Leonard Cohen's antidote to anger; great writers, artists, and scientists on the rewards of solitude; an illustrated field guide to the clouds

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]( NOTE: This newsletter is long and may be cut short by your email program. You can read it in full [at this link](. [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Joseph Brodsky on the cure for existential boredom, Octavia Butler on religion and the spirituality of symbiosis, Richard Jefferies on transcendence — 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 seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. [200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness]( There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman [howled]( “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and spiritual rewards, its primal sanities. Solitude by Maria Popova. Available [as a print](. RAINER MARIA RILKE [Rainer Maria Rilke]( (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) was in his late thirties when he began answering the eager letters of the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had [nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul](. Shortly after Rilke’s death of leukemia, Kappus published the correspondence. Letters to a Young Poet came to stand as one of the finest books of the past century. In a [wonderful new translation]( by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows, Rilke writes: What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing. Art by Giuliano Cucco from [Before I Grew Up]( by John Miller MAY SARTON A lifetime after she composed [her stunning ode to solitude]( as a young poet, after she contemplated [solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery]( upon entering her sixties, [May Sarton]( (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) moved to Maine to spend the last chapter of her life living alone in a house with a garden on the edge of the sea. Friends came to visit, as did strangers who admired her poetry and had found her address in the phone book — those were the days — but she cherished her solitude above even the most welcome company. In a passage from her boundlessly rewarding journal [The House by the Sea]( ([public library]( — which gave us her meditations on [the relationship between gardening and writing]( [how to cultivate your talent]( and [the art of living alone]( — Sarton considers the tilting balance of her life. Reflecting on her approach to visitors, she writes: I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson [Sarton’s prior home] focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end. Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s [stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks](. (Available [as a print]( HENRY DAVID THOREAU “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” [Henry David Thoreau]( wrote in his account of the months he spent at Walden Pond, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Although Thoreau’s solitude was not in actuality as total as he recounted it, it was deep and transformative. In a [long meditation on solitude and the meaning of life]( he writes in [Walden]( ([public library]( | [public domain]( It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. […] I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go [out among others] than when we stay in our chambers. For Thoreau, who suffered bouts of debilitating depression and [black grief]( solitude was not a way of caving in on himself, as one does in loneliness, but a way of unselfing, of stepping beyond his small human turmoils and into the wider universe that holds: The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. Illustration by Maurice Sendak from [Open House for Butterflies]( by Ruth Krauss SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL In the last years of the nineteenth century, shortly after he originated an entire new field we now call neuroscience and a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neuron as the basic unit of the nervous system, [Santiago Ramón y Cajal]( (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934) composed a short, passionate book titled [Advice for a Young Investigator]( ([public library]( predating Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by three decades. In it, he outlined [the six psychological flaws that keep the talented from reaching greatness]( and pointed to solitude as the supreme incubator of true originality. He writes: Our major commitment … is to discover ourselves before discovering scientific truth, to mold ourselves before molding nature. To fashion a strong brain, an original mind that is ours alone — this is the preliminary work that is absolutely essential. […] Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought! How satisfying and rewarding are the long winter evenings spent in the private laboratory, at the very time when educational centers are closed to their workers! Such evenings free us from poorly thought out improvisations, strengthen our patience, and refine our powers of observation. Art by Giuliano Cucco from [Before I Grew Up]( WENDELL BERRY In his splendid poem [“The Peace of Wild Things,”]( poet and farmer [Wendell Berry]( located the remedy for despair in learning to “rest in the grace of the world,” which is most readily found amid wild solitude. He deepens the sentiment in one of the essays from his altogether wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection [What Are People For?]( ([public library](. Reflecting on [the antidote to the two great enemies of creativity]( Berry writes: We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness… True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures. Art by Violeta Lópiz for [At the Drop of a Cat]( ROSE MACAULAY Often, it is only when something is taken away that we fully appreciate its value; in being famished for it, we remember how deeply it nourishes us. In a delightful reckoning with [the pleasure of being left alone after entertaining visitors]( found in her 1935 collection [Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life]( ([public library]( [Rose Macaulay]( (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) writes: An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness. […] The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom… It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Art by Dasha Tolstikova from [A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader]( STEPHEN BATCHELOR Buddhist scholar [Stephen Batchelor]( echoes Berry’s sentiment in his [thorough reckoning with solitude as contemplative practice]( and writes: By withdrawing from the world into solitude, you separate yourself from others. By isolating yourself, you can see more clearly what distinguishes you from other people. Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]). Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice. […] Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back. Sustained aloneness brings you to a tipping point where the pendulum of life returns you to others. Art by Ofra Amit for [The Universe in Verse]( MICHAEL LEUNIG A century after Virginia Woolf made her epochal case for the importance of having a room of one’s own in which to create — that womb of [“fertile solitude]( from which works of art are born — Australian cartoonist, poet, and philosopher [Michael Leunig]( offers a singsong echo of Woolf’s timeless insistence: TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS [Terry Tempest Williams]( has devoted her life to giving voice to the dialogue between human nature and the rest of nature, whether we call it wilderness or landscape or environment. In [Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place]( ([public library]( — which also gave us Williams on [change and denial]( — she writes: Solitude… is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude. Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( HERMANN HESSE In the wake of WWI, a quarter century before he won the Nobel Prize, [Hermann Hesse]( (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) composed [an impassioned letter to the disaffected young](. In it, an epoch before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly [unsexed man as the universal pronoun]( he writes: Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave. Learning to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it, Hesse argues, is a prerequisite for taking charge of our destiny: Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves… It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. […] Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Complement with Barry Lopez on [the cure for our existential loneliness]( — that archnemesis of solitude — then revisit poet Elizabeth Bishop on [why everyone ought to experience at least one long period of solitude in life]( and artist Rockwell Kent on [the relationship between wilderness, solitude, and creativity](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tens of 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](. [An Illustrated Field Guide to the Science and Wonder of the Clouds]( Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought. To me, a cloud will always be [a spell against indifference]( — a little bloom of wonder to remind us that everything changes yet everything holds. Two centuries after the amateur meteorologist Luke Howard [classified the clouds with Goethe’s aid]( and two generations after Rachel Carson composed [her lyrical serenade to the science of the sky]( Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of [Cloud Appreciation Society]( (of which I am a pin-wearing member), and artist [William Grill]( bring us [Cloudspotting for Beginners]( ([public library]( — an illustrated field guide to the science and splendor of the sky, and an ode to the human longing for pattern, for order, for an organizing principle that gives coherence to the chaos of life. Cumulus Cumulonimbus It can be hard to give an artistic interpretation of something so naturally beguiling, so replete with raw wonder, but under Grill’s color pencil, clouds take on an even more whimsical quality, gentle as a child’s song, unhurried as a daydream. Cirrus Altostratus With the plain-worded playfulness of a children’s book and the concise authority of an encyclopedia, the book covers the ten main cloud types — from the rough-hewn patchwork of Stratocumulus, commonest because it forms over the oceans that cover most of our planet’s surface, to Cirrocumulus, the rarest cloud of all and the most ephemeral. Cirrocumulus Altocumulus Beyond the main ten, there is the subgroup of special cloud types, from the aerial waves of Undulatus to the spaceship of Lenticularis. Among them is a touching triumph of citizen science — Asperitas, a cloud species identified and named by members of the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2009 and, with Pretor-Pinney’s advocacy, officially affirmed by the World Meteorological Organization in 2017. Asperitas Fluctus Radiatus Undulatus Lenticularis Opening beyond the cloud types is a cabinet of atmospheric curiosities — cloud iridescence, sundogs (which [inspired Hilma af Klint]( glories (which were central to [the discovery of cosmic rays]( clouds on other planets, thunder and lightning on our own, crepuscular rays. Crepuscular rays Pretor-Pinney details one of the great dramas of this world, which Coleridge saw as a [singular portal to the soul]( Inside a storm cloud, the ice crystals bump into one another as they are blown around by violent air currents. Each time hail and ice crystals collide, the larger pieces of ice pick up negative electric charge from smaller ones, which instead become positively charged. This electric charge is like the one you feel when you rub a balloon. The larger, heavier pieces of ice fall through the cloud’s rising air currents toward its base while the smaller, lighter ice crystals are wafted up toward the top. This is how separate parts of the Cumulonimbus become negatively and positively charged. Eventually, a massive current of electricity in the form of a lightning bolt can shoot through the sky to even out the charge again. Each bolt makes the air much hotter than the surface of the Sun, causing it to expand explosively, which we hear as the crash and boom of thunder. Like all processes and phenomena of nature, clouds are rife with metaphors for human life. (Coleridge himself used to frequent London’s science lectures, including Luke Howard’s, hunting for metaphors to backbone his poems.) With an eye to the astonishing fact that the average Cumulus weighs as much as eighty elephants, Pretor-Pinney considers how a cloud, composed of myriad small particles known as cloudlets, stays afloat: “A cloud stays up because it’s not one big thing but a group of tiny, tiny things,” he writes, which strikes me as an apt metaphor for how diversity and multiplicity ensure the buoyancy of any society. Fibratus Couple [Cloudspotting for Beginners]( with 19th-century Norwegian artist Kund Baade’s [haunting cloudscapes]( then revisit poet Mark Strand’s [love letter to the clouds]( and the story of [how they got their names](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tens of 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](. [Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance]( One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world. [Leonard Cohen]( (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who [thought deeply and passionately]( about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his [Book of Longing]( ([public library]( — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery. Leonard Cohen (courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust) In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes: We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society. In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying [the light between us]( and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance. Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes: Take a long time with your anger, sleepyhead. Don’t waste it in riots. Don’t tangle it with ideas. The Devil won’t let me speak, will only let me hint that you are a slave, your misery a deliberate policy of those in whose thrall you suffer, and who are sustained by your misfortune. The atrocities over there, the interior paralysis over here — Pleased with the better deal? You are clamped down. You are being bred for pain. The Devil ties my tongue. I’m speaking to you, “friend of my scribbled life.” You have been conquered by those who know how to conquer invincibly. The curtains move so beautifully, lace curtains of some sweet old intrigue: the Devil tempting me to turn away from alarming you. So I must say it quickly: Whoever is in your life, those who harm you, those who help you; those whom you know and those whom you do not know — let them off the hook, help them off the hook. You are listening to Radio Resistance. Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s [poetic antidote to anger]( and Erich Fromm’s [psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation]( then revisit Leonard Cohen on [the constitution of the inner country]( and [what makes a saint](. [Forward to a friend]( 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](. ALSO [THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK]( [---]( 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](