In my darkest hours, what has saved me again and again is some action of unselfing — some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle, the dazzling galaxy just discovered millions of lightyears away, the cardinal trembling in the tree outside my window. We know this by its mirror-image — to contact happiness of any kind is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” something beyond the bruising boundaries of the ego. The attainment of happiness is then less a matter of pursuit than of surrender — to the world’s wonder, ready as it comes.

That is what the Nobel-winning philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) explores in The Conquest of Happiness (public library) — the 1930 classic that gave us his increasingly urgent wisdom on the vital role of boredom in flourishing.

Bertrand Russell

Russell writes:

The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. The man* who can forget his worries by means of a genuine interest in, say, the Council of Trent, or the life history of stars, will find that, when he returns from his excursion into the impersonal world, he has acquired a poise and calm which enable him to deal with his worries in the best way, and he will in the meantime have experienced a genuine even if temporary happiness.

In a sentiment he would expand in his final years as he contemplated what makes a fulfilling life, he adds:

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Couple this fragment of the wholly nourishing The Conquest of Happiness with Kurt Vonnegut on the secret of happiness, then revisit Russell on the key to the good life, how to heal a divided world, and his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the four desires driving all human behavior.

Those of us who have lived with depression know the way it blindfolds us to beauty, the way it muffles the song of life, until we are left in the solitary confinement of our own somber ruminations, all the world a blank. It might feel like the visitation of some monster, but it is not something that happens upon us from the outside — it is our own undulating neurochemistry, it is the parts of ourselves we have not yet befriended, integrated, understood. “The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” William Styron wrote in his timeless account of depression. The pain can feel interminable. It is a lifeline to remember that it is not — that there is an other side, that the blindfold and the muffler can come off just like they came on.

That is what Swedish-born, London-based printmaker and graphic artist Staffan Gnosspelius explores with great subtlety and soulfulness in Bear (public library) — a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from depression.

We meet a bear with a body bent in the shape of sorrow and a cone on its head — a cone that won’t come off, only plunging the bear deeper into despair with each failed attempt.

One day, a white rabbit comes along and tries to help the bear take the cone off, but the small creature is powerless to remove it by force — the cone remains, and through it the bear growls the terrifying growl of menacing despair, terrifying his new friend.

So blinded to the reality of the wilderness, the bear comes to perceive the branches of the trees as the tentacles of some monstrous octopus and the blades of the grass as an assault of sharp swords.

Still, the rabbit persists, embracing the bear’s large cone-bowed body and simply being near, bearing witness to the suffering — that best aid for a friend in sorrow.

Watching its friend struggle, the rabbit begins gently singing to the bear.

Everywhere bear and cone go, rabbit and song go.

But when the bear tries to sing back through the cone, only those terrifying growls come out.

And so they continue — the sorrowing bear, the singing rabbit — until one day a trap in the forest snaps shut on the bear’s foot.

It is then, as pain mounts onto pain and becomes unbearable, that something breaks open in the bear and it sings out for help.

Across the forest, the rabbit hears the faint song and rushes over to release its friend.

Set free, the bear thanks the singing rabbit and timidly begins singing back, until a storm of song fills the forest — that great operatic scream of catalytic release, primal and numinous.

So it is that the song of life begins singing itself through the bear and the cone comes gently off — a tender reminder that no one can save anyone, not even with love; that we only ever save ourselves when we are ready: but love is what readies us to be our own savior.

Complement Bear with Bloom — a touching animated short film about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being — and The Rabbit Box — a wondrous vintage picture-book for grownups about the mystery of life — then revisit some of humanity’s most beloved writers on the mightiest antidote to depression.

In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the sacred wonder of reality, most capable of awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us when we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That word was “saint.”

Saints still walk our world, though now we might simply call them heroes, if we recognize them at all — heroes whose superpower is love.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) — one of the modern heroes — explores what makes a saint in a passage from his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers (public library).

Leonard Cohen, 1967

He writes:

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.

A year later, Cohen contemplated what these “balancing monsters of love” do for us in his song “Sisters of Mercy”:

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

Complement with Walter Lippmann’s magnificent meditation on what makes a hero, inspired by Amelia Earhart, then revisit Leonard Cohen on creativity at the end of life, language and the poetry of presence, democracy’s breakages and redemptions, and when (not) to quit a creative project.

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