Edward Gorey's illustrated 1969 poem about the secret of true love, a stunning musical tribute to Rachel Carson, Ann Druyan on wonder and the sacred

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 email digest of the daily online journal [Brain Pickings]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Viktor Frankl's lost lectures on moving beyond optimism and pessimism to find life's deepest meaning; James {NAME} on keeping the light alive amid the entropic darkness of being, poet and philosopher David Whyte's lovely letter to children about why we read — you can catch up [right 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 fourteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [The Osbick Bird: Edward Gorey’s Tender and Surprising Vintage Illustrated Allegory About the Meaning of True Love]( [osbickbird_gorey.jpg?fit=320%2C295]( Great loves, like great works of art, live at the crossing point of the improbable and the inevitable. That, at least, has been my experience, both as a scholar of history and as a private participant in the lives of the heart. Such loves come unbidden, without warning or presentiment, and that is their supreme insurance against the projectionist fantasy that so frequently disguises not-love — infatuation, obsession, jealousy, longing — as love. But when they do come, with all the delirium of the improbable, they enter the house of the heart as if they have always lived there, instantly at home; they enter like light bending at a certain angle to reveal, without fuss or fanfare, some corner of the universe for the very first time — but the corner has always been there, dusty and dim, and the light has always been ambient, unlensed and unbent into illumination. For great love, as the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her [splendid meditation on its mystery]( is “never justified” but is rather “like the little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves?” That improbable and inexplicable miracle is what Edward Gorey (February 22, 1925–April 15, 2000) celebrates with his signature faux-terse tenderness and soulful oddness in the vintage gem [The Osbick Bird]( ([public library](. Written in 1969 — several years after Gorey created his now-iconic [Gashlycrumb Tinies]( but well before his work for PBS and his [fantastical reimagining of Dracula]( made him a household name — it was originally published under Gorey’s own Fantod Press, whose author list included such venerated names as Ogdred Weary, Madame Groeda Weyrd, O. Müde, Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Raddory Gewe, Garrod Weedy, and the Oprah-like first-name-only Om — Gorey’s delightful [menagerie of pseudonyms](. [EdwardGorey_RichardAvedon.jpg?resize=680%2C857] Edward Gorey by Richard Avedon (Richard Avedon Foundation) This tiny treasure of a book, itself improbable and inevitable given its subject and its creator’s nature, lay dormant and forgotten for decades, until [Pomegranate Press]( heroic stewards of Gorey’s legacy, resurrected it twelve years after he became the posthumous author he had always lived as. In spare lines and spare verses, Gorey tells the singsong story of the osbick bird — a creature of his wild and wondrous imagination — who alights one day to lonely, dignified Emblus Figby’s bowler hat, out of the blue, or rather, out of the sky-implying negative space of Gorey’s minimalist, consummately cross-hatched black-and-white worldscapes. [theosbickbird_edwardgorey19.jpg?resize=680%2C431]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey1.jpg?resize=680%2C557]( And then, just like that, Emblus Figby and the osbick bird commence a life together — as if life was always meant to be lived in this particular tandem; as if each of the two was written into being just to complete the other’s rhyme. [theosbickbird_edwardgorey2.jpg?resize=680%2C559]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey3.jpg?resize=680%2C563]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey25.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey4.jpg?resize=680%2C558]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey5.jpg?resize=680%2C564]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey22.jpg?resize=680%2C457]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey6.jpg?resize=680%2C558]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey23.jpg?resize=680%2C414]( This charmingly eccentric shared life unspools in Gorey’s playful verses, evocative of Victorian nursery rhymes, and when the spool runs out, Gorey’s romantic realism takes over — the osbick bird flits out of the frame just like it had flitted into it, by that miraculous consonance of the improbable and the inevitable. [theosbickbird_edwardgorey7.jpg?resize=680%2C557]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey8.jpg?resize=680%2C557]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey11.jpg?resize=680%2C554]( [theosbickbird_edwardgorey24.jpg?resize=680%2C443]( “There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin had written a century earlier in the final passage of On the Origin of Species — in the view that death is the very mechanism ensuring the unstoppable ongoingness of life, the fulcrum by which ever shifts into after. There is grandeur, too, in Gorey’s subversive ending. There is beauty and bravery in its counterpoint to our incomplete happily-ever-after cultural mythos and its deep-seated [denial of death as an integral part of life]( and therefore of love; beauty and bravery in the reminder that the measure of a great love — as of a great life — is not in the happy ending, for all endings followed to the ultimate finality are the same, but in all the happy durings. [theosbickbird_edwardgorey20.jpg?resize=680%2C462]( Complement [The Osbick Bird]( with Shell Silverstein’s [tender line-drawn allegory for the simple secret of true love]( then revisit Hannah Arendt on [love and how to live with the fundamental fear of its loss]( and W.H. Auden on [what it means to be the more loving one](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for fourteen 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. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( 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 [Thrush Song: A Stunning Harmonic Tribute to Rachel Carson’s Courage by Composer Paola Prestini and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City]( [figuring_jacket_final.jpg?fit=320%2C486]( In 2019, the New York Philharmonic commissioned composer and force of nature [Paola Prestini]( — co-founder of [National Sawdust]( that visionary locus of possibility for world-building through music — to compose an original piece for their multi-season [Project 19]( initiative, celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Inspired by the stories of the remarkable unsung women in [Figuring]( she reached out to me to write the words. I chose a moment that occurs some 485 pages into the book — a moment small and private, but enormous in its symbolic significance and cultural reverberations. In January 1962, after a decade of incubation and four years of methodical research, Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) turned in the manuscript for what would become [Silent Spring]( — the epoch-making catalyst of the modern environmental movement, making ecology a household word and invitinig the human imagination to consider how intricately, vulnerably interleaved nature’s ecosystems are. Carson, by then savaged by cancer, knew that speaking such inconvenient truth to power would come at grave personal cost. It did: She was soon assaulted by government and industry, her scientific credibility attacked on the basis of her biology, with the crude weapon of gender. But she moored herself to what she had articulated to the love of her life, Dorothy Freeman, at the outset of her courageous endeavor: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent. [rachelcarson.jpg?resize=680%2C454] Rachel Carson (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) When Carson turned in the manuscript that cold January night, she tucked her newly adopted son Roger into bed, kissed him good night, took her beloved black cat Jeffie into the study, shut the door behind her, and put on her favorite Beethoven violin concerto. “Suddenly,” she recounted the evening to Dorothy the next day, “the tension of four years was broken and I let the tears come.” She told Dorothy: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Last summer… I said I could never again listen happily to a thrush song if I had not done all I could. And last night the thoughts of all the birds and other creatures and all the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness, that now I had done what I could — I had been able to complete it — now it had its own life. Carson never lived to see its life in the world, but her work inspired the creation of Earth Day and the led to the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. [paolaprestini.jpg?resize=680%2C425] Paola Prestini (Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe) Paola transfigured this moment into a gorgeous piece for soprano and orchestra, titled “Thrush Song.” After it premiered with the New York Philharmonic, I invited her to adapt it for a chorus of young people as part of the 2020 [Universe in Verse]( celebrating 50 years of Earth Day. (Days after David Byrne read a poem at [the 2019 edition]( of The Universe in Verse, I had been awed by the National Sawdust performance of [his countercultural hymn of resistance and resilience]( accompanied by a coruscating chorus of young people; I was also haunted by Carson’s [moving message to the next generations]( — to the Greta Thunbergs she never lived to meet.) [ThrushSong.jpg?resize=680%2C847] Paola Prestini’s working sketch for the New York Philharmonic project Paola reimagined “Thrush Song” as a wondrous harmonic serenade to Carson’s courage, working with a constellation of young women from the [Young People’s Chorus of New York City]( rehearsing and performing remotely in a world stilled and stunned by a global pandemic — a poignant meta-testament to Carson’s legacy: the revelation of how intimately connected we are to one another and to the rest of nature through the intricate, complex, delicate web of biological and ecological relationships weaving the tapestry of being. The result, which many in the live Universe in Verse audience welcomed as the crowning glory of the nearly four-hour show, is now available for all the world to cherish, with a deep bow of admiration and gratitude to Paola and the remarkable women of the Young People’s Chorus, and special thanks to [Debbie Millman]( for the lovingly hand-lettered lyrics. [c82e8a36-9012-4011-8046-afa23b969b13.png]( Complement with a [Carson’s birdsong notation set to music]( by singer-songwriter Dawn Landes and Neil Gaiman’s [poetic tribute to Carson’s courage]( written for the 2018 Universe in Verse, then revisit other highlights from the show’s four-year archive: a [stunning animated adaptation]( of Marie Howe’s poem about our cosmic inter-belonging, James {NAME}’s [ecological-humanistic wisdom set to song]( astronaut Leland Melvin reading [Pablo Neruda’s love letter to the forest]( and Neil Gaiman’s subversive feminist celebration of science and the human search for truth, in [a tactile animated short film](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Wonder and the Sacred Search for Truth: Ann Druyan on Why the Scientific Method Is Like Love]( [druyan_cosmos.jpg?fit=320%2C470]( “We, this people, on a small and lonely planet / Traveling through casual space / Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns / To a destination where all signs tell us / It is possible and imperative that we learn / A brave and startling truth…” So begins Maya Angelou’s [cosmic clarion call to humanity]( one of the most beautiful and poignant poems ever written — a poem that flew to space, a poem that came from space: a poem inspired by Carl Sagan’s [Pale Blue Dot]( — his lyrical meditation on the landmark photograph of Earth, which the Voyager spacecraft took in 1990 as an afterthought upon completing its unprecedented photographic survey of our Solar System, and which Sagan spent years petitioning NASA to permit. [palebluedot.jpg?resize=680%2C922] The “Pale Blue Dot” photograph captured by the Voyager 1 (NASA/JPL) The Voyager, which had sailed into space thirteen years earlier, carried alongside its instruments [The Golden Record]( — a visionary, intensely poetic effort to capture the essence of Earth in sounds and images that would convey to another planetary civilization across spacetime, and, perhaps even more vitally in the middle of the Cold War, mirror back to us who and what we are: a single symphonic species. Tasked with the impossible, inspired work of distilling that essence was the project’s creative director, Ann Druyan. In the course of composing the record, Sagan and Druyan, to their own wonder-stricken surprise, found themselves composing a stunning love story with their lives. They spent the remaining two decades of Sagan’s life fathoming and figuring the universe together — writing [poetic inquiries into the origin of comets]( dreaming up children’s book ideas, collaborating on the iconic 1980 television series turned book Cosmos, which The Library of Congress listed among 88 books to have shaped the country’s conscience, alongside epoch-making triumphs of courage and vision that have changed the course of culture and the understanding of nature — books like Rachel Carson’s [Silent Spring]( and Walt Whitman’s [Leaves of Grass](. [margaretcook_leavesofgrass17.jpg?resize=680%2C853] Art by Margaret C. Cook for a [rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass](. (Available [as a print]( Two decades after Sagan’s death — decades coruscating with dazzling scientific discoveries that have disquieted us into shedding more myths and beholding more of reality — Druyan picked up the thread of wonder to write and produce a continuation of Cosmos, starring astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and soaring into these new frontiers of our ever-evolving understanding of space and time. In the companion book, [Cosmos: Possible Worlds]( ([public library]( she extends an invitation “to feel more intensely the romance of science and the wonder of being alive right now, at these particular coordinates in spacetime, less alone, more at home, here in the cosmos.” Tracing our cosmic story — from the cyanobacteria through which life first bloomed on our rocky world billions of years ago to our search for life on possible worlds many lightyears away; from the cave walls on which early humans first mapped their spatial coordinates to the Rube Goldberg machine of discoveries that led to the lasers with which these caves are now studied; from the symbiotic evolution of plants and the pollinators that feast on them to the Russian scientists who starved to death in a murderous dictatorship to protect their precious collection of seeds ensuring our planet’s biodiversity far beyond their lifetimes — Druyan takes up the mission not as a scientist herself but as a lifelong student and steward of the scientific mindscape, a self-described “hunter-gatherer of stories”: stories that begin with the human, with individual scientists or teams of scientists, and beget the cosmic, parting the curtain to let in a few more golden rays of reality, chiseling some precious fragment of knowledge from the immense monolith of the unknown. At the center of her expansive reach into past and future is a lucid, luminous look at the realities and responsibilities the present is calling us to rise to — an inquiry into what it would take for us to transcend our human limitations and foibles so that we may endure as stewards rather than destroyers of this irreplaceable planet. In a testament to the fundamental fact that science is [“a truly human endeavor,”]( Druyan writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence, to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully alive. The scientific approach to nature and my understanding of love are the same: Love asks us to get beyond the infantile projections of our personal hopes and fears, to embrace the other’s reality. This kind of unflinching love never stops daring to go deeper, to reach higher. This is precisely the way that science loves nature. This lack of a final destination, an absolute truth, is what makes science such a worthy methodology for sacred searching. It is a never ending lesson in humility. The vastness of the universe — and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable — is out of reach to the arrogant. This cosmos only fully admits those who listen carefully for the inner voice reminding us to remember we might be wrong. What’s real must matter more to us than what we wish to believe. [Velocity_Hilts.jpg?resize=680%2C887] Art by the Brothers Hilts from [A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader](. Learning not to confuse the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence is, of course, one of the greatest, most difficult triumphs of our growth — as individuals, as societies, and as a species. In consonance with the tenets of Sagan’s timeless [Baloney Detection Kit]( for critical thinking, Druyan offers her simple, elegant formula for telling the two apart: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything, including authority. Do these things and the cosmos is yours. She opens and closes the book with the words of Albert Einstein, spoken at the 1939 World’s Fair, where he had gone to [leave a time-capsule of wisdom for posterity]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people. I am reminded — by Einstein’s words, by Druyan’s endeavor — of John F. Kennedy’s [miraculous defense of poetry]( “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” The man whose unassailable vision had landed the first human foot on another celestial body understood that in the poetry of reality, every portal of wonder, be it art or science, is a portal to truth. Sometimes — if our passion and persistence are great enough, if chance rolls its impartial dice suitably enough — it is a portal to [“a brave and starling truth.”]( What emerges from Druyan’s [Cosmos: Possible Worlds]( is a rosary of such shimmering sometimeses. Complement it with poet Marie Howe’s [stunning ode to the singularity of our cosmic belonging]( then revisit physicist Brian Greene on [wresting the poetry of existence from an aloof universe]( and Carl Sagan on [how to live with the unknown](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for fourteen 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. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( 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 [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. 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