Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, Toni Morrison on our task in troubled times, the science of tears and the art of crying

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[Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life]( Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus [wrote]( between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must [derive for ourselves]( not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone. The poetic neurologist [Oliver Sacks]( (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life’s meaning in one of his magnificent collected [Letters]( ([public library](. Oliver Sacks by his partner, [Bill Hayes](. In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead’s concept in [an anthology of their own]( even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)” — offers his own perspective: I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.” […] I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe. It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on [the measure of living and the dignity of dying]( thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead: I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History. I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.” Nine years later, in a different letter to [Stephen Jay Gould]( he would take issue with the idea that there are two “magisteria” — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing: Talk of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “another,” as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a “higher” domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature). Art by Ariana Fields from [What Love Knows]( by poet Aracelis Girmay A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in [contemplating the spirituality of nature]( after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in [contemplating the meaning of life]( in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives: When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us. I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love. Art by Sophie Blackall from [Things to Look Forward to]( As if to remind us that [the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love]( he adds: I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains). Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s wide and wonderful [Letters]( with Rachel Carson on [the meaning of life]( Loren Eiseley on [its first and final truth]( and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on [what makes life worth living]( then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on [consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning]( and his timely long-ago reflection on [how to save humanity from itself](. [SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen 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](. [The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity]( “All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her [timeless ode to the power of poetry](. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats [one of my favorite children’s books]( — which, at their best, are always [philosophies for living](. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called [“the art of living.”]( That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sandwich explores in [The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears]( ([public library]( — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence. She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body’s cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those “custodians of the heart,” as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal). Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can’t produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs. The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way. She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were “the humors of the heart,” to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin’s [studies of emotional expressions]( which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation. We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in [his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature](. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world’s largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle. This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed [“an occasion for unselfing,”]( locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only [came into popular use in the early twentieth century]( to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.) This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes: It doesn’t matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human. It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris’s death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories. Because every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita’s interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith’s [Just Kids]( on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion’s [The Year of Magical Thinking]( at the beach, crying “with pure love at the grocery store line.” She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships. Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s [mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions]( (which makes a cameo in [The Art of Crying]( as one of many celebrations of other artists’ art), then savor the fascinating [evolutionary history of dreaming]( — our other complex language for reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are. [SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen 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](. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear: Toni Morrison on the Artist’s Task in Troubled Times]( “Only an artist can telL... what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it,” James {NAME} asserted in contemplating [how the artist’s struggle illuminates the common human struggle](. “War and chaos have plagued the world for quite a long time,” wrote a forgotten defender of [E.E. Cummings and the artist’s duty to challenge the status quo]( “but each epoch creates its own special pulse-beat for the artists to interpret.” Often, the pulse-beats of chaos that feel most unsurvivable are those which artists must most urgently interpret in order for us to indeed survive. That task of the artist as a grounding and elevating force in turbulent times is what [Toni Morrison]( (February 18, 1931–August 5, 2019) explores in a stunning essay titled “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” included in the 150th anniversary issue of [The Nation](. Toni Morrison (Courtesy Alfred A. Knopf) Morrison writes: Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush. I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine — and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election…” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed. With an eye to the various brokennesses of the world, past and present, Morrison writes: This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art. Complement with Morrison on [how to be your own story]( and George Saunders on [the artist’s task]( then revisit JFK’s spectacular speech on [the artist’s role in society](. [SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen 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](. IF YOU MISSED IT [A Lighthouse for Dark Times]( [18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian]( ALSO: A LIVE EVENT To celebrate the centennial of [The Morgan Library & Museum]( — one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most influential works in the history of creative culture — I have chosen several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as springboards for larger [conversations]( about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative women I know. The third event in the series — a conversation with Caldecott-winning children's book artist and author [Sophie Blackall]( — considers children's books as miniature works of philosophy, drawing on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's [original watercolors for The Little Prince]( Beatrix Potter's illustrated letters, and Lewis Carroll's diary entry from the day he first [told the story of Wonderland to the real-life Alice](. Tickets (pay-what-you-can) [here]( and livestream (free) [here](. There will be signed copies of Figuring, The Universe in Verse, and Sophie's Things to Look Forward to. ALSO: OUT NOW A labor of love 7 years in the making. Peek inside [here](. [---]( 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. The Marginalian NOT RECEIVING MAIL 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](