Category: Self Help

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.

In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.

In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.

Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation, then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country and what makes a saint.

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.

The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life’s meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters (public library).

In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead’s concept in an anthology of their own, even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)” — offers his own perspective:

I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.”

[…]

I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe.

It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:

I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.

I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”

Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take issue with the idea that there are two “magisteria” — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing:

Talk of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “another,” as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a “higher” domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).

A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:

When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.

I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.

As if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love, he adds:

I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).

Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s wide and wonderful Letters with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth, and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on what makes life worth living, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself.

“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).

Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.

In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.

When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.

Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend:

It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.

In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius:

I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.

The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas:

Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.

“Do not go gentle into that good night” remains, indeed, Thomas’s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive — both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas’s life.

By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques — work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.

At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind’s eye.

In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:

For more beloved writers reading their own work, see Mary Oliver reading from Blue Horses, Adrienne Rich reading “What Kind of Times Are These,” J.R.R. Tolkien singing “Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll,” Frank O’Hara reading his “Metaphysical Poem,” Susan Sontag reading her short story “Debriefing,” Elizabeth Alexander reading “Praise Song for the Day,”, Dorothy Parker reading “Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom,” and Chinua Achebe reading his little-known poetry.

This essay is adapted from Traversal.

“Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.”

In late 1791, as important men were sitting down in America to make ten amendments to the young country’s constitution, which they called a Universal Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was sitting down in England to complete A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects — the beacon of political philosophy, inspired by Paine’s treatise, that would expand the universal to include all chromosomal arrangements, “demanding justice for one half of the human race” and laying the foundation of women’s political power, not by shaming and blaming the oppressor but by painting a passionate portrait of possibility.

When Wollstonecraft’s publisher invited her to a dinner celebrating one of those important men — Thomas Paine, whose landmark insistence on the right of the people to overthrow their rulers had inspired Wollstonecraft’s treatise — another of the publisher’s most successful and controversial authors was also there: the radical political philosopher William Godwin.

Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, who had never before met, had made their reputations on the bold denunciation of institutions, including the institution of marriage: Wollstonecraft in her Vindication and Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice, which issued a rigorously reasoned eight-book call for a society of equals, indicting government, religion, and marriage as oppressive forces that limit individual freedom and gape the abyss of inequality. Government and religion, Godwin argued, would be rendered obsolete with sufficient advancement of human knowledge and morality. “Marriage, as now understood,” he wrote, “is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.”

Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead — equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners — seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it — in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old — is the measure of our progress.

She had seen firsthand the moral, emotional, and bodily tyranny of an institution that considered the wife property of the husband, a creature owed as much sympathy and tenderness as a boot. As a child growing up in a house shaken by the cries of her own mother, regularly raped and beaten by her alcoholic husband, Wollstonecraft had stood sentinel before her mother’s door to keep her father from entering, which only aggravated his brutality. In a culture where just four women successfully obtained a divorce in the whole of a century, she came to see that to salvage the family, one had to revise the entire political foundations of society.

When the two philosophers met at their publishers’ dinner, the balding and reserved Godwin — a man so afraid of emotion that he never cared for music — found Wollstonecraft — a woman of symphonic intellect and unselfconscious passions — too eager to dominate the conversation with Paine. The middle child in a brood of thirteen, Godwin had always been introverted, awkward, and greatly challenged at attuning to the emotional states and needs of others. He regarded his peculiarity with both self-awareness and genuine bafflement:

I have a singular want of foresight on some occasions as to the effect what I shall say will have on the person to whom it is addressed. I therefore often appear rude, though no man can be freer from rudeness of intention and often get a character for harshness that my heart disowns.

Wollstonecraft was extroverted, her quick mind coupled with a kind of social magnetism, but the very capacity for large thought and feeling that made her so magnetic also made her capable of despair so fathomless that she came to regard herself as “a strange compound of weakness and resolution,” marked by a great “defect” of mind and a “wayward heart” that creates its own misery.

For the two philosophers, love did not barge through the barn door of animal passion — it entered slowly, quietly, through the sun porch of shared ideals and mutual respect. Respect begot friendship begot love. Wollstonecraft came to see the “tender affectionate creature” from which Godwin’s coolly reasoned idealism sprang — his pursuit of political justice was at bottom a philosophy of universal sympathies and unconditional kindness, impulses of which his own nature was woven. Godwin discovered above the gratifications of being admired the gladness of being seen:

After all one’s philosophy it must be confessed that the knowledge that there is some one that takes an interest in one’s happiness, something like that which each man feels for his own, is extremely gratifying.

There is something singularly endearing in his matter-of-fact account of how their relationship developed:

The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined kind of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each… When in the course of things the disclosure came there was nothing in the matter for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanations attendant upon the tale. It was friendship melting into love.

In his autobiography, never published in his lifetime, he would eventually acknowledge that “there is nothing that the human heart more irresistibly seeks than an object to which to attach itself.” When he did attach himself to Wollstonecraft, it was a molecular bond that staggered him, altered him.

In the first days of spring in 1797, in the small churchyard of St. Pancras, four months into her pregnancy, Mary and William entered a trailblazing marriage of equals, then took up residence together in a home where they shared a bed and a value system but kept separate studies, Wollstonecraft writing and receiving visitors in a room of her own, and Godwin in his. The choice to marry against their stated credos had puzzled both their public admirers and their private circle. It mattered little, even the response from Godwin’s mother, spiked with the fine quills of passive aggression of which only mothers are capable: “Your broken resolution in regard to matrimony encourages me to hope that you will ere long embrace the Gospel.”

Convinced that their child was to be a boy, the parents-to-be named him William. Wollstonecraft resumed work on a book of moral lessons for children, which William Blake would later illustrate. Godwin channeled their daily conversations about how to bring up happy, intelligent, and morally elevated children in a series of essays later published as The Enquirer his most timeless, if least known, book: an incisive inquiry into how we become who we are, laying out a radical new vision for optimal parenting and early childhood education.

“William” arrived on August 30, 1797, and was corrected, without fret or fanfare, to a Mary. After nine hours of labor and a difficult birth, the placenta and fetal membranes failed to leave Wollstonecraft’s uterus. A surgeon was summoned to extract it, rushing in from the street to plunge his hands into her flesh.

Within hours, the young mother was shivering with a savage fever.

* * *

Exactly fifty summers later, the Vienna General Hospital — one of the best teaching hospitals in the world — found itself the epicenter of a menacing medical mystery blackening the crucible of life with death: Young women were dying in agony by the legion shortly after giving birth.

The hospital had two maternity wards — one staffed by elite obstetricians and their medical students, the other by midwives with no formal medical training. (This was an era when the world’s university doors were closed to women.) Tenfold more mothers were dying of puerperal fever in the first.

The medical elders initially assumed that the students were treating the pregnant women too roughly. But retraining didn’t change the ratio. Baffled, these thoroughly trained scientists fell to superstition — a priest walked through the doctors’ ward ringing a bell for each death and a theory emerged that the haunting sound was terrifying the living mothers into dying.

A young Hungarian doctor by the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, in his first year as assistant professor at the hospital, wrote in his diary:

Even to me myself it had a strange effect upon my nerves when I heard the bell hurried past my door; a sigh would escape my heart for the victim that once more was claimed by an unknown power. The bell was a painful exhortation to me to search for this unknown cause with all of my might.

When the pastor was asked to stop making his bell rounds, the deaths continued and the sigh kept bellowing in the young doctor’s heart as he bent his mind around the mystery. He catalogued all the visible variables and pored over the data, but it told no discernible story. Because the unknown will always be greater than the sum of all our analyzable knowns, because the sum is always “simpler than its parts,” the history of science, the history of knowledge, is a rosary of breakthroughs that arrive through the side door of our reasoned theories. One day, Semmelweis’s mentor was teaching dissection at the morgue when a student accidentally nicked the professor’s finger with the scalpel while cutting open the cadaver on the table. Within days, he died a horrific death. A familiar death. It devastated Semmelweis, but it also pressed his face against the revelation — the doctors and medical students at the hospital were doing the exact same thing with the pregnant women: dissecting cadavers at the morgue, which none of the midwives did, and immediately going into the maternity ward to touch open flesh.

The young doctor realized that the men’s hands transferred some particle of death to the vulnerable living. He called them “cadaver particles” and set about devising ways to eradicate them, experimenting with various washing solutions and testing his results by smell alone — did his hands still have the putrid cadaver smell after washing them in the different agents. Eventually, he settled on a solution of chlorine and lime — bleach not strong enough to burn his hands, but strong enough to vanquish the other and, with it, the cadaver particles he theorized. When he implemented the protocol at his ward, the death count plummeted to that of the other ward.

That year, Louis Pasteur began his crystallography research that would lead to the birth of germ theory more than a decade later. The notion that some invisible unit of matter could unravel a body was still inconceivable. Semmelweis was a brilliant theorist and a fine empiricist, but a terrible communicator. He took the opposite of Mary Wollstonecraft’s approach, pouring polemics into letters to every major hospital and medical school, pummeling colleagues with that least effective of all behavioral change strategies: shaming. He went as far as calling doctors who didn’t wash their hands murderers and warned medical students that unless they adopted his protocol, they would be accomplices in an epochal crime.

Unsurprisingly, Semmelweis was largely dismissed; unsurprisingly, he grew increasingly cantankerous. By the time he was in his early forties, the idealistic young doctor had undergone a staggering physiological and psychological change — he looked at least sixty, had frequent detonations of temper, and suffered baffling lapses of memory in the midst of lectures. The mysterious malady — possibly early-onset Alzheimers, possibly tertiary syphilis, likely some parallel discomposure of body and spirit — made him unbearable to be around.

One day, a colleague lured him to an asylum on the pretext of seeing a new facility. When Semmelweis realized he was about to be committed against his will, he raged to get away, but was brutalized by the wardens and put into a straitjacket.

He died two weeks later from an infection contracted from the beating.

Four years later, two French scientists discovered the microbes en chainettes — “microbe chains” — of his hypothesized “cadaver particles,” which Pasteur would identify as the bacterium haemolytic streptococcus a decade later. It was ultimately a nurse — Florence Nightingale — whose extraordinary data diagrams and passionate advocacy persuaded the medical establishment to standardize hospital sanitization.

* * *

Just before eight on a late-summer morning ten days after giving birth, Mary Wollstonecraft drew her last breath, leaving behind a fragile baby girl, a baffled philosopher stony with heartache, and an angel-winged William Blake etching.

For Godwin, who had spent his life sieging religion with the artillery of reason, the loss was total and irrevocable. The notions of personal immortality and reunion with loved ones in an imaginary afterlife were the pacifier of puerile minds. And yet loss unlatches an emotional trapdoor beneath our firmest cerebral convictions, plunging us into elemental questions that live beyond our reasoned beliefs, childlike in their disbelieving sincerity. It was such a question that sprang unbidden to my atheist engineer grandmother’s lips as she stood over the hospital bed holding the dead body of my atheist engineer grandfather, her love of half a century: Where did you go, my darling?

The guarded Godwin kept a diary more like a ship’s log than a discursive journal of an inner life:

“Seneca, Ep. 8, 9.”

“Call from Coleridge.”

“Queen dies.”

On the day of his beloved’s death, this man of factual records could not bring himself to name the fact. All he wrote in the ledger was “20 minutes before 8,” followed by an interminable sequence of dashes suturing the unspeakable.

“– — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ”

By evening, he was able to write to his oldest friend with a confused fusion of dissociation and disconsolation:

My wife is now dead. She died this morning at eight o’clock… I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. When you come to town, look at me, talk to me, but do not — if you can help it — exhort me, or console me.

In the corner, his baby daughter was sleeping in her crib. She would learn to read by tracing the letters on her her mother’s tombstone and would come to write, while still a teenager, an epochal reckoning with the eternal interplay of life and death.

The year her Frankenstein was published, Ignaz Semmelweis was born in a Hungarian hospital.