NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program.[View it in full](. Â If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( â it's free. Â Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [The Marginalian]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition â Nick Cave on the art of growing older, Pico Iyer on our search for the sacred, uncommonly beautiful 19th-century Scottish illustrations of birds â you can catch up [right here]( if you missed the recap of the best of The Marginalian 2022 in a single place, that is [here](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( â for sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive (as have I) thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: You are among the kind-hearted 1% making this available to the free-riding 99%, and I appreciate you more than you know. [Meditation in Sunlight: May Sartonâs Stunning Poem About the Relationship Between Presence, Solitude, and Love]( May Sarton (May 3, 1912âJuly 16, 1995) was thirty-three when she left Cambridge for Santa Fe. She had just lived through a World War and a long period of personal turmoil that had syphoned her creative vitality â a kind of deadening she had not experienced before. Under the immense blue skies that had [so enchanted the young Georgia OâKeeffe]( a generation earlier, she started coming back to life. Her white-washed room at the boarding house had mountain views, a rush of sunlight, and a police dog and âa very nice English teacherâ for neighbors. As the sun rose over the mountains, she woke up each morning âsimply on fireâ with poetry â new poems she read to the English teacher, not yet knowing she was falling in love with her. Judy would become her great love, then her lifelong friend and [the closest she ever had to family](. Among the constellation of Santa Fe poems composed during this creative renaissance is an especially beguiling reflection on the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, soon published in Sartonâs 1948 poetry collection [The Lion and the Rose]( ([public library]( â her first in a decade â and read here for us by my [longtime]( poetry co-invocator [Amanda Palmer]( in her lovely oceanic voice: MEDITATION IN SUNLIGHT
by May Sarton In space in time I sit
Thousands of feet above
The sea and meditate
On solitude on love Near all is brown and poor
Houses are made of earth
Sun opens every door
The city is a hearth Far all is blue and strange
The sky looks down on snow
And meets the mountain-range
Where time is light not shadow Time in the heart held still
Space as the household god
And joy instead of will
Knows love as solitude Knows solitude as love
Knows time as light not shadow
Thousands of feet above
The sea where I am now Complement with Sarton on [the cure for despair]( [how to live openheartedly in a harsh world]( and her [stunning ode to solitude]( then revisit Amandaâs soulful readings of Jane Kenyonâs [meditation on life with and after depression]( Elizabeth Bishopâs [timeless consolation for loss]( Ellen Bassâs [immense and intimate poem of perspective and possibility]( and Mary Oliverâs [âWhen I Am Among the Trees.â]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving
Each year, I spend thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant â a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. 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. Â
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Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount.
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[User-Friendly Self-Deception: Philosopher Amélie Rorty on the Value of Our Delusions and the Antidote to the Self-Defeating Ones]( âLife is a dream. âTis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,â Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered [how our illusions keep us alive]( shining a sidewise gleam on an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life. It can only be so â given how many parallel truths comprise any given situation, given how multifarious the data points packed into any single experience, given that this very moment [âyou are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,â]( we are simply not capable of processing the full scope of reality. Our minds cope by choosing fragments of it to the exclusion, and often to the erasure, of the rest. Art by [Dorothy Lathrop]( 1922. (Available [as a print]( and [as stationery cards]( But what we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life. That is what philosopher [Amélie Rorty]( (May 20, 1932âSeptember 18, 2020) explores in a marvelous 1994 paper in the Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, marvelously titled [User-Friendly Self-Deception](. Recognizing that âmany varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful,â Rorty writes: We should not wish to do without the active, self-induced illusions that sustain us. Nor can we do without second order denials that they are illusions, the second order and regressive strategies that we self-deceptively believe rationalize our various self-deceptive activities. The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring? Self-deception, she notes, has various âcousins and clonesâ â among them âcompartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false consciousness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflectionâ â some of which are socially rewarded for their adaptive value in helping us attain our goals: When we admire persistent and dedicated single-minded attention that systematically resists the distraction of fringe phenomena, we call it courage or purposeful resolution. But as much as self-deception might animate our own inner lives, with our reflexive tendency to [mistake self-righteousness for morality]( we too readily indict with self-delusion anyone whose model of reality differs from ours: The person who does not have our favoured reactions is open game for the charge of self-deception, if not of a more serious form of psychological abnormality. One necessity of self-deception is the paradox of the self in time: We must each answer the question of [what makes us and our childhood selves the âsameâ person despite a lifetime physical and psychological change]( and we can only do so with a certain measure of self-deception, because, of course, in some essential sense we are not the same person â our personhood is pocked by inconstancy and inner contradiction, unstable across time. As Iris Murdoch reminds us, [âthe self, the place where we live, is a place of illusionâ]( â the fundamental illusion upon which the structure of human life is built. One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrettâs [1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales](. (Available as [a print]( Rorty considers the psychological roots and mechanisms of self-deception: Like deception, self-deception is a species of rhetorical persuasion; and like all forms of persuasion, it involves a complex, dynamic and co-operative process. Successful deceivers are acute rhetoricians, astute seducers who know how to co-opt the psychology of their subjects. They begin with minute and subtle interactions designed to establish trust, with a manner of approach, certain gestures and intonation patterns, intimations of directed and redirected attention. With an eye to the social dimension of all deception, she adds: Deception and self-deception are not merely detached conclusions of invalid arguments: they are interactive processes with a complex cognitive and affective aetiology. [â¦] The canny self-deceiver puts herself in situations where her deflected attention will be strongly supported by her fellows. [â¦] It is extremely difficult to sustain self-deception without a little help from our friends, often rendered by observant but tactful silence. Art by Kay Nielsen from [East of the Sun and West of the Moon]( 1914. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( This very fact points at the best antidote to harmful self-deception: Since we are highly susceptible to socially induced self-deception, the wisest practical course is to be very careful about the company we keep⦠Unfortunately self- deception is just the thing that prevents us from seeking its best therapy: it does not know when to expand, and when to limit its epistemological company. Fortunately, we have many other kinds of reasons for being astute about the company we keep. With luck, a canny self-deceiverâs other psychological and intellectual habits â a taste for astringency and a distrust of hypocrisy, for instance â can prevent the wild imperialistic tendencies of self-deception from becoming entrenched and ramified. Much self-deception, Rorty observes, is not a matter of outright lying to oneself, but of selective attention and fragmentation of truth: Self-deception need not involve false belief: just as the deceiver can attempt to produce a belief which is â as it happens â true, so too a self-deceiver can set herself to believe what is in fact true. A canny self-deceiver can focus on accurate but irrelevant observations as a way of denying a truth that is importantly relevant to her immediate projects. This is something that stems from the psychological machinery of all deception, possible because âany experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptionsâ: Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. Itâs too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magicianâs craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers â something red, something anomalous, something desirable â in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. The strategy of perceptual self-deception is identical: the trick is to place oneself where patterns of salience are likely to deflect attention away from what we do not wish to see. But for all of its pitfalls, and for all the urgency of continually questioning when it becomes self-defeating, self-deception can be greatly beneficent in our endeavors of self-transformation and growth, offering assurance that bolsters our will and an antidote to the âgeneralized uncertainty about the worth of our projects.â Rorty writes: By convincing themselves that a desired self-transformation is within relatively easy reach, canny self-improvers can use self-deception as an energizing instrument. Art by [Dorothy Lathrop]( 1922. (Available [as a print]( and [as stationery cards]( Self-deception is also necessary in propping up the precarious pillar of modern life in this century of selfing â identity: We invent something we call our identity, resting our self-respect on our engaging in its projects, independently of any other measure of their merits. But perhaps the most essential function of healthy self-deception is in allaying our ambivalence about projects and life-choices that bring us tremendous rewards, but also have tremendous personal costs, an accurate assessment of which might undermine our willingness to undertake them: Without some species of self-deception, our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse. In deciding to have children, we ignore the travails of parents, obliterating our otherwise keen awareness of the typical relations among parents and children; in devoting ourselves to writing philosophy, we conveniently forget how little philosophy we are willing to read; in the interest of sanity and joy, we sidestep our deep ambivalences about our kith and kin. [â¦] Disguising and submerging the ambivalence that is natural to most of our enterprises not only brings us the energy, verve, style and ease that successful action requires; it also helps to assure the social co-operation that is equally essential to our individual and collective projects. A good deal of the polite conversation of social life, â the public description of the joys of our social roles and functions (friend, mother, teacher, scholar) â channels and streams us to play our parts without the mess, confusion and upheaval that would occur if we openly expressed our natural and sensible ambivalence about these roles. It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion. Complement with Walter Lippmannâs superb century-old [anatomy of deception and self-delusion]( then revisit Rorty on [what makes a person: the seven layers of identity, in literature and life](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [If You Fail at Love]( âThere is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,â the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his timeless treatise on [learning love as a skill](. We fail at it largely because, given [how profoundly shaped we are by our formative attachments]( those of us who grew up with instability and violence from our primary caregivers â the people tasked with loving us and teaching us about love â can feel woefully handicapped at love, unconsciously replicating the emotional patterns of those familiar relationship dynamics known as [limbic attractors]( only to emerge with a colossus of shame and self-blame for what feels like failing at love. There is no greater consolation for that feeling than the knowledge that one is not alone in it, and that there is a way through it, past it, beyond it, within reach. That is what artist [Tara Booth]( offers in a largehearted and courageously vulnerable [illustrated reckoning]( she published on that industrialized emblem of shame and self-blame, Valentineâs Day. Complement with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanhâs [field guide to learning love]( Alain de Botton on [love and vulnerability]( Eric Berneâs classic [Games People Play]( and the heartening science of [how healthy love rewires the brain]( then revisit Shel Silversteinâs lovely illustrated allegory for [the simple secret of lasting love](. HT [Debbie Millman](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving
Each year, I spend thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant â a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. 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. Â
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 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay â life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](.
IN ATOMS: [Space & Time: An Evening of Music and Literature (March 25, NYC)]( On March 25, join me for an exploration of the fundamental dimensions of our world and our conscious experience through the twin portals of truth and beauty: music, poetry, and science. Carrying the evening will be music by cellist and composer [Zoë Keating]( punctuated by performances by poet Maria Howe, musician Joan As Police Woman, science historian James Gleick, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad, and other friends. DATE: March 25, 2023 TIME: doors 6:30PM, performance 7:30PM LOCATION: National Sawdust, 80 N 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249 [INFO + TICKETS]( A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT: [Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy]( [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week.
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