For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue.

In a small clearing on the forest floor, the male weaves twigs and branches into an elaborate bower, which he decorates exclusively with blue objects — the blue tail-feathers of parakeets, blue flowers and berries, bones and shells so bleached by sun and sea as to appear bluish-white, and, in the past century, various souvenirs from the waste and want of our own species: blue plastic caps, blue candy wrappers, blue strings. These he arranges on a straw platform in the front, where he performs his ecstatic courtship dance whenever a female enters the bower to consider him as a mate.

Great Bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis) by Elizabeth Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Unlike the octopus, capable of seeing shades of blue we cannot conceive, bowerbirds have been found to have no optical advantage in perceiving this particular color — they appear simply to like it. It may have to do with how much more impressive it renders the male’s feat: Although we live on a Pale Blue Dot — the consequence of an atmosphere that bends sunlight to make the oceans blue — blue is the rarest color in the living world. Humans have waged wars over indigo and traded fortunes for lapis lazuli. Perhaps the bowerbird recognizes that no color is more precious than blue, and therefore none is more seductive — seduction so ornate and labor-intensive because the stakes of mating are so high: most bowerbird pairings are monogamous, produce very few eggs of enormous size relative to the bird, sometimes just a single one, and the males take an active part in rearing the chicks.

When the taxidermist turned zoological writer John Gould first popularized bowerbirds in the 1840s in his landmark book on the birds of Australia — rendered a bestseller largely thanks to the 600 consummately illustrated plates by his gifted and tragically fated wife Elizabeth — the purpose of the bowers was still a mystery. Watching both sexes “run through and around the bower in a sportive and playful manner,” he deduced that, contrary to what the first Western observers had assumed, these fanciful structures “are certainly not used as a nest,” but he could not discern their exact purpose. Some naturalists went as far as speculating they were “play-houses” the birds built simply to amuse themselves.

But within a quarter century, as theories of sexual selection cast a new light on the living world, Darwin — who regarded the bowers as “the most wonderful instances of bird-architecture yet discovered” — was able to conclude that they are the bowerbirds’ theater “for performing their love-antics,” built “for the sole purpose of courtship.”

Color chart from Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours — the revolutionary 19th-century chromatic taxonomy that inspired Darwin. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In his landmark 1871 book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin quotes an observer’s delightful account of what actually happens in this theater of blue:

At times the male will chase the female all over the aviary, then go to the bower, pick up a gay feather or a large leaf, utter a curious kind of note, set all his feathers erect, run round the bower and become so excited that his eyes appear ready to start from his head; he continues opening first one wing then the other, uttering a low, whistling note, and, like the domestic cock, seems to be picking up something from the ground, until at last the female goes gently towards him.

An epoch later, we know that the bowers are part of the bird’s extended phenotype — a term Richard Dawkins coined in 1982 to describe the genetically determined observable characteristics of an organism that extend beyond its body and into its behavior, affecting its environment and ecosystem. A beaver’s dam, which changes the course of rivers and the lives of myriad other animals, is part of the beaver’s extended phenotype. A city is part of ours, as is language. (Out of the extended phenotype arose the notion of the extended mind.)

Of the twenty known bowerbird species, all native to Australia and New Guinea, none is more aesthetically impressive than the Satin Bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus) of eastern and south-eastern Australia. The male — himself a living artwork with deep indigo plumage that shimmers like satin, wing-feathers of velvety black, a bright ivory-yellow beak, and otherworldly purple eyes — builds what is known as an avenue bower: a short corridor of twigs with opening at both ends, facing the veranda of blue.

But makes these cathedrals of courtship especially wondrous is the conceptual centerpiece of their design: female consent and freedom of choice.

Satin Bowerbird with bower by Elizabeth Gould. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

When a female enters the bower from the back, the male commences his hopeful dance of desire, fluffing out his wings and body feathers, occasionally picking up a blue object, holding it up to the female, and cocking his head as if to say, Isn’t this beautiful? Aren’t I a catch for knowing beauty? If she is sufficiently impressed, she remains in the bower and crouches into a low copulating posture, inviting him to circle around and mount her. If she finds him lacking, she simply walks through and exits, proceeding with her search for a mate of greater virtuosity in blue. After all this labor, the rejected male is left as living affirmation of Rebecca Solnit’s haunting rendering of blue as “the color of solitude and of desire.”

Donika Kelly animates the bowerbird’s plight of bittersweet beauty in a poem — that exquisite extended phenotype of the human species — from her altogether magnificent collection Bestiary (public library):

BOWER
by Donika Kelly

Consider the bowerbird and his obsession
of blue, and then the island light, the acacia,
the grounded beasts. Here, the iron smell of blood,
the sweet marrow, fields of grass and bone.

And there, the bowerbird.
Watch as he manicures his lawn, puts in all places
a bit of blue, a turning leaf. And then,
how the female finds him,
lacking. All that blue for nothing.

Complement with Maggie Nelson’s stunning ode to blue, then revisit the wonder of hummingbirds hovering between science and magic.

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel this truth deeply, daily — for nearly two decades of offering these writings freely, I have lived by the generosity of strangers.

It is especially gratifying to perpetuate the spirit of generosity if you have arrived at the ability to do so by way of struggle and privation. No one takes more joy in giving than those who come from little.

That is what the philosopher-poet May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores in a passage from her endlessly rewarding 1972 book Journal of a Solitude (public library).

May Sarton

In her sixtieth year, after decades of struggling to live by her pen as she went on channeling the human experience in her ravishing poems, Sarton finds herself at last solvent, and giddily so. Reflecting on her belief in the “free flow” of energy and means, she writes:

Both human problems and money flow out of this house very freely, and I believe that is good. At least, it has to do in both cases with a vision of life, with an ethos… I am always so astonished, after all the years when I had none, that I now have money to give away that sometimes I may speak of it out of sheer joy. No one who has inherited a fortune would ever do this, I suspect — noblesse oblige. No doubt it is shocking to some people. But I am really rather like a child who runs about saying, “Look at this treasure I found! I am going to give it to Peter, who is sad, or to Betty, who is sick.”

She offers a simple, lovely definition of wealth:

Being very rich so far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

Complement with John Steinbeck on the equally important art of receiving and Seneca on what it really means to be a generous human being, then revisit May Sarton on the cure for despair, the relationship between presence, solitude, and love, and the art of living alone.

Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world and to invent languages for channeling that wonder — the wonder of the inner world, the language for which is art, and the wonder of the outer world, the language of which is science. Binding the two and translating between them is the crowning glory of our consciousness: music.

How these two languages mirror and inform each other is what Philip Glass explores some lovely passages from his memoir Words Without Music (public library).

Celestial harmonics of the planets, from The Harmony of the World (1619) by Johannes Kepler, based on the Pythagorean concept of the Music of the Spheres.

Glass — who was grinding lenses and building telescopes at age eleven, and who has written more operas about science than any other composer — recounts the enchantment science cast upon him as a freshman at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, studying chemistry under a Nobel laureate who had chosen to teach eighty teenagers with electrifying enthusiasm for the subject — a testament to how one great teacher can shape a life, can set into motion the orrery of wonder from which all creative work springs. Looking back on these lectures, Glass recognizes the parallels of passion that great artists and great scientists share:

Professor Urey lectured like an actor, striding back and forth in front of the big blackboard, making incomprehensible marks on the board… His teaching was like a performance. He was a man passionate about his subject, and he couldn’t wait until we could be there at eight in the morning. Scientists on that level are like artists in a way. They are intensely in love with their subject matter.

What also shaped Glass’s creative spirit and his understanding of creativity was the school’s rather unusual choice to teach students from primary sources — the voices and visions of great artists, writers, and scientists rising from the page directly, unmediated by a biographer’s interpretation or a critic’s commentary. Not yet twenty, Glass and his classmates read Schrödinger and Dalton, Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, replicated Mendel’s fruit fly experiments and restaged Galileo’s rolling balls. Something more than learning emerged from this immersion — something radiant with understanding, a way of seeing how individual ideas fit in a larger framework of knowledge, the framework we call culture. Glass reflects on how this imprinted his imagination:

The study of science became the study of the history of science, and I began to understand what a scientific personality could be like. This early exposure would be reflected in Galileo Galilei, which I composed forty-five years later, in which his experiments become a dance piece — the balls and inclined planes are there. I found the biographical aspects of scientists intensely interesting, and the operas about Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein pay tribute to everything I learned about scientists and science that came out of those years.

With an eye to the singular power of this primary-source method of learning, he adds:

The effect on me was to cultivate and understand in a firsthand way the lineage of culture. The men and women who created the stepping-stones from earliest times became familiar to us — not something “handed down” but actually known in a most immediate and personal way… I now see clearly that a lot of the work I chose was inspired by men and women whom I first met in the pages of books. In this way, those early operas were, as I see it, an homage to the power, strength, and inspiration of the lineage of culture.

Looking back on his own creative trajectory, he reflects:

Music and science have been my great loves. I see scientists as visionaries, as poets… What interests me is how similar these visionaries’ way of seeing is to that of an artist. Einstein clearly visualized his work. In one of his books on relativity, trying to explain it to people, he wrote that he imagined himself sitting on a beam of light, and the beam of light was traveling through the universe at 186,000 miles per second. What he saw was himself sitting still and the world flashing by him at a really high speed. His conclusion was that all he had to do — as if it were a minor matter — was to invent the mathematics to describe what he had seen.

Illustration by Vladimir Radunsky for On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein by Jennifer Berne

Glass adds:

What I have to do when I compose is not that different. All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold.

Complement with physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and the shared psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science, then revisit the neurophysiology of how music enchants us and the story of how Pythagoras and Sappho revolutionized music.

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