Midweek pick-me-up: The Light Between Us

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 midweek edition of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova — one piece resurfaced from the seventeen-year archive as timeless uplift for heart, mind, and spirit. If you missed last week's archival resurrection — Virginia Woolf on the root of creativity and the most important capacity necessary for being an artist — 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]( — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. [FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Light Between Us]( The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. In learning this afresh — as we must learn all the great and obvious truths, over and over — I was reminded of a passage by James {NAME} (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) from [Nothing Personal]( ([public library]( — his 1964 collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon, his high school classmate and lifelong friend, which contains some of {NAME}’s least-known yet most intimate writings, including his [antidote to dog-hour despair]( and his [counterforce to entropy](. (In the years since I first wrote about this forgotten treasure, it has been unforgotten in a [new edition]( by Penguin Random House — regrettably, without Avedon’s photographs, razing the spirit of collaboration between friends that occasioned the project in the first place; redemptively, with a foreword by the dazzling [Imani Perry]( who considers herself {NAME}’s “pupil in the study of humanity” and who writes splendidly about his enduring gift of reminding us how reading “allows us to recognize each other” and “makes everything seem possible.”) James {NAME} In the final of the book’s four essays, {NAME} writes: One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. This light, {NAME} intimates, is most often and most readily found in love — that [great and choiceless gift of chance](. Love becomes a lens on the world, on space and on time — a pinhole through which a new light enters to project onto [the cave wall of our consciousness]( landscapes of intimate importance from territories of being we would have never otherwise known. One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s [1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales](. (Available as [a print]( He writes: Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed. What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win. Total eclipse of the sun by [Étienne Léopold Trouvelot](. (Available [as a print]( as [stationery cards]( and [as a face mask]( A master of metaphor — that [handle on the door to new worlds]( — {NAME} takes the case of what we call long-distance love and finds in it a miniature of all love. All love bridges the immense expanse between lonelinesses, becomes the telescope that brings another life closer and, in consequence, also magnifies the significance of their entire world. All love is light’s battle against the entropy continually inclining spacetime toward nothingness, against the hard fact that you will die, and I will die, and everyone we love will die, and what will survive of us are only [shoreless seeds and stardust](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( NAME}-nothing-personal-love/ 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](. KINDRED READINGS: [James {NAME} on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe]( * * * [How to Live in Light: A Blind Hero of the French Resistance on Seeing the Heart of Life and Contacting the Oneness of Being]( * * * [How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O'Donohue on the Light Within Us and Between Us]( * * * ALSO [THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK]( [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a hand-picked piece worth revisiting from my 15-year archive. The Marginalian MAIL NOT DELIVERED 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](