Audubon on other minds and the secret knowledge of animals, the paradox of joy with Nick Cave and Lisel Mueller, how Dostoyevsky became a writer

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 — you and the universe, the psychology of waiting, a tender illustrated fable about the stubborn courage of making the impossible possible — you can catch up [right here](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( — for seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. [The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem]( In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte [wrote]( just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” [Kahlil Gibran]( observed in one of his prophetic poems. This paradox remains one of [the 17 most important things I have learned about life](. [Nick Cave]( who has lived through [some unimaginable loss]( brought the paradox of joy to the 300th edition of his wonderful journal [The Red Hand Files]( — an oasis of largehearted anticynicism in our world, and my favorite email by orders of magnitude. He writes: I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practised method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost — at least, it can seem that way. This paradox comes alive in Nick’s song “Joy” from his altogether soul-slaking record [Wild God](. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” goes a lyric spoken by the ghost of his dead son. Some time ago, amid a season of suffering, Nick introduced me to [the soulful work]( of poet Christian Wiman and sent me his lifeline of an anthology [Joy: 100 Poems]( ([public library]( — a kaleidoscopic lens on, as Wiman writes in the introduction, “why a moment of joy can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached, or why this lift into pure bliss might also entail a steep drop of concomitant loss.” Among the hundred poems, as various as Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, is the plainly and pointedly titled “Joy” by one of my favorite poets: Lisel Mueller, who lived nearly a century and wrote with such ravishing poignancy about [the consolations of mortality]( and [the dazzling complexities that make life worth living](. JOY by Lisel Mueller “Don’t cry, it’s only music,” someone’s voice is saying. “No one you love is dying.” It’s only music. And it was only spring, the world’s unreasoning body run amok, like a saint’s, with glory, that overwhelmed a young girl into unreasoning sadness. “Crazy,” she told herself, “I should be dancing with happiness.” But it happened again. It happens when we make bottomless love — there follows a bottomless sadness which is not despair but its nameless opposite. It has nothing to do with the passing of time. It’s not about loss. It’s about two seemingly parallel lines suddenly coming together inside us, in some place that is still wilderness. Joy, joy, the sopranos sing, reaching for the shimmering notes while our eyes fill with tears. Couple with Nick’s beautiful of reading of [“But We Had Music,”]( then revisit poet Ross Gay on [delight as a force of resistance](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals]( “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston [observed of other animals]( two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery reflected on [her encounters with thirteen different animals]( to insist that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.” An epoch before Beston and Montgomery — before we had the science to fathom how owls [see with sound]( how dolphins and whales [communicate in supersonic hieroglyphics]( how hummingbirds defy the physics of gravity, and [what birds dream about]( — John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) observed with astonishment and awe the myriad ways in which birds respond to the world with qualities of mind his contemporaries considered singularly human: tenderness and anger, memory and foresight, prudence and percipience about tides and tornadoes and the forces of nature far beyond mere instinct, far beyond human understanding. Art from [Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days](. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting the Audubon Society.) While working on the brown pelican divination for my [Almanac of Birds]( I was struck by a strikingly sensitive and scientifically prescient passage in Audubon’s essay on the species, suspended like all of his writing partway between ornithological description and lyrical memoir of personal encounters. Lamenting the population decline of the brown pelican in his lifetime, he marvels at the mysterious intelligence of these strange and ancient seabirds: The Brown Pelicans are as well aware of the time of each return of the tide, as the most watchful pilots. Though but a short time before they have been sound asleep, yet without bell or other warning, they suddenly open their eyelids, and all leave their roosts, the instant when the waters, which have themselves reposed for awhile, resume their motion. The Pelicans possess a knowledge beyond this, and in a degree much surpassing that of man with reference to the same subject: they can judge with certainty of the changes of weather. Should you see them fishing all together, in retired bays, be assured, that a storm will burst forth that day; but if they pursue their finny prey far out at sea, the weather will be fine, and you also may launch your bark and go to the fishing. In consonance with Beston’s insistence that [“we need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,”]( Audubon adds: I ponder on the faculties which Nature has bestowed on animals which we merely consider as possessed of instinct. How little do we yet know of the operations of the Divine Power! Audubon often contemplated the intelligence of birds in [his journal]( nowhere more so than in an 1833 entry about the species to which he would soon devote the greatest number of pages — twenty — in his voluminous Birds of America (and which yielded one of the most direct and sobering bird divinations). Writing on the summer solstice, he jabs at our human hubris: The Wild Goose is an excellent diver, and when with its young uses many beautiful stratagems to save its brood, and elude the hunter. They will dive and lead their young under the surface of the water, and always in a contrary direction to the one expected; thus if you row a boat after one it will dive under it, and now and then remain under it several minutes, when the hunter with outstretched neck, is looking, all in vain, in the distance for the stupid Goose! Every time I read or hear of a stupid animal in a wild state, I cannot help wishing that the stupid animal who speaks thus, was half as wise as the brute he despises, so that he might be able to thank his Maker for what knowledge he may possess. Art from [Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days](. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting the Audubon Society.) Complement with poet turned environmental historian and philosopher of science Melanie Challenger on [how to be more animal]( and artist James Bridle on [rethinking intelligence]( then revisit the story of [the seamstress who laid the foundation for the study of octopus intelligence]( the year Audubon contemplated the brilliance of the goose in his journal. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [From the Labor Camp to the Pantheon of Literature: How Dostoyevsky Became a Writer]( Aristotle believed that everyone’s true calling lies at the crossing point of their natural talent and the world’s need. But this simple, seductive equivalence breaks down as soon as we account for the myriad factors that go into the cultivation of natural talent and the myriad doors of opportunity that may open or close between the gifted and the world. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” [Stephen Jay Gould]( sniped at our crude conception of genius as pure natural endowment rather than a constellation of biological, psychosocial, and cultural conditions. Every once in a while, a particular life renders vivid the roulette of what-ifs that determine whether a person of genius will leave a mark on the world with their gift or perish unrealized in a cage of circumstance. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) — who was still a teenager when his mother died of tuberculosis and who grew up to believe that “in a person’s life here are many, many sorrows, much woe, and many joys” — was twenty-seven when he was arrested and sentenced to death for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. His sentence was repealed at the last moment, prompting him to send his brother an [ecstatic letter about the meaning of life](. But he was not set free — instead, he served four years in a hard labor camp in Siberia. Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871 When he was finally released, Dostoyevsky remained in Siberia, conscripted into compulsory military service as the lowest-ranking officer. He worked hard but anguished with the knowledge that this work was not his calling. At thirty-four, no longer able to bear the disconnect, he breached all permissible military conduct and broke rank to write directly to the head of his military unit, with whose brother he had once shared an apartment. Appealing not to the general’s authority but to his humanity, Dostoyevsky recounts his plight in Siberia: Four years of grievous, horrible time. I lived with thieves, with people lacking human feelings, with perverted principles; I did not see and could not see for all of these four years anything cheerful, besides the blackest, most hideous reality. I had not a single being at my side with whom I could exchange even a single sincere word; I experienced hunger, cold, illnesses, work that was beyond my strength and the hate of my thieving comrades… But… there was no suffering for me greater than when I realized… that I was cut off from society, an exile, and could not be useful to the extent of my energy, desire and capabilities. Feeling deeply what artist Agnes Martin would observe a century and a half later — [“Doing what you were born to do [is] the way to be happy.”]( — Dostoyevsky adds: Military service is not my field… My one dream is to be released from military service and enter the civil service… But I do not consider the service to be the main goal of my life… I have always considered the calling of the writer to be a most noble, useful calling. I am convinced that only on that path could I truly be useful, perhaps, I would attract at least some attention too, I would acquire a good name for myself again, and at least somewhat provide for my existence, because I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities. Etching by William Blake, 1793. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( An epoch later and a culture apart, Gabriel García Márquez would observe with an eye to [his own improbable literary path]( “If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones… After all, there are better ways to starve to death.” At the heart of Dostoyevsky’s impassioned plea to his general is the recognition that his very soul would starve to death if he did not follow his path as a writer. And then, in a defiance of military rank both bold and touching in its intimacy, he adds: I will not conceal from you that in addition to a sincere desire to exchange my lot for another, one more suitable to my energies, a certain circumstance, upon which, perhaps, depends that entire happiness of my life (a purely personal circumstance), has induced me to be so bold… That circumstance was that Dostoyevsky [was in love]( — and love, at its truest, wings the soul to live into its highest potential. He ends by acknowledging overtly just how daring his plea is, what a violation of code, what an act of hope: I know that by writing this letter I have committed a new crime against the service. A simple soldier writing to an adjutant-general! But you are magnanimous and I entrust myself to your magnanimity. His trust was not misplaced. The general was moved by his case and on Valentine’s Day 1854, Dostoyevsky was released to begin his life as a writer. And yet, had he not endured those difficult years, he may never have written the kind of literature he did, literature that has moved the world. No experience is ever wasted and all of our suffering is but raw material for art, for creation, for greater fulness of being. An AI could never write Crime and Punishment because an AI could never suffer a labor camp or a heartbreak. Couple with Dostoyevsky’s account of [the day he discovered the meaning of life in a dream]( then revisit the story of [how Van Gogh found his purpose](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. SIDEWISE GLEAMS [A CONVERSATION]( What a pleasure to converse with one of my oldest friends (and her new collaborator) about some of the oldest questions haunting humanity (how to bear our mortality, self vs. soul, existential yearning as a fulcrum of creativity) and their dialogue with our nascent digital lives. [Listen here](. [A BOOK]( Peek inside [here](. [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week. The Marginalian NOT RECEIVING MAIL 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](