Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those same sparse stars made everything we know and are.
The most life-shaping choices we can make are those of our mindset — we can choose the best orientation toward the world, we can choose the best orientation toward each other, but where we seem to struggle the most is orienting with clarity and compassion toward our own lives, toward the choice we have in the dialogue between our inner world and our circumstances.
The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) took up these questions in a moving letter to his closest friend, Cynthia Asquith, found in the out-of-print treasure The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (public library).
D.H. Lawrence and Lady Cynthia Asquith
The two had met as young writers both searching for their voice, both hungering to be heard — he was working as a kind of literary assistant to titans like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and she as a secretary to Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie. Their friendship was quick and deep and largely epistolary, their letters a sandbox for playing out the life of the mind that becomes literature, a found of mutual encouragement for the twin arts of writing and living. On these pages addressed to the other, they each became themselves.
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a year into the world’s first global war, he sent her what he called a “parting letter” — he was about to make one of the most courageous, disorienting, transformative choices a human being could make: to leave everything one knows and loves, to dismantle the superstructure of daily life that houses the life of the spirit, and begin again someplace new. He didn’t just choose another city, or another country — he chose another continent, another culture of young and untested idealism. He tells his friend:
I feel I must leave this side, this phase of life, for ever. The living part is overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it. So that life which is still fertile must take its departure, like seeds from a dead plant. I want to transplant my life. I think there is hope of a future, in America. I want if possible to grow toward that future.
He knew that Cynthia did not have this kind of freedom. He knew that, despite her talent and her passion, she felt trapped in her circumstances — a marriage too small for her, to which she felt tethered by her children, in a country still too corseted by Victorian mores to allow a woman the full freedom to claim her life. But he also knew the power of personal choice in any given set of circumstances. A generation before Viktor Frankl in his stirring memoir of surviving the concentration camps that “everything can be taken from a man 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,” Lawrence urges his friend in that way we have of giving others the pointed advice we most urgently need ourselves:
You must get the intrinsic reality clear within your soul — even if you betray it in reality, yet know it: that is everything. And know that in the end, always you keep the ultimate choice of your destiny: to abide by the intrinsic reality, or by the extrinsic: the choice is yours, do not let it slide from you, keep it always secure, reserved… Keep the choice of the right always in your own hands. Never admit that it is taken from you… Keep the choice of life… always in your hands: don’t ever relinquish it.
Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.
You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. “The gardener,” Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, “digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”
This is why Debbie Millman (yes) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything.
Page after painted page, Debbie’s lifelong longing for a garden is slowly revealed as her process of becoming herself, beginning with the portal of wonder that opened the moment her grandmother told her the seeds in the apple she was eating could grow a tree.
Seeds and flowers come to punctuate the story of her life — chapters ending, chapters beginning, the maelstroms of uncertainty, the discomposure of loss, the discomposure of love. They appear at auspicious moments, illustrating the vital difference between signs and omens:
Walking by a few days later, she halts mid-stride upon seeing the peonies blooming once more — only to realize that another mourner had placed a posy of plastic flowers where the real ones had thrived. In the artifice, connection; in the simulacrum, a prayerful bow before the deepest reality we share — time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss.
Half a lifetime later, living in a brownstone of her own, Debbie nurses herself back from heartbreak by making a small hopeful flower garden with a birdbath and tending to it daily with blind devotion.
She falls in love again, marries her soul mate, moves to California for a season and begins growing vegetables.
She navigates the terror and uncertainty of the pandemic by watching the smallest things grow.
And when the world finally regains its precarious balance, she travels its jungles and gardens, orchards and forests, to kneel on the woolly moss of Ireland, to bow before Japan’s sacred lotus, to savor Morocco’s Sanguine oranges and Tuscany’s Pesca Regina di Londa peaches, to run her hands over the elephantine trunks of Cambodia’s banyan trees and her fingers along the fibonacci spines of Mexico’s agave.
Over and over, she returns to her own garden for consolation and calibration. She learns patience. She learns perspective. Watching things come alive after a long germination, she begins to befriend time — the time it takes for a heart to heal, for a world to heal, for an ending to end so that a beginning may begin. Watching things die despite her best efforts, she confronts her lifelong fear of doing anything she isn’t good at — that is, she faces the abyss between the ego and the universe, the will and the world, the abyss in which we live.
What emerges from her Love Letter to a Garden (public library) is a tender reminder that we are here to plant a garden in the abyss, and to trust time.
I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the easiest and most marketable, because amid a culture that reduces literature to a commodity and binds readers in a moral paradox they ask us to think more widely and feel more deeply.
Having always believed that the most valiant way to complain is to create, I have joined forces with my friends at McNally Jackson — New York’s most beloved independent bookstore, and the independent publisher with whom I partnered on my Almanac of Birds — to launch Marginalian Editions: an act of resistance to the erasures of culture and a loving corrective for the collective selective memory called history.
Every year, Marginalian Editions revives three such out-of-print treasures that offer a torchlight in our search for meaning — from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s books. I introduce each with a reflection on how it has shaped my inner world and why our world needs it. Some are forgotten books by beloved writers like Margaret Wise Brown, Henry Miller, and Diane Ackerman. Some are books of timeless resonance by forgotten visionaries like Kathleen Lonsdale (the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist who became the first woman to preside over the British Association of Sciences and helped keep the Cold War from ending in a nuclear holocaust), Jane Ellen Harrison (the iconoclastic historian who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, bridged science and religion, and influenced writers as various as Virginia Woolf and Mary Beard), and Hockley Clarke (a onetime teenage soldier who spent a decade befriending a family of blackbirds).
This is our inaugural trio:
A deep bow to Margaret Harring at McNally Jackson for the raptures of geometry and color gracing our covers and fathoms of gratitude to Elizabeth Alexander, whose poem “Amistad” led me to the stunning Muriel Rukeyser book I was so determined to save from oblivion that I launched this entire imprint.
Our new edition atop my well loved copy of the 1942 edition, acquired years ago from an antiquarian bookseller for $180.
Below is my foreword as it appears in that spark-book of the series:
MARGINALIAN EDITIONS # 1 | FOREWORD
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.
“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,” Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) begins her book-length prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) — a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: “a phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art”; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following “the imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the impelled spirit.”
Muriel Rukeyser
Rukeyser was twenty-one when Theory of Flight — her debut poetry collection, based on the flying lessons she had taken barely out of her teens — won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. Critics didn’t know what to make of her. Some were offended by “the confident self-assurance of the young woman taking on the Whitman mantle of prophecy.” Others saw her unexampled art as the kind “that makes people act a little more valiantly when they have understood it.” A year earlier, she had been arrested in Alabama while reporting on the Scottsboro case; a year later, she would arrive in Spain on the eve of the Civil War to cover the defiant alternative to the Nazi Olympics in Berlin–the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona. She would go on to place her very body in the path of a South Korean dictatorship that had sentenced an obscure radical poet to death. Her motto would become: “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” She would never cease defending and celebrating the “axiom-breaking” visionaries who dismantle the world in order to reimagine it. She would become the poet of possibility.
The daughter of a Yonkers bookkeeper and a concrete salesman, Rukeyser had been writing poems since she was a teenager; she had been trying to see the world whole. The Yale prize conferred upon her the thorny crown of expectation to become America’s next great poet. And she would. Adrienne Rich would regard her as a genius “beyond her time,” and Anne Sexton would call her “Muriel, mother of everyone.” But first she would spend seven years immersed in the world of this strange and solitary axiom breaker, whose story interlaces with the story of science, of America, of our search for equilibrium in the very substance of being.
Working in silence and isolation, through indifference and rejection, Willard Gibbs, with his gentle beautiful face and his unwillingness to concede that anything is unknowable, revolutionized thermodynamics — the science of heat, work, and energy that governs the universe and its every echo in an engine, in the ocean’s tides, in the energy metabolism that keeps us alive. “He becomes a shadow radiating light; by that light we see the map of possibilities,” Rukeyser writes. “He had taken a field not regarded as fertile and had taught the laws of its fertility; this lean, laconic gardener still gives us harvest, and promise of more.” Einstein placed him in the highest rank of genius. Ludwig Boltzmann lauded his statistical mechanics as the greatest achievement in science since Newton’s theory of gravity. Many consider him the greatest scientist America has so far produced. The head of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company — an industry that could not exist without Gibbs’s work, an industry that evolved to become the internet — lamented that Gibbs’s science is so difficult to convey precisely because it is so fundamental: “a ponderous foundation on which so great a superstructure has been built that no one notices the foundation anymore.”
The foundation was vast and various. The statistical mechanics he invented came to underpin fields as disparate as game theory, weather forecasting, the study of neural networks, and the calculation of life insurance. His vector analysis shaped the geometry of motion applied in miracles of invention he could have never imagined: cinema, space flight, self-driving cars. His equilibrium studies shed light on the ancient mystery of human blood. His work on heat fostered a new understanding of the most haunting and intimate consequence of thermodynamics — entropy, that grand cosmic march of dissolution dragging us along the vector of irreversibility from order to disorder and dissolution: the salad that will never again become a garden, the first gray hair auguring the grave; it was Gibbs’s entropic thermodynamics that led Max Planck, in his passionate debates with Boltzmann, to come up with the notion of energy quanta that lit the dawn of quantum physics. His phase rule — Gibbs’s great triumph — illuminated the thermodynamic properties of a system as matter changes from one state to another across solid, liquid, and gas, a system for “the gathering of atoms, of constellations.” It made rubber gloves and rockets possible. It sparked a new use of alloy systems that ushered in the birth of automobiles, air travel, and radio; it helped agricultural chemists better understand soil, that lifeblood of the biosphere; it made Rukeyser’s father’s work, cement, possible. Edison profited greatly from knowledge of the phase rule — without it, there could be no incandescent bulb. The pioneering polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team froze to death by ignorance of it — they had left their oil cans, precious source of heat and fuel, atop an icy cairn, not aware that at extremely low temperatures, the tin alloy changes phase and turns to powder. Today, the phase rule underpins the new field of computational material science, which allows us to computationally model the properties of alloys never previously imagined and then to make them — high-entropy alloys that can withstand the roiling atmospheres of other worlds to let our space probes gather clues about the origin, nature, and possibility of life.
“Here was a principle that had made a clean sweep,” Rukeyser writes, “not only of its science, but of a whole way of thinking.” Here was a mind “controlled and flowing, the source of a flashing river,” heavy with the burden of communicating itself to a world not yet ready for him — this reserved and intensely imaginative man who lived with his sister and never married, who honed his equations walking the garden and climbing the red canyons around New Haven, who spent nights delighting in the chess puzzles of Alice in Wonderland with the neighbor’s children, who wrote poetry and believed above all else that “the whole is simpler than its parts.” A visitor to one of his lectures remembered walking into a classroom with only four students “sitting with faraway looks like angels’ on their faces” as Gibbs drew circles on the blackboard, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Through his arcane equations, Muriel Rukeyser saw an expression of “the great dream of order that moved any man or woman living in protest against the forces of the nineteenth century”; saw a creator who “lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America”; saw the kinship between his time and hers, as we see the kinship between her time and ours: the way “people seemed, as they do in any wartime, to open their minds to their relation to human beings,” and how “in these sudden wakening to old relationships, they searched for new ideas”; saw work that “led up to fearfully significant and branching changes: a fountain of results, reaching in war and peace, not only to our moment, but to the future” — work done in science but furnishing a framework for society, for creativity, for the life of the human spirit.
Through her twenties, through the outbreak of World War II, Rukeyser labored at this elaborate lattice of ideas, never losing sight of the parallels between his science and her art: “He was in the position of a great poet whose idiom must reach its audience through dilution after dilution, the work of prose writers and lesser poets, imitators and contemporaries who in their detailed flashes indicate his wider constellations.” She would later say she wrote the book she needed to read. At its heart is a search for an organizing principle of the imagination — in science, in art, in politics, in the collaborative creation we call culture:
The parable of his acceptance and rejection, of his background and his emergence, becomes a parable of human freedom and a free attitude toward the gifts which the imagination makes. Truth, belonging to no group, no leader, no army, may be chosen by a free people; that is a test of both for freedom and for truth. This power, which may emerge from the stillest of centers, which has emerged from the imagination of Gibbs, is to be used. It belongs to the stream of that great tradition from which free people are at liberty to choose their own ancestors. Gibbs is an ancestor and a contemporary of our moment in history. We bear many of the penalties he bore; many of the narrownesses are what we suffer from today, in our time and in our war; but in the generosity of his spirit he made his gifts. They, in their turn, enter into history; they are an image of its tendency.
We are still living these tendencies of history a century after Rukeyser and two after Gibbs, in our time of new wars and new leaps of the imagination. Our redemption, if it is to be had, lies still in the same recognition:
The sight of the truth is the crucial vision; the sight of the chance of America, or the chance of people anywhere in the world, to use the gifts that are offered. War is made by imagination, and the peace that follows is made in the same way. The tendencies of history are directed by the acceptance or rejection of the imagination. Economic pressures and the will of the people, aroused to resistance or producing in the full vividness of conscious life — they make these tendencies, which may go burning to war, or flow toward creative belief and the wish for a living order.
There is a lineage that emerges, a lineage of revelations and responsibilities, of which we are the inheritors and stewards. Likening Gibbs to Melville and to Whitman — creators all obscure and neglected at the peak of their creative powers, who went on to become great catalytic forces for other minds — Rukeyser writes:
We look for ancestors as if the world were completed. It is constantly being torn away. Wars and suppression on every level tear it. The life of the world is in its living people, in those who express that life and the dynamic equilibrium, which is its home. Once that expression is made, the responsibility is to receive it.
“It is said that his time was easier than ours,” James Baldwin wrote in his consummate essay on Shakespeare, “but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” Muriel Rukeyser never fell prey to the ahistorical self-pity of the present. Writing at the peak of the second planetwide war of the twentieth century, she still saw the nineteenth as “more desperate and contradictory than any other hundred years” and its final quarter — the years when Gibbs’s great breakthrough was lighting other minds afire — as “ill-equipped and grasping, romantic and wasteful, tinkering with the details of the democratic state and ignoring the vast hope and invention that would have to come before that state could be confirmed.” Still, she saw deeper into the heart of the epoch than its want and waste and farther past the horizon of possibility:
Even so, in these years, the country lifted up freshness and hope, a frontier brightness as the frontier passed. That line had wandered West as the equilibrium of America changed — indeed, as an image, the country might be seen as one of Gibbs’s mixed fluids, with the frontier, a barrier of single molecules, drawn down the map as a surface of discontinuity. The hope was always there: a lawless hope, since no one could predict the future of this system, unless they worked as Gibbs was working, frankly with partial knowledge, toward great and partial ends.
Throughout the book, Rukeyser keeps widening the aperture of attention and connection without sacrificing the finest detail, writing with the same vigor of mind about democracy as she does about vector analysis and membrane equilibrium and the crystalline phases of ammonium nitrate. To paint the landscape of thought in which Gibbs worked, she invokes John Quincy Adams and William James and a constellation of scientists, writers, and politicians who were once household names and who now draw a blank in most minds — a haunting reminder of how ahistorical our lives are, how limited our perspective by the collective selective memory of our culture, with all its erasures and indifferences. Over and over, Rukeyser counters this loss of perspective, drawing a continuous thread of revelation between the Amistad slave uprising and America’s first observatory, between Newton and Whitman, between the phase transition of alloys and the political forces behind World War II. Over and over, she zooms in to the level of the atom and out to the level of the world — the human world, that thing of chaos and contradiction, charged and fractal in its narratives of history, in its visions of possible futures. Adrienne Rich would come to laud her as “one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.” It was through the life of Gibbs that the young Rukeyser honed her reparative vision, her lifelong insistence on the need to integrate and connect — people, ideas, disciplines, differences. Later, she would come to see poetry as an “exchange of energy,” a “system of relationships” — notions at the center of Willard Gibbs’s science, at the center of her vision for a thriving democracy that permeates the book like a spell and a summons, cast upon our own time, calling us to rise to it with our own lives:
The highest level, that level of our thought at which Gibbs stands, looks to the past with re-affirmation and to the future with foreboding. Such foreboding is not the dark gaze, but the creation of images, which speak for the future as it arrives, with the speed of the poet . . . The re-affirmations are on the side of human chance. And it is this combination that permits Gibbs to play his immense part in a world in rearrangement, whose development he, as a mortal man, did not foresee.
What emerges from his story is a portrait of a country, a century, a cosmos of creativity that would color every realm of the human endeavor for epochs to come — an antidote to the artificial split, often antagonistic, between the different kinds of imagination. Enveloped in Rukeyser’s passionate and rigorously researched prose, Gibbs’s life becomes a living poem of possibility.
All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings.
In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order. In the extreme conditions of the kiln, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance converge to make a third glaze that may turn out to be infinitely more beautiful than either of the two, or disastrous, discolored, hideously cracked with exposed impurities and cratered with burst bubbles.
Consolations from the kiln.
This, of course, is what happens in our most intimate relationships, themselves the product of chemistry and chance. Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.
A century after the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore observed that “relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,” physicist Carlo Rovelli traces the scientific path to that same truth in his excellent quantum primer Helgoland (public library), titled after the windswept North Sea island on which the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg arrived at the idea that became the mathematical blueprint for the staggering cathedral of quantum field theory: that revolutionary description of how one aspect of reality — one object, one entity, one part of nature — manifests itself to any other. Because every description of a thing is a claim about its nature, at the heart of the theory is the claim that interaction is the fundamental reality of the universe, that there are no entities as such — only dynamic manifestations of which we catch an evanescent glimpse and call that flashing image entity.
Rovelli writes:
The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call “reality,” is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other.
[…]
The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions.
This is why objectifying — the impulse to reduce something or someone to a set of properties — always misses the point of the objectified, and why we always draw closer to reality when we instead “subjectify” the universe, as Ursula K. Le Guin put it in her magnificent meditation on the interplay of poetry and science. The intersubjective — the dynamic reality that arises from the interactions between objects with seemingly fixed properties — is the essence of the quantum world, and it is also the essence of human relationships. Who you become in a particular relationship is not any more you or less you than who you are in your deepest solitude, because there is no you — the self is not the container of your interactions with the rest of the world but the contents.
Observing that the “phantasmal world of quanta is our world,” Rovelli writes:
The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision. It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.
With an eye to quantum entanglement, he articulates what I learned at the kiln:
Even if we know all that can be predicted about one object and another object, we still cannot predict everything about the two objects together. The relationship between two objects is not something contained in one or the other of them: it is something more besides.
If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world… is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based. If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.
This fundamental axiom of being is, to me, the first and final proof that the measure of our lives is the light between us.
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