“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two world wars. There are many species of despair — the private despair of ill health and heartbreak, the public despair we call politics, the existential despair of bearing our transience and our utter insignificance to the life of the cosmos.
In the autumn of 1978, Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) faced several species at once as a grim diagnosis first interrupted, then fortified her work as one the most personal yet most politically consequential voices of the past century. “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word ‘I,’” she had written in the prime of her life, in the bloom of health. Now, she came to hone her philosophy on the sharp edge of her mortality.
“Spring comes, and still I feel despair like a pale cloud waiting to consume me,” she writes at the outset of what became The Cancer Journals (public library) — Lorde’s effort, blazingly successful, “to give form with honesty and precision to the pain faith labor and loving which this period of my life has translated into strength.” Like all translation, however, it was a demanding task, a creative task, a task that required learning a new language of being well enough to channel through it the poetry of being alive.
Audre Lorde
It begins with the stammer of incomprehension that follows every existential shock: She finds herself “not feeling very hopeful these days, about selfhood or anything else.” But soon she discovers that the only way out of that “molten despair” is through.
In consonance with poet May Sarton’s hard-won insistence that “sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands,” Lorde comes to see how it is precisely by allowing the despair that she can reach beyond it:
If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again. I must be content to see how really little I can do and still do it with an open heart… I must let this pain flow through me and pass on. If I resist or try to stop it, it will detonate inside me, shatter me, splatter my pieces against every wall and person that I touch.
Along the way, consumed with writing while trying to stay alive, she trembles with the question haunting every artist: “What is this work all for?” But then, upon finishing a novel, she looks back to see it had been a lifeline. In what is by far the most concise, precise manifesto for those of us who process our loves and our losses in writing — or do whatever the world sees as our work — she reflects:
I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.
Calibrating her personal suffering against “the enormity of our task, to turn the world around,” and coming to see that despair “means destruction,” she allows her despair — that is, feels it — then refuses it — that is, refuses to act out of it, to live into it:
How do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy? I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning… It means trout fishing on the Missisquoi River at dawn and tasting the green silence, and knowing that this beauty too is mine forever.
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.
But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.
The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.
The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.
The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.
The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.
The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.
In his 2008 psychology classic Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (public library), Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all the possible lonelinesses into the three core kinds that pulsate beneath our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls “the profound loneliness of being close to God.” This I take to mean the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity that dwells at the intersection of time, chance, and love; God is just what some call their dream of a crosswalk when they face that intersection.
The first two lonelinesses are rooted in time, which is itself fractal — there are many kinds of time we live with. The third kind of loneliness deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time — like music, like wonder, like love. It is an existential loneliness, a creative loneliness, made not from the atoms of now that compose the other two lonelinesses but from the atoms of forever.
Because we, creatures made of time, cannot comprehend forever, it is easy to call it God — that catchall for everything immense and incomprehensible we face in ourselves. But this is an illusion — forever too is fractal, with myriad visitations of it in our daily lives. In a testament to James Baldwin’s timeless insistence that “the poets… are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” it is not the psychologists or the philosophers but the poets who part the veil of illusion to reveal the truth:
SOME KINDS OF FOREVER VISIT YOU by Brenda Hillman
The unknowns are up early;
they browse through the bronze
porch bells. Crows
call & late
apples blaze
toward western emptiness.
In your illness,
the edges hesitate;
like the revolt
of workers, they
will take a while…
Here comes the fond
mild winter; other
realms are noisy
& unanimous. You tap
the screen & dream
while waiting; four
kinds of forever
visit you today:
something, nothing,
everything & art,
greater than you are
& of your making —
Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:
Learn something.
Help someone.
Feel it all.
We need our sciences to learn how the universe works, to know what we don’t yet know and to comprehend it. We need our arts to learn how the heart works, to feel what we are unwilling or unable to feel and hold it without apprehension. We need both — knowledge and feeling, intelligent comprehension and emotional intelligence — to be capable of empathy, as well as self-compassion.
The damage of our time is that it pragmatizes everything, reducing the wonder of curiosity to the practical application of discoveries, reducing the symphony of feeling to the hold music of self-help, reducing human beings to data points in a log of user statistics and political polls. It is not only an insult but a violence to our humanity, the only antidote to which is a passionate defense of the irreducible things that make us human — those things useless as moonlight, unnecessary as music, as love: There is no practical value to apprehending the magnificent eye of the scallop or the mystery of the ghost pipe, no practical value to Leaves of Grass, yet these are the things that mediate the worst propensities of our kind — our capacity for despair, which is the price of consciousness, and our capacity for war, which is the cost of despair.
A century ago, as the world was recovering from its first global war, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) foresaw another unless humanity could find a way to resist this dehumanizing cult of utility. We didn’t then, but maybe, just maybe, we can now with the prescription Russell offers in his wonderful essay “‘Useless Knowledge,'” later included in the altogether revelatory collection In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (public library).
Bertrand Russell
Observing that the Renaissance was so transformative because its “main motive” was delight — “the restoration of a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation which had been lost while ignorance and superstition kept the mind’s eye in blinkers” — and that the Enlightenment was so transformative because it probed the workings of the universe without expectation of practical gain, he writes:
Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, men have questioned more and more vigorously the value of “useless” knowledge, and have come increasingly to believe that the only knowledge worth having is that which is applicable to some part of the economic life of the community… Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill… This is part and parcel of the same movement which has led to compulsory military service, boy scouts, the organisation of political parties, and the dissemination of political passion by the Press.
We do not like to think of anyone lazily enjoying life, however refined may be the quality of his enjoyment. We feel that everybody ought to be doing something to help on the great cause (whatever it may be), the more so as so many bad men are working against it and ought to be stopped. We have not leisure of mind, therefore, to acquire any knowledge except such as will help us in the fight for whatever it may happen to be that we think important.
But while the usefulness of “useful” knowledge in making the modern world cannot be denied — here we are, with our computers and airplanes and ever-growing life-expectancies — we need its “useless” counterpart to make life not longer, not more productive, but wider and deeper and more present. Russell writes:
There is indirect utility, of various different kinds, in the possession of knowledge which does not contribute to technical efficiency. I think some of the worst features of the modern world could be improved by a greater encouragement of such knowledge and a less ruthless pursuit of mere professional competence… When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder… Narrowness of outlook has caused oblivion of some powerful counteracting force.
Several years before the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga composed his revelatory treatise on how play made us human, Russell adds:
Men as well as children have need of play, that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment. But if play is to serve its purpose, it must be possible to find pleasure and interest in matters not connected with work.
And yet play is an active rather than passive form of leisure. In a prophetic sentiment anticipating the menacing mesmerism of social media, the way it would turn the human animal into a screen zombie, he observes:
The amusements of modern urban populations tend more and more to be passive and collective, and to consist of inactive observation of the skilled activities of others… If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.
Half a lifetime before he looked back to reflect on the key to growing old contentedly — “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life” — he writes:
[Such useless] knowledge, when it is successfully assimilated, forms the character of a man’s thoughts and desires, making them concern themselves, in part at least, with large impersonal objects, not only with matters of immediate importance to himself. It has been too readily assumed that, when a man has acquired certain capacities by means of knowledge, he will use them in ways that are socially beneficial. The narrowly utilitarian conception of education ignores the necessity of training a man’s purposes as well as his skill… It must be admitted that highly educated people are sometimes cruel, I think there can be no doubt that they are less often so than people whose minds have lain fallow. The bully in a school is seldom a boy whose proficiency in learning is up to the average. When a lynching takes place, the ring-leaders are almost invariably very ignorant men. This is not because mental cultivation produces positive humanitarian feelings, though it may do so; it is rather because it gives other interests than the ill-treatment of neighbours, and other sources of self-respect than the assertion of domination.
Even Bertrand Russell did not foresee that within a century bullies and lynchers with fallow minds would take the reins of superpowers, waging wars by whims and feeding the fragile ego’s lust for power by terrorizing the powerless. But he did give us, as plainly and precisely as possible, a prescription for prevention:
Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction… Hamlet is held up as an awful warning against thought without action, but no one holds up Othello as a warning against action without thought… For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion. A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.
Describing what Iris Murdoch would later term “unselfing,” which she identified as the chief reward of engaging with art and nature, he adds:
A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.
These contemplative acts of unselfing, Russell notes, have “advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound, [from] minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates [to] the difficulty of securing international co-operation.” In passage evocative of physicist Richard Feynman’s classic Ode to a Flower, he reflects:
Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word “precocious,” because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.
[…]
But while the trivial pleasures of culture have their place as a relief from the trivial worries of practical life, the more important merits of contemplation are in relation to the greater evils of life, death and pain and cruelty, and the blind march of nations into unnecessary disaster. For those to whom dogmatic religion can no longer bring comfort, there is need of some substitute, if life is not to become dusty and harsh and filled with trivial self-assertion.
In a passage of overwhelming prescience, he adds:
The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote. The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.
In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to “make this world worthy of its children.” Today, as we face a world that treats its children as worthless, we are challenged like we have never been challenged to consider the deepest existential calculus of bringing new life into a troubled world — what is the worth of children, what are our responsibilities to them (when we do choose to have them, for it is also an act of courage and responsibility to choose not to), and what does it mean to raise a child with the dignity of being an unrepeatable miracle of atoms that have never before constellated and will never again constellate in that exact way?
Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from Song of Two Worlds by physicist Alan Lightman.
When a young mother with a newborn baby at her breast asks for advice on children and parenting, Gibran’s poetic prophet responds:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
“Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,”Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) wrote in offering his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life in the preface to Leaves of Grass. When Whitman first published his masterpiece in 1855, it was met with indifference punctuated by bursts of harsh criticism. It is difficult to imagine just how insulting to the young poet’s soul such reception must have been, or what it took for him to dismiss it and carry on writing. What buoyed his spirit through the tidal wave of negativity was an extraordinary letter of appreciation from Ralph Waldo Emerson — the era’s most respected literary tastemaker and Whitman’s greatest hero, whose 1844 essay The Poet had inspired Leaves of Grass. The young poet wore Emerson’s praise of “incomparable things said incomparably well” like an armor, almost literally — he carried the letter folded in his shirt-pocket over his heart, regularly reading it to friends and lovers.
Walt Whitman circa 1854 (Library of Congress)
It is certainly easier, though never easy, to dismiss what insults one’s soul when it comes from critics who haven’t earned one’s confidence — “Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect,” Jeanette Winterson offered in her ten wise rules of writing. But to dismiss criticism that insults the soul from someone we respect — or, harder still, love — requires superhuman strength of spirit. How do we hold on to the integrity and solidity of our conviction and vision, be it creative or existential, when it is being challenged and censured by a person we regard with high intellectual esteem and tenderness of heart?
Whitman modeled this exquisitely in an encounter with Emerson himself.
On a crisp February afternoon in 1860, five years after the publication of Leaves of Grass, the two men took a two-hour walk along Boston Common. They had by then befriended one another and formed a courteous, frank relationship embodying Emerson’s ideal of friendship: “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.” That winter day, Whitman found Emerson to be “in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm’d at every point, and when he chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual.” When the criticism came, Whitman knew it sprang from that selfsame source — a quality of character he deeply respected, even revered. And yet, rather than coming undone by self-doubt, he was able to stay rooted in his own values and vision.
During those two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an argumentstatement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, “Children of Adam.” More precious than gold to me that dissertation — it afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point of E.’s statement was unanswerable, no judge’s charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. “What have you to say then to such things?” said E., pausing in conclusion. “Only that while I can’t answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it,” was my candid response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at the American House. And thenceforward I never waver’d or was touch’d with qualms, (as I confess I had been two or three times before).
Emerson — the patron saint of self-reliance, who exhorted: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” — no doubt appreciated this orientation of spirit. Whitman’s first and foremost biographer, the great naturalist John Burroughs, goes even further in his sublimely poetic 1896 biography Whitman: A Study:
In many ways was Whitman, quite unconsciously to himself, the man Emerson invoked and prayed for — the absolutely self-reliant man; the man who should find his own day and land sufficient; who had no desire to be Greek, or Italian, or French, or English, but only himself; who should not whine, or apologize, or go abroad; who should not duck, or deprecate, or borrow; and who could see through the many disguises and debasements of our times the lineaments of the same gods that so ravished the bards of old.
To be sure, Whitman did not dismiss criticism wholesale — rather, he separated the wheat from the chaff through the sieve of confidence and surefooted creative vision. But criticism, he believed, could be far more valuable than praise. In Leaves of Grass, he wrote under the heading “STRONGER LESSONS”:
Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you and were tender with you? and stood aside for you?
Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?
The kind of criticism he readily dismissed was that of the professional critics and opinionators — those aimed at tearing down rather than improving a writer’s art, for their judgments are based on the standards of their time and therefore tend to censure any vigorous break with convention. Such critics are apt to pronounce any work of true originality bad, and then to embody W.H. Auden’s incisive observation that “one cannot review a bad book without showing off.”
Burroughs noted this in his praiseful biography of Whitman, composed at a time when the poet was still more rejected than celebrated by his era:
There are no more precious and tonic pages in history than the records of men who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, in obedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature.
[…]
Every man is a partaker in the triumph of him who is always true to himself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions.
Whitman himself had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass:
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.
Later in life, he would reflect:
Has it never occurr’d to any one how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics?… I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied human soul giving its verdict.
[…]
The quality of BEING, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.
Whitman’s poetry, founded upon the unshakable foundation of his creative and spiritual vision, eventually catapulted him to the top of the English-language literary pantheon. Leaves of Grass endures as one of the most beloved poetic works of all time, having influenced generations of writers and buoyed ordinary livers of life through the worst existential upheavals — such is the power of poetic truth channeled with unwavering stability of confidence and vision.
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