That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate corrective for our self-righteousness, the reason we invented language and science and art. If there weren’t such an abyss between us and all that is not us, we never would have tried to bridge it with our microscopes and telescopes and equations seeking to know the vaster realities of nature beyond us; with our poems and our paintings and our songs seeking to be known, to convey to another what it is like to be alive in this particular arrangement of sinew and spirit.
Not long after the philosopher Thomas Nagel fathomed the abyss between one creaturely consciousness and another with his classic paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and long before science revealed the strangest aspect of what it is like to be an owl, the Japanese artist and storyteller Keizaburō Tejima beckoned the human imagination to enter the world of humanity’s most beloved bird with his 1982 book Owl Lake (public library).
As “the sky darkens from gold to blue and a gentle stillness settles upon the land,” we see the owls awake into the gloaming “hungry after a day of sleep” and set out to hunt.
We see the great wings sweep the sky, the great eyes mirror the moonlight, casting yellow shadows over the still black water.
All night the mother and father owls take turns hunting to feed their baby, bringing silver fish to the nest.
As dawn cracks the day open like a hatching egg, we see the owl family recede into the landscape, merge with mountain and lake, and we are returned to the wider world, reminded that every creature in all its dazzling complexity is ultimately part of a greater whole — a whole simpler than its parts.
Nestled deep in the mountain there lies a lake that shimmers in the morning starlight.
As the stars fade away, the sky brightens from black to blue and a gentle awakening settles upon the land.
Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages.
How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No — to live a life of science is to live so wonder-smitten by reality, by the majesty and mystery of nature, that the willful destruction of any fragment of it becomes unconscionable. It is impossible to study the building blocks of life without reverence for life itself, impossible to devote one’s days to the enigma of a single element or elementary particle without venerating the inviolable cohesion of the universe. There is a kind of innocent exhilaration to this sense of wonder, and a quiet ethic. It may well be our greatest antidote to self-destruction.
This exuberance drove Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971) to regularly run the last few yards to her laboratory, to puzzle over differential equations throughout her pregnancies and take her calculations into the maternity ward.
The tenth child in a Quaker household without electricity, she was born in Ireland the year the Wright brothers built and flew humanity’s first successful flying machine heavier than air. Her home was still lit by gas when she first began studying science — in a school for boys, because no such subjects figured into the curriculum of the local girls’ school. By the time she was a teenager, living outside London, she watched gas-filled zeppelins rain bombs and death from the air. She watched them plummet in flames, shot down by British weapons. She watched her mother cry with the knowledge that piloting them were German boys not much older than Kathleen.
After attaining a higher score in physics than any London University student ever had, she joined the Cambridge laboratory of J. D. Bernal — the first scientist to apply X-ray crystallography to the molecules of life. He came to see how beneath her quiet, unassuming manner lay “such an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place.” Soon, she was pioneering uses of X-ray crystallography that would fuel the chemistry of the century to come: still in her twenties, Lonsdale illuminated the shape, dimensions, and atomic structure of the benzene ring that had mystified chemists since Michael Faraday discovered benzene a century earlier.
The first woman tenured at London’s most venerated research university and the first female president of both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Union of Crystallography, Lonsdale was also one of the twentieth century’s most lucid, impassioned, and indefatigable activists against our civilizational cult of war and the military industrial complex’s funding its planet-sized house of worship. By the time the next World War broke out, Lonsdale — by then one of the world’s preeminent scientists — was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to military conscription. She went on to become one of Europe’s most influential prison reformers, recognizing that the prison industrial complex is the price societies governed by the military industrial complex pay for the inequalities and injustices stemming from that foundational cult.
Lonsdale wrote Is Peace Possible? in 1957 as part of a Penguin series that invited some of the era’s most lucid and luminous minds to reckon with some of the era’s most urgent questions. It is perspectival and prophetic. “History teaches us that time can bring about reconciliations that seemed at another time impossible, but only when violence has ceased, whether by agreement or through exhaustion,” Lonsdale writes in the middle of the Cold War that never erupted into the nuclear holocaust it could have been, largely thanks to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament, in which she was involved and which reached agreements thought unimaginable. It is difficult today to imagine how real the doom felt to the children ducking under school desks, how improbable its aversion given the geopolitical forces at play — and yet here we are, survivors of an abated apocalypse, here to tell its story: the story of the triumph of the possible over the probable, the triumph of peace.
Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace
Bridging the spiritual ethos of her upbringing with the scientific worldview of her calling and training, Lonsdale challenges the misconception of pacifism as the simplistic idea that a perfect and peaceful world is merely a matter of individuals refusing to fight. “Truisms based on Utopias are poor arguments,” she observes, instead invoking the style of pacifism native to the Quaker tradition and its original formulation in 1660 as the refusal to partake of “all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatever.” Peace, she argues, is the product of the recognition “that war is spiritually degrading, that it is the wrong way to settle disputes between classes or nations, the wrong way to meet aggression or oppression, the wrong way to preserve national or personal ideals.” It is wrong not merely in a philosophical sense but in a practical sense, for we are far too interdependent to harm another without harming ourselves. To illustrate the interleaving of lives across the artificial pickets of national borders, she looks back on the 1947 cholera epidemic that quickly came to claim five hundred lives per day in Egypt but was also quickly curbed after twenty nations cooperated on a supply line for vaccines. In a sentiment of staggering timeliness in the wake of the twenty-first century’s deadliest pandemic, Lonsdale observes that “plagues are no respecters of sovereignty,” nor are the far-reaching economic, moral, spiritual, and radioactive consequences of war.
Ultimately, Lonsdale indicts the underlying reason for the existence of war lurking beneath all surface conflicts: Military alliances and international treaties only gauze the open wound of widespread inequality and injustice that colonialism and capitalism have inflicted on our world. “Real security can only be found, if at all, in a world without the injustices that now exist, and without arms,” she insists. At the heart of her slender masterwork of moral courage is a vision for how such a world might be possible:
There are two ways in which such changes might come. One is the way of the compulsion of experience, the whip and spur of historical inevitability, the coercion of facts. That is the hard and bitter way. The other is the way of foresight, of preparation, of imagination. It is also the way of moral compulsion. It may be no less hard but it is not bitter.
Lonsdale’s words abide, indict, incite:
Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.
When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels or songs) — a question fundamentally about what it means to be human.
I asked an elder poet friend why she thought chatGPT rang hollow where Whitman could compact infinities of feeling in a single image, could unseat the soul in a word.
She paused, then said: “Because AI hasn’t suffered.”
On the one hand, this echoes a dangerous myth: the archetype of the tortured genius handed down to us by the Romantics, who, cornered in their time and place, in a century of bloody revolutions, deadly epidemics, and punitive Puritanical norms, must have needed to believe that their suffering — those lives of poverty and privation, those ill-fated exercises in projection mistaken for love, all those premature deaths — was a fair price to pay for such creative volcanicity.
On the other hand, this is reality: Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without. It is these painful convolutions of the psyche — which used to be termed neurosis at the dawn of modern psychotherapy, and which we may simply call suffering — that reveal us to ourselves, and it is out of these revelations that we create anything capable of touching other lives, that contact we call art.
Our power and our freedom lie in learning to neither negate our suffering nor romanticize it but to harness its catalytic power as a current passing through us to jolt us alive, then passing on and down into the ground of being.
In 1943, a scholar of Kierkegaard asked Jung’s opinion of the relationship between “psychological problems” and creative genius. With an eye to Kierkegaard’s gift for letting his anxiety fuel rather than hinder his creativity, Jung declares him a “whole” person and not “a jangling hither and dither of displeasing fragmentary souls,” and writes:
True creative genius does not let itself be spoilt by analysis, but is freed from the impediments and distortions of a neurosis. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth — part of the general lunacy of our time.
It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. Nietzsche’s syphilitic infection undoubtedly exerted a strongly neuroticizing influence on his life. But one could imagine a sound Nietzsche possessed of creative power without hypertension — something like Goethe. He would have written much the same as he did, but less strident, less shrill — i.e., less German — more restrained, more responsible, more reasonable and reverent.
Neurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase — a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use.
Jung considers the advice he would have given Kierkegaard about how to orient to his suffering, which was the raw material of his philosophical writings:
It doesn’t matter what you say, but what it says in you. To it you must address your answers. God is straightaway with you and is the voice within you. You have to have it out with that voice.
“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
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