“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in,” Rachel Carson wrote as she contemplated the loneliness of creative work after her unexampled books about the sea made her one of the most beloved writers of her time, “you will interest other people.”

She couldn’t have known it then, but across the Atlantic another visionary was drawing creative succor from her work while reckoning with the same blessed burden of the unexampled.

M.C. Escher: Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror, 1935.

In the autumn of 1955, M.C. Escher (June 17, 1898–March 17, 1972) wrote to his son:

A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.

Escher spent his life trying to bear up under the loneliness of gift — the product of a rare mind best described, to use a notion alien to his epoch, as gloriously neurodivergent. His stunningly detailed lithographs and his meticulous woodcuts, his reality-warping geometries and astonishing tessellation and pleasantly unnerving defiances of gravity partway between optical illusion and dream, were a hallmark of the lonely patience of creative work, which often left him feeling like a “miserable fanatic,” “always wandering around in enigmas,” afflicted by an “association-mania.”

M. C. Escher: The Fifth Day of Creation. (Available as a print.)

Like Carson, who was too lyrical for science and too scientific for literature, Escher inhabited two worlds as an outsider to both; he felt that scientists nodded politely at his mathematically inspired art “in a friendly and interested manner,” but considered him merely a “tinkerer,” while artists were “primarily irritated” by his unclassifiable graphic daring. From this betwixt-and-between place, he lamented to son:

It continues to be a profoundly sad and disillusioning fact that I am beginning to speak a language these days only very few understand. It only increases my loneliness more and more.

In the introduction to the 1957 book about his core creative obsession, Regular Divisions of the Plane, he painted himself as a vessel for some larger creative force, available to all but accessed only by the very few:

I am walking around all alone in this splendid garden that does not belong to me and the gate of which stands wide open for anyone; I dwell here in refreshing but also oppressive loneliness. That is why I’ve been attesting to the existence of this idyllic spot for years… without expecting many strollers to come, however. For what enthralls me and what I experience as beauty is often judged to be dull and dry by others.

But for all his loneliness, Escher also saw himself as tasked with “astonishment” — “sometimes ‘beauty’ is a nasty business,” he wrote — and with rendering “dreams, ideas or problems in such a way that other people can observe and consider them.” And this was enough — the sheer joy his work gave him assured him that he was on “the right track.”

M.C. Escher: Sky and Water I. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Work so unusual did not, could not, be arrived at via the usual paths. For all the astonishing mathematical precision of his prints, Escher had struggled ferociously with mathematics as a young student at the Haarlem School of Civil Engineering and Decorative Arts. It wasn’t until he heard Bach’s Goldberg Variations that his mind snapped onto its own gift for rendering meaning through form. “Father Bach,” he called him. Wonder-smitten by Bach’s music — by its mathematical figures and motives repeating back to front and up and down, by the majesty of “a compelling rhythm, a cadence, in search of a certain endlessness” — Escher felt in it a strong kinship, a special “affinity between the canon in the polyphonic music and the regular division of a plane into figures and identical forms.”

Later, Escher would come to regard his own work as “a kind of small philosophy,” but one that has nothing to do with the literary form philosophy ordinarily takes — rather, his was a philosophy of pleasure and spaciousness: the compositional joy of arranging forms on a plane and giving meaning to each part of it. “It has much more to do with music than with literature,” he wrote.

M.C. Escher: Fish.

What most enchanted him in Bach was the “infinite variation of waves and undulations” in his music — it spoke to something in his own soul that had not yet awakened. And then one day, while he was traveling through Italy as he did throughout much of his twenties and thirties, it did: Listening to his wife brushing her hair, Escher was reminded of the sound of waves and was suddenly overcome by an intense longing for the sea.

He had always been curious about the marine world, fascinated by the “fluid mass,” by its creatures and its phenomena — especially the otherworldly wonder of bioluminescence — but this was a calling of a different order and a new urgency.

M.C. Escher: The Phosphorescent Sea. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

He began taking voyage after voyage aboard cargo ships. Mesmerized by the billowing trails the ship left on the water, he watched the flying fish from the deck. He filled his notebook with a private glossary of nautical terms. On land, he read everything about the ocean he could get his hands on as the it went on tugging at his heart. He felt that only seasoned sailors understood this elemental yearning. “You never (or very rarely) come across such people on land,” he told his son.

This swelling obsession eventually led Escher to Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us — the lyrical book that had won her the 1951 National Book Award.

Rachel Carson, 1951

Wonder-smitten with her writing, Escher wrote to his son:

She describes that liquid element, with an overview of all its associated facets and problems, in such an enthralling manner, with precision and poetry, that it is driving me half insane. This is exactly the kind of reading material I, with my advancing years, need most: a stimulus from our mother earth for my spatial imagination… It is kindling in me intense inspiration to create a new print.

M.C. Escher: Regular Division of the Plane Drawing #20. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

He grew obsessed with rendering the blue fluidity of the “liquid element” in a static black-and-white image that sacrificed none of the feeling-tone and dynamism of the living reality:

Those waves! Soon I’m going to try once more to draw something wavelike. But how can you suggest movement on a static plane? And how can you simplify something as complicated as a wave in the open sea to something comprehensible?

M.C. Escher: The Second Day of Creation. (Available as a print.)

Carson’s poetic yet scientifically scrumptious writing rendered the wonder of the sea comprehensible not by diminishing its enchantment but by magnifying it with understanding, giving Escher a new way of thinking about the three-dimensional nature of space that had always animated his work and making him consider for the first time the fourth dimension of time. Like Carson, who looked at the ocean and saw in it a lens on eternity and the meaning of life, he now saw the ocean as an antidote to the transience that marks our lives — an ever-flowing, ever-lapping salve for our terrified incomprehension of the finitude of time, which is always at bottom a terror of our own finitude:

A human being is not capable of imagining that the flow of time could ever come to a standstill. Even if the earth were to stop turning around its axis and around the sun, even if there wouldn’t be any more days and nights, any more summers and winters, time will continue to flow onward into eternity, that’s how we imagine it.

M.C. Escher: Dolphins. (Available as a print and as a cutting board.)

Like Carson, who found in music the concentration and consecration of her work, Escher never ceased slaking his soul on Bach:

Many a print reached definite form in my mind while I was listening to the lucid, logical language he speaks, while I was drinking the clear wine he pours.

Months after Rachel Carson’s untimely death, Escher received an award with a reflection on his core creative ethos that is as true of hers:

The consistency of the phenomena around us, order, regularity, cyclical repetitions and renewals… brings me repose and gives me support. In my pictures I try to bear witness that we are living in a beautiful, ordered world, and not in a chaos without pattern, as it sometimes seems.

M.C. Escher. Sketchbook, tessellations.

After Carson’s death, two original signed Escher prints were discovered among her belongings. In the final years of his own life, in a token of gratitude for how her work had touched his, he granted the posthumously assembled Rachel Carson Council permission to freely reproduce his prints in their advocacy of the sea for perpetuity.

Complement with the Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton’s stirring letter of appreciation to Carson, then revisit the story of how Carl Sagan inspired Maya Angelou.

Even if we recognize the statistical-existential fact that death is an emblem of our luckiness, most living beings are emphatically averse to the idea of dying. Since the dawn of our species, in our poems and our psalms and our dreams of eternal life, we humans have been petitioning entropy for mercy, for exception, for a felicitous violation of the laws of physics. In prior ages, this was the task of religion, and it was a necessary task — all major religions arose at a time when most children never survived childhood, most people had lost a panoply of parents, children, siblings, and spouses by the end of their twenties, and most never lived past their forties. People needed a pleasing consolation just to live with such staggering levels of loss, and they found it in the soothing notion of an immortal soul that survives the body. In our own epoch, secular notions like cryogenics, transhumanism, and technological singularity have taken on that role, trying to get to immortality through the wormhole of some very slippery semi-science.

But what if the key to immortality was already ours, hidden in the very heart of our humanity, not in our science but in our art? So argues the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler (December 4, 1835–June 18, 1902) — a writer of uncommon foresight into our common future, epochs ahead of his time in his thinking, and still ahead of ours — in a lecture he delivered under the brief “How to Make the Best of Life.”

Samuel Butler

Butler begins by facing the magnitude of the question:

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. One cannot make the best of such impossibilities, and the question is doubly fatuous until we are told which of our two lives — the conscious or the unconscious — is held by the asker to be the truer life.

In a sentiment Richard Dawkins would come to echo two human lifetimes later, Butler adds:

I do not deny that we had rather not die, nor do I pretend that much even in the case of the most favoured few can survive them beyond the grave. It is only because this is so that our own life is possible; others have made room for us, and we should make room for others in our turn without undue repining.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

But then he offers a wondrous perspective on our longing for immortality, both counterintuitive and grounded in the most fundamental truth of life, which is our creative conscience:

Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the Odyssey, and of Jane Austen — the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life consist — their own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a hundred years or so after he was dead and buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter.

[…]

Homer and Shakespeare speak to us probably far more effectually than they did to the men of their own time, and most likely we have them at their best.

Considering what determines whether a person is making “the best of life” in this way — whether they are living up to their highest human potential, which ensures they go on living in other lives — Butler locates some of the key in “in the wideness of his or her sympathy with, and therefore life in and communion with other people.” We are able to recognize such everlasting lives “in the wreckage that comes ashore from the sea of time” — but they are not always those who reached greatness in their own lifetime, or those worshipped by the greatest number of posterity:

I do not speak of the Virgils and Alexander Popes, and who can say how many more whose names I dare not mention for fear of offending. They are as stuffed birds or beasts in a museum; serviceable no doubt from a scientific standpoint, but with no vivid or vivifying hold upon us. They seem to be alive, but are not. I am speaking of those who do actually live in us, and move us to higher achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts out our own and overrides it. I speak of those who draw us ever more towards them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to feel at once that we are in the hands of those we love, and whom we would most wish to resemble.

Jacob’s Dream by William Blake, 1805. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

If we are attentive enough to our inner lives, we can each recognize the influential dead living within us, whose life’s work has shaped and is shaping our own. (Figuring most dominantly in my own private retinue are Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Thomas, Carl Sagan, and Rilke.) Those who attain such immortality, Butler intimates, are passionate lovers of life, enamored with all the dazzlements of nature and human nature:

We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.

[…]

People stamp themselves on their work; if they have not done so they are naught, if they have we have them; and for the most part they stamp themselves deeper on their work than on their talk. No doubt Shakespeare and Handel will be one day clean forgotten, as though they had never been born. The world will in the end die; mortality therefore itself is not immortal, and when death dies the life of these men will die with it — but not sooner. It is enough that they should live within us and move us for many ages as they have and will. Such immortality, therefore, as some men and women are born to achieve, or have thrust upon them, is a practical if not a technical immortality, and he who would have more let him have nothing… He or she who has made the best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it.

With an eye to the imperceptible means by which we come to live in others, as others have come to live in us, he writes:

Unconsciousness is no bar to livingness. Our conscious actions are a drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones. Could we know all the life that is in us by way of circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste and repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally small part consciousness plays in our present existence; yet our unconscious life is as truly life as our conscious life, and though it is unconscious to itself it emerges into an indirect and vicarious consciousness in our other and conscious self, which exists but in virtue of our unconscious self. So we have also a vicarious consciousness in others. The unconscious life of those that have gone before us has in great part moulded us into such men and women as we are, and our own unconscious lives will in like manner have a vicarious consciousness in others, though we be dead enough to it in ourselves.

The Dove No. 1 by Hilma af Klint, 1915. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

It is by the force of our creative vitality, and by the generosity of spirit with which we share it with others, that we attain such immortality in the consciousness of others. Recognizing this as he looks over the landscape of his own creative field — the art of literature — Butler arrives at a common truth for all art:

Will [any artist] hesitate to admit that it is a lively pleasure to her to feel that on the other side of the world someone may be smiling happily over her work, and that she is thus living in that person though she knows nothing about it? Here it seems to me that true faith comes in. Faith does not consist, as the Sunday School pupil said, “in the power of believing that which we know to be untrue.” It consists in holding fast that which the healthiest and most kindly instincts of the best and most sensible men and women are intuitively possessed of, without caring to require much evidence further than the fact that such people are so convinced; and for my own part I find the best men and women I know unanimous in feeling that life in others, even though we know nothing about it, is nevertheless a thing to be desired and gratefully accepted if we can get it either before death or after… Our life then in this world is, to natural religion as much as to revealed, a period of probation. The use we make of it is to settle how far we are to enter into another.

In a lovely sentiment that would have sent Vonnegut into a vigorous nod, he considers the type of person who most readily reaches such immortality in others:

As the life of the race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often in the lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far beyond anything produced while their single lives were yet unsupplemented by those other lives into which they infused their own.

Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on slaking our yearning for eternal life and Lisel Mueller’s splendid poem “Immortality,” then revisit Butler’s prophetic admonition for how to save ourselves in the age of artificial intelligence.

Anything, when faced with unalloyed attention, becomes a mirror. But few things have served as a mightier magnifying mirror for humanity, and for the individual human being, than the apple. Its blossoms have been selected by countless generations of pollinators in painting Earth with color. Its fruit focused the Bible story of original sin, seeding thousands of years of metaphor and myth. In the folklore of my native Bulgaria, a woman has reached the apogee of beauty when she can be likened to an apple. When British America was being settled, a land grant required settlers in the Northwestern Territory to each plant at least fifty apple or pear trees on their homestead as a kind of commitment to the land. The apple gave the greatest metropolis of Western civilization its nickname, even though most native New Yorkers don’t know the origin story of “The Big Apple.”

The Cowarne Red Apple, 1811. (Available as a print, as a backpack, and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

For Darwin, the apple was a lens on natural selection: Traveling on the Beagle, he marveled at how this commonest fruit of his homeland seemed to “thrive to perfection” in the southernmost reaches of South America. For Emerson, it was the great chip on his philosophy: The patron saint of self-reliance berated himself for his sweet tooth, which in the era prior to the golden age of processed sugar manifested itself as an irrepressible craving for apples. For Whitman, it was a microcosm of the medicine of nature that healed him after his paralytic stroke: He would sit for two hours each morning amid the apple-trees, “envelop’d in sound of bumble-bees and bird-music,” watching in the ripening fruit “the summer fully awakening.” For Emily Dickinson, the “hopeless hang” of the apples — the way they both symbolized and embodied the sweet unreachable — was her version of heaven.

No one has written about the sensorial and spiritual splendors of the apple more beautifully, or more passionately, than the great naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) in one of the essays from his 1915 collection Sharp Eyes (public library | free ebook), which also gave us his lovely meditation on the art of noticing.

John Burroughs

Burroughs writes:

Not a little of the sunshine of our northern winters is surely wrapped up in the apple. How could we winter over without it! How is life sweetened by its mild acids!

[…]

The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of fruits… A rose when it blooms, the apple is a rose when it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, the touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it falls in the still October days it pleases the ear [when] down comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth, towards which it has been nodding so long.

In a passage evocative of poet Diane Ackerman’s sensuous ode to the apricot, Burroughs composes a part prose poem and part love letter to the irresistible sensorium of the apple:

How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-cheeked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive! You glow like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost expect to see you move. I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful! How compact; how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun and varnished against the rains. An independent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my own flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wasting away, and almost of repairing damages!

The Red Must Apple, 1811. (Available as a print and as a backpack, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Burroughs’s own grandfather was “one of those heroes of the stump” — the early settlers who traveled many miles on horseback for seeds and went to great lengths to protect their prized apple trees, fastening with iron bolts any storm-split trunk, even though these uncultivated pioneer trees gave only small and sour fruit. In his spirited sincerity with a wink, he serenades the apple as a cultivar of moral virtue:

Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most loved by him, following him like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes. His homestead is not planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the plough and the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit! You mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest; fruit always a little hyperborean, leaning towards the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit.

With the same passionate playfulness, Burroughs paints the apple-eater as a kind of beneficent addict:

The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their season as others with a pipe or a cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or is bored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats an apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk he arms himself with apples… He dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows the best flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple this is lost.

The Yellow Elliot, 1811. (Available as a print, as a cutting board, and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

But the apple is a benediction not only to human lives. Long before the term existed, Burroughs celebrates it as a microcosm of biodiversity — a haven for “the never-failing crop of birds — robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds, orioles, starlings — all nesting and breeding in its branches.” Leaning on his ardor for ornithology, he writes:

There are few better places to study ornithology than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds’ eggs, the woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants. The red-bird comes too, if only to see what a friendly covert its branches form; and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the grove near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller hawks know that this is a most likely spot for their prey; and in spring the shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the fine insects amid its branches.

Apple, pear, and service berry by Anne Pratt. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Burroughs has the naturalist’s talent for meeting nature on its own terms and finding beauty in its living realities, rather than appropriating them for poetic metaphor alone; when he does come to metaphor, it is a lovely and living one:

I think if I could subsist on you or the like of you, I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around.

Complement with Burroughs on the faith of the “naturist” — his wondrous century-old manifesto for spirituality in the age of science — and his timeless wisdom on the mightiest consolation for human hardship, then revisit the little-known story of how New York City came to be known as The Big Apple.

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