In June 1816, five young people high on romance and rebellion — two still in their teens, one barely out, none beyond their twenties — found themselves in bored captivity at a rented villa on the shore of Lake Geneva as an unremitting storm raged outside for days. If they couldn’t have the dazzling spring days for which they had fled England, they would have long rambling nights of poetry readings and philosophical disquisitions, animated by wine and laudanum. 

The Villa Diodati 200 years later.

So it is that, late one stormy night, one of them — Lord Byron: gifted, grandiose, violently insecure, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in the words of one of his discarded lovers — pulled a French translation of some German ghost stories from their Airbnb’s bookshelf and read from it to the group. He then suggested that they each write a supernatural story of their own, share the results aloud, and vote a winner.

Of the five, one alone completed the challenge at the Villa Diodati and made of it something to outlast its marble columns. It was not His Lordship.

The idea came to her in a “waking dream” several nights later, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) would recall, looking back on the crucible of creativity — the dream she would sculpt, over the next year of ferocious writing and revision, into one of humanity’s most visionary works of literature.

Mary Shelley

There is no record of the exact night or the exact hour. But two centuries later, drawing on Mary’s account of the moment her idea finally arrived as she lay in bed restless with “the moonlight struggling to get through,” astronomers would use the phase of the Moon and its position in the sky over the Villa Diodati to determine that the only light bright enough to clear the hillside and shine through Mary’s shutters in the middle of the night was the gibbous of June 16, just shy of 2 A.M. 

“Once a poem is made available to the public,” the teenage Sylvia Plath would tell her mother a century-some later, “the right of interpretation belongs to the the reader.” Like a great poem, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus would lend itself to infinite interpretations as it came to tower over the popular imagination for centuries to come, casting its long shadow over the fault lines of the future — the future that is now our present, in which so many of the ideas Mary Shelley contoured and condemned are realities both mundane and menacing: artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, racism and income inequality, the longing for love and the lust for power.

Rising above the multitude of possible readings is the overarching concern that unites them all: the responsibility of life to itself and the question of what makes a body a person; the clear sense that any life is a responsibility — one not to be taken lightly, not to be sullied with vanity and superstition, not to be used as a plaything of power.

Mary Shelley. Art from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of trailblazing women writers who have enchanted and transformed the world.

Victor Frankenstein creates a life out of vainglorious ambition and existential loneliness, and flees from his own creation in horror. Unable to love the life he has made, he fails to rise to the fundamental responsibility that parenting demands.

Deprived of that primary bond of love, which moors us to the seabed of being to weather life’s storms, the Creature — which Mary Shelley herself never calls a “monster,” a word applied to him only in later stagings of her masterwork — is savaged by such profound self-loathing that he ends up destroying numerous innocent passersby who cross his sad path. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he roars in one the truest and most devastating lines in all of literature, in all the common record of our reckoning with human nature.

Mary Shelley’s warning rises from the story sonorous and clear as larksong: Life is not to be made, unless it can be tended with love — or else it dooms all involved to a living death.

“Oh! Stars and clouds and winds,” cries the Creature in his anguished wish for self-erasure, “if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory” — anguish outmatched only by that of his creator. Wishing with every fiber of his being that he could unmake the life he made but knowing that he cannot, Victor Frankenstein goes through his own life as “a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.”

The notion of reproductive rights was nowhere near the cultural horizon in Mary Shelley’s lifetime. Still beyond the horizon were most basic human rights for women. No woman could vote. No woman could attend university. In her entire century, only four women successfully obtained divorce, and only after demonstrating savage brutality from their husbands. Husbands were legally allowed to beat and rape their wives, who were their property. Women could not own property, including their own bodies.

This was the world Mary was born into, by a mother — the brilliant founding mother of what posterity christened feminism — who had died in giving birth to her. Mary herself — penniless, malnourished, and wearied by long mountain crossings in exile — would barely survive the births of the four children she bore before she was twenty-four, three of whom would die before reaching adolescence. She was eighteen and had already lost her firstborn when she wrote one of the farthest-seeing works of her time, of all time.

With an eye to his creation — “the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I had let loose upon the world” — Victor Frankenstein laments the responsibility to life, to other lives, that he had sidestepped in the sweep of his passion:

In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being.

This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery.

So begins his quest to track down and vanquish the life he ought never to have created in the first place — a quest that ultimately ends in his own destruction.

A world without the option of abating an ill-conceived life before it has begun is a world that dooms millions to Victor Frankenstein’s fate. What a pause-giving thought: that a girl not yet nineteen, who lived two centuries ago, has a finer moral compass than the Supreme Court of the world’s largest twenty-first-century democracy.

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

Several years and several deaths later — including that of her young husband — Mary Shelley would write the mirror-image of these ideas into another novel, imagining a twenty-first-century world savaged by a deadly pandemic to consider what ultimately makes life worth living.

“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity,” Richard Feynman wrote in his poetic ode to the wonder of life a decade before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics and two decades before these atoms of consciousness sent their most ambitious civilizational artwork toward the unknown reaches of the cosmos as the Golden Record sailed aboard NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, carrying our music, our photographs, and our longing for connection.

An improbable dream dreamt by Carl Sagan, rendered real on the wings of his passionate conviction that we are “a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.”

A poetic gesture signaling to some other civilization who we are and what we value.

Humanity’s first art beyond our atmosphere.

Voyager Golden Record and plaque. (Photographs: NASA)

A generation and an epoch of discoveries later, the first cosmic gallery of art by the youngest members of our young species is launching into Earth orbit: a data-gathering NASA satellite carrying 100 drawings by children, depicting what they most love about life on Earth.

Inspired by the Golden Record, the project is a collaboration between illustrator and graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton and NASA spacecraft systems designer Luke Idziak, winged by Wendy’s DrawTogether experiment-turned-icon — another improbable dream made real and resonant for millions with little more than passion and perseverance.

DrawTogether was born early in the pandemic, in that Blakean way of complaining by creating: Amid the gasping incomprehension of the lockdown, as schools vanished from the cultural horizon and left parents around the world sequestered with their small humans and their large fears in every imaginable type of human habitat, Wendy — a longtime friend and occasional collaborator — began offering a daily series of free, simple, sunny-spirited online art lessons for kids, using drawing as a tool of social emotional learning and feeling-processing. Living proof of Ruskin’s impassioned Victorian case for drawing as a technique for paying attention. A way of seeing the world — both the inner world and the outer world — more clearly so that we may love it more deeply and live more unafraid of what we feel.

What began as a personal labor of love on Wendy’s Instagram became an online show became a global club, in that organic unfurling by which a seed becomes a sunflower. Millions of kids around the world have gathered for the ongoing invitations to draw a particular thing — a wolf, a treehouse, a ferry, a sunflower, the sound of a guitar riff, the weather in the heart. Then came NASA and the invitation to draw the largest thing there is for us earthlings: this one and only home, this drifting house in the drawing room of which our “child of a species” sits together to give shape to our love of life and our curiosity about it in the art we make and in the science that carries poems of metal and mathematics into space.

The satellite is part of NASA’s PACE initiative — a kind of R&D lab aimed at transforming the future of deep-space missions by designing ever-smaller, sturdier, and lither modular satellites. Only one such satellite has ever carried art into space before, and it carried Feynman’s diagrams — those beguiling hieroglyphics of quantum field theory, which created a new visual language for how subatomic particles interact, using drawing to usher in this new way of seeing the most fundamental layer of reality.

DrawTogether kids visiting NASA Ames to see the satellite carrying their work. (Photograph: @wendymac.)

The drawings come from kids across different developmental stages, from early childhood to early adolescence, different cultural and social backgrounds, different places across this landmass — an elementary school in Ohio, the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in San Francisco, a music school in Manhattan, a STEAM school in Los Angeles, a nature-centered school housed in an upstate New York barn. Accompanying each drawing is the child’s written answer to why they drew what they drew — a carnival of inventive spellings and simply worded elemental truths.

A fourth-grader named Amaya draws a butterfly in loving memory of her recently deceased grandmother, who loved “butterflys.”

Her classmate Rachelle offers a bittersweet reminder of the unselfconscious sincerity we learn to cower from as we grow up: “Dear NASA, I chose this drawing because I like nature, and it’s very pretty to look at and it calms me down.”

A boy named Christopher offers a most endearing and rather psychologically apt spelling of “astronaut”: aschonut.

A miniature philosopher of nine named Jovie draws the infinity symbol over a heart and explains: “This is love. Love brings us together. It will never tear us apart. We’re stronger with love.”

Punctuating the hundred-piece totality are some touching testaments to how impressionable kids are and how formed the human mind is by its cultural brine: cartoon characters, movie references, video game consoles, sports emblems.

But two things emerge as the most common objects of pride in life on Earth, incontestable as daybreak: nature and love. (Which are, in the end, a single thing.)

There are many people holding hands. There are flowers and turtles and a singing bird and a smiling octopus. Two different black-and-white curvatures colored by the mind’s eye into rainbows. The ocean and the sky. A multitude of mountains.

Most of all, there are the trees, abstracted and detailed, crowned and coniferous — a wilderness of ways of seeing, carrying a diverse forest of love into space. (Cue aschonut Leland Melvin reading Pablo Neruda’s love letter to Earth’s trees and Bruno Munari’s existentialist exercise in drawing a tree.) Because, as nine-year-old Dominic explains in his caption, trees are “one of the most inportent thing on earth they give us 02.”

Radiating from it all is G.K. Chesterton’s dandelion-inspired observation that “what was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder,” and echoes of Dylan Thomas’s poetic insight that, when we strip away the accrued confusions of adulthood, to be “children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.”

But what I find most moving is the developmental progression — by the time we get to the kids on the cusp of adolescence, the drawings are animated by the dual awareness that this wonder-full world is in peril and that it falls on them, these emissaries of tomorrow, to save it.

Thirteen-year-old Sylvia draws an exquisite geometric hummingbird to represent “the fragile beauty of our world.”

“Earth isn’t the best place right now,” writes thirteen-year-old Alma beneath a drawing of a smoking house and a denuded tree, “but we can work to fix it.” Their classmate Sebastian’s detailed drawing and pointed caption can spin a future President on her axis: “Taking notice isn’t enough we need to take action first.”

The project shares something profound and everlasting with its inspiration: The Golden Record’s stated scientific aim — to compress, encode, and transmit information about our world to another — was the Trojan horse by which Sagan conquered NASA’s consent and achieved his true aim, which was the poetic: In a world falling apart in the Cold War, shuddering with the aftershocks of two World Wars, haunted by the assassinations of Dr. King and JFK and Gandhi, here was a mirror held up to humanity, inviting us to reflect on who we are and what we stand for, on the staggering beauty of this indivisible, irreplaceable Pale Blue Dot and our staggering capacity for the noticing of beauty, which is the language of love — that ultimate poetic truth of what makes us human.

It is this same truth, made all the truer and more tender by their openhearted innocence, that radiates from the children’s drawings.

This is the great and terrifying truth about the creative life: Anything we make — all this longing for beauty and meaning, all these reckonings and raptures, these most passionate and personal fragments of being — is just a tiny seed compacting everything we are, blown into the wind that is the world.

Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later — and we can never fully know, or know at all, when or where or how they might.

But in that uncertainty is also our redemption — the thing that sets the artist, that civilizational gardener of eternal ideas, apart from the politician or the entrepreneur or any other harvester of seasonal urgencies.

Rebecca Solnit — one of the eternals of our time — explores this in some lovely passages from her unsummarizably magnificent book Orwell’s Roses (public library).

Rebecca Solnit prior to her 2020 Universe in Verse performance.

She writes:

Writing is a murky business: you are never entirely sure what you are doing or when it will be finished and whether you got it right and how it will be received months or years or decades after you finish. What it does, if it does anything, is a largely imperceptible business that takes place in the minds of people you will mostly never see and never hear from (unless they want to argue with you). As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination; you can describe a battlefield, a birth, a muddy road, or a smell.

And then, making her contribution to the canon of great writers whose gardening anchored their art, she holds up the counterpoint and vital counterpart to this ethereal uncertainty:

A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect… To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.

Elemental Forces by Maria Popova. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

And yet this is the paradox of the creative life: The world of ideas needs the world of atoms and forces — to believe otherwise is to dial back the centuries and go on perpetrating that amply confuted Cartesianism of regarding the life of the body as separate from the life of the mind. We are living embodiments of these selfsame forces of physics and biology. Walking hydrologies. Portable worlds with weather systems of biochemistry and feeling. Bodies moving through a world of other bodies in a particular stretch of spacetime.

All of these physical variables and the interactions between them shape our ideas, for they shape the interdependent chance-configuration of variables we experience as a self. We would not have Leaves of Grass or Beloved if Whitman’s and Morrison’s minds had been rooted in different bodies and different spacetimes.

If anyone knows this, of course, it is Rebecca Solnit — she who writes so beautifully about how the way we move shapes the way we think and about how the landscape colors the mind with feeling; she who thinks so deeply about trees and the shape of time; she who devotes two years of her life to writing a song of a book about how Orwell’s rose garden shaped his ideas.

Flowers by Clarissa Munger Badger — the artist who seeded Emily Dickinson’s botanial inspiration. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Complement with two centuries of beloved writers on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening, then revisit Rebecca Solnit’s stirring letter to tomorrow’s readers about why we read and write.

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