“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most sobering opening pages in literature. So here you are, having answered affirmatively, consciously or not, now facing the second fundamental question that ripples out of the first: How shall you live?

Perhaps the sharpest, most recurrent shock of being alive is the realization that no one can give you a ready-made answer — not your parents or your teachers, not scripture or Stoicism, not psychotherapy or psilocybin, not the old dharma teacher or the new pope. Only life itself. Only what Seamus Heaney called “your own secret knowledge,” which you may spend your life learning, but which is always whispering to you if you get still enough and quiet enough to discern its voice through the clangor of confusion and the din of shoulds.

In this sense, Nietzsche was right to caution that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.” In another, he was wrong in depicting life as a river you stand on the banks watching and waiting to cross without getting wet. No: You are the water. You are a molecule afloat among all the other molecules of everything else alive, the flow of life living itself through you, an answer complete unto itself.

This is why I’ll take, over all the world’s philosophy combined, Marie Howe’s spare and stunning poem “The Maples,” found in her New and Selected Poems (public library) — that benediction of a book that won her the Pulitzer Prize — read here by sapling-poet Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy:

THE MAPLES
by Marie Howe

I asked the stand of maples behind the house,
How should I live my life?

They said, shhh shhh shhh…

How should I live, I asked, and the leaves seemed to ripple and gleam.

A bird called from a branch in its own tongue,
And from a branch, across the yard, another bird answered.

A squirrel scrambled up a trunk
then along the length of a branch.

Stand still, I thought,
See how long you can bear that.

Try to stand still, if only for a few moments,
drinking light      breathing

Couple with two kindred answers to the same question in the same medium — Mary Oliver’s “I Go Down to the Shore” and Anna Belle Kaufmann’s “Cold Solace” — then revisit Marie’s timeless hymn to being human.