We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made of concepts — the brain’s coping mechanism for the blooming buzzing confusion of what we are. We label, we classify, we contain — that is how we parse the maelstrom of experience into meaning. It is a useful impulse — without it, there would be no science or storytelling, no taxonomies and theorems, no poems and plots. It is also a limiting one — the most beautiful, rewarding, and transformative experiences in life transcend the categories our culture has created to contain the chaos of consciousness, nowhere more so than in the realm of relationships — those mysterious benedictions that bridge the abyss between one consciousness and another.

When we hollow the word friend by overuse and misuse, when we make of love a contract with prescribed roles and rigid, impossible expectations, we become prisoners of our own concepts. The history of feeling is the history of labels too small to contain the loves of which we are capable — varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again. It takes both great courage and great vulnerability to live outside concepts, to meet each new experience, each new relationship, each new emotional landscape on its own terms and let it in turn expand the terms of living.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

That is what Rhaina Cohen explores in The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center (public library) — a journalistic investigation of the vast yet invisible world of unclassifiable intimate relationships, profiling pairs of people across various circumstances and stages of life sustained by such bonds, people who have “redrawn the borders of friendship, moving the lines further and further outward to encompass more space in each other’s lives,” people who have found themselves in finding each other.

What emerges through this portrait of a type of relationship “hidden in plain sight” is an antidote to the tyranny of the “one-stop-shop coupledom ideal” and “an invitation to expand what options are open to us,” radiating a reminder that we pay a price for living by our culture’s standard concepts:

While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

A generation after Andrew Sullivan celebrated the rewards of friendship in a culture obsessed with romance, Cohen writes:

This is a book about friends who have become a we, despite having no scripts, no ceremonies, and precious few models to guide them toward long-term platonic commitment. These are friends who have moved together across states and continents. They’ve been their friend’s primary caregiver through organ transplants and chemotherapy. They’re co-parents, co-homeowners, and executors of each other’s wills. They belong to a club that has no name or membership form, often unaware that there are others like them. They fall under the umbrella of what Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, calls “other significant others.” Having eschewed a more typical life setup, these friends confront hazards and make discoveries they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

Noting that her interest in the subject is more than theoretical, catalyzed by her own expansive relationship with another woman in parallel with her marriage, Cohen considers these category-defying bonds as a countercultural act of courage and resistance:

I began to see how these unusual relationships can also be a provocation — unsettling the set of societal tenets that circumscribe our intimate lives: That the central and most important person in one’s life should be a romantic partner, and friends are the supporting cast. That romantic love is the real thing, and if people claim they feel strong platonic love, it must not really be platonic. That adults who raise kids together should be having sex with each other, and marriage deserves special treatment by the state.

With an eye to the long lineage of people who have defied the categories of their time and place — the kinds of people populating Figuring, which I wrote largely to explore such relationships — she adds:

Challenging these social norms is not new, nor are platonic partners the only dissidents. People who are feminists, queer, trans, of color, nonmonogamous, single, asexual, aromantic, celibate, or who live communally have been questioning these ideas for decades, if not centuries. All have offered counterpoints to what Eleanor Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Southampton, calls compulsory coupledom: the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood. This is a riff on the feminist writer Adrienne Rich’s influential concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” — the idea, enforced through social pressure and practical incentives, that the only normal and acceptable romantic relationship is between a man and a woman. Some of the first stories we hear as children instill compulsory coupledom, equating characters finding their “one true love” with living “happily ever after.”

[…]

It can be confusing to live in the gulf between the life you have and the life you believe you’re supposed to be living.

In the remainder of The Other Significant Others, Cohen relays the stories of people who have sliced through the confusion to build lives that serve them through tailor-made relationships that reward the deepest and truest parts of them, relationships that reimagine what it means to love and be loved, to see and be seen — relationships like those of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.

Complement it with poet and philosopher David Whyte on love and resisting the tyranny of relationship labels, then revisit Coleridge on the paradox of friendship and romantic love.

I grew up loving Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My grandmother read it to me before I could read. I read it to myself as soon as I could. I loved the strangeness of it, and the tenderness. As a child mathematician, I loved knowing that a grown mathematician had written it. But what I most loved about the story was Alice’s fearless curiosity and compassion as she encountered all the creatures populating Wonderland. I loved the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat and Bill the Lizard because Alice loved them.

This is what makes Wonderland Wonderland: To its denizens, it is just their world, mundane as life. “This is water.” What confers wonder upon it for the reader, what makes the story a story and not a vignette of ordinary life in an ordinary world, is the view through Alice’s wonder-smitten eyes as she moves through it, and wonder is the mightiest catalyst of care.

We care because she cares.

Art by Tove Jansson from a rare 1966 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In the century and a half since Lewis Carroll, a lineage of writers — Richard Jefferies, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Robert Macfarlane, Richard Powers — have applied that method to this world, reminding us that we too are living in a wonderland, as real as it is improbable, for nowhere else across the inky vastness of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems is there another world lush with life, as far as we yet know.

“Nature writing” and “environmental writing” are odd terms, one intimating that we ourselves are not nature (which Denise Levertov captured poignantly in her poem “Sojourns in the Parallel World”) and the other casting nature as something that surrounds us, in turn implying our centrality. Those writers who have gotten humanity to care about the natural world — which is the world — have done so because they themselves have moved through it with a sense of wonder, each of them an Alice making a Wonderland of Earth.

Art by Salvador Dalí from a rare 1969 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

This is what Jonathan Franzen affirms in a passage from his foreword to Spark Birds (public library) — a lovely Orion anthology of essays and poems celebrating the wonder of the feathered world, featuring such beloved voices as Mary Oliver, Terry Tempest Williams, and J. Drew Lanham, co-edited by Franzen himself.

With an eye to the basic A-to-B structure of a story propelled by a sense of purpose along the axis of its plot, he considers the challenge of creating a dramatic narrative around creatures whose primary purpose is basic survival, creatures “driven by desires the opposite of personal” and free from “ethical ambivalence or regret” — those marvelous, maddening complexities that make for the human drama. He writes:

Absent heavy-duty anthropomorphizing or projection, a wild animal simply doesn’t have the particularity of self, defined by its history and its wishes for the future, on which good storytelling depends. With a wild animal character, there is only ever a point A: the animal is what it is and was and always will be. For there to be a point B, a destination for a dramatic journey, only a human character will suffice. Narrative nature writing, at its most effective, places a person (often the author, writing in the first person) in some kind of unresolved relationship with the natural world, provides the character with unanswered questions or an unattained goal, however large or small, and then deploys universally shared emotions — hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment — to engage a reader in the journey. If the writing succeeds in heightening a reader’s interest in the natural world, it does so indirectly.

Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane — a visual dictionary of poetic spells resisting the erasure of nature’s language from our cultural lexicon.

Rachel Carson — who awakened the modern ecological conscience by making of science a magnifying lens for the inherent wonder of the natural world and rendering that wonder in the poetic language of universal emotion — conveyed this indirect enchantment in her magnificent National Book Award acceptance speech: “If there is poetry in my book about the sea,” she said at the ceremony where she shared a table with the poet Marianne Moore, “it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” In consonance with Carson’s credo that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race,” Franzen celebrates the power of writing with feeling, with wonder, with reverence for life:

We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is tell stories of people who do care, and hope that the caring is contagious.

Complement with marine biologist Andreas Weber on poetic ecology and the biology of wonder, then revisit Rachel Carson on writing.

Each time we have tried to elevate ourselves above the other animals by claiming singular possession of some faculty, we have been humbled otherwise: Language, it turns out, is not ours alone, nor is the use of tools, nor is music. Elephants grieve, octopuses remember and predict, crows hold grudges.

Perhaps one day this too will be snatched from us, but for now there seems to be one tumult of being pulsating in the human breast alone: the capacity to be sorry, to feel the soul-ache of remorse as the penitent past fangs the flesh of the present.

How to live with remorse, how to make of it a catalyst for creation, is what the philosopher-artist Maira Kalman explores in her small and splendid book Still Life with Remorse — a collection of miniature essays, poems, and painted vignettes reckoning with remorse through Maira’s own family story, punctuated by glimpses of the lives of some of her muses: Leo Tolstoy, Clara Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Henri Matisse.

Objects in Matisse’s Studio by Maira Kalman

Defining remorse as “deep regret implying shame, implying guilt, implying sorrow,” Maira observes that “in still lifes and interiors there must be a certain amount of remorse lurking among the bowls of fruit, vases or flowers and objects scattered about the room.”

Rising from the pages is the intimation that memory is the still life of living, that while remorse may haunt the mental images of our recollections, we can find in it an occasion for beauty, for creative vitality, for defiant joy.

Tolstoy Eating Breakfast by Maira Kalman

Opening with an allusion to that immortal line from Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — she considers the half-life of sorrow across generations:

Happy families,
Unhappy families.
All the same, right?
Ach. ach. ach.

To begin
You are born.
To a long line of ancestors
who are long gone
but still yell or whisper
in your ear
in the depths of night.
A game of telephone played
from one generation to the next.

Garbled and confused.
Glimmers of light.
Misunderstandings.
Errors.

And now, here you are.
With the ones you love.
Or the ones you don’t.

The ones you cannot live without.
The ones you would like to smite.

Those who have disappointed you
or betrayed you. Those who have
been kinder than you deserve. And
the kind ones who inevitably die.
And leave you feeling very much
alone. They are what you have.

And if you think, at any given point,
that you know what is going on,
you are sorely mistaken.

And yet.

With an eye to the complicated marriage of Sophia and Leo Tolstoy (so different from that of Anna and Fyodor Dostoyevsky) — the initial mutual infatuation, the thirteen children, the selflessness with which Sophia transcribed all of Leo’s writings, the mutual resentment of the end — she writes:

When trying to understand why human beings do what they do, a fog descends.

The verse to which Mahler wrote music becomes a quiet animating chorus for the book:

Dark is life.
Spring is here.
The birds are singing.

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Table by Maira Kalman

From the personal stories — her grandparents killed in the Holocaust, her father delivering milk as his cover while working for a Palestine liberation underground, Kafka’s troubled relationship with his own father, Clara Schumann’s tenacity and her tender unclassifiable relationship with Brahms — emerges a universal lens on suffering, remorse, and redemption, shining a sidewise gleam on what makes life worth living despite the almost unbearable brunt of being alive.

Your family.
My family.

Your remorse.
My remorse.

All the same, right?

Vast skies full of remorse.
Oceans of remorse.
But enough.

There should be merriment.
And good cheer.
Good tidings. Well wishing.

Tables laden with food.
Children playing.
Gathering of kinfolk.

Like Clara would have wanted.
Seeing the best.
Forgiving the worst.

If there is remorse,
let there be a limit to remorse.
A way to shake off the heavy weight.

But how can we make this happen?
How to do this?

Dark is life.
Spring is here.
The birds are singing.

In the strangeness of life, LIVE.

Yellow Vase by Maira Kalman

Couple with “Antilamentation” — poet Dorianne Laux’s antidote to regret — then revisit Maira Kalman’s wonderful Women Holding Things and her illustrated love letter to Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s love.

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

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