Spell against indifference, Bertrand Russell's salve for our helpless overwhelm, Camus on writing and the importance of stubbornness in creative work

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 — Audre Lorde on the relationship between eros, creativity, power, and joy; a watercolor ode to the courage of authenticity; how a marmoset saved Leonard and Virginia Woolf from the Nazis — 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: I appreciate you more than you know. [Spell Against Indifference]( I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do not understand, discounted. But under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being where the truest truths dwell, the most difficult and the most beautiful; how it sneaks in through the backdoor of consciousness to reveal us more fully to ourselves; how it gives us an instrument for paying attention, which is how we learn to love the world more. When I first began writing poetry, it was privately, [almost]( secretly, certainly shyly. But I have come to see that while poetry may be a language for the silent places in us, it is also a language of connection — a way of finding the intimate in the universal and the universal in the intimate — and so it is meant to be shared. In that spirit, and with immense gratitude to my poetry teachers — [Marie Howe]( and [Ellen Bass]( — here is a poem. SPELL AGAINST INDIFFERENCE by Maria Popova The rain falls and falls cool, bottomless, and prehistoric falls like night — not an ablution not a baptism just a small reason to remember all we know of Heaven to remember we are still here with our love songs and our wars, our space telescopes and our table tennis. Here too in the wet grass half a shell of a robin’s egg shimmers blue as a newborn star fragile as a world. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend thousands of hours and 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](. [Bertrand Russell on the Salve for Our Modern Helplessness and Overwhelm]( “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum concluded in considering [how to live with our human fragility](. And yet in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, when the world seems to splinter and crumble in the palm of our civilization’s hand, something deeper and more robust than blind trust is needed to keep us anchored to our own goodness — something pulsating with [rational faith in the human spirit]( and [a profound commitment to goodness](. That is what [Bertrand Russell]( (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) explores in the out-of-print treasure [New Hopes for a Changing World]( ([public library]( composed a year after he [received the Nobel Prize]( while humanity was still shaking off the dust and dread of its Second World War and already shuddering with the catastrophic nuclear threat of the Cold War. Bertrand Russell Observing that his time, like ours, is marked by “a feeling of impotent perplexity” and “a deep division in our souls between the sane and the insane parts,” Russell considers the consequence such total world-overwhelm has on the human spirit: One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. And yet, with his unfaltering reasoned optimism, he insists that there is an alternate view of our human destiny — one that vitalizes rather than paralyzes, based on “the completest understanding of the moods, the despairs, and the maddening doubts” that beset us; one that helps mitigate the worst of Western culture — “our restlessness, our militarism, our fanaticism, and our ruthless belief in mechanism” — and amplifies the best in it: “the spirit of free inquiry, the understanding of the conditions of general prosperity, and emancipation from superstition.” He examines the root of our modern perplexity, perhaps even more pronounced in our time than it was in his: Traditional systems of dogma and traditional codes of conduct have not the hold that they formerly had. Men and women are often in genuine doubt as to what is right and what is wrong, and even as to whether right and wrong are anything more than ancient superstitions. When they try to decide such questions for themselves they find them too difficult. They cannot discover any clear purpose that they ought to pursue or any clear principle by which they should be guided. Stable societies may have principles that, to the outsider, seem absurd. But so long as the societies remain stable their principles are subjectively adequate. That is to say they are accepted by almost everybody unquestioningly, and they make the rules of conduct as clear and precise as those of the minuet or the heroic couplet. Modern life, in the West, is not at all like a minuet or a heroic couplet. It is like free verse which only the poet can distinguish from prose. Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a [rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass](. (Available [as a print]( This torment, Russell argues, is simply the growing pains of our civilization. When we reach maturity, we would attain a life “full of joy and vigour and mental health.” Building on his lifelong reckoning with [the meaning of the good life]( and [the nature of happiness]( he writes: The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good. Unhappiness is deeply implanted in the souls of most of us. […] A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams. He offers a lucid and luminous prescription for attaining the good life, individually and as a society: What I should put in the place of an ethic in the old sense is encouragement and opportunity for all the impulses that are creative and expansive. I should do everything possible to liberate men from fear, not only conscious fears, but the old imprisoned primeval terrors that we brought with us out of the jungle. I should make it clear, not merely as an intellectual proposition, but as something that the heart spontaneously believes, that it is not by making others suffer that we shall achieve our own happiness, but that happiness and the means to happiness depend upon harmony with other men. When all this is not only understood but deeply felt, it will be easy to live in a way that brings happiness equally to ourselves and to others. If men could think and feel in this way, not only their personal problems, but all the problems of world politics, even the most abstruse and difficult, would melt away. Suddenly, as when the mist dissolves from a mountain top, the landscape would be visible and the way would be clear. It is only necessary to open the doors of our hearts and minds to let the imprisoned demons escape and the beauty of the world take possession. Complement [New Hopes for a Changing World]( with the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas on [how to live with ourselves and each other]( and Virginia Woolf on [finding beauty in the uncertainty of time, space, and being]( then revisit Russell on [the four desires driving all human behavior]( and [how to grow old](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend thousands of hours and 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](. [Albert Camus on Writing and the Importance of Stubbornness in Creative Work]( Three years after he became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, awarded him for literature that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. The writings he left behind — about [the key to strength of character]( about [creativity as resistance]( about [the antidotes to the absurdity of life]( about [happiness as our moral obligation]( — endure as a living testament to Mary Shelley’s conviction that [“it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”]( Albert Camus Camus addressed his views on writing most directly in a 1943 essay about the novel, included in his altogether indispensable [Lyrical and Critical Essays]( ([public library](. He reflects: One must be two persons when one writes… The great problem is to translate what one feels into what one wants others to feel. We call a writer bad when he expresses himself in reference to an inner context the reader cannot know. The mediocre writer is thus led to say anything he pleases. In a sentiment James {NAME} would echo in [his advice on writing]( insisting that “beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” Camus observes that all creative endeavor demands of us “a certain constancy of soul, and a human and literary knowledge of sacrifice.” He writes: To someone who asked Newton how he had managed to construct his theory, he could reply: “By thinking about it all the time.” There is no greatness without a little stubbornness. Nearly a century after Tchaikovsky asserted that [“a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,”]( Camus adds: Great novels… prove the effectiveness of human creation. They convince one that the work of art is a human thing, never human enough, and that its creator can do without dictates from above. Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity. Complement with more excellent advice on writing from [Mary Oliver]( [Rachel Carson]( [Maya Angelou]( [George Saunders]( [John Steinbeck]( and [Ernest Hemingway]( then revisit the [beautiful letter of gratitude]( Camus sent to his childhood teacher shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend thousands of hours and 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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