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]( â 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 â one piece resurfaced from the sixteen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week's archival resurrection â Nobel-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli on science, spirituality, and our search for meaning, with a side of Carl Jung â 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]( â 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 | Bob Dylan on Vulnerability, the Meaning of Integrity, and Music as an Instrument of Truth]( Self-knowledge might be the most difficult of lifeâs rewards â the hardest to earn and the hardest to bear. To know yourself is to know that you are not an unassailable fixity amid the entropic storm of the universe but a set of fragilities in constant flux. To know yourself is to know that you are not invulnerable. The honest encounter with that vulnerability is the wellspring of art: Every artistâs art is their coping mechanism for the extreme sensitivity to aliveness that we call beauty â the transcendent and terrifying capacity to be moved by the world, to let something outside us stir deeply something within us. All great art â and only honest art can be great â is therefore the work of vulnerability and all integrity the function of fidelity to oneâs fragilities. That is what Bob Dylan (b. May 24, 1941) addresses with his penetrating poetics of insight in a 1977 conversation with Jonathan Cott â that uncommonly sensitive and erudite [investigator of uncommon minds](. Bob Dylan (Library of Congress) Cott prefaces the conversation, included in his collection [Listening: Interviews, 1970â1989]( ([public library]( with a soulful and percipient encapsulation of Dylanâs gift: His songs are miracles, his ways mysterious and unfathomable. In words and music, he has reawakened, and thereby altered, our experience of the world. In statement (âHe not busy being born is busy dyingâ) and in image (âMy dreams are made of iron and steel / With a big bouquet / Of roses hanging down / From the heavens to the groundâ) he has kept alive the idea of the poet and artist as vates â the visionary eye of the body politic â while keeping himself open to a conception of art that embraces and respects equally Charles Baudelaire and Charley Patton, Arthur Rimbaud and Smokey Robinson. Dylanâs virtuosity with the mysterious and the miraculous has always sprung from his ethos of [placing the unconscious mind at the center of creativity](. In discussing his film Renaldo and Clara â which Dylan describes as being about integrity, about ânaked alienation of the inner self against the outer selfâ â he tells Cott: Human emotions are the great dictator. [â¦] You canât be a slave to your emotions. If youâre a slave to your emotions youâre dependent on your emotions, and youâre only dealing with your conscious mind⦠You have to be faithful to your subconscious, unconscious, super-conscious â as well as to your conscious. Integrity is a facet of honesty. It has to do with knowing yourself. True integrity necessitates the honesty of vulnerability â that great valve between us and the world, through which reality rushes into the chamber of our being and art pours out. Dylan observes: You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to me being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose. I donât have anything but darkness to lose. Iâm way beyond that. Bob Dylan by [Milton Glaser]( 1967. When the conversation turns to humanityâs greatest spiritual sages â the teachers from various traditions best able to access and teach the eternal truths â Dylan counters Cottâs observation that âthey speak and teach with more emotion,â redoubling his defiance of feeling as an organizing principle for truth: I donât believe in emotion. They use their hearts, their hearts donât use them. A generation after Aldous Huxley reverenced music as the great illuminator of the [âblessedness lying at the heart of things,â]( Dylan exalts music as a supreme instrument of revelation: its inherent honesty, its elemental fidelity to truth â the temporal and the eternal, the personal and the universal: Music is truthful⦠Music attracts the angels in the universe. It may be that Bob Dylan is the Bach of our time â the rare vessel for universal truth, whose music contains [âthe ultimate expression of anything and everything.â]( Complement with three centuries of uncommon minds on [the singular power of music]( and Nick Cave on [music, feeling, and transcendence]( then revisit psychologist Erich Fromm on [vulnerability as the key to our sanity]( philosopher Martha Nussbaum on [how to live with our human fragility]( and philosopher-poet Kahlil Gibran on [the courage to know yourself](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving
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KINDRED READINGS: [Aloneness, Belonging, and the Paradox of Vulnerability, in Love and Creative Work]( * * * [Bob Dylan on Sacrifice, the Unconscious Mind, and How to Cultivate the Perfect Environment for Creative Work]( * * * [Brené Brown on Vulnerability, Human Connection, and the Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy, Animated]( * * * [3 Things to Learn from a Child, 7 from a Thief: Bob Dylanâs Favorite Hasidic Teaching]( * * * 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.
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