All human lives are too various and alive with contradiction to be neatly classed into the categories in which we try to contain the chaos of life, and yet we spend so much of our own unclassifiable lives classing the lives of others. One measure of kindness might be the unwillingness to crush complexity into category, the refusal to lash others with our labels.
Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180) knew this, lived this. Once a heartbroken queer teenager raised by a single mother, he was saved by Stoic philosophy, then tried to save a dying world with it when he came to rule Rome as the last of its Five Good Emperors. Across the epochs, he goes on saving us with the sonorous undertone of his entire philosophy — his humming insistence on kindness as the only effective antidote to all of life’s assaults.
Marcus Aurelius
In his timeless Meditations (public library) — notes on life he had written largely to himself while learning how to live more nobly in an uncertain world that blindsides us as much with its beauty as with its brutality — he returns again and again to kindness and the importance of extending it to everyone equally at all times, because even at their cruelest, which is their most irrational, human beings are endowed with reason and dignity they can live up to.
Seventeen centuries before Tolstoy looked back on his long and contradictory life to make the bittersweet observation that “nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness,” Marcus Aurelius draws on the other great refrain that carries his philosophy — the insistence that embracing our mortality is the key to living fully — and writes:
You should bear in mind constantly that death has come to men* of all kinds, men with varied occupations and various ethnicities… We too will inevitably end up where so many [of our heroes] have gone… Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates… brilliant intellectuals, high-minded men, hard workers, men of ingenuity, self-confident men, men… who mocked the very transience and impermanence of human life…. men… long dead and buried… Only one thing is important: to behave throughout your life toward the liars and crooks around you with kindness, honesty, and justice.
One of Harry Clarke’s 1933 illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. (Available as a print.)
The key to kindness, he observes, is keeping “the purity, lucidity, moderation, and justice of your mind” from being sullied by the actions of those you encounter, no matter how disagreeable and discomposed by unreason they may be. In a passage itself defying the laziness of labels, rooted in a metaphor more evocative of a Buddhist parable or a Transcendentalist diary entry or a Patti Smith Instagram poem than of a Stoic dictum, he writes:
Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface. Even if he throws mud or dung in it, before long the spring disperses the dirt and washes it out, leaving no stain. So how are you to have the equivalent of an ever-flowing spring? If you preserve your self-reliance at every hour, and your kindness, simplicity, and morality.
He offers a kind of thought experiment to be tested in action — try kindness on, the way one tries on a costume, and see how you feel moving through life wearing it, see that you feel infinitely better about both yourself and life:
Try living the life of a good man* and see how it too suits you — a man who’s gratified by the lot he’s been assigned by the universe and satisfied with the justice of his acts and the kindness of his character.
Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
In a sentiment Bertrand Russell would echo epochs later in contemplating how to stop limiting your best life, Marcus Aurelius offers the ultimate recipe for fulfillment:
If you carry out every present task by following right reason assiduously, resolutely, and with kindness; if, rather than getting distracted by irrelevancies, you keep your guardian spirit unspoiled and steady…; if you engage with the task not with expectations or evasions, but satisfied if your current performance is in accord with nature and if what you say and express is spoken with true Roman honesty, you’ll be living the good life. And there’s no one who can stop you doing so!
Complement with poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s soul-broadening ode to kindness and George Saunders on its regret-annihilating power, then revisit Marcus Aurelius on the good luck of your bad luck, how to handle disappointing people, the key to living with presence, the most potent motivation for work, and how to begin each day.
To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live. But with our creaturely capacity for wonder comes a responsibility to it — the recognition that reality is not a singularity but a plane. Each time we presume to have seen the whole, the plane tilts ever so slightly to reveal new vistas of truth and new horizons of mystery, staggering us with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment, framed by our parochial point of view. The history of our species is the history of learning and forgetting and relearning this elemental truth.
These were the thoughts swimming through my point of mind while composing the poem I contributed to the 40th anniversary issue of the oasis of wonder that is Orion Magazine — a poem distilling in its handful of stanzas what The Universe in Verse has been inviting and celebrating all these years: the poetry of perspective.
Accompanying the poem in the magazine is a breathtaking watercolor interpretation by artist and immigrant rights activist TK, born in Vietnam and based in Philadelphia — my own first home in America as a young immigrant — who somehow summons, without ever having known it, the working title of the poem: “Octopus Blues.”
THE AGE OF THE POSSIBLE
by Maria Popova
There,
at the bottom of being,
where the water that makes
this planet a world
is the color of spacetime
the octopus —
with her body-shaped mind
and her eight-arm embrace
of alien realities,
with her colorblind vision
sightful of polarized light
and her perpetually awestruck
lidless eye —
can see
shades of blue we cannot conceive.
Call it god
if you must
lean on the homely
to fathom the holiness
of the fathomless whole.
And meanwhile,
up here,
we swim amid particles
we cannot perceive
folded into dimensions
we cannot imagine
to tell stories about
what is real and
what is possible,
and what it means to be.
A blink of time ago
we thought the octopus
impossible,
we thought this blue world
lifeless
below three hundred fathoms
until in 1898 —
an epoch after Bach
scribbled in the margin
of a composition
“Everything that is possible is real” —
we plunged our prosthetic eye
deep into the blue
and found a universe of life.
There,
the octopus,
godless and possible,
lives.
Are any of her three hearts breaking
for us
and our impossible blues?
“To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her finest poems, “is profound responsibility.”
When Dickinson was a teenager, across the Atlantic, the self-taught botanist Anna Atkins pioneered another art-form for celebrating nature — visual poetry of a kind the world had never before encountered. Her stunning cyanotypes of sea algae engraved her onto our common record as the first person to illustrate a book with photographs and the first woman known to take a photograph at all.
Beauty, too, is profound responsibility — to notice it, to cherish it, to magnify it in our art as we search for meaning, which might be the supreme human responsibility.
Two dahlias by Rosalind Hobley
Two centuries hence, London-based artist Rosalind Hobley unites our twin responsibilities to nature and human nature, to beauty and wonder, in her cyanotype portraits of flowers, immortalized with ravishing fidelity to a long-ago printing process developed in the golden age of chemistry and wonder, in a world far less impatient than ours and far more reverent of the artist’s work, which is the work of noticing and reverencing.
Tulips by Rosalind Hobley
Hobley builds on a long lineage of wonder at the boundary of art and science. In 1839, the polymathic astronomer John Herschel coined the word “photography” to name the process his friend Henry Fox Talbot had developed, not yet knowing he was naming a revolution in our way of seeing and our way of being. Herschel sensed that something vast and beautiful lay hidden beyond this new horizon of photochemical reactions — something that would reveal to the human eye forms of light to which we are born blind, those wondrous unseen extremes bookending the visible spectrum: the luxurious wavelengths of infrared light, which his own father — William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus and brother to the world’s first professional female astronomer — had detected when John was eight, and the petite band of ultraviolet light, which the German chemist Johann Ritter had discovered a year later.
Sweet pea by Rosalind Hobley
So began Herschel’s devotion to our species’ consciousness-defining history of pondering the nature of light. For three years, he toiled to understand how different elements react to sunlight. His experiments were constantly derailed by bad English weather, beginning with an uncommon spell of “extreme deficiency of sunshine during the summer and autumn of the year 1839” and nearly ending with an “almost unprecedented continuance of bad weather during the whole of the [1841] summer and autumn.”
Tulip by Rosalind Hobley
Finally, in 1842, he arrived at an economical printing process to capture the light of the world, the light that gives form and substance to everything we see, in otherworldly blueprints — a slow-reacting solution of equal parts potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate, sensitive to the blue portion of the spectrum spilling into ultraviolet, developed and fixed by only water and sunlight.
Ranunculus bud by Rosalind Hobley
Looking back on his years of weather-derailed experiments, Herschel presented his results before the Royal Society with touching ambivalence:
It is owing to these causes that I am unable to present the results at which I have arrived, in any sort of regular or systematic connection; nor should I have ventured to present them at all to the Royal Society, but in the hope that, desultory as they are, there may yet be found in them matter of sufficient interest to render their longer suppression unadvisable, and to induce others more favourably situated as to climate, to prosecute the subject.
It only takes one or two visionaries per generation to keep an idea alive, to sustain “sufficient interest” in something of quiet, unexampled promise. Generations after Herschel, Hobley’s cyanotypes live as a lovely antidote to photography’s fate in the age of smartphones and the visual culture of selfing — a fate Virginia Woolf anticipated a century ago, for she knew that it is the fate of every technology to be “killed by kindness”: to grow so easy and readily available as to become a cultural compulsion requiring no skill or sensibility. The art, of course, is never the technology and always its use as a means of meaning, of care, of delight. One can write a beautiful and layered letter that reads like a prose poem using email.
Ranunculus by Rosalind Hobley
When Florence Nightingale championed the healing power of beauty a century and a half before modern medicine attested to it, she held up two prime forms of it: art and flowers. Hobley’s tender, haunting cyanotypes unite the two in a single rapture of beauty that feels nothing less than medicinal. I live with two of her dahlias and regularly look up at them from my writing stand for a vivifying infusion of delight.
Dahlia by Rosalind Hobley
Dark anemone by Rosalind Hobley
Ranunculus by Rosalind Hobley
Geranium by Rosalind Hobley
Garden rose by Rosalind Hobley
Dahlia by Rosalind Hobley
Parrot tulips by Rosalind Hobley
Two anemones by Rosalind Hobley
Hellebore by Rosalind Hobley
Dahlia by Rosalind Hobley
Dahlia by Rosalind Hobley
If you too would like to live with these time-traveling beauties cross-pollinating the ephemeral and the eternal, many of Hobley’s flowers are available as prints. Complement them with Lia Halloran’s cyanotype celebration of trailblazing women in astronomy, then revisit the stunning botanical art of Herschel’s contemporary Clarissa Munger Badger, who inspired Emily Dickinson, and this epochs-wide meditation on flowers and the meaning of life.
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