The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on Reaping the “Moments of Being” That Make You Who You Are

By Maria Popova

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of my favorite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his classic on anxiety that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity… the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.”

Given that nearly every cell in your body has changed since the time you were a child, given that nearly all of your values, desires, and social ties are now different, given that you are, biologically and psychologically, a different person from one moment to the next, what makes you and the child you were the same person — what makes a self — is nothing more than the thread of selective memory and internal narrative stringing together the most meaningful beads of experience into the rosary of meaning that is your personhood.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) called these beads “moments of being” — the “scaffolding in the background” of life, “invisible and silent” yet shaping the foreground of experience: our relationship to other people, our response to events, the things we make with our hands and our minds in our daily living. The most intensely felt of these moments, she believed, “have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence”; we don’t call them to memory — they call us into being. They are the antipode of what she called “non-being” — the lull of habit and mindless routine that drags us through our days in a state of near-living.

In Moments of Being (public library) — the posthumous collection of her autobiographical writings — she writes:

A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.

In her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway — part love letter to these moments of being, part lamentation about the proportion of non-being we choose without knowing we are choosing — she locates the key to righting the ratio in “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” Placing one of the characters in one such vivid moment of being — “coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand” — she writes him thinking:

Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

This question of life’s fullness — what fills it, what syphons it, how to live when it overflows beyond what we can hold — animates Woolf’s entire body of work. In the spring of 1928, while working on her trailblazing novel Orlando (“which is wretched,” she told her sister Vanessa in a letter, then wrote the relationship between creativity and self-doubt into the novel itself) — she reflected in her diary:

A bitter windy rainy day… Life is either too empty or too full. Happily, I never cease to transmit these curious damaging shocks. At 46 I am not callous; suffer considerably; make good resolutions — still feel as experimental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever… And I find myself again in the driving whirlwind of writing against time. Have I ever written with it?

In a sense, to live in the moment is always to live against time. Woolf captured his with uncommon splendor in another autobiographical fragment:

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it is pressed so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of house moving — causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters.

Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River.

As Woolf was thinking these beautiful thoughts and writing these beautiful sentences, she was enduring regular visitations the acute depression that would eventually lead her to fill her coat-pockets with stones and wade into the river, never to return. She had come to the brink once before, in her twenties. That she lived to fifty-nine despite such suffering, that she wrote the flashes of eternity she did, is an astonishing achievement of the spirit — a testament to her own power “of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”

It is through her protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway that Woolf best captures these luminous building blocks of personhood:

Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there — the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.

These moments, Woolf knew and devoted her life to having us know, are our best listening device for hearing the soul beneath the self — the soul that is little more than the quality of attention we pay to being alive.

It was one such almost painfully acute moment of being while walking through her garden that lifted what Woolf called “the cotton wool of daily life” and sparked her epiphany about why she became a writer — a lens on a larger truth about what it means to be an artist, a person of creative fire in the river of time — prompting her to exult in the revelation:

I reach… the idea… that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

BP

How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love

By Maria Popova

How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love

“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

It is a beautiful sentiment, beautiful and incomplete. Art is but one way of contacting that deeper reality. Science is another, with its revelations of truths so beyond sight that they seem inconceivable, from the billions of neutrinos passing through your body this very second to the hummingbird’s flight to the quantum bewilderment of the subatomic world.

But more than art, more than science, we have invented one implement to cut through the curtain of habit and render the world new. Love alone blues the sky and greens the grass and brightens all the light we see. It is the last irreducible reality, whose mystery no painting or poem can fully capture and no fMRI can fully explain.

In 1965, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) moved from Los Angeles, where he had just finished a graduate program at UCLA, to New York, where he was offered a post at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He found the city a place of “fantastic creative furor,” but his painful introversion and sense of difference left him feeling friendless.

Oliver Sacks as a UCLA graduate student, 1964. (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks Foundation.)

That summer, just before beginning his new job, he traveled home to London. While in Europe, he met Jenö Vincze — a charismatic Hungarian theater director living in Berlin. Oliver had been planning to go to a neurology conference in Vienna. Instead, he found himself in Paris, in Amsterdam, in love with Jenö. Here was a rigorous and original scientist, who would devote his life to illuminating the neurological underpinnings of our strangest mental states, suddenly subsumed in the strangest and most mysterious of them all. He would later look back on this time as one of “an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.”

When he reluctantly returned to New York, Oliver set about trying to bridge the abyss of physical absence by rendering his world alive in words, composing some of the greatest love letters I have read. In one of the treasures collected in his posthumously published Letters (public library), he writes:

My dearest Jenö:

I have clutched your letter in my pocket all day, and now I have time to write to you. It is seven o’clock, the ending of a perfect day. The sun is mauve and crimson on the New York skyline. Reflected from the cubes and prisms of an Aztec city. Black clouds, like wolves, are racing through the sky. A jet is climbing on a long white tail. Howling wind. I love its howling, I want to howl for joy myself. The trees are thrashing to and fro. An old man runs after his hat. Darker now. The sun has set, City. A black diagram on the sombre skyline. And soon there’ll be a billion lights.

He isn’t, of course, describing the city as it is but as he is. This, in the end, may be what love is — the billion lights inside that make the whole world luminous, an inner sun to render every dull surface and every dark space radiant:

I don’t feel the distance either, only the nearness. We’re together all the while. I feel your breath on the side of my neck… My blood is champagne. I fizz with happiness. I smile like a lighthouse in all directions. Everyone catches and reflects my smile.

[…]

I want to share my joys with you. To see the green crab scuttling for the shadow, translucent egg cases hung from seaweed. A little octopus, just hatched, jetting for joy in the salty water. Sea anemones. The soft sweet pressure if you touch their center. The chalky hands of barnacles. And polychaetes in their splendid liveries (they remind me of Versailles), moving with insensate grace. And dive with me under the ocean, Jenö. Through fish, like birds, which accept your presence. And scarlet sponges in a hidden cave. And the freedom, the complete and utter freedom of motion, second only to that of space itself.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.

Oliver yearned to transport Jenö not only to the world he walked through but to the world within, the world he would always best access and best channel in writing. “The act of writing,” he would reflect a lifetime later, “is a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.” Now, he tells his beloved:

I read Psalms in profanity, for the joy they contain, and the trust and the love, and the pure morning language… I write so much. I want to catch everything and share it with you. You will be deprived of all your social life, your sleep, your food, condemned to read interminable letters. Poor Jenö, committed to a lover who’s never silent, who talks all day, and talks all night, and talks in company, and talks to himself. Words are the medium into which I must translate reality. I live in words, in images, metaphors, syllables, rhymes. I can’t help it.

Again and again, he keeps returning to this new quality of light suddenly revealed by love:

The weather has been of supernal beauty. The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love… I never saw that golden light before we met in Paris.

Perhaps it was this brush with the irreducible immensity of love that would later lead Oliver to write so presciently about the limits of artificial intelligence and so poignantly about the meaning of our human lives.

Two days later, he writes again:

I love you insanely, yet it is the sweetest sanity I have ever known. I read and reread your wonderful letter. I feel it in my pocket through ten layers of clothing. Its trust, its warmth, exceed anything I have ever known… I believe we are both infinite, Jenö. I see the future as an endless expansion of the present, not the remorseless tearing-off of calendar leaves.

Like all people in love, Oliver was envisioning a life with Jenö, not once imagining that they would never see each other again, that he would spend the next thirty-five years celibate and afraid of love, afraid of himself in love.

But love would find him in the end — a beautiful and bright love that would hold him through dying with dignity.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
BP

The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison

By Maria Popova

The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”

The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, brutal and inevitable, we come to realize that no prayer or protest will bend reality to our will, that we are being bent to it instead and we have two options only: bow or break. Suffering, surrender, transformation — this may be the simplest formulation of the life process. It is the evolutionary mechanism of adaptation by which every creature on Earth became what it is. It is existential mechanism by which we become who we are. In a universe where free will may well be an illusion, what we make of our suffering may be the measure and meaning of our freedom. “Everything can be taken from a man,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his epochal memoir of surviving the unsurvivable, “but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Just before dawn on May 29, 1979, the Czechoslovakian State Security Police barged into the home of the playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011), dragged him out of bed, and threw him in a municipal jail along with ten other members of the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted — a human rights movement formed to bring to light cases of people harassed and imprisoned for speaking up against the dictatorship.

Havel was not surprised. A decade earlier, he had discovered a listening device in the ceiling of his Prague apartment. He had been trailed by the secret police ever since. He had watched his books removed from schools and public libraries, his plays banned from the stage.

“It’s Tuesday evening and I’ve just returned from court a sentenced man,” he wrote to his wife Olga when he was found guilty on charges of “subversion” a month after his forty-third birthday. “I’m taking my sentence, as they say, philosophically.” The philosophy he drew from the experience would lead him to write the finest thing I have ever read about the meaning of hope.

Václav Havel

Havel was sent to a prison ruled by a sadistic admirer of Hitler who in his heyday had presided over a Stalinist prison camp. Now, all the more embittered by the knowledge that he was nearing the end of his career, the warden spent his days tormenting his captives in body and in mind. The prisoners, whose days were filled with hard labor, were allowed to write to just one person, a single four-page letter a week. Havel chose Olga — “a working-class girl, very much her own person, sober, unsentimental,” who had always been the first reader of all his work and his “main authority when it comes to judging it.” Looking back on his life, he would recall: “I needed an energetic woman beside me to turn to for advice and yet still be someone I could be in awe of.”

The letters had to be legible, with nothing corrected or crossed out. Quotation marks, foreign expressions, underlining, and humor were forbidden. Those deemed to contain too many “thoughts” were confiscated. Once, Havel was thrown into solitary confinement after it was discovered that he had been writing on behalf of an illiterate Roma man, just as Whitman had done for illiterate Civil War soldiers an epoch ago and a world away.

Still, as if to remind us that constraint is a catalyst of creativity, Havel managed to contraband a wealth of “thoughts” in these spare dispatches to his wife. They survive as Letters to Olga (public library) — the extraordinary record of the philosophy he drew from his plight, out of which arises a lucid and luminous field guide to suffering as an instrument of self-refinement, an ode to the refusal of having one’s spirit broken by any depredation of the body or the mind, and a stubborn insistence on kindness as the only lifeline amid cruelty.

Black-throated waxwing divination from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days, available as a print and as stationery cards.

Days after his sentence, with an eye to the five years ahead — an unimaginable time horizon of freedom — Havel outlines his spiritual strategy for survival:

I find myself in a radically new existential situation, and the first thing I have to do is learn to live with it, which means finding a completely new structure of values and a new perspective on everything — other hopes, other aims, other interests, other joys. I have to create a new concept of time for myself and ultimately a new concept of life.

But, in consonance with the visionary Elizabeth Peabody’s admonition that the greatest danger to the gifted is middle age, “when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth,” Havel realizes that this new concept is in fact a return to a prior purity occluded by the self we ossify into when we begin believing our own myth, which may be the greatest danger to the artist. (The recovery of that deeper purity is what Hermann Hesse meant when he contemplated discovering the soul beneath the self.) Suddenly horrified by the way we have of caving in on ourselves by becoming our own favorite subject, Havel tells Olga:

Learning to live with this new situation and one of the tasks I’ve set myself during this long stay in prison will be a kind of “self-consolidation.” When I began to write plays, I wasn’t as inwardly burdened as I have been in recent years; I had… far more equanimity; I saw most things in proportion; I had a balanced outlook and a sense of humor, without a trace of uptightness, hysteria, bitterness. The positions I took were not absolute; I wasn’t constantly brooding over myself, absorbed in my own feelings, etc. — and at the same time I possessed a kind of harmonious inner certitude. Obsessive critical introspection is the other side of “pigheadedness.”

With an eye to the fault lines that often become frontiers of growth, he adds:

Jail, of all places, may seem to you a strange instrument of this self-reconstitution, but I truly feel that when I’m cut off from all my former commitments for so long, I might somehow achieve inner freedom and a new mastery over myself. I don’t intend to revise my view of the world, of course, but rather to find a better way of fulfilling the demands that the world — as I see it — places on me. I don’t want to change myself, but to be myself in a better way… It also seems to me that the only way for someone like me to survive here is to breathe his own meaning into the experience.

Prison calibrated his metric for what constitutes a good or bad day. A hot bath, a healthy meal, and “a marvelous session of yoga” left him gladdened to the bone. Of the bad days he could say little — no record survives of the abuses he endured — other than reporting on the “sheer agony” of his hemorrhoids. (“It’s worse here than it would be outside… You’re alone with your pain and you have to go through with it.”) He decided that, “theoretically,” nothing could stop him from writing a new play while in prison. (He did.) He decided that, practically, he could use the time to improve his English and learn German. In one of his provision lists to Olga, in between a hard case for his glasses, a pocket calendar, warm socks, and “a lot of vitamins,” he requested the German-Czech dictionary from their home and a language textbook. And then he itemized his resolutions for serving his sentence:

  1. to remain at least as healthy as I am now (and perhaps cure my hemorrhoids);
  2. generally reconstitute myself psychologically;
  3. write at least two play;
  4. improve my English;
  5. learn German at least as well as I know English;
  6. study the entire Bible thoroughly.

Three years into his imprisonment, the state police visited Havel and told him he could be home within the week if only he would write a single sentence renouncing his views and asking for pardon. Unlike Galileo, he refused. Four months later, Havel fell ill with a fever so high that he feared he would not live. So did the wardens, who threw him in the back of a police van and drove him fifty miles to a prison hospital in Prague as he shivered with the delirium of death handcuffed in his pajamas.

When he slowly returned to the land of the living, Havel gambled that the hospital censors might be less severe than the prison’s and composed the first detailed letter to Olga describing his struggle. It made it. An epoch before social media, she immediately reached out to his friends aboard. Petitions on his behalf began pouring in from all over the world through this borderless network of solidarity.

One evening after he was sent back to prison, as he was about to go to sleep, several guards suddenly barged into his cell, along with a doctor and “a woman official of some kind.” They informed Havel that his sentence was terminated. He was so astonished that, in a literal embodiment of Dorris Lessing’s metaphor of the prisons we choose to live inside, he asked to spend one more night in his cell. They refused — he was now a civilian. He was taken out in his pajamas.

Art by Isol from Daytime Visions

When Havel reentered the real world, he devoted himself to eradicating the tyrannical impulse that makes dictatorships and their systemic attack on the dignity of human beings possible. Six years after his release from prison, he was unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly. The following year, when the country held its first free election in nearly half a century, the was re-elected by the people. As tensions between Czechs and Slovaks rose in the 1990s, he governed a divided nation by the personal credo he had articulated in one of his prison letters to Olga — a sentiment as true of physical imprisonment as of the prisons of the mind we enter whenever we succumb to divisive ideologies or take a victim stance toward our suffering:

I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them. I have different opinions of different people, but I cannot say that I hate anyone in the world. I have no intention of changing in that regard. If I did, it would mean I had lost.

BP

An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them

By Maria Popova

An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them

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

BP

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