“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing just before the Little Prince sighed his timeless sigh: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

No one has written about what it takes to see — and how to do the looking — more poignantly than Jacques Lusseyran (September 19, 1924–July 27, 1971) in his stirring memoir And There Was Light (public library).

Looking back on his blissful early childhood, Lusseyran recounts his formative enchantment with the world:

Light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour… flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left. This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.

There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.

Art by Ping Zhu from The Snail with the Right Heart by Maria Popova

Nightfall didn’t end the spell of the light, for he felt it in the very fabric of being:

Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.

And then, one May morning when he was seven, the light of the world went out — a classroom scuffle ended in a violent fall onto the corner of the teacher’s desk, leaving Lusseyran completely blind.

Somehow, he adapted, guided by the light within and by the discovery that the light without is a kind of vibration can we feel whenever we assume “the attitude of tender attention” — a vibration that reveals the world, its materiality and its mystery:

Objects do not stand at a given point, fixed there, confined in one form. They are alive, even the stones. What is more they vibrate and tremble. My fingers felt the pulsation distinctly, and if they failed to answer with a pulsation of their own, the fingers immediately became helpless and lost their sense of touch. But when they went toward things, in sympathetic vibration with them, they recognized them right away… Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead.

In a passage evocative of Virginia Woolf’s transcendent epiphany about the oneness of the world, he adds:

If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers which were heavy. I didn’t even know whether I was touching it or it was touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me. And that was how I came to understand the existence of things.

[…]

The reality — the oneness of the world — left me in the lurch, incapable of explaining it, because it seemed obvious. I could only repeat: “There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up

Lusseyran was still a teenager when, unnerved by Hitler’s rise to power, he set out to teach himself German in order to understand the menacing radio broadcasts. In 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of France, he formed a resistance group and began publishing an underground newspaper that soon became the voice of the French freedom fighters. He was seventeen.

Two months before his nineteenth birthday, Lusseyran was betrayed by a member of the resistance, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. For six months, he was kept in “a space four feet long and three feet wide, with walls like a medieval fortress, door three fingers thick with a peephole through which the jailers watched day and night, and a sealed window.” But his bright spirit remained undimmed — devoted to stirring the spirit of resistance among the thousands of inmates, he came to see the place not as a prison but as “a church underground.” He would recount:

The mechanism of hope in our hearts must have a thousand springs, almost all of them unknown to us.

Jacques Lusseyran

When liberation finally came two years later, Lusseyran was one of thirty inmates to leave the camp alive. Looking back on how he survived the unsurvivable, he returns to the lifeline of the light and the radiance of what the poet Muriel Rukeyser called “the living moment… in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” Aliveness, he intimates, is a matter of our receptivity to light, which is the quality of attention we pay the world — no matter our circumstance:

When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.

And There Was Light is a remarkable read in its entirety. Complement it with Viktor Frankl, shortly after his release from the concentration camps, on life’s deepest source of meaning, then revisit Rebecca Elson’s poetic love letter to the light of the universe.

In the late autumn of 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson’s death, her poems met the world for the first time in a handsome volume bound in white. Beneath the gilded title was a flower painting by Mabel Loomis Todd — the complicated woman chiefly responsible for editing and publishing Dickinson’s poems and letters.

Any flower would have been a fitting emblem for the poet who spent her life believing that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” but none more than this one — a flower she had collected in the woods of Amherst as “a wondering Child,” then pressed into her teenage herbarium and into her poems, enchanted by its “almost supernatural” appearance.

She considered it “the preferred flower of life.”

Monotropa uniflora, known as ghost pipe, is unlike the vast majority of plants on Earth. White as bone, it lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons and turn light into sugar for life.

Throughout the summer — usually after rainfall, usually under beech trees — the ghost pipe emerges from the darkest regions of the forest floor in clusters, from the Himalayas to Costa Rica to Amherst. Each stem bears a single nodding flower — a tiny chandelier of several translucent petals encircling its dozen stamens and single pistil. Bumblebees, drawn to the pale beauty despite their astonishing ultraviolet vision, are the ghost pipe’s most passionate pollinators.

Monotropa uniflora. (Photograph: Walter Siegmund.)

The secret of Earth’s most “supernatural” flower is its uncommon relationship with the rest of nature:

Rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down. Its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae. So connected, the ghost pipe begins to sap nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.

Out of this second-hand survival, such breathtaking beauty.

The mystery of how the ghost pipe flourishes without chlorophyll has enchanted scientists since the dawn of botany. The answer began bubbling up with the discovery of the mycorrhizal network undergirding the forest — a term coined in 1885 by the German botanist, plant pathologist, and mycologist Albert Bernhard Frank, from the Greek mykos (fungus) and rhiza (root). But for nearly a century, the mycorrhizal network — and its relation to the mystery of the ghost pipe — remained a purely theoretical notion, until in 1960 the Swedish botanist Erik Björkman used sugars laced with the radioactive carbon-14 isotope to trace how nutrients move between trees and nearby ghost pipes via the underground fungi.

It was a revelatory notion — an entirely new type of relationship we had never before imagined, as old as the living world.

Less than a century later, we know that 90% of plants rely on these mycorrhizal relationships for their survival — an interdependence for which the English botanist David Read coined the term “the Wood Wide Web,” to describe the groundbreaking research of Canadian plant ecologist Suzanne Simard, who furnished the definitive evidence for it in the 1990s.

Pressed ghost pipe from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, labeled in her hand.

By late autumn, the ghost pipe has turned black and brittle. By winter, it has vanished.

“That it will never come again,” Dickinson wrote, “is what makes life so sweet.”

From the brevity and beauty of the ghost pipe’s bloom emerges a tender living poem about the transience of life, about its mystery, about the delicate interdependence that deepens its sweetness.

Complement with a Dickinson-inspired adventure in nature’s nonbinary botany and some Dickinson-lensed reflections on the flower and the meaning of life, then relish the ongoing mystery of chlorophyll.

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” And yet one of the supreme challenges of humans life is, to borrow Rilke’s lovely phrase, to “go to the limits of your longing” — to fully surrender to your suffering, to fully step into your hope and own your desire for a grand life, desire not fueled by the grandiosity of ego but aimed at the grandeur of the cosmos that betokens our longing for homecoming to the Ultimate. The ability to do that is the deepest root of heroism and our mightiest, most vulnerable means of wresting meaning from our mortality.

How to own our heroism and our cosmic longing is what the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (September 27, 1924–March 6, 1974) explores in his 1973 classic The Denial of Death (public library), published just before his untimely return to the Ultimate.

Ernest Becker

Becker — whose concept of the hero is not dissimilar to Leonard Cohen’s concept of the saint — writes:

Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.

Echoing Milan Kundera’s admonition about knowing what we really want, he considers how modern culture cauterizes the heroic impulse within us:

When we appreciate how natural it is for man* to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it.

We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill… We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are.

The Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

The templates of heroism, Becker observes, are handed down to us by our particular culture as proscribed roles to be assumed in our struggle to give shape to the creative impulse — that supreme expression of our yearning for a counterforce to mortality:

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

And yet, half-opaque to ourselves as we are, we remain largely unconscious that much of what we do, we do to earn this feeling of heroism — an admission that would come as “a devastating release of truth,” making us demand of our culture what we most long for: “a primary sense of human value as unique contributors to cosmic life.” In a sentiment of extraordinary cultural sensitivity and pertinence to the social tumult of our own time, he writes:

The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism of which they have been cheated historically… But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There’s the rub… To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

Becker observes that modern culture has supplanted the cosmic heroism we long for with the counterfeit heroism of demagogues and the “silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life,” selling us on a simulacrum of life:

The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.

Writing a decade before Lewis Hyde’s epochal manifesto for the gift of creativity, Becker considers the relationship between the heroic and the creative impulse in the singular blessing and curse of the artist:

The whole thing boils down to this paradox: if you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance. If you are an artist you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification of your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men… To renounce the world and oneself, to lay the meaning of it to the powers of creation, is the hardest thing for man to achieve — and so it is fitting that this task should fall to the strongest personality type.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Throughout the book, Becker examines various hero-systems across the history of our species, all inseparable from our struggle to live with our transience. “All historical religions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life,” he writes, then traces how death became “the muse of philosophy” from its dawn in Ancient Greece to its golden hour in twentieth-century existentialism. With an especially keen eye to the cosmology of Kierkegaard, he considers our search for meaning and spiritual fulfillment through the lens of the heroic in us:

Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value in place of merely social and cultural, historical value. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. This invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith… The truly open person, the one who has shed his character armor, the vital lie of his cultural conditioning… is absolutely alone and trembling on the brink of oblivion — which is at the same time the brink of infinity.

With an eye to the diversity of our gifts, he adds:

The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can.

The Denial of Death is a revelatory read in its entirety. Complement these particular fragments from it with Joseph Campbell’s seminal monomyth of the hero’s journey and Walter Lippmann’s magnificent reckoning with what makes a hero in his tribute to Amelia Earhart, then revisit Kierkegaard on how to bridge the ephemeral and the eternal.

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