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“The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth,” the visionary Elizabeth Peabody, who coined the term transcendentalism, wrote in her timeless admonition against the trap of complacency. “The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”

A century and a half after her, contemplating how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, Simone de Beauvoir observed: “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”

Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living — the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition.

How to honor the unfolding of life without a punitive clinging to past selves is what Nick Cave explores in a passage from Faith, Hope and Carnage — one of my favorite books of 2022.

Nick Cave in Newcastle, 2022.

At sixty-five, he reflects:

We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.

In consonance with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s insight that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he considers what is found on the other side of that self-shattering:

Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.

A generation earlier, Bertrand Russell touched on this in his astute observation that growing older contentedly is matter of being able to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”

Complement with Grace Paley on the art of growing older, then revisit Nick Cave on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.

Birds populate our metaphors, our poems, and our children’s books, entrance our imagination with their song and their chromatically ecstatic plumage, transport us on their tender wings back to the time of the dinosaurs they evolved from. But birds are a time machine in another way, too — not only evolutionarily but culturally: While the birth of photography revolutionized many sciences, birds remained as elusive as ever, difficult to capture with lens and shutter, so that natural history illustration has remained the most expressive medium for their study and celebration.

To my eye, the most consummate drawings of birds in the history of natural history date back to the 1830s, but they are not Audubon’s Birds of America — rather, they appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, in the first volume of The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier, published in the wake of the pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier’s death.

Hundreds of different species of birds — some of them now endangered, some on the brink of extinction — populate the lavishly illustrated pages, clustered in kinship groups as living visual lists of dazzling biodiversity.

Titmice. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Sugarbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Shrikes. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Shrikes. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Thrush-shrikes. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Tangers. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Gnat-catchers. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Chats. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Pittas. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Orioles. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Warblers. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Kinglets. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Owls. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Owls. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Wrens. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Eurylaimidae. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Bunting. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Finches. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Crossbills. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Jays. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Sunbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Hoopoes. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Bee-eaters. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Hornbills. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Woodpeckers. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Trogon. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Cockatoos. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Lories and parakeets. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Quails. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Harrier hawks. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Pigeons. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Pigeons. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Pigeons. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Among the cornucopia of species depicted — pigeons and parakeets, warblers and jays, woodpeckers and owls, sunbirds and sugarbirds — none occupy more space than hummingbirds, perhaps due to their enduring enchantment partway between science and magic.

Hummingbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Hummingbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Hummingbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Hummingbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Hummingbirds. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

Couple with some stunning 19th-century ink illustrations of owls, dial back a century with the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone’s paintings of exotic, endangered, and extinct species, and dive into the fascinating science of feathers.

“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Milton wrote in his immortal Paradise Lost. With these human minds, arising from these material bodies, we keep trying to find heaven — to make heaven — in our myths and our mundanities, right here in the place where we are: in this beautiful and troubled world. We give it different names — eden, paradise, nirvana, poetry — but it springs from the selfsame longing: to dwell in beauty and freedom from suffering.

With soulful curiosity channeled in his ever-lyrical prose, Pico Iyer chronicles a lifetime of pilgrimages to some of Earth’s greatest shrines to that longing in The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise (public library).

Art by Gilbert James from a 1900 English edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyām.

He begins in Iran, replete with monuments to Omar Khayyām, who built “a paradise of words” with his poems while revolutionizing astronomy — a place of uncommon beauty and uncommon terror, with roots as deep as the history of the written word, and living branches as tangled as the most contradictory impulses of human nature:

After years of travel, I’d begun to wonder what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict — and whether the very search for it might not simply aggravate our differences. And the natural place to embark upon such an inquiry — should we discard the notion of heaven entirely? — seemed to be the culture that had given us both our word for paradise and some of our most soulful images of it.

In Jerusalem, he walks through the Damascus Gate to find himself in “something as irreducible as life.” He visits the Himalayas and North Korea. As he travels, he is reminded of the seventeen years he spent at a Benedictine monastery in the mountains of California — an experience that forever imprinted him with the voice of inner stillness and the awareness that presence is the fundamental portal to the sacred:

Days, sometimes weeks, in the silence had given me a taste of what lies on the far side of our thoughts. Who we become — cease to become — when we put all ideas and theories behind us. I went often through pages of Thomas Merton there, but they seemed to belong to the cacophony below the stillness; the golden pampas grass in front of me, the dry hills beyond, the fleecy clouds stealing up the hillside — not what I thought about them — were the truth.

He arrives at the oceanic idyll of Sri Lanka in the lull of ceasefire after twenty years of violent fighting between the separatists and the government, not long after a deadly tsunami devastated the island. Over and over, he finds himself contemplating the interplay of beauty and brutality, in nature and human nature, reading the solution to the riddle in the still stone countenances of the statues in a local temple:

The Buddhas… stared at me impassively. Onto the quiet faces in the sun I could project anything I needed. Our one task is to make friends with reality, I could imagine them whispering — which is to say, with impermanence and suffering and death; the unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what’s around you. In one celebrated story, the Buddha had come upon a group of picnickers who were enraged because they’d just been robbed. “Which,” he’d famously asked, “is more important? To find the robbers or to find yourself?”

Walking through a cemetery in conflicted Kashmir, he thinks about the bygone people buried under the stone inscriptions, and about the mercy of being blind to our own fates:

I’d long been drawn to graveyards in the places where cultures cross if only because headstones put every kind of division in its place.

[…]

Few of them had probably seen what was coming: our lives can only be half known insofar as their final act, which seems to put all that has come before in place, is always hidden, and we seldom wish to think of it. We step out of the play with no chance to think back on it — and even as we’re trying to make sense of life, things are shifting, falling away from us on every side. The older I got, the more I began to feel that almost everything that had happened to me, good or bad, seemed to have come out of nowhere. As Leonard Cohen, faithful for life to the Old Testament, put it in one of his final songs, we’re “none of us deserving the cruelty or the grace.”

Liminal Days by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

He visits another cemetery atop the sacred mountain three hours from his home in Japan, accompanied by the poems of Emily Dickinson — that supreme patron saint of death, who believed that “wonder is not precisely knowing and not precisely knowing not.” In consonance with poet Mark Doty’s Whitman-fomented insistence that “even in the imagined paradise of limitless eros, there must be room for death,” Iyer arrives at the deepest yearning of our paradisal pursuits while walking the ghostly cemetery, aware that in the Japanese vision of an afterlife, the transience of things — the transience of us — is “not a cause for grief so much as a summons to attention.” He reflects:

The thought that we must die, I might have heard the two hundred thousand graves saying, is the reason we must live well.

Complement The Half Known Life with Tolstoy’s vision of the afterlife and Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence and luminosity in loss, then savor this poetic meditation on how to live and how to die.

Space & Time: An Evening of Music and Literature (March 25, NYC)

On March 25, join me for an exploration of the fundamental dimensions of our world and our conscious experience through the twin portals of truth and beauty: music, poetry, and science. Carrying the evening will be music by cellist and composer Zoë Keating, punctuated by performances by poet Maria Howe, musician Joan As Police Woman, science historian James Gleick, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad, and other friends.

DATE: March 25, 2023

TIME: doors 6:30PM, performance 7:30PM

LOCATION: National Sawdust, 80 N 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249

INFO + TICKETS

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