Seneca's antidote to anxiety, Rachel Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work, an illustrated ode to the courage of withstanding cynicism

Seneca's antidote to anxiety, Rachel Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work, an illustrated ode to the courage of withstanding cynicism, and more. NOTE: This message 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. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety]( “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his [influential lecture on the shapes of stories](. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for [learning not to think in terms of gain or loss](. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into [five categories of worries]( four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.” A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as [Letters from a Stoic]( ([public library]( — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on [true and false friendship]( and [the mental discipline of overcoming fear](. Seneca In his thirteenth letter, titled “On groundless fears,” Seneca writes: There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend: What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come. Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow. Illustration by María Sanoja from [100 Days of Overthinking]( Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries, using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our anxieties: It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the sword has been checked even at the victim’s throat. Men have survived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things. Art by Catherine Lepange from [Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to Ease a Worried Mind]( Sixteen centuries before Descartes examined [the vital relationship between fear and hope]( Seneca considers its role in mitigating our anxiety: The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is, considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope. There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us. Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become excited and disquieted. But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering point: The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live. Complement this particular portion of Seneca’s wholly indispensable [Letters from a Stoic]( with Alan Watts on [the antidote to the age of anxiety]( Italo Calvino on [how to lower your “worryability,”]( and Claudia Hammond on [what the psychology of suicide prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries]( then revisit Seneca on [making the most of life’s shortness]( and [the key to resilience when loss does strike](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [The Paper-Flower Tree: An Illustrated Ode to the Courage of Withstanding Cynicism and the Generative Power of the Affectionate Imagination]( “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees,” William Blake wrote in his [spectacular 1799 defense of the imagination](. More than a century and a half later, illustrator and designer Jacqueline Ayer (May 2, 1930–May 20, 2012) offered a beautiful allegorical counterpart to Blake’s timeless message in her 1962 masterpiece [The Paper-Flower Tree]( ([public library]( — a warm and whimsically illustrated parable about the moral courage of withstanding cynicism and the generative power of the affectionate imagination. As vibrant and vitalizing as the tales Ayer imagines in her children’s books is her own true story. Born to first-generation Jamaican immigrants in New York City, Jacqueline grew up in the “Coops” — a communist-inspired cooperative for garment workers in the Bronx. Her father, a graphic artist and the founder of the first licensed modeling agency for black women, taught her to draw. Her mother, a sample cutter, imbued her with an uncommon aptitude for pattern and color. In the 1940s, Jacqueline enrolled in Harlem’s iconic public High School of Music & Art, whose alumni include cartoonist Al Jaffe, graphic designer Milton Glaser, and banjoist Bela Fleck. After graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in fine art, she continued her studies in Paris, where she became a fashion illustrator and starred in a Dadaist film alongside Man Ray. Her singularly imaginative artwork attracted the attention of designer Christian Dior and Vogue Paris editor Michel de Brunhoff, who procured for her an appointment as fashion illustrator for Vogue in New York. There, she supplemented her meager salary — for those were the days before the [Equal Pay uprising that revolutionized the modern workplace]( and she was a woman of color — by illustrating for the department store Bonwit Teller alongside [young Andy Warhol](. Jacqueline Ayer at work Three years later, Jacqueline went back to Paris on vacation and fell in love with Fred Ayer — a young American who had just returned from Burma and had grown besotted with the cultures of the East. The couple got married and began traveling through East Asia until they finally settled in Thailand, where Ayer raised her two daughters and drew incessantly as she traversed the strange, hot, fragrant wonderland of Bangkok on foot along the sidewalks, on scooter in the streets, on boat via the canals. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, she launched the fashion and fabric company Design-Thai, which printed her vibrant designs onto silk and cotton using traditional Thai craftsmanship. Jacqueline Ayer with her daughter Margot Ayer spent the remaining years of her life translating her distinctive aesthetic into home furnishings for New York and London’s glamorous department stores, working for the Indian government under Indira Gandhi to help develop the country’s traditional textile crafts, and creating children’s books of uncommon beauty and emotional intelligence. She was only thirty-one when she won the 1961 Gold Medal of the Society of Illustrators, considered the Oscars of illustration. Jacqueline Ayer’s 1961 Society of Illustrators medal [The Paper-Flower Tree]( originally published in 1962 and now lovingly resurrected by my friends of Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse [Enchanted Lion]( is one of four books about Thailand Ayer wrote and illustrated, like [Tolkien’s Mr. Bliss]( for her own children. It tells the story of a little girl named Miss Moon, who lives under “the enormous blue sky” of rural Thailand and wanders the horizonless rice fields with her baby brother. One day, a most unusual sight punctuates the noonday torpor of the village. Ayer writes: Miss Moon saw a little man in the distance, puffing and blowing as he walked slowly along. He carried over his shoulder a bamboo stick, on which were tied colored bits of paper that fluttered in the wind. Mesmerized by the burst of color, Miss Moon asks the elderly stranger, addressing him with the respectful and affectionate “grandfather,” where he is headed and what marvel he is carrying. Returning Miss Moon’s affection, the old man addresses her as “little mouse” and explains that he is following the road to wherever it takes him, carrying a paper-flower tree. Ayer writes: Miss moon smiled. She loved the tree. It was then she knew she had to have one. “How pretty it is!” she said to the old man. “All those paper flowers twinkling in the sun. I wish I had a tree like that one.” “One copper coin will buy you two flowers. If one of them has a seed,” the old man said, “who knows? Perhaps you can plant it — perhaps you can grow a tree for yourself.” But Miss Moon’s heart sinks, for she has not a copper coin. The benevolent stranger meets her sadness with a smile and gives her a paper flower to keep — the smallest one on his tree, but adorned with a tiny black bead on a string — a seed. He instructs her: “Plant it — perhaps it will grow. I make no promises. Perhaps it will grow. Perhaps it will not.” Miss Moon thanked the old man. “Thank you for my tree.” “It’s not a tree yet; its only a flower, and a paper one at that,” he replied as he waved goodbye. Much of what makes the story so wonderful is the magical realism of this deliberate interpolation between reality and make-belief — the characters themselves dip in and out of the river of consciousness on the shores of which they are co-creating the half-real, half-imagined miracle of the paper-flower tree, as if to assure us that splendor and delight are only ever the response of consciousness to the world and not a feature of the world itself, no less real, no less splendid or delightful, for being born out of the uncynical imaginations of kindred spirits. When the old man continues on his open-ended journey, Miss Moon diligently plants the paper-flower seed, builds it a tiny roof to shield it from the unforgiving sun, then begins waiting and watching for it to sprout. Days and weeks go by, seasons turn, the rice fields change color. Life in the village continues its usual cycle, until a whole year passes — with no paper-flower tree. The other villagers mock Miss Moon’s hopefulness. “You can’t possibly grow a tree from a bead,” they scoff. “You’re wasting your time,” they jeer — responses reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s thoughts on [the failure of imagination at the heart of cynicism](. But Miss Moon remains enchanted by the memory of the beautiful paper-flower tree and resolutely hopeful in her enchantment. One day, a ramshackle truck rumbles down the road, tooting its horn and kicking up dust. It rolled into the little village, and — rickety, rackety, crash bam — it came to a stop. A strange little brown man, dressed in flashy, raggy tatters, hopped up like a bird to the top of the truck. The odd fellow announces at the top of his lungs that his troupe of musicians and dancers will entertain the people of the village in exchange for a few silver coins. But then Miss Moon spots amid the performers her old friend — the man with the paper-flower tree. She rushes over and asks “grandfather” if he remembers her. Of course he remembers the “little mouse.” When she laments the fate of her infertile seed, the old man’s face grows sad as he reminds her that he never promised it would grow: I only said it might grow. Perhaps it won’t, and then again, perhaps it will. As the spectacle of the circus unfolds into the warm night until the moon sets — drums and cymbals, dancers and clowns, flowing silks and tattered costumes — Miss Moon drifts off to sleep in her own bed and dreams of “bright-light colors and rice fields filled with paper-flower trees.” When she rises with the sun, awakened by the smell of her mother’s cooking, she steps into the dawn to find aglow in the morning breeze a paper-flower tree. Just then, she sees the rickety circus truck huffing and puffing away from the village. She runs after it, shouting excitedly at the old man that she finally got her paper-flower tree. He smiled and waved as the old truck rumbled and roared away. “Goodbye, little mouse!” he called. When Miss Moon shows her treasured tree to the other villagers, they dismiss her enthusiasm with the same cynicism — it’s just the old man’s paper flowers on a stick, they say and hasten to remind her that it’s impossible to grow a tree from a bead. But Miss Moon’s radiant joy is undimmed by the cynics — their failure to see the tree as real is their own tragic limitation, and hers is a sovereign joy. Complement [The Paper-Flower Tree]( with other courageous and imaginative treasures from Enchanted Lion — [Cry, Heart, But Never Break]( [The Lion and the Bird]( [Bertolt]( and [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish]( — then revisit [Umbrella]( by Japanese illustrator Taro Yashima, a kindred-spirited gem from the same era serenading time, anticipation, and the art of waiting. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work]( Many of the titans of literature have left, alongside a body of work that models powerful writing, [abiding advice on the craft]( that examines the source of that power. Unrivaled among them in the combination of cultural impact and sheer splendor of prose is Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) — the Promethean writer and marine biologist whose 1962 [masterwork of moral courage]( Silent Spring, ignited the modern environmental movement. Nowhere does Carson’s writing philosophy, of which she never published a formal statement, come to life more vividly than in the 1972 out-of-print treasure [The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work]( ([public library]( — a portrait of Carson, drawn from her previously unpublished papers and letters, by Paul Brooks, who worked closely with her as editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin during the publication of The Edge of the Sea and Silent Spring. Rachel Carson, 1951 A generation after Virginia Woolf contemplated [the relationship between loneliness and creativity]( Carson echoed the lament at the heart of [Hemingway’s Nobel Prize speech]( and observed upon accepting one of the many writing awards she won: Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He[*]( moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening. In a sentiment that calls to mind choreographer Martha Graham’s notion of the [“divine dissatisfaction”]( driving all creative work, Carson adds: No writer can stand still. He continues to create or he perishes. Each task completed carries its own obligation to go on to something new. [Like Einstein]( Carson made an unwearying effort to answer as much as she could of the voluminous fan mail she received, but her most touching correspondence is with a young aspiring writer by the name of Beverly Knecht — a blind girl hospitalized with what would turn out to be a terminal illness. After devouring The Edge of the Sea on Talking Books — an early audiobook program initiated by the Library of Congress and the American Foundation for the Blind in the 1930s — Beverly sent Carson a letter of affectionate appreciation. Carson wrote back: I hope you can realize the very deep and lasting pleasure your letter gave me. In my writing, I have always tried not to lean on illustrations (of which most of my books have had few) but to create in words an image that would register clearly on the eyes of the mind. You make me feel I may have succeeded. Illustration by Anne Herbauts from [What Color Is the Wind?]( a serenade to the senses inspired by a blind child In a letter to another young woman with whom Carson felt a deep kinship of spirit, she returns to the subject of loneliness as a necessary condition for creative work: You are wise enough to understand that being “a little lonely” is not a bad thing. A writer’s occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying. More than anything, however, Carson held up work ethic and integrity of vision as the most vital requirements for being a successful writer. In a sentiment which James {NAME} would come to echo decades later in his thoughts on [the relationship between talent and discipline]( and which Hemingway had articulated in his advice on [the art of revision]( she tells her young correspondent: Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually means many, many revisions. Carson adds a thought that parallels my own animating ethos since the inception of Brain Pickings more than a decade ago: If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well. Diagram of my [gradation of great writing]( In previously contemplating what constitutes great nonfiction, I placed writers in a hierarchy of [explainers, elucidators, and enchanters]( the latter class being exceedingly rare and exceedingly rewarding to read. Carson was the twentieth century’s science-enchanter par excellence, whose writing was governed by her belief in “the magic combination of factual knowledge and deeply felt emotional response.” Today’s finest science writers — authors like [Oliver Sacks]( [Janna Levin]( [Alan Lightman]( [Diane Ackerman]( and [James Gleick]( who convey the inherent poetry of the universe in uncommonly enchanting prose — have some of Carson’s blood coursing through the pulse-beat of their books. Carson, who made an art of [illuminating nature beyond scientific fact]( resented the notion that science is somehow separate from life. Our only means of upending the conventions and belief systems we resent is by modeling superior alternatives, and that is precisely what Carson did with her 1937 masterpiece [Undersea]( which pioneered a new way of writing about science with a strong lyrical sensibility, revealing the native poetry of nature. The piece became the seed for Carson’s 1951 bestseller [The Sea Around Us]( which won her the National Book Award. In her acceptance speech, she took head on the obtuse convention — one enduring to this day — that writing about science belongs in a special compartment of literature: The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction; it seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. Rachel Carson at her microscope and her typewriter With an eye to the deliberate stylistic choices she made in [how she wrote about the sea]( — choices highly unusual for their time, which steered nonfiction toward an epoch-making new aesthetic direction — she adds: My own guiding purpose was to portray the subject of my sea profile with fidelity and understanding. All else was secondary. I did not stop to consider whether I was doing it scientifically or poetically; I was writing as the subject demanded. The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry. She took up the subject again in a letter written a few years after the publication of The Sea Around Us: The writer must never attempt to impose himself upon his subject. He must not try to mold it according to what he believes his readers or editors want to read. His initial task is to come to know his subject intimately, to understand its every aspect, to let it fill his mind. Then at some turning point the subject takes command and the true act of creation begins… The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him. Later, during [the writing of Silent Spring]( Carson would reflect on the writer’s ultimate task: The heart of it is something very complex, that has to do with ideas of destiny, and with an almost inexpressible feeling that I am merely an instrument through which something has happened — that I’ve had little to do with it myself. She would then tell [her beloved]( Dorothy Freeman, in the same letter: As for the loneliness — you can never fully know how much your love and companionship have eased that. Art by Isol from [Daytime Visions]( During her final revisions of Silent Spring, as she navigated the anguishing late stages of metastatic breast cancer, Carson addressed a friend’s concern that the book’s focus on pesticides would eclipse the splendor of the planet she was trying to protect. Acknowledging for the first and only time the dual motive power of moral outrage and fidelity to beauty that had animated her as she composed her masterpiece, she wrote: I myself never thought the ugly facts would dominate, and I hope they don’t. The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind — that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could — if I didn’t at least try I could never again be happy in nature. But now I can believe I have at least helped a little. It would be unrealistic to believe that one book could bring a complete change. Carson died eighteen months after Silent Spring was published and never lived to see herself proven wrong as it catalyzed the modern environmental movement by mobilizing the public conscience and effecting major government reform in environmental policy — nothing less than “a complete change” in culture and consciousness, proof that unrelenting idealism is in the end the mightiest realism. Complement the thoroughly wonderful [The House of Life]( with Carson’s [prescient protest against the government’s assault on science and nature]( and her almost unbearably touching [farewell to her beloved]( then revisit other timeless advice on writing from [Ernest Hemingway]( [William Faulkner]( [Susan Sontag]( [James {NAME}]( [Umberto Eco]( [Friedrich Nietzsche]( and [Ursula K. Le Guin](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. 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