That one mind can reach out from its lonely cave of bone and touch another, express its joys and sorrows to another — this is the great miracle of being alive together. The object of human communication is not the exchange of information but the exchange of understanding. If we are lucky enough, if we are attentive enough, communication then becomes a system for the transfer of tenderness. That we have invented so many forms of it — the language of words, the language of music, the language of flowers — is a testament to our elemental need for this exchange.

A bright and immeasurably tender celebration of that need comes from French author Élise Fontenaille and Spanish artist Violeta Lópiz in their lovely collaboration At the Drop of a Cat (public library).

We meet a six-year-old boy just learning to read and write in his grandfather Luis’s house — a house Luis has built with his own hands, surrounded by a garden full of artichokes the size of heads and green beans climbing into the sky — a garden that “feels like a whole other world.”

Through the little boy’s unjudging eyes, in illustrations as textured and layered as a life well lived, a loving portrait of Luis emerges — his green thumb and the way he “speaks bird language,” his gifts for painting and cooking, his many tattoos, his thick Spanish accent and his charming misuse of idioms: He calls his grandson “the apple of his pie” and loves the expression “at the drop of a cat,” of which the little boy is so fond that he continues using it in school despite his teacher’s correction.

As the portrait unfolds, we realize that Luis misuses idioms because he has only ever heard them spoken, in a foreign tongue: When he was a little boy himself, having spent his childhood working in the fields, he fled war-torn Spain and “crossed mountains and hills and the countryside until he got to France.” He never went to school, never learned to write. Instead, he developed his own language of belonging — a living lexicon for feeling at home in the living world.

And that is how Luis communicates with his grandson — in the language of plants, in the language of paintings, in the language of love.

They draw together in the garden, forage in the meadow, and luxuriate in each other’s light as Luis plays his guitar under the cherry tree.

Radiating from the pages is the great tenderness that blooms between the young boy and the old man as they try to understand each other, to inhabit each other’s inner garden.

The day comes when the child reads a poem to his grandfather — he has finally learned to read and write, but he has also learned something else: that there are many languages of connection, each with its own dignity and delight, each an outstretched hand reaching for another.

Couple At the Drop of a Cat with What Is Love? — a kindred reckoning with the consolations of connection, told through the tender relationship between a child and a grandparent — then revisit The Forest — a love letter to our bond with the wilderness, also illustrated by Violeta Lópiz.

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and rapturous, unmediated by interpretation.

Eight centuries before the birth of photography, Alhazen gave the first clear description of a camera obscura, which he constructed to observe a partial solar eclipse. Drawing on his experiments with pinhole projection, he became the first person to proffer a correct theory of vision, refuting the two competing theories that had been dominating since Ancient Greece: that we see by emitting rays of light from our eyes, as Euclid and Ptolemy believed, and that sight is the product of objects entering the eye as physical forms, as Aristotle believed. After conducting various experiments on reflection and refraction with lenses and mirrors, he correctly described the anatomy of the eye as an optical system, laying the groundwork for the entwined history of vision and consciousness.

Alhazen’s description of the human optical system.

To avoid persecution by the tyrannical caliph whose ire he had spurred, Alhazen feigned insanity and was placed under house arrest. There, he spent a decade detailing his experiments and reckoning with their far-reaching implications in his revolutionary seven-volume Book of Optics, which went on to influence Galileo and Kepler, Descartes and Newton, Da Vinci and Chaucer.

Half a millennium before Copernicus, he criticized Ptolemy’s cosmology in a treatise titled Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum (Doubts on Ptolemy). On its pages, he formulates what is essentially the first succinct description of the scientific method, five centuries ahead of its bloom in the Renaissance. In this regard, Alhazen could be considered the first true scientist, eight centuries before the word itself was coined (incidentally, for a woman).

Nearly a millennium before Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit for critical thinking, Alhazen writes (as translated by the late Harvard scholar Abdelhamid Ibrahim Sabra):

Truth is sought for itself; and in seeking that which is sought for itself one is only concerned to find it… The seeker after the truth… is not he* who studies the writings of the ancients and… puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. It is thus the duty of the man who studies the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. If he follows this path, the truths will be revealed to him, and whatever shortcomings or uncertainties may exist in the discourse of those who came before him will become manifest.

Complement with Galileo on critical thinking and the folly of believing our preconceptions and Bertrand Russell on the will to doubt, then revisit the illustrated story of Alhazen’s polymathic Persian contemporary Ibn Sina, who shaped the course of medicine.

It says something about our species that we have eradicated smallpox and invented vaccines and antibiotics for yellow fever and the Black Death, but war continues to plague us; that in the past century — this supposed pinnacle of enlightened modernity — war has claimed or maimed more of our children’s lives than any virus or bacterium. It says something about both our immense imagination and our immense blind spots: Our species’ failure to eradicate war is a failure of the imagination, a failure to imagine what it is like to be anybody else, without which there can be no empathy and compassion — those vital molecules of harmony, the other name for which is peace.

While I stand with Kathleen Lonsdale on the question of war, I also understand that there are myriad complexities keeping human beings from simply refusing to take part. On the phone with a poet friend the other night, sorrowing with heartbreak for the lives with hopes and dreams and loves slain at that very moment on the other side of our pale blue dot by this failure of the imagination, she read to me a passage from Sapiens author Yuval Harari’s op-ed in TIME Magazine, capturing with such openhearted clarity the human predicament in wartime. His words, so deeply personal yet so perspectival, came as a spell against hatred, summoning into being the part of the human spirit we must nourish so that there may be no more war — in the world, and in the heart. Hearing them was a salve for me that night.

Illustration by Oleksandr Shatokhin from Yellow Butterfly — a tender wordless story about war, hope, and keeping the light alive.

Harari writes:

Most Israelis are psychologically incapable at this moment of empathizing with the Palestinians. The mind is filled to the brim with our own pain, and no space is left to even acknowledge the pain of others. Many of the people who tried to hold such a space… are dead or deeply traumatized. Most Palestinians are in an analogous situation — their minds too are so filled with pain, they cannot see our pain.

But outsiders who are not themselves immersed in pain should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only part of the terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders to help maintain a space for peace. We deposit this peaceful space with you, because we cannot hold it right now. Take good care of it for us, so that one day, when the pain begins to heal, both Israelis and Palestinians might inhabit that space.

Complement with Einstein and Freud’s little-known correspondence, penned in the interlude between two World Wars, about human nature, war, and the path to peace, and Tolstoy and Gandhi, corresponding in the first years of the first century of World Wars, on why we hurt each other and how to stop, then revisit Jane Hirshfield’s magnificent poem “Spell to Be Said Against Hatred.”

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