Van Gogh on the beauty of sorrow, Rachel Carson on the science of why the sea is blue, the illustrated story of saving the world's coral reefs

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 — Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz on love, Mary Wollstonecraft on friendship, a lovely illustrated fable of belonging and the meaning of home — 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. [Van Gogh on the Beauty of Sorrow and the Enchantment of Storms, in Nature and in Life]( [everyours_vangoghletters.jpg?w=680]( doesn’t deal happiness with an even hand — some lives are more weighed down by sorrow than others. It can be easy, and misguided, to romanticize suffering — despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s [superb admonition against it]( we have a long cultural history of perpetuating the “tortured genius” myth, the reality behind which is [far more complex](. What would it mean, instead, to orient ourselves toward sorrow neither with indulgence nor with self-pity, to regard it not as a malignancy of life but as part of its elemental richness? That is what Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) addressed in a remarkable letter to his brother Theo, found in [Ever Yours: The Essential Letters]( ([public library]( — the treasure trove that gave us Van Gogh on [talking vs. doing]( and [how inspired mistakes move us forward](. [vangogh.jpg?w=600] ‘Self-Portrait with Straw Hat’ by Vincent van Gogh Despite his lifelong poverty, despite his [debilitating mental illness]( Van Gogh managed to transmute his various hardships into some of the most visionary art humanity has produced. During one particularly harrowing period of struggle, he writes to his brother in a letter from the Hague penned in mid-September 1883: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]You write about your walk to Ville-d’Avray that Sunday, at the same time on that same day I was also walking alone, and I want to tell you something about that walk, since then our thoughts probably crossed again in some degree. Van Gogh had set out on this particular walk in order to clear his head and his heart after finally splitting up with Sien — the alcoholic prostitute with whom he had fallen in love a year and a half earlier, just after recovering from the heartbreak that taught him [how to turn unrequited love into fuel for art](. It was a deeply ambivalent breakup — Van Gogh recognized that they couldn’t make each other happy in the long run, but he was deeply attached to Sien and her children, as was she to him. Seeking to quiet his mind, Van Gogh headed out “to talk to nature for a while.” From this turbulent inner state, he witnessed a violent storm which, paradoxically, reconciled him to his sorrow and helped him rediscover in it the elemental beauty of life. [vangogh_pinetree.jpg?resize=600%2C763] Vincent van Gogh: Pine Trees against an Evening Sky, 1889. (Van Gogh Museum) He recounts this transcendent encounter with nature to his brother: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]You know the landscape there, superb trees full of majesty and serenity beside green, dreadful, toy-box summer-houses, and every absurdity the lumbering imagination of Hollanders with private incomes can come up with in the way of flower-beds, arbours, verandas. Most of the houses very ugly, but some old and elegant. Well, at that moment, high above the meadows as endless as the desert, came one driven mass of cloud after the other, and the wind first struck the row of country houses with their trees on the opposite side of the waterway, where the black cinder road runs. Those trees, they were superb, there was a drama in each figure I’m tempted to say, but I mean in each tree. Then, the whole was almost finer than those windblown trees seen on their own, because the moment was such that even those absurd summer houses took on a singular character, rain-soaked and dishevelled. In it I saw an image of how even a person of absurd forms and conventions, or another full of eccentricity and caprice, can become a dramatic figure of special character if he’s gripped by true sorrow, moved by a calamity. It made me think for a moment of society today, how as it founders it now often appears like a large, sombre silhouette viewed against the light of reform. Writing half a century before before Rilke contemplated [how great sadnesses bring us closer to ourselves]( Van Gogh adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Yes, for me the drama of a storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the best… Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness, but chiefly to let the form be felt, to make the lines of the silhouette speak. But let the whole be sombre. [vangogh_stormyweather1.jpg?resize=680%2C886] Vincent Van Gogh: Landscape in Stormy Weather, 1885. (Van Gogh Museum) Seven years later, the drama of sorrow [disfigured the silhouette of Van Gogh’s life](. Complement this fragment of Van Gogh’s deeply alive [Essential Letters]( with French philosopher Simone Weil — one of the most luminous and underappreciated minds of the twentieth century — on [how to make use of our suffering]( and Tchaikovsky on [depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul]( then revisit Nicole Krauss’s beautiful letter to Van Gogh across space and time about [fear, courage, and how to break our destructive patterns](. [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]( [The Brilliant Deep: The Illustrated Story of the Man Who Set Out to Save the World’s Coral Reefs with Hammer and Glue]( [thebrilliantdeep.jpg?fit=320%2C282]( “Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?” poet Marie Howe asked in her [stunning contribution to The Universe in Verse](. She imagined a time before we severed ourselves from “Nature,” a time when there were “no tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain.” The living reality of coral reefs animated another visionary poet a century and a half earlier: In his ode to [“the world below the brine,”]( Walt Whitman celebrated corals as some of our planet’s most wondrous creatures. A living example of [non-Euclidean geometry]( corals have graced Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They are as remarkable in their evolutionary longevity as they are fragile in their dependence on the health of the world’s oceans, from which springs the health of Earth itself — a physical embodiment of naturalist and [Whitman biographer]( John Muir’s poetic assertion that [“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”]( But under the combinatorial assault of climate change, overfishing, and pollution, coral reefs have been dying at a heartbreaking rate in the century and a half between Muir and Whitman’s time and our own — how, we must wonder, could they not feel the pain of such brutal demise? One man set out to heal this ecological heartbreak with an ingenious remedy involving hammer and glue. [thebrilliantdeep2.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( [thebrilliantdeep22.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Ken Nedimyer grew up near the Kennedy Space Center as the son of a NASA engineer in the golden age of space exploration. And yet he fell in love not with the stars but with the depths — a world then [more mysterious than the Moon]( — after seeing a television program about the ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau. [thebrilliantdeep23.jpg?resize=680%2C464]( [thebrilliantdeep24.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [thebrilliantdeep3.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( This young love became a lifelong devotion. [thebrilliantdeep4.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( Nedimyer’s story and immensely inspiring work come alive in [The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World’s Coral Reefs]( ([public library]( by Kate Messner, illustrated by [Matthew Forsythe]( — a lovely addition to the growing body of [picture-book biographies of cultural heroes](. Like many scientific breakthroughs, Nedimyer’s radical marine remedy began with a stroke of luck. [thebrilliantdeep5.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( [thebrilliantdeep26.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Nedimyer had translated his childhood love of the oceans into a quiet life of farming live rocks — rocks covered with algae, sponges, mollusks, and other marine life, used as a handsome natural water purification system in saltwater aquariums. One day, he noticed that a colony of staghorn corals had spawned and migrated to his rocks from the nearby open waters of Florida. [thebrilliantdeep1.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( [thebrilliantdeep30.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Messner writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It starts with one. One night, after a full moon, the corals begin to spawn — releasing first one, then millions of tiny lives — until the waters swirl like a snow globe. As Nedimyer and his daughter observed these lovely interlopers, they noticed that if they cut pieces of living coral off and attached them to other rocks — literally gluing them on — the coral from the original colony would grow on this new blank canvas for life. So they wondered what would happen if they grew a coral colony and tried attaching it to a dying reef. [thebrilliantdeep6.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( Nedimyer decided to return to the reef where he had learned to dive as a child — a reef that had begun dying when he was still young. He took six small coral colonies from his farm, each no larger than an outstretched hand, and glued them onto the bleached and barren limestone. [thebrilliantdeep27.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Month after month, Nedimyer and his team dove to check on this hand-mended reef. Month by month, the coral colonies grew larger and larger. [thebrilliantdeep25.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Out of this heartening experiment the [Coral Restoration Foundation]( was born — Nedimyer’s rugged and revolutionary effort to bring coral reefs back to life through a new kind of marine conservation driven by hammer, glue, and the hands of a swarm of volunteers. [thebrilliantdeep29.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( They began farming coral by hanging small bits on special underwater trees, until the corals were large enough to be transplanted to dying reefs — an operation performed with tremendous care and precision by the volunteer divers as they find the perfect place for the graft, clear the surface of algae, smooth it with chipping hammers, dab a touch of epoxy — “just the size of a Hershey’s Kiss,” Messner writes — and attach the living coral colonies to the dead, hoping they would grow on their own. And grow they did — since Nedimyer launched this improbable mission, he and his volunteers have planted tens of thousands of coral colonies that are now reproducing on their own. What began as one man’s labor of love in the Florida Keys — the locus of his childhood love of the ocean — has become a global model of hands-on resistance to the assault on nature. [thebrilliantdeep28.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Messner brings this cycle-of-life story — of a coral colony, of one man’s dream, of our ecological interdependence — full circle: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Tonight, the moon will be full and bright. The corals may spawn, and if one tiny life lands in just the right spot, another new colony will grow. And then another. And another. And another. It starts with one. [thebrilliantdeep7.jpg?resize=680%2C303]( To support this wonderful and hope-giving project, consider [donating to]( or [volunteering with]( Nedimyer’s Coral Restoration Foundation. [thebrilliantdeep20.jpg?resize=680%2C449]( Complement [The Brilliant Deep]( with the illustrated stories of other world-shifting visionaries — [Jane Goodall]( [Jane Jacobs]( [Ada Lovelace]( [Louise Bourgeois]( [John Lewis]( [Frida Kahlo]( [E.E. Cummings]( [Louis Braille]( [Pablo Neruda]( [Albert Einstein]( [Muddy Waters]( and [Nellie Bly]( — then revisit the [lyrical 1937 essay]( with which marine biologist Rachel Carson invited the human imagination into the underwater world and ignited our aquatic empathy. Illustrations courtesy of Chronicle Books; page photographs by Maria Popova [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Why the Sea Is Blue: Rachel Carson on the Science and Splendor of the Marine Spectrum]( [theseaaroundus_carson.jpg?fit=320%2C505]( “The world is blue at its edges and in its depths,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her contribution to [history’s most beautiful meditations on the color blue](. And yet blue itself is a universe of color — the world is woven not of blue but of blues. “Each blue object could be,” Maggie Nelson observed in her [stunning serenade to the most existential color]( “an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe.” Nowhere is this chromatic cosmos richer than in the marine world, and no one has had more profound an impact on impressing its science and splendor upon the popular imagination than marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964). [rachelcarson_undersea.jpg?resize=680%2C398] Rachel Carson In 1937, a quarter century before she [catalyzed the modern environmental movement]( with her epoch-making book Silent Spring, Carson pioneered a new storytelling aesthetic by making science a literary subject in an exquisite Atlantic Monthly essay titled [Undersea](. This lyrical, unprecedented invitation to imagine our blue planet from the perspective of nonhuman creatures — creatures that inhabit the aquatic mystery Walt Whitman called [“the world below the brine”]( — earned Carson a book deal. It became the basis of her 1951 book [The Sea Around Us]( ([public library]( which won Carson the National Book Award and soon rendered her the most respected science writer in America. With her uncommon gift for bridging the scientific and the poetic — a gift rooted in Carson’s conviction that [science is part and particle of our spiritual bond with nature]( — she writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]To the human senses, the most obvious patterning of the surface waters is indicated by color. The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness; the green water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life. The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays into deep water all the red rays and most of the yellow rays of the spectrum have been absorbed, so when the light returns to our eyes it is chiefly the cool blue rays that we see. Where the water is rich in plankton, it loses the glassy transparency that permits this deep penetration of the light rays. The yellow and brown and green hues of the coastal waters are derived from the minute algae and other microorganisms so abundant there. Seasonal abundance of certain forms containing reddish or brown pigments may cause the “red water” known from ancient times in many parts of the world, and so common is this condition in some enclosed seas that they owe their names to it — the Red Sea and the Vermilion Sea are examples. But the sea’s truest blue is its blackest — the result of the subtraction of light from the fathomless sum of all colors. In a chapter hauntingly titled “The Sunless Sea,” Carson writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The unrelieved darkness of the deep waters has produced weird and incredible modifications of the abyssal fauna. It is a blackness so divorced from the world of the sunlight that probably only the few men who have seen it with their own eyes can visualize it. We know that light fades out rapidly with descent below the surface. The red rays are gone at the end of the first 200 or 300 feet, and with them all the orange and yellow warmth of the sun. Then the greens fade out, and at 1000 feet only a deep, dark, brilliant blue is left. In very clear waters the violet rays of the spectrum may penetrate another thousand feet. Beyond this is only the blackness of the deep sea. Complement this particular portion of the wholly enthralling [The Sea Around Us]( with a lovely [animated adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot]( then revisit Carson on [writing and the loneliness of creative work]( her brave and prescient [letter protesting the government’s assault on nature]( and her [almost unbearably moving farewell to her soul mate](. [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](