The relationship between friendship and creativity, Thoreau and the little owl, the crucial difference between love, sympathy, and solidarity

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 — the 12 kinds of time, the science of what made you you (with a dazzling poem read by David Byrne), an illustrated ode to love's secret knowledge — 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. [Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community]( The sunshine of life springs from twin suns. We may call them love and art. We may call them connection and creativity. Both can take many forms. Both, if they are worth their salt and we ours, ask us to show up as our whole selves. Both are instruments of [unselfing](. It is often in the cradle of friendship — a word [not to be used carelessly]( — that our creative energies are strengthened and renewed. Through its tendrils, we find community — a place where our own creative work is reflected and refracted through that of others to cast a shimmering radiance of mutual magnification that borders on magic. Art by Arthur Rackham for [Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens]( 1906. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship. In 1950, epochs before our social media were but a glimmer in the eye of the possible, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) reckoned with the seedling of our modern predicament in his [meditation on art and life](. Considering the downfall of art in his own epoch, when the age of publicity and mass media was just beginning to maim culture, he laments the state of the creative community: No communication. No real intercommunication. No concern for the vital, subtle things which mean everything to a writer, painter or musician. We live in a void spanned by the most intricate and elaborate means of communication. Each one occupies a planet to himself. But the messages never get through. After honing his ideas on two decades of living, Miller took up the subject again in his uncommonly wonderful 1968 book [To Paint Is to Love Again](. In a passage just as hauntingly true of the compulsion for social media “likes,” he writes: How distressing it is to hear young painters talking about dealers, shows, newspaper reviews, rich patrons, and so on. All that comes with time — or will never come. But first one must make friends, create them through one’s work. Henry Miller: The Hat and the Man from [To Paint Is to Love Again](. This mutually sustaining circle of creative kinship begins with a single lifeline of connection. Those of us who are lucky to have it in our own lives can easily identify it, always with a swell of gratitude. Miller writes: Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend… to work miracles. Complement with David Whyte on [the deepest meaning of friendship]( Kahlil Gibran on [the building blocks of meaningful connection]( and this almost unbearably lovely [vintage illustrated ode to friendship]( then revisit Henry Miller on [the measure of a life well lived]( and [the value of and antidote to despair](. [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](. [Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl]( the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when we judge, we cannot understand. True curiosity is therefore a form of love, because, as the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh so plainly and poignantly put it, [“understanding is love’s other name.”]( There have been few more curious and loving observes of this world than Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862). “Life! who knows what it is, what it does?” he exclaimed on the pages of [his journal]( — perhaps the book in my library most populous with highlights and marginalia — a tender record of Thoreau’s yearning to understand the nature and workings of life in all its physical and psychic manifestations, not as a scientist but as a poet. “Every poet has trembled on the verge of science,” he conceded as he read books of ornithology to deepen his reverence for the birds he observed, and yet it was with a poet’s eyes that he observed them, animated by the belief that “the poet’s relation to his theme is the relation of lovers.” Because curiosity is a supreme act of unselfing, it is at its most difficult and most rewarding when aimed at what is most unlike ourselves — as Thoreau’s is in his journal account of a singular encounter from the autumn of 1855. One “raw and windy” October afternoon, paddling down a stream under the overcast skies, Thoreau sees a small screech-owl perched on the lee side of a three-foot hemlock stump, looking at him with its “great solemn eyes” and raised horns. An epoch before science began illuminating the mysteries of [what it’s like to be an owl]( he marvels at this creature so profoundly other: It sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off. When it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris. You see two whitish triangular lines above the eyes meeting at the bill, with a sharp reddish-brown triangle between and a narrow curved line of black under each eye…. You would say that this was a bird without a neck. Its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, excepting the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back. Art by JooHee Yoon from [Beastly Verse]( After observing the bird for ten minutes, transfixed by its strangeness, Thoreau decides he must study the creature closely to better understand its umwelt. He lands the boat and carefully makes his way to the hemlock from the windward side, surprised to find the owl unperturbed by his approach. Unlike the ornithologists of his day, who killed in order to know and reduced living species to “specimens” — even Audubon, for all his tenderheartedness, shot every bird he drew and described — Thoreau sets out to capture the living bird. (“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others,” he writes in another journal entry.) Sneaking up behind the hemlock, he springs out his arm to gently grasp the little owl, which is so surprised that it offers no resistance but only glares at him “in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers.” He swaddles it in his handkerchief, rests it at the bottom of the boat, and paddles home, where he builds a small cage for observation. He marvels at the seemingly neckless owl puffing out its feathers and stretching out its neck, slowly rotating its head in that singular owl way. He tries to imitate its hiss “by a guttural whinnering.” He offers his hand, to which the bird clings so tightly that it draws blood from his fingers. He regards its “squat figure” and “catlike” face, the fine white down covering its legs all the way down to the sharp talons. When dusk falls, he sits down to record his observations and becomes the object of observation himself, the owl looking out at him with its immense eyes, intent and perfectly still. Thoreau writes: It would lower its head, stretch out its neck, and, bending it from side to side, peer at you with laughable circumspection; from side to side, as if to catch or absorb into its eyes every ray of light, strain at you with complacent yet earnest scrutiny. Raising and lowering its head and moving it from side to side in a slow and regular manner, at the same time snapping its bill smartly perhaps, and faintly hissing, and puffing itself up more and more, — cat-like, turtle-like, both in hissing and swelling. The slowness and gravity, not to say solemnity, of this motion are striking. […] He sat, not really moping but trying to sleep, in a corner of his box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. I never once caught him with his eyes shut. When morning comes, Thoreau sets out to return the bird to its home, rowing back to the hill with the hemlock. But to his surprise, the owl refuses to leave the box and has to be gently shaken out of it. With raw reverence for this creature, this mind so incomprehensibly other yet so strangely kindred, he records their farewell: There he stood on the grass, at first bewildered, with his horns pricked up and looking toward me. In this strong light the pupils of his eyes suddenly contracted and the iris expanded till they were two great brazen orbs with a centre spot merely. His attitude expressed astonishment more than anything. I was obliged to toss him up a little that he might feel his wings, and then he flapped away low and heavily to a hickory on the hillside twenty rods off. There is something poignant in this account — a disquieting reminder of how accustomed we too grow to the false comforts of our traps, how unwilling to leave them for the terror of freedom, how we too may need a gentle push to feel our own wings. Our habitual way of seeing is also a comfort and a trap. In another entry, Thoreau wonders what it might be like to “witness with owls’ eyes” the life of the forest, then concludes that what we perceive of the world is what we receive in the world and each person “receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally.” Art by Jackie Morris from [The Lost Spells]( Complement with the strange and wondrous science of [how owls hear with sound]( then revisit Thoreau on [living through loss]( [the Milky Way and the meaning of life]( and his [introvert’s field guide to friendship](. [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](. [Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference Between Love, Sympathy, and Solidarity]( “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love. Half a century after Whitman’s atomic theory of belonging and half a century before Dr. King’s [“inescapable network of mutuality,”]( the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the meaning of solidarity in his visionary 1902 book [Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution]( ([public library]( — the culmination of his pioneering studies of the cooperation networks of social insects and his outrage at the destructive power structures and power struggles of human society, for which he was eventually imprisoned. After a dramatic escape, Kropotkin spent four decades in exile across Western Europe and went on to influence generations of thinkers with this radical insistence on cooperation and solidarity, not the struggle for power, as the true engine of survival and flourishing. Peter Kropotkin by [Félix Nadar](. Having fallen under Darwin’s spell as a teenager, Kropotkin came to see in evolutionary science an optimistic model for the elevation of human conscience — in the history of life on Earth, across which organisms have continually improved their biological adaptation for survival, he found assurance for a better future forged by our continual moral improvement. Unable to obtain the scientific education he yearned for, the young Kropotkin took a post as an officer in Siberia (where Dostoyevsky [was serving in a labor camp]( then used his military credentials to join geological expeditions studying glaciation, all the while witnessing staggering corruption and abuses of power in local government while the peasants governed themselves through deep bonds of mutual trust that seemed purer, more primal, and closer to nature than any political power structure. Challenging the anthropocentric view of other animals, Kropotkin considers the deepest driving force beneath the harmony and coherence of nature: To reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and humans in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and humans alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life. Century-old art by the adolescent [Virginia Frances Sterrett](. (Available as [a print]( and [stationery cards]( An epoch before Lewis Thomas speculated in his [poetic case for why we are wired for friendship]( that “maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute,” Kropotkin adds: Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each person from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Complement with Albert Camus on [what solidarity means]( and Lewis Thomas’s forgotten masterpiece of perspective on [how to live with our human nature]( then revisit Kropotkin on [how to reboot a complacent society]( and [the art of putting your gift in the service of the world](. [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](. ALSO: A NEW BOOK A labor of love 7 years in the making. Peek inside [here](. ALSO: A LIVE EVENT [OCTOBER 15: HOW TO BE A LIVING POEM]( To celebrate the centennial of [The Morgan Library & Museum]( — one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most influential works in the history of creative culture — I have chosen several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as springboards for larger [conversations]( about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative women I know, beginning with poet Marie Howe on October 15. We will be drawing on original Whitman and Blake manuscripts held at the Morgan (“O Captain! My Captain!” and Auguries of Innocence) to explore questions of the visible and the visionary, poetry as a fulcrum of change, the democratic vistas of poetic vision, and how to be a living poem. [Tickets here](. There will be signed copies of [The Universe in Verse book]( — which opens with Marie’s gasp of a poem [“Singularity”]( — available at the event (I am doing no public signings) alongside signed copies of Marie’s magnificent [New and Selected Poems](. [---]( 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](