Seneca on resilience and the key to tranquility of mind, a stunning ode to solitude from 1938, Oliver Jeffers celebrates of our shared cosmic journey

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. If you no longer wish to receive this, you can [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello, {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [brainpickings.org]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition – Walt Whitman on Beethoven and music as the profoundest expression of nature, Primo Levi on how science brings us closer to each other, Amanda Palmer reads Jane Kenyon's perfect poem about happiness, and more – you can catch up [right here](. If you missed the [special edition celebrating 11 years of Brain Pickings]( that is [here](. And if you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my labor of love with a [donation]( – each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps enormously. [The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude]( “The best things in life happen to you when you’re alone,” artist Agnes Martin [reflected]( in her final years. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” wrote the founding father of neuroscience in his [advice to young scientists](. The poet Elizabeth Bishop [believed]( that everyone should experience at least one prolonged period of solitude in life. For in true solitude, as Wendell Berry [so memorably observed]( “one’s inner voices become audible [and] in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives” — an intuitive understanding of what psychologists have since found: that [“fertile solitude”]( is the basic unit of a full and contented life. But in the neutral state of aloneness, the psychoemotional line between solitude and loneliness can be as thin as a razor’s edge and as lacerating to the soul. How to draw it skillfully in orienting ourselves to the world, exterior and interior, is what poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores in a beautiful poem she penned ten days after her twenty-sixth birthday, decades before she came to contemplate solitude in [stunning prose](. Originally titled “Considerations,” the poem was slightly revised and published the following year as “Canticle 6” in Sarton’s second poetry collection, the altogether sublime [Inner Landscape]( ([public library](. CANTICLE 6 by May Sarton Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, waking In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there; The spirit adventures in sleep, the sweet thirst-slaking When only the moon’s reflection touches the wild hair. There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone: It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning. It is only where two have come together bone against bone That those alonenesses take place, when, without warning The sky opens over their heads to an infinite hole in space; It is only turning at night to a lover that one learns He is set apart like a star forever and that sleeping face (For whom the heart has cried, for whom the frail hand burns) Is swung out in the night alone, so luminous and still, The waking spirit attends, the loving spirit gazes Without communion, without touch, and comes to know at last Out of a silence only and never when the body blazes That love is present, that always burns alone, however steadfast. Complement with Louise Bourgeois on [how solitude enriches creative work]( Virginia Woolf on [the relationship between loneliness and creativity]( and Olivia Laing’s [masterwork on the art of being alone]( then revisit other readings of beautiful poems of existential radiance: Derek Walcott’s [“Love After Love,”]( Wisława Szymborska’s [“Life-While-You-Wait,”]( Jane Kenyon’s [“Having It Out With Melancholy,”]( and Adrienne Rich’s [“Planetarium.”]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2017, my 11th year of doing this, I poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. one-time donation You can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( [Here We Are: Oliver Jeffers’s Warm Illustrated Field Guide to Living Together on Our Pale Blue Dot]( When the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera back on the Solar System for one last look after taking its pioneering photographs of our planetary neighborhood, it captured a [now-iconic image of Earth]( — a tiny pixel in a tiny slice of an incomprehensibly vast universe. The photograph was christened the “Pale Blue Dot” thanks to Carl Sagan, who immortalized the moment in his [timeless monologue on our place in the cosmos]( From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Forty years after the Voyager sailed into space, we seem to have lost sight of this beautiful and sobering perspective, drifting further and further into our divides, fragmenting our fragile home pixel into more and more warring factions, and forgetting that we are bound together by the improbable miracle of life on this Pale Blue Dot and a shared cosmic destiny. A mighty antidote to this civilizational impoverishment of imagination comes from Oliver Jeffers, one of the great visual storytellers of our time, in [Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth]( ([public library]( — Jeffers’s most personal picture-book yet, dedicated to his firstborn child. (The subtitle, Jeffers said, was inspired by [The Universe in Verse]( which he attended with his own father.) With expressive illustrations and spare, warm words, Jeffers extends an invitation to all humans, new and old, to fathom the beautiful unity of beings, so gloriously different, orbiting a shared Sun on a common cosmic voyage. Taking an approach evocative of Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic [Powers of Ten]( Jeffers zooms from the Solar System to Earth to the city to its living kaleidoscope of inhabitants to the single home where a newborn is meeting the world for the first time, illustrating the intricate interconnectedness of life across all scales of existence. On our planet, there are people. One people is a person. You are a person. You have a body. […] People come in many shapes, sizes and colors. We may all look different, act different and sound different … but don’t be fooled, we are all people. In the final pages, we see the new father embrace his cocooned child as the whole of humanity stretches into infinity in a colorful waiting line of helpers, reminding us that it takes a village — our global village — to nurture any one life on Earth. Complement the charming [Here We Are]( with Jeffers’s [illustrated love letter to books]( and his [imaginative celebration of the alphabet]( then revisit Carl Sagan on [why reading is essential to a just world](. Illustrations courtesy of Oliver Jeffers [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [On the Tranquility of Mind: Seneca on Resilience, the Trap of Power and Prestige, and How to Calibrate Our Ambitions for Maximum Contentment]( “Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” the poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her [abiding ode to perseverance](. But in our quest to do the best we can, we are apt to defeat ourselves by pushing against life with the brute force of uncalibrated ambition, razing our peace of mind on the sharp-edged sense that there is always more to achieve. If the object of life is not mere resilience but flourishing, attaining it may be less a matter of wild pursuit of favorable outcomes that leave us perpetually dissatisfied and reaching for more than of wise acceptance that allows us to do the best we can with the cards we’ve been dealt. That is what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examines in a dialogue titled “On the Tranquility of Mind,” included in the indispensable 1968 volume [Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters]( ([public library](. Seneca, translated here by classics scholar Moses Hadas, admonishes against the trap of power and prestige: We are all chained to fortune: the chain of one is made of gold, and wide, while that of another is short and rusty. But what difference does it make? The same prison surrounds all of us, and even those who have bound others are bound themselves; unless perchance you think that a chain on the left side is lighter. Honors bind one man, wealth another; nobility oppresses some, humility others; some are held in subjection by an external power, while others obey the tyrant within; banishments keep some in one place, the priesthood others. All life is slavery. Therefore each one must accustom himself to his own condition and complain about it as little as possible, and lay hold of whatever good is to be found near him. Illustration from [Six Dots]( the illustrated story of how blind child inventor Louis Braille changed the world Two millennia before Holocaust survivor and humanitarian Viktor Frankl proffered his hard-earned conviction 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,”]( Seneca writes: Nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it. Small tablets, because of the writer’s skill, have often served for many purposes, and a clever arrangement has often made a very narrow piece of land habitable. Apply reason to difficulties; harsh circumstances can be softened, narrow limits can be widened, and burdensome things can be made to press less severely on those who bear them cleverly. In a complement to his famous advice on [our mightiest self-defense against misfortune]( Seneca highlights the other side to this notion of not letting ill fortune dispirit us — the importance of also not letting our desire for good fortune imprison us into a state of endless striving: With the omission of those things which either cannot be done, or can only be done with difficulty, let us follow the things which are placed near at hand and which offer encouragement to our hopes; but let us remember that all things are equally unimportant, presenting a different appearance on the outside, but equally empty within. Art from [Louis I, King of the Sheep]( an illustrated parable of how power corrupts. He cautions against envying those who rank higher than we do and who hold positions of power, for power is its own trap and ambition, as David Foster Wallace [observed two thousand years later]( a double-edged sword: Whatever seems lofty is dangerous… Those whom an unfavorable fortune has placed in a critical position will be safer if they eliminate pride from their proud circumstances and bring down their fortune as much as possible to a lowly state. Indeed there are many who must of necessity cling to their high position, from which they cannot descend except by falling: but they testify that … they are not raised to their high position, but chained to it: let them prepare, by means of justice and human clemency, with a kind and liberal hand, many means of assistance for a safe descent, on the hope of which they can rest more securely. Yet nothing will free us from these disturbances of the mind so well as always fixing some limit to our advancement. Art from [Beastly Verse]( by JooHee Yoon Untamed ambition, Seneca admonishes, stands in the way of meeting life on its own terms with calm consent — acceptance that is the supreme prerequisite for tranquility of mind. The most we can do, he argues, is accept every card life deals us, be it winning or losing, as temporarily borrowed from the deck to which it must ultimately return. The measure of wisdom and the key to peace of mind is the nonresistance and graciousness with which we return what we have borrowed when the time of our loan is up: The wise man … does not need to walk about timidly or cautiously: for he possesses such self-confidence that he does not hesitate to go to meet fortune nor will he ever yield his position to her: nor has he any reason to fear her, because he considers not only slaves, property, and positions of honor, but also his body, his eyes, his hands, — everything which can make life dearer, even his very self, as among uncertain things, and lives as if he had borrowed them for his own use and was prepared to return them without sadness whenever claimed. Nor does he appear worthless in his own eyes because he knows that he is not his own, but he will do everything as diligently and carefully as a conscientious and pious man is accustomed to guard that which is entrusted in his care. Yet whenever he is ordered to return them, he will not complain to fortune, but will say: “I thank you for this which I have had in my possession. I have indeed cared for your property, — even to my great disadvantage, — but, since you command it, I give it back to you and restore it thankfully and willingly…” If nature should demand of us that which she has previously entrusted to us, we will also say to her: “Take back a better mind than you gave: I seek no way of escape nor flee: I have voluntarily improved for you what you gave me without my knowledge; take it away.” What hardship is there in returning to the place whence one has come? That man lives badly who does not know how to die well. Complement the altogether magnificent [Stoic Philosophy of Seneca]( with Seneca on [the antidote to anxiety]( his insightful advice on [distinguishing between true and false friendship]( and Marcus Aurelius — another Stoic sage of timeless wisdom — on [the key to living fully](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2017, my 11th year of doing this, I poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. one-time donation You can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: Made inBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book](//brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629) [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](