Bertrand Russell on what makes a fulfilling life, an illustrated celebration of the many meanings and manifestations of love, an immigrant's tale

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 [brainpickings.org]( weekly digest by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — 'Frankenstein' author Mary Shelley on creativity, Seneca on what it means to be a generous human being, an ode to "the bond of live things everywhere" — you can catch up [right here](. And if you'd like to try something new/old, I've launched another newsletter that comes out every Wednesday, offering a midweek pick-me-up — something inspiring and uplifting culled from the twelve-year Brain Pickings archive. You can sign up for that [here](. If you're enjoying my labor of love, please consider supporting it 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. [How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life]( “If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he [contemplated the measure of a life well lived]( on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same life-stage in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year and later published in [Portraits from Memory and Other Essays]( ([public library](. Bertrand Russell Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on [the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors]( he writes: Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her [stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity]( Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who [jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life]( and concludes: The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done. [Portraits from Memory and Other Essays]( is an uncommonly potent packet of wisdom in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with Nobel laureate André Gide on [how happiness increases with age]( Ursula K. Le Guin on [aging and what beauty really means]( and Grace Paley on [the art of growing older]( — the loveliest thing I’ve ever read o the subject — then revisit Russell on [critical thinking]( [power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge]( [what “the good life” really means]( [why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness]( and his [remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation](. [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]( [Love]( “What is love?” Kafka asked in contemplating [love and the power of patience](. “After all, it is quite simple,” he answered his own question. “Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.” Behind the comical quip lies a common strain of cynicism. One need not be [as profoundly defeated by love as Kafka]( to default to this achingly human form of self-defense — for cynicism is, after all, [a maladaptive coping mechanism]( when we feel the threat of disappointment and heartbreak. I take a less cynical perspective and stand with J.D. McClatchy: [“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”]( And in those moments when the heart stands on the brink of breakage, I like to revise Borges’s [timeless reflection on the nature of time]( substituting love for time to produce a sentiment of equally exquisite profundity: “Love is the substance I am made of. Love 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.” Perhaps the truest and most abiding thing about love is that it means different things to each of us, and presents itself in myriad different guises. That splendid multiplicity of manifestations is what author Matt de la Peña and illustrator Loren Long explore with uncommon loveliness in a book simply titled [Love]( ([public library]( — a testament to my [long-held conviction]( that great “children’s” books are simply great books, imaginative and intelligible to young readers, replete with soulful wisdom that spills into what we grownups call philosophy. In the beginning there is light and two wide-eyed figures standing near the foot of your bed, and the sound of their voices is love. The book is as a mosaic of vignettes, each unfolding against the backdrop of the New York City skyline and capturing a particular tessellation of love, addressed in the second person to a child who transmogrifies across ages, genders, ethnicities, and faiths across the pages — a small black boy whose older brother hands him breakfast as they watch their father take the bus to work in the blizzard at dawn; a small Latina girl clutching her teddy bear as terrifying news streams into the family living room under the blessing glances of Frida Kahlo and Jesus Christ; a Muslim girl laying in an open field of flowers, drinking in the love of the trees and the wind and the universe; a little white boy curled with his dog under the grand piano of a lavish home, looking small and lonely and afraid as his father rages and his mother cries; a young black girl searching her own beautiful eyes in the bathroom mirror — all discovering the various meanings and manifestations of love, braided of sweetness and difficulty and simple gladness. A cabdriver plays love softly on his radio while you bounce in back with the bumps of the city and everything smells new, and it smells like life. Love is the embrace of a mother after a bad dream, and a grandfather’s creased face, and a father dancing with his daughter atop their mobile home overlooking a clothesline and the ocean sunset, and the old lady pointing to the sky with reverence for the steadfast stars. Love, too, is the smell of crashing waves, and a train whistling blindly in the distance, and each night the sky above your trailer turns the color of love. On the night the fire alarm blares, you’re pulled from sleep and whisked into the street, where a quiet old lady is pointing to the sky. “Stars shine long after they’ve flamed out,” she tells you, “and the shine they shine with love.” One day you find your family nervously huddled around the TV, but when you ask what happened, they answer with silence and shift between you and the screen. And in time you learn to recognize a love overlooked. A love that wakes at dawn and rides to work on the bus. A slice of burned toast that tastes like love. And the man in rags outside the subway station plays love notes that lift into the sky like tiny beacons of light. Complement the throughly wonderful [Love]( with philosopher Skye Cleary on [why we love]( John Steinbeck’s [letter of advice on love]( to his teenage son, philosopher Martha Nussbaum on [how you know whether you love somebody]( and Jessica Strand’s [enchanting illustrated collection of classic love poems]( then dive into this growing archive of [beautiful love letters](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [From Immigrant to Inventor: The Great Serbian-American Scientist Michael Pupin on the Value of a Penniless Immigrant Boy Full of Promise]( “Society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her timeless, increasingly timely meditation on [the immigrant experience and the meaning of “refugee.”]( But discrimination is also a self-inflicted wound by which the society perpetrating it bleeds internally — not only because it lacerates the moral fabric of the culture, but because it is a means by which a society cheats itself of the vital [polyphony of voices]( necessary for symphonic polity. That is what the great Serbian-American physicist and chemist Michael Pupin (October 4, 1858–March 12, 1935) illustrates with his life in his Pulitzer-winning 1923 autobiography [From Immigrant to Inventor]( ([public library](. Michael Pupin Born in a Serbian village so tiny as to be missing from maps, Pupin immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. Having sold all of his belongings — his books, his clothes, his watch, his beloved yellow sheepskin coat — to pay for the fare, he made the long journey across the Atlantic aboard an immigrant ship with just the clothes on his back and “a red Turkish fez which nobody would buy.” He landed at Castle Garden — New York’s first immigration station, predating Ellis Island by nearly half a century — on a sunny morning in the first days of spring midway through his fifteenth year. Pupin recounts the electric elation of his arrival into a new life of possibility: On the fourteenth day, early in the morning, the flat coast-fine of Long Island hove in sight. Nobody in the motley crowd of excited immigrants was more happy to see the promised land than I was. It was a clear, mild, and sunny March morning, and as we approached New York Harbor the warm sun-rays seemed to thaw out the chilliness which I had accumulated in my body by continuous exposure to the wintry blasts of the North Atlantic. I felt like a new person, and saw in every new scene presented by the New World as the ship moved into it a new promise that I should be welcome. Nine years later, Emma Lazarus would channel this ethos of unconditional welcome in her iconic sonnet [“The New Colossus,”]( giving voice to the newly erected Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free Nearly a century and a half later, as this country made of and by immigrants suffers a tragic kind of auto-immune policy failure, Pupin’s words burn with searing pertinence: He who has never crossed the stormy Atlantic during the month of March in the crowded steerage of an immigrant ship does not know what hardships are. I bless the stars that the immigration laws were different then than they are now, otherwise I should not be among the living. To stand the great hardships of a stormy sea when the rosy picture of the promised land is before your mind’s eye is a severe test for any boy’s nerve and physical stamina; but to face the same hardships as a deported and penniless immigrant with no cheering prospect in sight is too much for any person. Michael Pupin, 1916. With the hindsight of half a century and a lifetime of uncommon accomplishment, Pupin looks back on that pivotal moment when he arrived to America as a penniless boy full of promise: I had only five cents in my pocket. Had I brought five hundred dollars, instead of five cents, my immediate career in the new, and to me a perfectly strange, land would have been the same. A young immigrant such as I was then does not begin his career until he has spent all the money which he has brought with him. I brought five cents, and immediately spent it upon a piece of prune pie, which turned out to be a bogus prune pie. It contained nothing but pits of prunes. If I had brought five hundred dollars, it would have taken me a little longer to spend it, mostly upon bogus things, but the struggle which awaited me would have been the same in each case. It is no handicap to a boy immigrant to land here penniless; it is not a handicap to any boy to be penniless when he strikes out for an independent career, provided that he has the stamina to stand the hardships that may be in store for him. Insisting that immigrants must never lose sight of “their meaning and their vital importance in American life,” he adds another sentiment of harrowing relevance today: If the present standards had prevailed forty-eight years ago I should have been deported. There are, however, certain things which a young immigrant may bring to this country that are far more precious than any of the things which the present immigration laws prescribe. The greatest gift a young immigrant confers upon their new home, Pupin argues, is the gift of perspective — of seeing the landscape of culture with new eyes. “An immigrant can see things which escape the attention of the native,” he writes. Our ways of seeing are invariably shaped by our formative experiences, which factor into [the combinatorial nature of our creative contribution](. Pupin illustrates this by drawing a beautiful coiling line between his formative experience as a peasant boy in the fields of rural Serbia and his field of scientist endeavor: The light of the stars, the sound of the grazing oxen, and the faint strokes of the distant church-bell were messages of caution which on those dark summer nights guided our vigilance over the precious herd… Enveloped in the darkness of night and surrounded by countless burning stars, we guarded the safety of our oxen. The rest of the world had gone out of existence; it began to reappear in our consciousness when the early dawn announced what we boys felt to be the divine command, “Let there be light,” and the sun heralded by long white streamers began to approach the eastern sky, and the earth gradually appeared as if by an act of creation. Every one of those mornings of fifty years ago appeared to us herdsmen to be witnessing the creation of the world — a world at first of friendly sound and light messages which made us boys feel that a divine power was protecting us and our herd, and then a real terrestrial world, when the rising sun had separated the hostile mysteries of night from the friendly realities of the day. […] Sound and light being associated in my young mind of fifty years ago with divine operations by means of which man communicates with man, beast with beast, stars with stars, and man with his Creator, it is obvious that I meditated much about the nature of sound and of light. I still believe that these modes of communication are the fundamental operations in the physical universe and I am still meditating about their nature. “General View of Apparatus used by Dr. Pupin” (Smithsonian Report, 1901) Pupin would go on to become one of America’s most prolific inventors. The recipient of eighteen doctorates, he would make significant contributions to early X-ray imaging and would revolutionize telecommunication with his invention of a loading coil that greatly extended the long-distance range of signal transmission across telephone wires. A founding member of NASA predecessor [NACA]( he would preside over some of the country’s most esteemed scientific institutions, including the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A lunar crater bears his name. [From Immigrant to Inventor]( ([public library]( which I discovered through an admiring mention in [Freeman Dyson’s letters]( is a magnificent read in its totality — one of those rare books, on par with Oliver Sacks’s [On the Move]( and Erwin Chargaff’s [Heraclitean Fire]( in which a visionary scientist looks back on a life of strife and achievement to emerge with something larger than an autobiography, radiating into philosophy, politics, cultural history, and creative inquiry. Complement this particular portion with Margaret Mead and James {NAME}’s fantastic forgotten conversation about [the problematic metaphor of the “melting pot”]( and Alfred Kazin on [loneliness and the immigrant experience](. [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](