The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Roots and the Meaning of Life

By Maria Popova

They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark hummus to which the body will one day return, they become a spell against despair and a consecration of all that is alive.

Beneath our feet, roots spread fractal and pulmonary, veining the biosphere with the bloodstream of life. The word itself shares its root with “radical” and “race” in the Latin radix — the origin point from which all things centripetally grow.

Just as I was contemplating the logical language of roots — the exposed fragments of them across the trail like a message in Morse code, a poem in Braille, a code language of fractals and Fibonacci sequences and mathematics we are yet to discover — I came upon botanist and prairie ecologist John Weaver’s marvelously illustrated century-old book The Ecological Relations of Roots.

Schematic bisect showing the root stem relations of important prairie plants: hu, Heuchera glabella; a, Astragalus arrectus; s, Sidalcea oregana; h, Helianthella douglasii; ag, Agropirum spicatum. (Available as a print and a field notebook, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

In the first year of the First World War, Weaver set out to understand how life anchors itself to the substrate of living. He spent four years studying 1,150 individual root systems of about 140 different species of shrubs, grasses, and herbs across Nebraska, Washington, and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Belonging to the last generation of scientists who were not yet schooled out of art and its power to magnify thought, he illustrated the book himself, drawing the root systems as he excavated them, always to exact measurements, and later retracing them in India ink.

Schematic bisect: h, Hieracium scouleri; k, Keleria cristata; b, Balsamorhiza sagittata; f, Festuca ovina ingrata; g, Geranium oviscosissimum; p, Poa sandbergit; ho, Hoorebekia racemosa; po, Potentilla blaschheana. (Available as a print and a field notebook, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Schematic bisect: s, Sieversia ciliata; w, Wyethia amoplezicaulis; ll, Lupinus leucophyllus; lo, Lupinus ornatus; p, Poa sandbergii; e, Leptotenia multifida; a, Agropyrum spicatum. (Available as a print and a field notebook, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Looking back on the discoveries, he observes:

The general characters of the root systems of a species are often as marked and distinctive as the above-ground vegetative characters. But the root systems of different species of the same genus, while often somewhat similar, may be of entirely different types.

It is not hard to see ourselves in them — how much of our essential character dwells beneath the surface of the self, how seemingly similar people may differ profoundly in their subterranean essence. It helps to remember that the visible self is fed by an invisible counterpart at least as intricate and extensive; that the two are so tightly stemmed together that we are always interacting with both the visible person and their invisible root system.

Root system relations. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

As it happens, my friend Hannah Fries has just the right poem to reverence this existential dimension of roots and their relations, found in her altogether wonderful collection Little Terrarium (public library):

EPITHALAMION
by Hannah Fries

The elm weaves the field’s late light, this hill
hanging from the tree’s roots like the moon
from its shadow and the whole
world beneath suspended.

Roots knead the earth’s thick sorrow.
Still, leaves from this.
From this unshackling, birdsong.

I am a blade of corn where you kneel,
wind and quaking stalk.
The elm’s body a vase of poured sky.

The tree will die.
Someday, the tree will die.

For now, this axis —
what we choose to compass by.

Couple with Hannah’s poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit a kindred meditation on lichens and the meaning of life.

BP

The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older

By Maria Popova

A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.

This is not easy in a culture that fetishes youth, that clothes us in an invisibility cloak as life strips us of time. We could use all the help we can get — a psychological equivalent of what Eva Perón set out to do politically with her constitutional decalogue for the dignity of growing old. Here is the best help I have encountered over the years — a kind of decalogue for the constitution of the inner country.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON

The first thing one must do in this culture is refute the romanticizing of youth, recalibrate the value metrics of the self, and no one has done it more concisely and creatively than Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — one of the most daring and underappreciated intellects of the past century — in her altogether superb disquisition on youth and old age:

People ask: “Would you or would you not like to be young again?” Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible. You cannot be — you that are — young again. You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no “you” except your life — lived. But apart from that, when you rise from what somebody calls “the banquet of life,” flushed with the wine of life, can you want to sit down again? When you have climbed the hill, and the view is just breaking, do you want to reclimb it? A thousand times no! Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

At the dawn of her sixties — that threshold moment when people, women especially, first begin to feel the cold shoulder of society, the small cruelties of daily dismissal, the subtle intimations of irrelevance — Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) took up the question of what beauty really means as one grows older, cutting through the collagen of our cultural ideology to celebrate the most beautiful thing about growing older: how it anneals personhood, chiseling away the marble of personality to reveal the sculpture of the naked soul:

For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

[…]

There’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.

Also well worth reading is Le Guin’s meditation on change, menopause as rebirth, and the civilizational value of elders

BERTRAND RUSSELL

In the first year of his eighties, already a Nobel laureate who had lived through two world wars, the polymathic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) wrote a short essay about how to grow old, anchored in this life-magnifying advice:

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. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

HENRY MILLER

Upon turning eighty, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) set down everything he knew about growing old and the secret to remaining young at heart, his long reflection best distilled in this one short passage:

If you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power… If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Wading into her sixties, Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) looked ahead to old age in a passage of her memoir and offered her characteristically passionate yet unsentimental advice, largely to herself, as the best advice to others tends to be:

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

JOAN DIDION

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934–December 23, 2021) was only thirty-four when, thinking about the value of keeping a notebook, she found herself shining a sidewise gleam on what may be the most important orientation we can have to ourselves as the years advance, the most important thing we can do to keep the arrow of time from becoming a deadly weapon of revisionism and regret:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch… keeping those lines open to ourselves.

NICK CAVE

Not long after offering a thirteen-year-old some excellent advice on how to grow up, Nick Cave, midway through his sixties, considered the two qualities cultivating which ensures that growing older is a broadening rather than a narrowing of life, a way of seeing the world with more nuance and moving through it with more tenderness:

The first is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

Although Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) never lived past middle age, he was born an old soul and saw clearly the rewards of life’s later years. His excellent lyric meditation on the art of becoming yourself across the arc of life is anchored in the hard-earned self-trust that steels you against the winds of circumstance:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

PABLO CASALS

Shortly after his ninety-third birthday, the legendary cellist Pablo Casals (December 29, 1876–October 22, 1973) reflected on his life, locating the key to contentment in never ceasing to work with love, to live awake to wonder:

If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

Continuing to practice and perform, Casals approached his daily routine as a microcosm of that orientation:

I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!

GRACE PALEY

At the sunset of her sixties, Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) took up the question of “upstaging time,” ending her magnificent meditation with the parting gift of life-changing advice she herself had received from her aging father:

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

BP

How to Save a Life: “Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on the Power of the Smallest Kindnesses

By Maria Popova

Though researchers since Darwin may have spent considerable effort on the science of smiles, at the heart of that simple human expression remains a metaphysical art — one captured nowhere more beautifully and grippingly than in a short account by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31, 1944), found in Letter to a Hostage (public library) — the same exquisite short memoir he began writing in December of 1940, a little more than two years before he created The Little Prince on American soil, which also gave us his poignant reflection on what the Sahara desert teaches us about the meaning of life.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In a creative sandbox for what would become Saint-Exupéry’s most famous line in The Little Prince — “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — he writes:

How does life construct those lines of force which make us alive?

[…]

Real miracles make little noise! Essential events are so simple!

One such essential event in Saint-Exupéry’s life had to do with the mundane miracle of a simple smile, a gift he so poetically describes as “a certain miracle of the sun, which had taken so much trouble, for so many million years, to achieve, through ourselves, that quality of a smile which was pure success.” He once again channels the spirit of his famous Little Prince line and writes:

The essential, most often, has no weight. The essential there, was apparently nothing but a smile. A smile is often the essential. One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. And the quality of a smile might make one die.

Indeed, in a subsequent chapter, Saint-Exupéry recounts an incident that rendered a smile very much the difference between life and death — his life and death. One night during his time in Spain as a journalist reporting on the Civil War, he found himself with several revolver barrels pressed tightly into his stomach — the militia of the rebel forces had snuck up on him under the veil of the dark and captured him in “solemn silence,” staring at his tie — “such a luxury was not fashionable in an anarchist area” — rather than his face. He recounts:

My skin tightened. I waited for the shot, for this was the time of quick trials. But there was no shot. After a complete blank of a few seconds, during which the shifts at work appeared to dance in another universe — a kind of dream ballet — my anarchists, slightly nodding their heads, bid me precede them, and we set off, without hurry, across the lines of junction. The capture had been done in perfect silence, with an extraordinary economy of movement. It was like a game of creatures of the ocean bed.

I soon descended to a basement transformed into a guard post. Badly lit by a poor oil lamp, some other militia were dozing, their guns between their legs. They exchanged a few words, in a neutral voice, with the men of my patrol. One of them searched me.

One of Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.

Saint-Exupéry didn’t speak Spanish, but he understood enough Catalan to gather that his identity documents were being requested. He tried to communicate to his captors that he had left them at the hotel, that he was journalist, but they merely passed around his camera, yawning and expressionless. The atmosphere, to his surprise, wasn’t what one would expect of an anarchist militia camp:

The dominant impression was that of boredom. Boredom and sleep. The power of concentration of these men seemed exhausted. I almost wished for a sign of hostility, as a human contact. But … they gazed at me without any reaction, as if they were looking at a Chinese fish in an aquarium.

(One has to wonder whether that desire for contact, whatever its nature or cost, might be a universality of the human condition — the same impulse that drives trolls to spew the venom of hostility as a desperate antidote to their own apathy and existential boredom. Aggression is, perhaps, the only form of contact of which they are capable, and yet it is contact they crave so compulsively.)

After a tortuous period of observing his captors wait for nothing in particular, Saint-Exupéry grew increasingly exasperated with a longing for contact, for the mere acknowledgement of his existence. He paints the backdrop of the miracle that would take place:

In order to load myself with the weight of real presence, I felt a strange need to cry out something about myself, which would impose upon them the truth of my existence — my age for instance! That is impressive, the age of a man! That summarizes all his life. This maturity of his has taken a long time to achieve. It was grown through so many obstacles conquered, so many serious illnesses cured, so many griefs appeased, so many despairs overcome, so many dangers unconsciously passed. It has grown through so many desires, so many hopes, so many regrets, so many lapses, so much love. The age of a man, that represents a good load of experience and memories. In spite of decoys, jolts, and ruts, you have continued to plod like a horse drawing a cart.

Saint-Exupéry was thirty-seven at the time.

But what happened next had nothing to do with the achievement of age, or the gravitas of maturity, or any other willful self-assertion. Instead, it was driven by the simplest, most profound form of shared humanity:

Then the miracle happened. Oh! a very discreet miracle. I had no cigarette. As one of my guards was smoking, I asked him, by gesture, showing the vestige of a smile, if he would give me one. The man first stretched himself, slowly passed his hand across his brow, raised his eyes, no longer to my tie but to my face, and, to my great astonishment, he also attempted a smile. It was like the dawning of the day.

This miracle did not conclude the tragedy, it removed it altogether, as light does shadow. There had been no tragedy. This miracle altered nothing visible. The feeble oil lamp, the table scattered with papers, the men propped against the wall, the colors, the smell, everything remained unchanged. Yet everything was transformed in its very substance. That smile saved me. It was a sign just as final, as obvious in its future consequences, as unchangeable as the rising of the sun. It marked the beginning of a new era. Nothing had changed, everything was changed. The table scattered with papers became alive. The oil lamp became alive. The walls were alive. The boredom dripping from every lifeless thing in that cellar grew lighter as if by magic. It seemed that an invisible stream of blood had started flowing again, connecting all things in the same body, and restoring to them their significance.

The men had not moved either, but, though a minute earlier they had seemed to be farther away from me than an antediluvian species, now they grew into contemporary life. I had an extraordinary feeling of presence. That is it: of presence. And I was aware of a connection.

The boy who had smiled at me, and who, until a few minutes before, had been nothing but a function, a tool, a kind of monstrous insect, appeared now rather awkward, almost shy, of a wonderful shyness — that terrorist! He was no less a brute than any other. But the revelation of the man in him shed such a light upon his vulnerable side! We men assume haughty airs, but within the depth of our hearts, we know hesitation, doubt, grief.

Nothing had yet been said. Yet everything was resolved.

One of Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.

Saint-Exupéry ends with a reflection on the sacred universality and life-giving force of that one simple gesture, the human smile:

Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed. We communicate in a smile beyond languages, classes, and parties. We are faithful members of the same church, you with your customs, I with mine.

Four years after he wrote Letter to a Hostage, which is a sublime read in its totality, Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Bay of Biscay never to return. Popular legend has it that Horst Rippert, the German fighter pilot who shot down the author’s plane, broke down and wept upon hearing the news — Saint-Exupéry had been his favorite author. What a tragic form of contact, war.

BP

Pi and the Seductions of Infinity

By Maria Popova

This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book.

“My business is circumference,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most cryptic letters.

Since ancient times, human beings have been enchanted by the immutable
relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, no matter the circle’s size. Today, we have a symbolic form for that mathematical relationship: π — an ancient Greek letter conferred upon it by a Welsh mathematician in the first years of the eighteenth century, though it was the ancient Greeks themselves who first began thinking mathematically about the mysterious number. The longest number in nature and possibly the most powerful, π factors into our understanding of fractals and eclipses, of cosmology and thermodynamics, yet it remains ever elusive in its totality.

In the third century BCE, a millennium after Babylonian and Egyptian scholars tried to discern its exact value with fractions, Archimedes devised a geometrical approach that contoured its first few digits. Eight centuries later, ancient Chinese and Indian mathematicians approximated it to seven digits. The invention of calculus in the seventeenth century bloomed hundreds of digits, with Newton himself computing the first fifteen. Modern supercomputers can calculate with perfect precision 1.4 trillion digits. We need only the first thirty-two to compute the size of the known universe with a margin of error a single proton wide.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

An irrational number — a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction, the ratio between two whole numbers — π unmoors our basic intuitions about reality with its disquieting whisper of an infinity beyond the grasp of reason. There are no known infinities in nature — as transient creatures suspended in space between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, suspended in time between not yet and no more, we simply cannot conceive of infinity.

And yet the decimal point of π taunts us like the gun barrel of the unimaginable. If we ever reach the last digit of π, we will have known the universe.

Meanwhile, its assuring constancy goes hedging against our own transience, slaking our yearning for permanence in a cosmos governed by incessant change.

PI
by Wisława Szymborska

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn’t stop at the page’s edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief — a mouse tail, a pigtail — is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star’s ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.

BP

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)