Love vs. desire, astrophysicist Janna Levin reads Ursula K. Le Guin's "Hymn to Time," a Nobel Pace Prize laureate on what it means to be yourself

NOTE: This newsletter 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. Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [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 — Rilke on creativity, Erich Fromm on the paradox of inner freedom, Lynn Margulis on the spirituality of science, and more — you can catch up [right 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. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Hymn to Time”]( “The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” Kierkegaard wrote in contemplating [the paradoxical nature of time]( half a century before Einstein [forever changed our understanding of it](. As relativity saturated the cultural atmosphere, Virginia Woolf was tussling and taffying with [time’s confounding elasticity]( the psychology of which scientists have since [dissected](. We are beings of time and in time — something Jorge Luis Borges spoke to beautifully in his classic 1946 [meditation on time]( “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” That riverine dimension of being is what Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) explores with spare words and immense splendor of sentiment in “Hymn to Time” from her final poetry collection, [Late in the Day]( ([public library]( — a poem embodying her conviction that [“science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside, [and] both celebrate what they describe.”]( In this recording created as a warmup for our second annual [Universe in Verse]( astrophysicist Janna Levin — who has [written beautifully]( about the nature of time herself — brings Le Guin’s poem to life in thirty-five transcendent seconds: HYMN TO TIME by Ursula K. Le Guin Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance. Time makes room for going and coming home and in time’s womb begins all ending. Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding. Complement with Hannah Arendt on [space, time, and our thinking ego]( then revisit Le Guin’s [feminist translation]( of the timeless Tao Te Ching and Levin’s splendid reading of [“Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich]( from the inaugural edition of [The Universe in Verse](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have 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 Brooklyn lunch. one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( [J.D. McClatchy on the Contrast and Complementarity of Desire and Love]( We are creatures of such staggering psychoemotional complexity that we are often opaque to ourselves, purblind to the constellation of our own thoughts, our own feelings, our chaotic and often contradictory desires — nowhere more so than in the realm of the heart. “The alternations between love and its denial,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in contemplating [the difficulty of knowing ourselves]( “constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.” Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of that interior opacity is that of distinguishing between love and desire, both electrifying in their own right and interdependent in many ways, but throughly distinct species of being. The contrast and complementarity between the two is what the late, great poet and literary polymath J.D. McClatchy (August 12, 1945–April 10, 2018) explores in the preface to [Love Speaks Its Name]( ([public library]( — his lovely 2001 anthology of LGBT love poems. J.D. McClatchy (Photograph: Geoff Spear) With an eye to the kaleidoscopic intoxication of desire and its contradistinction to love, McClatchy writes: A desire can be a vague wish, a sharp craving, a steadfast longing, a helpless obsession. It can signal an absence or a presence, a need or a commitment, an ideal or an impossibility. The root of the word “desire” links it to consider and to terms of investigation and augury, thereby reminding us that desire is often less what we feel than what we think about what we feel. And the still deeper root of the word links it to star and shine, as if our desires, and bright centers of our being, were also like the fixed fates in the heavens, determining the course of our lives. Indeed, our mundane experience of desire often coincides with this sense of something beyond our control, of something confusing, something driving us beyond the bounds of habit or reason. It is the heart of our hearts, the very stuff of the self. Desire explodes past borders of time or law. It drifts through veils of propriety. It cannot be confined by social expectations or strictures. Love is something else again. As mysterious as are the ways of desire, and as disconcerting its effects, love is desire raised to a higher power. It can be as consuming as desire, but it lasts longer. Love is the quality of attention we pay to things. Love is both the shrine and the idol. Love is what we make of other people, and what they make of us. It can be as dispassionate as a Zen monk’s, or as wasting as the Romantic hero’s. In a sentiment that calls to mind physicist Richard Feynman’s [extraordinary love letter to his young wife]( penned after her untimely death, McClatchy adds: Love has nothing to do with behavior or circumstance. Love doesn’t require sexual expression, or even a meeting, just as it continues, often stronger, after the beloved’s death. […] Anxiety is sewn into the lining of euphoria. What makes the beloved so dear, what makes love so precious, is the realization that it may — no, in the end, it will — end…. Love’s illusions are constructed in order to be undermined. Vulnerability, not music, is the food of love. Our fears are the black backing of our silvered hopes, and are as much a part of love as are the anticipation and the fervor. And when love evaporates or ends? Perhaps the most poignant stage of love is not its tender antennae probing the new surface, and not the glistening track of its progress, but the shell into which it retreats for shelter. Neither betrayal nor death can end our love. The force of memory, and the heart’s persistent needs see to that… Poems are meant to embody and eternalize the moment. So too are our memories of a love, just as love itself, when we are in the grip of it, throws off the shackles of time and makes us — for a moment that seems forever — feel divine. Art from [Love Found]( — a diverse illustrated collection of classic love poems celebrating desire, longing, and devotion Reflecting on the poems he anthologized — poems about “both desire and its higher power, and love in its tender or taunting variety”; poems composed by “men and women whose desires for love, over the centuries, have been condemned and persecuted” — McClatchy echoes Nietzsche’s insight into [how we use metaphors to both conceal and reveal reality]( and extols the singular power of poetry to liberate love from the confines of punitive concealment: To hide something is to conceal it; to disguise something is to reveal it but only to those who know how and where to look. The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. To make a metaphor, after all, is to describe something in terms of what it is not, the better to apprehend what it is. The poems gathered in [Love Speaks Its Name]( — timeless gems by poets as diverse as Sappho and Shakespeare, {NAME} and Bishop, Whitman and Wilde — are sectioned along the stages of love: longing, looking, loving, ecstasy, anxiety, and aftermath. Complement this tiny treasure with [Love Found]( — an illustrated collection of classic love poems celebrating desire, longing, and devotion — and some of humanity’s [most beautiful LGBT love letters]( then revisit Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue on [the disorientation of falling in love]( and Anne Sexton’s intoxicating hymn to desire, [“Song for a Lady.”]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [An Openness to Life: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dag Hammarskjöld on Love, Failure, and What It Means to Be Yourself]( Months after his death in a plane crash while traveling to negotiate a ceasefire during the budding civil war in Congo, the Swedish diplomat, economist, and author Dag Hammarskjöld (July 29, 1905–September 18, 1961) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Hammarskjöld became one of only two people in history awarded the Nobel posthumously. John F. Kennedy considered him the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. Hammarskjöld left behind a most unusual manuscript, eventually published as [Markings]( ([public library]( — a compendium of reflections and poems constellating a luminous record of one person’s struggle for a foothold of meaning, radiating universal human truth. Partway between [young Tolstoy’s diaries]( [Walt Whitman’s prose meditations]( and [artist Ann Truitt’s journals]( these fragments of thought and feeling embody what it means for a person who has devoted their life to moral action to also have a rich inner life of contemplation — the rare, bountiful marriage of via activa and via contemplativa, as W.H. Auden observes in his admiring foreword to the book. Hammarskjöld contemplates love, justice, devotion, morality, and empathy, united by a larger inquiry into the nature of being, which he explores through the relationship between self and other, self and world, self and self-containing consciousness. Das Hammarskjöld Writing at the peak of WWII, as he is still orienting himself in his own sense of purpose, thirty-six-year-old Hammarskjöld examines the interplay of emotion and the intellect in how we relate to ourselves and to others: Openness to life grants a lightning-swift insight into the life situation of others. What is necessary? — to wrestle with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form — and then act accordingly. In another entry from the same period, Hammarskjöld considers the dignity in our human capacity for devoting ourselves to the improbable, the unreasonable, that which is bound to break our own hearts: It makes one’s heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn’t this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn’t the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self-delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all — every one of us — take ourselves serious is not merely ridiculous. Four years later, Hammarskjöld echoes young Borges’s [insistence on the illusoriness of the self]( and probes the crux of our self-delusion: At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one — which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I. Nowhere does our overinvestment in the I swell to more self-harming proportions than in our relationship with other I’s to whom we feel bound by the threads of deep and demanding emotion — threads on which we pull greedily, unreasonably, unlatching the inevitable Rube Goldberg machine of unmeetable expectation, disappointment, and heartbreak. More than half a century before Hilton Als considered [the art of receptivity at the heart of love]( Hammarskjöld reflects: When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover. Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a [rare 1917 edition]( of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Hammarskjöld finds that what mitigates this tension of need between self and self is a surrender to the relationship between self and nature. “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on,” Whitman exulted in [contemplating hat gives life meaning]( “[and] have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” Generations after Whitman, Hammarskjöld writes: So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the oil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no — but refreshed, rested — while waiting. In another entry, he considers what it takes to surrender ourselves to Nature’s embrace: The extrahuman in the experience of the greatness of Nature. This does not allow itself to be reduced to an expression of our human reactions, nor can we share in it by expressing them. Unless we each find a way to chime in as one note in the organic whole, we shall only observe ourselves observing the interplay of its thousand components in a harmony outside our experience of it as harmony. Landscape: only your immediate experience of the detail can provide the soil in your soul where the beauty of the whole can grow. Photograph by Maria Popova Like Whitman, Hammarskjöld saw this harmony between humanity and the natural world as inseparable from, and in some deep sense essential for, the harmony within the human world, between human beings. Two years into his post as Secretary-General of the United Nations, he writes: Salty and wind-swept, but warm and glittering. Keeping in step with the measure under the fixed stars of the task. How many personal failures are due to a lack of faith in this harmony between human beings, at once strict and gentle. In his fiftieth year, Hammarskjöld echoes Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s poignant lament about [the loneliness of leadership]( and reflects: For him who has responded to the call of the Way of Possibility, loneliness may be obligatory. That year, Hammarskjöld records a kind of personal resolution, governed by the humanistic ideals that became the animating ethos of his public life: To remain a recipient — out of humility. And preserve your flexibility. To remain a recipient — and be grateful. Grateful for being allowed to listen, to observe, to understand. [Markings]( is a singular and singularly rewarding read in its entirety. Complement it with Nobel laureate André Gide’s [rules of moral conduct]( and Susan Sontag on [what it means to be a decent human being](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have 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 Brooklyn lunch. one-time donation Or 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. [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](