The Marginalian
The Marginalian

What Happens When We Die

By Maria Popova

What Happens When We Die

When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether:

“Where did you go, my darling?”

Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.

Even if we understand that dying is the token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it — a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime — this understanding blurs into an anxious disembodied abstraction as the body slouches toward dissolution. Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp a timeless and infinite inanimacy — a void beyond being.

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Even Walt Whitman, who could hold such multitudes of contradiction, could not grasp the void. “I will make poems of my body and of mortality,” he vowed as a young man as he reverenced our shared materiality in his timeless declamation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It was easy, from the shimmering platform of his prime, to look forward to becoming “the uncut hair of graves” upon returning his own atoms to the grassy ground one day.

But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.”

And then he did dissolve, leaving us his immortal verses, verses penned when his particles sang with the electric cohesion of youth and of health, verses that traced with their fleshy finger the faint contour of an elemental truth: “What invigorates life invigorates death.”

“Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death.” Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)

I wish I could have given my grandmother, and given the dying Whitman, the infinitely invigorating Mr g: A Novel About the Creation (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman — a magical-realist serenade to science, coursing with symphonic truth about our search for meaning, our hunger for beauty, and what makes our tender, transient lives worth living.

Toward the end of the novel, Mr g watches, with heartache unknown in the Void predating the existence of universes and of life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life unspooling from the reel of memory, leaving her grief-stricken by its terminus, shuddering with defiant disbelief that this is all.

“How can a creature of substance and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass?” wonders Mr g as he sorrows watching her succumb to the very laws he created. “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”

And then, as a faint smile washes across her face, she does die. Lightman writes:

At that moment, there were 3,​147,​740,​103,​497,​276,​498,​750,​208,​327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.

In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.

But then we see that every atom belonging to her — or, rather, temporarily borrowed by her — truly does belong to everything and everyone, just as you and I are now inhaling the same oxygen atoms that once inflated Walt Whitman’s lungs with the lust for life:

Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.

Pectanthis Asteroides — one of the otherworldly drawings of jellyfish by the 19th-century German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology. (Available as a print.)

In a passage evocative of the central sentiment in Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, stunning poem “Kinship,” he adds:

Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.

And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.

Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my grandmother who is and my grandfather who is no more — each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence.

Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions, we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness: our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves.

BP

C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the Receptive Imagination

By Maria Popova

C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the Receptive Imagination

There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there.

Wonder, like enchantment, is not something you can control or plan for or will — it is something that befalls you, overcomes you, pours upon you spontaneous and unbidden. Paradoxically, what makes such spontaneity possible is structure — an organizing principle for the hours of the day that makes room, and reserves it, for these moments of magic. This is not simple to configure and not easy to enact: How to spend our hours and shape our days may be the supreme problem of human life. There is no permanent, perfect, or universal solution, for the problem is laced with our particularity — but we can learn from each other, borrow bits and pieces from various approaches, constellate a singular organizing principle from different points of light.

Among the finest I have encountered, in being both pragmatic and profound, is the one C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) offers in his memoir Surprised by Joy (public library).

C.S. Lewis

Looking back on a period of especial creative fertility and focus — one in which The Chronicles of Narnia began germinating — he details the deliberate structure of his days:

I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better… At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend.

Echoing mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s insight about what makes an ideal walking companion, he adds:

Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world… The only friend to walk with is one… who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.

Every visionary is equal parts proprietor of a way of seeing unlike any other in the entire history and future of the universe, and product of their time and place. For all his originality and daring, Lewis — born in the final years of the nineteenth century, forged in the crucible of proper Englishness — was still touchingly a product of his culture:

The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude.

Tea comes with a light meal. Observing that, unlike walking and talking, “eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably,” he recounts always dining with a book — though not all books would do. “It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table,” he admonishes. Read, instead, “a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere.” To us, the whole of the Internet may be one such gossipy, formless scroll. To Lewis, it meant books like Tristram Shandy and Anatomy of Melancholy.

And then, at five, back to work until seven, concluding the day in a manner that would make Andrew Huberman proud:

Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies… there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven.

Art by Lisk Feng from There Was a Shadow by Bruce Handy

In a passage of especial poignancy in our own time, when the modes and demands of correspondence have proliferated to a tyrannical degree, he adds a primary parameter that holds the entire structure together:

It is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock. In those blessed days I received, and answered, only two letters a week; one from my father, which was a matter of duty, and one from [my best friend] Arthur, which was the high light of the week, for we poured out to each other on paper all the delight that was intoxicating us both.

All of this structure, all of this protection from intrusion, is in the service of one thing only — training the imagination to receive the signal of life, the signal of which all of our creative work is a translation. A century before science illuminated how the natural world fuels creativity, Lewis saw a parallel between our encounters with nature and with the muse. He offers a timeless instruction for how to face the forest or the blank page, the cosmos or the canvas:

Total surrender is the first step… Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else.

Complement with George Kubler on how to hear the signal of your life and Hermann Hesse on wonder and the proper aim of education, then revisit C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing.

BP

David Bowie Answers the Famous Proust Questionnaire

By Maria Popova

In the 1880s, long before he claimed his status as one of the greatest authors of all time, teenage Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871–November 18, 1922) filled out an English-language questionnaire given to him by his friend Antoinette, the daughter of France’s then-president, as part of her “confession album” — a Victorian version of today’s popular personality tests, designed to reveal the answerer’s tastes, aspirations, and sensibility in a series of simple questions. Proust’s original manuscript, titled “by Marcel Proust himself,” wasn’t discovered until 1924, two years after his death. Decades later, the French television host Bernard Pivot, whose work inspired James Lipton’s Inside the Actor’s Studio, saw in the questionnaire an excellent lubricant for his interviews and began administering it to his guests in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1993, Vanity Fair resurrected the tradition and started publishing various public figures’ answers to the Proust Questionnaire on the last page of each issue.

In 2009, the magazine released Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life (public library) — a charming compendium featuring answers by such cultural icons as Jane Goodall, Allen Ginsberg, Hedy Lamarr, Gore Vidal, Julia Child, and Joan Didion. Among the most wonderful answers, equal parts playful and profound, are those by David Bowie — himself a vocal lover of literature — published in the magazine in August of 1998.

Portrait of David Bowie by Robert Risko for Vanity Fair

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Reading.

What is your most marked characteristic?
Getting a word in edgewise.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Discovering morning.

What is your greatest fear?
Converting kilometers to miles.

What historical figure do you most identify with?
Santa Claus.

Which living person do you most admire?
Elvis.

Who are your heroes in real life?
The consumer.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
While in New York, tolerance.
Outside New York, intolerance.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Talent.

What is your favorite journey?
The road of artistic excess.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Sympathy and originality.

Which word or phrases do you most overuse?
“Chthonic,” “miasma.”

What is your greatest regret?
That I never wore bellbottoms.

What is your current state of mind?
Pregnant.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
My fear of them (wife and son excluded).

What is your most treasured possession?
A photograph held together by cellophane tape of Little Richard that I bought in 1958, and a pressed and dried chrysanthemum picked on my honeymoon in Kyoto.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Living in fear.

Where would you like to live?
Northeast Bali or south Java.

What is your favorite occupation?
Squishing paint on a senseless canvas.

What is the quality you most like in a man?
The ability to return books.

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
The ability to burp on command.

What are your favorite names?
Sears & Roebuck.

What is your motto?
“What” is my motto.

Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire is a treat in its colorful totality. For a similar compendium of wisdom from cultural icons, see LIFE Magazine’s 1991 volume The Meaning of Life, then revisit Bowie’s 75 must-read books.

BP

Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of Connection: Eric Berne on the Key to True Intimacy

By Maria Popova

Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of Connection: Eric Berne on the Key to True Intimacy

We move among surfaces. If we are lucky enough, if we are courageous enough, every once in a while we dive into the depths with another. It is not easy, because even through our best self-awareness, we remain largely unfathomable to ourselves. To reach the nether fathoms with another is a transcendent terror — one we can only bear for a little while before some great gasp of panic beckons us back to the surface.

The willingness to stay is what we call intimacy, and it is the hardest-won, most precious mutual gift two people could exchange.

In the final year of his life, six years after he radicalized the psychology of relationships with his now-iconic book Games People Play, Eric Berne (May 10, 1910–July 15, 1970) took up the intricacies of intimacy by building on his central model of the three ego states that live in each of us: the Child (the most natural, vulnerable, and spontaneous part of our personality, keeper of our creative vitality and our most unalloyed capacity for pleasure); the Parent (the part of us that unconsciously mimics the psychological responses of our parents as we observed them in childhood); and the Adult (the competent and self-possessed part of us capable of making sound decisions in our best interest).

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up by John Miller.

In Games People Play, Berne had codified the basis of all human miscommunication and mutual wounding in the crossed communication channels between these three different ego-states as they converse with one another within and between persons. In Sex in Human Loving (public library), he considers the particular interference that garbles the flow of intimacy and the particular solution to it. He writes:

The human race has had so much time on its hands, and is so afraid of open intimacy, that it has devised many ways of using its organs for hidden purposes and for frivolous or false relationships.

[…]

Intimacy is a candid Child-to-Child relationship with no games and no mutual exploitation. It is set up by the Adult ego states of the parties concerned, so that they understand very well their contracts and commitments with each other, sometimes without a word being spoken about such matters. As this understanding becomes clearer, the Adult gradually retires from the scene, and if the Parent does not interfere, the Child becomes more and more relaxed and freer and freer. The actual intimate transactions take place between the two Child ego states. The Adult, however, still remains in the background as an overseer to assure that the commitments and limitations are kept. The Adult also has the task of keeping the Parent from barging in and spoiling the situation. In fact the capacity for intimacy depends upon the ability of the Adult and the Child to keep the Parent at bay if necessary; but it is even better if the Parent benevolently gives permission or, best of all, encouragement, for the relationship to proceed. Parental encouragement helps the Child lose his fear of intimacy, and assures that he will not be restrained by a burden or threat of guilt.

Art by Shel Silverstein from his allegory of the secret to true intimacy, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.

Berne notes that anyone who has embarked on an intimate relationship would recognize the mental voices of the three ego states — the exuberant Child, impatient to dive headfirst into the shimmering waters of the new relationship; the Parent wagging a finger at some supposed red flag or “making some approving comment… at which the Child nods eagerly,” and the Adult coolly evaluating the situation until a pronouncement can me made that this potential partner seems to be “the one.”

Real intimacy, Berne argues, requires that the Child be set free from both the inner Parent and the Adult, for they have corrupted true seeing with notions of knowing: naming things, classifying things, conceptualizing things — the interpretive filters we superimpose over raw experience as we grow up.

In Berne’s model — although he doesn’t use those terms, for ancient Eastern philosophy was yet to permeate mainstream Western culture — the Child is the most nondualistic part of us: the part that inhabits that primeval space before the world has been divided into subject and object, when all is unfiltered experience, spontaneous and pure.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Kenny’s Window — his little-known philosophical first children’s book.

In consonance with Wild Things creator Maurice Sendak’s insistence that a full life is a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” Berne writes:

Most human beings never really see another person after they are five years old. In an intimate relationship, each party returns to the original naïve Child ego state, where he is free of such Parental prohibitions and Adult requirements, and can see, hear, and taste in its purest form what the world has to offer. This freedom of the Child is the essential part of intimacy, and it turns the whole universe, including the sun, moon, and stars, into a golden apple for both parties to enjoy.

[…]

Once the Child is free of Adult caution and Parental criticism, he has a sense of elation and awareness. He begins to see and hear and feel the way he really wants to, the way he originally did before he was corrupted by his living parents. In this autonomous state, he no longer has to name things, as is usually required by his Adult, nor account for his behavior, as demanded by his Parent. He is free to respond directly and spontaneously to what he sees and hears and feels. Because the two parties trust one another, they freely open up their secret worlds of perception, experience, and behavior to each other, asking nothing in return except the delight of opening the gates without fear.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

A childlike playfulness with language — that supreme castle of concepts — is one way Berne countered the Adult and the Parent. He enjoyed twisting common words deemed obscene, folding them unto themselves by spelling them backward and sideways. Cuff was his preferred phonetic origami of fuck — a superior form of the word, he thought, as a sensory emblem of both our somatic experience and our experiential ideologies:

A respect for the power of obscenity is not a quaint relic of an antique way of thinking. Rather it is one aspect of a way of life in which the most important quality is grace. Grace means graceful movements, and graceful moments of solitude or communion. This quality is well understood by dancers, rhetoricians, and students of Zen and other Oriental philosophies. It means speaking gracefully and making each hour a work of art.

[…]

Cuff is the only word in the English language that gives the full feeling, excitement, slipperiness, and aroma of the sexual act. Its lascivious “f” sound also helps to give it a realistic punch. [Other synonyms] carefully avoid the idea of excitement and lust, and even more carefully avoid one of the most primitive and powerful elements in sex, which is smell. Cuff takes in all of these, just as a child does, because it starts off as a child’s word.

Intimacy, Berne argues in the central premise of his model, can only be achieved by allowing untrammeled spontaneity — a function of the inner Child that must remain alive and beloved in each of us as we move through adulthood, if life is to have a fulness of being. In a lovely passage that reads like a poetic children’s book for grownups, he considers what real intimacy means:

A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity. Each person lives alone in inner space, and intimacy is out there. Intimacy is outer space, and if that’s where you are, you don’t say “Cuff you!” to a star.

Art from Before I Grew Up

Complement with Shel Silverstein’s illustrated allegory of the key to true intimacy, then revisit Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss.

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.)