
Eiseley on the inner light that makes us human, then revisit the story of Alexander von Humboldt and
the invention of nature.
“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.”

“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du
Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false
steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime,
for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who
we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its
best, night and day, to make you everybody else.” Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s
prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures
surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as
human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

In 1926, more than a decade before a team of Harvard psychologists commenced history’s longest and
most revelatory study of human happiness and half a century before the humanistic philosopher Erich
Fromm penned his classic on the art of living, the British psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner
(February 1, 1900–May 29, 1998) undertook a seven-year experiment in living, aimed at unpeeling the
existential rind of all we chronically mistake for fulfillment — prestige, pleasure, popularity — to reveal
the succulent, pulsating core of what makes for genuine happiness. Along her journey of “doubts,
delays, and expeditions on false trails,” which she chronicled in a diary with a field scientist’s rigor of
observation, Milner ultimately discovered that we are beings profoundly different from what we imagine
ourselves to be — that the things we pursue most frantically are the least likely to give us lasting joy and
contentment, but there are other, truer things that we can train ourselves to attend to in the elusive
pursuit of happiness.

Art
by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

In 1934, under the pen name Joanna Field, Milner released the results of her inquiry in A Life of One’s
Own (public library) — a small, enormously insightful book, beloved by W.H. Auden and titled in homage
to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published three years after Milner began her existential
experiment. Milner would go on to fill her ninety-eight years with life of uncommon contentment,
informed by her learnings from this intensive seven-year self-examination.

In the preface to the original edition, Milner admonishes:

Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with
stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one’s eyes to what one
really likes, to drift into accepting one’s wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the
continual day to day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not
prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought.

This disorienting yet illuminating task of turning the mind’s eye inward requires a practice of
recalibrating our conditioned perception. Drawing on Descartes’s tenets of critical thinking, she set out
to doubt her most fundamental assumptions about what made her happy, trying to learn not from
reason alone but from the life of the senses. Half a century before Annie Dillard offered her beautiful
lens on the two ways of seeing, Milner writes:

As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were
different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a
narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head;
and there was a wide focus which meant knowing with the whole of my body, a way of looking which
quite altered my perception of whatever I saw. And I found that the narrow focus way was the way of
reason. If one was in the habit of arguing about life it was very difficult not to approach sensation with
the same concentrated attention and so shut out its width and depth and height. But it was the wide
focus way that made me happy.

She reflects on the sense of extreme alienation and the terror of missing out she felt at the outset of the
experiment, at twenty-six:

Although I could not have told about it at the time, I can now remember the feeling of being cut off from
other people, separate, shut away from whatever might be real in living. I was so dependent on other
people’s opinion of me that I lived in a constant dread of offending, and if it occurred to me that
something I had done was not approved of I was full of uneasiness until I had put it right. I always
seemed to be looking for something, always a little distracted because there was something more
important to be attended to just ahead of the moment.

Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special

edition of Alice in Wonderland

Throughout the book, Milner illustrates the trajectory of her growth with the living record that led to her
insights, punctuating her narrative with passages from her diary penned during the seven years. One,
evocative of eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath’s journal, captures the disquieting restlessness she felt:

I want to feel myself part of things, of the great drift and swirl: not cut off, missing things, like being sent
to bed early as a child, the blinds being drawn while the sun and cheerful voices came through the chink
from the garden.

In another, she distills the interior experience of that achingly longed-for sense of belonging to with
world:

I want… the patterns and colourings on the vase on my table took on a new and intense vitality — I want
to be so harmonious in myself that I can think of others and share their experiences.

Looking back on the young self who penned those journal entries at the outset of the experiment,
Milner reflects:

I had felt my life to be of a dull dead-level mediocrity, with the sense of real and vital things going on
round the corner, out in the streets, in other people’s lives. For I had taken the surface ripples for all
there was, when actually happenings of vital importance to me had been going on, not somewhere
away from me, but just underneath the calm surface of my own mind. Though some of these discoveries
were not entirely pleasant, bringing with them echoes of terror and despair, at least they gave me a
sense of being alive.

Much of that aliveness, she notes, came from the very act of chronicling the process of self-examination,
for attention is what confers interest and vitality upon life. Joining the ranks of celebrated authors who
championed the benefits of keeping a diary, Milner writes:

Not only did I find that trying to describe my experience enhanced the quality of it, but also this effort to
describe had made me more observant of the small movements of the mind. So now I began to discover
that there were a multitude of ways of perceiving, ways that were controllable by what I can only
describe as an internal gesture of the mind. It was as if one’s self-awareness had a central point of
interest being, the very core of one’s I-ness. And this core of being could, I now discovered, be moved
about at will; but to explain just how it is done to someone who has never felt it for himself is like trying
to explain how to move one’s ears.
 Art by Katrin Stangl from Strong as a Bear

This inarticulable internal gesture, Milner found, was a matter of recalibrating her habits of perceiving,
looking not directly at an object of attention but taking in a fuller picture with a diffuse awareness that is
“more like a spreading of invisible sentient feelers, as a sea anemone spreads wide its feathery fingers.”
One morning, she found herself in the forest, mesmerized by the play of sunlight and shadow through
the glistening leaves of the trees, which left her awash in “wave after wave of delight” — an experience
not cerebral but sensorial, animating every cell of her body. Wondering whether such full-body
surrender to dimensional delight could provide an antidote to her feelings of anger and self-pity, she
considers the trap of busyness by which we so often flee from the living reality of our being:

If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done?
Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill
as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears
might not have a wisdom of their own.

That tuning into one’s most elemental being, she came to realize, was the mightiest conduit to
inhabiting one’s own life with truthfulness and integrity undiluted by borrowed standards of self-
actualization. Nearly half a century before the poet Robert Penn Warren contemplated the trouble with
“finding yourself,” Milner writes:

I had been continually exhorted to define my purpose in life, but I was now beginning to doubt whether
life might not be too complex a thing to be kept within the bounds of a single formulated purpose,
whether it would not burst its way out, or if the purpose were too strong, perhaps grow distorted like an
oak whose trunk has been encircled with an iron band. I began to guess that my self’s need was for an
equilibrium, for sun, but not too much, for rain, but not always… So I began to have an idea of my life,
not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery
and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: “It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the
only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory.”
Distilling the essence of this reorientation of being, she adds:

I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.

Several decades later, Jeanette Winterson would write beautifully of “the paradox of active surrender”
essential to our experience of art. As in art, so in life — Milner writes:

Here then was a deadlock. I wanted to get the most out of life, but the more I tried to grasp, the more I
felt that I was ever outside, missing things. At that time I could not understand at all that my real
purpose might be to learn to have no purposes.

Half a century after Nietzsche proclaimed that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only
you, must cross the river of life,” Milner considers the difficulty — and the triumph — of recognizing that
you are crossing life on someone else’s bridge:

I had at least begun to guess that my greatest need might be to let go and be free from the drive after
achievement — if only I dared. I had also guessed that perhaps when I had let these go, then I might be
free to become aware of some other purpose that was more fundamental, not self-imposed private
ambitions but some thing which grew out of the essence of one’s own nature. People said: ‘Oh, be
yourself at all costs’. But I had found that it was not so easy to know just what one’s self was. It was far
easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one’s own.

Art from Kenny’s Window, Maurice Sendak’s

forgotten philosophical children’s book about knowing what you really want
“One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her own diary in the same era. “Looked
at, it vanishes.” Happiness, Milner found, was similarly elusive to direct pursuit. Rather, its attainment
required a wide-open attentiveness to reality, a benevolent curiosity about all that life has to offer, and a
commitment not to argue with its offerings but to accept them as they come, congruous or incongruous
as they may be with our desires.

Looking back on the diary entires from the final stretch of her seven-year experiment, she reflects on the
hard-earned mastery of this unarguing surrender:

It struck me as odd that it had taken me so long to reach a feeling of sureness that there was something
in me that would get on with the job of living without my continual tampering. I suppose I did not really
reach it until I had discovered how to sink down beneath the level of chattering thoughts and simply feel
what it meant to be alive.

Having termed this nonjudgmental receptivity “continual mindfulness” in her journal from the time,
Milner evokes Plato’s metaphor of the two charioteers of thought and reflects:

I came to the conclusion then that “continual mindfulness” could certainly not mean that my little
conscious self should be entirely responsible for marshalling and arranging all my thoughts, for it simply
did not know enough. It must mean, not a sergeant-major-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual
readiness to look and readiness to accept whatever came…. Whenever I did so manage to win its
services I began to suspect that thought, which I had always before looked on as a cart-horse, to be
driven, whipped and plodding between shafts, might be really a Pegasus, so suddenly did it alight beside
me from places I had no knowledge of.

Those interior unknowns, Milner discovered, were the recesses where insecurity lurked, in that ancient
here-be-monsters way we humans have of filling unmapped territories with dread. She examines the
vital relationship between inner security and happiness:

I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness
seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of
personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and
detachment must depend on a fundamental sense of security, and yet that I could apparently never feel
safe enough to do it, because there was an urge in me which I had dimly perceived but had never yet
been able to face. It was then that the idea occurred to me that until you have, once at least, faced
everything you know — the whole universe — with utter giving in, and let all that is “not you” flow over
and engulf you, there can be no lasting sense of security.
 Art by Vern Kousky from The Blue
Songbird, an illustrated parable of belonging and finding one’s authentic voice

Looking back on her seven-year study of what her moments of happiness depended on and how her
thought wrapped itself around her lived experience to extract from it a felt sense, Milner summarizes
how she came to discover her most authentic existential needs as a human being:

By continual watching and expression I must learn to observe my thought and maintain a vigilance, not
against “wrong” thoughts, but against refusal to recognize any thought. Further, this introspection
meant continual expression, not continual analysis; it meant that I must bring my thoughts and feelings
up in their wholeness, not argue about them and try to pretend they were something different from
what they were.

I had also learnt how to know what I wanted; to know that this is not a simple matter of momentary
decision, but that it needs a rigorous watching and fierce discipline, if the clamouring conflict of likes is
to be welded into a single desire. It had taught me that my day-to-day personal “wants” were really the
expression of deep underlying needs, though often the distorted expression because of the confusions
of blind thinking. I had learnt that if I kept my thoughts still enough and looked beneath them, then I
might sometimes know what was the real need, feel it like a child leaping in the womb, though so
remotely that I might easily miss it when over-busy with purposes. Really, then, I had found that there
was an intuitive sense of how to live. For I had been forced to the conclusion that there was more in the
mind than just reason and blind thinking, if only you knew how to look for it; the unconscious part of my
mind seemed to be definitely something more than a storehouse for the confusions and shames I dared
not face.

[…]

It was only when I was actively passive, and content to wait and watch, that I really knew what I wanted.
 Art by Jacqueline Ayer from The Paper-Flower
Tree

That knowledge, Milner found, arises from breaking the inertia of mindless thought that governs much
of our perception, which in turn shapes our entire experience of reality. She considers what it means,
and what it takes, to apprehend the world with unclouded and receptive eyes:

Blind thinking… could make me pretend I was being true to myself when really I was only being true to
an infantile fear and confusion of situations; and the more confused it was the more it would call to its
aid a sense of conviction. Yet for all its parade there was as much in common between its certainties and
the fundamental sense of my own happiness as between the windy flappings of a newspaper in the
gutter and the poise of a hovering kestrel. And only by experience of both, by digging down deep
enough and watching sincerely enough, could I be sure of recognizing the difference.

By keeping a diary of what made me happy I had discovered that happiness came when I was most
widely aware. So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more
aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as
intellectual comprehension…. Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with
understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations
of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs. And, by finding that in order to be more and
more aware I had to be more and more still, I had not only come to see through my own eyes instead of
at second hand, but I had also finally come to discover what was the way of escape from the imprisoning
island of my own self-consciousness.

Complement the uncommonly penetrating A Life of One’s Own with Hermann Hesse on the most
important habit for living with presence, E.E. Cummings on being unafraid to feel, and Maurice Sendak’s
forgotten debut — a magnificent philosophical children’s book about knowing what you really want.
A labor of love four years in the making, celebrating a trailblazing woman who
shattered multiple glass ceilings.

One late February afternoon in 2013, as my then-partner and I were cooking dinner at home in New
York, my phone rang. It was my dear friend and frequent collaborator Wendy MacNaughton. She knew
that I feel about the telephone the way Barthes did, so I in turn knew that there was some momentous
reason for the call.

Wendy was calling from the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, where behind a glass case she
had discovered something she intuitively recognized as a rare treasure — a set of vibrant original
paintings of traditional Jewish foods, alongside recipes written in a most unusual, meticulously hand-
lettered typeface. It bore the feisty title “Leave Me Alone with the Recipes” and was dated 1945.
When our mutual friend Sarah Rich joined Wendy at the fair, their inquiry about the author of this
magical manuscript was met with a name that meant nothing to either of them: Cipe Pineles (June 23,
1908–January 3, 1991). Upon probing further, they were jarred to realize that the name should not only
mean something to them, but should mean very much indeed — especially since Wendy is an illustrator
and Sarah a writer with a background in food and design. Cipe Pineles, they found out, was a trailblazer
who paved the way for women in design, illustration, and publishing — the first in many boys’ clubs, a
woman who embodied Audre Lorde’s assertion that “that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is
that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” She was also a pioneer of bringing fine artists to
magazines — she hired visionary artists like Ben Shahn and gave young Andy Warhol, who considered
her his favorite art director, his first editorial commissions.
 Cipe Pineles (Photograph: Trude
Fleischmann)

Wendy and Sarah had called us to see if Debbie and I wanted to split the cost of the illustrated
manuscript four ways — it was too pricey for them alone, but they felt strongly that this was a treasure
worth salvaging from antiquarian obscurity. Debbie and I heartily agreed. None of us had any sense at
the time of what we had acquired or how it could live, but a strange and wonderful Rube Goldberg
machine of serendipity followed, culminating in Leave Me Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art, and
Cookbook of Cipe Pineles (public library) — a labor of love four years in the making, using the illustrated
recipes as a centrifugal force for a larger celebration Cipe’s far-reaching legacy.
This part-cookbook and part-monograph was meticulously researched and edited by Sarah and Wendy,
with contributions by Debbie and me, alongside a small clan of art and design titans whose work was
directly or indirectly influenced by Cipe’s legacy: Artist Maira Kalman painted a one-page love letter to
Cipe; design legend Paula Scher eulogized Cipe’s tireless crusade for diversity in a field composed almost
entirely of white men; design historian Steven Heller chronicled how Cipe’s monumental influence as an
art director and educator shaped the sensibility of generations; legendary food writer Mimi Sheraton, at
ninety-one, recounted working among the editorial staff at Seventeen under Cipe’s leadership and
reflected on their shared culinary and cultural heritage.
 Art by Maira Kalman for Leave Me
Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art, and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles

Below is my own contribution — a biographical essay exploring how Cipe harnessed her outsider status
as woman and immigrant to revolutionize a hegemony — as it appears in the book:

BECOMING CIPE: OUTSIDERDOM AND PERSEVERANCE

Cipe Pineles was the first independent female graphic designer in America, the first female member of
the prestigious Art Directors Club, and the first woman inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.
A quarter century would pass before another woman was inducted, months before Pineles’s death.
Pineles was posthumously awarded the lifetime achievement medal from the American Institute of
Graphic Arts, the Nobel Prize of design. And yet through all of her acclaim, Pineles was animated not by
ego but by a tremendous generosity of spirit. She saw her success as belonging not to her alone but to
all the women whom she was pulling up the ranks along with her, to the young designers whose lives
and worlds she shaped as an educator and mentor, and to the American public, whose taste she subtly
and systematically refined through the unfaltering vision that defined her life’s work.

When I first heard of Cipe Pineles, I thought of her counterpart Maria Mitchell — a pioneer no less
trailblazing in opening up an entire world of possibility to women, yet no less lamentably forgotten.

One sweltering July afternoon, I found myself stunned before one particular object at the birthplace of
Maria Mitchell — America’s first woman astronomer — on the small island of Nantucket. In the
nineteenth century, Mitchell paved the way for women in science and became the first woman
employed by the United States Federal Government for a nonspecialized domestic skill — she was hired
as “computer of Venus” for the United States Nautical Almanac, performing complex mathematical
computations to guide sailors around the world. She was also the first woman elected into the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. It would be another ninety years until the second woman — legendary
anthropologist Margaret Mead — was admitted. The item that stopped my stride, hanging humbly in the
hallway of Mitchell’s small Quaker home, was her certificate of admission into the Academy. On it, the
salutation “Sir” was crossed out in pencil and “honorary member” was handwritten over the printed
“Fellow.” This yellowing piece of paper was the fossil of a quiet, monumental revolution — the record of
an opening hand-etched into a glass ceiling centuries thick.

Like Mitchell’s, Pineles’s path to success was neither straight nor free of obstacles.

Born to Orthodox Jewish parents in Vienna at the end of Europe’s last untroubled decade before the
horrors of the World Wars forever scarred the face of the Old World, young Ciporah — who soon
became Cipe and never looked back — grew up as the second youngest child in a family of five, with two
sisters and two older brothers. In search of relief for her father’s diabetes more than a decade before
the first insulin injection saved a human life, Cipe and her family migrated across Europe’s most
venerated spas and sanatoria before settling in Poland, right outside Warsaw. (How tempting to imagine
young Cipe crossing paths, without ever knowing it, with some of Europe’s intellectual titans who
frequented the continent’s spas around the same time, seeking cure for their own bodily bedevilments
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka.)
From a young age, flavor and color were married for Cipe. One of her earliest memories was of walking
in the woods with her siblings, gathering strawberries — “red caps through the green grass” — and
sitting down by the river to savor them. In childhood, as in her professional life decades later, she was
also unafraid of a difficult and even dangerous climb to the top. She recounted one particularly
memorable hike in the mountains on the border between Poland and the area then known as Bohemia,
on which she and her siblings had chosen one of the highest and most formidable peaks to climb. “With
great difficulties after falling a few times we reached at last the top,” she wrote — a sentence of
inadvertent prescience as an existential allegory for her later life in the creative world.

But the adventurous idyll was violently interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Shortly after Russia’s
Red Army invaded Poland in 1920, twelve-year-old Cipe and her family returned to Vienna. Years later, as
a high school senior in America, she won a national essay contest by the Atlantic for her vivid eyewitness
account of the Bolshevik-inflicted tumult in Europe, which she described as a time of “suspense,
excitement, and uncertainty.”

Back in Vienna, the Pineles sisters had set about learning English by memorizing Charles Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol — a strategy with a serendipitous payoff when they finally arrived in America in mid-
October of 1923 (“a very beautiful day,” Cipe recalled of the morning she first glimpsed the Statue of
Liberty) and entered school just before the holidays, impressing classmates with their season-
appropriate vocabulary. “From the beginning we have hard work,” she wrote shortly after arriving, “but I
think that in a few months, when we will speak and understand more English it will be much easier.”

So began Pineles’s life in America as a prototypical immigrant, marked by the peculiar, if lonely-making,
privilege of being in a culture but not of it. “There accrue to the outsider great benefits,” wrote the
trailblazing biochemist Erwin Chargaff — a compatriot and contemporary of Pineles’s, who immigrated
to America around the same time and for similar reasons. The European sensibility she had
unconsciously absorbed in her formative years would later bring to her design work a level of originality
and sophistication that rose above her American peers.

At the end of her senior year of high school, classmates wrote alongside her yearbook portrait: “She
knows she draws well. A little Polish girl who won our hearts.” She was voted “best natured member” of
her graduating class — a title that reflected the core values of kindness and generosity that never left
her, even as she ascended the rungs of the corporate world in the golden age of unfeeling self-
actualization.

During her final year of high school, Cipe received a fifty-dollar art scholarship — a non-negligible sum
that covered more than a third of the annual art school tuition at Pratt, where she enrolled in the fall of
1926. Her graduation portfolio at Pratt was strewn with food paintings, from a loaf of bread to a
chocolate cake. It was also an ode to her first big love, watercolor. Once again, a sort of character
summary by her classmates appeared next to her senior portrait:

The most remarkable water colorist in our class. Boys, it’s too late: Cipe is wedded to her art — and
they’re both happy.
Beneath the tongue-in-cheek remark lay a deeper truth about Cipe’s attitude toward art and marriage —
one nurtured by her older brother Sam, who was instrumental in encouraging her vocational autonomy.
Before Pratt, she had voiced to him her reservation that attending college would keep her from finding a
husband to support her. Sam reportedly replied: “Marriage is not a full-time occupation. Did you ever
hear of a doctor or a lawyer giving up his profession because he was getting married?” (That her
youngest sister became a doctor in an era when the field was almost entirely male is probably not
coincidental.) In another conversation, Sam reiterated the sentiment: “Marriage is not a substitute for
having something to do in life.” Pineles did eventually get married — twice — but although she was a
classic Jewish mother in some ways, including in the kitchen, she never let her family life contract her
expansive devotion to her art.

Pineles’s name worked both for and against her. To the American ear, Cipe Pineles bears a peculiar
ambiguity. An ambiguous foreign name functions like the screen behind which orchestra auditions are
performed — the applicant’s gender, ethnicity, age, and other potential points of bias are obscured to let
the music speak for itself. But unlike orchestras, which employ this strategy deliberately to avoid bias,
the magazine world of mid-century America had no such noble commitment to impartiality. The screen
of Cipe Pineles’s name was accidental and as soon as her gendered identity was revealed, the
opportunities dwindled or disappeared altogether. She would later recount: “I would drop my portfolio
off at various advertising agencies. But the people who liked my work and were interested enough to ask
me in for an interview had assumed by my name that I was a man! When they finally met me, they were
disappointed, and I left the interview without a chance for the job.” Some prospective employers
explained that if she were hired, she’d have to work in the bullpen — an enormous corporate hangar of
men — where a woman’s presence would be ill-advised and downright unwelcome.

Still, she pressed on. Reluctantly, she took a job as a watercolor teacher at New Jersey’s Newark Public
School of Fine and Industrial Art in the fall of 1929, at a salary of ten dollars a week, but she continued
to search for work in the commercial world. Compounding the persistent gender obstacle was the
inopportune timing of cultural catastrophe: Pineles had graduated from Pratt just before the devastating
stock market crash of 1929 and was attempting to enter the workforce at the dawn of the Great
Depression.

Determined to succeed, she scoured the New York Public Library for a list of advertising agencies
working with food accounts, purposefully pursuing her passion for the intersection of food and graphic
art.

She was eventually hired by Contempora — the experimental consortium of designers, artists, and
architects including Lucian Bernhard, Paul Poiret, Rockwell Kent and others — where she designed fabric
designs and dimensional displays. But her real breakthrough came obliquely to her direct efforts. The
magazine magnate Condé Nast saw her pattern design and window fabric displays for Contempora. They
were unlike anything Nast had seen. He immediately hired Pineles as an editorial designer for Vogue and
Vanity Fair, both of which she imprinted with her singular vision. She continued to move up in the
magazine world. By the mid-1940s, she was shaping the visual voice of Glamour and earning the
magazine every prestigious accolade of design.
It was in this period that she began illustrating Leave Me Alone with the Recipes, perhaps because she
was contending for the first time with negotiating the competing roles of traditional womanhood and a
thriving corporate career, which she followed to the very top over the next half-century, eventually
pouring the confluence of her accomplished expertise and her generosity of spirit into teaching as well.
She became a passionate and beloved educator at Parsons, where she taught editorial design for nearly
two decades.
Exactly thirty years after she wrote and illustrated her family cookbook, Pineles had a chance to
resurrect her love of the intersection of the culinary and graphic arts. In 1975 — a tumultuous year for
her, marked by her induction into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and the sudden death of her lover
— she spearheaded the Parsons yearbook project, themed “cheap eats”: a collection of illustrated
recipes for delicious but affordable meals by students, faculty, and celebrated artists such as Maurice
Sendak, Larry Rivers, and Elaine de Kooning. Alongside an original painting, Pineles herself contributed a
recipe for kasha served with meatballs, a version of which appears in Leave Me Alone with the Recipes.
The students’ introduction to the yearbook encapsulated Pineles’s influence as an educator, artists, and
cross-pollinator of food and design, and it captured the spirit and sensibility of her unpublished 1945
family cookbook with uncanny precision. They wrote:

The style is in the color, the scale, the original and unusual use of common items and of art materials.
The recipes and ideas in this cookbook are made with the same ingredients any student on a budget
would buy; but it is the resourcefulness and inventiveness as well as the artists’ love for cooking which
make for good design and especially creative meals. Eating is more than food… it is visual impact,
contrast, style, scale, mood, fragrance, color.

Visual impact, indeed, was the raw material of Pineles’s work. But from it radiated a larger legacy of
cultural impact. A century earlier, to her first class of female astronomers at Vassar, Maria Mitchell had
remarked, “No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?”
Pineles’s life and legacy were one quiet but continuous incarnation of this incantation, the
reverberations of which live on as the palpable pulse animating the corpus of possibility for every
contemporary woman in publishing and graphic design.
On the absurdity of truth by consensus, and a gentle invitation to consider how our
way of looking at the world limits our view of it.

This is how the world changes: We loosen the stranglehold of our givens, bend and stretch our minds to
imagine what was once unimaginable, test our theories against reality, and emerge with vision
expanded into new dimensions of truth. “What we see, we see,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful
ode to women’s unheralded heroism in science and to science itself as a supreme tool of changing our
seeing and understanding what we cannot see. Nearly a century earlier, the Victorian schoolmaster and
theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott (December 20, 1838–October 12, 1926) explored this subject from a
different angle in his brilliant 1884 allegorical novella Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions, newly
issued in a lovely slip-case edition. In this classic masterwork of perspective, Abbott examines the
science of multiple spatial dimensions while satirizing the absurdity of truth by consensus and extending
a subtle invitation to consider how what we take as our givens limits our grasp of reality, presenting us
with a false view of the world warped by our way of looking at it.

The story is narrated by a protagonist named A. Square, a native of Flatland — a world whose geometric
denizens only live and see in two dimensions. But the square has a transformative experience that
renders him “the sole possessor of the truths of Space.” On the eve of a new year, he has a hallucinatory
vision of journeying to a faraway place called Lineland, populated by “lustrous points” who see him not
as a shape but merely as a scattering of points along a line. Frustrated, he tries to demonstrate his
squareness to their king by moving from left to right. The king, ignorant of directions, fails to perceive
the motion and clings to his view of the square as points on a line.

But then the square himself is visited by a creature from another world — a sphere from the three-
dimensional Spaceland. The very notion of three dimensions is at first utterly unimaginable to our hero
— he sees the visitor merely as a circle. And yet when the sphere floats up and down, thus contracting
and expanding the radius of the perceived circle based on its distance from our grounded observer, the
square begins to suspect that he, like the inhabitants of Lineland, might be congenitally blind to the
existence of another dimension.
When he returns to Flatland and tries to awaken his compatriots to the revelatory existence of a third
dimension, he is met only with obtuse denial and declared mad. Decrees are passed to make illegal any
suggestion of a third dimension and all who make such claims are to be imprisoned or executed. (Only
two centuries earlier, in the very unimaginary world of the Inquisition, Galileo was imprisoned for
asserting that the Earth moves.)

The square himself is eventually thrown in jail, where he spends seven years and composes Flatland as a
cautionary memoir he hopes will inspire posterity to see beyond the limit of two dimensions. (In that
selfsame era, in the nonfictional obtuseness of Victorian reality, Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for loving
another man and composed his own stirring prison memoir of sorts as cautionary commentary on a
society whose blind adherence to dogma bleeds into inhumanity.)

Complement the delicious new edition of Flatland with these stunning Victorian illustrations of Euclid’s
Elements and the 1963 Norton Juster gem The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics,
inspired by the Abbott classic, then stretch your mind into the science of multiple dimensions.
Remembering Steven R. Covey with Timeless Insights from The 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People
by Maria Popova

“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a
character, reap a destiny.”

In 1989, Stephen R. Covey penned The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (public library), a book
that went on to sell millions of copies worldwide and defined a new genre bridging self-improvement,
business management, and personal productivity. This week, Covey passed away at the age of 79.
Here’s a look back at his legacy with some of the keenest insights from his beloved bestseller.

Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).

Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a
character, reap a destiny.*

People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them.

Until a person can say deeply and honestly, ‘I am what I am today because of the choices I made
yesterday,’ that person cannot say, ‘I choose otherwise.’

To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.

It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. People will forgive mistakes,
because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the
mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake.

Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.

How you treat the one reveals how you regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one.

There’s no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of
reading good literature.

And, of course, the meat of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Habit 1: Be Proactive
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
Habit 6: Synergize
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

6 Rules for Creative Sanity from Radical Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich

by Maria Popova

“Never yield to the expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless.”

A student of Freud’s and a radical pioneer of early psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a
fascinating and often misunderstood mind who influenced a generation of public intellectuals, including
William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer. Where’s the Truth?: Letters and Journals, 1948-
1957 (public library), following previous installments, is the fourth and final volume of Reich’s
autobiographical writings, culled from his diaries (a favorite trope around here), letters, and laboratory
notebooks. What emerges is an intimate portrait of the fringe scientist’s hopes and fears, aspirations and
insecurities, doubts and convictions.

But nothing bespeaks his inherent idealism more crisply than this journal entry dated June 7, 1948, in
which Reich lists his six necessary conditions for creative sanity — an aspirational, if overly ambitious and
pedantic, blueprint to the secret of happiness and the life of purpose.

To stay sane in an insane world as a creative man or woman he or she must:

1. Keep one’s life financially independent.

2. Continue unabated to exercise one’s power of creativity in concrete, strenuous tasks, always
seeking perfection as near as possible.

3. Carefully cherish LOVE of a partner with full gratification, of the total emotional being if possible,
of the body in a clean way if necessary.

4. Keep out of the trap of confusion by the average man and woman, helping others to keep out of
the trap too as best they can.

5. Keep one’s structure clean like brook water through knowing and correcting every mistake,
making the corrected mistake the guiding lines to new truth.

6. Never yield to the expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless or where the main line
of development is not impeded for the duration of one’s life.

Where’s the Truth? is utterly absorbing and illuminating throughout — highly recommended.
Happy Birthday, Bukowski: On Going All The Way
By: Maria Popova

“It’s the only good fight there is.”

Charles Bukowski — beloved poet and novelist, grim prophet of love, champion-voice of the 99% long
before they were called that — would have been 92 today.

From his 1975 novel Factotum (public library) comes one of my favorite passages in literature, which
lives beautifully outside its immediate context as a timeless and powerful manifesto for living
wholeheartedly and living the life of purpose:

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives,
relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean
freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation.
Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And,
you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.
If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and
the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion

by Maria Popova

“Colour itself is a degree of darkness.”

Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the
earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and
politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colours (public library;
public domain), his treatise on the nature, function, and psychology of colors. Though the work was
dismissed by a large portion of the scientific community, it remained of intense interest to a cohort of
prominent philosophers and physicists, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

One of Goethe’s most radical points was a refutation of Newton’s ideas about the color spectrum,
suggesting instead that darkness is an active ingredient rather than the mere passive absence of light.

…light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its
absence, are necessary to the production of colour…. Colour itself is a degree of darkness.

But perhaps his most fascinating theories explore the psychological impact of different colors on mood
and emotion — ideas derived by the poet’s intuition, which are part entertaining accounts bordering on
superstition, part prescient insights corroborated by hard science some two centuries later, and part
purely delightful manifestations of the beauty of language.
Color wheel designed by Goethe in 1809

YELLOW

This is the colour nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-
transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces. In prismatic experiments it extends itself
alone and widely in the light space, and while the two poles remain separated from each other, before it
mixes with blue to produce green it is to be seen in its utmost purity and beauty. How the chemical yellow
develops itself in and upon the white, has been circumstantially described in its proper place.

In its highest purity it always carries with it the nature of brightness, and has a serene, gay, softly exciting
character.

State is agreeable and gladdening, and in its utmost power is serene and noble, it is, on the other hand,
extremely liable to contamination, and produces a very disagreeable effect if it is sullied, or in some
degree tends to the minus side. Thus, the colour of sulphur, which inclines to green, has a something
unpleasant in it.

When a yellow colour is communicated to dull and coarse surfaces, such as common cloth, felt, or the
like, on which it does not appear with full energy, the disagreeable effect alluded to is apparent. By a
slight and scarcely perceptible change, the beautiful impression of fire and gold is transformed into one
not undeserving the epithet foul; and the colour of honour and joy reversed to that of ignominy and
aversion. To this impression the yellow hats of bankrupts and the yellow circles on the mantles of Jews,
may have owed their origin.

RED-YELLOW
As no colour can be considered as stationary, so we can very easily augment yellow into reddish by
condensing or darkening it. The colour increases in energy, and appears in red-yellow more powerful and
splendid.

All that we have said of yellow is applicable here, in a higher degree. The red-yellow gives an impression
of warmth and gladness, since it represents the hue of the intenser glow of fire.

YELLOW-RED

As pure yellow passes very easily to red-yellow, so the deepening of this last to yellow-red is not to be
arrested. The agreeable, cheerful sensation which red-yellow excites increases to an intolerably powerful
impression in bright yellow-red.

The active side is here in its highest energy, and it is not to be wondered at that impetuous, robust,
uneducated men, should be especially pleased with this colour. Among savage nations the inclination for
it has been universally remarkedy and when children, left to themselves, begin to use tints, they never
spare vermilion and minium.

In looking steadfastly at a perfectly yellow-red surface, the colour seems actually to penetrate the organ. It
produces an extreme excitement, and still acts thus when somewhat darkened. A yellow-red cloth disturbs
and enrages animals. I have known men of education to whom its effect was intolerable if they chanced to
see a person dressed in a scarlet cloak on a grey, cloudy day.

The colours on the minus side are blue, red-blue, and blue-red. They produce a restless, susceptible,
anxious impression.

BLUE

As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness
with it.

This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on
the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a
kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.

As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.

But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue — not
because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.

Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its
affinity with black.

Rooms which are hung with pure blue, appear in some degree larger, but at the same time empty and
cold.

The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.

When blue partakes in some degree of the pltis side, the effect is not disagreeable. Sea-green is rather a
pleasing colour.
RED-BLUE

We found yellow very soon tending to the intense state, and we observe the same progression in blue.

Blue deepens very mildly into red, and thus acquires a somewhat active character, although it is on the
passive side. Its exciting power is, however, of a different kind from that of the red-yellow. It may be said
to disturb, rather than enliven.

As augmentation itself is not to be arrested, so we feel an inclination to follow the progress of the colour,
not, however, as in the case of the red-yellow, to see it still increase in the active sense, but to find a point
to rest in.

In a very attenuated state, this colour is known to us under the name of lilac; but even in this degree it has
a something lively without gladness.

BLUE-RED

This unquiet feeling increases as the hue progresses, and it may be safely assumed, that a carpet of a
perfectly pure deep blue-red would be intolerable. On this account, when it is used for dress, ribbons, or
other ornaments, it is employed in a very attenuated and light state, and thus displays its character as
above defined, in a peculiarly attractive manner.

As the higher dignitaries of the church have appropriated this unquiet colour to themselves, we may
venture to say that it unceasingly aspires to the cardinal’s red through the restless degrees of a still
impatient progression.

RED

Whoever is acquainted with the prismatic origin of red will not think it paradoxical if we assert that this
colour partly actu, partly potentia, includes all the other colours.

We have remarked a constant progress or augmentation in yellow and blue, and seen what impressions
were produced by the various states; hence it may naturally be inferred that now, in the junction of the
deepened extremes a feeling of satisfaction must succeed ; and thus, in physical phenomena, this highest
of all appearances of colour arises from the junction of two contrasted extremes which have gradually
prepared themselves for a union.

As a pigment, on the other hand, it presents itself to us already formed, and is most perfect as a hue in
cochineal ; a substance which, however, by chemical action may be made to tend to the plus or the minus
side, and may be considered to have attained the central point in the best carmine.

The effect of this colour is as peculiar as its nature. It conveys an impression of gravity and dignity, and at
the same time of grace and attractiveness. The first in its dark deep state, the latter in its light attenuated
tint; and thus the dignity of age and the amiableness of youth may adorn itself with degrees of the same
hue.

History relates many instances of the jealousy of sovereigns with regard to the quality of red. Surrounding
accompaniments of this colour have always a grave and magnificent effect. The red glass exhibits a
bright landscape in so dreadful a hue as to inspire sentiments of awe.

GREEN
If yellow and blue, which we consider as the most fundamental and simple colours, are united as they first
appear, in the first state of their action, the colour which we call green is the result.

The eye experiences a distinctly grateful impression from this colour. If the two elementary colours are
mixed in perfect equality so that neither predominates, the eye and the mind repose on the result of this
junction as upon a simple colour. The beholder has neither the wish nor the power to imagine a state
beyond it. Hence for rooms to live in constantly, the green colour is most generally selected.

Though hardly a work of science, Theory of Colours stands as an absorbing account of the philosophy
and artistic experience of color, bridging the intuitive and the visceral in a way that, more than two
hundred years later, continues to intrigue.

How to Raise a Child: 10 Rules from Susan Sontag

1. Be consistent.

2. Don’t speak about him to others (e.g., tell funny things) in his presence. (Don’t make him self-
conscious.)

3. Don’t praise him for something I wouldn’t always accept as good.

4. Don’t reprimand him harshly for something he’s been allowed to do.

5. Daily routine: eating, homework, bath, teeth, room, story, bed.

6. Don’t allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.

7. Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)

8. Do not discourage childish fantasies.

9. Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his business.
 10. Don’t assume that what I don’t like to do (bath, hairwash) he won’t like either.

David Foster Wallace on Empathy

On empathy and kindness, echoing Einstein:

[P]lease don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this
way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and
if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this
fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not
usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of
bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just
yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of
bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what
you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating
on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and
miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will
actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not
only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the
mystical oneness of all things deep down.

On what “education” really means and the art of being fully awake to the world:

[T]he real value of a real education [has] almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do
with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us,
all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

‘This is water.’

‘This is water.’
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.
Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.

--David Foster Wallace

Charles Bukowski, Arthur C. Clarke, Annie Dillard, John Cage, and Others on the
Meaning of Life
by Maria Popova

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

The quest to understand the meaning of life has haunted humanity since the dawn of existence. Modern
history alone has given us a plethora of attempted answers, including ones from Steve Jobs, Stanley
Kubrick, David Foster Wallace, Anais Nin, Ray Bradbury, and Jackson Pollock’s dad. In 1988, the editors
of LIFE magazine posed this grand question head-on to 300 “wise men and women,” from celebrated
authors, actors, and artists to global spiritual leaders to everyday farmers, barbers, and welfare mothers.
In 1991, they collected the results, along with a selection of striking black-and-white photographs from
the magazine’s archives that answered the question visually and abstractly, in The Meaning of Life:
Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (public library). Here is a selection of the
answers.

Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard:

We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets
noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially,
we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness
the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our
generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty
house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster
Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we
counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out
even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a[plow, a fish,'
is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars
themselves.

Ralph Morse

ALbert Einstein's study shortly after his death, Princeton, New Jersey

Legendary science writer Stephen Jay Gould:

The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so-roughly.0015 percent of the
history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the
last moment of earthly time–and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental
afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.

Moreover, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly
unpredictable. Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But
wind back life’s tape to the dawn of time and let it play again–and you will never get humans a second
time.

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs
for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and
tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by
hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists. This explanation, though
superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the
meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves-from our own
wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.

Bill Owens

Graduation dance

Frank Donofrio, a barber:

I have been asking myself why I’m here most of my life. If there’s a purpose I don’t care anymore. I’m
seventy-four. I’m on my way out. Let the young people learn the hard way, like I did. No one ever told
me anything.
Leonard Freed

Harlem summer day

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke:

A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search
for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a
bonus?

If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

Franco Zecchin
Sicily

Literary icon John Updike:

Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression,
to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the
universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. This
formulation (knowing what we know of the universe’s ghastly extent) is more incredible, to our sense of
things, than the Old Testament hypothesis of a God willing to suffer, coddle, instruct, and even (in the
Book of Job) to debate with men, in order to realize the meager benefit of worship, of praise for His
Creation. What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from
the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind
gratitude for being here.

Abbas

Fireman at scene of bomb explosion, Belfast, Northern Ireland

Poet Charles Bukowski:

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t
readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions
and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system.
We are here to drink beer.

We are here to kill war.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

We are here to read these words from all these wise men and women who will tell us that we are here
for different reasons and the same reason.

Myron Davis

A boy and his dog, Iowa

Avant-garde composer and philosopher John Cage:

No why. Just here.

Duane Michals

The Human Condition

The Meaning of Life is a cultural treasure in its entirety, and the screen does the stunning photographs
no justice — do grab yourself an analog copy.
“Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically,
as narratives — we are each of us unique.”

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his brilliant treatise on personhood, “is like a pattern drawn
on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will
react, the whole drum will sound.” In thinking about how identity politics frays that parchment and
fragments the essential wholeness of our personhood, I was reminded of a poignant passage by
neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), the poet laureate of the mind, from his 1985
classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (public library).

In the twelfth chapter, titled “A Matter of Identity,” Dr. Sacks recounts the case of a patient with a
memory disorder that rendered him unable to recognize not only others but himself — unable, that is,
to retain the autobiographical facts which a person constellates into a selfhood. To compensate for this
amnesiac anomaly, the man unconsciously invented countless phantasmagorical narratives about who
he was and what he had done in his life, crowding the void of his identity with imagined selves and
experiences he fully believed were real, were his own, far surpassing what any one person could
compress into a single lifetime. It was as though he had taken Emily Dickinson’s famous verse “I’m
Nobody! Who are you?” and turned it on himself to answer with a resounding “I’m Everybody!”

But just as depression can be seen as melancholy in the complex clinical extreme and bipolar disorder as
moodiness in the complex clinical extreme, every pathological malady of the mind is a complex clinical
extreme of a core human tendency that inheres in each of our minds in tamer degrees. By magnifying
basic tendencies to such extraordinary extremes, clinical cases offer a singular lens on how the ordinary
mind works — and that, of course, is the great gift of Oliver Sacks, who wrests from his particular patient
case studies uncommon insight into the universals of human nature.

Oliver Sacks (Photograph: Adam Scourfield)

“Such a patient,” Sacks writes of the inventive amnesiac man, “must literally make himself (and his
world) up every moment.” And yet that is precisely what we are all doing in a certain sense, to a certain
degree, as we continually make ourselves and our world up through the stories we tell ourselves and
others.

A decade after philosopher Amelie Rorty observed that “humans are just the sort of organisms that
interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves,” Sacks examines the building
blocks of that self-conception and how narrative becomes the pillar of our identity:

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It
might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our
identities.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask “what is his story — his real, inmost story?” — for each of us is
a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously,
by, through, and in us — through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least,
our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each
other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.
 Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses

Sacks considers the basic existential responsibility that stems from our narrative uniqueness:

To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must
“recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a
narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat remains a classic of uncommon illumination. Complement
this particular portion with Rorty on the seven layers of personhood and Borges on the nothingness of
the self, then revisit Dr. Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, the paradoxical power of
music, what a Pacific island taught him about treating ill people as whole people, and his stunning
memoir of a life fully lived.
An imaginative extension of Euclid’s parallel postulate into life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.

“The joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her
paradigm-shifting treatise on how freedom demands that happiness become our moral obligation. A
decade and a half later, the mathematician and writer Lillian R. Lieber (July 26, 1886–July 11, 1986)
examined the subject from a refreshingly disparate yet kindred angle.

Einstein was an ardent fan of Lieber’s unusual, conceptual books — books discussing serious
mathematics in a playful way that bridges science and philosophy, composed in a thoroughly singular
style. Like Einstein himself, Lieber thrives at the intersection of science and humanism. Like Edwin
Abbott and his classic Flatland, she draws on mathematics to invite a critical shift in perspective in the
assumptions that keep our lives small and our world inequitable. Like Dr. Seuss, she wrests from simple
verses and excitable punctuation deep, calm, serious wisdom about the most abiding questions of
existence. She emphasized that her deliberate line breaks and emphatic styling were not free verse but a
practicality aimed at facilitating rapid reading and easier comprehension of complex ideas. But Lieber’s
stubborn insistence that her unexampled work is not poetry should be taken with the same grain of salt
as Hannah Arendt’s stubborn insistence that her visionary, immensely influential political philosophy is
not philosophy.

Lillian R. Lieber

In her hundred years, Lieber composed seventeen such peculiar and profound books, illustrated with
lovely ink drawings by her husband, the artist Hugh Lieber. Among them was the 1961 out-of-print gem
Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics (public library) — an inquiry into the limits and
limitless possibilities of the human mind, beginning with the history of the greatest revolution in
geometry and ending with the fundamental ideas and ideals of a functioning, fertile democracy.
 Illustration
by Hugh Lieber from Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber
Lieber paints the conceptual backdrop for the book:

This book is really about

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,
using ideas from mathematics
to make these concepts less vague.
We shall see first what is meant by
“thinking” in mathematics,
and the light that it sheds on both the
CAPABILITIES and the LIMITATIONS
of the human mind.
And we shall then see what bearing this can have
on “thinking” in general —
even, for example, about such matters as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness!

For we must admit that our “thinking”

about such things,
without this aid,
often leads to much confusion —
mistaking LICENSE for LIBERTY,
often resulting in juvenile delinquency;
mistaking MONEY for HAPPINESS,
often resulting in adult delinquency;
mistaking for LIFE itself
just a sordid struggle for mere existence!
 Illustration by Hugh Lieber from
Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber

Embedded in the history of mathematics, Lieber argues, is an allegory of what we are capable of as a
species and how we can use those capabilities to rise to our highest possible selves. In the first chapter,
titled “Freedom and Responsibility,” she chronicles the revolution in our understanding of nature and
reality ignited by the advent of non-Euclidean geometry — the momentous event Lieber calls “The Great
Discovery of 1826.” She writes:

One of the amazing things

in the history of mathematics
happened at the beginning of the 19th century.
As a result of it,
the floodgates of discovery
were open wide,
and the flow of creative contributions
is still on the increase!

[…]

Furthermore,
this amazing phenomenon
was due to a mere
CHANGE OF ATTITUDE!
Perhaps I should not say “mere,”
since the effect was so immense —
which only goes to show that
a CHANGE OF ATTITUDE
can be extremely significant
and we might do well to examine our ATTITUDES
toward many things, and people —
this might be the most rewarding,
as it proved to be in mathematics.

In order to fully comprehend a revolutionary change in attitude, Lieber points out, we need to first
understand the old attitude — the former worldview — supplanted by the revolution. To appreciate
“The Great Discovery of 1826,” we must go back to Euclid:

Euclid…
first put together
the various known facts of geometry
into a SYSTEM,
instead of leaving them as
isolated bits of information —
as in a quiz program!

[…]

Euclid’s system
has served for many centuries
as a MODEL for clear thinking,
and has been and still is
of the greatest value to the human race.
 Illustration by
Hugh Lieber from Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber
Lieber unpacks what it means to build such a “model for clear thinking” — networked logic that makes it
easier to learn and faster to make new discoveries. With elegant simplicity, she examines the essential
building blocks of such a system and outlines the basics of mathematical logic:

In constructing a system,
one must begin with
a few simple statements
from which,
by means of logic,
one derives the “consequences.”
We can thus
“figure out the consequences”
before they hit us.
And this we certainly need more of!

Thus Euclid stated such

simple statements
(called “postulates” in mathematics)
as:
“It shall be possible to draw
a straight line joining
any two points,”
and others like it.

From these
he derived many complicated theorems
(the “consequences”)
like the well-known
Pythagorean Theorem,
and many, many others.

And, as we all know,

to “prove” any theorem
one must show how
to “derive” it from the postulates —
that is,
every claim made in a “proof”
must be supported by reference to
the postulates or
to theorems which have previously
already been so “proved”
from the postulates.
Of course Theorem #1
must follow from
the postulates ONLY.
Half a century before physicist Janna Levin wrote so beautifully about the limitations of logic in the
pursuit of truth, Lieber zeroes in on a central misconception about mathematics:

Now what about

the postulates themselves?
How can THEY be “proved”?
Obviously they
CANNOT be PROVED at all —
since there is nothing preceding them
from which to derive them!
This may seem disappointing to those who
thought that in
Mathematics
EVERYTHING is proved!
But you can see that
this is IMPOSSIBLE,
even in mathematics,
since EVERY SYSTEM must necessarily
START with POSTULATES,
and these are NOT provable,
since there is nothing preceding them
from which to derive them.

This circularity of certainty permeates all of science. In fact, strangely enough, the more mathematical a
science is, the more we consider it a “hard science,” implying unshakable solidity of logic. And yet the
more mathematical a mode of thinking, the fuller it is of this circularity reliant upon assumption and
abstraction. Euclid, of course, was well aware of this. He reconciled the internal contradiction of the
system by considering his unproven postulates to be “self-evident truths.” His system was predicated on
using logic to derive from these postulates certain consequences, or theorems. And yet among them
was one particular postulate — the famous parallel postulate — which troubled Euclid.

The parallel postulate states that if you were to draw a line between two points, A and B, and then take
a third point, C, not on that line, you can only draw one line through C that will be parallel to the line
between A and B; and that however much you may extend the two parallel lines in space, they will
never cross.

Euclid, however, wasn’t convinced this was a self-evident truth — he thought it ought to be
mathematically proven, but he failed to prove it. Generations of mathematicians failed to prove it over
the following thirteen centuries. And then, in the early nineteenth century, three mathematicians —
Nikolai Lobachevsky in Russia, János Bolyai in Hungary, and Carl Friedrich Gauss in Germany —
independently arrived at the same insight: The challenge of the parallel postulate lay not in the proof
but, as Lieber puts it, in “the very ATTITUDE toward what postulates are” — rather than considering
them to be “self-evident truths” about nature, they should be considered human-made assumptions
about how nature works, which may or may not reflect the reality of how nature work.
 Illustration by Hugh Lieber from
Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber

This may sound like a confounding distinction, but it is a profound one — it allowed mathematicians to
see the postulates not as sacred and inevitable but as fungible, pliable, tinkerable with. Leaving the rest
of the Euclidean system intact, these imaginative nineteenth-century mathematicians changed the
parallel postulate to posit that not one but two lines can be drawn through point C that would be
parallel to the line between A and B, and the entire system would still be self-consistent. This resulted in
a number of revolutionary theorems, including the notion that the sum of angles in a triangle could be
different from 180 degrees — greater if the triangle is drawn on the surface of a sphere, for instance, or
lesser if drawn on a concave surface.

It was a radical, thoroughly counterintuitive insight that simply cannot be fathomed, much less
diagramed, in flat space. And yet it wasn’t a mere thought experiment, an amusing and suspicious
mental diversion. It bust open the floodgates of creativity in mathematics and physics by giving rise to
non-Euclidean geometry — an understanding of curved three-dimensional space which we now know is
every bit as real as the geometry of flat surfaces, abounding in nature in everything from the blossom of
a calla lily to the growth pattern of a coral reef to the fabric of spacetime of which everything that ever
was and ever will be is woven. In fact, Einstein himself would not have been able to arrive at his
relativity theory, nor bridge space and time into the revolutionary notion of spacetime, without non-
Euclidean geometry.

Here, Lieber makes the conceptual leap that marks her books as singular achievements in thought — the
leap from mathematics and the understanding of nature to psychology, sociology, and the understanding
of human nature. Reflecting on the larger revolution in thought that non-Euclidean geometry embodied
in its radical refusal to accept any truth as self-evident, she questions the notion of “eternal verities” — a
term popularized by the eighteen-century French philosopher Claude Buffier to signify the aspects of
human consciousness that allegedly furnish universal, indubitable moral and humane values.
Considering how the relationship between creative limitation, freedom, humility, and responsibility
shapes our values, Lieber writes:

Even though mathematics is

only a MAN-MADE enterprise,
still
man has done very well for himself
in this domain,
where he has
FREEDOM WITH RESPONSIBILITY —
and where
though he has learned the
HUMILITY that goes with
knowing that he does
NOT have access to
“Self-evident truths” and
“Eternal verities,”
that he is NOT God —
yet he knows also that
he is not a mouse either,
but a man,
with all the
HUMAN DIGNITY and the
HUMAN INGENUITY
needed to develop
the wonderful domain of
mathematics.

The very dignity and ingenuity driving mathematics, Lieber points out in another lovely conceptual
bridging of ideas, is also the motive force behind the central aspiration of human life, the one which
Albert Camus saw as our moral obligation — the pursuit of happiness.

In the final chapter, titled “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Lieber recounts the principle of
metamathematics demanding that a set of postulates within any system not contradict one another in
order for the system to be self-consistent, and considers mathematics as a sandbox for the subterranean
morality without which human life is unlivable:

[This] means of course that

LYING
CANNOT SERVE as an instrument of thought!
Now is not this statement
usually considered to be
a MORAL principle?
And yet
without it we cannot have
ANY satisfactory mathematical system,
nor ANY satisfactory system of thought —
indeed we cannot even PLAY a GAME properly
with CONTRADICTORY rules!

In a similar way,
I wish to make the point that
there are other important MORAL ideas
BEHIND THE SCENES,
without which there cannot be
ANY MATHEMATICS or SCIENCE.
And therefore, in this sense,
Science is NOT AT ALL AMORAL —
any more than one could have
a fruitful and non-trivial postulate set
in mathematics
which is not subject to
the METAmathematical demand for
CONSISTENCY!

One of these “behind-the-scenes” moral ideas, Lieber argues, is the notion of taking Life itself as a basic
postulate:

Without LIFE
there can be
no living thing —
no flowers,
no animals,
no human race —
also of course
no music, no art,
no science,
no mathematics.
 Illustration by Hugh Lieber from
Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber

In a counterpoint to Camus, who considered the question of suicide the “one truly serious philosophical
problem,” and with an allusional jab at Shakespeare, Lieber writes:

I am not suggesting that we consider here

WHETHER life is worth living,
whether it would make more “sense”
to commit suicide,
whether it is all just
“Sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
I am proposing that
LIFE be taken as a POSTULATE,
and therefore not subject to proof,
just like any other postulate.
But I propose to MODIFY this
and take more specifically as

POSTULATE I:
THE PRESERVATION OF
LIFE FOR THE HUMAN RACE
is a goal of human effort.
This does not mean that
we are to go about
wantonly killing animals,
but to do this only when
it is necessary to support
HUMAN life —
for food,
for prevention of disease,
vivisection, etc.
Indeed a horse or dog or other animals,
through their friendliness and sincerity,
might actually HELP to sustain
Man’s spirit and faith and even his life.
And I interpret this postulate
also to mean that
so-called “sports,”
like bull-fighting,
or “ganging up” on one little fox —
a hole gang of men and women
(and corrupting even horses and dogs
to help!) —
is really a cowardly act,
so unsportsmanlike that it is amazing
how this activity could ever be called
a “sport.”

Echoing Alan Watts’s insistence that “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you
accord them to all others,” Lieber springboards from this postulate into the moral foundations of
equality, human rights, and social justice:

All this is by way of interpreting

the meaning to be given to
Postulate I:
ACCEPTANCE of LIFE for the HUMAN RACE.
Surely everyone will accept the idea that
is definitely present,
behind the scenes,
in science or mathematics.
But this is not all.
For, I take this postulate to mean also
that we are not to limit it to
only a PART of the human race,
as Hitler did,
because this inevitably leads to WAR,
and in this day of
nuclear weapons
and CBR (chemical, biological, radiological)
weapons,
this would certainly contradict
Postulate I,
would it not?

Lieber uses this first postulate as the basis for a larger, self-consistent “System of MORALITY,” just as
Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai used the landmark revision of the parallel postulate as the basis for the
revolution of non-Euclidean geometry. Four years before Joan Didion issued her timeless, increasingly
timely admonition against mistaking self-righteousness for morality and a generation before physicist
Richard Feynman asserted that “it is impossible to find an answer which someday will not be found to
be wrong,” Lieber offers this moral model with conscientious humility:

May I say at the very outset that

the “SYSTEM” suggested here
makes no pretense of finality (!),
remembering how difficult it is,
EVEN in MATHEMATICS,
to have a postulate set which is
perfect!
Nevertheless, one must go on,
one must TRY,
one must do one’s BEST,
as in mathematics and sciences.
And so, let us continue, in all humility,
to try to make
what can only at best be regarded as
tentative suggestions,
in the hope that the basic idea —
that there is a MORALITY behind the scenes
in Mathematics and Science —
may prove to be helpful
and may be further
improved and strengthened
as time goes on.
 Illustration by
Hugh Lieber from Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber

Drawing on the consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies for living things an
inevitable degradation toward destruction, Lieber offers additional postulates for the moral system that
undergirds a thriving democracy:

POSTULATE II:
Each INDIVIDUAL HUMAN BEING
must fight this “degeneration,”
must cling to LIFE as long as possible,
must grow and create —
physically and/or mentally.
And for this we need

POSTULATE III:
We must all have the LIBERTY to
so grow and create,
without of course interfering
with each other’s growth,
which suggests

POSTULATE IV:
This Freedom or LIBERTY
must be accompanied by
RESPONSIBILITY,
if it is not to lead to
CONFLICT between
individuals or groups
which would of course
CONTRADICT the other postulates.

All this is of course very DIFFICULT to do,

involving
accepting LIFE without whimpering,
growing without interfering with
the growth of others,
in short
it involves what Goethe called
“cheerful resignation”
(“heitere Resignation”).

But how can this be done?

It seems clear that we must now add

POSTULATE V:
The PURSUIT of HAPPINESS
is a goal of human effort.
For without some happiness,
or at least the hope of some happiness
(the “pursuit” of happiness)
it would be impossible
to accept “cheerfully”
the program outlined above.
And such acceptance leads to
a calm, sane performance of our work,
in the spirit in which a mathematician
accepts the postulates of a system
and accepts his creative work
based on these —
accepting even the Great Difficulties
which he encounters
and is determined to conquer.

[…]

And I finally believe that

the results of such a formulation
will re-discover the conclusions
reached by the
great religious leaders and the
great humanitarians.
 Illustration
by Hugh Lieber from Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics by Lillian Lieber
Lieber distills from this conception of the system “some invariants and some differences,” drawing from
science and mathematics a working model for democracy:

(1) Invariants: LIFE — which demands

(a) Sufficient and proper food;

(b) Good Health;
(c) Education — both mental and physical;
(d) NO VIOLENCE!
(a real scientist does NOT go
into his laboratory with an AXE
with which to DESTROY his apparatus,
but rather with a well-developed BRAIN,
and lots of PATIENCE
with which to CREATE new things
which will be BENEFICIAL to the
HUMAN RACE).
This of course implies PEACE,
and better still
(e) FRIENDSHIP between K and K’!
(f) Humility — remembering that
he will NEVER know THE “truth”
(g) And all this of course
requires a great deal of
HARD WORK.

(2) Differences which will

NOT PREVENT both K and K’
from studying the universe
WITH EQUAL RIGHT and EQUAL
SUCCESS —
which is certainly
the clearest concept of
what DEMOCRACY is:
(a) Different coordinate systems
(b) Differences in color of skin!
(c) Different languages — or
other means of communication.

And please do not consider this program

as an unattainable “Utopia,”
for it really WORKS in
Science and Mathematics,
as we have seen,
and can also work in
other domains,
if we would only
put our BEST EFFORTS into it,
instead of
fighting WARS —
(HOT or COLD)
or even PREPARING for wars —
HATING other people,
etc., etc.

Complement Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics with Carl Sagan on science and
democracy, Robert Penn Warren on art and democracy, and Walt Whitman on literature and
democracy, then revisit Lieber’s equally magnificent exploration of infinity and the meaning of freedom.
William James on Habit
by Maria Popova

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or
of vice leaves its never so little scar.”

“We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a
habit.” Perhaps most fascinating in Michael Lewis’s altogether fantastic recent Vanity Fair profile of
Barack Obama is, indeed, the President’s relationship with habit — particularly his optimization of
everyday behaviors to such a degree that they require as little cognitive load as possible, allowing him to
better focus on the important decisions, the stuff of excellence.

I found this interesting not merely out of solipsism, as it somehow validated my having had the same
breakfast day in and day out for nearly a decade (steel-cut oats, fat-free Greek yogurt, whey protein
powder, seasonal fruit), but also because it isn’t a novel idea at all. In fact, the same tenets Obama
applies to the architecture of his daily life are those pioneering psychologist and philosopher William
James wrote about in 1887, when he penned Habit (public library; public domain) — a short treatise on
how our behavioral patterns shape who we are and what we often refer to as character and personality.
When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is
that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity
implanted at birth in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the
result of education. The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those
due to education would by most persons be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very
large part of life, and that one engaged in studying the objective manifestations of mind is bound at the
very outset to define clearly just what its limits are.

James begins with a strictly scientific, physiological account of the brain and our coteries of ingrained
information patterns, exploring the notion of neuroplasticity a century before it became a buzzword of
modern popular neuroscience and offering this elegant definition:

Plasticity … in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to
an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.

He then bridges the body and the mind to shed light on how “habit loops” dominate our lives:

What is so clearly true of the nervous apparatus of animal life can scarcely be otherwise than true of that
which ministers to the automatic activity of the mind … Any sequence of mental action which has been
frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think,
feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without
any consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results.

He eventually brings this lens to social science, painting a somewhat ominous picture of habit as a kind of
trance:

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what
keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings
of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those
brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds
the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the
months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms
us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best
of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin
again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the
professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the
young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the
character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop,’ in a word, from which the man
can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the
whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the
character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

This brings us to the question of education, whose responsibility it is to chaperone the formation of habit
and curtail the very daily deliberations of which Obama has gladly rid himself:

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is
to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must
make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against
the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the
plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of
automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no
more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the
lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

He proceeds to offer three maxims for the successful formation of new habits:

1. The acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch
ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible
circumstances which shall reenforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that
encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if
the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your
new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it
otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of
its not occurring at all.

2. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is
like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more
than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the
nervous system act infallibly right … It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be
never fed.

3. Seize the Very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every
emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you
aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing
motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new ‘set’ to
the brain.

Of course, as is often the case with famous advice, James immediately follows up with a disclaimer that
echoes Joan Didion’s eloquent definition of character:

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments
may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may
remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this
is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A ‘character,’ as J. S. Mill says, ‘is a
completely fashioned will’; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to
act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act
only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the
actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use.

He makes a case, once again, for the consistency of effort, offering one final maxim:

Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to
suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will
be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time.
Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.

[…]

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically
ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than
that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not
unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays
on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a
return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin.

He cautions about the gravity of our habitual choices, however small they may seem:

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to
be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this
world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon
they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in
the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or
of vice leaves its never so little scar. … Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

James concludes with a timeless validation of grit as the secret to success:

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he
keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can
with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones
of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his
business, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a
possession that will never pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of
it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous
careers than all other causes put together.

Habit is now in the public domain and is available for free in its entirety in multiple formats.
Stunning Spanish Illustrations for The Communist Manifesto
By: Maria Popova

The Marx and Engels classic, brought to new life in black, white, and red.

For a new Spanish edition of The Communist Manifesto, Madrid-based artist Fernando Vicente created a
series of striking, chromatically appropriate black-white-and-red illustrations that capture the message
and sensibility of the Marx and Engels classic with brilliant conceptual and aesthetic expressiveness:
Positively the most gorgeous graphic design for the Marx and Engels classic since Paul Buckley’s cover for
the Penguin Deluxe Edition:
Meanwhile, beloved British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away a month ago today,
contextualizes the contemporary relevance of the classic text in his introduction to The Communist
Manifesto: A Modern Edition:

How will the Manifesto strike the reader who comes to it today for the first time? The new reader can
hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and
stylistic force, of this astonishing pamphlet. It is written, as though in a single creative burst, in lapidary
sentences almost naturally transforming themselves into the memorable aphorisms which have become
known far beyond the world of political debate: from the opening ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the
spectre of Communism’ to the final ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win.’ Equally uncommon in nineteenth-century German writing: it is written in short, apodictic
paragraphs, mainly of one to five lines — in only five cases, out of more than two hundred, of fifteen or
more lines. Whatever else it is, The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force.
In short, it is impossible to deny its compelling power as literature.

[…]

But then, the Manifesto — and this is not the least of its remarkable qualities — is a document which
envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of capitalist development would be ‘A revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large’ but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the alternative:
‘common ruin’. Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and
barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.
Fiona Apple’s Stirring Handwritten Letter About Her Dying Dog

by Maria Popova

“I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.”

The love of dogs has produced its fair share of moving literature and art, but little comes close to the
stirring four-page handwritten letter that Fiona Apple sent her fans as she cancelled the South American
leg of her tour to be with her dying dog, Janet — a 13-year-old rescue pitbull with Addison’s Disease and
a chest tumor.

Apple writes:

I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of
everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can’t leave her now, please understand.

[…]

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of
love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be
comfortable & comforted & safe & important.
Though profoundly different in nature and sentiment from Christopher Hitchens’s meditation on mortality,
Apple’s is a counterpart of unparalleled sincerity and humanity:

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life that keeps us
feeling terrified & alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I
know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in
the last moments.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever
known.

Full transcript below.

It’s 6pm on Friday, and I’m writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I’m writing to ask them
to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here’s the thing.

I have a dog, Janet, and she’s been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest,
growing ever so slowly. She’s almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21
then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and
face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She’s almost 14 and I’ve never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why
they chose her for that awful role. She’s a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We’ve lived in
numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it’s always really been just the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her
chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years
went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in
the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she’s used to me being gone for a few
weeks, every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison’s Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular
injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which
keep most of us from literally panicking to death.
Despite all this, she’s effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago.
She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she’s the one who taught
me what love is.

I can’t come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a
big, big difference.

She doesn’t even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she’s not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality
and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present than people.

But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part
of everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can’t leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I’m afraid she’ll die and I won’t have
the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of
love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be
comfortable & comforted & safe & important.

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life that keeps us
feeling terrified & alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time. I
know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in
the last moments.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I’ve ever
known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest,
most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I’m asking for your blessing.

I’ll be seeing you.

Love,

Fiona