Every great book, whatever its subject or genre or style, is about one thing only: the eternal question of what gives meaning to our tiny, transient lives. And every answer given, however faintly whispered, points to one thing only: the quality of attention we pay to those lives.

If attention is the lever of love, the particular — the sacred specificity of something small and singular, something easy to overlook — is its fulcrum. “Love quells fear,” Octavia Butler wrote in contemplating creativity, “and a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.” Our highly clinical culture, with its tendency to pathologize the tendrils of personality that make us who we are, regards obsession as unambiguously negative — something that kidnaps us from the actuality of life. And yet all the creative energy that has given us our greatest works of art and most revolutionary breakthroughs in science has sprung from such a “powerful positive obsession.”

Susan Orlean takes up this question in her 1994 classic The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (public library). One answer to what we long for in our existential longing, she posits, may be “to know what it feels like to care about something passionately” — to have an obsession, something very particular to which you pay rigorous and rapturous attention.

When she asks her protagonist what it is about orchids he finds so irresistible, how it is they are the animating passion of his life, he shrugs:

Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose… I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody’s always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.

Often, it is not we who find that unusual something but it that finds us, jolts us awake from the stupor of near-living. Considering her own obsession with telling the story of the orchid thief, which had begun with a random article she read in a newspaper on a random day and ended up consuming years of her life, she observes how these obsessions take hold of us:

[It begins with] some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can’t believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water.

As Susan finds herself traveling through the vastness of Florida in the footsteps of the orchid thief, she comes to see these obsessions as our most powerful antidote to the hollow feeling of meaninglessness that visits upon every life — against the overwhelming bigness of life, we have the saving grace of smallness:

The land was marble-smooth and it rolled without a pucker to the horizon. My eyes grazed across the green band of ground and the blue bowl of sky and then lingered on a dead tire, a bird in flight, an old fence, a rusted barrel. Hardly any cars came toward me, and I saw no one in the rearview mirror the entire time. I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.

Nothing counterbalances our helpless givens and shapes our lives more powerfully than our relationship to possibility. To be overwhelmed is to be paralyzed by possibility. To be obsessed it to be catalyzed by it. Whatever the obsession is one of collecting or creating, whatever form it takes — orchids or oboe, birds or baking, writing or trapeze — it is a way of centering into our only task here: to fill our allotted days with maximum aliveness.