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|  Hello Reader! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's special annual edition — what happens when we die, Iris Murdoch on what love really means and its symmetry with art, the woman who brought the "submarine fairyland" to life — you can catch up right here. If you missed the annual highlights of the best of Brain Pickings / The Marginalian in one place, those are here. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation — for more than fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive (as have I) thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
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Two years before she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom with her devotedly honed gift for mathematics to compose the world's first computer program in a 65-page footnote, Ada Lovelace postulated in a letter that creativity is the art of discovering and combining — the work of an alert imagination that "seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition." Her father — the poet Lord Byron, rockstar of the Romantics — embodied this in his own work, fusing influences* as diffuse in time, space, and sensibility as Confucius and Virgil, Erasmus Darwin and and Mary Shelley, Greek tragedy and Galilean astronomy, to compose some of the world's most original* and enduring poetry. A century and a poetic revolution after him, Rilke captured this combinatorial nature of creativity when he contemplated what it takes to write anything of beauty and substance. All poets — "poets" in Baldwin's broad sense of "the only people who know the truth about us," encompassing all artists, all makers of beauty and knowledge, all shamans of our self-knowledge — understand this intimately, and therefore understand the most elemental truth about creativity: that *these two words are chimeras of the ego.  I see my soul reflected in Nature. One of artist Margaret C. Cook illustrations for a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.) There is no blank slate upon which works of true originality are composed, no void out of which total novelty is created. Nothing is original because everything is an influence; everything is original because no influence makes its way into our art untransmuted by our imagination. We bring to everything we make everything we have lived and loved and tessellated into the mosaic of our being. To be an artist in the largest sense is to be fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it, porous to it and absorbent of it, moved by it and moved to translate those inner quickenings into what we make. That is what Nick Cave, part Byron and part Baldwin for our own time, explores in an issue of his Red Hand Files — the online journal in which he takes questions from fans and answers them in miniature essays of uncommon insight, soulfulness, and sensitivity, opening up improbable backdoors into those cavernous chambers where our most private yet common bewilderments about art and life dwell, and filling those chambers with the light of sympathetic understanding.  Nick Cave by JooHee Yoon When a fan from my own neighborough asks Cave how he muffles all of his influences in order to hear his own inner voice and trust that he is making something wholly his own, he answers with his characteristic poetics of numinous pragmatism:  Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.
Your spirit is the part of you that is essential. It is separate from the imagination, and belongs only to you. This formless pneuma is the invisible and vital force over which we toss the blanket of our imagination — that habitual mix of received information, of memory, of experience — to give it form and language. In some this vital spirit burns fiercely and in others it is a dim flicker, but it lives in all of us, and can be made stronger through daily devotion to the work at hand.
 Art by Maurice Sendak for a special 1973 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. In consonance with Black Mountain College poet and ceramicist M.C. Richards's lovely notion of creativity as the poetry of our personhood and with anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson's concept of "composing a life" — which captures with such poetic precision the fundamental fact that our very lives are the ultimate creative work — Cave adds: Worry less about what you make — that will mostly look after itself, and is to some extent beyond your control, and perhaps even none of your business — and devote yourself to nourishing this animating spirit. Bring all your enthusiasm to bear on the development of that good and essential force. This is done by a commitment to the creative act itself. Each time you tend to that ingenious spark it grows stronger, and sets afire the ordinary gifts of the imagination. The more dedication you show to the process, the better the work, and the greater your gift to the world. Apply yourself fully to the task, let go of the outcome, and your true voice will appear. You'll see. It can be no other way.
There are echoes here of Whitman, who declared in his "Laws of Creation" for "strong artists and leaders… and coming musicians" that to create means only to "satisfy the Soul"; there are echoes, too, of Mary Oliver and her invocation of "the third self" — that crucible of our creative energy, which demands of us to give it both power and time. Complement with Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of algorithms and grief as a portal to aliveness, then revisit poet Naomi Shihab Nye on the two driving forces of creativity, John Coltrane on outsiderdom as a wellspring of originality, John McPhee on the relationship between originality and self-doubt, and Paul Klee on how an artist is like at tree. donating=lovingIn 2021, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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The story goes that when a newspaper mistakenly printed his obituary in 1888, the Swedish entrepreneur and inventor Alfred Nobel, very much alive, was so horrified to see himself remembered as the "tradesman of death" for his inventions of dynamite and ballistic that he decided to devote his remaining years to supporting the most life-affirming endeavors of the human spirit. And so the Nobel Prize was born. Two dynamite-powered World Wars later, in his insightful Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Bertrand Russell identified vanity as one of the four desires driving all human behavior. Whatever our judgments about personal vanity may be, the awareness that it is so elemental to the human animal, so much an exoskeleton of the self, makes Alfred Nobel's impulse touchingly relatable; that he chose to channel it in so generative a way is a testament to his character. What is highly unusual about his experience, however, is that he had a living glimpse of what none of us ordinarily do — our legacy. Every human being, whether they readily admit it to themselves, wishes to be remembered and remembered kindly. The ultimate vanity of personhood is the wish not to have lived in vain. Given how relatable this wish is on the individual level, it is rather odd that we rarely consider it on the collective level of the culture, the civilization, the species. There, a time-travel glimpse of how posterity remembers us — the totality of us who lived and died in a shared region of spacetime — can be the ultimate calibrator of our conscience and its echoes in our actions as we make (or unmake) the world we bequeath to the future. Such an uncommon ante-obituary for our time is what poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield (who, in my book, is due the Nobel Prize in Literature) offers in the opening poem from her superb collection Ledger (public library), one of my favorite books of 2020 — a poem she describes as a sort of prayer, a vow to the future to not be true, a poem "hoping to make itself someday incomprehensible," read here by Krista Tippett (with a touch of Debussy) in an excerpt from their altogether fantastic On Being conversation about poetry as an instrument of conscience and contemplative aliveness: 
LET THEM NOT SAY
by Jane Hirshfield Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw. Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard. Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled. Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands. Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough. Let them say, as they must say something: A kerosene beauty.
It burned. Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
Complement with Jane Hirshfield herself reading "Today, Another Universe," also from Ledger, and her long-ago masterpiece "For What Binds Us" — one of her earliest and most moving poems — then revisit her penetrating reflection on what art and poetry do for us and a lovely stop-motion animation of her spare tree-inspired ode to the meaning of optimism. 
"Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being," wrote Rumi. "Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty." Eight centuries later, we go on spending our lives trying to win something we don't fully understand but are constantly defining, and we go on betting on all the wrong things: We mistake admiration, visibility, and the trappings of success for love, we mistake being powerful for being loved, we mistake needing for loving. True maturity is largely a matter of unlearning all these confusions acquired in the course of costuming ourselves with adulthood. So it is that only the very young and the very old seem to remember the elemental truth about love — love not as a bargaining chip but as the living prize, both vulnerable and wildly tenacious, radiant with Iris Murdoch's timeless definition of it as "the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real." 
That gladsome, reality-broadening understanding comes abloom on the pages of What Is Love? (public library) by author Mac Barnett and artist Carson Ellis — a poetic modern fable reimagining with uncommon tenderness and originality the oldest quest narrative: that ancient hero's journey of discovery and homecoming. 
A young boy, yearning to know what love is, asks his gardener-grandmother. 
In a gesture that is itself the deepest solution to the riddle of life and love, she enfolds him in an embrace and tells him that she does not have an answer — but that he might find it if he goes out into the world. This is Barnett's subtle summation of what it means to be human — we long for love, we long to understand how the world works, and spend our lives foraging for understanding as we make our uncharted way through the wilderness of being. 
And so the boy goes, meeting all kinds of people with all kinds of answers — a living reminder that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, each with its own understanding of beauty and love. The answers he encounters bewilder him — each strange and suspect if taken literally, each shimmering with the intimation of some larger abstract truth, each almost absurdly particular yet shining a sidewise gleam on some spect of the universal. Along the way, love emerges as a sculpture of understanding — the stone of all it is not, carved away to reveal the essence that is, a form delicate yet robust. 
Love is a fish, says the fisherman. 
It glimmers and splashes,
just out of reach.
And the day that you catch it,
if you know what you're doing,
you give it a kiss
and throw it back in the sea.
When the boy grimaces and pronounces his disgust at fish, with their sliminess and their alien eyes, the fisherman sighs, "You do not understand," and we are instantly reminded that while the human imagination began in the metaphor-machine of children's minds, metaphors are, in poet Jane Hirshfield's lovely phrase, "handles on the door of what we can know and of what we can imagine" — and, sometimes, we must first know to imagine. 
And so the boy moves through the world, gathering knowledge of its variousness and of the touching ways in which its creatures go about foraging love. "Love is applause," the actor tells him. Love is a seed the farmer holds up. Love is the night to the cat. 
Love, barks the dog over its shoulder while chasing the cat, is this. On goes the boy, meeting people clutching and carrying their loves: a chessboard, a tree, a bear, the Moon. 
Love is a house, says the carpenter, with her bandaged thumbs and her competent contented smile, speaking really about the house of life. 
Love is a house… You hammer and saw,
and arrange all the planks.
It wobbles and creaks,
and you alter your plans.
But in the end, the thing stands.
And you live in it.
Last comes the poet, resembling a cross between Rumi and god, filling an infinite scroll with his bid for the answer. 
As the long poem of life unspools into the setting sun, we suddenly see the boy-pilgrim grown — now a young man, making his way back to the little house where his gardener-grandmother is now a very old woman, still tending to her sunflowers. 
She asked me,
"Did you answer your question?" I picked her up in my arms.
I smiled. I said,
Yes.
Couple What Is Love? — a fine time-shifted addition to the year's loveliest children's books — with poet David Whyte's lyrical reflection on the measure of true love, then revisit a kindred celebration of the world's variousness in Carson Ellis's illustrated meditation on the many things "home" can mean and her painted veneration of time. donating=lovingIn 2021, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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EXOLOVE OF THE WEEK Each week, I share something I encountered elsewhere online (or off) that filled my heart with gladness and delight — may it fill yours, too. Spell Songs: Let the Light In 
You might recall The Lost Words — writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris's radiant act of resistance to the erasure of nature — one of my all-time favorite things. It has since become a record, equally light-filled and life-affirming, and it is now going on tour. If you can go, go. If you, like me, cannot, relish the gladness that something so wonderful exists. Rob and Jackie are a force of nature, in both senses, and I am grateful daily that we are alive together in the same chance-sliver of spacetime. The Guardian has more about the project. A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT | |
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