Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation — a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another.
And yet, in steps too unconscious and incremental even for me to perceive, I became a writer and not a mathematician. Words, in the end, are where we live and how we build the world inside the universe. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in one of the finest things I have ever read. Words are all we have to translate one consciousness to another. They are how we render ourselves real to each other — we need them to convey what the touch of life feels like on the skin of the particular psyche and the particular nervous system we have each drawn from the cosmic lottery: You will never know what blue looks like to me and I what a fever feels like to you. They are how we render reality for ourselves — it is in words that we narrate the events of our lives inside the lonely bone cave of the mind in order to make sense of what is happening and inscribe it into the ledger of memory, on the pages of which the story of the self emerges.
This fundamental subjectivity of experience makes every word we write and utter a bottle of pressurized ambiguity effervescent with myriad meanings, tossed into the ocean of experience in the touching hope that it will convey a clear message about what we see and what we feel. The great miracle is that we understand each other at all.
Artist Julie Paschkis (who illustrated those wonderful picture-book biographies of Pablo Neruda and Maria Merian) conjures up the magic of words and their blessed bewilderment of meaning in The Wordy Book (public library), each page of which opens up a question — simple yet profound, quietly poetic — and leaves you to wander into your own answer inside a painting alive with words.
There is an Alice in Wonderland quality to the book: The questions play with the limits of logic (What tells me more, an IF or an OR?) and with the existential restlessness of childhood (When does there become here? When does then become now?); they invite the fundamental curiosity at the heart of compassion (Do you see what I see?) and emanate a radiant love of life (What is the sum of a summer day?) consonant with the vitality of Paschkis’s paintings — this parallel language of shape and color just as rich and eloquent as the language of words, as playful and abstract as the language of mathematics.
Complement The Wordy Book with The Lost Words — writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris’s courageous rewilding of children’s imagination through nature words discarded from the modern dictionary as irrelevant — and The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — John Koenig’s splendid invented words for real things we feel but cannot name — then revisit the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice, narrating her lyrical love letter to the art of words, and Mary Shelley on their world-revising power.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.”
White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on a tenderness for life with books like Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web — wasted no time polishing the absurd proposition into a lens on the deepest problem facing our civilization.
In one of his wartime editorials for The New Yorker, later collected in the hauntingly timely out-of-print gem The Wild Flag (public library), he writes:
The Pacific Ocean, said Clarence Budington Kelland firmly, must become an American lake. He didn’t make it clear why it should become an American lake rather than, say, a Chinese lake or a Russian lake. The Chinese were seaside dwellers along the Pacific many thousands of years before the Americans, and presumably even now like to gaze upon its blue and sometimes tranquil waters. This may seem annoying to a party leader, who is apt to find it difficult to believe that there can be anybody of any importance on the far end of a lake. Yet the Pacific and its subsidiary seas are presumably real and agreeable to the people who live on them. The Sea of Okhotsk is five times the size of Mr. Kelland’s state of Arizona, the Sea of Japan is longer than the longest serial he ever wrote, the Yellow Sea is as big as the Paramount Building and bigger, and the South China Sea runs on endlessly into the sunset beyond Borneo. Are these the coves in an American lake — little bays where we can go to catch our pickerel among the weeds?
E.B. White at work
What made Kelland’s postwar plan so preposterous is also what made it so dangerous — it lived by the same metastatic nationalism that had hurled the world into war in the first place. Against this malady humanity’s narrowly evaded self-destruction was evidently only a temporary vaccine that has since worn out: Here we are again, gulfing toward an abyss from which there may be no return.
E.B. White devoted his life to diagnosing the malady in the hope that future generations — that’s us — may arrive at a cure before another metastasis, this one deadly.
Art by Garth Williams from Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, 1952.
A generation before Gary Snyder considered what it would take to unbreak the world, urging us to place “community networks” at the center of how we govern ourselves and work “toward the true community of all beings,” White writes:
The answer to war is no war. And the likeliest means of removing war from the routine of national life is to elevate the community’s authority to a level which is above national level.
When I took the Oath of Allegiance at my naturalization ceremony twenty years after emigrating to America as a lone teenager from a poor post-communist country — an oath natural-born citizens never have to swear — I was taken aback by its demand to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required to do so.
The flag rose and I, standing between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, repeated the words, received my certificate in a daze, and left with an uneasy feeling.
Out in the sterile municipal parking lot, watching a yellow leaf flutter at the tip of an aspen branch, I wondered what the world would look like if this were the flag we all swore allegiance to — this bright burst of life holding onto itself.
The Wild Flag
E.B. White — who never lost faith in humanity, even as he lived through two world wars and the nuclear terror of the Cold War — wondered the same, observing in another 1943 editorial:
The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet.
And in another:
A nation asks of its citizens everything — their fealty, their money, their faith, their time, their lives. It is fair to ask whether the nation, in return, does indeed any longer serve the best interests of the human beings who give so lavishly of their affections and their blood.
[…]
Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part. This choice is implicit in the world to come. We have a little time in which we can make the choice intelligently. Failing that, the choice will be made for us in the confusion of war, from which the world will emerge unified — the unity of total desolation.
Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace
He envisioned a new organizing principle for the world, different from nationalistic government — one that would “impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom — although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.” Imagine if we all viewed our participation in humanity the way astronauts do, how naturally then we would unfist our nationalisms into an outstretched hand. White imagined it, with all the salutary disorientation it would entail:
A world made one, by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would deprive him of the enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he has never seen.
There is, White wrote, already a microcosm of that possibility:
The City of New York is a world government on a small scale. There, truly, is the world in a nutshell, its citizens meeting in the subway and ballpark, sunning on the benches in the square. They shove each other, but seldom too hard. They annoy each other, but rarely to the point of real trouble.
New Yorkistan by Maira Kalman. (The New Yorker, December 2001.)
This little aside in the middle of a New Yorker editorial would become the seed for White’s timeless love letter to the city, penned just a few years after the end of the war. In it, he would write:
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines… [a] poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.
What if we governed human life not by politics but by poetry?
“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” James Baldwin would insist a generation after White — James Baldwin, who also insisted that “the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”
What if the choice White saw a century ago is yet to be made, can be made, fall on us to make? We can choose, we can, to make of this dying planet a living poem.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we’ve got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms to the atomic bomb.
I know no mightier or more mellifluous voice of resistance to this dangerous belief than the poet, anthropologist, and ecological steward Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), who would surely resist being called a philosopher, but who for nearly a century has been teaching us with his writing and his living how to live and how to die — and what else is philosophy?
Born into a family that survived by subsistence farming after the Great Depression hurled them into poverty, Snyder was seven when an accident left him bedridden for months. He spent them devouring book after book from the public library, so that by the time he was back on his feet, he had read more than a college freshman. Reading, of course, teaches us that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives — it complicates our story of what it means to be alive, it opens our eyes and our hearts to how other people and peoples in other times and other places have lived, how their ways of being might deepen and broaden and elevate our own.
By the time he was a young man, Snyder was determined to bend his gaze beyond his era’s horizon of possibility.
He took a job as a seaman to better understand other cultures and enrolled in a graduate program for Asian languages at Berkeley.
He worked as a vagabond laborer up and down the West Coast, a trail-builder in Yosemite, a crewman in the engine room of an oil tanker, a fire lookout in the North Cascades, and a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
He roomed for a while with Jack Kerouac, studied for a while with Alan Watts, and climbed Glacier Peak with Allen Ginsberg at the belay.
He discovered Zen through D.T. Suzuki and learned ink and watercolor painting from Chiura Obata.
He spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities after boarding a marine freighter to study Zen Buddhism in Japan.
And all the while, he wrote poetry, thought deeply about the nature of the mind and the substance of the spirit, and paid tender attention to the living world, to the relational nature of being, to the meaning and making of freedom.
Snyder’s increasingly urgent and clarifying vision for remaking the world by rewriting our stories of the possible comes alive in Earth House Hold (public library) — the 1969 collection of his journal entries and poem fragments.
Long before Doris Lessing urged us to examine the prisons we choose to live inside, Snyder makes a piercing parenthetical observation in a diary entry penned after “two days contemplating ecology, food-chains and sex”:
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
He considers the cages of our cultural ideologies:
There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities… The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.
The most merciless danger of our present world order is that we have turned these “violent and frustrated personalities” into leaders, largely because the power structures of secular life, which we call politics, are modeled on the power structures of large organized religions. But there are other organizing principles to be drawn from other, older spiritual traditions that may better address the problem of being alive in this time and place, of managing the superorganism we have become and the inner life of the spirit in each of us cells. In Distant Neighbors (public library) — the absolutely wonderful record of his epistolary friendship with Wendell Berry — Snyder (whose poetically titled graduate thesis “He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village” explored the wisdom of indigenous traditions) reflects:
Whereas “world religions” tend to have great charismatic human leader-founders, the natural religions, the old ways, take their teachings direct from the human mind, the collective unconscious, the ground of being. Rather than theology, they have mythology and visionary practice… The two levels, of course, are (1) acting as social glue and intensifying the bonds of the culture and the coherence of it; the other is liberating and transcendent, of freeing one from the bonds of ego and conditioning. It’s fascinating to see the dialectic of these two roles as they work out in different times and places. Some traditions within great traditions tend toward total mysticism, others ground themselves entirely in secular affairs. All religions are one at the point where life is given to the spirit, and real breakthrough is achieved. I doubt that any of the world religions ever have or could achieve a fusion of the two levels; I like to believe that some ancient religions — Old Ways — did achieve it: like perhaps the Hopi. The thing is, “world religions” are always a bad deal: they are evoked by the contradictions and problems of civilization, and they make compromises from the beginning to be allowed to live. The Great Fact of the last 8,000 years is civilization; the power of which has been and remains greater than the power of any religion within that time span.
Some mystics, Snyder observes, have always found ways to “crack through dogma” — he names Meister Eckhart among them, and I would add Hildegard of Bingen and Simone Weil — but he laments that Christianity, the dominant religion of the capitalist West, has become more and more of “a centralist teaching.” In most Eastern spiritual traditions, on the other hand, “the center of being is everywhere.” He writes:
Zen, as the arm of Buddhism most given to the life of the spirit, really doesn’t care about theology or dogma; it takes people where the spirit leads, and has a complete authenticity of its own, one must adjust this authenticity to whatever received teachings one started from on one’s own.
Nobody else can do it for you; the Buddha is only the teacher.
Drawing on his life in Zen, he considers what he made for himself of the ancient teachings:
Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions… Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of “all beings.” This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior — defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West. It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one’s own responsibility, but willing to work with a group.
[…]
The traditional cultures are in any case doomed… The coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.
The story the “Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West” has sold us is that self-interest is the only path to growth — there goes Silicon Valley lining up with the fault line that is Donald Trump — and that parasitism the only way of securing resources for oneself. Snyder’s vision for this coming revolution of consciousness is not against growth but for symbiosis rather than parasitism, for interdependence rather than selfing, as the path to growth. In Turtle Island (public library) — his 1974 book of poems and essays, titled after the Native American term for North America — he reflects:
The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature… If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth — of the highest and most fascinating order — it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation.
In The Real Work (public library) — the collection of interviews and talks he gave in the 1960s and 1970s — he elaborates on this idea, considering what those alternative paths to growth look like and what they ask of us. Just as Rachel Carson was signing her untimely farewell to the world with her haunting instruction for how to save it, he writes:
The danger and hope politically is that Western civilization has reached the end of its ecological rope. Right now there is the potential for the growth of a real people’s consciousness.
[…]
All of industrial/technological civilization is really on the wrong track, because its drive and energy are purely mechanical and self-serving — real values are someplace else. The real values are within nature, family, mind, and into liberation… And how do we make the choices in our national economic policy that take into account that kind of cost accounting — that ask, “What is the natural-spiritual price we pay for this particular piece of affluence, comfort, pleasure, or labor saving?”
[…]
The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that… Nobody can move from [one] to [the other] in a vacuum as a solitary individual…. What have to be built are community networks… When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.
A decade later, Snyder would distill the essence of this orientation in a talk he delivered to an audience of college students:
What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.
And while it is true that no one else can walk the path and do the real work for us, it is also true that we can be helped and guided, that we especially need the help and guidance in such times of helplessness and disorientation. Snyder writes:
True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization… We need them.
If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: “Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him,” he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as “a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”
Most of our heartbreak, most of our aching sense of failure at love, comes from the idea, central to our dominant cultural mythology, that this truth, this recognition, is a static reward to be attained — through effort, through bargaining, through self-negation — rather than the dynamic process it is, an end-point state of soul-merging rather than an infinite vector of growing understanding, of deepening mutual compassion, of simultaneous self-possession and unselfing.
D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) mounts a passionate defense of the process over the product in his autobiographically tinted 1922 novel Aaron’s Rod (free ebook | public library), animated by the perennial question and perennial confusion of what love actually is, what it looks like between people and how it lives within a person.
D.H. Lawrence
Unwilling to risk love’s danger of self-abandon yet unable to accept loneliness as a state of fulfillment, the protagonist attributes the irreconcilable tension to a broken cultural model of love as “a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul.” He reckons with the necessary recalibration:
We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self- possession… Only that. Which isn’t exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge.
[…]
Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease.
Given this process demands everything of us, given it asks us to risk everything, perhaps it is just easier to spare ourselves the pain of longing and the anxiety of loss by not undertaking it at all. He considers this, seduced by the fantasy of a life free from longing and therefore immune to disappointment, and tries to find affirmation for it in nature, whose living metaphors are always the clearest mirror for the soul:
The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her own way. But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try to weave ourselves a life. The lily is life-rooted, life-central. She cannot worry. She is life itself, a little, delicate fountain playing creatively, for as long or as short a time as may be, and unable to be anxious… Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfillment.
And yet, he realizes, this way of being is a negation of something elemental. It gives the illusion of “life-rootedness,” but denies the soul its necessary flight. He considers another way of being, one truer to the nature of love and the nature of the soul — being “happily alone in all the wonders of communion, swept up on the winds, but never swept away from one’s very self.”
Drawing on “The Dalliance of the Eagles” — exulting in the birds’ “rushing amorous contact high in space together,” their way of attaining “a motionless still balance in the air, then parting” — Lawrence reflects on the balance between communion and self-possession that it models:
Two a eagles in mid-air, maybe… Two eagles in mid-air, grappling, whirling, coming to their intensification of love-oneness there in mid-air. In mid-air the love consummation. But all the time each lifted on its own wings: each bearing itself up on its own wings at every moment of the mid-air love consummation. That is the splendid love-way.
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