Midweek pick-me-up: Willa Cather on relationships

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](. [The Marginalian]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the midweek edition of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova — one piece resurfaced from the sixteen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week's archival resurrection — James {NAME} on the doom and glory of knowing who you are, and what it means to be an artist — you can catch up [right here](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: You are among the kindhearted 1% making this available to the free-riding 99%, and I appreciate you more than you know. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Tragic Necessity of Human Life: Willa Cather on Relationships and How Our Formative Family Dynamics Imprint Us]( “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn wrote in his short, potent [meditation on how to love](. Developmentally, we humans learn — or mislearn — how to love through our formative attachment patterns, modeled by and cultivated within the family — patterns that [imprint our emotional identity]( and shape the defaults of how we connect, be they wounding or harmonizing. Family dynamics thus become inseparable from our sense of identity, and although we might eventually rewire our attachment patterns through new relationships and ample self-work, we can never fully unmoor ourselves from those formative affections, for they are woven into [the mysterious thread that makes us and our childhood selves one person](. That peculiar, inescapable dance between the family and the self is what beloved novelist Willa Cather (December 7, 1873–April 24, 1947) explores in one of the pieces found in her altogether magnificent 1936 nonfiction collection [Not Under Forty]( ([public library](. Willa Cather (Library of Congress) In a beautiful appreciation of Katherine Mansfield’s genius for conveying the complexities of human relationships, Cather writes: I doubt whether any contemporary writer has made one feel more keenly the many kinds of personal relations which exist in an everyday “happy family” who are merely going on living their daily lives, with no crises or shocks or bewildering complications to try them. Yet every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavor. As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain which keeps everybody almost at the breaking-point. One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another — secret and passionate and intense — which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. Art from [In Pieces]( by Marion Fayolle, a wordless exploration of human relationships And yet even amid this glibness, Cather does what she does best — out of the seemingly damning, she wrests the redemptive: In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works… These secret accords and antipathies which lie hidden under our everyday behavior … more than any outward events make our lives happy or unhappy. That [Not Under Forty]( has gone out of print is nothing short of a tragedy, but used copies are still findable and well worth a trip to the public library. Complement it with Cather on [how to persevere through difficult times]( and [the life-changing advice that made her a writer]( then revisit philosopher Martha Nussbaum on [how storytelling rewires our emotional patterning]( immunologist Esther Sternberg on [how relationships affect our immune system]( Charles Darwin on [family, work, and happiness]( and Adrienne Rich on [honorable human relationships](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2022, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ([formerly Brain Pickings]( 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 — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable this year, 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.  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 — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. KINDRED READINGS: [How Relationships Refine Our Truths: Adrienne Rich on the Responsibility of Love]( * * * [The Key to Good Love: Relationship Lessons from Trees]( * * * [The Neural Harmonics of Emotion and How Relationships Rewire the Brain]( * * * 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 each Wednesday and offers a hand-picked piece worth revisiting from my 15-year archive. The Marginalian MAIL NOT DELIVERED 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](