Empathy is a clock that ticks in the consciousness of another, the art of the clean and kind breakup, Sylvia Plath's never before seen visual art 

Empathy is a clock that ticks in the consciousness of another, the art of the clean and kind breakup, Sylvia Plath's never before seen visual art, and more. NOTE: This message 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. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[Empathy Is a Clock That Ticks in the Consciousness of Another: The Science of How Our Social Interactions Shape Our Experience of Time]( When I was growing up, my father — a kind man of quick intellect and encyclopedic knowledge about esoteric subjects — had, and still has, one habit that never failed to make other people uneasy and to infuriate my mother: In conversation, the interval of time that elapses between the other person’s sentiment or question and my father’s response greatly exceeds the average, a lapse swelling with Kierkegaard’s assertion that [“the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.”]( At first, one might suspect that my father is taking an incubatory pause to produce a considered response. But, soon, it becomes apparent that these disorienting durations have no correlation with the complexity of the question — even when asked something as simple as the time of day, he would often let miniature eternities pass and lasso the other person in anxiety as the contrast between the natural response time and my father’s gapes its discomfiting abyss of ambiguity. It turns out that my father’s liberal pauses are so discomposing because our experience of time has a central social component — an internal clock inheres in our capacity for intersubjectivity, intuitively governing our social interactions and the interpersonal mirroring that undergirds the human capacity for empathy. This social-synchronistic function of time is what New Yorker staff writer Alan Burdick examines in [Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation]( ([public library]( — a layered, rigorously researched, lyrically narrated inquiry into the most befuddling dimension of existence. Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, from [Cartographies of Time]( Burdick begins at the beginning — the ur-question of how the universe originated from nothing and what this means for time, a question at the heart of the landmark [1922 debate between Einstein and Bergson]( that shaped our modern understanding of time. Burdick asks: For argument’s sake, I’ll accept that perhaps the universe did not exist before the Big Bang — but it exploded in something, right? What was that? What was there before the beginning? Proposing such questions, the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, is like standing at the South Pole and asking which way is south: “Earlier times simply would not be defined.” Nearly a century after Borges’s exquisite [refutation of time in language]( — “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” — Burdick adds with an eye to the inherent limitations of our metaphors: Perhaps Hawking is trying to be reassuring. What he seems to mean is that human language has a limit. We (or at least the rest of us) reach this boundary whenever we ponder the cosmic. We imagine by analogy and metaphor: that strange and vast thing is like this smaller, more familiar thing. The universe is a cathedral, a clockworks, an egg. But the parallels ultimately diverge; only an egg is an egg. Such analogies appeal precisely because they are tangible elements of the universe. As terms, they are self-contained — but they cannot contain the container that holds them. So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft. […] Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting sense of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one’s to-do list, much less to confront the world’s true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends. Illustration by Harvey Weiss from [Time Is When]( by Beth Youman Gleick, 1960 From the temporal meditations of the ancient philosophers to the last hundred years of ingenious psychological experiments, Burdick goes on to explore such aspects of his subject — a nearly infinite subject, to be sure, which makes his endeavor all the more impressive — as [why time dilates and contracts]( depending on whether we are having fun or facing danger, how fetuses are able to coordinate their [circadian activity]( and what we are actually measuring when we speak of keeping time. In a fascinating chapter detailing the complex ecosystem of time-making — the [inventions]( [standardizations]( and global teams of scientists responsible for measuring and synchronizing earthly time — Burdick reflects on the tremendous coordination of human efforts keeping the world’s clocks ticking: Time is a social phenomenon. This property is not incidental to time; it is its essence. Time, equally in single cells as in their human conglomerates, is the engine of interaction. A single clock works only as long as it refers, sooner or later, obviously or not, to the other clocks around it. One can rage about it, and we do. But without a clock and the dais of time, we each rage in silence, alone. Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for [a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]( But our technologies are always prosthetic extensions of our consciousness — time, it turns out, is an innately social phenomenon not only in how it is measured, but in how it is experienced. Burdick cites the research of French neuropsychologist Sylvie Droit-Volet, who studies the warping of our temporal perception. In one experiment, she presented people with images of human faces — some neutral, some happy, some angry, some frightened — each displayed on the screen for anywhere between half a second to a second and a half. The research subjects were then asked to evaluate how long the faces appeared for. She found that across images displayed for the same duration, happy faces were perceived to last longer than neutral ones and shorter than angry or fearful ones. Burdick explains: The key ingredient seems to be a physiological response called arousal, which isn’t what you might think. In experimental psychology, “arousal” refers to the degree to which the body is preparing itself to act in some manner. It’s measured through heart rate and the skin’s electrical conductivity; sometimes subjects are asked to rate their own arousal in comparison to images of faces or puppet figures. Arousal can be thought of as the physiological expression of one’s emotions or, perhaps, as a precursor of physical action; in practice there may be little difference. By standard measures, anger is the most arousing emotion, for viewer and angry person alike, followed by fear, then happiness, then sadness. Arousal is thought to accelerate the pacemaker, causing more ticks than usual to accumulate in a given interval, thereby making emotionally laden images seem to last longer than others of equal duration… Physiologists and psychologists think of arousal as a primed physical state — not moving but poised to move. When we see movement, even implied movement in a static image, the thinking goes, we enact that movement internally. In a sense, arousal is a measure of your ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Art by Oliver Tallec from [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish]( by Jean-Pierre Simeón We perform this kind of emotional mimicry intuitively and incessantly over the course of our daily social interactions, in some degree donning the emotional and mental outfit of each person with whom we come into close contact. But we are also, apparently, absorbing each other’s sense of time, which is encoded in our psychoemotional states. In another study, Droit-Volet found that research subjects perceived images of elderly faces to last shorter than they actually did and misjudged the duration of young faces in the opposite direction — viewers were essentially embodying the typically slower movements of the elderly. Burdick explains: A slower clock ticks less often in a given interval of time; fewer ticks accumulate, so the interval is judged to be briefer than it actually is. Perceiving or remembering an elderly person induces the viewer to reenact, or simulate, their bodily states, namely their slow movement. A book, Rebecca Solnit memorably wrote, is [“a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”]( In a very real sense, we are each a temporally open book and empathy a clock that only ticks in the consciousness of another. Burdick writes: Our shared temporal distortions can be thought of as manifestations of empathy; after all, to embody another’s time is to place oneself in his or her skin. We imitate each other’s gestures and emotions — but we’re more likely to do so, studies find, with people with whom we identify or whose company we would like to share. […] Life dictates that we possess some sort of internal mechanism to keep time and monitor brief durations — yet the one we carry around can be thrown off course by the least emotional breeze. What’s the point of owning such a fallible clock? … Maybe there’s another way to think about it, Droit-Volet suggests. It’s not that our clock doesn’t run well; on the contrary, it’s superb at adapting to the ever-changing social and emotional environment that we navigate every day. The time that I perceive in social settings isn’t solely mine, nor is there just one cast to it, which is part of what gives our social interactions their shading. “There is thus no unique, homogeneous time but instead multiple experiences of time,” Droit-Volet writes in one paper. “Our temporal distortions directly reflect the way our brain and body adapt to these multiple times.” She quotes the philosopher Henri Bergson: “On doit mettre de côte le temps unique, seuls comptent les temps multiples, ceux de l’expérience.” We must put aside the idea of a single time, all that counts are the multiple times that make up experience. Our slightest social exchanges — our glances, our smiles and frowns — gain potency from our ability to synchronize them among ourselves, Droit-Volet notes. We bend time to make time with one another, and the many temporal distortions we experience are indicators of empathy; the better able I am to envisage myself in your body and your state of mind, and you in mine, the better we can each recognize a threat, an ally, a friend, or someone in need. But empathy is a fairly sophisticated trait, a mark of emotional adulthood; it takes learning and time. As children grow and develop empathy, they gain a better sense of how to navigate the social world. Put another way, it may be that a critical aspect of growing up is learning how to bend our time in step with others. We may be born alone, but childhood ends with a synchrony of clocks, as we lend ourselves fully to the contagion of time. Perhaps Borges was right, after all, that [time is the substance we are made of](. Complement the thoroughly fascinating [Why Time Flies]( with James Gleick on [how our time-travel fantasies illuminate consciousness]( Patti Smith on [time and transformation]( T.S. Eliot’s [timeless ode to time]( and Hannah Arendt on [time, space, and our thinking ego]( then revisit the story of [how Rilke and Rodin gave birth to the modern meaning of empathy](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [The Creative Tension Between Vitality and Fatality: Illuminating the Mystery of Sylvia Plath Through Her Striking Never-Before-Revealed Visual Art]( “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader,” young Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother upon the publication of her [first tragic poem](. Perhaps Plath would have felt differently had she been able to anticipate how inseparable her poetry would become from its indelible wellspring, her personhood, as posterity enveloped both in an immensity of interpretation — and misinterpretation — the right to which “the public” all too haughtily presumes over any artist’s life. In the decades since her death — a death the circumstances of which have only intensified the impulse for interpretation — her poetry has permeated the fabric of culture, quoted in everything from popular science books to Hollywood blockbusters, often unmoored from context and warped by a superficial understanding of fact. Half-opaque though we are to ourselves, we so readily presume to see the reality of another’s life on the basis of little more than fragmentary glimpses and biographical half-fictions. Sylvia Plath In addition to her poems, Plath left behind a rich body of [journals]( and [letters]( — an abundance of autobiographical material that seems to have only deepened the mystery and myth of her person. She found an outlet for what words could not contain in her visual art. “It gives me such a sense of peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything,” Plath wrote in a letter to Ted Hughes when she [took up drawing seriously]( at the age of twenty-four. “I can lose myself completely in the line, lose myself in it.” In [One Life: Sylvia Plath]( Smithsonian curator Dorothy Moss hopes that we may find Plath — the unseen, unfathomed, misinterpreted Plath — in the lines of her visual art. Self-Portrait in Semi-Abstract Style by Sylvia Plath, ink and gouache on paper, c. 1946-1952 (Estate of Robert Hittel, © Estate of Sylvia Plath) The exhibition features a selection of images and objects from the Plath archives at Smith College and Indiana University’s Lilly Library, most of them never previously exhibited — sketches, drawings, collages, photographs, letters from her psychiatrist, handwritten pages from her journal, her childhood ponytail, her typewriter. Triple-Face Portrait by Sylvia Plath, tempera on paper, c. 1950-1951 (Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, © Estate of Sylvia Plath) Sylvia Plath’s childhood ponytail with her mother’s inscription, August 1945 (Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) “A War to End Wars,” self-portrait by Sylvia Plath, February 26, 1946 (Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, © Estate of Sylvia Plath) Moss, curator of painting at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, had been incubating the idea for the show for five years. Having studied English and art history at Smith, where she first encountered the poet’s remarkable archives, she grew convinced that Plath made a worthy candidate for the Smithsonian’s One Life exhibitions, each offering a deep look at a single person’s impact on American life and culture. Previous installments in the series have celebrated founding father Thomas Paine, poet-philosopher Walt Whitman, baseball legend Babe Ruth, rivaling Civil War generals Grant and Lee, and civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. Plath is only the third woman portrayed, after pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart and farm work activist Dolores Huerta. (Incidentally, Plath’s first job was as a farm worker — an experience [she believed shaped her as a writer]( “Twas the Night Before Monday” by young Sylvia Plath, (Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. © Estate of Sylvia Plath) Collage (Includes images of Eisenhower, Nixon, bomber, etc.) by Sylvia Plath, 1960 (Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, © Estate of Sylvia Plath) Moss, who teamed up with Plath scholar and Smith Rare Book Room curator Karen Kukil, was particularly interested in Plath’s curious power over the popular imagination — how she has remained so relevant even to people who know little about her, why so much of the mythology that surrounds her stems from a place of misunderstanding, what it is about the combination of her poetry and her personhood that so enchants. Moss tells me of her fascination with Plath’s visual art: Her impulse to draw and sketch was as strong as her instinct to write. In the context of a museum of art history and biography, Moss set out to explore the poet’s visual imagination and the way Plath performed her identity — how she made sense of herself in her art, how she deliberately revealed herself only in fragments. Half a century before Instagram and Facebook’s hyperconscious art direction of the self, Plath carefully curated her own image, sculpting before the camera a persona she felt represented her ideal self and destroying many of the photographs she didn’t like. Studio photograph of Sylvia Plath (with brown hair) by Warren Kay Vantine, 1954 (Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. © Estate of Sylvia Plath) Sylvia “Marilyn” Shot by Gordon Ames Lameyer, June 1954 (Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Yorkshire, England. Photograph by Harry Ogden, 1956. (Courtesy Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts) Sylvia Plath with her children, Frieda and Nicholas, Court Green. Photograph by Siv Arb, April 1962. (Courtesy Writer Pictures Ltd., © Writer Pictures Ltd.) In her selections for the show, Moss sought to honor the full dimension of Plath’s person beyond the archetypal persona of the tragic genius into which popular culture has flattened her — to celebrate not only the undeniable [darkness of her poetry]( but also her sense of humor, her witty and whimsical sides. “To have the intensity that she achieved in her writing, she needed to experience a range of emotions,” Moss tells me — a sentiment Plath herself articulated in a poignant and precocious [letter to her mother]( penned at the age of seventeen: Always I want to be an observer. I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light and mock myself as I mock others. Sylvia Plath by Rollie McKenna, gelatin silver print, 1959 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation) In consonance with this effort to illuminate Plath’s multitudes, the show highlights two of the poems she penned in the final days before taking her own life, both animated by an exuberant vitality and a benevolence toward life, and posthumously published in her [Collected Poems]( ([public library]( KINDNESS Kindness glides about my house. Dame Kindness, she is so nice! The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke In the windows, the mirrors Are filling with smiles. What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit’s cry may be wilder But it has no soul. Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says. Sugar is a necessary fluid, Its crystals a little poultice. O kindness, kindness Sweetly picking up pieces! My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies, May be pinned any minute, anesthetized. And here you come, with a cup of tea Wreathed in steam. The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. You hand me two children, two roses. BALLOONS Since Christmas they have lived with us, Guileless and clear, Oval soul-animals, Taking up half the space, Moving and rubbing on the silk Invisible air drifts, Giving a shriek and pop When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling. Yellow cathead, blue fish — Such queer moons we live with Instead of dead furniture! Straw mats, white walls And these traveling Globes of thin air, red, green, Delighting The heart like wishes or free Peacocks blessing Old ground with a feather Beaten in starry metals. Your small Brother is making His balloon squeak like a cat. Seeming to see A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it, He bites, Then sits Back, fat jug Contemplating a world clear as water. A red Shred in his little fist. When I asked Moss what most surprised her in bringing the show to life, it was this creative tension between fatality and vitality that she pointed to — “how much wonder and light is in [Plath’s] work throughout her life, even in her last days.” Accompanying the exhibition is an arresting sound and light sculpture by Wellesley composer Jenny Olivia Johnson, titled [Glass Heart (Bells for Sylvia Plath)]( — a haunting homage to Plath, both physical and ethereal, in which visitors tap on glass jars to activate the sound of Wellesley college students singing Plath’s verses. The title of the piece is inspired by the parenthetical last verse of Plath’s [first tragic poem]( (How frail the human heart must be — a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing — a fragile, shining instrument of crystal, which can either weep, or sing.) [One Life: Sylvia Plath]( is on view until May 20, 2018. Complement it with Plath on [what makes us who we are]( her little-known [children’s book]( written for her own kids and illustrated by Sir Quentin Blake, and a rare BBC recording of her [haunting reading of the poem “Spinster,”]( then revisit [her ink sketches]( collected by her daughter. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [How to Break Up Like a Poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Art of the Kind, Clean Break]( Published at nineteen and a Pulitzer winner at thirty-three, the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892–October 19, 1950) is one of the most influential writers in the English language. She was also an early and unselfconscious pioneer of free love, openly bisexual and polyamorous in an era when society was still gasping for air from the suffocating grip of Puritanical dogmatism and homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. Her 1920 poetry collection [A Few Figs From Thistles]( became a trailblazing manifesto for women’s sexual and political emancipation — a project she espoused in her poetry and embodied in her personal life, replete with passionate polyamorous romances with both [women]( and [men](. Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1920s In the autumn of 1917, Millay, newly graduated from Vassar and settled in New York City’s Greenwich Village, answered an audition call for the role of ingenue in a play by Floyd Dell — a charming satirist, fellow intellectual, and kindred champion of free love, thirty-one and recently divorced. He would later recount in a passage from his [memoir of Millay]( I fell in love with her voice at once; and with her spirit, when I came to know it, so full of indomitable courage. But there was in her something of which one stood in awe — she seemed, as a poet, no mere mortal, but a goddess; and though one could not but love her, one loved her hopelessly, as a goddess must be loved. After a fiery love affair, Dell asked Millay to marry him. She declined, breaking his heart and breaking it open — a heartbreak that would, in Dell’s later recollection, “reveal in blinding glimpses something truer about love, and perhaps more terrible in its splendor, than was set forth in any philosophy of freedom.” In a letter to Millay found in [What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay]( ([public library]( a resigned but dignified Dell takes the only high ground there is for a jilted lover: I am asking you to end a one-sided love relationship because it seems to be one-sided…. If this is true, then — I really think we can be the best of friends, and I hope you will want to, as I do. If this were a conversation, I should somewhere in the course of it, I know, ask you again to marry me. Will you … let the happiness which is possible between us come to be? Millay took this invitation to make the clean, kind break that would transform their romance into a lifelong friendship. Perhaps she was thinking back to another intense relationship she had ended a year earlier at Vassar — her formative romance with a boyish Italian-American aspiring scientist by the name of Elaine Ralli, a class year ahead of her. When Elaine graduated from Vassar, Vincent — as Millay signed her letters — razed the relationship with a clean cut. The devastated Elaine tried to make sense of it in a letter to the poet: I’m sorry we had to disagree so decidedly and that out of all we had been we didn’t have enough left to build up a friendship of some kind. — But I guess that’s the usual thing — the more people are to one another the more decided is the break…. I grant you that I made a fool of myself but I learned an awful lot. In the years following her relationships with Ralli and Dell, which mounted over the landscape of young Millay’s lively romantic life, she penned a suite of sonnets about the tumults and transformations engendered by the heart’s interplay with other hearts — poems that captured the bittersweet lessons of great loves that had ended and explored her ambivalent regrets as to her own part in those endings. In one, she writes: I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two. Another stands as an eulogy — a simultaneous celebration and lament — for the fickleness of the heart: Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! Faithless am I save to love’s self alone. Were you not lovely I would leave you now: After the feet of beauty fly my own. Were you not still my hunger’s rarest food, And water ever to my wildest thirst, I would desert you — think not but I would! — And seek another as I sought you first. But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true. In another, she pokes mournful fun at the willful blindness inherent to every vow — the sweet delusion that love is impervious to the transience of all things and the oblivion to which the whole of the universe tends: I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year, Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far, — Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking. Complement the altogether delicious [What Lips My Lips Have Kissed]( with Millay on [the sublime power of music]( [what it really means to be an anarchist]( and her [stunning love letters]( to the British silent film actress Edith Wynne Matthison, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s [masterwork of a breakup letter](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: NO UNSOLICITED MAILINGS, PLEASE. 47 Bergen Street, 3rd floorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](