Spell to be said against hatred, the illustrated story of astronaut Ronald McNair's childhood civil disobedience, Octavio Paz on otherness and courage

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 weekly email digest of the daily online journal [Brain Pickings]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Edward Gorey's illustrated 1969 poem about the secret of true love, a stunning musical tribute to Rachel Carson, Ann Druyan on wonder and the sacred — 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 fourteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [Ronald McNair’s Civil Disobedience: The Illustrated Story of How a Little Boy Who Grew Up to Be a Trailblazing Astronaut Fought Segregation at the Public Library]( [ronsbigmission.jpg?fit=320%2C401]( “Knowledge sets us free… A great library is freedom,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating [the sacredness of public libraries](. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be,” her contemporary James {NAME} — who had [read his way]( from the Harlem public library to the literary pantheon — insisted in [his courageous and countercultural perspective on freedom](. Ronald McNair (October 21, 1950–January 28, 1986) was nine when he took his freedom into his own small hands. Unlike Maya Angelou, who [credited a library with saving her life]( McNair’s triumphant and tragic life could not have been saved even by a library — he was the age I am now when he perished aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger before the eyes of a disbelieving nation. But his life was largely made by a library — a life equal parts inspiring and improbable against the cultural constrictions of his time and place; a life of determination that rendered him the second black person to launch into space, a decade and a half after [a visionary children’s book]( first dared imagine the possibility. A quarter century after McNair’s untimely death, a contemporary children’s book set out to broaden the landscape of possibility for generations to come by celebrating the formative fortitude of his trailblazing life. [ronsbigmission20.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [Ron’s Big Mission]( ([public library]( by lyricist, scriptwriter, and teacher Rose Blue and former U.S. Navy journalist Corinne J. Naden, illustrated by Don Tate — a lovely addition to [these emboldening picture-book biographies of cultural heroes]( — tells the story of a summer day in the segregated South in 1959 when the young Ron, a voracious reader with a passion for airplanes and dreams of becoming a pilot, awakens with the daring determination to bring home a book from the library checked out under his own name. He knows this is not allowed — he has devoured countless books at the library, but he knows that only white people are allowed to check them out. He also knows, with the clarity that children have in seeing into the unalloyed heart of reality, that whatever justification the grownups in power might have for this rule, there is no justice and humanity in it. [ronsbigmission21.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( On the wings of his purehearted enthusiasm to dismantle the hypocrisies of the system, Ron races past the local baker offering him a fresh-baked donut, past his fried Carl shooting hoops, and into the library as the day’s first visitor. [ronsbigmission22.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [ronsbigmission23.jpg?resize=680%2C447]( [ronsbigmission24.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( The head librarian greets him warmly, delighted to see the young reader who has become “her best customer.” Ron waves back and heads straight for the shelves. After the usual disappointment of finding hardly any books with children who look like him, he opts for the impersonal consolation of machines, pulling out a few books about airplanes. [ronsbigmission25.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( When another regular patron of the library — a kindly older white lady — offers to check the books out for him, Ron thanks her but declines. He heads to the front desk and lays the books on the counter. The desk clerk doesn’t even look at him. [ronsbigmission26.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( With a child’s benevolence of interpretation, he thinks at first that she simply hasn’t heard him. But when she continues to disregard him, he does the most logical thing, by the undiluted logic we adults have relinquished in favor of the polite pretensions we call propriety: He jumps on the counter, then calmly restates his wish to check out the books. [ronsbigmission6.jpg?resize=680%2C864]( Everyone is aghast. Ron is reminded of the rule. Still polite but still standing on the counter, he simply restates his wish — a small boy’s enormous act that would have made Thoreau proud as America’s [premier champion of civil disobedience]( and [ardent lover of public libraries](. Other patrons are staring. The library staff are stumped. Finally, they call the police. Two policemen arrive immediately. “Let someone check out the books for you, son,” one of them pleads with Ron. Ron refuses. [ronsbigmission27.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( The head librarian then turns to the ultimate authority — Ron’s mother. When Mrs. McNair arrives, she too reminds Ron of the rule — the rule he has known all along, the rule that is not a matter of reminding but of resisting. When this nine-year-old revolutionary states simply that the rule is wrong and unfair, and asks why he can’t check out books like everyone else, all the adults look at each other and grow silent. The head librarian stares into the empty space as pandemonium enfolds the empty rule, then looks at Ron — this largehearted, hardheaded, hungry-brained boy, her very best customer. And she knows instantly what she must do. [ronsbigmission28.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( In a testament to Hannah Arendt’s superb contemporaneous inquiry into [the only effective antidote to the normalization of evil]( and her insistence that “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not [and] no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation,” the librarian disappears into her office as Mrs. McNair and the policemen continue trying to sway Ron. [ronsbigmission29.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( When she emerges a few minutes later, she hands Ron a library card with his very own name on it. Beaming with his triumph and with gratitude to his sole ally in this act of resistance on the small scale of the personal, with the colossal stakes of the political, he hands the card to the desk clerk as he politely restates his wish to check out the books. [ronsbigmission30.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( She stamps it. The rest is history, and it is the making of a future — Ron’s own future as a trailblazer who devoted his life to the ultimate unifying force, [our shared cosmic belonging]( and the futures of generations for whom he modeled the courage of rewriting the dominant narrative of permission and possibility. Today, a Space Shuttle graces the mural on the walls of the children’s room at the Lake City public library in South Carolina, where all children are allowed to check out any book they wish, including books starring children who look a lot like them. [ronsbigmission31.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Complement [Ron’s Big Mission]( with [What Miss Mitchell Saw]( — a lyrical picture-book about astronomer Maria Mitchell, who blazed the way for women in science — and a [moving remembrance of Ronald McNair]( by his brother, then revisit astronaut Leland Melvin — the thirteenth black astronaut to leave Earth’s atmosphere, and among the fraction of a fraction of one percent of our species to have seen the splendor of our planet’s canopy from space — reading [Pablo Neruda’s love letter to the forest](. For other picture-book biographies of visionaries who have changed the way we understand and live life, savor the illustrated stories of [Wangari Maathai]( [Ada Lovelace]( [Louise Bourgeois]( [Jane Goodall]( [Jane Jacobs]( [John Lewis]( [Frida Kahlo]( [E.E. Cummings]( [Louis Braille]( [Pablo Neruda]( [Albert Einstein]( [Muddy Waters]( and [Nellie Bly](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for fourteen 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 [Spell to Be Said against Hatred: Amanda Palmer Reads Poet Jane Hirshfield’s Miniature Masterwork of Insistence, Persistence, and Compassionate Courage]( [dearamerica.jpg?fit=320%2C467]( “When we come to it,” Maya Angelou beckoned in [her stunning cosmic vision for humanity]( “when the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate…” Then, she bent the mind in language to remind us, and only then will we have risen to our cosmic destiny — a destiny built on the discipline of never forgetting, never daring let ourselves forget, our shared cosmic belonging. [“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.    Remember?”]( But we do forget, and so the minstrel show of hate remains with us; the curtain falls, only to rise again, as if to affirm Zadie Smith’s poignant observation that [“progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”]( It is especially in times of uncertainty, in tremulous times of fear and loss, that the curtain rises and the minstrel show resumes — a show of hate that can be as vicious and pointed as the murderous violence human beings are capable of directing at one another, or as ambient and slow-seething as the deadly disregard for the universe of non-human lives with which we share this fragile, irreplaceable planet. “We don’t know where we belong,” Annie Dillard wrote in her [gorgeous meditation on our search for meaning]( “but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here, here with these silly pansies and witless mountains, here with sponges and hard-eyed birds. In times of sorrow the innocence of the other creatures — from whom and with whom we evolved — seems a mockery.” How to end the mockery and the minstrel show is what poet Jane Hirshfield — one of the most [unboastfully courageous voices of our time]( an ordained Buddhist, a more-than-humanitarian: a planetarian — explores in “Spell to Be Said against Hatred,” a miniature masterwork of quiet, surefooted insistence and persistence. Included in the anthology [Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy]( ([public library]( alongside contributions by Jericho Brown, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, it is inhaled into life here by musician, activist, fellow more-than-humanitarian, and my darling friend [Amanda Palmer](. [be5d4817-f395-4ca6-a37e-ea1dfd1fb387.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]SPELL TO BE SAID AGAINST HATRED by Jane Hirshfield Until each breath refuses they, those, them. Until the Dramatis Personae of the book’s first page says, “Each one is you.” Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another. Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly: I. Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless table. Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves bending. Until fear bows to its object as a bird’s shadow bows to its bird. Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles. Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat. Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral. Until what feels no one’s weighing is no longer weightless. Until what feels no one’s earning is no longer taken. Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing know themselves mirrors. Until by we we mean I, them, you, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger. Until by I we mean as a dog barks, sounding and vanishing and sounding and vanishing completely. Until by until we mean I, we, you, them, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger, the lonely barking of the dog before it is answered. “Spell to Be Said against Hatred” was originally published in Hirshfield’s altogether soul-resuscitating collection [Ledger]( ([public library]( which also gave us the wonderful [“Today, Another Universe.”]( Complement it with Marie Howe’s kindred-spirited poem [“Singularity”]( and a soulful reading of Hirshfield’s splendid succor for resilience, [“The Weighing,”]( then revisit Amanda’s enchanting readings of [“When I Am Among the Trees”]( by Mary Oliver, [“Einstein’s Mother”]( by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, [“Life While-You-Wait”]( by Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, [“Humanity i love you”]( by E.E. Cummings, [“Hubble Photographs: After Sappho”]( by Adrienne Rich, and [“Questionnaire”]( by Wendell Berry. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Octavio Paz on Being Other, the Courage of Responsibility, the Meaning of Hope, and the Only Fruitful Portal to Change]( [thelabyrinthofsolitude_paz.jpg?fit=320%2C492]( I came to this country not having inherited its sins, not being afforded many of its rights, but eager to share — and having by now devoted my adult life to sharing — in its responsibilities, its atonements, its healing. I came alone, barely out of my adolescence, into a country not yet out of its adolescence — that developmental stage when the act of taking responsibility is most difficult, and the impulse toward evasion and escapism most intense. “I have a green passport and I am an American citizen, and the crimes of this Republic, whether or not I am guilty of them, I am responsible for,” James {NAME} told Margaret Mead in their historic, staggeringly timely conversation about [race, forgiveness, and the crucial distinction between guilt and responsibility]( — historic also in speaking to {NAME}’s definition of history as “a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.” These complex dynamics are what the great Mexican poet and political activist Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores in the opening chapter of his superb 1950 book-length essay [The Labyrinth of Solitude]( ([public library]( written in Paris months after the city’s liberation from Nazi occupation, while Paz was serving as a newly appointed Mexican diplomat, and shortly after he lived in the United States as a Mexican poet, having chosen to use his Guggenheim Fellowship to study at U.C. Berkeley in California. [OctavioPaz_FBI.jpg?resize=680%2C519] Portrait of Octavio Paz from his FBI file Like me, Paz arrived to the United States as an other — as an alien of a different tongue, from a country scarred by centuries of violent invasions and decades of dictatorship, with a culture older than the American by epochs; unlike me, he arrived male, non-white, an adult, and an award-winning poet of cultural standing. It was with all of these multitudes that he observed and interpreted what he saw in his adolescent host country. In a sentiment his contemporary Louise Bourgeois echoed in her diary — [“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”]( — Paz writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence. Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall — that of our consciousness — between the world and ourselves. It is true that we sense our aloneness almost as soon as we are born but children and adults can transcend their solitude and forget themselves in games or work. The adolescent, however, vacillates, between infancy and youth, halting for a moment before the infinite richness of the world. He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question. Much the same thing happens to nations and peoples at a certain critical moment in their development. They ask themselves: What are we, and how can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are? The answers we give to these questions are often belied by history, perhaps because what is called the “genius of a people” is only a set of reactions to a given stimulus. The answers differ in different situations, and the national character, which was thought to be immutable, changes with them. [Velocity_BeatriceAlemagna.jpg?resize=680%2C908] Art by Beatrice Alemagna from [A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader](. In a sentiment of staggering timeliness today, as we face the challenge and discipline of reflection in order to respond — and respond robustly and effectively — rather than merely react to unbearably triggering events, Paz adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]There is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth. It is a moment of reflective repose before we devote ourselves to action again… It does not matter, then, if the answers we give to our questions must be corrected by time. The adolescent is also ignorant of the future changes that will affect the countenance he sees in the water. The mask of an old man is as indecipherable at first glance as a sacred stone covered with occult symbols; it is the history of various amorphous features that only take shape, slowly and vaguely, after the profoundest contemplation. Eventually these features are seen as a face, and later as a mask, a meaning, a history. […] The questions we all ask ourselves today will probably be incomprehensible fifty years from now. Different circumstances are likely to produce different reactions. On this latter point, Paz may be wrong — or at least incomplete, neglecting the vital outliers, the rare far-seers who speak of their present and speak to the future, voices like {NAME}’s and Mead’s, whose [questioning quickenings of mind and spirit]( remain not only comprehensible but acutely relevant fifty years later. [bearandwolf_salmieri.jpg?resize=680%2C578] Art by Daniel Salmieri from [Bear and Wolf]( — a tender illustrated fable of walking side by side in otherness. Before we go on, we must pause to remember that language is the supreme vessel of meaning-making, hulled with a history and masted with a future. It carries in its colossal careening body all the baggage of its culture. Paz uses man to say citizen, to denote universal humanity — a convention by which writers of his era, male or female, abided; a convention at the gendered Goliath of which Ursula K. Le Guin shot her perfectly aimed pebble in [her exquisite civilizational service of unsexing the universal pronoun](. It may be a useful exercise to note with disquietude the biases of language, but the exercise becomes distinctly unhelpful when the disquietude deafens us to the message inside the vessel. Paz’s message transcends the bounds of his time to speak to ours: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In the United States man… has built his own world and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows. His creations, like those of an inept sorcerer, no longer obey him. He is alone among his works, lost — to use the phrase by José Gorostiza — in a “wilderness of mirrors.” Upon arriving to the United States — which, as a resident of a neighboring landmass the shared name of which a single nation has usurped as its own, he insistently and correctly refers to as culturally North American rather than “American” — Paz found himself “surprised above all by the self-assurance and confidence of the people, by their apparent happiness and apparent adjustment to the world around them.” Drawing on the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s distinction between uses and abuses in differentiating the revolutionary spirit from the merely reformist impulse, he dismantles the apparent with the hard actuality: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The revolutionary is always radical, that is, he is trying to correct the uses themselves rather than the mere abuses of them. Almost all the criticisms I heard from the lips of North Americans were of the reformist variety: they left the social or cultural structures intact and were only intended to limit or improve this or that procedure. Two decades before he resigned his post as a Mexican diplomat to protest the massacre of hundreds of peacefully protesting unarmed citizens, mostly students, by his country’s armed forces, Paz adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]It seemed to me then, and it still does, that the United States is a society that wants to realize its ideals, has no wish to exchange them for others, and is confident of surviving, no matter how dark the future may appear. I am not interested in discussing whether this attitude is justified by reason and reality; I simply want to point out that it exists… I found it in the actions, the words and even the faces of almost everyone I met. Americans, he notes more with curiosity than with condemnation, consider this disposition realism — but it is only a pseudo-realism, sustained by a willful blindness to uncomfortable realities — a form of culturally condoned hypocrisy that has become part of the national character. He writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]When hypocrisy is a character trait it also affects one’s thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant. [friendorfoe4.jpg] Art by Dasha Tolstikova from [Friend or Foe]( — an illustrated meditation on making unfrightened sense of difference. And yet, in consonance with {NAME} and Mead’s distinction between guilt and responsibility, Paz insists that the fruitful attitude with which to face those disagreeable realities is not guilt, for guilt is never “transformed into anything other than hatred, solitary despair or blind idolatry.” The fruitful response — the responsible response — has to do with refusing to see ourselves as islanded in the river of time, unaccountable to and for history: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Contemporary history invalidates the belief in man as a creature whose essential being can be modified by social or pedagogical procedures. Man is not simply the result of history and the forces that activate it, as is now claimed; nor is history simply the result of human will, a belief on which the North American way of life is implicitly predicated. Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history. Paz terms his meditation on these immensely complex and interleaved issues his “testimony” — a lovely term and a subtle way of acknowledging that all of our perspectives, however informed by a wide and deep understanding of history, however enriched by experience and empathy, are still at bottom subjective witnessings that render any self-appointed authority over absolute universal truth a farce. It is with this reverence for the shared and the subjective that he ends the chapter, reaching across the millennia, across the panoply of cultures, to wrest an elemental human truth: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]A study of the great myths concerning the origin of man and the meaning of our presence on earth reveals that every culture — in the sense of a complex of values created and shared in common — stems from the conviction that man the intruder has broken or violated the order of the universe. He has inflicted a wound on the compact flesh of the world, and [chaos, which is the ancient and, so to speak, natural condition of life]( can emerge again from this aperture… Man collaborates actively in defending universal order, which is always being threatened by chaos. And when it collapses he must create a new one, this time his own. But exile, expiation and penitence should proceed from the reconciliation of man with the universe. [blastoff7.jpg] Art by Leo and Diane Dillon from [Blast Off]( by Linda C. Cain and Susan Rosenbaum, 1973. We have not, he laments, achieved this reconciliation — and out of this unmet longing arises a terror that rattles the root of our humanity: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]We have lost our sense of the very meaning of all human activity, which is to assure the operation of an order in which knowledge and innocence, man and nature are in harmony. […] It is possible that what we call “sin” is only a mythical expression of our self-consciousness, our solitude. I remember that in Spain during the civil war I had a revelation of “the other man” and of another kind of solitude: not closed, not mechanical, but open to the transcendent. No doubt the nearness of death and the brotherhood of men-at-arms, at whatever time and in whatever country, always produce an atmosphere favorable to the extraordinary, to all that rises above the human condition and breaks the circle of solitude that surrounds each one of us. But in those faces — obtuse and obstinate, gross and brutal, like those the great Spanish painters, without the least touch of complacency and with an almost flesh-and-blood realism, have left us — there was something like a desperate hopefulness, something very concrete and at the same time universal. In yet another resonance with {NAME}’s insistence that [“we’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope,”]( Paz concludes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The memory will never leave me. Any one who has looked Hope in the face will never forget it. He will search for it everywhere he goes, among all kinds of men. And he will dream of finding it again someday, somewhere, perhaps among those closest to him. In every man there is the possibility of his being — or, to be more exact, of his becoming once again — another man. [The Labyrinth of Solitude]( is a resplendent read in its entirety. Couple the vital human issues Paz explores in it with an equally vital non-human counterpart in the great nature writer Henry Beston’s reflections on [otherness, belonging, and the dignity of difference]( then revisit Toni Morrison on [borders, belonging, and the violence of otherness]( Walter Lippmann’s tremendous century-old treatise on [the psychology of and the antidote to prejudice]( and {NAME}’s [prophetic insight into race and reality](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for fourteen 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](