Inner wholeness, our greatest obstacle to happiness, and the body as the seedbed of a flourishing soul; the enchantment of cacti; the bilingual mind

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](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly [Brain Pickings]( newsletter by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — how to live and how to die; Patti Smith on libraries and the transformative power of reading; a poetic Victorian encyclopedia of lessons from flowers — you can catch up [right here]( if you missed the annual summary of the best of Brain Pickings 2019, you can find it [here](. And if you find any value and joy in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – I spend innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, as I have been for more than thirteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [Anne Gilchrist on Inner Wholeness, Our Greatest Obstacle to Happiness, and the Body as the Seedbed of a Flourishing Soul]( [lettersofanngilchristwaltwhitman.jpg?fit=320%2C477]( “So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance,” Jane Hirshfield wrote in her stunning poem [“The Weighing.”]( In how we chip from the monolithic weight of the world those osmian grains of happiness lies the promise of an answer to the abiding question: [How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?]( That is what Anne Gilchrist (February 25, 1828–November 29, 1885) — a woman Walt Whitman cherished as “a sort of human miracle,” whose “vision went on and on” and who “belonged to the times yet to come” — returns to again and again, each time quarrying new strata of insight, in the forgotten treasure [The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman]( ([free ebook]( | [public library](. Radiating from the pages of her [beautiful and heartbreaking love letters to Whitman]( is an uncommonly original and penetrating mind in dialogue perhaps even more richly with itself than with its half-attentive correspondent. (Whitman responded to a fraction of the letters; he could not, for the obvious reason, meet her romantic ardor — but he relished and responded to her exceptional mind.) [AnneGilchrist.jpg?resize=680%2C848] Anne Gilchrist By the time Gilchrist encountered Whitman’s soul-salving poetry, which she helped popularize in England with her coruscating review, she had been widowed for more than a decade, raising her four children as a single mother and making a living by her pen in an era when [very few women]( were published authors. On the second day of summer in 1869, in consonance with her contemporary and compatriot Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s insistence on [happiness as a moral obligation]( Gilchrist writes in a letter to William Michael Rossetti — Christina Rossetti’s brother and Whitman’s British publisher, who had boldly brought Leaves of Grass to England when it was scorned in America and who would eventually introduce Gilchrist and Whitman: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness; to pluck it out of “each moment and whatever happens”; to find that one can ride as gay and buoyant on the angry, menacing, tumultuous waves of life as on those that glide and glitter under a clear sky; that it is not defeat and wretchedness which come out of the storm of adversity, but strength and calmness. [margaretcook_leavesofgrass8.jpg?resize=680%2C874]( Art by Margaret C. Cook from a [rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass](. (Available [as a print]( Our greatest obstacle to happiness, Gilchrist intimates, are our illusions of finitude and fragmentation — a failure of imagination that becomes a self-imposed prison of smallness, from which we are liberated only when we learn to see the interconnected wholeness of the universe: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no “down” for the world, but only in every direction an “up.” And that this is an all-embracing truth, including within its scope every created thing, and, with deepest significance, every part, faculty, attribute, healthful impulse, mind, and body of a man (each and all facing towards and related to the Infinite on every side), is what we grown children find it hardest to realize, too. [margaretcook_leavesofgrass18.jpg?resize=680%2C1028]( Art by Margaret C. Cook from a [rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass](. (Available [as a print]( Fifteen years before William James devised [his revolutionary theory of how our bodies affect our feelings]( and more than a century before our modern science shed light on [how the mind and the body converge in the healing of trauma]( Gilchrist makes a beautifully articulated, elegantly reasoned case for nondualistic wellbeing: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I feel deeply persuaded that a perfectly fearless, candid, ennobling treatment of the life of the body (so inextricably intertwined with, so potent in its influence on the life of the soul) will prove of inestimable value to all earnest and aspiring natures, impatient of the folly of the long-prevalent belief that it is because of the greatness of the spirit that it has learned to despise the body, and to ignore its influences; knowing well that it is, on the contrary, just because the spirit is not great enough, not healthy and vigorous enough, to transfuse itself into the life of the body, elevating that and making it holy by its own triumphant intensity; knowing, too, how the body avenges this by dragging the soul down to the level assigned itself. Whereas the spirit must lovingly embrace the body, as the roots of a tree embrace the ground, drawing thence rich nourishment, warmth, impulse. Or, rather, the body is itself the root of the soul — that whereby it grows and feeds. The great tide of healthful life that carries all before it must surge through the whole man, not beat to and fro in one corner of his brain. [margaretcook_leavesofgrass1.jpg?resize=680%2C883]( Art by Margaret C. Cook from a [rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass](. (Available [as a print]( Like Whitman, who both [reverenced science]( and [probed its limitations]( Gilchrist bolstered her erudition and her philosophical ideas with an intense interest in astronomy, chemistry, and biology, keeping up with the latest discoveries of the time. Drawing on her respect for science, and echoing computing pioneer Alan Turing’s brokenhearted belief that [“the body provides something for the spirit to look after and use,”]( she adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Science knows that matter is not, as we fancied, certain stolid atoms which the forces of nature vibrate through and push and pull about; but that the forces and the atoms are one mysterious, imperishable identity, neither conceivable without the other. She knows, as well as the poet, that destructibility is not one of nature’s words; that it is only the relationship of things — tangibility, visibility — that are transitory. She knows that body and soul are one, and proclaims it undauntedly, regardless, and rightly regardless, of inferences. Complement with Gilchrist’s contemporary Mary Shelley on [nature and the meaning of happiness]( and Whitman himself on [what makes life worth living]( then leap across epochs of scientific understanding to Harvard’s groundbreaking [75-year study of human happiness](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. 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]( [The Poetics of Outer Toughness and Inner Tenderness: Gorgeous 19th-Century Engravings of Cacti]( [lemaire_cacti.jpg?fit=320%2C458] Among the oddities of my childhood in communist Bulgaria was my mother’s collection of cacti. Against the chipped grey concrete of our apartment building, these improbable emissaries of another climate from another world stood as spiked sentinels of a fantastical optimism at the portal to another life. Each winter, we brought the entire ensemble — dozens of them, all kinds of shapes and sizes and species — indoors; each summer, we carefully arranged them back on the tiny balcony overlooking the grey parking lot. My mother even tried her hand at grafting, without much success — but I vividly remember my astonishment at seeing the thick spiny skin open into the softest, most succulent flesh I had ever seen — softer than the inside of the cucumbers from my grandmother’s garden, moister than the vermillion interior of my thumb the time I pressed it into the knife’s blade accidentally flipped upside down. I loved their geometric elegance, the splendid shock of their rare blossoms, their quiet resilience. I felt a deep affinity with these strange, otherworldly creatures — the child who also had to learn to thrive on being underwatered, the child longing for thick-skinned spiny armor to protect the inner succulence from the intemperate climate and violent dust-storms of its local environment. (Many years later, well into adulthood, I would discover and fall in love with a [charming children’s book]( embracing this very metaphor.) [cactus2.jpg?resize=680%2C860]( Mammillaria Elephantidens. Available [as a print](. Imagine, then, my delight at chancing upon the forgotten 1841 gem [Illustrations from a Descriptive Iconography of Cacti]( by the French botanist Charles Antoine Lemaire (November 1, 1800–June 22, 1871), who spent his entire personal and professional life under the enchantment of cacti, dying in poverty and without renown despite his voluminous publications and the number of genera he named, including the famed Christmas Cactus. (A plant, as it happens, about a hundred million years older than Christ.) His successor at the horticultural journal Lemaire edited for the last seventeen years of his life lamented that “posterity will esteem M. Lemaire more highly than did his contemporaries.” May we so do. [cactus12.jpg?resize=680%2C946]( Echinocactus sellowianus. Available [as a print](. His 1841 classification of cacti features a dozen beautifully colored and detailed engravings of some of the most notable species, which I have restored, digitized, and made available as prints, with proceeds benefiting [The Nature Conservancy](. [cactus11.jpg?resize=680%2C996]( Echinocactus pentacanthus. Available [as a print](. [cactus6.jpg?resize=680%2C923]( Echinocactus horizontalinus. Available [as a print](. [cactus10.jpg?resize=680%2C966]( Echinocactus pectiniferus. Available [as a print](. [cactus9.jpg?resize=680%2C896]( Echinocactus astrophytum myriostigma. Available [as a print](. [cactus8.jpg?resize=680%2C908]( Echinocactus gibbosus. Available [as a print](. [cactus7.jpg?resize=680%2C938]( Echinocactus concinnus. Available [as a print](. [as a print]( Echinocactus coptonogonus. Available [as a print](. [cactus4.jpg?resize=680%2C985]( Echinocactus hexaedrophorus. Available [as a print](. [cactus3.jpg?resize=680%2C928]( Mammillaria Erecta. Available [as a print](. [cactus1.jpg?resize=680%2C870]( Echinocactus horizontalinus. Available [as a print](. Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on [how a rare night-blooming cactus reconciles us to the universe]( then revisit poet and painter Rebecca Hey’s [gorgeous illustrations for the world’s first encyclopedia of trees]( published in Lemaire’s era, and Elizabeth Blackwell’s trailblazing [illustrated botany of medicinal plants]( from the previous century. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [William Godwin on the Advantages of the Multilingual Mind]( [williamgodwin_enquirer.jpg?fit=320%2C434]( Language is not the content of thought but the vessel that carries thought, the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking in order to anneal our understanding of the world. The more spacious the vessel, the more latitude we have to clarify our own thoughts, to reach farther horizons on the waves of the mind. “We die. That may be the meaning of life,” Toni Morrison asserted in her spectacular [Nobel Prize acceptance speech](. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” In language we fathom ourselves and our own lives[;]( in language we compose, to borrow Leonard Cohen’s lovely phrase, [“the Constitution of the inner country.”]( And yet language is inherently moored to the territory of an outer country — to the lexicon, vocabulary, and folkloric tongue of a people and a place. Nothing furthers the reach of thought in language more surely than proficiency in multiple lexicons, which confers upon the bilingual or multilingual mind a lush advantage of thought. That is what the radical philosopher William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) explores in a passage from his altogether excellent 1797 book [The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature]( ([public library]( — the collection of essays he composed while his partner, the philosopher and feminism founding mother Mary Wollstonecraft, was pregnant with their daughter, who would one day write the visionary Frankenstein. [WilliamGodwin_JamesNorthcote.jpg?resize=680%2C819] William Godwin. Portrait by James Northcote. (National Portrait Gallery, London.) Nearly two centuries before Ursula K. Le Guin observed that the function of language is [“to give people the words to know their own experience”]( and James {NAME} [lamented the exclusionary nature of any single language]( which may not reflect the experiences of the diverse people forced to speak it, Godwin makes an ardent case for how the knowledge of multiple languages liberates the mind and swells the power of the human spirit. (A crucial meta-sensitivity to language as an emissary of time and place is due in reading Godwin: His use of the masculine to address universal humanity is a reflection of his era’s lexical convention — he was writing two centuries before [the unsexing of he as the universal pronoun]( — and not of his beliefs: Godwin was an ardent exponent of gender equality, who courageously bore the opprobrium such radical views earned him, who forged with Wollstonecraft a [a trailblazing marriage of equals]( and who, in an era when girls were entirely excluded from real education and the world of ideas, raised his daughters with uncompromising focus on the life of the mind.) Advocating for teaching young people multiple languages, Godwin writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]He that is acquainted with only one language, will probably always remain in some degree the slave of language. From the imperfectness of his knowledge, he will feel himself at one time seduced to say the thing he did not mean, and at another time will fall into errors of this sort without being aware of it. It is impossible he should understand the full force of words. He will sometimes produce ridicule, where he intended to produce passion. He will search in vain for the hidden treasures of his native tongue. He will never be able to employ it in the most advantageous manner. He cannot be well acquainted with its strength and its weakness. He is uninformed respecting its true genius and discriminating characteristics. But the man who is competent to and exercised in the comparison of languages, has attained to his proper elevation. Language is not his master, but he is the master of language. Things hold their just order in his mind, ideas first, and then words. Words therefore are used by him as the means of communicating or giving permanence to his sentiments; and the whole magazine of his native tongue is subjected at his feet. [thelostwords3.jpg] Art by Jackie Morris from [The Lost Words]( by Robert Macfarlane Epochs before Susan Sontag insisted that [words are a tool of personal agency]( Godwin argues that our vocabulary furnishes the building blocks of our understanding, which in turn foments our capacity for effective action in the world: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Words are of the utmost importance to human understanding. Almost all the ideas employed by us in matters of reasoning have been acquired by words. In our most retired contemplations we think for the most part in words; and upon recollection can in most cases easily tell in what language we have been thinking. Without words, uttered, or thought upon, we could not probably carry on any long train of deduction. The science of thinking therefore is little else than the science of words. He that has not been accustomed to refine upon words, and discriminate their shades of meaning, will think and reason after a very inaccurate and slovenly manner. He that is not able to call his idea by various names, borrowed from various languages, will scarcely be able to conceive his idea in a way precise, clear and unconfused. Complement with [The Lost Words]( — writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris’s courageous act of resistance against the impoverishment of our language, which is an impoverishment of our imagination — and Iris Murdoch on [language as an instrument of truth against tyranny]( then revisit Godwin on [how to raise a reader](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. 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]( [---] 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. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](