An emotional intelligence primer in the form of a tender illustrated poem about our capacity for love, Marcus Aurelius's key to living fully, 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] Dear {NAME}, welcome to this week's edition of the [brainpickings.org]( newsletter by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's digest — Rebecca Solnit on love and living with purpose, Toni Morrison on writing and the transformative power of art, and a lovely picture-book about the Moon — you can catch up [right here](. And if you are enjoying this labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – I spend innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [My Heart: An Emotional Intelligence Primer in the Form of an Uncommonly Tender Illustrated Poem About Our Capacity for Love]( [myheart_luyken.jpg?fit=320%2C417]( “How is your heart?” I recently asked a friend going through a trying period of overwork and romantic tumult, circling the event horizon of burnout while trying to bring a colossal labor of love to life. His answer, beautiful and heartbreaking, came swiftly, unreservedly, the way words leave children’s lips simple, sincere, and poetic, before adulthood has learned to complicate them out of the poetry and the sincerity with considerations of reason and self-consciousness: “My heart is too busy to be a heart,” he replied. How does the human heart — that ancient beast, whose roars and purrs have inspired sonnets and ballads and wars, defied myriad labels too small to hold its pulses, and laid lovers and empires at its altar — unbusy itself from self-consciousness and learn to be a heart? That is what artist and illustrator Corinna Luyken explores in the lyrical and lovely [My Heart]( ([public library]( — an emotional intelligence primer in the form of an uncommonly tender illustrated poem about the tessellated capacities of the heart, about love as a practice rather than a state, about how it can frustrate us, brighten us, frighten us, and ultimately expand us. [myheart_luyken1.jpg?resize=680%2C447] [myheart21.jpg?resize=680%2C453] [myheart22.jpg?resize=680%2C453] [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]My heart is a window, My heart is a slide. My heart can be closed or opened up wide. Some days it’s a puddle. Some days it’s a stain. Some days it is cloudy and heavy with rain. Across the splendid spare verses, against the deliberate creative limitation of a greyscale-and-yellow color palate, a sweeping richness of emotional hues unfolds. What emerges is one of those rare, miraculous “children’s” books, in the tradition of The Little Prince, teaching kids about some elemental aspect of being human while inviting grownups to unlearn what we have learned in order to rediscover and reinhabit the purest, most innocent truths of our humanity. [myheart23.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Some days it is tiny, but tiny can grow… and grow… and grow. [myheart24.jpg?resize=680%2C453] [myheart25.jpg?resize=680%2C453] [myheart_luyken2.jpg?resize=680%2C447] [myheart26.jpg?resize=680%2C456] [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]There are days it’s a fence between me and the world, days it’s a whisper that can barely be heard. There are days it is broken, but broken can mend, and a heart that is closed can still open again. [myheart_luyken3.jpg?resize=680%2C447] [myheart27.jpg?resize=680%2C453] [myheart28.jpg?resize=680%2C434] [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]My heart is a shadow, a light and a guide. Closed or open… I get to decide. [myheart_luyken4.jpg?resize=680%2C447] [myheart20.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Complement [My Heart]( with [The Day I Became a Bird]( — another spare, poetic picture-book about love and learning to unmask our truest selves — and a wondrous [illustrated collection of classic love poems]( then revisit three philosophers’ insightful perspectives on the largest subject in the universe: Erich Fromm on [the greatest obstacle to mastering the art of loving]( Martha Nussbaum on [how you know you love somebody]( and Skye Cleary’s [animated inquiry into why we love](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it 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]( [Marcus Aurelius on Embracing Mortality and the Key to Living with Presence]( [marcusaurelius_meditations.jpg?w=680]( you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the great Lebanese poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote in her beautiful meditation on [time, self, impermanence, and transcendence](. It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures, spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our best earthly efforts. Physicist Alan Lightman contemplated this paradox in his lyrical essay on [our longing for permanence in a universe of constant change]( “It is one of the profound contradictions of human existence that we long for immortality, indeed fervently believe that something must be unchanging and permanent, when all of the evidence in nature argues against us.” Two millennia earlier, before the very notion of a universe even existed, the Roman emperor and [Stoic philosopher]( Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) provided uncommonly lucid consolation for this most disquieting paradox of existence in his [Meditations]( ([public library]( | [free ebook]( — the timeless trove of ancient wisdom that gave us his advice on [how to motivate yourself to get out of bed each morning]( [the mental trick for maintaining sanity]( and [the key to living fully](. [marcusaurelius.jpg?w=680]( Eons before the modern invention of self-help, the Stoics equipped the human animal with a foundational toolkit for self-refinement, articulating their recipes for mental discipline with uncottoned candor that often borders on brutality — an instructional style they share with the Zen masters, whose teachings are often given in a stern tone that seems berating and downright angry but is animated by absolute well-wishing for the spiritual growth of the pupil. It is with this mindset that Marcus Aurelius takes up the question of how to embrace our mortality and live with life-expanding presence in Book II of his Meditations, translated here by Gregory Hays: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The speed with which all of them vanish — the objects in the world, and the memory of them in time. And the real nature of the things our senses experience, especially those that entice us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are loudly trumpeted by pride. To understand those things — how stupid, contemptible, grimy, decaying, and dead they are — that’s what our intellectual powers are for. And to understand what those people really amount to, whose opinions and voices constitute fame. And what dying is — and that if you look at it in the abstract and break down your imaginary ideas of it by logical analysis, you realize that it’s nothing but a process of nature, which only children can be afraid of. (And not only a process of nature but a necessary one.) [duckdeathandthetulip9.jpg] Art from [Duck, Death and the Tulip]( by Wolf Erlbruch, an uncommonly tender illustrated meditation on life and death. In a sentiment Montaigne would echo sixteen centuries later in his assertion that [“to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,”]( Marcus Aurelius rebukes our pathological dread of death by demonstrating how it ejects us from the only arena on which life plays out — the present. Long before Rilke made the countercultural, almost counterbiological observation that [“death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,”]( he adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have? Remember two things: 1) that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; 2) that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. [sidewalkflowers4.jpg] Art by Sydney Smith from [Sidewalk Flowers]( by JonArno Lawson — a lyrical illustrated invitation to living with presence. He concludes by summarizing the basic facts of human life — a catalogue of uncertainties, crowned by the sole certainty of death — and points to philosophy, or the love of wisdom and mindful living, as the only real anchor for our existential precariousness: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion. Then what can guide us? Only philosophy. Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or dishonestly and with imposture, not dependent on anyone else’s doing something or not doing it. And making sure that it accepts what happens and what it is dealt as coming from the same place it came from. And above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed. If it doesn’t hurt the individual elements to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It’s a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil. Complement this portion of the altogether indispensable [Meditations]( with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on [what Freud and Darwin taught us about how to live with death]( neurologist Oliver Sacks on [gratitude, the measure of living, and the dignity of dying]( and philosopher, comedian, and my beloved friend Emily Levine on [how to live with exultant presence while dying]( then revisit two other great Stoics philosophers’ strategies for peace of mind: Seneca on [the antidote to anxiety]( and Epictetus on [love, loss, and surviving heartbreak](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Trailblazing Writer and Feminist Margaret Fuller on the Social Value of Intellectual Labor and Why Artists Ought to Be Paid]( [figuring_jacket_final.jpg?fit=320%2C486]( By the end of her thirties, Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850) — one of the central figures in [Figuring]( — had shaped her young nation’s sensibility in literature and art as founding editor and prolific contributor to the visionary Transcendentalist journal The Dial, advocated for prison reform and African American voting rights as the only woman in a New York newsroom, trekked through war-torn Rome seven months pregnant as America’s first foreign war correspondent, and composed the foundational treatise of American women’s emancipation movement. Elizabeth Barrett Browning would come to admire “the truth and courage in her, rare in woman or man.” Emerson would come to consider her his greatest influence. Fuller alone among the Transcendentalists left the sanctuary of nature to test her ideas and ideals against the real world. She alone used her work as a journalist and literary artist to bring life as it was being lived a little closer to life as she believed it ought to be lived in a just society — pacing the periphery of Walden Pond while philosophizing is not quite the same thing as marching into prisons, asylums, and orphanages to uncover abuse and incite the public to demand change. She alone relinquished the Transcendentalist disdain for material means as an antithesis to the creative life and the life of the mind, instead insisting that artists and those engaged in intellectual labor ought to get paid the way other laborers do. [margaretfuller_daguerreotype.jpg?resize=680%2C880] The only known photograph of Margaret Fuller With her hard-earned income as a teacher and writer, Fuller had put her brothers through Harvard — an institution closed to her and other women for decades to come. In a letter penned in her thirty-third year, she lovingly exhorted her younger brother: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Even your frugality does not enable you wholly to dispense with the circulating medium you so much despise and whose use, when you have thought more deeply on these subjects, you will find to have been indispensable to the production of the arts, of literature and all that distinguishes civilized man. It is abused like all good things, but without it you would not have had your Horace and Virgil stimulated by whose society you read the woods and fields… Two years later, Fuller set sail for Europe to report on the Roman Revolution for the New-York Herald Tribune, where she had been working as the first female editor at a major American newspaper. There, she met and fell in love with a young revolutionary, whose baby she bore at the age of thirty-eight in a willow-hedged cottage by a rapid river in the mountains of Italy. That she survived the birth at all was miracle enough for Fuller, whose health had been hazardously frail since childhood, so she was hardly surprised when her body reached its limit and failed to produce milk. As the young father returned to Rome to resume his duties in the Risorgimento, she hired a local wet nurse. Throughout her time in Europe, she had struggled to make ends meet, writing tirelessly for the Tribune for only $10 per column and constantly negotiating various loans and literary advances. Having supported her mother and brothers since her young adulthood, she was now once again the sole breadwinner for a family — for the baby, for the wet nurse and her own infant, and for her partner, who was unemployed and had relinquished support from his father on account of their political differences. [JudithClay.jpg?resize=680%2C902] Art by Judith Clay from [A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader](. Available [as a print]( benefiting the New York public library system. Frugality took on a new meaning for Fuller as she began working on her ambitious chronicle of the Revolution. In the mountain cottage, which she rented for nine dollars a month, she could feast on “a great basket of grapes” for one cent and a day’s worth of figs and peaches for five. She didn’t hesitate to let her brother know, at the end of a three-page letter, that getting a single page to him cost her eighty cents. In another letter to him penned in the first months of her pregnancy, as she was facing the reality of providing for her new makeshift family, Fuller crystallized her sober philosophy of making a living in a life of purpose: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It is not reasonable to expect the world should pay us in money for what we are but for what we can do for it. Society pays in money for the practical talent exerted for its benefit, to the thinker, as such, only the tribute of materials for thought… We cannot have every thing; we cannot have even many things; the choice is only between a better and worser. Fuller grew convinced that the most she could do for society lay in her chronicle of the revolution she saw as an exalted reach for better over worse, with implications not only for Italy but for the whole of humanity in upholding the ideals of liberty and equality she had long considered vital to human flourishing. And yet, in a letter to her mother penned upon returning to Rome, she articulated a profound recalibration of her sense of contribution: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In earlier days, I dreamed of doing and being much, but now am content with the Magdalen to rest my pleas hereon, “She has loved much.” Couple with Fuller on [what makes a great leader]( then revisit Amanda Palmer, invoking another great Transcendentalist, on [how artists can learn to ask for support and accept love](. For other excerpts from [Figuring]( see Emily Dickinson’s [love letters]( environmental pioneer Rachel Carson’s [timeless advice to the next generations]( Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli on [science, spirituality, and our search for meaning]( the story of how the forgotten sculptor Harriet Hosmer [paved the way for women in art]( Herman Melville’s [passionate and heartbreaking love letters]( to his neighbor and literary hero Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a [stunning astrophysical reading]( of the Auden poem that became the book’s epigraph. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it 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. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](