“Letting art is the paradox of active surrender,” Jeanette Winterson wrote in her superb meditation on how art transforms us. “I have to work for art if I want art to work on me.” But letting life is also a paradox of active surrender — we have to work for life too if we want life to work for us. (That is what Maya Angelou meant when she observed that “life loves the liver of it.”)

The paradox is that much of what we think is work at life — all the ways in which we try to bend reality to our will, all the ways in which we clutch at control (which only ever means the illusion of control) as an organizing principle — is in fact an escape from the true work, which is the work of letting go: letting go of the illusion, of the systems of belief and magical thinking by which we fancy ourselves in control.

The subtlety — sometimes devastating, sometimes deeply rewarding — lies in learning the difference between the false work and the true work of life: that elusive art of active surrender.

This is what Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) explores with uncommon self-awareness and sensitivity in one of the many miniature masterpieces of insight into human nature collected in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller (public library) — the record of the layered and durable relationship between these longtime lovers turned lifelong friends, comrades in the republic of literature, kindred rebels against the tide of convention and the tyranny of circumstance, forever bonded by their shared devotion to shaping themselves and reshaping their world through writing.

Henry Miller

From his home in Big Sur, he writes to her in the spring of 1946:

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that… if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing. To be able to put yourself in tune or rhythm with the forces beyond, which are the truly operative ones, that is the task — and the solution, if we can speak of “solutions.”

He observes that when we don’t fully surrender to those currents of life larger than us, some part of, however suppressed, knows it. Out of that quiet, gnawing knowledge arise the feelings of guilt that often haunts our days without an easily identifiable source — for the source lurks in those secret strata of being, half-opaque even to us. It is a wholly interior knowledge and a wholly interior guilt, impervious to outside judgment, independent of the external world. And yet, in our desperation to locate a source, we often project it outward and place it in others.

With his characteristic faith in human nature, Miller writes:

One thing I don’t worry about… is what people think, how they misinterpret things. There’s nothing you can do about that… What amazes me more and more is how much people do understand when you give them the full dose, when you hold back nothing.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai, 1831. (Available as a print.)

With an eye to the value of despair, he considers how only after hitting emotional rock-bottom are we fully receptive to those truths we spend our lives swimming away from; how the ego paddles at a frantic pace beneath the surface of illusion to keep us from sinking into the very surrender that is our redemption from struggle:

One has to permit people to become desperate, to become wholly lost, that only then are they ready for the right word, only then can they avail themselves of the truth. To withhold it then is a crime. But to nurse them along is a worse crime. And there is where much of the conflict centers, about that point. The human instinct to spare the other person his agony (which is his means of salvation, in any sense of the word) is a fallacious instinct. Here the subtle temptations, the vicious and insidious ones, because so confused and entangled, enter in. On this so-called human plane it is the ego which commands — often in the most amazing disguises. The temptation to be good, to do good, gets us all some time or other. It’s the last ruse, I feel, of the ego.

[…]

This clamor and agitation which I seem to create all about me, even from a distance, proceeds from me. I know it.

Henry Miller on his beloved bicycle

Sharing with Nin the news of an elder local woman’s extraordinary generosity in making his dream home available to him, giving it up herself for “it is now inside her [and] can’t be lost,” he adds:

Have I not become more and more aware latterly that the things I deeply desire come without struggle? … All the struggle, then, is phantom play. The fighting with shadows. This I know.

Complement with poet and philosopher David Whyte on the interplay of control and surrender in living with presence and some timeless wisdom on control, surrender, and the paradox of self-transcendence from Tove Jansson’s Moomins, then revisit Miller on the measure of a life well lived.

In the final year of his twenties, the Austrian physicist Victor Franz Hess (June 24, 1883–December 17, 1964) climbed into the basket of a balloon, carefully stationed the exquisitely precise new electroscopes he had built himself, and ascended into the sky to probe a mystery that had long puzzled scientists: the presence of ionizing radiation and electricity in the air. Hess flew day and night into the moody skies, through icy sunshine and black storms — a naked ape afloat five kilometers above his habitat on the wings of hydrogen and silk, risking his life for this one fragment of truth the way Caroline Herschel had risked hers for another a century-some earlier.

Hess on one of his balloon ascents, 1911.

Ever since the discovery of radioactivity in 1896, it was believed that any radiation in the atmosphere was emanating from radioactive elements in Earth’s rocky body, and should therefore decrease as distance from the surface increases. But Hess discovered something astonishing as he ascended, making meticulous measurements at regular intervals along the way: Radiation steadily decreased in the first kilometer from the surface, then began steadily increasing, registering the highest level at his greatest height.

He seemed to be was moving not farther from the source of this mysterious energy but closer to it.

It had to be coming from outer space.

In 1936, a quarter century after his balloon ascent, Hess won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cosmic rays. Albert Einstein bowed to him in his 1939 World’s Fair speech. Cosmic rays went on to revolutionize nuclear physics and the wonderland of subatomic particles, leading to the discovery of the muon — the electron’s heavy-set cousin — and the positron, the electron’s antimatter twin.

The Crab Nebula. Hubble Space Telescope / ESA. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Today, cosmic rays still carry with them a particulate cloud of mystery — a million cosmic rays go through your body each night while you sleep, but we don’t yet know where they come from. Most probably supernovae, but possibly also quasars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts. Some have been identified to originate in the Crab Nebula supernova remnant thousands of lightyears away. Some might be coming from one of the radio galaxies closest to Earth, Centaurus A. Cosmic rays detected on the International Space Station might hold clues to the supreme cosmic mystery of dark matter.

Months after Hess made his first balloon ascent, the Swiss physicist and meteorologist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (February 14, 1869–November 15, 1959) built a wondrously imaginative device for studying cloud formation and optical illusions in humid air, which would find an unexpected application in the study of cosmic rays and for which Wilson too would receive the Nobel Prize.

In his twenties, standing atop a mountain with his back to the Sun, Wilson had gasped at the enormous haloed shadow his body cast upon the distant clouds — an atmospheric phenomenon known as Brocken bow or mountain specter, produced when the tiny near-identical water droplets in clouds refract and backscatter sunlight.

Brocken spectre with glory. (Creative Commons photograph by Brocken Inaglory.)

He began building chambers to recreate this effect in the laboratory and quickly discovered that ions could act as the kernels, around which water molecules enflesh droplets.

Wilson perfected the first prototype in 1911, as Hess was soaring into the sky in his balloon, and called it a “cloud chamber.”

In the decades that followed, other scientists built on Wilson’s inventive particle detector. The year Hess won his Nobel Prize for the discovery of cosmic rays, the American physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr. — who had worked on the atomic bomb and became a vocal critic of nuclear weapons — reimagined the cloud chamber not with water but with alcohol, coolable to much lower temperatures before freezing, making it much more sensitive to ionization tracks.

Cloud chamber photograph of the first positron ever observed, entering from the lower left and curving toward the upper left after being slowed down by the lead plate at the center.

When the trays of alcohol are heated, the vapor sinks because alcohol molecules are heavier than air, supersaturating the chamber with vapor so that any littlest particle will kernel the condensation of droplets as subatomic particles collide with air molecules and fracture them into charged ions around which cloudlets condense — a fractal miniature of what happens when cosmic rays pass through Earth’s atmosphere, breaking air molecules apart into high-energy subatomic particles that then break more molecules apart and make more particles.

A century after Wilson’s birth, in the Summer of Love, NASA Ames Research Center donated one of their cloud chambers to the first exhibit at The Exploratorium — San Francisco’s magical museum of science and wonder, founded that year by Frank Oppenheimer.

Inside the cloud chamber, as cosmic rays drag subatomic particles through matter, they paint a constellation of wispy white lines left behind by muons traipsing through the liquid, dappled with some shorter, curlier electrons tracks and a handful of thicker scratches made by alpha particles — the nuclei of helium atoms. Suddenly, this the dazzling faraway mystery of cosmic rays is rendered intimate and visible, reminding us that we too are mostly restlessness and empty space.

Complement with this wonderful BBC In Our Time episode about cosmic rays, then revisit the story of how physicist Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission (and was excluded from the Nobel Prize for her own discovery, but went on to blast open the portal for women in science) and the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on what makes our atomic lives worth living.

“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his uncommonly insightful model of human relationships a generation after Borges insisted that time is the substance we are made of. It is the elementary particle of presence and the fundamental unit of attention — the two most precious resources we have, out of which every meaningful experiences is welded. To give a practice your time is an act of devotion. To give a person your time is a supreme act of love — for, as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”

It is no wonder, then, that in a culture of accelerating urgency and suffocating time-anxiety, we feel syphoned of the substance of our lives.

Discus chronologicus — an 18th-century German depiction of time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

How to break free from that cultural tyranny and reconnect with this deepest metaphysical dimension of aliveness is what philosopher Jacob Needleman (October 6, 1934–November 28, 2022) explores in his timelessly wonderful 1998 book Time and the Soul (public library).

With an eye to Wordsworth’s immortal indictment of our compulsive haste — “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” — Needleman frames the basic paradox of our relationship to time:

The question of our relationship to time is both a mystery and a problem. It calls to us from the deepest recesses of the human heart. And it bedevils us on all the surfaces of our everyday life. At the deeper levels, in front of the mystery of time, we are mortal beings solemnly aware of our finitude — longing, perhaps, for that in ourselves which partakes of the eternal. But at the surface levels of ourselves, in front of the problem of time, we are like frantic puppets trying to manage the influences of the past, the threats and promises of the future and the tense demands of the ever-diminishing present moment. The mystery of time has the power to call us quietly back to ourselves and toward our essential freedom and humanness. The problem of time, on the other hand, agitates us and “lays waste our powers.”

Writing in 1997, he diagnoses a new epidemic of “time-poverty” that has only deepened in the decades since:

We began to realize, dimly at first, that we were no longer living our lives. We began to see that our lives were living us. And we began to suspect that our relationship to time had become so toxic precisely because we had forgotten how to bring to our day-to-day lives the essential question of who and what a human being is and is meant to be.

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

Needleman — who went on to probe the mystery of what makes us who we are in his final book — considers “what it means to allow the mystery of time to irrigate our parched and driven lives” and offers a path to liberation from the problem of time, a portal into its mystery:

The pathology of our relationship to time can be healed only as we allow ourselves to be penetrated by the mystery of what we are beneath the surface of ourselves — by striving, that is, to remember our Selves.

[…]

The ego, the false self, [is] the root of all the evil that enters the earth and destroys human life, and with it, of course, the reality of time, the reality of lived presence. The ego lives only in the future and the past; it has no present moment; it is always hurrying or dreaming.

In consonance with the neuropsychological fact that attention is our only lens on reality, he weighs this fundament of our humanity against the absent-minded mechanization of our lives:

The essential element to recognize is how much of what we call “progress” is accompanied by and measured by the fact that human beings need less and less conscious attention to perform their activities and lead their lives. The real power of the faculty of attention… is one of the indispensable and most central measures of humanness.

[…]

In the world as in oneself, everything depends of the presence of humanness — in oneself it depends on the presence, even if only to a relative degree, of the Self, the real I am — and in the life of the world it depends on the presence of people who have and can manifest this capacity to be, or even only who wish for it and who come together to learn from each other and to help each other for that purpose.

Art by Stanislav Kolíbal from The Fairy Tale Tree, 1961

This attrition of presence, he observes, is maiming not only our individual inner lives but the inner life of humanity as we have come to mistake the right away of immediacy for the now of presence. Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have invented innumerable tools and technologies to save time but find ourselves wasting it more helplessly than ever. We can only save ourselves, Needleman intimates, by recalibrating our relationship to time, which is fundamentally our relationship to the self and to the meaning of human life. He writes:

The real significance of our problem with time… is a crisis of meaning… The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychological. It is metaphysical. It is a question of the meaning of human life itself.

At the center of our self-defeating challenge is an unexamined premise: We have framed time as a problem — the problem of how to structure and manage our lives — when it is best regarded as a question. (A problem is a judgment and all judgment is a straitjacket of understanding; a question is an invitation to wonder, which is the antipode of judgment.)

Needleman writes:

Such great questions cannot be answered with the part of the mind that solves problems. They need to be deeply felt and experienced long, long before they can begin to be answered. We need to feel the question of time much more deeply and simply than we do. We agitate about the problem of time, but we seldom feel what it means.

This is largely due to the general sublimation of feeling — the disconnect from our creaturely sensorium — in an age of disembodied technos. A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler cautioned against our enslavement by intelligent machines, Needleman writes:

The time of machines is not our own time. Human time is always… the time of a being or of beings who can in truth say I. In other cultures, perhaps less alienated from the teachings of wisdom, mankind lived in closer relationship to biological time, the pulses and rhythms of nature, the sun and the moon, the tides, the seasons, the light and darkness, all the measures and meters of the music of the earth and the skies. But even this time, this more natural time, is not in itself human time. Human time is always the time of the consciousness that says and means I, I am… To live in accordance with nature’s time is to allow the nature that is within us to beat with more synchronous rhythms — the body’s tempo, the tempos of organic love and fear and tenderness and anger; and the tempos and rhythms of the mind that searches, that needs to guide and receive the action of the senses, to plan and manage and to remember the gods, the greater forces… To live with these tempos and times more in harmony is to live in the time of earth and nature and to be a more ready receptacle for the consciousness that can truly say I am.

Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)

While biological time is still not entirely human time — it still unfolds on the material level of existence and not on the level of meaning — it is infinitely closer to human time than mechanical time, meted out by the hollow pulse-beat of the tools to which we have relinquished the management of meaning. An epoch before AI came to mediate and menace our reach for meaning, Needlman adds:

By governing our own inner world through mechanical, computer time, we are running one part of our nature with a time and a tempo so far removed from the time of our body and our feeling that there is less and less possibility of these central parts of ourselves coming into relationship. And only in the relationship, the actual harmonic contact, between the main sources of perception and energy in ourselves can there be a medium through which the authentic self can appear and act in us.

In the remainder of Time and the Soul, Needlman sets out “to uncover the link between our pathology of time and the eternal mystery of what a human being is meant to be in the universal scheme of things.” Complement it with Oliver Burkeman, writing an epoch of technology later, on escaping the time-anxious trap of efficiency and Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovely “Hymn to Time,” then revisit Einstein’s Dreams — physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic exploration of time and the antidote to our existential anxiety.

A charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.

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