“Love the earth and sun and the animals,” Walt Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life — advice anchored, like his poetry, in that all-enveloping totality of goodwill that makes life worth living, advice at the heart of which is the act of unselfing; poetry largely inspired by the prose of Emerson, who had written of the “secret sympathy which connects men to all the animals, and to all the inanimate world around him.”

A quarter century after Leaves of Grass, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) took up this bright urgency in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (public library | public domain) — one of the great moral masterworks in the history of literature.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871

Dostoyevsky — who felt deeply the throes of personal love — contours the largest meaning of love:

Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!

In our era of ecological collapse, as we reckon with what it means to pay reparations to our home planet, the next passage rings with especial poignancy, painting the antidote to the indifference that got us where we are:

My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.

Complement with Shelley’s prescient case for animal rights and Christopher Hitchens on the lesser appreciated moral of Orwell’s Animal Farm, then revisit Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the meaning of life.

Right this minute, people are making plans, making promises and poems, while at the center of our galaxy a black hole with the mass of four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss of oblivion. Someday it will swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, swallow Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations, calculus and Leaves of Grass.

When black holes first emerged from the mathematics of relativity, Einstein himself wavered on whether or not they could be real — he struggled to imagine that nature could produce so menacing a thing, that spacetime could bend to such a monstrous extreme. And then it took us a mere century to hear with our immense prosthetic ear the sound of two black holes colliding to churn a gravitational wave, then to see with our telescopic eye an actual black hole in the cosmic wild. Here looms living proof of Richard Feynman’s insistence that “the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”

With their cosmic drama and their dazzling science at the edge of the possible, black holes beckon the human imagination with myriad metaphors for our existential perplexities. One of them comes alive in Little Black Hole (public library), by
Radiolab producer Molly Webster and artist Alex Willmore — an uncommon meditation on how to live with the austere existential loneliness of knowing that everything and everyone we cherish can be taken away from us and is ultimately destined for oblivion, how to live with the looming loss that is the price of being fully alive.

The story’s central conceit draws on Stephen Hawking’s black hole information paradox — the combined intimation of relativity and quantum field theory that, even though not even light can escape from a black hole, bits of information can transcend its immense gravitational pull and break free in the form of what is known as Hawking radiation.

Tucked into the lyrical opening lines is a subtle vulpine allusion to The Little Prince, that most poetic of cosmic tales:

There once was a little black hole who loved everything in the universe.

The stars. The planets. The space rocks and the space fox. Even the flying astronauts.

The little black hole loved her friends.

One day, the little black hole befriends a star, but just as they are delighting in building a cosmic castle together, the star vanishes, her light nowhere to be seen.

Next, a comet swings by, but just as the little black hole grows giddy for a new friendship, the comet crumbles to cosmic dust and disappears.

So they come and they go, the planets and the asteroids, the fox and the astronauts, each new friend taken away as soon as they get close, leaving the little black hole baffled and bereaved.

Confused and disconsolate, the little black hole comes upon a big black hole replete with an elder’s wisdom, who illuminates the fundamental fact that to be a black hole means to swallow and annihilate anything and anyone who comes near.

And yet bits of information can escape from the belly of the black hole, bubbling back up as remnants of what was consumed. Out of Hawking’s legacy arises the story’s central metaphor for how to live with loss: Because, in poet Meghan O’Rourke’s lovely words, “the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created,” we can always bring them back up to the surface of our consciousness with the twin levers of memory and imagination.

This might seem like cold consolation for the infernal heat of loss. And yet it is no small gift that a cold cosmos kindled the warm glow of consciousness — this radiant faculty that makes it possible to love and to suffer, to imagine and to remember; this wonder that — like music, like love — didn’t have to exist.

Couple Little Black Hole with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, then revisit “Singularity” — Marie Howe’s stunning ode to Stephen Hawking and our cosmic belonging.

When the dust of the centuries settles, what is left of every civilization are not its dogmas and its ideologies, not its reasons for going to war, but its arts — those emblems of our search for meaning, reaching for a reality realer than fact, deeper than doctrine; those records of our reckoning with what the world is and what it can be; those supreme revelations of who and what we are. Rebecca West understood this when she wrote in her exquisite meditation on storytelling and survival that “art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.” Saul Bellow understood it when he insisted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that “only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” while a more genuine reality is “always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.” Toni Morrison understood it when she observed that “art reminds us that we belong here.”

The writer and activist Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890–September 18, 1980) understood it uniquely, having lived through two World Wars and tremendous upheavals, making art — poems and essays, short stories and novels — that made life richer and more livable for generations.

Katherine Anne Porter

In the introduction to the 1940 Modern Library edition of Flowering Judas (public library) — her first short-story collection, originally published in the interlude between the two World Wars — Porter reflects on the role of art in human life as she watches the world come undone by its second global war:

In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

Altarpiece by Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

A quarter century later, in a Paris Review interview, she revisits the question of the artist’s role in civilization:

Nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless if the artist will face it. And it’s his* business to face it. He hasn’t got the right to sidestep it like that. Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he’s good for — is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning… We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.

Half a century later, Ursula K. Le Guin would echo this sentiment in her own magnificent meditation on the power and purpose of art, observing that one of its functions is “to give people the words to know their own experience… a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”

Complement with Iris Murdoch on the psychological function of art and James Baldwin on the artist’s function in society, then revisit Pablo Neruda’s lovely childhood epiphany about why we make art.