All societies are both the creators of their myths and are created by them. All artists are the makers and remakers of our myths of meaning — myths we co-create whenever we engage with art. The best of them transmigrate across societies and epochs, naming what is difficult to name and difficult to bear, touching other lives — often lives wildly different from the artist’s — with that luminous longing for elemental truth that is the creative impulse in its purest form, the fundament of our shared humanity.

Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores the legacy of one such artist in Sor Juana (public library) — his superb more-than-biography of the radical seventeenth-century Mexican nun, poet, playwright, philosopher, and composer.

Sor Juana

Like Sister Corita Kent, Juana Inés de la Cruz used the cloister as a crucible of creative insurrection, making unexampled art that stood up to the politics of her time and place, filling her convent cell with books, art, and scientific instruments. Like Sappho, she comes to us only in fragments across the abyss of entropy and erasure, most of her plays, essays, and other papers gone, all of her correspondence destroyed, only her poems surviving, and those all but forgotten for more than two centuries, between their last posthumous printing in 1725 and their rediscovery in 1940. In the wake of her death, she was rose from the posthumous page as “the Mexican phoenix,” celebrated as “the Tenth Muse” — a distinction originally Sappho’s. Long before Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman’s great-great-grandparents were born on European soil, Sor Juana was lauded as “the Poetess of America.”

Nested into Paz’s rigorous and loving study of Sor Juana is a broader meditation on the creative spirit and the relationship between those who make art and those who enjoy art, be it literature or song — a relationship entwines intents to shape not only the destiny of the art but the landscape of the society in which it lives.

With an eye to the paucity of surviving biographical detail on Sor Juana’s life, and to the understandable but limited and limiting human impulse to mine the private lives of artists for information presumed to further illuminate their public art, Paz writes:

It is clear that an author’s life and work are related, but the relation is never simple: the life does not entirely explain the work, nor does the work explain the life. There is something in the work that is not to be found in the author’s life, something we call creativity or artistic and literary invention.

That invention, Paz argues, is not the author’s own but a kind of co-creation process that invites and involves the reader:

The work shuts the author and opens to the reader. The author writes impelled by conscious and unconscious forces and objectives, but the sense of the work — and the pleasures and surprises we derive from the reading — never coincides exactly with those impulses and objectives. A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions. The reader stands between the work and the author. Once written, the work has a life of its own distinct from that of its author, a life granted by its successive readers.

Art by Ping Zhu for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print, benefiting The New York Public Library.

That succession of readers spills into the collective we call society. Turning now to the particular art-form of poetry — a form that has always carried a society’s most rebellious and generative impulses toward resisting and revising the status quo — Paz writes:

To a writer’s life and work we must add a third term: society, history… It would be absurd to close our eyes to this elementary truth: poetry is a social, a historical, product. To ignore the relation between society and poetry would be as grave an error as to ignore the relation between a writer’s life and work. [But] in the same way that there are elements in art and poetry that cannot be reduced to psychological and biographical explanations, there are elements that cannot be reduced to historical and sociological explanation.

Thinking of Sor Juana but speaking to every enduring creative visionary, Paz observes that it is not enough to see a great artist’s work as a product of history — we must also see history as a product of their work. (James Baldwin — another example of such an artist — touched on this in his unforgettable proclamation that “a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” Artists are the vital destabilizing forces of the status quo, who shake the very structure of society — with all of its structural biases — and incline it toward a more evolved architecture of values.) Paz returns to the vital role the community of writers and readers plays in this recreation, shaping and reshaping the landscape of social permission:

A work exists not in isolation but in relation to other works, past and present, that are its models and its rivals… There is another, no less determinant, relationship: that of work to reader… In every society there is a system of prohibitions and sanctions: the domains of what can and cannot be done. There is another area, usually broader, that is also divided into do’s and don’ts: what can and cannot be said. Authorizations and prohibitions encompass a range of nuances that vary from society to society. Even so, they can be divided into two broad categories, the expressed and the implicit. The implicit prohibition is the more powerful; it is what is never voiced because it is taken for granted and therefore automatically and unthinkingly obeyed. The ruling system of repressions in each society is based upon this group of inhibitions that do not need to be monitored by consciousness.

Art by Beatrice Alemagna from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

In a menacing prophecy about the age of publishing focus groups and “sensitivity readers,” which is the death of literature as art and the triumph of the book as market commodity, Paz writes:

In the modern world, the system of implicit authorizations and prohibitions exerts its influence on writers through their readers.

In a passage that reminds me of the deadly silence with which the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was met — a book of lush and daring sensuality, composed not only against convention but beyond the parameters of anything previously known — Paz adds:

An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference — a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

Throughout history, poetry has regularly fallen out of favor in periods of turmoil, for it has always been a form of rebellion — something evident in the fact that in all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, the poets are the first to be jailed and persecuted when society begins bubbling with uprising. Paz writes:

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future. Of course some poets have sincerely and passionately believed in progressive ideals, but their works say something quite different. Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society. Our society believes in history: newspapers, radio, television, the now; poetry, by its very nature, is atemporal.

Art by Violeta Lópiz from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print, benefiting The New York Public Library.

Turning again to Sor Juana’s work as a lens on the broader picture, Paz observes that the most timeless poetry is made not only of its words but of the silence surrounding the words, which is “not the absence of meaning” but the opposite — the negative space contouring what cannot be said under the sanctions of its milieu. He writes:

Usually the author is a part of the system of tacit but imperative prohibitions that forms the code of the utterable in every age and society. Nevertheless, not infrequently, and almost always in spite of themselves, writers violate that code and say what cannot be said, what they and they alone must say. Through their voices speaks the other voice: the condemned voice, the true voice.

He returns to the role of the reader in the ongoing composting of ideas we call culture:

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them there would be no work. The text transcends its own history only by being assessed within the context of a different history.

[…]

A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.

Complement Paz’s altogether magnificent Sor Juana with Audre Lorde on poetry as an instrument of change and Nabokov on what makes a good reader, then revisit Paz on the meaning of hope and the mightiest portal to change.

Every year, monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles from Canada to Mexico. Each passage takes three to four generations, and each generation manages to communicate to the next, without language as we know it, the direction and call of the journey as it dies. Along the way, the caterpillars of the new generation feed exclusively on milkweed — the only host plant of the species, the only taste of home for these eternal migrants.

A house is the milkweed of human life. Within it, generations live out their lives, passing customs and apple pie recipes and personality traits to each other.

One spring not long ago, my darling friend, occasional collaborator, and Caldecott-winning children’s book maker Sophie Blackall bought an old dairy farm that came with a ramshackle house, in which twelve children had been born and raised a century ago; the old lady who sold it to her was one of them.

After years of immersion in the enchanting remnants of their bygone lives — photographs and hand-printed wallpaper, a handkerchief and a wedding dress, old brass keys and dusty books, a box of mud-soaked rags that turned out to be twenty colorful hand-sewn dresses — Sophie brings them alive in her wondrous book Farmhouse (public library) — a consummately illustrated, painstakingly hand-collaged story in the shape of a poem that is a single sentence, undulating with its “ands” and “ors” like a life does.

It begins:

Over a hill,
at the end of a road,
by a glittering stream
that twists and turns,
stands a house
where twelve children
were born and raised,
where they learned to crawl
in the short front hall,
where they posed, arranged
on the wooden stairs,
and were measured with marks
over the years,
where they carved potatoes
and dipped them in paint
to pattern the walls
with flowers and leaves,
and painted the cat,
about which they lied,
for which they were scolded
and maybe they cried
and then were enfolded
in forgiving arms
in the serious room…

…and on and on it goes, as their lives unfold…

…until one day,
the youngest child,
who was now quite old,
took a last look around
and picked up her case
and opened the door
and stepped outside
and into a car,
where her sister was waiting,
to drive to the sea,
which they’d always,
always wanted to see,
and the house
gave a sigh
and slumped
on the stones,
which caused
a slight lean
in its beams
and its bones,
so the door
swung open
to let in
the breeze…

In the author’s note at the end of the book, Sophie reflects on the splendid confluence of chance and choice by which it all came together:

I first explored the house on a late-spring day. Outside, the meadow was noisy with chattering birds, and the wildflowers nodded their heads in the sun. Inside, everything was cool and dark and quiet. The floor was scattered with brittle leaves, a saucepan lid, and a stiff leather shoe. An ornate parlor organ held walnut shells and the curled-up pages of lovesick songs. A waterlogged catalog offered beehives and waffle irons, bedsprings and guitar strings. In the kitchen, newspapers, with reports of milk prices and war, lined sagging pantry shelves of rusted tin cans. A straw mattress slumped in a corner. A calendar still hung on the wall, open to July 1970, the month and year I was born.

A willow sapling grew through a hole in the floor, reaching toward a hole in the roof. Nobody had lived there for a long time. Well, no people, that is. Plenty of animals had taken shelter. Raccoons, judging by the droppings; squirrels, by the walnut shells; swallows, by the nests. Not to mention mice and bats and wasps. It was as well I didn’t know, until a farmer told me later, that a bear had been sleeping in the basement.

I was convinced then and there that I needed to honor this farmhouse.

She honored it with this lovely book. But she also, with much love and much labor, turned the farm into a wondrous residency for children’s-book artists and writers called Milkwood, after Dylan Thomas’s poetic 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, which begins: “It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.” Under the century-old wooden beams, in a majestic library that was once a heap of hay, a new generation of storytellers are gathering to tell stories of what we are and how the world works — stories that, in words and pictures, transmit to the next generations that monarch knowledge of where we are going.

Just after the revolutionary work he recounted in Awakenings, Oliver Sacks wrote in a note to the music therapist at Beth Abraham Hospital: “Every disease is a music problem; every cure is a musical solution.” He was quoting Novalis — the young German poet and philosopher who, while working in a salt mine and studying mathematics, geology, physics, and biology, was composing tortured and transcendent poems inspired by the death of his teenage beloved.

Novalis is one of the characters who animate Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (public library) — the story of a circle friends and lovers in late-eighteenth-century Germany who refined their ideas in ricochet — ideas that shaped our present understanding of art and nature, mind and reality, the world and ourselves as function and functionary of it.

After the formidable Germaine de Staël popularized their ideas outside Germany, the tendrils of their influence went on to touch Coleridge and Emerson, Whitman and Joyce, sinking into the very soul of the modern world and its self-regard.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Having previously written about Alexander von Humboldt and the “invention” of nature — in the sense of the birth of its modern conception — Wulf now chronicles the “invention” of the modern self, the Ich, in the intellectual kiln of the same time and place, revealing the two to be inseparably related, reminding us that we can’t understand nature if we don’t understand ourselves or care for one without caring for the other.

She calls them the Jena set, after the town in Duchy of Saxe-Weimar where they constellated their portable universe of radicalism, and writes:

They were rebellious and felt invincible. Their lives became the playground of this new philosophy. And the story of their tiptoeing between the power of free will and the danger of becoming self-absorbed is significant on a universal level. The Ich, for better or worse, has remained centre stage ever since. The French revolutionaries changed the political landscape of Europe, but the Jena Set incited a revolution of the mind. The liberation of the Ich from the straitjacket of a divinely organised universe is the foundation of our thinking today. It gave us the most exciting of all powers: free will.

Against the grain of their time, they exercised their free will in open marriages and long-term monogamies without marriage. With names that sounded alike and intellectual passions that fired alike, they became a kind of hive mind fixated on celebrating the self and set out to “symphilosophize” — a term they invented for the intellectual symbiosis and symphonic creative collaboration at the heart of their life. Wulf writes:

Taken together, the knowledge available in the minds of those who lived in Jena was like a great living encyclopaedia covering a vast range of subjects from antiquity to comparative anatomy, from electricity to Spanish literature, from philosophy to poetry, from history to botany.

Among them, of course, were Goethe and Schiller, whose intergenerational friendship was the intellectual and creative anchor of both of their lives. Humboldt flits in and out of the scene, with his experiments in galvanism and his passionate devotion to the web of life. But there are also central characters now nearly forgotten — the influential brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, who believed that they were “all part of the same family of magnificent outlaws” and stood against Rousseau in their conviction that both boys and girls deserved a rigorous education; the young Friedrich Schelling, who at age eleven had informed his teachers that they had nothing else to teach him and had become the youngest professor appointed at the University of Jena at twenty-three, who “radiated infinity,” and who believed that “mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind” and told his students:

As long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand myself.

Goethe’s color wheel from his theory of color and emotion. (Available as a print.)

There was Novalis, who “regarded the ordinary with wonder” and “slept little and worked hard” — at his poetry and in the salt mines — and believed that we and the world are an integrated system, each indispensable to the other, so that our task is to “catch sight of ourselves as an element in the system.” Wulf writes:

His notebooks are filled with more than a thousand sections which analyse, synthesise and connect everything from music to physics, poetry to chemistry and philosophy to mathematics. And he did so with a fluidity and lightness that reveals a mind wide open to everything. Novalis began to assemble his ideas and material under conventional headings, such as archaeology, religion, nature, politics, medicine, and so on, but also under more unusual groupings, such as “theory of the future,” “musical physics,” “poetical physiology” and “theory of excitation.”

It was Novalis who offered the closest thing they had to a founding credo of Romanticism:

By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.

But by far the most colorful character is Caroline Schlegel, who was to the German Romantics what Margaret Fuller was to the American Transcendentalists. Vivacious, opinionated, educated far beyond the gendered limits of her time, Caroline spent time in prison for her revolutionary leanings, had a baby by a young Napoleonic soldier after a fiery one-night stand, and was animated by what she called “a firm, almost instinctive need for independence.” She besotted both Schlegel brothers, married one in what was at base an amicable friendship, and took the young Schelling as a lover, becoming the great love and muse of his life. The slight squint of her blue eyes cast the spell binding everyone into the “magic circle” of the group. “We have to build a poetic world out of ourselves,” Novalis told her as he declared her the beating heart of that world.

Art by Cindy Derby from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. (Available as a print, benefitting the New York public library system.)

They all believed in the power of language. “You have not just to carry out revolutions,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “you have to speak them too.” No one spoke them more revolutionarily than the young Schelling, whose lectures enchanted a generation of thinkers with a whole new way of seeing the world — his students called it his “poetry of the universe.” Wulf writes:

For millennia, thinkers had turned to their gods to understand their place and purpose in the unknowable divine plan. Then, in the late seventeenth century, a scientific revolution began to illuminate the world. Scientists had peered through microscopes into the minutiae of life or lifted new telescopes to the skies to discover Earth’s place in the universe. They had dissected human hearts to learn how the body functioned and classified plants, animals and minerals in neat categories to impose order on the world in which they lived. They had calculated the distance between the Sun and Earth, described how blood circulated through the body, and sailed to Australia, a “new” continent some ten thousand miles away on the other side of the world. They had discovered oxygen and used mathematics to define the laws of planetary motion and gravity.

The Enlightenment had truly enlightened. But this new rational approach had also created a certain distancing from nature and excluded the roles of feeling and beauty. Nature had become something that was investigated from a so-called objective perspective. Light, for example, was no longer appreciated for its kaleidoscopic play of iridescent colours, Novalis said, but for its refraction and “mathematical obedience”: hence its elevation to the term “Enlightenment” itself. This was why Schelling’s students fell for their young professor. He reunited what the scientific revolution had separated: nature and humankind. No matter how much scientists observed, calculated and experimented, there was something emotional, something visceral and perhaps inexplicable about humanity’s connection to nature. However we feel it, nature can soothe, heal or simply fill us with joy. Schelling gave us the philosophical explanation.

And by doing so, his philosophy of oneness became the heartbeat of Romanticism.

Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

In consonance with William Blake’s lifelong devotion to turning art into a lens on the universe, the Jena set understood that because we are part of nature, the products of our creative imagination are how nature examines itself, comprehends itself, and coheres. Wulf considers how Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism “became the philosophical underpinning of Romanticism”:

An artwork — a painting, a sculpture, a poem — was therefore the expression of the union between the self and nature. Whatever an artist produced was created by nature through him or her. Nature — the unconscious product of the self — and the conscious self came together in the artistic creation. Art was therefore essential in order to make sense of the world, Schelling declared. Neither rational thought nor the most accurate scientific instruments held the key to understanding the world. Art was the finite or concrete representation of the infinite. Art opened “the holiest of holies,” Schelling wrote. It was the revelation of the universe through the creative production of an artist.

These were ideas the entire Jena set shared. Friedrich Schlegel proclaimed that “all art should become science and all science art.” Novalis insisted that “science in its perfected form must be poetic” and that “laboratories will be temples.” Caroline Schlegel prophesied that “when the world goes up in flames like a scrap of paper, works of art will be the last living sparks.”

Works of art only ever spring from the particular vantage point of a particular authentic self — an Ich — and this is the enduring legacy of the first Romantics.

But all great ideas, if followed not critically but cultishly, run the risk of metastasizing into dogmas. Today, we are living with one such metastasis of Romanticism in our staggering epidemic of selfing — rather than connecting us to each other and the living world as kindred elements in a system, the inflamed Ich has folded us unto ourselves: living proteins of ego. It is by returning to the original philosophy, before its mutation, that we stand a chance of reclaiming the self as a crucible of creativity and a portal of connection to nature.

Art by Paloma Valdiva for Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions

Wulf reclaims the legacy of the Romantics:

Life is a negotiation between our rights as an individual and our role as a member of a community, including our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. How can we live a meaningful life in which we determine the direction of our path while also being a morally good person? How do we reconcile personal liberty with the demands of society? Are we selfish? Are we pursuing our dreams? Are we treading on someone else’s liberty? Are we looking only after ourselves? Or others? Or both? We have entered a social contract with each other and with our governments, agreeing to abide by laws and conventions — yet this only works if we are free and trust one another at the same time.

The Jena Set believed that we have to be conscious of our selves — to be “selfish” in the sense of being aware of and in control of our own being and free will.

[…]

The “Art of being Selfish,” in the context of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, also means understanding one’s place in this great interconnected living organism that is nature. “Since we find nature in the self,” one of Schelling’s students concluded, “we must also find the self in nature.” Being selfish in that sense means comprehending and recognising the concept of unity with the universe. Not harming the planet therefore means not harming yourself.

Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

With an eye to Novalis’s insistence that “without perfect self-understanding we will never learn truly to understand others,” she adds:

Only if we are fully aware of ourselves — of our needs, our wishes, and of our thoughts — can we truly embrace the other. This emphasis on the Ich means being “self aware” as the prerequisite for “being aware and concerned for the other.” Only through self-awareness can we feel empathy with others. Only through self-reflection can we question our behaviour towards others. Self-examination in that sense is for the greater good — for us, for our wider community, for society in general and for our planet.

Complement Magnificent Rebels with poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan — a modern-day Romantic, writing in her nineties — on the self and the universe, then revisit the Schelling-influenced Emerson on how to trust yourself and Whitman’s Humboldt-inspired poem “Kosmos.”

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