James {NAME} on how to live through your darkest hour of despair, poet Marie Howe's cosmic serenade to home, physicist Brian Greene on mortality

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](NAME}-marie-howe-brian-greene?e=729b5d7c3e).  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 weekly [Brain Pickings]( newsletter by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Mary Shelley, writing 200 years ago about a pandemic-ravaged world, on what makes life worth living and nature's beauty as a lifeline to sanity — you can catch up [right here](. And if you find any value and joy in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – I spend innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, as I have been for more than thirteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film]( “We, this people, on a small and lonely planet,” Maya Angelou begins [“A Brave and Startling Truth”]( — her cosmic wakeup call to humanity, which flew into space aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft and which opened [the 2018 Universe in Verse]( dedicated to our ecological awakening on the wings of [Rachel Carson’s courageous work](. That year, Marie Howe — one of our great living poets, who awakens the creaturely conscience of the next generation in her ecopoetry class at Sarah Lawrence College — [premiered]( a kindred poem that stilled the crowd constellating at [Pioneer Works]( before erupting into a thousand-bodied standing ovation. While inspired by Stephen Hawking (who had just returned his stardust to the universe several weeks earlier) and titled after his trailblazing work on black holes and singularities — work that shines a sidewise gleam on the origin of everything — the poem is at bottom a stunning meditation on the interconnectedness of belonging across space and time, across selves and species, across the myriad artificial unbelongings we have manufactured as we have drifted further and further from our elemental nature. Its closing line is an invocation, an incantation, ending with a timeless word of staggering resonance today: home. [singularity4.jpg?resize=680%2C380]( As we now stand on a profound precipice two years later — facing our deeply interconnected ecology of being on this shared cosmic home as we look back on fifty years of Earth Day built on Carson’s legacy, facing the most intimate meaning of home in our isolated shelters scattered across this “small and lonely planet” — the poem pulsates with a whole new meaning, as all great poems do in the veins of time. [singularity2.jpg?resize=680%2C381]( And so, as a special treat for [the 2020 Universe in Verse]( streaming on April 25 into millions of homes around this sole shared home, I teamed up with [SALT Project]( — a kindred clan of visual storytellers, who have won some hearts and won some Emmys with their soulful shorts ranging from book trailers to bird migration documentaries — to bring Howe’s “Singularity” to life in a transcendent short film, illustrated by paper collage artist [Elena Skoreyko Wagner]( and featuring original music by the heroic cellist [Zoë Keating]( who was present in atoms at the 2018 show when “Singularity” premiered and who also composed the score for [“Antidotes to Fear of Death”]( — the headlining miracle of a poem for the 2020 show. It is with exuberant joy and gratitude that I share this symphony of beauty and perspective, over which so many talented women have labored with so much heart and generosity of spirit. [d3b4e034-c721-4440-bba1-463e372558c9.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]SINGULARITY by Marie Howe           (after Stephen Hawking) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money — nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you.   Remember? There was no   Nature.    No  them.   No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf    or if the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French; would that we could wake up   to what we were — when we were ocean    and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all — nothing before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it? what once was?    before anything happened? No I, no We, no one. No was No verb      no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is All   everything   home Complement with an ink-and-watercolor animation of Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz’s [gorgeous poem of brokenness and belonging]( from the 2020 Universe in Verse and an animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s [feminist revision of the history of science]( from the inaugural 2017 show, then revisit the [archive of treasures]( from all past seasons of The Universe in Verse [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook](NAME}-marie-howe-brian-greene?fblike=fblike-409c314d&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3D48f014c863%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2020%252F04%252F23%252Fsingularity-marie-howe-animated%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2020%252F04%252F23...) donating=loving Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace 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. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( 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]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 [A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James {NAME} on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe]( [avedon{NAME}_nothingpersonal.jpg?fit=320%2C424]( “Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of [life’s most haunting hour](. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease — for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude. The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit — James {NAME} (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays. [avedon_{NAME}.jpg?resize=680%2C927] Richard Avedon and James {NAME}. (Photograph courtesy of Taschen.) In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, {NAME} joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon — an old high school friend of his — to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book [Nothing Personal]( ([public library](. Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits — of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age- and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope — are four stirring essays by {NAME}, the first of which gave us his famous sobering 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.”]( At no time does the terror within, {NAME} argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed. It is a fearful speculation — or, rather, a fearful knowledge — that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you. Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined [how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives]( {NAME} adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it — life — one more time? [artyoung_treesatnight2.jpg?resize=680%2C1072] Art from [Trees at Night]( by Art Young, 1926. Available [as a print]( After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay — lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” — {NAME} continues: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. That alone, {NAME} insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a [“yea-sayer”]( to life — to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill [this blink of existence bookended by nothingness]( with the courage of a bellowing aliveness. In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem [“Wait,”]( composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, {NAME} writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]For, perhaps — perhaps — between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct — I believe — causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death. [margaretcook_leavesofgrass17.jpg?resize=680%2C853] Art by Margaret C. Cook from [a rare 1913 English edition]( of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Available [as a print](. And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith — so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, {NAME} argues, at four AM: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor — the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self — death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. — And many of us perish then. What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for [night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart]( {NAME} offers: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]But if one can reach back, reach down — into oneself, into one’s life — and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality — oneself — which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again. {NAME} — whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in [introducing his last public appearance]( before his death — wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try — we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves. [littlemanlittleman19.jpg?zoom=2&w=1200] Art by from [Little Man, Little Man]( — James {NAME}’s only children’s book, written to foment his own young nephew’s self-regard. Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that [“we must believe, without fear, in people,”]( {NAME} adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost. More than half a century later, [Nothing Personal]( remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before {NAME}, on [how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit]( then revisit {NAME} on [resisting the mindless of majority]( [how he learned to truly see]( [the writer’s responsibility in a divided society]( his [advice on writing]( his [historic conversation with Margaret Mead]( about forgiveness and responsibility, and his [only children’s book](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like NAME}-nothing-personal-4-am/ on Facebook](NAME}-marie-howe-brian-greene?fblike=fblike-3acffd63&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3D48f014c863%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2020%252F04%252F23%252Fjames-{NAME}-nothing-personal-4-am%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2020%252F04%252F23...) [Physicist Brian Greene on Mortality, Our Search for Meaning, and the Most Important Fact of the Universe]( [untiltheendoftime_briangreene.jpg?fit=320%2C468]( “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,” Rainer Maria Rilke [wrote in letter]( to his grief-stricken friend, the Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, in 1923 — the year he published, after a decade of work, his miraculous [Duino Elegies](. Nearly a century after Rilke’s death, the theoretical physicist and mathematician Brian Greene — who is reading and reflecting on the ninth of Rilke’s ten elegies at [the 2020 Universe in Verse]( — brought the poetics of science to this life-expanding perspective on mortality in his [equally miraculous]( book [Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe]( ([public library]( which he launched in dialogue with his Columbia colleague, [Pioneer Works]( Director of Sciences, and [poetry-performer]( Janna Levin. [BrianGreenePW.jpg?resize=680%2C588] Brian Greene. (Photograph by Michael Avedon for [Pioneer Works Science Studios]( In this fragment from their [altogether revelatory conversation]( Greene bridges Shakespeare and science to consider how facing the elemental fact of our finitude — facing it with the courage that only comes from lucidity, from “absolute and passionate presence with all that is here” — dilates our subjective experience of time and broadens our being, so that while we may not live any longer than we do, we may live wider: [d506ba83-dc95-4559-8155-b9e47a937ac1.png]( Elsewhere in the conversation, and throughout his [excellent book]( Greene echoes the sentiment at the heart of Richard Feynman’s iconic [Ode to a Flower]( insisting that a knowledge of what we are made of, a knowledge of the fundamental laws — the laws that govern the atoms that make the molecules that make the cells that make the conscious, self-reflective beings that examine these laws in conversation and contemplation — helps us tell a fuller story of who and what we are. “When you see all of those stories nested together in one narrative arc,” he says, “it gives a deeper understanding of where we came from, and what’s happening at the moment, and ultimately where we’re going.” He makes an elegant argument for this necessity of self-cohesion in another fragment of [the conversation]( [bce606b8-8a52-461f-822f-6d7434348c59.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]When you recognize that we are the product of purposeless, mindless laws of physics playing themselves out on our particles — because we are, all, bags of particles — it changes the way you search for meaning and purpose: You recognize that looking out to the cosmos to find some answer that’s sort of floating out there in the void is just facing the wrong direction. At the end of the day, we have to manufacture our own meaning, our own purpose — we have to manufacture coherence… to make sense of existence. And when you manufacture purpose, that doesn’t make it artificial — that makes it so much more noble than accepting purpose that is thrust upon you from the outer world. This recognition, Greene reminds us, is the very thing that makes our humanity and the consciousness from which it springs such a wondrous triumph of nature, chance, and evolution: [0293099d-39d2-4a24-a09d-243b2c1d9973.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]If we’re used to thinking of consciousness as this pristine, spectacular quality that we are endowed with from something magical in the external world, to frame it in a reductionist way might feel like we’re flattening it. However, I think it’s utterly spectacular that the very same physical processes that are responsible for this pitcher of water or the structure of this table are what’s responsible for conscious self-awareness — how miraculous that collections of particles can do and think and feel what we do. That, I think, is the conclusion — it amplifies and elevates the wonder of it all, it doesn’t take away from it. In the full conversation, in which Greene goes on to explore consciousness, free will, evolution, storytelling, and more, is well worth savoring and can be savored on [Broadcast]( — the wonderful new digital initiative my friends at Pioneer Works have launched to open to the world their archive of uncommon treasures featuring some of the world’s fiercest and most fertile minds — scientists and artists, Nobel laureates and Pulitzer-winning authors — in conversation and contemplation at the edge of our search for truth, our longing for beauty, and our hunger for meaning. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook](NAME}-marie-howe-brian-greene?fblike=fblike-fd194575&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3D48f014c863%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2020%252F04%252F24%252Fbrian-greene-janna-levin-conversation%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2020%252F04%252F24...) donating=loving Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace 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. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( 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]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 [---] 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](