When a recent bout of illness sent me sulking with indignant disappointment at the ruin of long laid plans, I had to remind myself that we were never promised any of this; that it is hubris and self-importance and almost touching delusion to expect an indifferent cosmos to bend to our will, our wishes, and our plans; that meeting the universe on its own terms is the end of suffering.
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
Stafford had a late start as a poet — his first major collection was published when he was 48. And then the poems that had been writing themselves in him all his life came pouring out, spare and stunning. Within eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United Staes.
The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:
You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.
The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective. Months shy of 100, Helen had been born into a world war, survived the Holocaust, and fled from Poland to America without speaking a word of English before becoming a professor of English literature for half a century.
I asked her what to do, where the hope lies.
Her response was simple, profound.
“The most hideous crime against humanity,” she reminded me, began with a legal election. It is not, therefore, purely on the level of politics that we avert the unconscionable. It begins deeper, she said: in the moral foundation of the people, which is laid early in life; it begins with the impulses we nurture in our young.
Half a century earlier, the pioneering scientist and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale had arrived at the same conclusion in her superb manifesto for what makes peace possible. But it was another woman of uncommon brilliance and moral courage, writing amid the bloodiest revolution the world had yet seen, that first articulated the urgency of planting the seeds of compassion, out of which all social harmony blooms, in the fallow hearts of children.
Sophie de Grouchy, self-portrait, 1790s
Born in an era when women were barred from formal education and all institutions of political, intellectual, and creative life, Sophie de Grouchy (April 8, 1764–September 8, 1822) was still a girl when she learned English, Latin, Italian, and German by sitting in on her brothers’s studies, not being allowed to have a tutor of her own; soon, she was teaching the boys herself. By the time she was a teenager, her bedtime reading was Marcus Aurelius, whose teachings on kindness left a deep impression.
Determined to grow both intellectually and morally, Sophie made frequent visits to the local poor with her mother and her sister to offer compassion and comfort. In this living laboratory of sympathy, she came to see how entwined the wellbeing of others is with one’s own, how enmeshed we are in what Martin Luther King, Jr. would call “an inescapable network of mutuality a quarter millennium later.
After discovering philosophy — Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau — she grew disenchanted with the unprovable promises of religion. Upon announcing her atheism, her mother burned all of Sophie’s books.
She was twenty-two when she met the philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet, twice her age. He was as taken with Sophie’s intellect as he was with her moral courage — in one of their first encounters, he watched her throw herself between a rabid dog and a boy she was tutoring. Within weeks, they were married. After helping Condorcet set up a new lyceum where celebrated philosophers and scholars taught, she devoured the curriculum herself, studying mathematics, botany, history. She started taking painting lessons. She joined one of the first anti-slavery clubs.
And then she began writing.
While most of her writing is now lost, one masterwork survives — her translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Published to earn money when her husband was killed in the Reign of Terror and she lost all her property, it embodies what the poet Wisława Szymborska would call “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes…. a second original.” Appended to it is her entirely original Letters on Sympathy (public library) — Sophie de Grouchy’s leap from the springboard of Smith’s theories into her own singular moral cosmogony.
Although it appeared as an afterword to her translation of Smith in 1798, Sophie had been working on Letters on Sympathy for seven years, beginning when she was only twenty-seven and the French Revolution was raging around her. Rising from its pages are ideas epochs ahead of their time: Not long after Descartes declared nonhuman animals mere automatons, and very long before Jane Goodall lit the dawn of understanding animal consciousness, she insisted that animals are “sensitive beings” capable of empathy; two centuries before the discovery of mirror neurons, she wrote of how our sympathy is activated “when we see a sensible being suffer.” At the heart of her theory is the recognition that we are endowed with “a secret impulse to understand the troubles of others as soon as we suspect their existence,” but that this impulse atrophies if we fail to nourish it from the start and exercise it regularly.
Anchoring her argument is an impassioned appeal to parents and educators — one just as urgent today, and perhaps even more so in our age of competitive parenting that scars children’s souls with the tyranny of achievement and trains them to measure themselves by the trappings of outward success rather than by the scope of their sympathy. She writes:
It seems clear that the more we exercise our sensitivity, the stronger it becomes… When it is not exercised, sensitivity tends to weaken… How important it must be, therefore, to exercise children’s sensitivity to the point where it will continue to develop as much as it is capable of — so that it can no longer be dulled by those things in life that tend to lead sensitivity astray. These things lead us far from nature and ourselves by focusing our sensitivity on vain and selfish passions, leading us away from simple tastes, and from those natural leanings in which the happiness of each person resides, the kind of happiness that does not require the sacrifice of others and that benefits all. Fathers, mothers, teachers — you nearly have in your hands the destiny of the next generation! How guilty you are if you allow your children to abort these precious germs of sensitivity which require, for their development, nothing more than the sight of suffering, the example of compassion, the tears of gratefulness, and an enlightened hand leading and moving them! How guilty you are if you care more about your children’s success than about their virtue, if you are more impatient to see them gain popularity in their circle than to see their heart brim with indignation for an injustice, their faces turn pale at the sight of suffering, their hearts treat all men as brothers!
She offers a timeless recipe for cultivating that vital sensitivity in children:
Teach them to be easily remorseful, delicately proud, and honest; let them not see suffering without being tormented by the need to bring relief. No less is needed in the midst of these oppressive barriers, raised between man and man from need, strength, and vanity, but that they should fear at each step to hurt rights or to neglect to repair some ancient wrong! That the sweet habit of doing good should teach them that it is through the heart that they will find happiness, and not through titles, luxury, dignities, or riches!
Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we call our own. The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will take place between them and other seeds in the dark underground of consciousness where we become who we are.
As he dismantles the myth of originality in the altogether fantastic Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave looks back on his body of work as “primarily narrative songs using vivid imagery” and traces this sensibility to one particularly fertile seed planted when he was five — a 1961 Czech book of fairy tales he read and reread for years, into his teens when he first began making music.
Full of brightly illustrated stories from around the world, The Fairy Tale Tree (public library) by Vladislav Stanovsky and Jan Vladislav dazzles with its vivid primary-color illustrations by the great Czech artist and sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal.
The first page of the book casts its promise as part poem and part magic spell — something strange and transcendent that reads like a Nick Cave song:
Beyond endless mountains, beyond endless rivers,
at the very remotest end of the earth
and whither no bird has ever yet flown,
there is a deep blue sea,
and in this sea there is a small green island,
and on this island is a stately tree,
all of gold with shapely branches, twelve in all,
and on each branch there is a nest,
and in each nest a nestful of eggs
— a nestful of eggs of clear crystal.
You’ve only to break the crystal shell,
And each has a fairy tale to tell.
From there, each chapter proceeds as an egg on a branch of the storytelling tree — a concept Cave realized only in hindsight anchors “Spinning Song” on his record Ghosteen. He used an illustration of a red devil from the book in the artwork of another record, and it was the image of a red devil that came to him one day a lifetime later that sparked an entirely new and unexpected creative practice — his series of bizarre and beautiful ceramic figurines.
Wild and wondrous, partway between a child’s drawing and a modernist painting, Kolíbal’s illustrations emanate his own early influences of Egyptian and Cycladic art yet rise from the page entirely original, full of uncommon vitality and vim — a pig with a cane, a mouse waltzing with a lobster, a wolf diving down a chimney, strange and joyful like the best of childhood.
How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyond why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the reason you love one and not another. The feeling trembling beneath the fact — the brutal knowledge that everything we love is irreplaceable yet will be lost: to dissolution and death, to rejection and indifference, to our own return to stardust — is the hardest thing to bear, the thing for which we have devised our most elaborate theaters of denial.
Among those coping mechanisms is the invention of sentimentality. “Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” Carl Jung wrote. Its strange psychological machinery is what the poet Mark Doty explores with uncommon insight and sensitivity in a passage from his wonderful memoir Dog Years (public library).
He writes:
The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world — our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other — how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love — they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt — these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace. They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm. It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable. In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable. (Why don’t you just get another dog?) The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness. But it is, I supposed, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable.
Art by Margaret C. Cook for a 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Of course, our fury at entropy is the great motive force of our creativity — we make art to make meaning out of our mortality, to counteract its brutality with beauty. Every creative act is an act of consolation for our transience, for our despair about our transience. A century after Albert Camus insisted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Doty contemplates this fundamental equivalence of existence:
Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation. Perhaps it’s less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will? The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it. Fine, says the world, don’t accept it. The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away. To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish — does that make one wise, or make one a fool?
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