Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.

How to love the world more by negotiating our hunger for certainty and our gift for story is what George Saunders explores in some lovely passages from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library) — the boundlessly wonderful and layered book in which he reckoned with the key to great storytelling and the way to unbreak our hearts.

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

In consonance with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s insight into narrative as the pillar of personal identity, Saunders examines the elemental impulse for storytelling as the basic organizing principle by which we govern our lives:

The instant we wake the story begins: “Here I am. In my bed. Hard worker, good dad, decent husband, a guy who always tries his best. Jeez, my back hurts. Probably from the stupid gym.”

And just like that, with our thoughts, the world gets made.

Or, anyway, a world gets made.

This world-making via thinking is natural, sane, Darwinian: we do it to survive. Is there harm in it? Well, yes, because we think in the same way that we hear or see: within a narrow, survival-enhancing range. We don’t see or hear all that might be seen or heard but only that which is helpful for us to see and hear. Our thoughts are similarly restricted and have a similarly narrow purpose: to help the thinker thrive.

All of this limited thinking has an unfortunate by-product: ego. Who is trying to survive? “I” am. The mind takes a vast unitary wholeness (the universe), selects one tiny segment of it (me), and starts narrating from that point of view. Just like that, that entity (George!) becomes real, and he is (surprise, surprise) located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in his movie, so to speak; it is all, somehow, both for and about him. In this way, moral judgment arises: what is good for George is… good. What is bad for him is bad. (The bear is neither good nor bad until, looking hungry, it starts walking toward George.)

So, in every instant, a delusional gulf gets created between things as we think they are and things as they actually are. Off we go, mistaking the world we’ve made with our thoughts for the real world. Evil and dysfunction (or at least obnoxiousness) occur in proportion to how solidly a person believes that his projections are correct and energetically acts upon them.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Over time, our stories harden into certainties that collide with each other every time we engage with another person, who is another story — another embodiment of the unreliable first-person narration known as skaz that permeates classic Russian literature. With an eye to the inescapable fact that “there is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see,” Saunders contours the commonplace tragicomedy of colliding in the mind-made world of skaz:

I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.

[…]

The entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves as the center of the universe, thinking highly of themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything.

Trying to communicate across this fissure of understanding yields results sometimes comical and sometimes tragic, always affirming that reality is not singular but plural, not a point of view but a plane of possible vantages. With an eye to Chekhov — who was a physician by training and an excellent one, but an even better writer because a diagnosis is a forced conclusion of curiosity but art is the eternal sandbox of doubt — Saunders writes:

In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.

After a close reading of Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries,” he reflects:

It’s hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system of belief can be a great relief.

[…]

As long as we don’t decide, we allow further information to keep coming in. Reading a story like “Gooseberries” might be seen as a way of practicing this. It reminds us that any question in the form “Is X right or wrong?” could benefit from another round of clarifying questions. Question: “Is X good or bad?” Story: “For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more.”

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

This openness to more — to truth beyond story, to beauty beyond certainty — is precisely what teaches us how to love the world more. With a deep bow to Chekhov as the master of this existential art, Saunders writes:

This feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination. (“Am I sure? Is it really so? Is my preexisting opinion causing me to omit anything?”) He has a gift for reconsideration. Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it. In other words, we have to stay open (easy to say, in that confident, New Age way, but so hard to actually do, in the face of actual, grinding, terrifying life). As we watch Chekhov continually, ritually doubt all conclusions, we’re comforted. It’s all right to reconsider. It’s noble — holy, even. It can be done. We can do it. We know this because of the example he leaves in his stories, which are, we might say, splendid, brief reconsideration machines.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain remains one of my all-time favorite books. Complement these fragments from it with Virginia Woolf on finding beauty in the uncertainty of time, space, and being and Kurt Vonnegut on uncertainty as the crucible of creativity, then revisit some thoughts on figuring forward in an uncertain world.

Pastel-colored apparitions of tenderness, magnolias are titans of resilience. They have been consecrating Earth with their beauty since the time dinosaurs roamed it, long before bees evolved to give our planet its colors, pioneering the exquisitely orchestrated pollination strategies by which perfect flowers survive.

Today, for a precious week in spring, they bloom to remind us that life is livable, then die to remind us that it must be lived.

Magnolia under a dawn redwood in Downtown Brooklyn

When Western botanists first encountered these ravishing flowering trees on an island in the West Indies, they named them after the trailblazing French botanist Pierre Magnol — originator of the concept of plant families and the first person to devise a system of natural classification, a century ahead of Linnaeus. The word magnolia was heartily adopted, so that by the time Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum, introducing his revolutionary binomial naming system, the magnolia appeared in it as a single species. Today, we know there to be hundreds, some of them deciduous and some evergreen, with the American evergreen species Magnolia grandiflora the most widely recognizable.

Magnolias have a long history of enchanting humanity with their splendor and symbolic intimations. As early as the year 650, Buddhist monks in China made of the wild magnolia a garden deity, planting a white-blooming Magnolia denudata at their temple as a symbol of purity. The magnolia planted at the White House from a Tennessee sprout in the 1820s lived through thirty-nine presidencies and came to grace the back of the $20 bill for seven decades. Magnolia sieboldii is the national flower of North Korea, and Magnolia grandiflora the state flower of both Mississippi and Louisiana.

Magnolias have long figured in our efforts to mediate between the body and the mind — the mediation we call medicine. In the early nineteenth century, American physicians began using the dried bark of Magnolia virginiana, Magnolia acuminata, and Magnolia tripetala to treat malaria, rheumatism, and gout. For millennia, Chinese medicine has been transmuting the bark of Magnolia officinalis into a tonic known as hou-phu, used for treating neurological and gastric disorders. Twentieth-century science isolated from it the compounds magnolol and honokio — sedatives with relaxant effects on the central nervous system, found to help reduce tremors in Parkinson’s patients. Throughout Asia, the common drug hsin-i, made of the flowering buds of several magnolia species, is used to treat headaches, fever, allergies, and respiratory disorders.

Humans are not the only animals to wrest vitality from magnolias. Migrating songbirds relish them, drawn to the bright seeds and nourished by their unusually high fat content of 40% — more than twice that of the avocado, Earth’s most nutritious fruit. Squirrels, raccoons, and possums also savor them. Their leaves are a favorite food for the larvae of the giant leopard moth — one of Earth’s most majestic and resplendent insects.

Humans, too, have feasted on the magnolia — in rural England, the petals of Magnolia grandiflora are used to spice stews, in Japan the young leaves and buds of Magnolia hypoleuca are broiled as a vegetable, and in other Asian cuisines the flower buds of various magnolia species are used to scent tea and flavor rice. The aromatic hoba miso is made with magnolia.

To me, magnolias are the most existential of trees, their weeklong bloom an open-mouth scream of exhilaration at the transient miracle of being alive. There is cruelty to beauty so fierce and so fleeting. “Blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white,” Robert Lowell wrote in a poem. But there is also kindness in its gentle reminder not to squander a single moment of living. In five days, a whole life can spin on its axis.

I suspect our ability to ask the unanswerable questions that Hannah Arendt knew are the heartbeat of civilization is intimately related to our capacity for dwelling in a particular state of being beyond the realm of our compulsive doing. Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to enact such states of being — states in which our inner voice becomes audible, the voice with which we sing the song of our lives.

The Pakistani-British psychoanalyst Masud Khan (July 21, 1924–June 7, 1989) calls this mode of being “lying fallow” and unfurls its psychological tendrils in a short, brightly penetrating essay included in his 1983 collection Hidden Selves (public library).

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss.

With an eye to the dictionary definition of fallow as “ground that is well-ploughed and harrowed, but left uncropped for a whole year or more,” Khan considers his choice of compound phrasing:

Through the metaphor of an active verb, I wish to indicate that the mood I am trying to discuss is not one of inertia, listless vacancy or idle quietism of the soul; nor is it a flight from harassed purposiveness and pragmatic action. Lying fallow is a transitional state of experience, a mode of being that is alerted quietude and receptive wakeful lambent consciousness.

Noting the strange deficiency of our language in describing “positive nonconflictual moods” — a language with a vast lexicon for conveying tension and friction — Khan defines lying fallow not as “a neurotic, conflictual, or distress state” but as “a healthy function of the ego in the service of the individual,” one of those “intractably silent states which we associate with the healthy individual.” Radiating from this notion is a reminder that we are infinitely complex totalities forged by a process of slow incubation and incremental becoming, and that how we govern our interiority — how we tend to those processes as they shape us — shapes every outward expression of our lives. Khan writes:

The capacity for lying fallow is a function of the process of personalization in the individual. This process of personalization achieves its sentient wholeness over a slow period of growth, development and acculturation, and its true matrix is a hierarchy of relationships… This is a long process and it is waylaid by many a traumata — personal, familial and social. But if all goes well — and it does, more often than not — what crystallizes and differentiates into the separate status of adult selfhood is a personalized individual with his own privacy, inner reality and sense of relatedness to his social environment.

Noting the extreme cult of the individual in Western society, with its militant focus on self-help and self-improvement, Khan adds:

In this excessive zeal to rescue and comfort the individual, we have perhaps overlooked some of the basic needs of the person to be private, unintegrated and to lie fallow.

Art by Olivier Tallec from What If…

Observing that we all experience lying fallow “frequently in fleeting patches” — in our moments of procrastination between tasks, in our states of idleness and our restless sense that we must snap out of this “benignly languid passive mood” — he considers the rewards of surrendering to rather than fleeing from this state:

What does the fallow mood achieve for us? The answer is a paradox: a great deal and nothing. It is a nutrient of the ego and a preparatory state. It supplies the energic substratum for most of our creative efforts, and through it unintegrated, psychic suspended animation… allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.

Lying fallow is, in other words, the antidote to the deadly trap of efficiency. Khan outlines the five features of the fallow state:

1. A transitional and transient mood
2. A nonconflictual, noninstinctual, and intellectually uncritical state
3. A capacity of the ego
4. An alert wakeful mood — unintegrated, receptive and labile
5. A largely nonverbal and imagistic state, kinaesthetic in expression

In the history of creative culture, many great and enduring artistic productions have arisen out of this state — evidence that lying fallow is not a form of idleness but “a cogent capacity in a well-established, disciplined and personalized individual.” Half a century after Bertrand Russell admonished that “a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation… in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase,” Khan writes:

Lying fallow is, above all, the proof that a person can be with himself unpurposefully.

Art by Austrian artist Tom Seidmann-Freud — Freud’s niece — from David the Dreamer, 1922

But while lying fallow is the antipode of productivity, it is also, paradoxically, the antipode of leisure. In a passage of extraordinary prescience given our present epoch of endless social media streams supplanting every moment of stillness with a reflexive hit of on-demand entertainment, Khan writes:

It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. Hence the emergence of a colossal trade in organizing people’s leisure. This need is perhaps one of the real absurdities of our existence today, and it reflects the decay of some crucial value-systems… in all types and kinds of human beings. The pursuit of frantic leisure… is perhaps one of the most dissipating qualities of the technical cultures. The individual on whom leisure has been imposed in massive doses, and who has little capacity to deal with it, then searches for distractions that will fill this vacuum… A great deal of the distress and psychic conflict that we see clinically… is the result of a warped and erroneous expectancy of human nature and existence. It is the omnipresent fallacy of our age that all life should be fun and that all time should be made available to enjoy this fun. The result is apathy, discontent and pseudo-neurosis.

[…]

A craving for leisure, and the concomitant yearning for distractions to fill the void of given-leisure, is the result of our failure to understand the role and function of the need to lie fallow in the human psyche and personality… We have industriously misinformed ourselves about the essentials of human nature. We have confused the necessity to relieve human poverty and misery with the demand that all life should be fun and kicks. The entertainment media of modern cultures have further exploited this leisure void for commercial gain and flooded citizens with ready-made switchable distractions, so that no awareness of the need to develop personal resources to cope with fallow states can actualize as private experience.

The consequence, Khan cautions, is that we have developed a narcissistic personality style — one that makes myriad outward demands on the world with “little comprehension of the necessity of the responsibility for an inner relation to its own self.” Under this warping of the soul, we have come to our core existential problems — loneliness, misery, grief, alienation — “with no inkling of insight into the person’s primary human responsibility for a commitment to sustain and nourish himself.” Lying fallow is how we begin to nourish ourselves, how we begin to take responsibility for ourselves as transient miracles of aliveness and creative agents of destiny.

Complement with May Sarton’s stunning poem about the relationship between solitude, presence, and love and Hermann Hesse on solitude and how to find your destiny, then revisit two centuries of titanic minds, from Kierkegaard to Sontag, on the spiritual and creative rewards of boredom.

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