The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love

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

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

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

Reworldling Humanity: E.B. White’s Magnificent 1943 Response to a Politician Who Wanted to Make the Pacific Ocean an American Lake

Reworldling Humanity: E.B. White’s Magnificent 1943 Response to a Politician Who Wanted to Make the Pacific Ocean an American Lake

On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.”

White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on a tenderness for life with books like Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web — wasted no time polishing the absurd proposition into a lens on the deepest problem facing our civilization.

In one of his wartime editorials for The New Yorker, later collected in the hauntingly timely out-of-print gem The Wild Flag (public library), he writes:

The Pacific Ocean, said Clarence Budington Kelland firmly, must become an American lake. He didn’t make it clear why it should become an American lake rather than, say, a Chinese lake or a Russian lake. The Chinese were seaside dwellers along the Pacific many thousands of years before the Americans, and presumably even now like to gaze upon its blue and sometimes tranquil waters. This may seem annoying to a party leader, who is apt to find it difficult to believe that there can be anybody of any importance on the far end of a lake. Yet the Pacific and its subsidiary seas are presumably real and agreeable to the people who live on them. The Sea of Okhotsk is five times the size of Mr. Kelland’s state of Arizona, the Sea of Japan is longer than the longest serial he ever wrote, the Yellow Sea is as big as the Paramount Building and bigger, and the South China Sea runs on endlessly into the sunset beyond Borneo. Are these the coves in an American lake — little bays where we can go to catch our pickerel among the weeds?

E.B. White at work

What made Kelland’s postwar plan so preposterous is also what made it so dangerous — it lived by the same metastatic nationalism that had hurled the world into war in the first place. Against this malady humanity’s narrowly evaded self-destruction was evidently only a temporary vaccine that has since worn out: Here we are again, gulfing toward an abyss from which there may be no return.

E.B. White devoted his life to diagnosing the malady in the hope that future generations — that’s us — may arrive at a cure before another metastasis, this one deadly.

Art by Garth Williams from Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, 1952.

A generation before Gary Snyder considered what it would take to unbreak the world, urging us to place “community networks” at the center of how we govern ourselves and work “toward the true community of all beings,” White writes:

The answer to war is no war. And the likeliest means of removing war from the routine of national life is to elevate the community’s authority to a level which is above national level.

One of Paula Scher’s typographic maps of points of view.

When I took the Oath of Allegiance at my naturalization ceremony twenty years after emigrating to America as a lone teenager from a poor post-communist country — an oath natural-born citizens never have to swear — I was taken aback by its demand to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required to do so.

The flag rose and I, standing between an Ethiopian family holding a newborn and a beautiful Burmese woman older than my grandmother, repeated the words, received my certificate in a daze, and left with an uneasy feeling.

Out in the sterile municipal parking lot, watching a yellow leaf flutter at the tip of an aspen branch, I wondered what the world would look like if this were the flag we all swore allegiance to — this bright burst of life holding onto itself.

The Wild Flag

E.B. White — who never lost faith in humanity, even as he lived through two world wars and the nuclear terror of the Cold War — wondered the same, observing in another 1943 editorial:

The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet.

And in another:

A nation asks of its citizens everything — their fealty, their money, their faith, their time, their lives. It is fair to ask whether the nation, in return, does indeed any longer serve the best interests of the human beings who give so lavishly of their affections and their blood.

[…]

Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part. This choice is implicit in the world to come. We have a little time in which we can make the choice intelligently. Failing that, the choice will be made for us in the confusion of war, from which the world will emerge unified — the unity of total desolation.

Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace

He envisioned a new organizing principle for the world, different from nationalistic government — one that would “impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom — although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.” Imagine if we all viewed our participation in humanity the way astronauts do, how naturally then we would unfist our nationalisms into an outstretched hand. White imagined it, with all the salutary disorientation it would entail:

A world made one, by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would deprive him of the enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he has never seen.

There is, White wrote, already a microcosm of that possibility:

The City of New York is a world government on a small scale. There, truly, is the world in a nutshell, its citizens meeting in the subway and ballpark, sunning on the benches in the square. They shove each other, but seldom too hard. They annoy each other, but rarely to the point of real trouble.

New Yorkistan by Maira Kalman. (The New Yorker, December 2001.)

This little aside in the middle of a New Yorker editorial would become the seed for White’s timeless love letter to the city, penned just a few years after the end of the war. In it, he would write:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines… [a] poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

What if we governed human life not by politics but by poetry?

“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” James Baldwin would insist a generation after White — James Baldwin, who also insisted that “the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”

What if the choice White saw a century ago is yet to be made, can be made, fall on us to make? We can choose, we can, to make of this dying planet a living poem.

BP

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