The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Roxane Gay on Loving vs. Being in Love and the Mark of a Soul Mate

By Maria Popova

Roxane Gay on Loving vs. Being in Love and the Mark of a Soul Mate

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” Baldwin cautioned a generation later as he himself reckoned with the work of love.

Because the stakes are so high, because we are so overwhelmed by both the power and the fragility of love, we regularly find ourselves catatonic with confusion about what it all means and what it asks of us. We mistake much for love — admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love — an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies — and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.

How to bridge the abyss and see clearly through all the confusion is what Roxane Gay explores in one of the pieces collected in Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business (public library — her astute commentary on popular culture and politics, punctuated by reflections on the deepest and most timeless strata of our experience.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

A century and a half after Jane Welsh Carlyle reckoned so brilliantly with the difference between loving and being in love, an exasperated 43-year-old reader turns to Roxane with the same perplexity, signing herself Where the hell is the love of my life? With an eye to the tyrannical myth of “the one,” Roxane responds:

We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. You may never know if you have made the right choice. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless.

Having “lived and loved long enough to recognize that there is a difference between the idea of love and the reality of love,” she adds:

You never really know if a marriage or relationship will last a lifetime. You can want that. You can work hard to make a relationship work and have the best of intentions and still, things might not work out but that doesn’t mean you have wasted your time or failed.

[…]

When you meet someone and start dating, you have no idea where things will lead…. It is so very important to know what you want from a relationship but you also have to create space for a relationship to develop without worrying about what the relationship will or won’t become.

To look for the love of one’s life, she observes, requires an understanding of and a commitment to what it takes — the immensity it takes — to love someone for a lifetime. This cannot be done without arriving at a personal definition of love that we live up to and into. (My favorite definitions come from Iris Murdoch, Robert Graves, and Tom Stoppard.)

Art by Charles M. Schulz from Love Is Walking Hand in Hand, 1965

Professing herself to be “a passionate, foolish romantic,” Roxane offers her own definition, anchored in the difference between loving and being in love:

Loving someone is recognizing the role they play or have played in your life and honoring that presence. Sometimes, love feels like an obligation but it is one you are willing to fulfill. Sometimes it takes hard work but you are willing to put in that work. Love is the constant you hold on to when you don’t particularly like the one you love. Love is recognizing the ways in which, for better and worse, someone has contributed to your life.

Being in love is wild, breathtaking, infuriating. It is butterflies in your stomach when you think about your person, when you see them, when you hold them. It’s the electricity when your skin meets. It’s smiling at your person with wide eyes and an open heart and seeing them smile back at you in the same way. It’s wanting to hold someone’s hand, even when your hand is hot, a little sweaty. It’s lust and the heat of wanting, wanting, wanting. It’s seeing who someone truly is, the best and most terrible parts of them, and choosing not to look away from everything you see, actively embracing everything you see… It’s wanting to be the best version of yourself for your person but also for yourself, especially for yourself… It’s the pride you feel in their accomplishments and being as happy for their successes as you are for your own, if not more. It’s their hurts becoming your hurts… It’s a gut instinct. You just feel it. You know it in your bones. It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.

To this taxonomy she adds the most culturally mythologized manifestation of love — the idea of the soul mate, so slippery precisely because it is intimately tied to the elusive notion of the soul. She writes:

A soul mate is someone so deeply part of you that they feel like a vital organ, living outside of your skin. They are the hottest part of the sun, your true north, your home, the one from whom you will never walk away, no matter what the material conditions of your relationship might be. Your soul mate is the one you wait for knowing no matter what happens, that they are worth the wait. Your soul mate is the person you choose because you look at them always and think, “You… there you are.”

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme

She ends her advice with the sage and sensitive disclaimer that, ultimately, we are each responsible for our own definition of love, our own private understanding of what it means and what it feels like to love and be loved — a difficult triumph of self-knowledge amid the perpetual confusion of knowing what we really want.

Complement with poet Donald Hall on the secret to lasting love, philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to know if you really love somebody, and David Whyte’s stunning poem “The Truelove,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on the courage to weather the uncertainties of love and Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of loss at the heart of love.

BP

Milan Kundera on Animal Rights and What True Human Goodness Really Means

By Maria Popova

“Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals,” Dostoyevsky admonished in his largehearted case for animal rights.

A quarter century before him, on the other side of the world, Whitman instructed in his radiant advice on life to “love the earth and sun and the animals,” then went on to celebrate the dignity of nonhuman animals as creatures “so placid and self-contain’d” that they put our human follies to shame:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

These were radical ideas in an age of religious revival, flaming with the dogma that an omnipotent God placed atop his creation the human animal, entitled to owning and using and murdering other creatures — dogma Descartes had lodged into the body of secular culture two centuries earlier with his coronation of “Man” as the “master and proprietor of nature,” anchored in his belief that other animals are non-conscious automatons, which he set out to prove by vivisecting his wife’s beloved dog.

A century after Dostoyevsky and Whitman, just before the dawn of a new science illuminating the wonders of non-human minds, Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929–July 11, 2023) challenged these dogmas in a poignant aside from his classic 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (public library).

In the final pages of the novel, reckoning with the meaning of power and of tenderness, Kundera aims his mischievous humor at humanity’s hubris:

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.

Art by Ralph Steadman from the special 50th anniversary edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

An epoch after Kepler invented science fiction as he challenged humanity’s cosmically egocentric view with the simple perspective-shift of imagining how denizens of the Moon would assume the Earth revolves around them, Kundera uses a kindred cosmic analogy to dethrone the human animal from the center of creation:

The right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars. The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party enter the game — a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, “Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars” — and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly) to the cow.

At the heart of this murderous self-importance is our troubled relationship to power — the power within and between selves, its confused uses and abuses, its role as a mirror for our emotional incompleteness. Out of it arises the entire dynamic system we call society and all the inner turmoil of discerning where we end and the world begins. Kundera writes:

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotion — love, antipathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Art by Alice and Martin Provensen from a vintage edition of Aesop’s fables

Complement with the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler’s prescient case for animal rights, the great nature writer Henry Beston on the dignity of our fellow creatures, and naturalist Sy Montgomery on what thirteen animals taught her about how to be a good creature, then revisit Kundera on the power of coincidences, the central ambivalences of life and love, and the key to great storytelling

BP

The Importance of Trusting Yourself: Nick Cave on the Relationship Between Creativity and Faith

By Maria Popova

The Importance of Trusting Yourself: Nick Cave on the Relationship Between Creativity and Faith

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand,” the poetic physicist Alan Lightman wrote in his magnificent recollection of his transcendent encounter with a young osprey. A generation before him, in differentiating it from belief, Alan Watts defined faith as “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.”

For those of us animated by what Bertrand Russell called “the will to doubt,” who abide by the light of reason and wish to meet reality on its own terms, the notion of faith can be challenging, for it presupposes a leap beyond reason, beyond will — a surrender to the unknown, to the possibly unknowable. And yet to create anything of substance and originality — be it a song or a painting or a theorem — requires that you give yourself over to something you don’t fully understand, in the act of which you better understand yourself and the world. We may call it the divine. We may call it mystery. We may just call it the life-force of a universe that, as Carl Sagan reminds us across space and time, “will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

This relationship between creativity and faith is what Nick Cave explores throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — his yearlong conversation with music journalist Seán O’Hagan, which was among my favorite books of 2022 and also gave us his reflections on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the art of growing older.

Nick Cave in Newcastle, 2022.

Placing at the center of his creativity his “struggle with the notion of the divine,” he reflects:

I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.

This radical receptivity at the heart of faith is fundamental to creativity itself — out of it arises the ability to be very deliberate about what you are creating and at the same time channel something larger than yourself: a kind of controlled serendipity that produces something greater than the sum of the intentional parts. He reflects:

It seems to me that my best ideas are accidents within a controlled context. You could call them informed accidents. It’s about having a deep understanding of what you’re doing but, at the same time, being free enough to let the chips fall where they may. It’s about preparation, but it’s also about letting things happen… It seems that just by being open, you become a conduit for something else, something magical, something energising.

Art by the 16th-century Portuguese artist and mystic Francisco de Holanda. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Though faith is a portal into the unknown, it is also a revelation of truths we know deep down but easily forget in the swirl of everyday life’s cynicisms and shoulds — elemental knowledge that bubbles to the surface in those lovely moments when our own creative process surprises us, reveals us to ourselves.

In music, there is a particularly vivid manifestation of this self-revelation made possible by faith:

There have been moments when I’m singing a line I’ve written and suddenly I am overwhelmed by its intent. It’s like, “Okay! That’s what it’s about.” But that doesn’t mean I have attached an arbitrary meaning to it. The meaning was always there embedded in the song and waiting to reveal itself. It has taken me a long time to get there and have the confidence to do that. It requires a certain conviction to trust in a line that is essentially an image, a vision — a leap of faith into the imagined realm. I’m hoping that the image will lead me somewhere else that will be more revealing or truthful than a more literal line would be. It’s a matter of faith. What’s interesting, too, is that often, when I write a line that is essentially an image, it does something to me physically to write that line down, to articulate that image. I have a physical reaction to it that signifies its importance in the scheme of things.

Art by William Blake for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1796. (Available as a print.)

Echoing Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney’s life-tested insistence that “the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own secret knowledge,” he anchors his advice on the creative life in the importance of trusting that mysterious flow of revelation:

You have to have faith in your own intuitive process. That is really all you can do. I would say this to all people who are trying to become musicians or writers or artists of any kind: learn as much as you can about your craft, of course, but ultimately trust your own instinctive impulses. Have faith in yourself, so you can stand beside whatever it is you have done and fight for it, because if you can invest it with that faith, then it has its own truth, its own honesty, its own resilient vulnerability, and hence its own value.

Complement with Emerson on how to trust yourself and Lewis Hyde on what sustains the creative spirit, then revisit Nick Cave on songwriting, the antidote to our existential helplessness, and his wonderful life-advice to a teenager.

BP

Octavio Paz on Freedom

By Maria Popova

Octavio Paz on Freedom

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin admonished as he considered how we imprison ourselves, for he knew just how limited our freedom is and how illusory our choices. And yet we must move through the world with a feeling of freedom, necessary for our sense of agency, for making our existential helplessness bearable, for making our lives of consequence. More than that, freedom — the sense of it, no matter the fact of it — must be at the center of our being, if we are to be. Ursula K. Le Guin’s understood this when she insisted that freedom “must remain a quality of the mind or spirit not dependent on circumstances, a gift of grace.”

That is what Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores throughout The Double Flame (public library) — his uncommonly insightful inquiry into love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms,” at the center of which is his insistence that “there is an intimate, causal relation between love and freedom,” that freedom is the fundamental necessity of being.

And yet the entire premise is haunted by the abiding question of what place freedom can possibly have, as Paz himself recognizes, “in a universe governed by immutable laws” — the same disquieting question at the heart of the paradox of free will.

Art by Levi Walter Yaggy from his Geographical Portfolio, 1887. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Paz twists our existing assumptions into an ouroboros, intimating that the question itself is a prison of which we must break free in order to comprehend freedom:

Freedom is not an isolated concept nor can it be defined in isolation; it is permanently wedded to another concept without which it cannot exist — necessity. But necessity in turn is impossible without freedom: each exists only in opposition to the other. The Greek tragedians saw this with greater clarity than did the Greek philosophers. Since that time, theologians have not stopped arguing about predestination and free will.

Noting that modern scientists have returned to this concept, he considers Stephen Hawking’s groundbreaking work on black holes and its consequent concept of the singularity, which Paz shorthands as “an exception, a place within space-time where the laws of the universe cease to apply.” Triangulating between what is, what can be, and what must be, he writes defiantly:

An unthinkable, inconsistent idea. It resembles Kant’s antinomies, which he regarded as insoluble. Nonetheless, black holes exist. In like manner, then, freedom exists. Knowing that we are setting forth a paradox, we may say that freedom is a dimension of necessity.

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

That we are both a function of the universe and its functionary makes all the more vivid our elemental need to feel free, without which we cannot function as human beings. Paz puts it succinctly:

Without freedom, what we call a person does not exist.

Complement with Toni Morrison on the deepest meaning of freedom, Iris Murdoch on the its five layers, and Maya Angelou’s magnificent conversation with Bill Moyers about it, then revisit Einstein on free will and the power of the imagination.

BP

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