“What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Stoic strategy for turning suffering into strength.

Two millennia later, the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich (April 25, 1866–June 28, 1892) attested to this insight with her life, short and soaring, spent writing soulful poems she considered “chiefly in a minor key” — the lyric epitome of “the bittersweet.”

Anne’s father died when she was eight. Immersed in music and art, with a gift for mathematics, she was only fifteen when she submitted her first poem to a magazine. With the notice of rejection came a friendly note of encouragement and praise from the editor, who eventually published a poem of hers two years later. Soon, her poems were populating prominent magazines, and newspapers frequently quoted verses from them.

But midway through her twenties, the impartial hand of chance dealt her a rapidly debilitating illness. She lived through it with fierce devotion to life. Like Beethoven, who vowed to “take fate by the throat” when chance dealt him his own hand of suffering, Aldrich went on composing poems at a feverish pace until the very end, even as she grew too weak to write by hand. She dictated her last poem, “Death at Daybreak,” and died just before dawn on June 18, 1892 — a season after Whitman. She was twenty-six.

Anne Reeve Aldrich

Her final poetry collection, aptly titled Songs about Love, Life, and Death (public library | public domain), was posthumously published by summer’s end. The Springfield Republican — the first paper to print Emily Dickinson’s poetry in her lifetime — lauded Aldrich as one of “the few who nearest share the moods of Sappho and her talents.” Seven years after her death, a major newspaper was still celebrating her “brief poems of unusual merit,” reprinting from them these “especially pregnant lines” — lines of abiding insight into how often we are the architects of our own suffering, a knowledge we carry with an uneasy awareness that only unmasons us more:

I made the cross myself, whose weight
Was later laid on me.
This thought adds anguish as I toil
Up life’s steep Cavalry.

She understood that personal suffering — pain on the scale of our individual lives — is the grandest portal to sympathy with universal life; she understood that “we bear a common pain” — the elemental pain that is the price of being alive, pain often invisible and always ineffable, except perhaps through art. She articulated this understanding with uncommon sympathy and splendor of sentiment in an 1890 letter to Emily Dickinson — herself a patron saint of suffering.

A year after the publication of her debut collection, The Rose of Flame, and Other Poems of Love (public library | public domain), the twenty-four-year-old Aldrich writes to the fifty-year-old Dickinson, whose own immense body of work never appeared as a book in her lifetime:

A life of patient suffering, such as I am sure yours must be, dear Miss Dickinson is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write, and I believe it is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.

Art by Virginia Frances Sterrett, who died barely out of her twenties. (Available as a print.)

Those who read Anne Reeve Aldrich’s melancholy poetry speculated that she must be “an invalid” or “a sufferer,” but those who knew her knew a sunny-spirited young woman with a sense of humor and an exceptionally hopeful nature. Upon the posthumous publication of her final poems, she was compared to Elizabeth Barrett Browning — herself an emissary of radiance through inordinate suffering, who saw felicitous perseverance as a moral obligation. “Since Mrs. Browning has died, no sweeter spirit has breathed its life into verse than that of Anne Reeve Aldrich,” declared The Atlanta Constitution, noting how difficult it must be to die at the peak of one’s powers and prophesying that her poems would go on to “have a life of their own.” In them, she exalted not suffering itself but the full surrender to suffering, which triumph over it requires:

I love to feel a bitter throe
Rise to its fullest height,
Then watch a conquering anodyne
Softly assert its might.

Complement with Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering, Ursula K. Le Guin on getting to the other side of pain, and Sophie Scholl, who was even younger than Aldrich when she died for her values, on suffering, strength, and the deepest wellspring of courage, then revisit Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed moments before his execution, on what makes life worth living.

“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote as he contemplated the transcendent power of music half a century before this supreme hallmark of our species sailed into the eternal silence of spacetime aboard the Voyager, encoded on the Golden Record as the sonic fingerprint of what we yearn for and what we are — “atoms with consciousness.”

The rings of Saturn, captured by the Voyager in 1981.

All of our most inexpressible feelings — our loneliness and our longing, our grief and our famishing hunger for meaning — are scale models of our great cosmic loneliness, microcosms of the immense silence of spacetime itself. And so, to bear it all, we sing — singing as sensemaking, singing as the supreme gesture that bridges lonelinesses, singing as the tonic gasp at the wonder of existence and the ravishing improbability of it all.

And yet music was not inevitable — nothing in our animal architecture calls for this extravagance of expression, nothing in the laws of probability inclines toward it. But once there was consciousness — which is also, arguably, not inevitable: look at every other planet we have studied — music arose from our complex consciousness, from this cathedral of thought and feeling: a byproduct as inevitable as god.

Uranus, Voyager, 1986.

This glorious inevitability comes alive with uncommon splendor in The Listeners — the staggering oratorio composer, violinist, vocalist, and polymathic music-sibyl Caroline Shaw made for and recorded with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, inspired by the Golden Record dreamt up a generation ago by the poetic, prophetic Carl Sagan, who saw us as “a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.”

Five centuries of celebrated poetry take on a new radiance in the light of Shaw’s music, recorded live at First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, in the spring and autumn of 2019. Among the spoken-word recordings that punctuate the sung poems, their soulful prose-poetry magnified by the orchestral magic, are Sagan’s own words from his iconic Pale Blue Dot speech and a recording the Secretary General of the United Nations made that NASA never asked for, but which Sagan found “so sensitively and gracefully composed, and so appropriate,” that they included it on the Golden Record:

We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universes that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.

The fifth piece on the record, titled “Of a Million Million,” inspirits Tennyson’s 1885 poem “Vastness” — a masterwork of moral clarity and scientific foresight that envisioned, epochs before the Kepler mission discovered the first exoplanet, a universe of innumerable possible worlds and held up, a century before Maya Angelou did, a mirror to humanity with lines of searing resonance today:

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,
Many a planet by many a sun may roll with a dust of a vanish’d race.

Raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth’s pale history runs, —
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourn’d by the Wise,
Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies;

[…]

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire;
Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapp’d in a moment of fire;

[…]

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;
All new-old revolutions of Empire — change of the tide — what is all of it worth?

[…]

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,
Swallow’d in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown’d in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment’s anger of bees in their hive? —

Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive.

But, to me, the crowning glory of the record is the second piece, drawn from Whitman — the poet laureate of astronomy, who called himself a “kosmos” and uniquely understood music as the profoundest expression of nature.

Caroline Shaw recomposes Leaves of Grass in such a way that the singer — bass-baritone Dashon Burton — enters Whitman’s river of language mid-stream, partway through the forty-sixth section of “Song of Myself,” culminating in that one exquisite line that titles the song:

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

Inexpressible feeling riding on a pillar of breath — the true Pillars of Creation, both steadying the soul and setting it free.

The Listeners, also savorable on Spotify, is an enchantment in its entirety. Complement it with one of Emily Dickinson’s deepest-feeling and farthest-seeing poems, brought to life in an animated song.

“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” asks the poetic physicist and scientific novelist Alan Lightman on the pages of his exquisite inquiry into the nature of existence. We can’t, of course — but out of those creaturely limits, out of our longing to transcend them, arises our eternal hunger for meaning, arises everything we might call art. Nick Cave intuited this in his lovely meditation on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of artificial intelligence.

A century before Cave and Lightman, as he lay dying, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) — one of the vastest intelligences our species has produced, and one of the most deeply and therefore fallibly human — collided with this question on the pages of his final journals, included in the altogether revelatory Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy (public library).

Leo Tolstoy

Two decades after the uncommonly brilliant and prematurely death-bound Alice James wrote in her journal that “[dying] is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” Tolstoy writes in his:

I’m beginning to get used to regarding death and dying not as the end of my task, but as the task itself.

One night, he dreams about “a clear, simple refutation of materialism comprehensible to all”; one morning, he wakes up filled with self-pity, feeling disgusted with himself. He rides the waves as they come. In the midwinter of his seventy-seventh year, having outlived the life expectancy of a Russian peasant twofold and having begun his life with a fierce search for purpose, he writes:

I woke up, and two things became especially and absolutely clear to me: (1) that I am a very worthless man. I say this absolutely sincerely, and (2) that it would be good for me to die, and that I would like to do so.

Along the way, he reckons with the meaning of life and with our making of meaning. In one of the most poignant entries from the journal, and in one of the most titanic acts of character a human being can perform, Tolstoy — a deeply spiritual man — scrutinizes his own blind spot as he considers the mutual blindnesses of science and spirituality, blinkered by the irreconcilable fact of our materiality and our hunger for meaning:

Normally people (myself included) who recognize the spiritual life as the basis of life deny the reality, the necessity, the importance of studying the physical life, which evidently cannot lead to any conclusive results. In just the same way, those who only recognize the physical life completely deny the spiritual life and all deductions based on it — deny, as they say, metaphysics. But it is now absolutely clear to me that both are wrong, and both forms of knowledge — the materialistic and the metaphysical — have their own great importance, if only one doesn’t wish to make inappropriate deductions from the one or the other. From materialistic knowledge based on the observation of external phenomena one can deduce scientific data, i.e. generalizations about phenomena, but one should not deduce any guiding principles for people’s lives, as the materialists — Darwinists for example — have often tried to do. From metaphysical knowledge based on inner consciousness one can and should deduce the laws of human life — how should we live? why are we living? — the very thing that all religious teachings do; but one should not deduce, as many people have tried to do, the laws of phenomena and generalizations about them.

Each of these two kinds of knowledge has its own purpose and its own field of activity.

One of a series of illustrations of how nature works from a nineteenth-century French physics textbook. (Available as a print.)

In another entry, which reads like the metaphysical counterpart to the science of entropy, Tolstoy confronts the crux of living and dying:

Life is continual creation, i.e. the formation of new, higher forms. When this formation comes to a stop in our view or even goes backwards, i.e. when existing forms are destroyed, this only means a new form is taking shape, invisible to us. We see what is outside us, but we don’t see what is within us, we only feel it (if we haven’t lost our consciousness, and don’t take what is visible and external to be the whole of our life). A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.

Complement with Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad’s soulful commencement address about monarch butterflies and the meaning of life and Alan Lightman on what makes life worth living, then revisit Einstein’s dialogue with the Indian poet Tagore about science and spirituality and Tolstoy on kindness and the measure of love.

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