Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz on love, Mary Wollstonecraft on friendship, a lovely illustrated fable of belonging and the meaning of home

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[Pioneering Feminist Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft on Loneliness, Friendship, and the Courage of Unwavering Affection]( [wollstonecraft_sweden.jpg?fit=320%2C480]( “We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich observed in her exquisite meditation on [the art of honorable human relationships]( shortly before we began [commodifying the word friend]( by egregious misuse and overuse in the hands of so-called social media. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell wrote in contemplating [how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship](. A century before Mitchell and two centuries before Rich, another trailblazing woman — the British philosopher and political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759–September 10, 1797) — considered the complexities of friendship and companionship in her 1796 book [Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark]( ([public library]( | [free ebook]( composed four years after she ignited the feminist consciousness with her landmark treatise [Vindication of the Rights of Woman]( and shortly after she attempted suicide in the wake of heartbreak. Part travelogue and part memoir, exploring subjects spanning from beauty and the sublime to divorce laws and prison reform, this collection of twenty-five pieces drawn from Wollstonecraft’s diaries and letters to her lover inspired readers to travel to Scandinavia and influenced the titans of Romantic poetry, Wordsworth and Coleridge. A year after its publication, Wollstonecraft would die of complications from childbirth after bringing future Frankenstein author [Mary Shelley]( into the world. [marywollstonecraft_johnopie.jpg?resize=680%2C829] Mary Wollstonecraft shortly before her death. Portrait by John Opie. In the twelfth letter, having left Norway’s Tønsberg for the next stop on her journey, Wollstonecraft considers how it is possible to arrive at a place with “a sort of emancipation” and yet suffer a hollowing loneliness in the absence of loved ones: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I dreaded the solitariness of my apartment, and wished for night to hide the starting tears, or to shed them on my pillow, and close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone. Why has nature so many charms for me — calling forth and cherishing refined sentiments, only to wound the breast that fosters them? … Self-applause is a cold solitary feeling, that cannot supply the place of disappointed affection, without throwing a gloom over every prospect, which, banishing pleasure, does not exclude pain. I reasoned and reasoned; but my heart was too full to allow me to remain in the house, and I walked, till I was wearied out, to purchase rest — or rather forgetfulness. From this paradoxical place of emancipation and loneliness, she laments the common pitfall of friendship and companionship: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Friendship is in general sincere at the commencement, and lasts whilst there is anything to support it; but as a mixture of novelty and vanity is the usual prop, no wonder if it fall with the slender stay. Lasting relationships, Wollstonecraft argues, require a certain courage and tenacity of affection after the novelty and the flattery of the other person’s attention wear out: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised; yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are; and a degree of simplicity, and of undisguised confidence, which, to uninterested observers, would almost border on weakness, is the charm, nay the essence of love or friendship, all the bewitching graces of childhood again appearing… I therefore like to see people together who have an affection for each other; every turn of their features touches me, and remains pictured on my imagination in indelible characters. She revisits the subject in the seventeenth letter. After noting that under Swedish law, both husband and wife can easily obtain a divorce if they can prove the infidelity of the other party — not the case in England, where divorce at the time was readily available only to the rich and of great difficulty for women — Wollstonecraft writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Affection requires a firmer foundation than sympathy, and few people have a principle of action sufficiently stable to produce rectitude of feeling; for in spite of all the arguments I have heard to justify deviations from duty, I am persuaded that even the most spontaneous sensations are more under the direction of principle than weak people are willing to allow. [Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark]( is a beautiful and at times harrowing read, replete with insight into such facets of existence as gender, identity, politics, death, the building blocks of character, and the essential elements of social change. Complement this particular portion with Seneca on [true and false friendship]( Aristotle on [the art of human connection]( and John O’Donohue on [the ancient Celtic notion of soul friend]( then revisit Wollstonecraft on [the power of the imagination in human relationships](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like 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]( [King of the Sky: A Lyrical Illustrated Fable of Belonging and the Meaning of Home]( [kingofthesky.jpg?fit=320%2C271]( “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their [magnificent 1973 conversation](. But what do freedom and belonging mean in an age when immigration — that is, institutionalized otherness, divisiveness, and exclusion — is remapping humanity’s geopolitical and emotional landscape? That is what zoologist and author Nicola Davies and illustrator Laura Carlin explore with uncommon tenderness in [King of the Sky]( ([public library]( — the lyrical story of a young immigrant boy, trapped in unbelonging after his family leave their native Italy for the gloomy and forlorn hills of Wales. [kingofthesky2.jpg?resize=680%2C286]( His hollowing loneliness spills from the pages under Davies’s poetic pen and Carlin’s soft, deeply alive illustrations: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It rained and rained and rained. Little houses huddled on the humpbacked hills. Chimneys smoked and metal towers clanked. The streets smelled of mutton soup and coal dust. And no one spoke my language. All of it told me This is not where you belong. [kingofthesky3.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( Throughout the story, we see the boy’s family — his mother, his infant sister — only as a ghostly and fragmentary presence, further contouring his all-consuming sense of isolation. Dislocated and desolate, magnetized by nostalgia, he finds solace in the improbable friendship of his elderly neighbor — a retired coal miner who spends his days caring for and training racing pigeons. [kingofthesky4.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( [kingofthesky22.jpg?resize=680%2C462]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Just one thing reminded me of home — of sunlight, fountains, and the vanilla smell of ice cream in my nonna’s gelateria. It was Mr. Evans’s pigeons in their loft behind my house, cooing as if they strutted in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. [kingofthesky5.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( [kingofthesky23.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Every day, the boy visits Mr. Evans and watches his pigeons soar “above the chimneys and the towers, up to where the sky stretched all the way to Italy.” One day, Mr. Evans puts a grey pigeon with a head “whiter than a splash of milk” into his young friend’s hands — a pigeon he believes is going to be a champion, one whose “eye blazed with fire.” He asks the boy to name the bird. Re del Cielo, he replies in an instant — King of the Sky. [kingofthesky6.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( [kingofthesky25.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( The boy begins accompanying Mr. Evans on train trips, releasing the pigeons at various stations along the line to let them race back home, taking them a little farther each time. Each time, boy and man return to the loft, eating Mrs. Evans’s Welsh cakes as they await the pigeons’ steadfast return. [kingofthesky24.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It never took them long. From places far away, places that they’d never been, the pigeons flew home straight and fast as arrows. But the pigeon with the milk-white head was always last. Still Mrs. Evans said he’d be a winner. Aged and frail, Mr. Evans grows weaker by the day. By racing season, unable to leave his bed, he entrusts his young friend with putting the race rings on the birds, taking them to the train station, and logging their return on his clipboard. [kingofthesky7.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( The pigeons’ winnings rake in, but none for King of the Sky. Still, Mr. Evans asserts with unfaltering confidence that the white-headed bird is destined for victory — if only they can find the right race for him. “He’s got the wings for distance,” he tells the boy. One day, the perfect race for King of the Sky emerges — the bird would go all the way to the boy’s native Rome by train, then race more than a thousand miles back to the humble Welsh loft. As the race commences and King of the Sky starts making his way back from Italy, rain and lightning envelop the land. For two days and nights, the boy awaits his champion’s return, but the pigeon is nowhere to be seen. [kingofthesky26.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [kingofthesky8.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I sat beside y friend’s bed, and told him that perhaps the sunlight and the fountains and the vanilla smell of ice cream from a thousand gelaterie had made our pigeon want to stay. “No!” said Mr. Evans. “That will only tell him… This is not where you belong.” [kingofthesky28.jpg?resize=680%2C461]( [kingofthesky9.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( [kingofthesky27.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( At last, the downpour ends and the boy runs outside to squint at the sky, into the clouds of fragile hope. And there it is — “a speck… a blob… a bird.” His King of the Sky — a soaring alter ego for the displaced boy trying to make a home in a new land, trying to fathom the depth and meaning of belonging. [kingofthesky10.jpg?resize=680%2C572]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Twelve hundred miles he’d flown, from somewhere far away he’d never been. Steered north and west, finding his direction from the sun and the force that guides a compass needle. Flown until he saw the shape of humpbacked hills, the lines of little houses and the chimneys, heard the clanking towers, smelled the soup and coal dust. Flown down into the arms of the smiling, crying boy — the boy who knew at last that he was home. [kingofthesky20.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Complement the soulful [King of the Sky]( with [The Blue Songbird]( — a very different but kindred avian-inspired parable of homecoming — and Carson Ellis’s [illustrated meditation on the many things home can mean]( then revisit physicist Freeman Dyson on [how immigration effects a loneliness in time as well as space]( and Hannah Arendt on [the immigrant plight for identity](. Illustrations courtesy of Candlewick Press; photographs by Maria Popova [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [The Great Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz on Love]( [milosz_newandcollectedpoems.jpg?fit=320%2C489]( Perhaps the greatest trial of love, and its greatest triumph, is to unmoor yourself from your longings and refuse to constrict the other with the dictate of your unmet needs — to accept that love, to the extent that it is real, must come unbidden. It cannot be obtained by ultimatum or negotiation; it is not subject to demand; it must flow freely or it doesn’t flow at all. And yet, though [befriending our neediness may be essential to happiness]( how do we keep ourselves from constricting love with the cycle of insatiable need? In tussling with this elemental question, I have found myself returning again and again to two complementary perspectives — the great Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s assertion that [“to love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,”]( built upon his foundational teaching that “understanding is love’s other name”; and poet Nikki Giovanni’s insistence in [her forgotten conversation with James {NAME}]( that “if you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.” We might feel that such an understanding calls for crouching closer and closer to its subject, be it self or other, in order to examine it with narrow focus and shallow depth of field, but this is a misleading intuition — the understanding of love is an expansive understanding, requiring us to zoom out of our habitual solipsism so as to regard ourselves and the object of our love from a great distance against the backdrop of universal life. Nothing articulates this notion more beautifully than a spare, profound poem by the Nobel-winning Polish poet, essayist, translator, diplomat, and dissident Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911–August 14, 2004), found in his indispensable [New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001]( ([public library](. [6e3c1a68-c5ba-4a6d-b13b-5d899ebab94f.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]LOVE by Czesław Miłosz Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it, from various ills. A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. Then he wants to use himself and things So that they stand in the glow of ripeness. It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves: Who serves best doesn’t always understand. Complement with Shel Silverstein’s [lovely illustrated allegory for the simple secret of love]( Rainer Maria Rilke on [what it really means to love]( and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on [how you know whether you love somebody]( then revisit Miłosz’s compatriot and fellow Nobel-winning poet Wisława Szymborska on [great love](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like 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](