“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” Baldwin cautioned a generation later as he himself reckoned with the work of love.

Because the stakes are so high, because we are so overwhelmed by both the power and the fragility of love, we regularly find ourselves catatonic with confusion about what it all means and what it asks of us. We mistake much for love — admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love — an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies — and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.

How to bridge the abyss and see clearly through all the confusion is what Roxane Gay explores in one of the pieces collected in Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business (public library — her astute commentary on popular culture and politics, punctuated by reflections on the deepest and most timeless strata of our experience.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

A century and a half after Jane Welsh Carlyle so brilliantly rendered the difference between loving and being in love, an exasperated 43-year-old reader turns to Roxane with the same perplexity, signing herself Where the hell is the love of my life? With an eye to the tyrannical myth of “the one,” Roxane responds:

We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. You may never know if you have made the right choice. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless.

Having “lived and loved long enough to recognize that there is a difference between the idea of love and the reality of love,” she adds:

You never really know if a marriage or relationship will last a lifetime. You can want that. You can work hard to make a relationship work and have the best of intentions and still, things might not work out but that doesn’t mean you have wasted your time or failed.

[…]

When you meet someone and start dating, you have no idea where things will lead…. It is so very important to know what you want from a relationship but you also have to create space for a relationship to develop without worrying about what the relationship will or won’t become.

To look for the love of one’s life, she observes, requires an understanding of and a commitment to what it takes — the immensity it takes — to love someone for a lifetime. This cannot be done without arriving at a personal definition of love that we live up to and into. (My favorite definitions come from Iris Murdoch, Robert Graves, and Tom Stoppard.)

Art by Charles M. Schulz from Love Is Walking Hand in Hand, 1965

Professing herself to be “a passionate, foolish romantic,” Roxane offers her own definition, anchored in the difference between loving and being in love:

Loving someone is recognizing the role they play or have played in your life and honoring that presence. Sometimes, love feels like an obligation but it is one you are willing to fulfill. Sometimes it takes hard work but you are willing to put in that work. Love is the constant you hold on to when you don’t particularly like the one you love. Love is recognizing the ways in which, for better and worse, someone has contributed to your life.

Being in love is wild, breathtaking, infuriating. It is butterflies in your stomach when you think about your person, when you see them, when you hold them. It’s the electricity when your skin meets. It’s smiling at your person with wide eyes and an open heart and seeing them smile back at you in the same way. It’s wanting to hold someone’s hand, even when your hand is hot, a little sweaty. It’s lust and the heat of wanting, wanting, wanting. It’s seeing who someone truly is, the best and most terrible parts of them, and choosing not to look away from everything you see, actively embracing everything you see… It’s wanting to be the best version of yourself for your person but also for yourself, especially for yourself… It’s the pride you feel in their accomplishments and being as happy for their successes as you are for your own, if not more. It’s their hurts becoming your hurts… It’s a gut instinct. You just feel it. You know it in your bones. It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.

To this taxonomy she adds the most culturally mythologized manifestation of love — the idea of the soul mate, so slippery precisely because it is intimately tied to the elusive notion of the soul. She writes:

A soul mate is someone so deeply part of you that they feel like a vital organ, living outside of your skin. They are the hottest part of the sun, your true north, your home, the one from whom you will never walk away, no matter what the material conditions of your relationship might be. Your soul mate is the one you wait for knowing no matter what happens, that they are worth the wait. Your soul mate is the person you choose because you look at them always and think, “You… there you are.”

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf by Nadine Brun-Cosme

She ends her advice with the sage and sensitive disclaimer that, ultimately, we are each responsible for our own definition of love, our own private understanding of what it means and what it feels like to love and be loved — a difficult triumph of self-knowledge amid the perpetual confusion of knowing what we really want.

Complement with poet Donald Hall on the secret to lasting love, philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to know if you really love somebody, and David Whyte’s stunning poem “The Truelove,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on the courage to weather the uncertainties of love and Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fundamental fear of loss at the heart of love.

We are denizens of an enormous pebble drifting through the cosmic ocean of pure spacetime — a planet made a world largely by its rockiness. Rock gave us mountains and beaches, bridges and kitchen countertops, gave us the first Promethean fire that sparked civilization. A rock is a reliquary of the story of life on Earth — the open face of a canyon, its lined strata exposing evolutionary epochs; the fossil undusted on the forest trail, embodying the haunting truth that “we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences.”

This, perhaps, is what makes rocks so comforting, so pleasing to the touch of hand and mind. Lining my bookshelf are stones collected from places I have been: a perfectly round pebble of milky quartz from Puget Sound, a dark piece of basalt with dazzling white veins from Big Sur, a sparkly piece of metamorphic schist from the Rila Mountains of my native Bulgaria — a kind of altar to deep time and to the memory of the Earth.

That is what Leslie Barnard Booth celebrates in her poetic book A Stone Is a Story (public library), illustrated in soulful watercolor by Australian artist and bookmaker Marc Martin.

The story begins with that most primal of delights — a child on a beach picking up a stone — out of which unspools a tunnel into deep time: the lava oozing from Earth’s magmatic depths to make the rock, the mighty roots of ancient trees sculpting it into shape, the glaciers grinding it and sending it down the river, until it is “ground down to a speck of sand and sent to sea.”

There
it has waited
for millions of years.
Bits of seaweed and shell and bone
have piled on top of it
have become part of it.

A stone has felt the slow drifting
the slow           shifting
of the surface of the earth.

In their slow formation, rocks become the planet’s most steadfast witness — we see the dinosaurs come and go, we see the first humans make the first music, we see mountains rise and crumble, until they become the pebbles on the beach by the wonder-smitten child.

Every rock we touch is the emissary of timescales we cannot begin to comprehend without confronting our own transience, and yet radiating from it is also the quiet assurance that the world goes on and on, that we are part of something vast and magnificent, that beneath all the tumult and turmoil of our human lives there is a steadfast continuity that anchors life to eternity.

Complement A Stone Is a Story with Rita Dove’s stunning poem “The Fish in the Stone” and Temujin Doran’s beautiful short film about the life and death of mountains, then revisit this illustrated love letter to rivers.

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand,” the poetic physicist Alan Lightman wrote in his magnificent recollection of his transcendent encounter with a young osprey. A generation before him, in differentiating it from belief, Alan Watts defined faith as “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.”

For those of us animated by what Bertrand Russell called “the will to doubt,” who abide by the light of reason and wish to meet reality on its own terms, the notion of faith can be challenging, for it presupposes a leap beyond reason, beyond will — a surrender to the unknown, to the possibly unknowable. And yet to create anything of substance and originality — be it a song or a painting or a theorem — requires that you give yourself over to something you don’t fully understand, in the act of which you better understand yourself and the world. We may call it the divine. We may call it mystery. We may just call it the life-force of a universe that, as Carl Sagan reminds us across space and time, “will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

This relationship between creativity and faith is what Nick Cave explores throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — his yearlong conversation with music journalist Seán O’Hagan, which was among my favorite books of 2022 and also gave us his reflections on self-forgiveness, the relationship between vulnerability and freedom, and the art of growing older.

Nick Cave in Newcastle, 2022.

Placing at the center of his creativity his “struggle with the notion of the divine,” he reflects:

I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.

This radical receptivity at the heart of faith is fundamental to creativity itself — out of it arises the ability to be very deliberate about what you are creating and at the same time channel something larger than yourself: a kind of controlled serendipity that produces something greater than the sum of the intentional parts. He reflects:

It seems to me that my best ideas are accidents within a controlled context. You could call them informed accidents. It’s about having a deep understanding of what you’re doing but, at the same time, being free enough to let the chips fall where they may. It’s about preparation, but it’s also about letting things happen… It seems that just by being open, you become a conduit for something else, something magical, something energising.

Art by the 16th-century Portuguese artist and mystic Francisco de Holanda. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Though faith is a portal into the unknown, it is also a revelation of truths we know deep down but easily forget in the swirl of everyday life’s cynicisms and shoulds — elemental knowledge that bubbles to the surface in those lovely moments when our own creative process surprises us, reveals us to ourselves.

In music, there is a particularly vivid manifestation of this self-revelation made possible by faith:

There have been moments when I’m singing a line I’ve written and suddenly I am overwhelmed by its intent. It’s like, “Okay! That’s what it’s about.” But that doesn’t mean I have attached an arbitrary meaning to it. The meaning was always there embedded in the song and waiting to reveal itself. It has taken me a long time to get there and have the confidence to do that. It requires a certain conviction to trust in a line that is essentially an image, a vision — a leap of faith into the imagined realm. I’m hoping that the image will lead me somewhere else that will be more revealing or truthful than a more literal line would be. It’s a matter of faith. What’s interesting, too, is that often, when I write a line that is essentially an image, it does something to me physically to write that line down, to articulate that image. I have a physical reaction to it that signifies its importance in the scheme of things.

Art by William Blake for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1796. (Available as a print.)

Echoing Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney’s life-tested insistence that “the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own secret knowledge,” he anchors his advice on the creative life in the importance of trusting that mysterious flow of revelation:

You have to have faith in your own intuitive process. That is really all you can do. I would say this to all people who are trying to become musicians or writers or artists of any kind: learn as much as you can about your craft, of course, but ultimately trust your own instinctive impulses. Have faith in yourself, so you can stand beside whatever it is you have done and fight for it, because if you can invest it with that faith, then it has its own truth, its own honesty, its own resilient vulnerability, and hence its own value.

Complement with Emerson on how to trust yourself and Lewis Hyde on what sustains the creative spirit, then revisit Nick Cave on songwriting, the antidote to our existential helplessness, and his wonderful life-advice to a teenager.

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