Storytelling and the art of tenderness, David Bowie on creativity and his advice to artists, the poetic science of the aurora borealis

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]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — John Steinbeck on how to think better, the fascinating science of mushrooms and music, Jack Kerouac's love letter to November — you can catch up [right here](. Also worth reading, my [16 life-learnings from 16 years of The Marginalian](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( — for sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive (as have I) thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. [David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists]( Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means. What we call art is simply a gesture toward some authentic answer to these open questions, at once universal and intimately felt — questions aimed at the elemental truths of being alive, animated by a craving for beauty, haunted by the need to find a way of bearing our mortality. Without this elemental longing, without this authentic gesture, what is made is not art but something else — the kind of commodified craftsmanship Virginia Woolf indicted when she [weighed creativity against catering](. The year he turned fifty, and a year before he gave [his irreverent answers to the famous Proust Questionnaire]( David Bowie (January 8, 1947–January 10, 2016) contemplated the soul of creativity in a television interview marking the release of his experimental drum’n’bass record Earthling — a radical departure from the musical style that had sprinkled the stardust of his genius upon the collective conscience of a generation, and a testament to Bowie’s unassailable devotion to continual creative growth. Nested into the interview is his most direct advice to artists and the closest thing he ever formulated to a personal creative credo. In consonance with E.E. Cummings’s splendid insistence that [“the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,”]( Bowie reflects: Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations — they generally produce their worst work when they do that. Echoing Beethoven’s life-tested insight that though the true artist [“may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun,”]( Bowie adds a mighty antidote to the greatest enemy of creative work — complacency: If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting. Complement with John Lennon [on creativity]( Nick Cave on [the relationship between art and mystery]( Paul Klee on [how an artist must be like a tree]( and Wassily Kandinsky on [the three responsibilities of the artist]( then revisit Virginia Woolf’s account of [the epiphany that revealed to her what the creative life means](. [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 sixteen 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 Poetic Science of the Aurora Borealis]( On the evening of February 19, 1852, a scientist at the New Haven station of the nascent telegraph witnessed something extraordinary: A blue line appeared upon the paper, which gradually grew darker and larger, until a flame of fire followed the pen, and burned through a dozen thicknesses of the prepared paper. The paper was set on fire by the flame, and produced considerable smoke. The current then subsided as gradually as it came on, until it entirely disappeared, and was then succeeded by a negative current, which bleached instead of colored, the paper; this also gradually increased, until, as with the positive current, it burned the paper, and then subsided, to be followed by the positive current. The early telegraph was an electro-chemical technology that used a current passing through chemically coated paper to record a message from a faraway station. Lightning storms and other electrical disturbances were a known interference — a current of normal electricity would emit a bright spark while passing from the stylus to the moistened paper, but it would not set it aflame and would produce no color. This was something else entirely. It came in waves of varying intensity all throughout the evening, interpolating between positive and negative current with each wave. Scientists knew of only one phenomenon in nature that corresponds to this pattern: the Aurora Borealis. Aurora Borealis by [Étienne Léopold Trouvelot]( 1872. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( More than two millennia earlier, despite never having traveled far enough north from his Mediterranean home to witness this spectacle of the higher latitudes, Aristotle had described the phenomenon in his book on meteorology. An even more detailed depiction comes to us from Seneca, also captive to the lower latitudes his whole life, who described the northern lights in his Natural Questions, calling them Chasmata — chasms, rifts, gapings — of the sky: Like a crown encircling the inner part of the fiery sky, there is a recess like the open mouth of a cave… A stretch of the sky seems to have receded and, gaping open, displays flames deep down. These all come in many colors: some are a very intense red; some have a weak, pale flame; some have a bright light; some pulsate; some are a uniform yellow with no discharges or rays emerging… The sky is seen to burn, the glow of which is occasionally so high it may be seen amongst the stars themselves, sometimes so near the ground that it assumes the form of distant fire. In 1865, a decade and a half after he published Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was moved to commemorate the peaceful disbanding of the Civil War armies with the lush symbolism of the northern lights: AURORA BOREALIS by Herman Melville What power disbands the Northern Lights After their steely play? The lonely watcher feels an awe Of Nature’s sway, As when appearing, He marked their flashed uprearing In the cold gloom — Retreatings and advancings, (Like dallyings of doom), Transitions and enhancings, And bloody ray. The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone — Portent or promise — and gives way To pale, meek Dawn; The coming, going, Alike in wonder showing — Alike the God, Decreeing and commanding The million blades that glowed, The muster and disbanding — Midnight and Morn. For as long as human animals have roamed the higher latitudes of the Northern hemisphere, the flaming dance of the sky has struck awe and wonder in the soul. But for the vast majority of the history of our species, it had no official name, appearing in various mythologies and early works of natural philosophy in various linguistic guises and poetic exultations. Art from “L’aurore boréale” by Selim Lemström, 1886. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) The Aurora Borealis was christened by an improbable admirer — not Galileo, to whom the term is often misattributed, but the young French priest, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (January 22, 1592–October 24, 1655) — the first human being to witness the transit of another planet (Mercury) across the face of the Sun. A lecturer in Aristotelean philosophy and an expert in sunspots — miniature blackenings of the Sun’s photosphere due to drops in surface temperature caused by magnetic flux — Gassendi had long been captivated by Aristotle’s description of the northern lights and yearned to see them for himself, to savor their magic and work out their science, suspecting a correlation between sunspot activity and aurora sightings. In 1621, he set out to put himself in the path of wonder and headed north. Chance favored him — this was one of the most active periods of auroral activity ever recorded; beginning just a few years later, the northern lights would slip into a long coma, not to shine again for nearly a century. Art by Anne Bannock from [Seeking an Aurora]( by Elizabeth Pulford What the 29-year-old Gassendi witnessed seemed nothing less than the work of some cosmic god. He took it upon himself to name the nameless wonder, and it was only fitting that it bear a divine name: He chose Aurora, after the Roman goddess of dawn, and Borealis, after Boreas — the Greek god of the North wind. Reasoning that this phenomenon takes place high above ground and only appears near the cold polar regions, Gassendi deduced a cause kindred to that of parhelia, or sundogs — bursts of light that typically appear in pairs around 22° to the left and right of the Sun, caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere refracting sunlight. While his hypothesis was not entirely correct, it was the first robust scientific effort to discern a cause, and the closest any human being had come to an explanation since the dawn of our species. Art by [Sophie Blackall](. (Personal collection.) It wasn’t until a century and a half after Gassendi’s death that the polymathic English “natural philosopher” Henry Cavendish — who lived in an epoch before [the word scientist was coined]( — made measurable observations in 1790, estimating that aurora light is produced between 100 and 130 kilometers above ground. More than a century later, in 1902, the Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland performed an experiment with a magnetized model of Earth — a sphere known as terrella, Latin for “little Earth” — which he placed inside a vacuum chamber and showered with streams of the newly discovered electron. He watched with pleasure as the magnetic fields of the terrella steered the electrons toward its poles, illuminating the true cause of the northern lights — charged particles flowing through the gas of the upper atmosphere. It took more than half a century, until 1954, for actual electrons to be observed in the Aurora Borealis by detectors aboard a rocket launched into the polar skies. Aurora Borealis from “Aurorae: Their Characters and Spectra” by John Rand Capron, 1879. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) And so it was pieced all together, this symphony of wonder generations in the composition: Auroras are caused by fluctuations in the Sun’s corona that send gusts of solar wind across the austere blackness of empty space, rippling through Earth’s magnetosphere. Magnetized by the solar wind, particles in the upper atmosphere above both poles — which is dominated by oxygen and nitrogen — grow excited, absorbing energy so that electrons jump from a lower to a higher state, or become ionized, losing an electron. Because each element absorbs light from a different portion of the spectrum, and because its absorption pattern changes as atoms grow excited or ionized, we see bands of otherworldly light — the same electrochemistry by which neon lights work and television screens fluoresce. Oxygen — the dominant atmospheric gas — takes on the mid-range wavelengths of green (557.7 nm), slipping toward rose-red (630.0 nm) as it grows excited; ionized nitrogen colors the sky with the shorter wavelengths of blue and purple, while excited nitrogen blazes crimson. And so aurorae are primarily green, with swirls of pink and red toward the top, more prominent the more magnetic activity there is. “Spectra of various light sources, solar, stellar, metallic, gaseous, electric” from [Les phénomènes de la physique]( by Amédée Guillemin, 1882. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( During particularly ferocious magnetic storms, the range of auroral activity, known as the aurora oval, widens as Earth’s atmosphere expands, sending those luminous colors higher and higher into the sky and farther and farther away from the poles, so that aurorae become visible at lower latitudes. As the excited nitrogen and low-density oxygen rise with their rosy hues, aurorae seen in lower latitudes tend to be dominated by red rather than green — so much so that a Roman emperor had once dispatched an army to aid a colony seemingly in flames, only to discover an apparition in the sky. In the late summer of 1859, aurorae blazed across the skies of New York and California, Jamaica and Rome — the product of the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, known as the Carrington Event, after the British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington, who observed the solar flare that sparked it; it was the first recorded observation of a soar flare — a dramatic eruption of electromagnetic radiation in a concerted spot of the Sun’s atmosphere, which foments ferocious solar wind. Magnetograms of the Carrington Event recorded at the Greenwich Observatory (British Geological Survey) Because photography was [still young then]( and because the grandeur of the aurora naturally belongs in the category of [the unphotographable]( what delivered the spectacle to those not lucky enough to have witnessed it were not images but lyrical narrative accounts — the mind’s eye, enchanted and rendered awestruck by the evocative power of words. One particularly wonderful account, far surpassing any possible photograph in detail and nuance of image, appeared in a small-town paper in Alabama, doing for the aurora borealis what Annie Dillard [did for the eclipse]( or [Virginia Woolf]( At 1 o’clock… the whole atmosphere to the South was filled with greenish white masses of light resembling smoke, from a rapidly burning fire, or cumulo stratus clouds in a state of rapid motion from west to east, for which indeed they were first taken. But they were perfectly transparent, small stars being plainly visible through the largest of them. They retained the appearance of clouds only a short time — soon collecting near the zenith and assuming more brilliant hues. And now commenced a display which baffles all description: the light gathering to a focus, assuming the most fantastical forms, exhibiting the most eccentric motions — dispersing and recollecting with a rapidity that was almost bewildering, and a beauty that cannot be described. Several times a scroll or wave of white light, like a flag, would roll away from the brightest of the foci… and slowly disappear… On the horizon of the west was a bank of dark clouds, and where the arch came in contact with these, it was a deep red color; and indeed whenever and wherever a cloud, however small, appeared, there the light was of a deep red — where the sky was clear, pale green and white were the prevalent colors. The light was evidently behind and beyond the clouds, and the red color resembled the red of a cloudy sunset. To the North the appearance was singular. The sky was perfectly clear, and of an intense metallic brilliancy, having a distinct greenish tinge; and though the source of the light was evidently in this quarter of the heavens no shapes or motions of light were visible there… The light afforded by this aurora was so great, that small objets were distinctly visible at great distances. Fine newspaper print could be read in the open air [at night] and many persons mistaking it for daylight, arose and commenced their daily avocations before discovering their mistake. It nearly resembled the light of early dawn and threw no shadow. It continued, with varying brilliancy, till obscured by daylight. What human beings have witnessed beyond the shallow reach of recorded history we shall never know, but we do know that a detailed description of a low-latitude aurora appears in the first chapter of the Biblical book of Ezekiel. In our own century, scientists have used historical records and modern tools to [uncover]( that the Carrington Event was far from unique — our planet has long been spectator and subject to its star’s ionic dramas. In the last week of summer in 1770, an intense magnetic storm sent aurorae all the way to Japan. A century later, in early February 1872, another ferocious solar flare colored the skies of Egypt, the Caribbean, and even the southern portions of Africa with its swirling radiance. It is possible that Aristotle and Seneca did, after all, see aurorae first-hand. Eyewitness sketch of an aurora seen in Japan in September 1770. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( In consonance with Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s [poetic meditation on the relationship between knowledge and mystery]( I feel that the science of it — this work of immense forces across immense distances, this work of the human imagination across a lineage of minds thirsting for truth — only magnifies the magic of the celestial spectacle. Suddenly, we are plunged into a dazzling awareness of our cosmic origins and our connection to one another, each of us a link in the unbroken chain of time going back to Gassendi, back to the first human animal who looked up at the storm of color and was stilled with awe, back to the Big Bang that produced the particles roiling in the night sky. Whenever we gasp at an aurora, our lungs inhale molecules of air made of atoms forged in the first stars, and we are left wonder-smitten by reality — the only way worth living. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech]( “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James {NAME} observed as he offered [his lifeline for the hour of despair](. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” When we do save each other, it is always with some version of the mightiest lifeline we humans are capable of weaving: tenderness — the best adaptation we have to our existential inheritance as [“the fragile species.”]( Like all orientations of the spirit, tenderness is a story we tell ourselves — about each other, about the world, about our place in it and our power in it. Like all narratives, the strength of our tenderness reflects the strength and sensitivity of our storytelling. That is what the Polish psychologist turned poet and novelist Olga Tokarczuk explores in her [Nobel Prize acceptance speech](. Olga Tokarczuk by Harald Krichel Tokarczuk recounts a moment from her early childhood that deeply moved her: Her mother, inverting Montaigne’s notion that [“to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,”]( told her small daughter that she missed her even before she was born — an astonishing gesture of love so total that it bends the arrow of time. Across the abyss of a lifetime, along the arrow of time that eventually shot through her mother’s life, Tokarczuk reflects: A young woman who was never religious — my mother — gave me something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world’s greatest tender narrator. Our present bind, Tokarczuk observes, is that the old narratives about who we are and how the world works are untender and clearly broken, but we are yet to find tender new ones to take their place. Observing that in our sensemaking cosmogony “the world is made of words” yet “we lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables,” she laments [the tyranny of selfing]( that has taken their place: We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times. This optics of the self, the way in which the individual becomes “subjective center of the world,” is the defining feature of this most recent chapter of the history of our species. And yet everything around us reveals its illusory nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, [“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”]( Art by Arthur Rackham from [Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens](. (Available [as a print]( With an eye to her lifelong fascination with “the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors” — the subject of her Nobel-winning compatriot Wisława Szymborska’s poem [“Love at First Sight”]( — Tokarczuk reflects on our creativity not as some separate and abstract faculty but as a fractal of the living universe: We are all — people, plants, animals, and objects — immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities. Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation. We sever this dazzling indivisibility whenever we contract into what she calls “the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self” — something magnified in all the compulsive sharing on so-called social media with their basic paradigm of [selfing masquerading as connection](. Instead, she invites us to look “ex-centrically” and imagine a different story — one tasked with “revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections.” Amid a world riven by “a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing,” accelerated by techno-capitalist media systems that prey on the greatest vulnerabilities of human nature, Tokarczuk reminds us that literature is also an invaluable tool of empathy — an antidote to the divisiveness so mercilessly exploited by our “social” media: Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate. Century-old art by the adolescent [Virginia Frances Sterrett](. (Available as [a print]( and [stationery cards]( She calls for something beyond empathy, something achingly missing from our harsh culture of dueling gotchas — a literature of tenderness: Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. Echoing Iris Murdoch’s unforgettable definition of love as [“the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,”]( Tokarczuk adds: Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy. It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self.” Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself. Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin on [storytelling as a force of redemption]( then revisit Toni Morrison’s superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech about [the power of language](. [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 sixteen 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](. A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT: [Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy]( [---]( 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. 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