Alain de Botton on infatuation, Ursula K. Le Guin on storytelling, "The Universe in Verse" in full, the central mystery of consciousness, and more

Alain de Botton on infatuation, Ursula K. Le Guin on storytelling, complete recording of The Universe in Verse, neuroscientist Christof Koch on the central mystery of consciousness, and more. NOTE: This message 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. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[Alain de Botton on Infatuation]( “An honorable human relationship … in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’” the poet Adrienne Rich [memorably wrote]( “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” But too often, we mistake for love feelings rooted in the pleasant untruths of delusion — about ourselves, or the other, or the possibility that exists between the two. Anyone who has ever been vitalized by the electricity of infatuation has also burned with disappointment as the fantasy of the idealized beloved has crumbled into the reality of a living and therefore flawed person. And yet one of the great paradoxes of the human heart is that we go on falling in love — or in what we think is love, or hope might be love — anyway. Nearly two centuries before the French philosopher Alain Badiou examined the delicate psychoemotional machinery of [why we fall and stay in love]( his compatriot Stendhal set out to outline the dark side of life’s most radiant experience in his “crystallization” theory of [the seven stages of infatuation and disillusionment](. But infatuation, argues Alain de Botton in a portion of [The Course of Love]( ([public library]( isn’t a maladaptive mutation of our love-faculty — rather, it is an essential feature of it. Illustration from the vintage Danish primer [An ABZ of Love]( De Botton writes: Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone — not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts — but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings. The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better. Though De Botton is being, of course, at least semi-facetious in this last sentiment, it does raise one inescapable question about the tradeoffs between normalcy and desirability, for in the desired stranger of our fantasies the abnormalities we witness are charming quirks, whereas in the partner of our reality they are flaws so alarming as to be feared fatal. In this sense, there might be no “cure” for love, but there is one mighty defense against the pathology of continual disappointment that can plague our intimate relationships — an unbegrudging acceptance of imperfection and frequent low-level letdown between even the most well-intentioned of partners, which works much like a vaccine enlists a small dose of the weakened microbe in fortifying the larger organism against the disease. What makes infatuation so intoxicating is precisely its imperviousness to disappointment, for it is rooted entirely in a chimera of the other, enshrined in the illusion of perfection. What makes love so rich and rewarding is the moving frontier of mutual discovery and understanding with each experience of disappointment, as we continually calibrate our flat fantasy of the idealized beloved to an ever-expanding reality of a dimensional person. Complement the immensely and at times heartbreakingly insightful [The Course of Love]( — which also gave us De Botton on [what makes a good communicator]( and [the paradox of sulking]( — with the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on [what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving]( the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s simple, profound treatise on [how to love]( and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the paradoxical psychology of [why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance](. [Forward to a friend](  /   [Read Online](  /  [Like on Facebook]( [Ursula K. Le Guin on Redeeming the Imagination from the Commodification of Creativity and How Storytelling Teaches Us to Assemble Ourselves]( “The imagination,” wrote the trailblazing philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in a [1794 letter]( “is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.” And yet somehow, in the centuries since, we have increasingly lost sight of the imagination’s rapturous rewards and come to see it as a commodity of what we now call “the creative industry” — something calculable and efficient, useful in maximizing society’s comforts and business’s profits. Much as today’s archetypal Silicon Valley characters are pragmatizing Eastern philosophy and ancient meditation practices as tools for “optimizing” their “performance,” the imagination — that [pinnacle of our cognitive evolution]( and seedbed of our core humanity — is being co-opted for purposes that have little to do with animating our sympathies and expanding our hearts. More than two centuries after Wollstonecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, another woman of extraordinary intellect and imaginative prowess, sets out to redeem the imagination from the grip of consumerist commodification in a magnificent 2002 lecture titled “Operating Instructions,” later included in Le Guin’s altogether fantastic nonfiction collection [Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with a Journal of a Writer’s Week]( ([public library](. Ursula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed Le Guin writes: In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination. Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. Le Guin observes that like any tool, the imagination requires that we first learn how to use it — or, rather, that we unlearn how to squander it. Storytelling, she argues, is the sandbox in which we learn to use the imagination: Children have imagination to start with, as they have body, intellect, the capacity for language: things essential to their humanity, things they need to learn how to use, how to use well. Such teaching, training, and practice should begin in infancy and go on throughout life. Young human beings need exercises in imagination as they need exercise in all the basic skills of life, bodily and mental: for growth, for health, for competence, for joy. This need continues as long as the mind is alive. When children are taught to hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures, to read and understand it, their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs. Nothing else does quite as much for most people, not even the other arts. We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story. Illustration by Olivier Tallec from [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish]( by Jean-Pierre Simeón Virginia Woolf considered memory [the seamstress that threads our lives together]( but it is story — our inner storytelling — that orders memory into a coherent thread; it is story that, as Susan Sontag [memorably observed]( can “reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.” Our life-paths are paved with story — stretching back, the stories we tell ourselves about what happened to us, why it did, and how it made us who we are; stretching forward, the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible, what we want to achieve, and who we want to become. In consonance with Rebecca West’s assertion that [“art is not a plaything, but a necessity… a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted,”]( Le Guin considers this essential function of story in sculpting our ability to be at home in the world and its formative role in our becoming: Through story, every culture defines itself and teaches its children how to be people and members of their people. […] A child who doesn’t know where the center is — where home is, what home is — that child is in a very bad way. Home isn’t Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary. Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community. All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Illustration by Dasha Tolstikova for ‘The Jacket’ by Kirsten Hall. Click image for more. But that self-invention, Le Guin cautions, is not a solitary act — it takes place at the communal campfire where our essential stories of being are co-created and told. Building on the ideas in her exquisite [earlier meditation on telling and listening]( she writes: Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way. […] Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone. What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen. Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence. Reading is a means of listening. Seven decades after Hermann Hesse made his beautiful case for [why we read and always will, however technology may evolve]( Le Guin adds: The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words. The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life. [Words Are My Matter]( is a tremendous read in its totality, exploring questions of art, storytelling, gender, freedom, dignity, and what happens when we go to sleep. Complement this particular portion with William Blake’s [searing defense of the imagination]( and Ada Lovelace on [its two core faculties]( then revisit Le Guin on [being a “man,”]( [the sacredness of public libraries]( [imaginative storytelling as a force of freedom]( [what beauty really means]( [where good ideas come from]( and [writing as falling in love](. [Forward to a friend](  /   [Read Online](  /  [Like on Facebook]( [The Universe in Verse: Complete Show]( On April 24, 2017, I joined forces with the [Academy of American Poets]( and astrophysicist Janna Levin to host [The Universe in Verse]( at Brooklyn’s [Pioneer Works]( — an evening of poetry celebrating great scientists and scientific discoveries, and a protest against the silencing of science and the defunding of the arts, with all proceeds benefiting the Academy of American Poets and the [Natural Resources Defense Council](. To our astonishment and delight, this seemingly esoteric idea drew an ardent audience of 850 — our maximum capacity — who lined up around the block to hear readings by Amanda Palmer, Rosanne Cash, Janna Levin, Elizabeth Alexander, Diane Ackerman, Billy Hayes, Sarah Jones, Tracy K. Smith, Jad Abumrad of Radiolab, Sam Beam of Iron & Wine, Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York, and myself. We celebrated pillars of science like Marie Curie, Euclid, Caroline Herschel, Oliver Sacks, the Harvard Computers, neutrinos, and the number pi, and read treasures like Adrienne Rich’s [ode to women in astronomy]( Campbell McGrath’s [tribute to Jane Goodall]( and the magnificent [feminist poem about science]( Neil Gaiman wrote especially for the occasion. Setting up for The Universe in Verse at Pioneer Works Queue for The Universe in Verse This magical evening, which ended in a standing ovation, was an immensely heartening project of collective goodwill — the show took me innumerable hours to put together and every single person involved, from the triple-Grammy-winning musician to the Pulitzer-winning poet to the camera crew, donated their time and talent so that we could lift hundreds of spirits and raise thousands of dollars for the perseverance of art and science. After publishing some of the [individual readings]( the time has come to release the complete show, with hearty gratitude to [Kickstarter Live]( and Kathryn Jones for the livestream and recording. Prefacing each poem is my introduction of the reader, some curious facts about the scientist or discovery celebrated in the poem, and the reader’s brief reflection on her or his relationship to science and poetry. The poem playlist is below, with links to the individual poems where available — please enjoy: - [“Planetarium”]( by Adrienne Rich from [Collected Poems: 1950–2012]( ([public library]( read by Janna Levin - [“My God, It’s Full of Stars”]( by Tracy K. Smith from [Life on Mars]( ([public library]( read by the poet herself - [“Power”]( by Adrienne Rich from [The Dream of a Common Language]( ([public library]( read by Rosanne Cash - [“The Venus Hottentot”]( by Elizabeth Alexander from [Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010]( ([public library]( read by the poet herself - “Cosmic Gall” by John Updike from [Telephone Poles and Other Poems]( ([public library]( read by Brandon Stanton - [“We Are Listening”]( by Diane Ackerman from [Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems]( ([public library]( read by the poet herself - [“On the Fifth Day”]( by Jane Hirshfield, read by Emily Levine - “For Oliver’s Birthday, 1997” by Steven Jay Gould, published in [On the Move]( by Oliver Sacks, read by Billy Hayes - “Euclid Alone Has Looked” by Edna St. Vincent Millay from [The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay]( ([public library]( read by Sam Beam - [“Jane Goodall (1961)”]( by Campbell McGrath from [XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century]( ([public library]( performed by Sarah Jones - “The Habits of Light” by Anna Leahy from [Aperture]( ([public library]( read by Ann Hamilton - “Address: The Archaeans, One Cell Creatures” by Pattiann Rogers from [Wayfare]( ([public library]( read by Jad Abumrad - “Pi” by Wisława Szymborska from [Map: Collected and Last Poems]( ([public library]( read by Maria Popova - [“The Mushroom Hunters”]( by Neil Gaiman, read by Amanda Palmer If you enjoyed this labor of love, please consider joining in the goodwill by supporting the [Academy of American Poets]( and the [Natural Resources Defense Council]( as well as [Pioneer Works]( who, like me, rely on patronage to continue doing what they do. [Forward to a friend](  /   [Read Online](  /  [Like on Facebook]( [Neuroscientist Christof Koch How the “Qualia” of Our Experience Illuminate the Central Mystery of Consciousness]( “I wish you could know what it means to be me,” Nina Simone sang in her 1967 civil rights anthem “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” — an invitation to empathy at the heart of which is the animating question of consciousness: What does the experience of being feel like from the inside and can that subjective experience ever be fully understood from the outside? “Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it,” 28-year-old Albert Camus proclaimed in his [meditation on the nature of consciousness]( just as modern science was beginning to wrest the question from the reposable thumbs of philosophers. Well before Santiago Ramón y Cajal [fathered modern neuroscience]( and set it loose on addressing these questions over the course of the following century, the poet Emily Dickinson captured this elemental paradox of existence in a verse that remains the ultimate ode to — or is it a lamentation of? — consciousness: How have I peace Except by subjugating Consciousness? And since We’re mutual Monarch How this be Except by Abdication — Me — of Me? A century and a half later, neuroscientist Christof Koch sets out to map this “mutual monarchy” of self and consciousness — or, rather, of the mind’s phenomenal experience and the brain’s neurophysiology — in his excellent book [Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist]( ([public library](. Koch describes himself as a “romantic reductionist” — a reductionist because he seeks “quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses,” and romantic on account of his conviction that “the universe has contrails of meaning that can be deciphered in the sky above us and deep within us” — meaning illuminated not within the blink of an individual existence but across the vast cosmic scales of space and time. (Physicist Sean Carroll would later call such an orientation to the quest for meaning [“poetic naturalism.”]( Two millennia after Plato’s famous [allegory of the cave]( Koch writes with an eye to the central inquiry of his life’s work: Without consciousness there is nothing. The only way you experience your body and the world of mountains and people, trees and dogs, stars and music is through your subjective experiences, thoughts, and memories. You act and move, see and hear, love and hate, remember the past and imagine the future. But ultimately, you only encounter the world in all of its manifestations via consciousness. And when consciousness ceases, this world ceases as well. […] Consciousness is the central fact of your life. One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s [pioneering drawing of how the brain works]( In addition to the paradox consciousness presents to the experiencing self, Koch points out that it presents a second paradox to science — on the one hand, it challenges the scientific model of the world by raising the same questions that mystics have been asking for millennia; on the other, it lends itself to being investigated empirically with the very tools of the scientific method and, as Koch puts it, “with both feet firmly planted on the ground.” Having devoted much of his life to uncovering “how a highly organized piece of matter can possess an interior perspective,” Koch considers one of the most interesting questions of consciousness — that of qualia, the subjective interiority of experiences. (Nina Simone’s moving lyric line brings into sharp relief the grandest quale of all — that of selfhood.) Koch writes: What it feels like to have a particular experience is the quale of that experience: The quale of the color red is what is common to such disparate percepts as seeing a red sunset, the red flag of China, arterial blood, a ruby gemstone, and Homer’s wine-dark sea. The common denominator of all these subjective states is “redness.” Qualia are the raw feelings, the elements that make up any one conscious experience. Some qualia are elemental — the color yellow, the abrupt and overpowering pain of a muscle spam in the lower back, or the feeling of familiarity in déjà vu. Others are composites — the smell and feel of my dogs snuggling up against me, the “Aha!” of sudden understanding, or the distinct memory of being utterly transfixed when I first heard the immortal lines: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” To have an experience means to have qualia, and the qualia of an experience are what specifies that experience and makes it different from other experiences. Qualia, this romantic reductionist asserts, are inherent properties of the natural world rather than manifestations of divinity or the supernatural — they arise from laws yet to be discovered, but decidedly discoverable, belonging to the ultimate frontiers of science which mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has termed [“the great unknown.”]( But they also raise enormous attendant questions about whether elementary particles have qualia or qualia exist only in complex systems like brains, that is, whether consciousness is a binary faculty or it exists on a continuum; questions that echo Alan Turing’s famous puzzlement about [whether a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream]( and even Goethe’s attempt to [decipher the psychology of color perception and emotion](. Drawing from Goethe’s [theory of color and emotion]( Koch follows this train of inquiry further: Understanding how qualia come about is just the first step toward eliminating the “problem” from the mind-body problem. Next in line is comprehending the particular way that a specific quale feels. Why does red feel the way it does, which is very different from blue? Colors are not abstract, arbitrary symbols: they represent something meaningful. If you ask people whether the color orange is situated between red and yellow or between blue and purple, those with normal eyesight will chose the former. There is an inborn organization to color qualia. Indeed, colors can be arranged in a circle, the color wheel. This arrangement is different from that of other sensations, such as the sense of depth or of pitch, which are arranged in a linear sequence. Why? As a group, color percepts share certain commonalities that make them different from other percepts, such as seeing motion or smelling a rose. Why? This lovely short film for Janna Levin’s [Scientific Controversies]( salon with Koch and philosopher David Chalmers — whose ideas Koch challenges throughout the book — captures these most fundamental unanswered questions of consciousness, the limitations of our present modes of asking them, and the most fertile frontiers of promise in answering them: Koch offers four definitions of consciousness — a commonsense one, which equates consciousness with our interior mental life and renders it our constant companion from the moment we wake to the moment we sink into dreamless sleep; a behavioral one, comprising a checklist of actions and reactions that attest an organism is conscious; a neuronal one, identifying the minimum physiological mechanisms necessary for experiencing a conscious sensation; and, finally, a philosophical one, under which “consciousness is what it is like to feel something.” And yet despite the effort to define what consciousness is, a larger underpinning perplexity is the question of why it must exist at all — after all, Koch points out, there is nothing about the absence of consciousness that would violate the known laws of physics, which means that the laws of physics alone aren’t enough to provide a complete explanation of what consciousness is. A parallel puzzlement is that of locating consciousness, which Koch captures succinctly: Consciousness does not arise from regions but from highly networked neurons within and across regions. This interconnectedness, he points out, is embedded in the very nature of qualia: Informationally speaking, the experience of being sad is a crystal, a fantastically complex shape in a space of a trillion dimensions that is qualitatively different from the brain state that gives rise to sadness. The conscious sensation arises from integrated information; the causality flows from the underlying physics of the brain, but not in any easy-to-understand manner. That is because consciousness depends on the system being more than the sum of its parts. And yet the system itself, far from some metaphysical mechanism, is very much a physical, material entity. Koch writes: Without some carrier, some mechanism, integrated information can’t exist. Put succinctly: no matter, never mind. He considers what decades of studying the neural coordinates of consciousness have taught him about this mesh of interconnected complexity: I believe that consciousness is a fundamental, an elementary, property of living matter. It can’t be derived from anything else; it is a simple substance, in Leibniz’s words. My reasoning is analogous to the arguments made by savants studying electrical charge. Charge is not an emergent property of living things, as originally thought when electricity was discovered in the twitching muscles of frogs. There are no uncharged particles that in the aggregate produce an electrical charge. An electron has one negative charge, and a proton — a hydrogen ion — has one positive charge. The total charge associated with a molecule or ion is simply the sum of all the charges of the individual electrons and protons, no matter what their relationship to each other. As far as chemistry and biology are concerned, charge is an intrinsic property of these particles. Electrical charge does not emerge from matter. And so it is with consciousness. Consciousness comes with organized chunks of matter. It is immanent in the organization of the system. It is a property of complex entities and cannot be further reduced to the action of more elementary properties. We’ve arrived at the ground floor of reductionism. Ultimately, Koch counters the intellectual defeatism of the popular stance that certain elemental questions of existence — of which consciousness is a crowning curio — are bound to remain unanswerable. Despite its limitations, he reminds us, science is still our mightiest reel for lifting the curtain obscuring reality. With an eye to the founding fathers of science — for he is writing before Neil Gaiman penned his [lovely ode to its founding mothers]( — Koch reflects: Because science is so good at figuring out the world around us, it should also help us to explain the world within us. […] Francis Bacon, together with Descartes, is the father of the scientific method. Bacon lived and died two decades before Descartes, and he was in many ways his English counterpart. Whereas Descartes is the prototype of the deductive theoretician, driven by an overarching principle to search for general laws, Bacon is the consummate empiricist, examining natural phenomena and going where the data take him in an inductive fashion. Science has done extremely well in the interplay between bottom-up Baconian and top-down Cartesian analysis. Despite the naysayers, science will ultimately understand consciousness by combining empirical and clinical studies with mathematical theories and, increasingly, the engineering of conscious artifacts. In the remainder of the thoroughly fascinating [Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist]( Koch goes on to explore the vital difference between awareness and consciousness, the eternally entrancing [paradox of free will]( what happens to our consciousness during sleep and dreams, and other leaps in science that have steadily narrowed the gap between the mind, the brain, and our experience of selfhood. Complement it with Walt Whitman on [identity and the paradox of the self]( and Sy Montgomery on [how the octopus, earth’s most alien creature, illuminates the wonders of consciousness](. [Forward to a friend](  /   [Read Online](  /  [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( 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. 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