The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Leo Tolstoy on Love and Its Paradoxical Demands

By Maria Popova

Leo Tolstoy on Love and Its Paradoxical Demands

Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910) began tussling with the grandest questions of existence from an early age. As a young man, he struggled through his search for himself, learned the hard way about the moral weight of immoral motives, and confronted the meaning of human existence. By late middle age, his work had gained him worldwide literary acclaim, but had also managed to antagonize both church and state at home — the Russian government found his social, political, and moral views so worrisome that they censored him heavily and threatened imprisonment, while the Orthodox Church was so offended by his spiritual writings that they eventually excommunicated him.

Leo Tolstoy

What his homeland withheld the world gave and gave heartily — especially England, where a small but spirited Tolstoy fan base had mushroomed. The author’s devoted secretary and supporter, Vladimir Chertkov, who had landed in London in 1897 after being exiled from Russia, invested his resources and his enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s writing in the Free Age Press — a visionary publishing outfit he founded in Dorset, as spiritually and morally idealistic as Tolstoy himself, dedicated to promoting “reason, justice, and love” and “spreading the deepest convictions of the noblest spirits of every age and race.” The Free Age Press operated from the belief that life has an essential spiritual dimension and that “man’s true aim and happiness consists in unity in reason and love in place of the present insane and unhappy struggle which is bringing and can bring real good to no one.”

The Free Age Press was also a pioneering model for a culture built on sharing rather than ownership and on the understanding that sharing itself is what gives rise to culture. Their original mission statement read:

We earnestly trust that all who sympathize will continue to assist us in circulating these books. No private person has benefited or will benefit financially by the existence of The Free Age Press; the books are issued free of copyright, so that anyone may reprint them who wishes; and any profits made (necessarily small) will go to assist the same work in the Russian language. For the hundreds of kindly letters received from all parts of the world, and the practical help in publicity which has enabled us to circulate upwards of 200,000 booklets and 250,000 leaflets since July 1900, we are very grateful, and tender our hearty thanks.

Vladimir Chertkov working at the Free Age Press workshop, 1902
Vladimir Chertkov working at the Free Age Press workshop, 1902

The press began publishing Tolstoy’s spiritual and moral writings — works bowdlerized or entirely unpublished in Russia in his lifetime — standing as a powerful testament to Neil Gaiman’s assertion that “repressing ideas spreads ideas.” Among the most widely circulated of these works was Tolstoy’s On Life* (public library), originally written as Tolstoy approached his sixtieth birthday in 1888.

In one of the most poignant chapters of the book, Tolstoy examines our gravest misconceptions about love — what he bemoans as “the confused knowledge of men that in love there is the remedy for all the miseries of life,” which stems from our insufficient curiosity about the true meaning of our lives. At the center of his argument is a conceptual parallel to the ethos of the Free Age Press — the insight that sharing only increases the sum total of goodness; that the ownership-based impulse to withhold diminishes it; that love, in its grandest sense, is never a zero-sum game wherein the love we extend to one being is at the expense of another.

He writes:

Every man knows that in the feeling of love there is something special, capable of solving all the contradictions of life and of giving to man that complete welfare, the striving after which constitutes his life. “But it is a feeling that comes but rarely, lasts only a little while, and is followed by still worse sufferings,” say the men who do not understand life.

To these men love appears not as the sole and legitimate manifestation of life, as the reasonable consciousness conceives it to be, but only as one of the thousand different eventualities of life; as one of the thousand varied phases through which man passes during his existence.

[…]

For such people love does not answer to the idea which we involuntarily attach to the word. It is not a beneficent activity which gives welfare to those who love and for those who are loved.

Our self-harming delusions about the nature of love, Tolstoy argues, spring from our over-reliance on reason, which is invariably an imperfect faculty and can be led astray by our misbeliefs. (His compatriot Dostoyevsky had addressed this in a beautiful letter to his brother half a century earlier.) Tolstoy writes:

The activity of love offers such difficulties that its manifestations become not only painful, but often impossible. “One should not reason about love” — those men usually say who do not understand life — “but abandon oneself to the immediate feeling of preference and partiality which one experiences for men: that is the true love.”

They are right in saying that one should not reason about love, and that all reasoning about love destroys it. But the point is, that only those people need not reason about love who have already used their reason to understand life and who have renounced the welfare of the individual existence; but those who have not understood life and who exist for the welfare of the animal individuality, cannot help reasoning about it. They must reason to be enabled to give themselves up to this feeling which they call love.

Every manifestation of this feeling is impossible for them, without reasoning, and without solving unsolvable questions.

One of Maurice Sendak’s illustrations for Tolstoy’s 1852 book Nikolenka’s Childhood

Tolstoy turns to the central paradox of reconciling our inherent solipsism with the ethos of universal love. (Twenty years later, he would explore these issues in his little-known correspondence with Gandhi, with whom Tolstoy shared a profound spiritual kinship.) He writes:

In reality every man prefers his own child, his wife, his friends, his country, to the children, wives, friends, and country of others, and he calls this feeling love. To love means in general to do good. It is thus that we all understand love, and we do not know how to comprehend it in any other way. Thus, when I love my child, my wife, my country, I mean that I desire the welfare of my child, wife, and country more than that of other children, women, and countries. It never happens, and can never happen, that I love my child, wife, or country only. Every man loves at the same time his child, wife, country, and men in general. Nevertheless the conditions of the welfare which he desires for the different beings loved, in virtue of his love, are so intimately connected, that every activity of love for one of the beings loved not only hinders his activity for the others but is detrimental to them.

In a passage that calls to mind Hannah Arendt on the humanizing value of unanswerable questions, Tolstoy considers the inquiries that result from this paradox:

In the name of which love should I act and how should I act? In the name of which love should I sacrifice another love? Whom shall I love the most and to whom do the most good — to my wife, or to my children — to my wife and children, or to my friends? How shall I serve a beloved country without doing injury to the love for my wife, children, and friends?

Finally, how shall I solve the problem of knowing in what measure I can sacrifice my individuality, which is necessary to the service of others? To what extent can I occupy myself with my own affairs and yet be able to serve those I love? All these questions seem very simple to people who have not tried to explain this feeling they call love — but, far from being simple, they are quite unsolvable.

Out of these unanswerable questions, he suggests, arises an awareness and, finally, an acceptance of the multiplicity and variousness of love. This, in turn, furnishes the understanding of love’s essential nature not as a hypothetical conceit but as an active state of being — or, to borrow the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn’s term, “interbeing” with others — necessarily grounded in the present moment:

The demands of love are so many, and they are all so closely interwoven, that the satisfaction of the demands of some deprives man of the possibility of satisfying others. But if I admit that I cannot clothe a child benumbed with cold, on the pretence that my children will one day need the clothes asked of me, I can also resist other demands of love in the name of my future children.

[…]

If a man decides that it is better for him to resist the demands of a present feeble love, in the name of another, of a future manifestation, he deceives either himself or other people, and loves no one but himself.

Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.

On Life is a spirit-rousing read in its totality. Complement it with Tolstoy on personal growth, human nature, how to find meaning when life seems meaningless, what separates good art from bad, and his reading list of essential books for every stage of life, then revisit the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s timeless experiment in love.

* Curiously, the 2009 digital edition of On Life by an English publisher called White Crow Books bears this affront to the spirit and explicit anti-copyright ethos of the Free Age Press: “All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction, in any manner, is prohibited.”

BP

The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest Form of Faith

By Maria Popova

The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest Form of Faith

Looking back on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of dark matter, astronomer Vera Rubin reflected: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”

Far from a mere diversion of the senses, beauty may just be the dialogue between nature and human nature — our most expressive language for loving the universe, for loving ourselves as fractals of the universe, for living wonder-smitten by reality. To find something beautiful is to find it interesting and meaningful in some way, often a way we can’t articulate — to render it significant and worthy of attention, to render it a wonder. In all of its forms — the beauty of a willow at night, the beauty of a noble act, the beauty of the imperfect face you love — beauty is what we find and what we create as we move through the world at our most fully human.

In 1955, the English marine biologist and poetic science writer N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) worked out the ideas that would later bloom into his perspectival masterpiece You and the Universe on the pages of another book. Despite a title very much a product of its time — a time before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliant unsexed the universal pronoun — Man’s Emerging Mind (public library) remains a singular and enduring reckoning with what makes us human, lensed through the majesty and mystery of beauty in all its forms, which pulsates beneath those qualities of mind we associate with terms like soul and spirit.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

Aware of himself as an individual unique in the history of a universe he doesn’t fully understand yet living with questions common to “all of us who move and think and feel and whom time consumes,” Berrill writes in the twenty-first chapter, wonderfully titled “The Shape of Wonder”:

I know beauty but I do not know what it means. Keats said that beauty is truth and so did the Greeks, although the one was concerned with loveliness and the others mainly with intellect. I do know that whatever beauty is, whether it is the kind that is woven within the mind itself or is perceived without, on this earth only the human mind can sense it… And inasmuch as we ourselves, in body, brain or mind, are as integral a part of the universe as any star, it makes little difference whether we say beauty lies only in the mind of the beholder or otherwise. We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.

With an eye to the creative impulse that is part of our humanity, part of the true nature of the universe that we refract, he echoes poet Robinson Jeffers’s moving meditation on moral beauty and adds:

Somehow, as our brains have grown beyond a certain complexity and size, beauty emerged both as perception and as creation. We know it when we meet it and we create it when we can. And we know it in many forms and not only in sublimated senses — we know it when love becomes selfless and solicitude becomes compassion. We see it in moral stature and in hope and courage. We see it whenever the transcending quality of growth is clear and unmistakable, knowing that only in such growth do we find our own individual happiness.

Berrill considers one thing beauty shares with love (which both share with the first of William James’s four features of transcendent experiences):

We can express them with words but cannot define them — we can only say that this and this are included but that is not, and wordlessly we all recognise the truth of it. Speech is limited, no matter what the language…. For in our hearts we understand more than we can possibly talk about.

A century after Walt Whitman called himself a “kosmos” and insisted that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Berrill intimates that this ineffable knowledge is a way of knowing ourselves, of anchoring ourselves to time and meaning as we evolve over the course of a lifetime and face our finitude. In consonance with Annie Dillard’s piercing insistence that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” he writes:

Your day’s activity, mental and physical, is a part of you and by extension you are all that you have ever been — like an unfinished symphony.

[…]

I believe… that during the closing notes of an individual life the question, if any, should be not do I have an immortal soul and what comes next, but how much of a soul have I grown? Whether individual consciousness persists at all… all that lives, all that has lived, retains its value and its meaning… I believe the past lives, that the present is eternal, and the future immanent; that we take it as an indivisible whole and that our obsession with the sweep and drama of history, our probing with fossils and other symbols of time, and our efforts to constructs theories of evolution of life and matter, are all in keeping with the craving to recreate in the human mind the unity of the universe in all its dimensions. The fact that we are so concerned and make such attempts to do this is much more significant than the results we may obtain. Space and time unite in the mind, in the organism, and in the universe as one all-inclusive whole.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

It is with this awareness that the Nobel-winning quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made his koan-like deathbed insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” Beauty, Berrill suggests, is how we rise out of our transient individual lives to contact this transcendent wholeness, to trust it and thus to trust ourselves. As such, it is a form of faith — the faith we most need to fully inhabit our lives, entwined as they are in that “inescapable network of mutuality.”

Berrill writes:

We need faith, a faith in ourselves as human beings and not as members of this or that race or religion or state or class of society. We need no faith in supernatural forces. We need only to recognise that our knowledge of the universe through our senses and our knowledge of the universe through our own inward nature show that it is orderly, moral and beautiful, that it is akin to intelligence, that love and hope belong in it as fully as light itself, and that the power and will of the human mind is but a symptom of reality; that we, when we are most human, most rational, most aware of love and beauty, reflect and represent the spirit of the universe. That should be enough.

And isn’t the sense of enough the triumph of life?

BP

The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem

By Maria Popova

The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem

In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” Kahlil Gibran observed in one of his prophetic poems. This paradox remains one of the 17 most important things I have learned about life.

Nick Cave, who has lived through some unimaginable loss, brought the paradox of joy to the 300th edition of his wonderful journal The Red Hand Files — an oasis of largehearted anticynicism in our world, and my favorite email by orders of magnitude. He writes:

I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practised method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost — at least, it can seem that way.

This paradox comes alive in Nick’s song “Joy” from his altogether soul-slaking record Wild God. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” goes a lyric spoken by the ghost of his dead son.

Some time ago, amid a season of suffering, Nick introduced me to the soulful work of poet Christian Wiman and sent me his lifeline of an anthology Joy: 100 Poems (public library) — a kaleidoscopic lens on, as Wiman writes in the introduction, “why a moment of joy can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached, or why this lift into pure bliss might also entail a steep drop of concomitant loss.”

Among the hundred poems, as various as Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, is the plainly and pointedly titled “Joy” by one of my favorite poets: Lisel Mueller, who lived nearly a century and wrote with such ravishing poignancy about the consolations of mortality and the dazzling complexities that make life worth living.

JOY
by Lisel Mueller

“Don’t cry, it’s only music,”
someone’s voice is saying.
“No one you love is dying.”

It’s only music. And it was only spring,
the world’s unreasoning body
run amok, like a saint’s, with glory,
that overwhelmed a young girl
into unreasoning sadness.
“Crazy,” she told herself,
“I should be dancing with happiness.”

But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love —
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.

Couple with Nick’s beautiful of reading of “But We Had Music,” then revisit poet Ross Gay on delight as a force of resistance.

BP

Making Space: An Illustrated Ode to the Art of Welcoming the Unknown

By Maria Popova

Making Space: An Illustrated Ode to the Art of Welcoming the Unknown

It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the gap between knowledge and mystery that we discover wonder. Every act of making space is in some sense a creative act and an act of faith. And yet in its open-endedness and indeterminacy, in its courtship of uncertainty, it challenges our most basic instincts about how to govern our lives, unsettling the foundation of our illusion of control (which is always the opposite of faith).

Italian writer Paola Quintavalle and artist Miguel Tanco offer a lovely antidote to our unease about this essential creative and contemplative act in Making Space (public library) — a charming illustrated taxonomy of the many forms of this existential exhale, the many ways we can deepen and magnify life by giving things beyond our control the time and space they take.

There is making space “to plant a seed and watch it grow,” space “for taking a chance” and “for another try,” space “for a hand to hold and when it’s time, for letting go.”

Children hold vigil over a dead bird, making space “for those who are no longer here.” A boy with a party hat and a mouthful of cake encircled by angry peers in party hats becomes an emblem of “the truth stuck inside your mouth.” A constellation of little cosmonauts make space “to wonder why.”

Page by page, there emerges a growing awareness that making space is really about our relationship to time and the unknown — that it is intimately related to learning how to wait better, that it is a laboratory for the paradoxes and possibilities of change, that it is where we come to terms with our necessary losses. (“Longing is like the Seed,” Emily Dickinson wrote, beholden to “the Hour, and the Zone, / Each Circumstance unknown.”)

Couple Making Space with Pablo Neruda’s beautiful poem “Keeping Quiet,” then revisit 200 years of beloved writers, artists, and scientists on the rewards of solitude, that supreme act of making space.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books

BP

Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals

By Maria Popova

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston observed of other animals two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery reflected on her encounters with thirteen different animals to insist that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.”

An epoch before Beston and Montgomery — before we had the science to fathom how owls see with sound, how dolphins and whales communicate in supersonic hieroglyphics, how hummingbirds defy the physics of gravity, and what birds dream about — John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) observed with astonishment and awe the myriad ways in which birds respond to the world with qualities of mind his contemporaries considered singularly human: tenderness and anger, memory and foresight, prudence and percipience about tides and tornadoes and the forces of nature far beyond mere instinct, far beyond human understanding.

Art from Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

While working on the brown pelican divination for my Almanac of Birds, I was struck by a strikingly sensitive and scientifically prescient passage in Audubon’s essay on the species, suspended like all of his writing partway between ornithological description and lyrical memoir of personal encounters. Lamenting the population decline of the brown pelican in his lifetime, he marvels at the mysterious intelligence of these strange and ancient seabirds:

The Brown Pelicans are as well aware of the time of each return of the tide, as the most watchful pilots. Though but a short time before they have been sound asleep, yet without bell or other warning, they suddenly open their eyelids, and all leave their roosts, the instant when the waters, which have themselves reposed for awhile, resume their motion. The Pelicans possess a knowledge beyond this, and in a degree much surpassing that of man with reference to the same subject: they can judge with certainty of the changes of weather. Should you see them fishing all together, in retired bays, be assured, that a storm will burst forth that day; but if they pursue their finny prey far out at sea, the weather will be fine, and you also may launch your bark and go to the fishing.

In consonance with Beston’s insistence that “we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Audubon adds:

I ponder on the faculties which Nature has bestowed on animals which we merely consider as possessed of instinct. How little do we yet know of the operations of the Divine Power!

Audubon often contemplated the intelligence of birds in his journal, nowhere more so than in an 1833 entry about the species to which he would soon devote the greatest number of pages — twenty — in his voluminous Birds of America (and which yielded one of the most direct and sobering bird divinations). Writing on the summer solstice, he jabs at our human hubris:

The Wild Goose is an excellent diver, and when with its young uses many beautiful stratagems to save its brood, and elude the hunter. They will dive and lead their young under the surface of the water, and always in a contrary direction to the one expected; thus if you row a boat after one it will dive under it, and now and then remain under it several minutes, when the hunter with outstretched neck, is looking, all in vain, in the distance for the stupid Goose! Every time I read or hear of a stupid animal in a wild state, I cannot help wishing that the stupid animal who speaks thus, was half as wise as the brute he despises, so that he might be able to thank his Maker for what knowledge he may possess.

Art from Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Complement with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on how to be more animal and artist James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, then revisit the story of the seamstress who laid the foundation for the study of octopus intelligence the year Audubon contemplated the brilliance of the goose in his journal.

BP

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