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 seventeen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week's archival resurrection â the art of solitude: a Buddhist scholar on contemplative practice and creativity â you can catch up [right here](. And if you missed it, here is [the best of The Marginalian 2023, in one place](. 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: I appreciate you more than you know. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully]( âWhen you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,â Henry Miller wrote in his [stunning letter]( to [Anaïs Nin]( (February 21, 1903âJanuary 14, 1977). âTry to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.â But we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we, the conflicted species, spend our lives resisting it yet craving its liberations. Anaïs Nin Nin herself â a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness â took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, [D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study]( ([public library]( composed when she was still in her twenties. With an eye to [D.H. Lawrence]( (September 11, 1885âMarch 2, 1930) and his âphilosophy that was against division,â his âplea for whole vision,â she writes: When the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion⦠Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing. In a sentiment central to [my own animating ethos]( she adds: Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. It was Lawrenceâs own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness â the way âlivingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.â In his 1924 novel [The Boy in the Bush]( Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all â the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment: All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for lifeâs sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain. D.H. Lawrence This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrenceâs worldview â the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel [Kangaroo]( reckoning with the most universal reality of life â the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitmanâs defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when [every woman was a âmanâ]( purely as a matter of linguistic convention: If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise â or nearly so â and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, lifeâs ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended [the wisdom of the inner voice]( Lawrenceâs protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence: I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life. Complement with Mary Oliver on [how to live with maximum aliveness]( and Henry Miller on [the measure of a life well lived]( then revisit Nin on [the meaning of maturity]( and [how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving
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KINDRED READINGS: [How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James]( * * * [Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living]( * * * [Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Maximize Our Aliveness]( * * * THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE 2024: TOTALITY [DETAILS + TICKETS]( [---]( 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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