“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough.

This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along the way, we have unlearned how to live wide-eyed with wonder at what Hermann Hesse called “the little joys” — those unpurchasable, unstorable emblems of aliveness that abound the moment we look up from our ledger of lack.

The poet and etymologist John Ciardi (June 24, 1916–March 30, 1986) offers an uncommonly wonderful wakeup call for this civilizational trance in the out-of-print 1963 gem John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan (public library) — part fable, part poem, part prayer for happiness.

Written as a long lyric and illustrated with gentle charcoal sketches by the artist and experimental filmmaker Madeliene Gekiere, the story is a soulful — spiritual, even — modern take on Aesop’s famed tale of the grasshopper and the ant, radiating a countercultural invitation to rediscover life’s true priorities amid our confused maelstrom of materialism and compulsive productivity.

Ten years ago, or maybe twenty,
There lived an ant named John J. Plenty.
And every day, come rain, come shine,
John J. would take his place in line
With all the other ants. All day
He hunted seeds to haul away,
Or beetle eggs, or bits of bread.

These he would carry on his head
Back to his house. And John J., he
Was happy as an ant can be
When he was carrying a load
Big as a barn along the road.

The work was hard, but all John J. —
Or any other ant — would say
Was “More! Get more! No time to play!
Winter is coming.”

So it is that, as the birds of summer sing, John J. Plenty goes on hoarding “beetle eggs, and crumbs, and seeds, moth-hams, flower-fuzz, salad-weeds, grub-sausages, the choicer cuts of smoked bees, aphid butter, nuts,” single of purpose, always marching to the chant of “More! Get more!,” insentient to Annie Dillard’s haunting admonition that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Then comes the turn — that vital and vitalizing element of every good poem and every good story: One day, John J.’s sister falls in love with a grasshopper named Dan, who spends his days playing his carefree fiddle in the grass, filling the world with music. Worried about what would happen to his sister when winter comes and she has no cache of sustenance, John J. tries to stop her. But she elopes with Fiddler Dan, feeding on love and music.

All day long from rose to rose
Dan played the music the summer knows,
Of the sun and rain through the tall corn rows,
And of time as it comes, and of love as it grows.

And all the summer stirred to hear
The voice of the music. Far and near
The grasses swayed, and the sun and shade
Danced to the love the music played.

And Dan played on for the world to turn,
While his little wife lay on a fringe of fern,
And heard the heart of summer ringing,
Sad and sweet to the fiddle’s singing.

In consonance with John Berger’s observation that music is our best means of taking shelter in time, Ciardi writes:

So the sun came up and the sun went down.
So summer changed from green to brown.
So autumn changed from brown to gold.
And the music sang, “The world grows old,
But never my song. The song stays new,
My sad sweet love, as the thought of you.”

And summer and autumn dreamed and found
The name of the world in that sad sweet sound
Of the music telling how time grows old.
Fields held their breath to hear it told.
The trees bent down from the hills to hear.
A flower uncurled to shed a tear
For the sound of the music. And field and hill
Woke from the music, sad and still.

John J. Plenty hears “the music far and near,” but goes on trudging along to the trance of “Get more!” His sister and Fiddler Dan, he vows, will get nothing from him when winter comes — that will teach them, he grumbles.

And then winter does come, and John J. Plenty shuts his door, and he gloats when he hears the music go silent, and he gloats as he begins relishing his infinite stash of delicacies.

But as he heaps poached beetle-eggs and moth-ham onto his plate, he is suddenly seized with a terrible thought: What if winter goes on forever and he ends up not having enough?

So John J. Plenty waited and fasted.
As for the winter, it lasted and lasted.
He nibbled a crumb one day in ten.
But he shook with terror even then
When the thought of how he might be wasting
All that food he was hardly tasting.
And that’s how it went.

When spring arrives at last, John J. Plenty vows to store twice as much this year. But as he starts out the door to find his first load, he is stilled in his tracks by the sound of music.

From far and near, from blade to blade,
He heard the song that springtime played.
It’s a softer fiddle than autumn knows
When the fiddler goes down tall corn rows,
But the same far song. It grows and grows,
And spring and summer stir to hear
The music sounding far and near.
And the grasses sway, and the sun and shade
Dance when they hear the music played.

It was Dan, still singing for time to turn
While his little wife lay on a fringe of fern
And heard the heart of the springtime ringing
Sweet and new as the fiddle’s singing.

Stung with disbelief that Fiddler Dan survived the winter with nothing but his store of beauty, John J. Plenty topples over and falls facedown in the mud as the music goes on playing and life goes on living itself through its natural abundance.

I guess he recovered. I hope he did.
I don’t know where the Fiddler hid
With his pretty wife from ice and snow.
I guess about all I really know
Is — save a little or save a lot,
You have to eat some of what you’ve got.
And — say what you like as you trudge along,
The world won’t turn without a song.

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote as he reckoned with what it takes to find yourself. And yet where would the world be if each generation didn’t plank its crossing with the life-tested wisdom of its elders? Often, that wisdom comes so simply worded as to appear trite — but it is the simplicity of a children’s book, or of a Zen parable: unvarnished elemental truth about what it means to be alive, hard-won and generously offered.

That is precisely what Kevin Kelly gathers in Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier (public library) — an herbarium of learnings that began as a list he composed on his 68th birthday for his own young-adult children, a list to which he kept adding with each lived year.

Kevin Kelly in his 70s. (Photograph: Christopher Michel)

Hovering between the practical and the poetic, his learnings are sometimes seemingly obvious reminders of what we know but habitually forget, sometimes pleasingly contrarian, always unselfconsciously sincere. What emerges is a shorthand manual for living with kindness, decency, and generosity of spirit.

Here are some I loved and shall try to live by.

In a fine complement to the Buddhist practice of deep listening, he offers:

Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

Affirming poet and philosopher David Whyte’s observation that “to forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” he reframes the object of forgiveness:

When you forgive others they may not notice but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.

[…]

Forgiveness is accepting the apology you will never get.

Inverting the equation and echoing Maimonedes’s wisdom on repentance and repair, he maps the noblest path to seeking forgiveness when you yourself have erred:

How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.

[…]

A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other) responsibility (not blaming someone else) and remedy (your willingness to fix it).

In consonance with George Saunders’s moving reflection on his greatest regret, Kelly urges:

Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.

In a kindred sentiment that would have pleased Simone Weil, who exhorts us across the epochs to “never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it,” he adds:

Anger is not the proper response to anger. When you see someone angry you are seeing their pain. Compassion is the proper response to anger.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker

A century and a half after Thoreau made his lyrical case for defining your own success, Kelly — whose own illustirous life is a testament to this — writes:

Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.

[…]

The greatest killer of happiness is comparison. If you must compare, compare yourself to you yesterday.

Echoing William James’s insistence that habit is how “we are spinning our own fates,” Kelly writes:

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

[…]

The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to flossing.

[…]

Keep showing up. 99% of success is just showing up. In fact, most success is just persistence.

Art by Christoph Niemann for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

And a few more, without qualification:

Before you are old attend as many funerals as you can bear and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Hang out with, and learn from people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

Promptness is a sign of respect.

Your passions should fit you exactly but your purpose in life should exceed you. Work for something much larger than yourself.

Bad things can happen fast but almost all good things happen slowly.

The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.

Criticize in private, praise in public.

You will thrive more — and so will others — when you promote what you love rather than bash what you hate. Life is short; focus on the good stuff.

The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.

Complement Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living with Henry Miller, upon turning 80, on the measure of a life well lived, Maya Angelou’s letter of advice to her younger self, and this compendium of resolutions for a life worth living drawn from some of our wisest cultural elders, then revisit my own 16 life-learnings from 16 years of The Marginalian.

When the Inquisition persecuted Galileo for advancing the rude truth that Earth is not the center of the universe, the charge against him was heresy — the same charge on which Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for her crusade for political reform. We have had many words for heretics over the epochs — rebels, radicals, freethinkers — but they have always been the ones to dislodge humanity from the stagnation of the status quo, to illuminate our blind spots, dismantle our unexamined biases, and jolt us out of our herd mentality. Without those devoted to seeing reality more clearly and possibility more wildly, we would still live in a world haunted by superstition and governed by dogma.

The power and dignity of this most courageous human mindset is what the pioneering classicist Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928), who brought the culture of Ancient Greece to the modern world, explores in her magnificent essay “Heresy and Humanity,” found in Alpha and Omega (public library) — the out-of-print essay collection that gave us Harrison on the art of growing older, published just as humanity was being dehumanized by its first World War.

Jane Ellen Harrison

Harrison writes:

The word “heretic” has still about it an emotional thrill — a glow reflected, it may be, from the fires at Smithfield, the ardours of those who were burnt at the stake for the love of an idea.

Heresy, the Greek hairesis, was from the outset an eager, living word. The taking of a city, its expugnatio, is a hairesis; the choosing of a lot in life or an opinion, its electio, is a hairesis; always in the word hairesis there is this reaching out to grasp, this studious, zealous pursuit — always something personal, even passionate… To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation.

In a sentiment Bertrand Russell would echo in timeless manifesto for freedom of thought, Harrison adds:

The gist of heresy is free personal choice in act, and specifically in thought — the rejection of traditional faiths and customs.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Louis I, King of the Sheep

A century and a half after Emerson inveighed that “masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence,” she considers what makes heresy so difficult yet so necessary to the health of society:

All traditional views are held with such tenacity, such almost ferocity, because they belong to the class of views induced, not by individual experience, still less by reason, but by collective, or, as it is sometimes called “herd,” suggestion. This used to be called “faith.” The belief so held may or may not be true; collective suggestion is not in the least necessarily collective hallucination. Mere collective suggestions — that is the interesting point — have the quality of obviousness; they do not issue from the individual, but seem imposed from outside, and ineluctable; they have all the inevitableness of instinctive opinion… Hence they are held with an intensity of emotion far beyond any reasoned conviction. To doubt them is felt to be at once idiocy and irreverence. Inquiry into their rational bases is naturally, and in a sense rightly, resented, because they are not rationally based, though they may be rationally supported. It is by convictions such as this that a society of the homogenous kind — a society based on and held together by uniformity — lives and thrives. To attack them is to cripple and endanger its inmost life.

Observing that the development of science is what pivoted heresy from damnable to desirable in society, Harrison contrasts sensemaking by empiricism with sensemaking by authority:

Science classifies, draws ever clearer distinctions; herd-suggestion is always in a haze. Herd-suggestion is all for tradition, authority; science has for its very essence the exercise of free thought. So long as we will not take the trouble to know exactly and intimately, we may not — must not — choose… We must follow custom; we must accept the mandates of [those] who enforce tradition.

[…]

Science opens wide the doors that turned so slowly on tradition’s hinges, and opens them on clean, quiet places where we breathe larger air… It is well to remember our debt to science — our inward and spiritual as well as material debt.

Art by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

And yet, Harrison argues, the heretic needs more than science — the heretic needs humanity. She writes:

Science broke the binding spell of herd-suggestion. For that great boon let us now and ever bless and praise her holy name. She cleared the collective haze, she drew sharp distinctions, appealing to individual actual experience, to individual powers of reasoning. But by neither individual sense — perception nor ratiocination alone do we live. Our keenest emotional life is through the herd, and hence it was that, at the close of the last century, the flame of scientific hope, the glory of scientific individualism that had blazed so brightly, somehow died down and left a strange chill. Man rose up from the banquet of reason and law unfed. He hungered half unconsciously for the herd. It seemed an impasse: on the one side orthodoxy, tradition, authority, practical slavery; on the other science, individual freedom, reason, and an aching loneliness.

[…]

We live now just at the transition moment; we have broken with the old, we have not quite adjusted ourselves to the new. It is not so much the breaking with the old faiths that makes us restless as the living in a new social structure.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Louis I, King of the Sheep

At the root of this new social structure, she observes, is not the old cult of homogeneity but the recognition of individuality, and the diversity of individualities, as the wellspring of vitality and social harmony — “differentiation that would unite, not divide.” With the World War flaming around her, waged on the herd-versus-herd collision of nationalisms and ideologies, she writes:

Only through and by this organic individuality can the real sense and value of Humanity emerge. We are humane so far as we are conscious or sensitive to individual life. Patriotism is collective herd-instinct; it is repressive of individuality. You feel strongly because you feel alike; you are reinforced by the other homogenous unites; you sing the same song and wave the same flag. Humanity is sympathy with infinite differences, with utter individualism, with complete differentiation, and it is only possible through the mystery of organic spiritual union. We have come, most of us, now, to a sort of physical union by sympathy and imagination. To torture even an enemy’s body would be to us physical pain, physical sickness. There will come the day when to hurt mentally and spiritually will be equally impossible, because the spiritual life will by enhanced sympathy be one. But this union is only possible through that organic differentiation that makes us have need one of the other.

A generation before Albert Camus, in the midst of the next World War, called for the superhuman duty to “mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once,” Harrison concludes:

In a word, if we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination, joint offspring of head and heart which is begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling. About the moral problem there is nothing mysterious; it is simply the old, old question of how best to live together. We no longer believe in an unchanging moral law imposed from without. We know that a harder incumbency is upon us; we must work out our law from within.

Noting that we have outgrown the easy shorthand for morality offered by religious dogma, she contours what is asked of us if we are to rehumanize humanity:

We must adventure a harder and higher spiritual task… a steady and even ardent recognition of the individual life, in its infinite variety, with its infinite interactions. We decline to be ourselves part of an undifferentiated mass; we refuse to deal with others in classes and masses… We are dissatisfied now not only with the herd-sanctions of religion, but with many of those later sanctities of law to which some even emancipated thinkers ascribe a sort of divinity. We feel the inherent savagery of law in that it treats individuals as masses… Yet all the time we know that we can, with spiritual safety, rebel only in so far as we are personally sensitive to the claims of other individual lives that touch our own. The old herd-problem remains of how to live together; and as the union grows closer and more intricate the chances of mutual hurt are greater, and the sensitiveness must grow keener. Others are safe from and with us only when their pain is our pain, their joy ours.

Couple with E.E. Cummings on the courage to feel, then revisit Albert Camus on what it means to be a rebel, the radical Russian dissident prince Peter Kropotkin on the spirit of revolt, and the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale on moral courage and our personal power in world change.