Walt Whitman on democracy and our mightiest force of resistance, Martin Buber on love and what it really means to live in the present, and more

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 — Iris Murdoch on storytelling, art as citizenship, and the key to good writing, Oliver Sacks on nature and the interconnectedness of the universe — 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. [Walt Whitman on Democracy and Optimism as a Mighty Form of Resistance]( “Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Zadie Smith wrote in her [spectacular essay on optimism and despair](. The illusion of permanent progress inflicts a particularly damning strain of despair as we witness the disillusioning [undoing]( of triumphs of democracy and justice generations in the making — despair preventable only by taking [a wider view of history]( in order to remember that democracy advances in fits and starts, in leaps and backward steps, but advances nonetheless, on timelines exceeding any individual lifetime. Amid our current atmosphere of presentism bias and extreme narrowing of perspective, it is not merely difficult but downright countercultural to resist the ahistorical panic by taking such a telescopic view — lucid optimism that may be our most unassailable form of resistance to the corruptions and malfunctions of democracy. That is what Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) insisted on again and again in [Specimen Days]( ([public library]( — the splendid collection of his prose fragments, letters, and diary entries that gave us his wisdom on [the wisdom of trees]( [the singular power of music]( [how art enhances life]( and [what makes life worth living](. Walt Whitman (Library of Congress) Shortly before his sixtieth birthday and a decade after issuing his immensely prescient admonition that [“America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,”]( Whitman writs under the heading “DEMOCRACY IN THE NEW WORLD”: I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy. Having lived and [saved lives]( through the Civil War, having seen the swell of “vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations,” having witnessed the corrosion of idealism and the collapse of democratic values into corruption and complacency, Whitman still faces a dispiriting landscape with a defiant and irrepressible optimism — our mightiest and most countercultural act of courage, then and now and always: Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society in our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the subject which I find possessing many good people. Zooming out of the narrow focus of his cultural moment — as we would be well advised to do with ours — Whitman takes [a telescopic perspective]( of time, progress, and social change, and considers what it really takes to win the future: The advent of America, the history of the past century, has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities — to this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening — and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something beyond — namely, the sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements… Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will finally make the blood and brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes. Three years later, and ten presidencies before a ruthless government began [assaulting and exploiting nature as a resource for commercial and political gain]( Whitman revisits the subject under the heading “NATURE AND DEMOCRACY—MORTALITY”: American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices — through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life — must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will morbidly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part — to be its health-element and beauty-element — to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World. [Specimen Days]( remains one of the most timelessly insightful books I have ever encountered. Complement this particular portion with Iris Murdoch on [why art is essential for democracy]( Rebecca Solnit on [lucid optimism in dark times]( and Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman’s [animated tribute to Leonard Cohen’s anthem to democracy]( then revisit Whitman on [the essence of happiness]( and his [advice on the building blocks of character](. [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]( [Reality, Representation, and the Search for Meaning: Argentine Artist Mirtha Dermisache’s Invented Graphic Languages]( “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Nietzsche asked in contemplating [how we use language to both reveal and conceal reality](. A century after Nietzsche, the Argentine artist Mirtha Dermisache (February 21, 1940–January 5, 2012) set out to probe the limits and possibilities of language by filling countless notebooks, letters, and postcards with text. None of it was legible. In the 1970s, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with a distinct syntactic texture and a visual rhythm that inclines toward meaning, or the longing for meaning. The lines she composed in them — so purposeful, so fluid, evocative of a script in a foreign tongue or a cardiograph or birdsong notation — become a Rorschach test, beckoning the mind to wrest from them a message, a meaning, a representation of some private reality of thought and feeling. These exquisite and enticing graphical texts, now collected in [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( ([public library]( radiate a poetic reminder that language itself is an invention — a net woven of abstraction in which we try to hold reality, only to watch it all too often slip through uncaught. Sin título (Texto), no date, c. 1970s, ink on paper, from [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. Page from Sin título (Libro), 1971, unique artist’s book, ink on paper, from [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. Sin título (Texto), no date, c. 1970s, ink on paper, from [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. Page from Libro No. 1, 1972, unique artist’s book, ink on paper, from [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. Sin título (Texto), no date, c. 1970s, ink on paper, from [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. Sin título (Texto), no date, c. 1970s, ink on paper, [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. Sin título (Texto), no date, c. 1970s, ink on paper, from [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( published by [Siglio]( and [Ugly Duckling Presse]( 2018. Image courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive. [Mirtha Dermisache: Selected Writings]( comes from the visionary Siglio Press, which also gave us [Tantra Song: Tantric Painting from Rajasthan]( and [Everything Sings]( — Denis Wood’s imaginative maps for a narrative atlas of a neighborhood. Complement it with a [visual history of language]( then revisit [Codex Seraphinianus]( — history’s strangest and most beautiful encyclopedia of imaginary things, written in a code language. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [Philosopher Martin Buber on Love and What It Means to Live in the Present]( “Love is the quality of attention we pay to things,” poet J.D. McClatchy [wrote]( seven decades after the brilliant and underappreciated philosopher Simone Weil observed that [“attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”]( The type of attention that makes for generous and unselfish love is what the Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (February 8, 1878–June 13, 1965) examined in [I and Thou]( ([public library]( — the 1923 existentialist masterpiece in which Buber laid out his [visionary relation modality that makes us real to one another](. Martin Buber Echoing Tolstoy’s insistence that [“love is a present activity only [and] the man who does not manifest love in the present has not love,”]( Buber extends his distinction between the objectifying It and the subjectifying Thou into the most intimate domain of relation, and writes: The present, and by that is meant not the point which indicates from time to time in our thought merely the conclusion of “finished” time, the mere appearance of a termination which is fixed and held, but the real, filled present, exists only in so far as actual presentness, meeting, and relation exist. The present arises only in virtue of the fact that the Thou becomes present. […] True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past. Love, Buber argues, is something larger than affect — not a static feeling, but a dynamic state of being lived in the present. In a counterpoint to [the Proustian model of love]( he writes: Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it… Feelings are “entertained”: love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from [The Well of Being]( In consonance with psychologist turned pioneering sculptor Anne Truitt’s definition of love as [“the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery,”]( Buber writes: Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its “content,” its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses… Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou. In this lies the likeness — impossible in any feeling whatsoever — of all who love, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blessedly protected man, whose life is rounded in that of a loved being, to him who is all his life nailed to the cross of the world, and who ventures to bring himself to the dreadful point — to love all men. Half a century after naturalist John Muir observed that [“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,”]( Buber adds: We live our lives inscrutably included within the streaming mutual life of the universe. [I and Thou]( which explores what it means to expand the boundaries of the self and grant others the dignity and sanctity of Thou, is a superb read in its entirety. Complement this particular portion with Adrienne Rich on [how honorable relationships refine our truths]( Erich Fromm on [what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving]( and a lovely [illustrated meditation on the many meanings and manifestations of love](. [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. 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