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The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe. Joan Didion knew this when she observed that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Jane Ellen Harrison knew it when, in her superb meditation on the art of growing older, she cautioned that “you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet.

Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait

In his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.

In a sentiment consonant with the aging Walt Whitman’s reckoning with what makes life worth living, he traces his path:

In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.

But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.

But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,

And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.

But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.

In a lovely metaphor rooted in the evolutionary history of life, he contrasts the spirit of youth to that of our later years:

The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.

A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.

But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,

Though life has been bitter upon his lips.

Passionflower and passionfruit by Étienne Denisse from Flore d’Amérique, 1846. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

With an eye to the restlessness of youth, Gibran echoes his earlier reflections on befriending time as he contemplates what might be the supreme reward of growing older — our widening capacity for patience, for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms and becomes one with the unfolding mystery:

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.

But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.

Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.

In a poignant reminder that our aversive reactions reveal not the nature of the things we abhor but the nature of our blinders and the limits of our understanding, he adds:

In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.

But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;

And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.

A century before science illuminated the poetics of wintering trees as a lens on renewal, Gibran writes:

In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”

But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.

Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

Touching on a concept known in Eastern spiritual traditions as non-identification — the ability to inhabit our vaster nature beyond transient circumstances and conditions — he writes:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

He ends the poem by looking back on the sad alienation of his youth as the rudiment of his fruition, indispensable and sacred:

Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.

And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.

Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.

And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.

In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.

Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.

Complement with Simone de Beauvoir on the art of growing older and how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, then revisit Gibran’s luminous wisdom on the courage to know yourself, the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, how to weather the uncertainties of love, and the secret to a lasting relationship.

All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence.

All joy is the act of remembering — the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.

This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay’s essay collection Inciting Joy (public library) — a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

With an eye to the community orchard he helped create — a “long sweaty collaborative dream” — Gay writes:

Though I didn’t yet have the words for it, planting that orchard — by which I mean… joining my labor to the labor by which it came to be — reminded me, or illuminated for me, a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future. A rhizomatic care I so often forget to notice I am every second in the midst of. By which I came to be, and am, at all. Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it. It’s certainly not the only thing we’re in the midst of, but it’s the truest thing. By far.

Tapping into that microrhizal mesh that stretches between us — between all of our individual joys and sorrows, lacing them together into an ecology of interdependence — is our surest way of tapping into joy itself. Gay reflects:

My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

This animating spirit of joy as a force-field of connection comes alive in Gay’s poem “Patience” from his altogether vivifying collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (public library):

PATIENCE
by Ross Gay

Call it sloth; call it sleaze;
call it bummery if you please;
I’ll call it patience;
I’ll call it joy, this,
my supine congress
with the newly yawning grass
and beetles chittering
in their offices
beneath me, as I
nearly drifting to dream
admire this so-called weed which,
if I guarded with teeth bared
my garden of all alien breeds,
if I was all knife and axe
and made a life of hacking
would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning
these sort of phallic spires
ringleted by these sort of vaginal blooms
which the new bees, being bees, heed;
and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell
from the words my mind makes
of the world, and everything
makes me mildly or more
hungry—the worm turning
in the leaf mold; the pear blooms
howling forth their pungence
like a choir of wet-dreamed boys
hiking up their skirts; even
the neighbor cat’s shimmy
through the grin in the fence,
and the way this bee
before me after whispering
in my ear dips her head
into those dainty lips
not exactly like one entering a chapel
and friends
as if that wasn’t enough
blooms forth with her forehead dusted gold
like she has been licked
and so blessed
by the kind of God
to whom this poem is prayer.

Complement with Borges on collective joy and collective grief and the remarkable story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” then revisit Ross Gay on what it takes to grow up and what it means to have grown.

There is but one emotion that claws at the heart with the twin talons of anger and shame, savaging self-regard with haunting ferocity that feeds on itself. “Jealousy,” wrote the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his insightful treatise on love, “is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.” And yet jealousy is also one of the commonest human experiences — one that visits upon even the noblest heart, warping reality and reason beyond recognition.

The complex psychological underpinnings of jealousy, and what they might reveal in the way of relief, and how they might illuminate the most hopeful frontiers of love, is what the pioneering psychiatrist Leslie Farber (July 12, 1912–March 24, 1981) explores in his 1973 essay “On Jealousy,” found in his altogether penetrating collection The Ways of the Will (public library).

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

Farber writes:

Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.

Defining the central animating spirit of jealousy as “a state of virtual paralysis in which the will races around a single point,” Farber investigates its most salient psychological characteristic and its relation to the will:

What sets jealousy apart from other possible responses to real or imagined infidelity — such as rage or grief — is its quality of obsession… Literally, obsession means being oppressed or besieged, as if by an evil spirit. On the one hand, one wills one’s obsession to disappear, thereby ensuring its perpetuation. On the other hand, the obsession is the condition of the will — simultaneously assertive and impotent, simultaneously frenzied and paralyzed. The role of the will here is crucial. Whether one is alone or with others, whether one rages or is silent, berates one’s mate with questions and accusations or refrains from berating one’s mate with questions and accusations, the internal drama remains the same: the will has become fixed in a rigid orbit of injury — it spins and burns, but cannot escape its tiny, terrible sphere.

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920s illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

This internal drama takes on a life of its own, contracting the whole of reality into its narrow aperture of self-concern, and eventually subsuming reality altogether — a gruesome counterpoint to the unselfing through which we attain the heights of our nature and the antithesis of Iris Murdoch’s wonderful definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Farber writes:

In the grip of jealous passion one’s state is reduced to a kind of craven non-being. One strives to appear to be the person he was, but he knows that he has lost his autonomy — his sense of self — and has become a slave whose diminished existence is at the mercy of his mate. His human space has shrunk to the narrow boundaries of the jealous melodrama in which he must perform. The world beyond those boundaries seems utterly alien, unreal, and his participation in it — insofar as it is compelled — will strike him not as reassuring and comforting, but hollow and mocking.

This bottomless craving for reassurance leads the jealous person to seek constant evidence of their mate’s presence, compulsively reaching out for contact as their experience of the relationship becomes increasingly “tortured and fragile.” The paradox is that no amount of external affirmation can counteract the internal melodrama of the obsession, leading every littlest gap in presence to read like total abandonment and betrayal, like death itself:

Once the mate goes through the door, moves outside the allotted space, the jealous one dies; the mate holds, in the shift and attention of his or her very eye, the power to grant or withhold permission to be. Small wonder that jealousy contains so striking a portion of anger. In his desperate need to prove the unprovable — namely affection, both his own and his mate’s — [the jealous person] wills what cannot be willed, demanding an enactment of relation that can only be grotesque in its deceits and disgusts.

Another of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome. (Available as a print.)

In a sentiment that calls to mind Adrienne Rich’s poignant definition of honorable human relationships, Farber notes that in such a dynamic neither person is “morally qualified” to use the word love — for it is exceedingly rare “that a fit of jealousy, whatever its provocation, is met with an outpouring of love from a guileless heart.” Instead, what commonly happens is a catastrophe of confirmation bias, wherein the mate’s every gesture and movement is seen as affirmation of the jealous person’s suspicions. Farber captures the parasitic nature of this ouroboros of thinking:

Jealousy is self-confirming; it breeds itself… In no simple way (such as: OK, I was wrong all along) will this state of torment and anguish give up its claims or its existence.

[…]

The imagination not to imagine is an important power of intelligence disabled here by the seeming necessities of obsession.

As jealousy folds consciousness unto itself with self-reference, the jealous person grows insentient to the impact of their jealousy:

The experience of jealousy always includes so strong a conviction of being injured that it is most unusual for the jealous person to be able to consider the injury his jealousy causes others. For this reason, the real guilt that is jealousy’s inevitable consequence is seldom acknowledged by a jealous person; it is obliterated by his overriding absorption in his own injury.

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

The extreme passions of jealousy can also be mistaken for other emotions, further blinding the jealous person not only to external reality but also to the internal, occluding the very nature of the relationship within which the passions play out:

These paradoxical surges of desire, in the midst of reduction and alienation, may be misconceived by either partner or both as a transcendent return to being-in-love and an escape from jealousy’s claims. Because of this misconception, jealousy has brought about marriages that were ill-advised, and prevented the dissolution of relationships in which meaning had altogether failed.

Farber considers how open relationships — a standard attempt to bypass the very potential for jealousy, aiming at “the achievement of an attitude toward, and practice of, sex that would combine total freedom with total invulnerability” — may in fact misunderstand and underestimate the force of these fundamental psychological dynamics. He cautions:

It seems unlikely to me that such an ancient fox as jealousy will be so simple-mindedly outwitted. I suspect that the new permissiveness offers him a vastly enlarged arena for his operations. If the new generation is serious about its ambitions in relation to sex and serenity of mind, it may be forced to reinvent fidelity.

Locating what he calls the “ground of jealousy” in the developmental psychology of childhood and the elemental pain of our quest for individuation, he writes:

As the child grows gradually aware of the absolute separateness of his being from all other beings in the world, he discovers that this condition offers both pleasure and terror. On the one hand he cherishes his separate, individual, regal self, and on the other he yearns for the loneliness of his autonomy to be relieved by relation with others. The manner in which he seeks and finds such relief, and the manner in which those about him not only answer his overtures but also turn to him for their own consolation, will have considerable bearing on his interpretation of his (and their) condition — and his handling of it.

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

If this delicate process of interbeing is mishandled, if the child learns that approval is the ground for connection, a kind of constant apprehension sets in — one that can metastasize into a dangerous alienation from ourselves:

This apprehension will, of course, proceed from, and present itself as, sensations of inadequacy, unaccaptability, and so on, requiring an habitual dissembling on his part to render himself lovable. This uneasy state is both painful and corrupting, the pain and the corruption… being consequences of his low self-esteem and fear of others’ indifference or rejection, which in turn causes him to project himself falsely.

So habituated, we can begin to lose sense of our true selves as the approval-seeking falsehoods take on a life of their own. This erects an insurmountable obstacle to love, for all emotional intimacy requires, as Tom Stoppard knew, “the mask slipped from the face” — a mutual revelation and mirroring of innermost truth. As Adrienne Rich so memorably wrote, “an honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” Without access to our own truth, we are forever doomed to withholding it from one another, withholding the very breath of love. Farber writes:

Telling the truth is, to be sure, no simple thing. Sometimes it is uncalled for; often it is hard. But telling it is by no means always the most difficult aspect of truth. That may be knowing it. Ordinary people — you and I — not in the grip of inner separation… often encounter uncertainty and confusion in their efforts to reveal by word and gesture what they do actually think and feel. They, too, cherish their integrity, and tend to believe that what they say, by virtue of their saying it, does indeed accurately represent them. Often it is only later, when the moment has passed, that one realizes, gradually and grudgingly, that, for one reason or another, caught up in the occasion, one falsified. One spoke with silence would have been truer; one was silent when he should have spoken. One spoke, and aimed at the right meaning, but used words of the wrong color. And so on. Most of us do not habitually betray ourselves — or others — with sweeping deceits. We just crowd a little here and there, we make ourselves a bit more comfortable than our good sense or loyalties should permit, we take refuge in discretion… One way and another we compromise in tiny steps until, we come to realize — perhaps with a shock — we are standing on alien ground. To make such discoveries, and to retrace our steps, it is essential not to be willfully caught up in sustaning an illusion of truth-telling. It is hard enough without it.

[…]

There are some things it is impossible both to do and at the same time to impersonate oneself doing. Speaking truthfully is one of them.

One of Arthur Rackham’s 1920 illustrations for The Tempest

This tendency to impersonate ourselves is an essential form of self-abandonment that inclines us toward that dangerous territory of relinquishing our self-regard to the approval of others. With an eye to “the inevitable jealousies that lie in store for a life lived on these terms,” Farber writes:

Out of this ground, with its racking insufficiency of self and harsh dependence on the excessive regard of others — no degree of excess ever being truly adequate — springs again and again the inescapable jealousy that follows the failure of one person after another to fulfill the impossible demand: make me whole.

That obsessive longing to be made whole by another is the pulse-beat of jealousy. Observing that obsession is “so poignantly lonely a condition” — what a searing insight — Farber charts the common ground between jealousy and its counterintuitive twin:

There is another affliction of passion which may be seen as a companion obsession to jealousy; that is the state called being-in-love. Unlike jealousy, about which, to my mind, there is really nothing redeeming to be said, being-in-love does have pleasures, even virtues, which can survive its transformation into some more reasonable relation. But the state of being-in-love itself is strikingly similar to jealousy. The imperative of total possession rules them both. In being-in-love each appropriates the other’s history as painlessly as possible (“I want to know everything about you, but be careful with the details”), at the same time that they rush to develop their own history and mutuality together, metaphorically fortified by their restaurant, song, drink, movie, first fight, and so on. Not only do they merge their lives, loyalties, passions, but their beliefs, attitudes, and opinions must match as well. Any hint of imperfection in his fusion… causes crisis. The smallest real difference of opinion… stands for the impossibility and unreality of the ideal of total mutual possession, and thus provokes jealousy, even in the absence of any rival whatsoever.

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

This impulse toward merging and total possession is the very opposite of the spacious togetherness at the heart of healthy relationships. Farber cautions against the central impossibility of such an orientation:

There is a blasphemous character to this endeavor, in which each singles the other out as an object of worship. To do this, and to be “worthy” of it, each implicitly yields — or tries to yield — up his separate existence to the exalted unity. He abandons — or tries to abandon — or tries to appear to abandon — his independence of spirit as though it were a false idol. Of course it doesn’t work. No matter how willing, one can never totally possess or be totally possessed by another. But before disillusionment sets in, and while the inevitable interruptions of jealousy are serving, paradoxically, both to cripple and to keep feverishly alive, being-in-love is often experienced as a miraculous rebirth, a time of exhilaration, inspiration, and ready transcendence, not to mention overstatement. Like jealousy, and all obsessions, it is addictive, requiring larger and larger doses of itself to satisfy the terms of its illusions.

With an optimistic eye to the capacity for self-transcendence that dwells in the human soul even at its most tangled, Farber adds:

But it is possible for two people and their relation to survive being-in-love. With enough appetite for each other’s company and enough hope in the possibilities for commonality that this life affords, they may go on to find a way of being together that includes being apart, a way that combines passionate affection with the reality of distance. A way that is also uncertain, vulnerable, and ever open to the contaminations of jealousy. There is no happy ending. But there is happy getting on with it.

Complement with Anne Carson on what Sappho teaches us about jealousy and the trailblazing French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet on jealousy and the metaphysics of love, then revisit philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s boundlessly insightful inquiry into anger, forgiveness, and the emotional machinery of trust.

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