An illustrated ode to wonder and our consanguinity with the universe, Amanda Palmer reads Wendell Berry's poignant protest against injustice, 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 — stunning Rorschach silhouettes of trees at night from the 1920s, Toni Morrison on borders, otherness, belonging, and the meaning of home, and more — 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. [Against the Slippery Slope of Evil: Amanda Palmer Reads Wendell Berry’s Stunningly Prescient Poem “Questionnaire”]( [leavings_wendellberry.jpg?fit=320%2C486]( “Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her [classic treatise on the normalization of evil]( “most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the deliberate protections we must place between unrelenting evil and our own sanity and goodness, for among the most insaning aspects of tyrannical regimes is the Stockholm syndrome of the psyche they inflict upon us — upon ordinary people, not-evil people, people who consider themselves decent and good, but who slowly, through a cascade of countless small concessions, lose sight of the North Star of their native moral compass. Therein lies the true seat of terror, the kind of terror James {NAME} meant when he made his chilling observation that [“it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”]( The Nobel-winning dissident poet Joseph Brodsky, who was expatriated for speaking inconvenient truth to power and sentenced to five years at a Soviet labor camp, captured this chilling dynamic perfectly as he contemplated [the most powerful antidote to evil]( “What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.” How to strip that guise is what Wendell Berry, another poet of uncommon insight and courage of conviction, examines in his stunningly prescient poem “Questionnaire,” first published in 2009, later included his altogether magnificent poetry collection [Leavings]( ([public library]( and generously read here by [poetry-lover]( and my dear friend [Amanda Palmer]( with the lovely score of crickets in the summer night: [c3df1cc3-b50b-4ee5-bba3-8382e8d2d433.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]QUESTIONNAIRE by Wendell Berry - How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons. - For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred. - What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy. - In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without. - State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill. Complement with Berry on [how to be a poet and a complete human being]( then revisit Amanda Palmer reading [“The Hubble Photographs”]( by Adrienne Rich, [“Having It Out With Melancholy”]( by Jane Kenyon, [“Humanity i love you”]( by E.E. Cummings, [“Possibilities”]( by Wisława Szymborska, and [“The Mushroom Hunters”]( by Neil Gaiman. Amanda’s work, like my own, is made possible by patronage — join me in [supporting her work]( so that she may go on bringing beauty and bravery into this world. [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]( [Eating the Sun: A Lovely Illustrated Celebration of Wonder, the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential Mystery of Being Human]( [eatingthesun_sanders.jpeg?fit=320%2C441]( “I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” poet Diane Ackerman wrote in her [Cosmic Pastoral]( which so enchanted Carl Sagan — her doctoral advisor — that he sent a copy of the book to Timothy Leary in prison. “Wonder,” Ackerman observed nearly half a century later in her [succulent performance at The Universe in Verse]( “is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time.” That ricochet wonder, in its myriad kaleidoscopic manifestations diffracted by various scientific phenomena, reflected by various facets of this splendidly interconnected universe, and hungrily absorbed by the human heart, is at the center of [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( ([public library]( by Ella Frances Sanders — the boundlessly curious writer and artist who gave us [Lost in Translation]( that lovely illustrated dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world. [eatingthesun_sanders11.jpg?resize=680%2C957] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders Sanders writes in the preface to this lyrical and luminous celebration of science and our consanguinity with the universe: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]A sense of wonder can find you in many forms, sometimes loudly, sometimes as a whispering, sometimes even hiding inside other feelings — being in love, or unbalanced, or blue. For me, it is looking at the night for so long that my eyes ache and I’m stuck seeing stars for hours afterwards, watching the way the ocean sways itself to sleep, or as the sky washes itself in colors for which I know I will never have the words — a world made from layers of rock and fossil and glittered imaginings that keeps tripping me up, demanding I pay attention to one leaf at a time, ensuring I can never pick up quite where I left off. [eatingthesun_sanders4.jpg?resize=680%2C934] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders With an eye to [the miraculous absurdity of our existence]( — we only exist by chance, after all, in a universe [governed by chaos and predicated on impermanence]( — Sanders writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping. Cry because we cannot even begin to understand how beautiful it is, cry because we are terribly flawed as a species, cry because it all seems so shockingly improbable that maybe our existence could be nothing but a dreamscape — celestial elephants in rooms without walls. But then? Surely, we can laugh. Laugh because being riddled head-to-toe with human emotions while trying to come to terms with just how indisputably tiny we are in the grand scheme of things, makes absolutely everything and everyone seem quite ridiculous, entirely farcical. We have heads? Ridiculous! There are arguments about who is in charge here? Ridiculous! The universe is expanding? Ridiculous! We feel it necessary to keep secrets? Ridiculous. [eatingthesun_sanders3.jpg?resize=680%2C974] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders In fifty-one miniature essays, each accompanied by one of her playful and poignant ink-and-watercolor drawings, Sanders goes on to explore a pleasingly wide array of scientific mysteries and facts — evolution, chaos theory, clouds, [the color blue]( the nature of light, [the wondrousness of octopuses]( the measurement of time, Richard Feynman’s famous [cataclysm sentence]( the clockwork mesmerism of planetary motion, [our microbiome]( the puzzlement of [why we dream](. What emerges is something sweetly consonant with Nabokov’s exultation at our [“capacity to wonder at trifles”]( — except, of course, even the smallest and most invisible of these processes, phenomena, and laws are not trifles but condensed miracles that make the everythingness of everything we know. It is tempting, then — and Sanders succumbs to the temptation in a most delicious way — to seek the existential in the scientific, even if the thread between the two is slender and human-made, rather than woven by this vast unfeeling universe in which we warm ourselves with wonder. In a chapter on our organic composition, so memorably captured in Carl Sagan’s assertion that [“we too are made of starstuff,”]( Sanders shines a sidewise gleam on the illusion of the solid and separate self: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Depending on where you look, what you touch, you are changing all the time. The carbon inside you, accounting for about 18 percent of your being, could have existed in any number of creatures or natural disasters before finding you. That particular atom residing somewhere above your left eyebrow? It could well have been a smooth, riverbed pebble before deciding to call you home. You see, you are not so soft after all; you are rock and wave and the peeling bark of trees, you are ladybirds and the smell of a garden after the rain. When you put your best foot forward, you are taking the north side of a mountain with you. [eatingthesun_sanders1.jpg?resize=680%2C918] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders Sanders revisits the subject through the lens of the physics beneath the chemistry in a chapter on the structure and discovery of the atom. In a passage evocative of physicist Alan Lightman’s wonderful explanation of [why we are mostly restlessness and empty space]( she writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Such a beautiful (and until recently invisible) idea, the importance and unavoidable nature of atoms, one that seems to put everyone and everything on a satisfyingly level playing field. Your good and bad decisions, your wingspan, your wholeness as a person — these are all possible because of your own 7 billion billion billion atoms, each one made up of (roughly speaking) a positive nucleus in the middle, and the negative electron cloud surrounding it — a cloud that sort of dances from side to side, alternately enchanting other atoms and pushing them away (the really complicated magic can be left to quantum mechanics). Without atoms, nothing would be here; not the book in your hands, not the pen that leaked into your pocket this morning, not those buildings that are enough to make you scared of heights, nothing. If it weren’t for atoms, there wouldn’t be mass, or molecules, or matter, or me, or you. [eatingthesun_sanders5.jpg?resize=680%2C940] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders The irrepressible human inquiry that magnetizes our imagination and draws us to the inner workings of the universe is the same inquiry Tolstoy scrawled into the diaries of his youth: [“This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?”]( Sanders weaves these elemental questions — what are we made of and what does that make us? — into nearly every scientific curiosity she picks up, but she addresses them directly in a chapter devoted to [our strangely continuous sense of self]( devoid of a physical basis of continuity. She writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The idea of an unchanging “you” or “self” is inherently fraught with confusion and conflict, and if you consider the topic for too long it can begin to feel clammy, almost suspect. An apparent string running through all the previous versions of you — the one five minutes ago, a few hours ago, several years — the idea of “self” inevitably gets tangled up in things like the physical body and appearance, like memory. It’s clear that you cannot pin yourself down as any one particular “thing” but rather that you resemble a story line, an endless progression, variations on a theme, something that enables you to relate your present “self” to the past and future ones. [eatingthesun_sanders2.jpg?resize=680%2C929] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders Echoing the great neurologist Oliver Sacks’s recognition of [narrative as the cognitive pillar of personhood]( she adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]We do seem to make sense of ourselves and the world as a part of a narrative — we think in terms of main characters, those we speak and interact with, and where the beginnings, the middles, and the endings are. Radiating from the book is lucid, lyrical consolation for the elemental disquietude of existence — the fact that haunting the fundamental laws of the universe and the sturdy certitude of their mathematics is the daily chaos of uncertainty with which we must somehow live, keeping one eye on our greatest loves and greatest losses, on the trifling urgencies of the mundane, and the other, wincing, on the only certainty there is: that one day we shall cease to exist. Sanders writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]A lot of our time is spent trying to tie up loose ends, trying to shape disorder into something recognizably smooth, trying to escape the very limits that hold us close, happily ignoring rough edges and the inevitable. We separate ourselves out into past, present, and future, if only to show that we have changed, that we know better, that we have understood something inherent; if only to draw neat lines from start to finish without looking back. The problem is that chaos is always only ever sitting just across the table, frequently glancing up from its newspaper, from its coffee cup filled with discolored and imploding stars. Because chaos too waits. Waits for you to notice it, for you to realize it’s the most dazzling thing you’ve ever seen, for all of your atoms to collectively shriek in belated recognition and stare, mouth open, at how exquisitely embedded it is in everything. Because we are not designed to be more orderly than anything else; seams have a tendency to come apart with time — you and the universe are the same in this way, which makes for a delicately overwhelming struggle. So, then, if you can’t ever end things neatly, can’t ever put them back quite the way you found them, surely the alternative is to remain stubbornly carbonated with possibility, to never rest from your rotation. To keep assembling stories between us, stories about how everything was everything, about how much we loved. [eatingthesun_sanders8.jpg?resize=680%2C934] Art from [Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe]( by Ella Frances Sanders Complement [Eating the Sun]( with [The Edge of the Sky]( — a poetic, unusual primer on the universe, written with the 1,000 most common words in the English language — and Carl Sagan on [how to live with mystery]( then revisit the great nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir on [the universe as an infinite storm of beauty](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [How to Punctuate with Style: Lewis Thomas’s Charming Meditation on the Subtleties of Language]( [themedusaandthesnail_thomas.jpg?fit=320%2C490]( Theodor Adorno celebrated punctuation as [the “friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language.”]( Mary Oliver jested that [each writer has a lifetime quota of them]( to be used judiciously. Indeed, the wielding of these tiny meaning-making symbols is a supreme test of a writer’s sensitivity to language as an instrument of sentiment and a laboratory for feeling. No one has conferred upon them more dignity and delight than the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) in his essay “Notes on Punctuation,” included in [The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher]( ([public library]( — the altogether scrumptious 1979 collection that gave us Thomas’s [beautiful meditation on altruism and affection]( and [one of the finest things ever written about the mystery of the self](. [landofpunctuation34.jpg] Art by Rathna Ramanathan for a [modern graphic design edition]( of Christian Morgenstern’s 1905 poem “In the Land of Punctuation” Thomas opens the essay, the whole of which is strewn with clever meta-demonstrations of his points about the marks, with a Russian nesting doll of punctuational observations: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))). [lewisthomas1.jpg?resize=595%2C737] Lewis Thomas (Photograph: NYU archives) He makes his case for commas in a nearly comma-free paragraph, adorned by precisely four exquisitely pinned specimens: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn’t realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself. In defiance of Kurt Vonnegut’s scornful (and, by present standards, possibly politically incorrect) condemnation of semicolons as [“transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”]( and only proving “that you’ve been to college,” Thomas writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer. [landofpunctuation000.jpg?resize=680%2C513] Art by Rathna Ramanathan for a [modern graphic design edition]( of Christian Morgenstern’s 1905 poem “In the Land of Punctuation” Thomas’s own scorn is reserved for the unworthy whole of which the semi-colon is supposed to be a mere half: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Colons are a lot less attractive, for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself, and, secondly, you suspect you’re in for one of those sentences that will be labeling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven’t sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered. Also, many writers use this system loosely and incompletely, starting out with number one and number two as though counting off on their fingers but then going on and on without the succession of labels you’ve been led to expect, leaving you floundering about searching for the ninethly or seventeenthly that ought to be there but isn’t. In a passage of especial urgency in our era of rampant misquotations littering the Internet and rampant bunny-eared hands rising in the midst of conversation to insert an air quote when the intention is irony or emphasis rather than citation, Thomas writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks… Above all, quotation marks should not be used for ideas that you’d like to disown, things in the air so to speak. Nor should they be put in place around clichés; if you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society. In a sentiment I have long shared — and one with which I also regard the use of Italics for emphasis, that pitiable attempt to compensate for a failure of style with styling — Thomas turns to the neediest, vainest, most off-putting of punctuation marks: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality! […] A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work. [landofpunctuation0.jpg?resize=680%2C475] Art by Rathna Ramanathan for a [modern graphic design edition]( of Christian Morgenstern’s 1905 poem “In the Land of Punctuation” Poetry, of course, owes a great share of its splendor to the miracle of surprise; to the twists of expectation and convention that plunge you suddenly and thrillingly into a whole new world; a world adjacent to but ordinarily inaccessible from the ordinary. Thomas Wentworth Higginson — Emily Dickinson’s editor — admonished that dashes should be used [only in “short allowance” or else they “will lose all their proper power”]( — advice Dickinson went on to boldly ignore, dealing her ample dashes like breaths, like blades, in verses that revolutionized poetry. Thomas, who must have read Dickinson given his erudition and his intense love of poetry, is far friendlier to dashes than her editor had been a century earlier: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The dash is a handy device, informal and essentially playful, telling you that you’re about to take off on a different tack but still in some way connected with the present course — only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he’s back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period. [landofpunctuation00.jpg?resize=680%2C513] Art by Rathna Ramanathan for a [modern graphic design edition]( of Christian Morgenstern’s 1905 poem “In the Land of Punctuation” Thomas ends by returning to his love of semi-colons, kindled by T.S. Eliot’s exquisite use of them in Four Quartets ([“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement.”]( and writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath. Commas can’t do this sort of thing; they can only tell you how the different parts of a complicated thought are to be fitted together, but you can’t sit, not even take a breath, just because of a comma, And so it ends, in a triumph of deliberately rule-defiant delight. Complement this fragment of Thomas’s wholly enjoyable and freshly insightful [The Medusa and the Snail]( with the zany and politically prescient 1905 poem [“In the Land of Punctuation,”]( then revisit Thomas on [the poetics of smell as a mode of knowledge]( and [our cosmic potential](. [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. 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