“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her splendid antidote to the irreversibility of life, “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”

And yet our culture holds up forgiveness as a moral virtue in too binary a way, placing the brunt of repair on the wounded, making little demand of the wounder. We need more nuance than this, and such nuance is what rabbi Danya Ruttenberg offers in On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (public library) — a field guide to the rewards and nuances of forgiveness, drawing on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides’s classic Laws of Repentance, using their ancient wisdom to calibrate our cultural reflexes and modernizing their teachings to account for our hard-earned evolution as a species conscious of its own blind spots.

She writes:

The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.

Art by Jacqueline Ayer from The Paper-Flower Tree

And yet, Ruttenberg observes, such a conception of forgiveness makes repair a wholly one-sided process, tasking the person wounded with the whole of it. The Hebrew language itself offers a vital remedy of greater subtlety:

In Hebrew, two different words, each with its own shade of meaning and weight, are used in the context of forgiveness. The first is mechila, which might be better translated as “pardon.” It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender; it’s transactional. It’s not a warm, fuzzy embrace but rather the victim’s acknowledgment that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation. You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back, and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me — it seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila, whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.

Slicha, on the other hand, may be better translated as “forgiveness”; it includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability, recognizes that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy. Like mechila, it does not denote a restored relationship between the perpetrator and the victim (neither does the English word, actually; “reconciliation” carries that meaning), nor does slicha include a requirement that the victim act like nothing happened. But it has more of the softness, that letting-go quality associated with “forgiveness” in English.

At the core of this ancient distinction is a central concern with what is needed for closure. (Here, we must remember that closure itself is largely a myth.) Maimonides offers a fascinating and very precise prescription: The wounder should make three earnest attempts at apology, showing both repentance and transformation — evidence that they are no longer the type of person who, in the same situation, would err in the same way; if after the third attempt they are still rebuffed by the wounded, then — and this is Maimonides’s brutal twist — the sin now belongs to the wounded for withholding forgiveness. The intimation is that a person who, in the face of genuine remorse and evidence of change, remains embittered is too small of spirit and too cut off from their own noblest nature. Mic-drop.

Maimonides wrote:

It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and not appeased; instead, a person should be satisfied easily and get angry slowly. And at the moment when the sinner asks for pardon — pardon with a whole heart and a desirous soul. And even if they caused them suffering and sinned against them greatly, [the victim] should not take revenge or hold a grudge.

One of Aubrey Beardsley’s radical 1893 illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. (Available as a print.)

While Ruttenberg acknowledges that no one is obligated to grant forgiveness at all costs, she considers how withholding forgiveness harms not only the repentant but the withholder:

Maimonides’ concern about the victim being unforgiving was likely at least in part a concern for their own emotional and spiritual development. I suspect that he thought holding on to grudges was bad for the victim and their wholeness. That is, even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason. And perhaps he believed that the granting of mechila can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.

[…]

If you are still so resolutely attached to the narrative that you were forever wronged, you are harming yourself and putting a kind of harm into the world. Try to respond to those who approach you sincerely — and who are sincerely doing the work — with a whole heart, not with cruelty.

Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Still, at the heart of the book is not the responsibility of the forgiver but the responsibility of the repentant, and the complex question of what repentance even looks like in order to be effective toward repair, doubly complicated by the fact that, in many situations, one can be both wrongdoer and wronged.

With an eye to the myriad causes that might drive even the best-intentioned people to do harm — our blind spots, our unexamined beliefs, our own tender places and past traumas, our despair — Ruttenberg considers the necessity of letting go of our attachment to a particular self-image as a person who means well and therefore could not possibly have caused harm:

Addressing harm is possible only when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves — the one in which we’re the hero, fighting the good fight, doing our best, behaving responsibly and appropriately in every context — and the reality of our actions. We need to summon the courage to cross the bridge over that cognitively dissonant gulf and face who we are, who we have been — even if it threatens our story of ourselves. It’s the only way we can even begin to undertake any possible repair of the harm we’ve done and become the kind of person who might do better next time. (And that, in my opinion, is what’s truly heroic.)

[…]

This work is challenging enough when facing the smaller failings in our lives — how much more difficult is it when our closest relationships or our professional reputation is at stake, or even the possibility of facing significant consequences? And yet this is the brave work we have to do. All of us. We are each, in a thousand different ways, both harmdoer and victim. Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.

Complement Ruttenberg’s wholly salutary On Repentance And Repair with Martha Nussbaum — whom I continue to consider the greatest philosopher of our time — on anger and forgiveness, then revisit Nick Cave — whom I continue to consider one of the great unheralded philosophers of all time — on self-forgiveness and art as an instrument of living amends.

“It troubled me,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “how an Atom fell and yet the Heavens held.” The Heavens hold, and so do we. We hold still. We hold hopes. We hold our pain and the world’s pain. We hold each other. We hold up our values and hold down our tasks. We hold on, and this might be the single most defining feature of human life. We hold on.

In Women Holding Things (public library), artist Maira Kalman — an uncommon philosopher of the quietly magnificent in the mundane — celebrates all the things we hold: flowers and lovers, grief and children, grudges and balloons, a stranger’s gaze, the barely bearable lightness of being, the weight of the world.

woman in my dream walking through almond blossoms holding a giant boulder

She writes in the opening pages:

What do women hold?

The home and the family.
And the children and the food.
The friendships.
The work.
The work of the world.
And the work of being human.
The memories.
And the troubles
and the sorrows
and the triumphs.
And the love.

Men do as well, but not
quite in the same way.

woman holding red balloons walking through the park

women holding a grudge

my grandmother (in pearls) holding the weight of the world on her shoulders, her legs as big as tree trunks

Populating the pages are strangers and friends and friends of friends; Maira’s mother and grandmother in Belarus, her daughter and granddaughters in America; her imperfect father holding her, her beloved son holding one of her paintings of women holding things; ordinary women glimpsed in some blooming buzzing corner of the world and extraordinary women who have changed the way we see that world — Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, Gertrude Stein, Rose McClendon, Edith Sitwell, Ayana V. Jackson, Natalia Ginzburg — refracted through the lens of this particular artist, the way we all refract our heroes through the subjective lens of our lived experience and its saturation of values.

woman walking down the street holding her sick dog

woman holding her red cap after swimming across the Hudson River

The tender, infinitely expressive paintings are captioned with spare words that lend each vignette an extra air of human fragility and resilience.

“My mother holding her sister the day of her ill-fated marriage,” says one such miniature novel drawn from real life.

“Virginia Woolf barely holding it together,” says another miniature biography.

“Sally Hemmings holding history accountable.”

Virginia Woolf barely holding it together

Coursing through it all is the indivisible totality of existence, its beauty and terror entwined in an eternal helix — the guns and the violins, the mass graves into which the Nazis dumped the bodies of her grandparents and the blue skies into which a bouquet of red balloons tries to escape from a stranger’s hand as Central Park blooms its cherry blossoms.

girl holding violin

woman holding up

Ayana V. Jackson holding my gaze

Punctuating the paintings are brief meditations partway between poetry and philosophy. In one, evocative of Seneca’s taxonomy of time spent, saved, and wasted, she writes:

My mother would ask us
“what is the most important thing?”
We knew that the correct answer was Time.

You could say that my mother lost a great deal of time to an unhappy marriage.
But how unhappy was it? Shakespearean level? Run of the mill unhappy? Impossible to say.
I can’t ask her because she is no longer alive.
But she ultimately left my father and found her time.

Finding time is all we want to do.
Once you find time, you want more time.
And more time in between that time.
There can never be enough time.
And you can never hold on to it.

It is so strange.
We live. And then we die.
So unutterably strange.

woman holding chicken

glamorous woman holding a can of worms

Gertrude Stein holding true to herself writing things very few people liked or even read

woman (Lotte Lenya) holding man (Peter Lorre)

mother holding the hand of her child as they are being killed by Nazi soldiers

If you meet the Holocaust, you can never escape its grip. You are obliged to feel it reverberate through all things for the rest of your life.

The terrors of the world exist.
And we are wounded.

It would be so nice to never be afraid.
But I am afraid that is just not possible.

woman holding a pink ukulele under a giant cherry tree

Coursing through it all is Maira’s singular species of optimism, bearing the feeling-tone of an overcast afternoon after the storm, the last layer of clouds backlit by the low sun, casting the world in a numinous light.

You may be exhausted from holding things
and be disheartened. And even weep if
you are very emotional. Which could be
anyone on any day. With good reason.

But then there is the next moment
and the the next day and

hold on

Complement Women Holding Things — a gem of a book to hold dear — with the subversive time-capsule Women in Trees, then revisit Maira Kalman’s illustrated love letters to dogs and Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s love, and this painted poem of perspective.

Artwork by Maira Kalman courtesy of the artist

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.

Mushrooms from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) was twenty-seven and pregnant with her first child, a daughter, when she wrested from mushrooms one — more than one — of the most enchanting metaphors in the history of the imagination.

In the setting summer in 1959, Plath and her complicated husband, Ted Hughes, arrived at Yaddo — the gilded artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York — and took up separate residences a five-minute walk apart. She had her first room of her own — a sunny third-floor studio in one of the larger houses, with a heavy wooden writing table and a hospital-green portable Swiss typewriter. Perched at her window, she watched the thicket of pines and listened to the birds. “I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about 7 hours a day,” she wrote to her mother.

But it was a season of dejection: One of America’s oldest and largest publishers had just rejected her poetry manuscript, another rejected her first children’s book — a story about living free from the world’s estimation — and her depression was back after a pleasantly distracting summer road trip.

Amanita muscaria from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

She sorrowed in her journal:

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness… Caught between the hope and promise of my work… and the hopeless gap between that promise, and the real world of other peoples poems and stories and novels.

In the evenings, Ted and some of the other residents engaged in antiscientific entertainment — astrology charts and ouija boards. She participated without enthusiasm, perhaps because she had been spending her days devotedly studying German — the language of rationalism and the Golden Age of Science, of Kant and Humboldt. By early November, she was seized with total creative block:

Paralysis again. How I waste my days. I feel a terrific blocking and chilling go through me like anesthesia… If I can’t build up pleasures in myself: seeing and learning about painting, old civilizations, birds, trees, flowers, French, German… To give myself respect, I should study botany, birds and trees: get little booklets and learn them, walk out in the world.

Walk out she did. The woods around Yaddo were damp and rife with mushrooms. Mushrooms were in the lavish food served at the colony. Mushrooms crept onto her mind.

Fungi from “Icones Mycologicae,” 1905. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

And then, in that way that noticing has of revivifying the deadened spirit, she started to come alive, as if assured by nature that life — like fungi, like art — persists against all odds.

Within a week, the outside world was also looking up — one of her stories was accepted in London Magazine. She wrote in her journal:

My optimism rises. No longer do I ask the impossible. I am happy with smaller things, and perhaps that is a sign, a clue… Every day is a renewed prayer that the god exists, that he will visit with increased force and clarity.

It was a conflicted clarity. She had a series of restless nights full of tortured dreams about her mother, about “old shames and guilts.” She and Ted were about to move to London — a prospect that had filled her with anxiety, like all major change does, but now she began feeling an “odd elation” at the thought of turning a new leaf.

On a windy mid-November day of grey but balmy weather, she took a walk with Ted under the open sky and the bare trees, listening to the last leaves rustle in the wind, watching a scarecrow in a cornfield wave its hollow arms, noticing the blackbird on the branch, the fox prints and deer tracks in the sandy trail, the blue-purple hills and the green underbed of the lakes, the mole hills and tunnels webbing the grassland. Something began stirring — some restive creative vitality that needed an outlet. She recorded:

Wrote an exercise on mushrooms yesterday which Ted likes. And I do too. My absolute lack of judgment when I’ve written something: whether it’s trash or genius.

Mushrooms from “Atlas des Champignons Comestibles et Vénéneux,” 1891. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

That exercise became her poem “Mushrooms” — a quietly mischievous work of genius, paying homage to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit. By the following summer, it was on the pages of Harper’s, marking a bold departure from Plath’s previous work.

It is both a hope and a heartache to consider that, today, mushroom species from the genus Psilocybe are being used in clinical trials to effectively allay treatment-resistant depression — a breakthrough she never lived to see that might have saved her life.

At the fifth annual Universe in Verse, held in a young redwood forest strewn with fungi, composer and cellist Zoë Keating brought Plath’s poem to life with a poignant prefatory meditation on its central metaphor for the creative spirit, accompanied here by the exquisite “Optimist” from her record Into the Trees, which has scored more of my own writing hours over the past decade than any other music.

MUSHROOMS
by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

Complement with Meryl Streep reading Plath’s “Morning Song” and Plath herself reading her poem “The Disquieting Muses,” then savor other highlights from The Universe in Verse, including Patti Smith reading a poem about dark matter (with music by Zoë Keating), Roxane Gay reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s lifeline to the dispirited, and a musical serenade to the ecology of Emily Dickinson.

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