We hope, we despair, and then we hope again — that is how we stay afloat in the cosmos of uncertainty that is any given life. Just as the universe exists because, by some accident of chance we are yet to fathom, there is more matter than antimatter in it, we exist — and go on existing — because there is more hope than despair in us. “Hope,” the great Czech dissident playwright turned president Václav Havel wrote, “is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” Hope, I have long believed, is the antidote to cynicism — that most cowardly and self-defeating of existential orientations. Hope, Rebecca Solnit reminds us, “is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” For it is a power indeed — the power to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from even the darkest and most dispiriting of circumstances, so that we may go on reaching for the light. In this capacity, hope might be our greatest evolutionary adaptation — the mitochondria of our spiritual metabolism, the opposable thumb of our grip on life.

That function of hope is what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) explores from an uncommonly illuminating perspective in a portion of The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) — his forgotten masterpiece about how to think, wrested from a marine biology expedition into the Gulf of California at the outbreak of a World War.

John Steinbeck

Steinbeck weighs what we are against the living reality — the living brutality — of other species, considering hope as our adaptive calibration of what is most brutal in our own nature. Writing two years before his humanistic reckoning with hope and despair, he reflects:

We have looked into the tide pools and seen the little animals feeding and reproducing and killing for food. We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, “This species typically does thus and so,” but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species, although we know the individuals fairly well. When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, “It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind. It is not known whether this be caused by a virus, some airborne spore, or whether it be a species reaction to some meteorological stimulus as yet undetermined.” Hope, which is another species diagnostic trait — the hope that this may not always be — does not in the least change the observable past and present. When two crayfish meet, they usually fight. One would say that perhaps they might not at a future time, but without some mutation it is not likely that they will lose this trait. And perhaps our species is not likely to forgo war without some psychic mutation which at present, at least, does not seem imminent. And if one place the blame for killing and destroying on economic insecurity, on inequality, on injustice, he is simply stating the proposition in another way. We have what we are. Perhaps the crayfish feels the itch of jealousy, or perhaps he is sexually insecure. The effect is that he fights. When in the world there shall come twenty, thirty, fifty years without evidence of our murder trait, under whatever system of justice or economic security, then we may have a contrasting habit pattern to examine. So far there is no such situation. So far the murder trait of our species is as regular and observable as our various sexual habits.

Common crayfish from The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, 1895. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

The Log from the Sea of Cortez is very much an admonition against the traps of teleological thinking — the antiscientific tendency to explain things by some purpose they serve, usually in relation to us, as opposed to meeting reality on its own terms and accepting that things are because they are. With an eye to “how the strictures of the old teleologies infect our observation,” keeping us from seeing reality clearly and seducing us with “causal thinking warped by hope,” Steinbeck builds on this idea of hope as a diagnostic trait for our species:

Hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man* grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live… In saying that hope cushions the shock of experience, that one trait balances the directionalism of another, a teleology is implied, unless one know or feel or think that we are here, and that without this balance, hope, our species in its blind mutation might have joined many, many others in extinction.

Art Giuliano Cucco by from Before I Grew Up

But this shock-absorber of survival serves another, far subtler purpose as an emblem of our incompleteness, reminding us, as James Baldwin knew, that “nothing is fixed”; reminding us, as Lewis Thomas knew, that we are a fragile species still in its adolescence. Steinbeck considers hope as our valve of becoming:

We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time… In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the trait of hope still controls the future… Man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps… his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming.

Complement this fragment of The Log from the Sea of Cortez — which was among the finest things I read all year — with Jane Goodall on the deepest wellspring of hope and some thoughts on hope and the remedy for despair from Nick Cave and Gabriel Marcel, then revisit Steinbeck on the art of seeing the pattern beyond the particular and his timeless advice on love.

It bears remembering that we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The puzzlement is so immense precisely because the boundary between us and not-us is profoundly permeable — we become ourselves through communion and conviviality with what is not us. This is as true existentially as it is evolutionarily, for symbiosis — not competition — is the mightiest propulsive force of evolution.

To this truth the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938–November 22, 2011) devoted her life, crystalized in her influential Gaia hypothesis — the notion that organisms interact with their environment to make of Earth a synergistic, self-regulating crucible of life.

Lynn Margulis

In her book Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (public library), Margulis — who understood uniquely the spirituality of science — writes:

Living beings defy neat definition. They fight, they feed, they dance, they mate, they die. At the base of the creativity of all large familiar forms of life, symbiosis generates novelty. It brings together different life-forms, always for a reason. Often, hunger unites the predator with the prey or the mouth with the photosynthetic bacterium or algal victim. Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities. Symbiogenetic life-forms are even more unlike than their unlikely “parents.” “Individuals” permanently merge and regulate their reproduction. They generate new populations that become multiunit symbiotic new individuals. These become “new individuals” at larger, more inclusive levels of integration. Symbiosis is not a marginal or rare phenomenon. It is natural and common. We abide in a symbiotic world.

Properly understood, the biology of symbiosis undermines our most tightly held intuitions about the nature of the self as a distinct entity separate from other selves — an illusory separation dissolved in the biological reality of all living beings, but rendered most clearly visible in some of the simplest. A generation after Lewis Thomas wrote so lyrically about the symbiotic life of a jellyfish and a sea slug — which remains the finest thing I have ever read on the paradoxes and mysteries of the self — Margulis details another living antidote to what Pablo Neruda rightly indicted as our illusion of separateness:

In Brittany, on the northwest coast of France, and along beaches bordering the English Channel is found a strange sort of “seaweed” that is not seaweed at all. From a distance it is a bright green patch on the sand. The patches slosh around, shimmering in shallow puddles. When you pick up the green water and let it slip through your fingers you notice gooey ribbons much like seaweed. A small hand lens or low-power microscope reveals that what looked like seaweed are really green worms. These masses of sunbathing green worms, unlike any seaweed, burrow into the sand and effectively disappear. They were first described in the 1920s by an Englishman, J. Keeble, who spent his summers at Roscoff. Keeble called them “plant-animals” and diagrammed them splendidly in the color frontispiece of his book, Plant-Animals. The flatworms of the species Convoluta roscoffensis are all green because their tissues are packed with Platymonas cells; as the worms are translucent, the green color of Platymonas, photosynthesizing algae, shows through. Although lovely, the green algae are not merely decorative: they live and grow, die and reproduce, inside the bodies of the worms. Indeed they produce the food that the worms “eat.” The mouths of the worms become superfluous and do not function after the worm larvae hatch. Sunlight reaches the algae inside their mobile greenhouses and allows them to grow and feed themselves as they leak photosynthetic products and feed their hosts from the inside. The symbiotic algae even do the worm a waste management favor: they recycle the worm’s uric acid waste into nutrients for themselves. Algae and worm make a miniature ecosystem swimming in the sun. Indeed, these two beings are so intimate that it is difficult, without very high-power microscopy, to say where the animal ends and the algae begin.

Art from Margaret Gatty’s Victorian guide to British algae

The living world, Margulis observes, is rife with such symbiotic bonds that challenge the notion of where one self ends and another begins. There is the Plachobranchus snail, inside which is an inner garden of green symbionts so perfectly arranged in neat rows that they appear planted by an invisible hand; there is the Mastigias jellyfish with its tiny green umbrellas animated by single-celled zooxanthellae; there is the giant clam, Tridacna gigas, which orients ints entire colossal body toward the light for the benefit of the greenhouse of algae living inside it.

Then there are, of course, we — we who contain multitudes, our microbiome living as a portable universe within us. “Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence,” Emerson inveighed. “I wish… to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.” But the patron saint of self-reliance was tragically antiscientific in his philosophy — in the living world, individuals as such simply don’t exist. There are only masses, some of whom move about with the illusion of individuality. Margulis writes:

We animals, all thirty million species of us, emanate from the microcosm. The microbial world, the source and well-spring of soil and air, informs our own survival. A major theme of the microbial drama is the emergence of individuality from the community interactions of once-independent actors.

One of the otherworldly drawings of jellyfish by Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology. (Available as a print.)

With an eye to our evolutionary future, itself a vista of tremendous humility, she adds:

The tendency of “independent” life is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. I suspect that the near future of Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation toward the fusions and mergers of the planetmates that have preceded us in the microcosm.

Complement with Iris Murdoch on how art unselves us and Helen Macdonald on the total solar eclipse as an instrument of unselfing, then revisit Margulis on the interconnectedness of life across time, space, and species.

In a universe governed by randomness and impartial laws, chance has been kind to us — a kindness so immense it feels like a benediction. Here we are, drifting through the austere blackness of pure spacetime on a planet just the right distance from its home star to have an atmosphere and water and warmth for life. And what life! A cornucopia of creatures moving through lushness beyond measure, born of blue oceans and shimmering shores.

It didn’t have to exist, not one bit of it — not the oceans, not the redwoods, not the octopus, not the miracle of consciousness that turns back on itself to stand wonder-smitten by the majesty of it all. And yet here it is and here we are, children of the flowers, captives of this wonderland, lulled by habit and hubris into dishonoring our benediction by forgetting the staggering improbability of it all.

Richard Powers extends an uncommonly beautiful invitation to unforgetting in his novel Bewilderment (public library) — the story of an astrobiologist father searching for habitable worlds beyond our Solar System and his sensitive son lovesick for Earth.

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth

A generation after the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Cosmic Ball” eulogized the Fermi paradox — the mournful question of where, if all probability points to the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, that other life is — Powers wrests poetry from this great puzzlement of science:

There was a planet that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.

In the novel, another world, Earthlike but further along the evolutionary cycles of the universe, becomes a lens on our own — both on the precariousness of life and on its persistence: life as a force of resistance to entropy. Much like Kepler used the imaginative trope of lunar beings to awaken earthlings to the realities of our own world in the first work of true science fiction, Powers uses the fate of that other world to jolt us awake to the improbable wonder of our own:

The first time Thea died, a comet tore off a third of the planet and turned it into a moon. Nothing on Tedia survived. After tens of millions of years, the atmosphere came back, water flowed again, and life sparked a second time. Cells learned that symbiotic trick of how to combine. Large creatures spread once more into every niche of the planet. Then a distant gamma ray burst dissolved Tedia’s ozone shield and ultraviolet radiation killed most everything. Patches of life survived in the deepest oceans, so this time it was faster coming back. Ingenious forests set out again across the continents. A hundred million years after that, just as a species of cetacean was beginning to make tools and art, a neighborhood star system supernovaed, and Tedia had to start again. The problem was that the planet lay too near the galactic center, packed in too closely to the calamities of other stars. Extinction would never be far away. But there were periods of grace, between the devastations. Forty resets in, the calm lasted long enough for civilization to take hold. Intelligent bear-people built villages and mastered agriculture. They harnessed steam, channeled electricity, learned and built simple machines. But when their archaeologists revealed how often the world ended, and their astronomers figured out why, society broke down and destroyed itself, millennia before the next supernova would have. This, too, happened again and again.

“Planetary System, Eclipse of the Sun, the Moon, the Zodiacal Light, Meteoric Shower” by Levi Walter Yaggy. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

Hinting at this eternal dialogue between nature and human nature, Powers considers the time arrow of the mind, reminding us that curiosity and all the tendrils of human longing exist only for as long as we ourselves exist; lest we forget, life as we know it — as we are it — is but “a flash in the pan, a few moments in the vast unfolding of time and space in the cosmos.” He writes:

Light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second. It takes ninety-three billion years to cross from one end of space to the other, past black holes and pulsars and quasars, neutron and preon and quark stars, metallics and blue stragglers, binaries and triple-star systems, globular and hypercompact clusters, coronal, tidal, and halo galaxies, reflection and plerion nebulae, stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic disks, dark matter and energy, cosmic dust and filaments and voids, all spun from the laws folded up into vibrations far smaller than the smallest units we have names for. The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.

Set a half-tone up the scale of time from the menacing tritone of our present predicament, the novel paints a world for which time has run out in order to awaken a world, this world, teetering on the event horizon of too late. The story ends with that rarest and most beautiful of compositional triumphs — a requiem that is also a clarion call:

Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.

Complement with Richard Powers on how to live with bewilderment, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s almost unbearably wonder-full meditation on our destiny as the fragile species and Rachel Carson on wonder as the antidote to self-destruction.

Creative Mornings (January 13, NYC)

Creative Mornings — the world's largest face-to-face creative community — is a free breakfast lecture series taking place once a month in more than 200 cities around the world, run entirely by volunteers: free breakfast, free coffee, and a free lecture by a member of the local creative community. On January 13, I will be breaking my five-year sabbatical from talks and speaking at the New York chapter on the month's theme — Sanctuary — with live music by the inimitable Joan As Police Woman. Join us.

DATE: January 13, 2023

TIME: doors 8:30AM, performance 9AM

LOCATION: The New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W 64th Street, New York, NY 10023

INFO + TICKETS