“Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness… to let the form be felt... but let the whole be sombre,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother as he exulted in the beauty of sorrow — not in that wallowing way some have of making an identity of their suffering, not in the way our culture has of fetishizing the tortured genius myth, but in the way of Whitman, who saw the plain equivalence between feeling deeply all of life’s hues and so touching its beauty more deeply, the contact we call art: Those who reach “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights,” Whitman knew, are also apt “to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses.” He had “a theory that no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them”; his own life was living proof of that theory. Two millennia before him, Aristotle too had wondered why an undertone of melancholy seems to reverberate across the personalities of the most fertile minds, the greatest leaders, and the finest artists.

Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

I too have wondered this while falling in love with the people I live with — Rachel Carson, with her uncommon grasp of the beauty inside the tragedy of transience; Rockwell Kent, who went to the remotest wilderness to discover loneliness as a catalyst of creativity; Beethoven, who turned a lifetime of sorrow into universal joy; Lincoln, who made of his melancholy a source of poetry and power; and Emily Dickinson, who turned the interleaving of love and loss into an eternal garden of delight.

I suspect that beneath it all is not an acceptance of but the longing for an acceptance of the elemental interplay between darkness and light, beauty and sorrow, mortality and meaning — the longing we transmute into meaning, that great act of creation.

Virginia Woolf called this the “shock-receiving capacity” necessary for being an artist — the willingness to see the totality of life, in all its syncopations of grief and gladness, of beauty and brutality, and feel the shock of it all, and make of that shock something that shimmers with meaning. Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet” — “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” Whitman and Woolf, Carson and Kent, Lincoln and Dickinson were all paragons of the bittersweet.

The Dreaming Horses (1912) by Franz Marc, a classic bittersweet type. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

First awakened to it by a curiosity about her own disproportionate love of music in a minor key, Cain realized that “the music was just a gateway to a deeper realm, where you notice that the world is sacred and mysterious, enchanted even” — a realm we can enter through music or a walk in an old-growth forest, through poetry or prayer. She began seeing echoes of this nebulous yet surprisingly common capacity for noticing in the lives of artists and thinkers she admired — Beethoven and Buckminster Fuller, Rumi and Alexander the Great, but none more exemplary than the creative patron saint of her life: Leonard Cohen.

So she gave that flavor of the spirit a name, then set out to understand it by following a procession of researchers who study its kaleidoscopic facets across neurobiology, psychology, social science.

In Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (public library), she writes:

The bittersweet is… an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know — or will know — loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.

Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

There is in this notion an echo of Oscar Wilde’s stirring prison letter, in which he resolved to turn his suffering into transcendence; an echo of Beethoven’s resolve to “take fate by the throat” once he began losing his hearing; an echo of Marina Abramovič, who turned a harrowing childhood into raw material for art.

At the heart of it all is an inspired inquiry into “transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love,” posed with sensitivity to the realities and varieties of pain we live with, not all of them easily mutable into a poem or a painting or a song.

It is an act of quiet courage for Cain to reckon with these questions in a culture that so readily cosigns the verdict on matters of complexity with a bellicose X illiterate of nuance. For these are indeed complex, nuanced matters beyond easy binaries, murky even as a spectrum — where do the fertile blues of melancholy end and the deadening black of depression begin? The bittersweet — this enchanted loom of longing on which we weave the tapestry of meaning — exits in the liminal space between the spiritual, the physiological, and the psychological. It is an orientation of the soul laced with neurochemistry and chance.

That is where Cain’s notion of longing as the litmus test for the bittersweet becomes useful — there is a subtlety in it that sets the spiritual apart from the clinical. Across languages and cultures, across epochs and sensibilities, we have always longed to name our longing. It is encoded in one of Sappho’s most ravishing surviving fragments and bellows from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and radiates from everything Nina Simone’s gum stands for. In a passage evocative of Woolf’s “shock-receiving capacity,” Cain writes:

C. S. Lewis called it the “inconsolable longing” for we know not what, or Sehnsucht, a German term based on the words das Sehnen (“the yearning”) and sucht (“an obsession or addiction”). Sehnsucht was the animating force of Lewis’s life and career. It was “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.” He’d felt it first as a young boy, when his brother brought him a toy garden in the form of an old biscuit tin filled with moss and flowers, and he was overcome by a joyous ache he couldn’t understand, though he would try for the rest of his life to put it into words, to find its source, to seek the company of kindred spirits who’d known the same wondrous “stabs of joy.”

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s century-old illustrations for French fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

The bittersweet, Cain observes, is most palpable in “those out-of-time moments when you witness something so sublime” — something like, say, a shimmering red leaf twirling in midair without falling — “that it seems to come from a more perfect and beautiful world.” Capturing with extraordinary precision the twin realities between which some of us spend our lives interpolating, she writes:

At their worst, bittersweet types despair that the perfect and beautiful world is forever out of reach. But at their best, they try to summon it into being. Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moon shots, masterpieces, and love stories. It’s because of longing that we play moonlight sonatas and build rockets to Mars. It’s because of longing that Romeo loved Juliet, that Shakespeare wrote their story, that we still perform it centuries later.

[…]

When you went to your favorite concert and heard your favorite musician singing the body electric, that was [the bittersweet]; when you met your love and gazed at each other with shining eyes, that was it; when you kissed your five-year-old good night and she turned to you solemnly and said, “Thank you for loving me so much,” that was it: all of them facets of the same jewel. And yes, at eleven p.m. the concert will end, and you’ll have to find your car in a crowded parking lot; and your relationship won’t be perfect because no relationship is; and one day your daughter will fail eleventh grade and announce that she hates you.

One of artist Rosalind Hobley’s haunting cyanotype portraits of flowers.

In this sense, then, longing becomes not the craving for perfection — for the shimmer of glory, for the myth of closure, for the happily ever after — but a kind of tenderness for imperfection, for the recognition that the place between no more and not yet is the place where the chance-miracle of life lives itself through us, and that is a beautiful place. Cain writes:

Longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen — to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.

In a sentiment evocative of Rosanne Cash’s transcendent science-laced reflection on what it means to be an artist, lensed through Adrienne Rich and Marie Curie, Cain adds:

The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly — care enough to act.

Bittersweet is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with poet and philosopher David Whyte on the deepest meaning of longing, then revisit Rilke — a classic bittersweet — on the relationship between solitude, longing, and creativity and Nick Cave — the monarch of the modern bittersweet — on hope, cynicism, and the salve for despair.

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife.

On this world, space has produced “atoms with consciousness,” in the lovely phrase of the later poet Richard Feynman. Minds. A world rife with minds, as various as they are numerous.

Elsewhere in his seventeenth-century epic of philosophy in blank verse, Milton formulated the quintessence of human experience:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

One of William Blake’s rare illustrations for Paradise Lost

In all of this, a paradox: A mind as complex and highly organized ours can perceive the fact of other minds, even more different from our own than the bodies they govern — an awareness haunted by Iris Murdoch’s reminder that the tragic freedom of our experience is the recognition that “others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves.” And yet the human mind is governed by a single organizing principle — self-reference, known often by its other names: memory, language, love.

Because it is its own place, it can only perceive the rest of reality from that place: Our entire view of the world, including the recognition of otherness, is lensed through our own particular mind, ground into shape by its particular genetic inheritance, smudged by its particular life-experience. Everything we see — ourselves, each other, the universe itself — is focused into meaning by that lens.

Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Milton lived through a turning point in human thought — an era that cleared the inner lens into a discomposing glimpse of reality as Galileo turned the lens of his primitive telescope outward to dismantle our illusions of centrality, our puerile cosmic self-reference. By the time Milton visited Galileo, he was too old and blind to look through the astronomer’s telescope and marvel at its concrete revelations of other moons spinning around other worlds spinning around a shared star. But he saw the abstract truth beyond it: The universe is rife with otherness, every point of light a point of view.

An epoch of lens-clearing after Milton, as we discovered that the universe is wildly larger than we thought and that our own world is wild with other consciousnesses, Robert Frost (March 26, 1874–January 29, 1963) took up this subject with great subtlety and splendor in his poem “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations.”

At the fifth annual Universe in Verse — which explored through the dual lens of science and poetry the ultimate question animating these atoms with consciousness: What is life? — Frost’s poem came alive in a lovely reading by cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz — director of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, writer of some uncommonly poetic books about how canine minds see the world, creator and host of the wonderful new podcast Off Leash. She prefaced her reading with a poignant reflection on the limits of consciousness lensed through a point of view:

ON LOOKING UP BY CHANCE AT THE CONSTELLATIONS
by Robert Frost

You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves —
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drout will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

Complement with Rebecca Solnit’s splendid reading of and reflection on the century-old poem “Trees at Night” from the same show, then revisit this rare recording of JFK’s tribute to Robert Frost — which is at heart a manifesto for the power of art to clarify, sanctify, and defend truth.

“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees, “no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

But this century-old classic, part meditation and part manifesto, is far from Hesse’s only contribution to the reliquary of our species’ tender kinship with trees — those “slim sentinels” watching over our existence, recalibrating our sense of time, fomenting our richest metaphors and our finest poems, speaking deeply to every deep-thinking, deep-feeling person and enchanting every noticer (which is the other word for artist). Trees strew Hesse’s novels and essays, his letters and diaries, his poems and paintings — all that survives of a life so clearly and mirthfully animated by them, from his Black Forest childhood to the Swiss mountain village of his old age.

Hermann Hesse

After the heroism of editing the first-ever complete edition of Hesse’s writings writings, scholar Volker Michels has culled the finest sylvan musings from this immense body of work and curated thirty of Hesse’s own drawings to illustrate them in the slender gem of a book Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings (public library).

In a piece penned in the spring of 1905 — the year Hesse formulated his timeless prescription for living with presence — Hesse recounts a visit to a long narrow park in the city, full of sunny lawns and prim flower beds. Standing apart from the copse of young fir trees, apart from the “stately elm, maple, and plane trees,” he notices two trees “rising in the warm and cheerful freedom of the grass, conspicuous and alone” — a weeping willow and a “mighty copper,” both of which he serenades with the full force of his luscious prose. He writes of the willow:

The [willow’s] long delicate silky tired branches hung so dense and deep all around that being inside them was to be in a tent or temple, where despite the eternal shade and twilight a muted constant warmth brooded.

[…]

From a distance [the copper] looked dark brown, almost black. But when you got closer, or stood under it and looked up, all the leaves on the outer branches, penetrated by the sunlight, burned with a low warm purple fire shining with a solemnly subdued glow like a church’s stained-glass windows.

Hermann Hesse, Aquarelle no. 319, 1936.

It is through this portal of beauty that Hesse enters a realm of elemental truth that would take science two more human generations to catch up to. Nearly a century before Canadian forester Suzanne Simard’s epoch-making discovery of how trees communicate demonstrated the ecological reality beneath the poetic truth of Hesse’s existential reckoning, he considers our ambivalent relationship with nature — its punitive history and its possible future — through the lens of the urban park:

At one time, the regularly laid out pleasure garden had been a rigorous work of art. But a time came when people grew tired of arduous waiting and tending and pruning, and no one cared about laboriously planted grounds, and the trees were left to fend for themselves. They had struck up friendships with one another, they had forgotten their artificially isolated roles, they had remembered in their crisis their old forest homeland, leaned on one another, flung their arms around one another for support. They had covered the paths straight as arrows with thick foliage and drawn those paths to themselves, with their long, grasping roots, transforming them into nourishing forest floor; their crowns had clasped one another and grown tightly intertwined; and they saw an eagerly upward-striving population of new trees grow under their protection, filling the emptiness with smoother trunks and lighter-colored leaves, conquering the fallow soil, making the earth black and soft and rich with their shade and fallen leaves, so that mosses and grass could now thrive more easily too, and little shrubs.

Hermann Hesse, Grotto in the Forest, 1924.

Long before the modern concept of rewilding, he adds:

[Now] the people whose grandfathers had planted the plane trees in ramrod-straight lines, and pruned and shaped them with judgment and discretion, now visited those trees with their own children and were happy that the long period of desolation had turned the allées into a forest, where sun and wind could linger and birds could sing and people could indulge in their thoughts and dreams and desires.

To be human is to see in the rest of nature not what it is but what we are. If we are lucky enough, if we are wakeful enough, we might see both — but never only reality unselved. Because we are the seeing, we are also the seen — this is the price of consciousness. In another piece penned in another spring nearly half a century and a Nobel Prize later, in the winter of his life, Hesse sees in trees an analogue for his own experience of the final life-stage, looks to them for a model of the stubborn dignity he yearns for — we all yearn for — in facing death.

Hermann Hesse, Early Spring, 1925.

He describes a beech sapling that had somehow planted itself in the thorny hedge bordering his garden some years earlier — at first “a little shrub from a seed flown over from the woods,” intruding on his ideas about garden design, now a thriving young tree that brings him immense delight — delight now bittersweet as he realizes that the “old mighty beech” from which the seed most likely flew, his most beloved tree in the nearby forest, had been cut down.Heartache drips from his words — a heartache Thoreau too knew, and I have known, in seeing a beloved tree cut down — as he reflects on the fate of the mother-tree: “Massive segments of its trunk, sawn apart, still lie there heavy and oversized like rubble from an ancient column.”

And yet the loss only makes him love the little tree more.

An epoch before we understood the poetic science of why leaves change color and fall — itself a metaphor for how every loss reveals what we are made of — Hesse writes:

It always delighted and impressed me how stubbornly my little beech held on to its leaves. When everything else was long since bare, it still stood clad in its withered leaves — through December, January, February; storms tore at it, snow fell on it and dripped off again, and the dry leaves, at first dark brown, grew ever paler, thinner, silkier, but still the tree would not let them go, they were needed to shield the young buds. Then at some point or another every spring — and every time it was later than you expected — the tree would one day have changed. It would have lost its old foliage and instead put out tender new buds dabbed with moisture. This time, I was witness to the transformation. It was an afternoon hour around mid-April, soon after the rain had made the landscape fresh and green; I had still not heard the cuckoo that year, not seen any daffodils in the meadow. Only a few days earlier I had stood there in a hard north wind, shivering, raising my collar, and watched with amazement as the beech stood indifferent in the wrenching wind, dropping barely a leaf. Tough and brave, hard and stubborn, it kept hold of its old bleached leaves.

And now, today, as I broke pieces of wood by my fire in the gentle calm warm air, I saw it happen: a soft breeze blew up, just a breath really, and the leaves saved for so long simply drifted off, by the hundreds and thousands — noiselessly, easily, willingly, tired from their long perseverance, tired of their stubbornness and fortitude. What had resisted and endured for five or six months now succumbed to a puff of air, a nothing, because the time had come and their furious persistence was no longer needed. Away they flew and fluttered, smiling, without a struggle, ready. The tiny wind was much too weak to carry the little leaves far no matter how light and thin they were, so they drizzled down like a light rain and covered the path and the grass at the foot of the little tree, which was now showing a few buds already broken open and green.

Hermann Hesse, Easter Monday, 1924.

Intuiting what we now know — that trees are Earth’s emissaries of immortality, and that their wintering is our blueprint of resilience — he sees in the little tree the same lens on the meaning of life that Rachel Carson saw in the ocean, and adds:

What had this surprising and touching performance revealed to me? Was it death: the easy, willingly undergone death of the winter leaves? Was it life: the urgently striving, celebratory youth of the buds making space for themselves with a suddenly roused will? Was the performance sad or cheering? Was it a sign that I, an old man, should let myself flutter and fall as well, a warning that I might be taking up space needed by the younger and stronger? Or was it a call to hold on, like the beech leaves — to stay on my feet and brace myself and defend myself as tenaciously and as long as I could, because then, at the right moment, my farewell would be easy, serene, and joyful? No, like everything we see it was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing, was a call to nothing; or, rather, it meant everything — it meant the mystery of existence and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning, a gift and a discovery for anyone who saw it, like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne. These names and these interpretations were not part of the experience, they came later: the experience itself was nothing but appearance, miracle, mystery, as beautiful as it was serious, as fair and propitious as it was unrelenting and merciless.

And then he realizes that he is only rediscovering a truth he had discovered long ago, in one the poems he penned in the summer of life:

FLOWERING BRANCH

Constantly this way and that
The flowering branch flails in the wind,
Constantly up and down
My heart flails like a child
Between bright days and dark,
Between wanting and renouncing.
Until the flowers have blown away
And the branch is covered in fruit;
Until the heart, sated with childhood,
Has its rest
And confesses: it was full of pleasure, not for nothing,
This restless game of life.

Hermann Hesse, Flowers After a Storm, 1934.

Complement the cover-to-cover delight that is Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings with some defiantly delightful photographs of women in trees across Hesse’s homeland in the final years of his life, his compatriot Paul Klee on how an artist is like a tree, their no less visionary yet forgotten American contemporary Anna Botsford Comstock on winter trees as a portal to aliveness, and the Harlem Renaissance prodigy Helene Johnson’s poem “Trees at Night” read by Rebecca Solnit, then revisit Hesse on the wisdom of the inner voice and solitude, the value of hardship, and the courage to be yourself.

The Universe in Verse: A Poetic Animated Celebration of Science and the Wonder of Reality

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy