Walt Whitman on the wisdom of trees, Oliver Sacks on the 3 essential elements of creativity, Carl Sagan on literature as a force of democracy and more

Walt Whitman on the wisdom of trees, Oliver Sacks on the 3 essential elements of creativity, Carl Sagan on literature as a force of democracy, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[The Wisdom of Trees: Walt Whitman on What Our Silent Friends Teach Us About Being Rather Than Seeming]( “When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his [lyrical love letter to our arboreal companions]( “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.” Two generations earlier, a different titan of poetic sentiment extolled trees not only as a source of joy but as a source of unheralded moral wisdom and an improbable yet formidable model of what is noblest in the human character. At fifty-four, a decade after his volunteer service as a nurse in the Civil War awakened him to [the connection between the body and the spirit]( Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) suffered a severe stroke that left him paralyzed. It took him two years to recover — convalescence aided greatly, he believed, by his immersion in nature and its healing power. “How it all nourishes, lulls me,” he exulted, “in the way most needed; the open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards.”. The transcendent record of Whitman’s communion with the natural world survives in [Specimen Days]( ([public library]( — a sublime collection of prose fragments and diary entries, restoring the word “specimen” to its Latin origin in specere: “to look at.” What emerges is a jubilant celebration of [the art of seeing]( so native to us yet so easily unlearned, eulogized with the singular electricity that vibrates in Whitman alone. Walt Whitman (Library of Congress) In the years following his stroke, Whitman ventured frequently into the woods — “the best places for composition.” One late-summer day in 1876, he finds himself before one of his favorite arboreal wonders — “a fine yellow poplar,” rising ninety feet into the sky. Standing at its mighty four-foot trunk, he contemplates the unassailable authenticity of trees as a counterpoint to what Hannah Arendt would lament a century later as [the human propensity for appearing rather than being](. In a meditation from the late summer of 1876, Whitman writes: How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a [rare 1917 edition]( of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Nearly a century and a half before researchers uncovered [the astonishing science of what trees feel and how they communicate]( Whitman adds: Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don’t, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons — or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. Art by Jacques Goldstyn from [Bertolt]( an uncommonly tender illustrated story about of the friendship of a tree. Two centuries after an English gardener exulted that trees [“speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons,”]( Whitman considers their quiet wisdom as a model for human character: Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think. One lesson from affiliating a tree — perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse — what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage — humanity’s invisible foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great-sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.) Art by Cécile Gambini from [Strange Trees]( by Bernadette Pourquié, an illustrated atlas of the world’s arboreal wonders. [Specimen Days]( is a beautiful, healing read in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with a [tender illustrated ode]( to our bond with trees, the story of [how Marianne Moore saved a rare tree’s life with a poem]( and a [lyrical short film]( about our silent companions, then revisit Whitman on [democracy]( [identity and the paradox of the self]( and his timeless advice on [living a vibrant and rewarding life](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity]( “And don’t ever imitate anybody,” Hemingway cautioned in his [advice to aspiring writers](. But in this particular sentiment, the otherwise insightful Nobel laureate seems to have been blind to his own admonition against [the dangers of ego]( for only the ego can blind an artist to the recognition that all creative work begins with imitation before fermenting into originality under the dual forces of time and [consecrating effort](. Imitation, besides being [the seedbed of empathy and our experience of time]( is also, paradoxically enough, the seedbed of creativity — not only a poetic truth but a cognitive fact, as the late, great neurologist and poet of science Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) argues in a spectacular essay titled “The Creative Self,” published in the posthumous treasure [The River of Consciousness](. Oliver Sacks captures a thought in his journal at Amsterdam’s busy train station (Photograph by Lowell Handler from [On the Move]( In his [impressive handwritten notes on creativity and the brain]( which became the basis of the essay, Sacks had enthused about — in two colors, underlined — the “buzzing, blooming chaos” of the mind engaged in creative work. But, contrary to the archetypal myth of the lone genius struck with a sudden Eureka! moment, this chaos doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Rather, it coalesces from a particulate cloud of influences and inspirations without which creativity — that is, birthing of something meaningful that hadn’t exist before — cannot come about. With the illustrative example of Susan Sontag — herself a writer of [abiding wisdom on the art of storytelling]( — Sacks traces the inevitable trajectory of creative development from imitation to originality: Susan Sontag, at a conference in 2002, spoke about how reading opened up the entire world to her when she was quite young, enlarging her imagination and memory far beyond the bounds of her actual, immediate personal experience. She recalled, When I was five or six, I read Eve Curie’s biography of her mother. I read comic books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias indiscriminately, and with great pleasure…. It felt like the more I took in, the stronger I was, the bigger the world got…. I think I was, from the very beginning, an incredibly gifted student, an incredibly gifted learner, a champion child autodidact…. Is that creative? No, it wasn’t creative…[but] it didn’t preclude becoming creative later on…. I was engorging rather than making. I was a mental traveler, a mental glutton…. My childhood, apart from my wretched actual life, was just a career in ecstasy. […] I started writing when I was about seven. I started a newspaper when I was eight, which I filled with stories and poems and plays and articles, and which I used to sell to the neighbors for five cents. I’m sure it was quite banal and conventional, and simply made up of things, influenced by things, I was reading…. Of course there were models, there was a pantheon of these people…. If I was reading the stories of Poe, then I would write a Poe-like story…. When I was ten, a long-forgotten play by Karel Čapek, R.U.R., about robots, fell into my hands, so I wrote a play about robots. But it was absolutely derivative. Whatever I saw I loved, and whatever I loved I wanted to imitate — that’s not necessarily the royal road to real innovation or creativity; neither, as I saw it, does it preclude it…. I started to be a real writer at thirteen. Sontag’s experience, Sacks argues, reflects the common pattern in the natural cycle of creative evolution — we learn our own minds by finding out what we love; these models integrate into a sensibility; out of that sensibility arises the initial impulse for imitation, which, aided by the gradual acquisition of technical mastery, eventually ripens into original creation. He writes: If imitation plays a central role in the performing arts, where incessant practice, repetition, and rehearsal are essential, it is equally important in painting or composing or writing, for example. All young artists seek models in their apprentice years, models whose style, technical mastery, and innovations can teach them. Young painters may haunt the galleries of the Met or the Louvre; young composers may go to concerts or study scores. All art, in this sense, starts out as “derivative,” highly influenced by, if not a direct imitation or paraphrase of, the admired and emulated models. When Alexander Pope was thirteen years old, he asked William Walsh, an older poet whom he admired, for advice. Walsh’s advice was that Pope should be “correct.” Pope took this to mean that he should first gain a mastery of poetic forms and techniques. To this end, in his “Imitations of English Poets,” Pope began by imitating Walsh, then Cowley, the Earl of Rochester, and more major figures like Chaucer and Spenser, as well as writing “Paraphrases,” as he called them, of Latin poets. By seventeen, he had mastered the heroic couplet and began to write his “Pastorals” and other poems, where he developed and honed his own style but contented himself with the most insipid or clichéd themes. It was only once he had established full mastery of his style and form that he started to charge it with the exquisite and sometimes terrifying products of his own imagination. For most artists, perhaps, these stages or processes overlap a good deal, but imitation and mastery of form or skills must come before major creativity. Curiously, Sacks points out, many creators don’t make the leap from mastery to such “major creativity” — something Schopenhauer considered in his incisive [distinction between talent and genius](. Often, creators — be they artists or scientists — contend themselves with reaching a level of mastery, then remaining at that plateau for the rest of their careers, comfortably creating more of what they already know well how to create. Sacks examines what set those who soar apart from those who plateau: Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement — such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all. Much of the gamble, Sacks argues, is a kind of patient gestation at the unconscious level — something Einstein touched upon in [explaining how his mind worked](. Echoing T.S. Eliot’s insistence on the necessity of [“a long incubation”]( in creative work, Sacks adds: Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own…. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and personal involvement. Illustration by Maurice Sendak from [Open House for Butterflies]( by Ruth Krauss He illustrates the detrimental absence of such a gestational period with an example from his own experience: Early in 1982, I received an unexpected packet from London containing a letter from Harold Pinter and the manuscript of a new play, A Kind of Alaska, which, he said, had been inspired by a case history of mine in Awakenings. In his letter, Pinter said that he had read my book when it originally came out in 1973 and had immediately wondered about the problems presented by a dramatic adaptation of this. But, seeing no ready solution to these problems, he had then forgotten about it. One morning eight years later, Pinter wrote, he had awoken with the first image and first words (“Something is happening”) clear and pressing in his mind. The play had then “written itself” in the days and weeks that followed. I could not help contrasting this with a play (inspired by the same case history) which I had been sent four years earlier, where the author, in an accompanying letter, said that he had read Awakenings two months before and been so “influenced,” so possessed, by it that he felt impelled to write a play straightaway. Whereas I loved Pinter’s play — not least because it effected so profound a transformation, a “Pinterization” of my own themes — I felt the 1978 play to be grossly derivative, for it lifted, sometimes, whole sentences from my own book without transforming them in the least. It seemed to me less an original play than a plagiarism or a parody (yet there was no doubting the author’s “obsession” or good faith). In a testament to his [uncommon empathic might]( and his endearing generosity of interpretation in regarding others, Sacks reflects on the deeper phenomena at play: I was not sure what to make of this. Was the author too lazy, or too lacking in talent or originality, to make the needed transformation of my work? Or was the problem essentially one of incubation, that he had not allowed himself enough time for the experience of reading Awakenings to sink in? Nor had he allowed himself, as Pinter did, time to forget it, to let it fall into his unconscious, where it might link with other experiences and thoughts. The unfortunate playwright seems to have embodied the lamentation which poet Mary Oliver so beautifully articulated in her [meditation on the creative life]( “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Sacks points to three essential elements in a creative breakthrough, be it a great play or a deep mathematical insights: time, “forgetting,” and incubation. More than a century after Mark Twain declared that [“substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,”]( Sacks — who had previously written at length about [our unconscious borrowings]( — adds: All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue is not the fact of “borrowing” or “imitating,” of being “derivative,” being “influenced,” but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own. Complement this fathom of [The River of Consciousness]( thoroughly resplendent in its totality, with physicist and poet Alan Lightman on [the psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science]( then revisit Bill Hayes’s [loving remembrance of Oliver Sacks]( and Sacks himself on [what the poet Thom Gunn taught him about creativity](. NOTE: If you are in NYC, join me for [a special celebration of Dr. Sacks]( on November 20 at the 92Y – an evening of readings from his beloved books and music by his favorite Bach quartet. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Carl Sagan on the Power of Books and Reading as the Path to Democracy]( reading a book is a sign of order in the world,” [wrote]( the poet Mary Ruefle. Four centuries earlier, while ushering in a new world order, Galileo contemplated [how books give us superhuman powers]( — a sentiment his twentieth-century counterpart, Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996), echoed in his shimmering assertion that [“a book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”]( Shortly before his death, Sagan expounded on this passionate conviction in an essay titled “The Path to Freedom,” co-written with Ann Druyan — creative director of the [Golden Record]( project and [the love of Sagan’s life](. It was published in [The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark]( ([public library]( — the indispensable volume that gave us Sagan on [moving beyond us vs. them]( [science as a tool of democracy]( and his increasingly needed [Baloney Detection Kit]( for critical thinking. With his wide cosmic lens, Sagan places the nascent miracle of the written word in evolutionary perspective: For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game “Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost. Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. More than a century after Walt Whitman insisted that [literature is central to a healthy democracy]( Sagan adds: Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. Echoing Hannah Arendt’s piercing insight into [how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression]( — and what more crushing isolation than to be severed from the life of the mind? — Sagan writes: Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects. The British Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia wrote in 1671: “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have [them] these [next] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!” Considering the complex socioeconomic forces that conspire in constricting opportunity and the powerful way in which books counteract those forces — power to which James {NAME} [so beautifully attested]( — Sagan reflects on his own experience: Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York public schools. They followed prescriptions on childhood nutrition recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as if they had been handed down from Mount Sinai. Our government book on children’s health had been repeatedly taped together as its pages fell out. The corners were tattered. Key advice was underlined. It was consulted in every medical crisis. For a while, my parents gave up smoking — one of the few pleasures available to them in the Depression years — so their infant could have vitamin and mineral supplements. Ann and I were very lucky. Art by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston from [A Child of Books]( an illustrated love letter to reading With an admiring eye to the example and legacy of the freed slaved turned pioneering social reformer [Frederick Douglass]( Sagan concludes: The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin…. Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path. [The Demon-Haunted World]( remains one of the most important books written in the cosmic blink since we first began writing and its central message is, rather sadly, increasingly relevant in our time of unreason. Complement this particular portion with Gwendolyn Brooks on [the power of books]( Rebecca Solnit on [why we read and write]( Anaïs Nin on [how books awaken us from the slumber of almost-living]( and Mary Oliver on [how reading saved her life]( then revisit Sagan on [science and spirituality]( and this [lovely animated adaptation]( of his famous Pale Blue Dot monologue about our place in the universe. 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