The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Seneca on True and False Friendship

By Maria Popova

Seneca on True and False Friendship

“Friendship is unnecessary,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Darwinian caveats aside, the truth of this beautiful sentiment resonates deeply for anyone whose life has been enriched or even saved by the existence of a genuine friend. And yet today, as we face the commodification of the word “friend,” what do we even mean — what should we mean — by this once-sacred term, now vacated of meaning by chronic misuse?

That’s what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examines in a series of correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic (public library) — the indispensable trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca’s famous letter on overcoming fear and inoculating yourself against misfortune.

seneca

Eighteen centuries before Emerson wrote in his meditation on the two pillars of friendship that “a friend is a person with whom [one] may be sincere,” Seneca considers the uses and misuses of the term in a magnificent letter titled “On True and False Friendship”:

If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means… When friendship is settled, you must trust; before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment. Those persons indeed put last first and confound their duties, who … judge a man after they have made him their friend, instead of making him their friend after they have judged him. Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself… Regard him as loyal and you will make him loyal.

In another letter, titled “On Philosophy and Friendship,” Seneca examines the common bases upon which friendships are formed and admonishes against the tendency, particularly common today, toward seeing others as utilitarian tools that help advance one’s personal goals. Observing that some people form so-called friendships by estimating how much a potential friend can help them in a moment of need, he writes:

He who regards himself only, and enters upon friendships for this reason, reckons wrongly. The end will be like the beginning: he has made friends with one who might assist him out of bondage; at the first rattle of the chain such a friend will desert him. These are the so-called “fair-weather” friendships; one who is chosen for the sake of utility will be satisfactory only so long as he is useful. Hence prosperous men are blockaded by troops of friends; but those who have failed stand amid vast loneliness their friends fleeing from the very crisis which is to test their worth. Hence, also, we notice those many shameful cases of persons who, through fear, desert or betray. The beginning and the end cannot but harmonize. He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays. A man will be attracted by some reward offered in exchange for his friendship, if he be attracted by aught in friendship other than friendship itself.

With an eye to such arrangements of convenience and favor, which he condemns as “a bargain and not a friendship,” Seneca adds:

One who seeks friendship for favourable occasions, strips it of all its nobility.

My visual taxonomy of the four levels of platonic relationships

In another letter, Seneca cautions against mistaking flattery for friendship — an admonition all the more urgent today, in the Age of Likes, when the forms of flattery and the channels of positive reinforcement have proliferated to a disorienting degree:

How closely flattery resembles friendship! It not only apes friendship, but outdoes it, passing it in the race; with wide-open and indulgent ears it is welcomed and sinks to the depths of the heart, and it is pleasing precisely wherein it does harm.

He turns the beam of his wisdom toward the only valid and noble reason for forming a friendship:

For what purpose, then, do I make a man my friend? In order to have someone for whom I may die, whom I may follow into exile, against whose death I may stake my own life, and pay the pledge, too.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

In another letter, Seneca suggests that such genuine friendship extends its rewards beyond the personal realm and becomes the civilizational glue that holds humanity together:

Friendship produces between us a partnership in all our interests. There is no such thing as good or bad fortune for the individual; we live in common. And no one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself. This fellowship, maintained with scrupulous care, which makes us mingle as men with our fellow-men and holds that the human race have certain rights in common, is also of great help in cherishing the more intimate fellowship which is based on friendship… For he that has much in common with a fellow-man will have all things in common with a friend.

Letters from a Stoic remains a timelessly rewarding read. Complement this particular portion with Eudora Welty on friendship as an evolutionary mechanism for language, Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue on the ancient Celtic ideal of friendship, and the epistolary record of Mozart and Haydn’s beautiful and selfless friendship, then revisit Seneca on the antidote to the shortness of life and the key to resilience in the face of loss.

BP

The Moving Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Fossil Came Back to Life to Bring Humanity Together in the Middle of Our Deadliest War

By Maria Popova

Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed an unusual adaptation that shaped its destiny: Despite being a conifer — needle-leaved trees that are usually evergreen — it became deciduous, losing all of its needles during the months-long lightless winter to conserve energy, then growing vigorously in the bright summer months — the fastest-growing of the redwoods. With this uncommon competitive edge, it conquered large swaths of the globe, spreading the seeds of its handsome cones across North America and Eurasia. But when the global climate plunged into the Ice Age, its victory march came to an abrupt halt.

We know this because, at the peak of WWII, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki discovered fossils of this small, mighty redwood species. Nothing like it had ever been described in the botanical literature, so he deemed it extinct, naming it Metasequoia after its kinship to Earth’s most majestic tree.

Metasequoia in winter. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)

The World War was still raging when a Chinese forester traveling through Central China in the winter of 1941 came upon a majestic old tree of a kind he had never seen before. There was a small shrine at its foot, where locals had been lighting votives and leaving offerings for decades. They called it, he learned, shui-sa, or “water fir,” for its love of moist soil — a name he had never heard before. Because the tree was already denuded of needles for its seasonal hibernation, he was unable to collect a proper specimen for identification — but he told other foresters and botanists of it, until word reached Zhan Wang, director of China’s Central Bureau of Forest Research.

Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the “water fir” as a Metasequoia.

Dawn redwood

Here was a living fossil — a lovely ghost of evolution that had somehow survived the unsurvivable.

Across the flaming divide that placed China and Japan on opposite sides of the World War, a small group of scientists had transcended the deadly artifice of borders and the ugliness of weapons to remind the world that the human longing for truth and beauty is greater than our foibles.

The first Chinese person to be awarded a Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University, Hu still maintained a relationship with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum — one of the world’s largest living museums of trees. As news of this ancient tree began making international headlines, lauded by journalists as a “living vestige of younger world,” “as remarkable as discovering a living dinosaur,” the director of the Harvard arboretum cobbled together funds for a collecting expedition in China across the ashen world — one of the last collaborations between Chinese and Western scientists before the Chinese Revolution dropped its leaden wall for decades.

Metasequoia cones. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)

As soon as the samples arrived at Harvard, the arborists planted several trees on Massachusetts soil — the first to grow in North America in more than two million years — and began distributing a kilogram of precious seeds to universities and botanical gardens across the globe. Hundreds of human hands from different nations and different creeds pressed them into moist soil, until this global effort to reanimate a ghost of evolution populated parks all over the world with Metasequoia.

Perhaps due to the rich orange color its feathery needles turn before falling, perhaps in homage to its improbable chance at a new day in the epochal calendar of existence, it became known as dawn redwood.

Metasequoia needles and bark. (Photograph: Arnold Arboretum)

In the 1950s, a retired forester planted eight in Oregon; the fire chief of a California county planted one at the fire department headquarters; eventually, many more were seeded across California and the Pacific Northwest. In the 1970s, New York City community garden patron saint Liz Christy planted one at the iconic Bowery community farm-garden now bearing her name. Today, dawn redwoods rise from the heart of London and thrive in Istanbul’s arboretum. Three stand sentinel over Strawberry Fields — the John Lennon memorial in Central Park. In the final years of the twentieth century, it was declared “the tree of the century.”

The year of the living fossil’s discovery, Einstein’s voice unspooled from the British radio waves, passionate and accented, to make a case for “the common language of science” as the only impartial understanding that can save humanity from itself. Each dawn redwood rising from a patch of spacetime somewhere on this divided and indivisible world is a living monument to what is truest and most beautiful in the human spirit.

BP

The Fascinating Science of How We Think Not with the Brain But with the World

By Maria Popova

The Fascinating Science of How We Think Not with the Brain But with the World

“Our minds are all threaded together,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the dawn of the twentieth century, “and all the world is mind.” Meanwhile in Spain, the middle-aged Santiago Ramón y Cajal was birthing a new science that would both greatly expand our knowledge of the brain and greatly contract our understanding of the mind. Over the following half-century, in its noble effort to render comprehensible what William James so poetically termed the “blooming and buzzing confusion” of consciousness, neuroscience would become both a great leap forward and a great leap back. Again and again, its illuminating but incomplete findings would be aggrandized and oversimplified into a sort of neo-phrenology that incarcerates some of our most expansive human experiences and capacities — love and grief, intelligence and imagination — in particular brain regions with particular neural firing patterns.

A century later and half a millennium after Descartes cleaved Western consciousness into its disembodied dualism, we are only just beginning to reckon with the growing understanding that consciousness is a full-body phenomenon, perhaps even a beyond-body phenomenon.

In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (public library), Annie Murphy Paul explores the most thrilling frontiers of this growing understanding, fusing a century of scientific studies with millennia of first-hand experience from the lives and letters of great artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Challenging our cultural inheritance of thinking that thinking takes place only inside the brain, she illuminates the myriad ways in which we “use the world to think” — from the sensemaking language of gestures that we acquire as babies long before we can speak concepts to the singular fuel that time in nature provides for the brain’s most powerful associative network.

LEFT: Glial cells in the cerebral cortex of a child by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1920s. RIGHT: One Mind by Maria Popova, 2020s.

Paul distills this recalibration of understanding:

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us — drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

Even our metaphors for the mind have taken us further and further from our essential nature as creatures shaped by our environment and our interactions with other creatures, dishonoring Rachel Carson’s science-rooted poetic insight that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” We left Plato’s cave of consciousness and, corralled by Descartes and the Industrial Revolution, reduced the mind to the brain, then reduced the brain to a machine, explaining its workings by drawing analogies to the technology of the hour: The brain was a loom, the brain was a telegraph, the brain was a computer.

Man as Industrial Palace by Fritz Kahn, 1926

In what remains one of the most inspired metaphors in the history of science, Paul renders the mind as a magpie — that evolutionary cousin of the crows and ravens, known for its uncommon intelligence and its ability to make messy yet elaborate nests out of whatever its environment has to offer.

Considering how profoundly this analogy reframes our understanding of mental processes, she writes:

Thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. For another: the kinds of materials available to “think with” affect the nature and quality of the thought that can be produced. And last: the capacity to think well — that is, to be intelligent — is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.

Magpie by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words

Reflecting on this mesh model of the mind — which mirrors what we have been learning about how trees “think” and “feel” over the past half century — Paul adds:

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle — but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts.

One major aspect of this extended mind is our capacity for interoception — an awareness of the internal sensations of the body that gives us a kind of non-conscious knowledge, which we might term intuition but which is rooted in concrete embodied experience and somatic pattern-recognition. We might not detect the signals consciously, but we respond to the information they carry.

One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne

Paul writes:

When a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it’s our interoceptive faculty that tips us off: with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. The body is rung like a bell to alert us to this useful and otherwise inaccessible information. Though we typically think of the brain as telling the body what to do, just as much does the body guide the brain with an array of subtle nudges and prods. (One psychologist has called this guide our “somatic rudder.”) Researchers have even captured the body in mid-nudge, as it alerts its inhabitant to the appearance of a pattern that she may not have known she was looking for.

It is a curious notion, referring to ourselves — and our selves — as “inhabitants” of our bodies. I am reminded of Whitman (then again, I am frequently reminded of Whitman):

“And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”

And Whitman again, contemplating “the fathomless human brain” to go on asking:

“And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?”

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 English edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

In the remainder of The Extended Mind, Paul goes on to explore the three most intriguing areas of growing understanding as we reorient our minds to our brains and bodies: embodied cognition (the empirical counterpart to the Austrian playwright and poet Thomas Bernhard’s observation that “there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking”), situated cognition (the empirical counterpart to the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s observation that “place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered”), and distributed cognition (the empirical echo of Woolf’s insight that “all the world is mind”) — ideas affirming quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s startling and stunningly reasoned statement that “the over-all number of minds is just one.”

BP

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

By Maria Popova

How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.

On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

[…]

Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.

Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

Only such raw receptivity to the reality of the universe without saves us from losing sight of the universe within. Consciousness may be the instrument the universe invented to look inside itself, but it is a flawed instrument that keeps inverting the lens — the price of consciousness is self-consciousness. Like the tragic flaw that haunts the Greek hero, our greatest strength is also the source of our greatest suffering. With an eye to this tragic flaw of the human animal, Pessoa observes:

To stop trying to understand, to stop analyzing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field — that is true wisdom.

Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.

BP

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