Nick Cave's advice on life, May Sarton on writing and gardening, Thoreau on living through loss

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 weekly email digest of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — how to love the world more: George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty; magnolias and the meaning of life; the art of lying fallow — 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]( — 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. [How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old]( “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Bertrand Russell counseled in [his timeless advice on how to grow old](. There is a lovely symmetry between this orientation to the winter of life and the natural state of its springtime — in youth, curiosity unfurls centripetally from the self to the world, touching more and more facets of it with that electric jolt of discovery when everything is new and interesting and dazzling with delight. How to harness youth’s centripetal curiosity as a creative force for bettering the world is what [Nick Cave]( — himself an [insightful reckoner with the art of growing older]( — explores in [answering]( a 13-year-old boy’s question about how to live a full, creative, actualized, spiritually rich life in “a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect.” Nick Cave In consonance with W.E.B. Du Bois’s [advice to his teenage daughter]( and with David Bowie’s [idea of perfect happiness]( Cave writes: Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential. This openhearted curiosity, this aura of astonishment, becomes an antidote to the spiritual poison most corrosive to the world — [cynicism]( that [supreme enemy of hope](. At any stage of life, the refusal to succumb to cynicism is among our greatest triumphs of the spirit. It is certainly our mightiest force of courage and resistance to the cowardly denouncements of possibility that pock the countenance of humanity. One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s [original watercolors for The Little Prince](. Cave’s urgent words to the boy speak to the tender, hopeful, openhearted child in each of us — for, in the plainest existential sense, we are daily beginners at life: Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world. Complement with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s [advice on life]( and Rebecca Solnit’s lovely [letter to children about the value of reading]( then revisit Nick Cave on [self-forgiveness]( [the relationship between vulnerability and freedom]( and [the antidote to our existential helplessness](. [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 — 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.  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](. [May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work]( The matter that we know — the stuff we can see and touch — comprises a mere 5% of the universe. All the rest is dark matter. We can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t discern what it is made of or how it came to be. And yet dark matter is what holds galaxies together, what keeps the regular matter in place so that we may live. I believe every creative practice is like that — only a small fraction of it we can see and touch in the works of art we can point to, made possible and alive by all the invisible devotions and despairs that animate the maker’s life, that fill the days and hours, that occupy the heart and the hands. These private practices are anchors of sanity vital to the public work, for they are vital to the soul from which creative work springs. The poet, novelist, and diarist [May Sarton]( (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores this throughout her altogether ravishing journal [The House by the Sea]( nowhere more poignantly than in her contribution to the canon of [great artists and writers on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening](. May Sarton In a diary entry penned as spring is cusping into summer, after a season of devoted planting and tending to her garden, she writes: I complained to Lee that no one really looks at the garden. Her answer was accurate, “You do the garden for yourself, after all.” Yes, I do, but I also long to give it, and in this it is very much like poetry — that is, I would write poems whether anyone looked at them or not, but I hope someone will. A generation before Rebecca Solnit contemplated [the creative purpose of Orwell’s rose garden]( Sarton considers the role of gardening as a sanity-salving device for her creative practice: Do I spend too much time at this ephemeral task? In spring, summer, and autumn I work harder at it than at writing, and I expect that looks crazy, but what it does is balance all the anxieties and tensions and keep me sane. Sanity (plus flowers) does make sense. Wildflowers by [Clarissa Munger Badger](. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) In a sentiment that evokes her lovely insistence on [“joy instead of will,”]( she celebrates gardening as an antidote to the cult of achievement — the cult that makes a travesty of all creative work: Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little. Complement with more reflections on gardening from [Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, and Jamaica Kincaid]( then revisit Sarton on [how to cultivate your talent]( [the relationship between presence, solitude, and love]( [grieving a pet]( [the cure for despair]( and her timeless [ode to the art of being alone](. [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 — 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.  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](. [Thoreau on Living Through Loss]( There is cosmic consolation in knowing [what actually happens when we die]( — that supreme affirmation of having lived at all. And yet, however much we might understand that every single person is a transient chance-constellation of atoms, to lose a beloved constellation is the most devastating experience in life. It feels incomprehensible, cosmically unjust. It feels unsurvivable. In the final years of his short and loss-riddled life, Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) wrote in his diary: I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. After long watching around the sickbed of a friend, we, too, partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be identified with this state of things. Henry David Thoreau (Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856) Thoreau’s life of losses had begun seventeen years earlier. He was twenty-five when his beloved older brother died of tetanus after cutting himself shaving — a gruesome death, savaging the nervous system and contorting the body with agony. Thoreau grieved deeply. A lifelong diarist, he slipped into a five-week coma of the pen. He tried to listen to the music-box, which had always flooded him with delight, but the sounds came pouring out strange and hollow. Eventually, the fever dream of grief broke into a new orientation to death. Two months into his bereavement, as the harsh New England winter was cusping into spring, Thoreau wrote to a friend — a letter quoted in the altogether wonderful book [Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives]( ([public library]( What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder? We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a great grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin on Arabian trees. Only Nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Having resumed his journal, he took up the subject in the privacy of its pages: I live in the perpetual verdure of the globe. I die in the annual decay of nature. We can understand the phenomenon of death in the animal better if we first consider it in the order next below us the vegetable. The death of the flea and the Elephant are but phenomena of the life of nature. This was a season of losses in Thoreau’s universe. His friend and mentor Emerson, who had hastened to stay with him and nurse him in the wake of his brother’s death, lost his beloved five-year-old son to scarlet fever, as incurable as tetanus in their era. Now it was Thoreau’s turn to comfort his friend. Leaning on his new acceptance of the naturalness of death as an antidote to grief, he wrote to Emerson: Nature is not ruffled by the rudest blast. The hurricane only snaps a few twigs in some nook of the forest. The snow attains its average depth each winter, and the chic-a-dee lisps the same notes. The old laws prevail in spite of pestilence and famine. No genius or virtue so rare and revolutionary appears in town or village, that the pine ceases to exude resin in the wood, or beast or bird lays aside its habits. Art by Sophie Blackall for [“Dirge Without Music”]( from [The Universe in Verse](. An epoch before Rilke insisted that [“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,”]( and a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered [the luckiness of death]( Thoreau adds: Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident — It is as common as life… Every blade in the field — every leaf in the forest — lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. When we look over the fields we are not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither — for their death is the law of new life. Couple these fragments from [Three Roads Back]( with Thoreau on [nature as prayer]( then revisit [the neuroscience of grief and healing]( Emily Dickinson on [love and loss]( Seneca on [the key to resilience in the face of loss]( and Nick Cave on [grief as a portal to aliveness](. [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 — 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.  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](. 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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