How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyond why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the reason you love one and not another. The feeling trembling beneath the fact — the brutal knowledge that everything we love is irreplaceable yet will be lost: to dissolution and death, to rejection and indifference, to our own return to stardust — is the hardest thing to bear, the thing for which we have devised our most elaborate theaters of denial.

Among those coping mechanisms is the invention of sentimentality. “Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality,” Carl Jung wrote. Its strange psychological machinery is what the poet Mark Doty explores with uncommon insight and sensitivity in a passage from his wonderful memoir Dog Years (public library).

He writes:

The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protect its maker, as well as the audience, from anger. At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world — our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other — how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love — they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt — these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace. They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm. It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable. In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable. (Why don’t you just get another dog?) The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness. But it is, I supposed, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable.

Art by Margaret C. Cook for a 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Of course, our fury at entropy is the great motive force of our creativity — we make art to make meaning out of our mortality, to counteract its brutality with beauty. Every creative act is an act of consolation for our transience, for our despair about our transience. A century after Albert Camus insisted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Doty contemplates this fundamental equivalence of existence:

Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation. Perhaps it’s less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will? The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it. Fine, says the world, don’t accept it. The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away. To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish — does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

Complement with Annie Dillard on how to bear your mortality and D.H. Lawrence on the best lifelong preparation for death, then revisit Doty’s magnificent Whitman-lensed reflection on the courage to love despite the certitude of loss.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” the great nature writer Henry Beston wrote in his lovely century-old meditation on otherness and the web of life. “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

In the century since, we have come to unravel some of the wonders of the non-human sensorium — from the tetrachromatic vision of bees to the choral communication of migrating birds to the magnificent eye of the scallop. But few animal sensoria are more marvelously other than the ability of owls to see with sound, partway between synesthesia and advanced mathematical computation.

Art by JooHee Yoon from Beastly Verse

The visual system of owls is already astonishing enough, a hundred times more light-sensitive than that of a pigeon and capable of seeing ultraviolet light. Their enormous tubular eyes admit more daylight and have more cells to process photons than the eyes of birds with much sharper daytime vision. While the retinae of most birds are dominated by cones — photoreceptors tuned to bright light and tasked with color detection — the retinae of owls contain more than 90% rods, tuned to low light and sensitive to movement: the elements of hunting at night.

And yet the most extraordinary aspect of owl vision takes place not in their eyes but in their ears — theirs is one of the most sensitive auditory systems in nature, connected to one of the most computationally impressive brains.

In 1978, neurobiologists Eric Knudsen and Masakazu Konishi set out to illuminate its mysteries. Enlisting the help of an engineer who had worked on NASA’s Viking spacecraft — humanity’s historic reach for Mars — they sent a loudspeaker circling the head of an owl along a light-rail, traveling at a constant distance from the owl’s head: part halo and part ring of Saturn. Observing the neural response, they discovered something never before seen in nature — particular auditory neurons in the owl’s brain were responding only when a sound was coming from a particular direction: geolocation not by satellite but by sound, doing overground what cetaceans do underwater.

Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells

Recounting the research in her altogether fascinating book What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (public library), Jennifer Ackerman writes:

By comparing the responses to sound by neurons in the cochlea of both ears, the brain builds a kind of multidimensional map of auditory space. This allows owls to fix the location of prey with speed and precision.

[…]

Animals have brain maps for vision and touch, but these are built from visual images and touch receptors that map onto the brain through direct point-to-point projections. With ears, it’s entirely different. The brain compares information received from each ear about the timing and intensity of a sound and then translates the differences into a unified perception of a single sound issuing from a specific region of space. The resulting auditory map allows owls to “see” the world in two dimensions with their ears.

Owls from The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, 1830s. (Available as a print and stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

This research laid the foundation of studying how all animal brains appraise their environment through sound, leading to the development of a new diagnostic test for hearing loss in human infants — something notoriously difficult to test in nonverbal creatures. But the owl brain itself remained a frontier of fascination.

As other neuroscientists picked up the thread, they discovered that a barn owl’s brain performs complex mathematical computations to accomplish this spatial specificity, not merely adding and multiplying signals but engaging in a kind of probabilistic statistical calculation known as Bayesian inference. (If there is anything to settle the debate about whether humans have discovered or invented mathematics, here is blazing evidence that this is a fundamental language of nature in constant dialogue with living systems.)

Further research into the brain anatomy of owls revealed something even more astonishing: part of their hearing nerve branches off into the optical center of the brain, so that auditory input is processed by the visual system — literally a way of seeing with sound.

Owl from Lydekker’s 1893 natural history of owls. (Available as a print and a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy.)

Couple the science of the owl with its poetry in Mary Oliver’s lovely meditation on the owl as a lens on the interconnectedness of life, then revisit the poetic science of how vision shaped consciousness.

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective. Months shy of 100, Helen had been born into a world war, survived the Holocaust, and fled from Poland to America without speaking a word of English before becoming a professor of English literature for half a century.

I asked her what to do, where the hope lies.

Her response was simple, profound.

“The most hideous crime against humanity,” she reminded me, began with a legal election. It is not, therefore, purely on the level of politics that we avert the unconscionable. It begins deeper, she said: in the moral foundation of the people, which is laid early in life; it begins with the impulses we nurture in our young.

Half a century earlier, the pioneering scientist and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale had arrived at the same conclusion in her superb manifesto for what makes peace possible. But it was another woman of uncommon brilliance and moral courage, writing amid the bloodiest revolution the world had yet seen, that first articulated the urgency of planting the seeds of compassion, out of which all social harmony blooms, in the fallow hearts of children.

Sophie de Grouchy, self-portrait, 1790s

Born in an era when women were barred from formal education and all institutions of political, intellectual, and creative life, Sophie de Grouchy (April 8, 1764–September 8, 1822) was still a girl when she learned English, Latin, Italian, and German by sitting in on her brothers’s studies, not being allowed to have a tutor of her own; soon, she was teaching the boys herself. By the time she was a teenager, her bedtime reading was Marcus Aurelius, whose teachings on kindness left a deep impression.

Determined to grow both intellectually and morally, Sophie made frequent visits to the local poor with her mother and her sister to offer compassion and comfort. In this living laboratory of sympathy, she came to see how entwined the wellbeing of others is with one’s own, how enmeshed we are in what Martin Luther King, Jr. would call “an inescapable network of mutuality a quarter millennium later.

Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

After discovering philosophy — Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau — she grew disenchanted with the unprovable promises of religion. Upon announcing her atheism, her mother burned all of Sophie’s books.

She was twenty-two when she met the philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet, twice her age. He was as taken with Sophie’s intellect as he was with her moral courage — in one of their first encounters, he watched her throw herself between a rabid dog and a boy she was tutoring. Within weeks, they were married. After helping Condorcet set up a new lyceum where celebrated philosophers and scholars taught, she devoured the curriculum herself, studying mathematics, botany, history. She started taking painting lessons. She joined one of the first anti-slavery clubs.

And then she began writing.

While most of her writing is now lost, one masterwork survives — her translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Published to earn money when her husband was killed in the Reign of Terror and she lost all her property, it embodies what the poet Wisława Szymborska would call “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes…. a second original.” Appended to it is her entirely original Letters on Sympathy (public library) — Sophie de Grouchy’s leap from the springboard of Smith’s theories into her own singular moral cosmogony.

Although it appeared as an afterword to her translation of Smith in 1798, Sophie had been working on Letters on Sympathy for seven years, beginning when she was only twenty-seven and the French Revolution was raging around her. Rising from its pages are ideas epochs ahead of their time: Not long after Descartes declared nonhuman animals mere automatons, and very long before Jane Goodall lit the dawn of understanding animal consciousness, she insisted that animals are “sensitive beings” capable of empathy; two centuries before the discovery of mirror neurons, she wrote of how our sympathy is activated “when we see a sensible being suffer.” At the heart of her theory is the recognition that we are endowed with “a secret impulse to understand the troubles of others as soon as we suspect their existence,” but that this impulse atrophies if we fail to nourish it from the start and exercise it regularly.

Illustration by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird

Anchoring her argument is an impassioned appeal to parents and educators — one just as urgent today, and perhaps even more so in our age of competitive parenting that scars children’s souls with the tyranny of achievement and trains them to measure themselves by the trappings of outward success rather than by the scope of their sympathy. She writes:

It seems clear that the more we exercise our sensitivity, the stronger it becomes… When it is not exercised, sensitivity tends to weaken… How important it must be, therefore, to exercise children’s sensitivity to the point where it will continue to develop as much as it is capable of — so that it can no longer be dulled by those things in life that tend to lead sensitivity astray. These things lead us far from nature and ourselves by focusing our sensitivity on vain and selfish passions, leading us away from simple tastes, and from those natural leanings in which the happiness of each person resides, the kind of happiness that does not require the sacrifice of others and that benefits all. Fathers, mothers, teachers — you nearly have in your hands the destiny of the next generation! How guilty you are if you allow your children to abort these precious germs of sensitivity which require, for their development, nothing more than the sight of suffering, the example of compassion, the tears of gratefulness, and an enlightened hand leading and moving them! How guilty you are if you care more about your children’s success than about their virtue, if you are more impatient to see them gain popularity in their circle than to see their heart brim with indignation for an injustice, their faces turn pale at the sight of suffering, their hearts treat all men as brothers!

She offers a timeless recipe for cultivating that vital sensitivity in children:

Teach them to be easily remorseful, delicately proud, and honest; let them not see suffering without being tormented by the need to bring relief. No less is needed in the midst of these oppressive barriers, raised between man and man from need, strength, and vanity, but that they should fear at each step to hurt rights or to neglect to repair some ancient wrong! That the sweet habit of doing good should teach them that it is through the heart that they will find happiness, and not through titles, luxury, dignities, or riches!

Complement with Kahlil Gibran’s poignant advice on parenting and the great cellist Pablo Casals on how to make this world worthy of its children, then — because books are the finest instrument we have invented for magnifying empathy — revisit Mary Shelley’s philosopher-father William Godwin, writing in Sophie de Grouchy’s day, on how to raise a reader.

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