The price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we are powerless to keep the accidents from happening, the losses from lacerating, the galaxies from drifting apart.

Because our locus of choice is so narrow against the immensity of chance, nothing haunts human life more than the consequences of our choices, nothing pains more than the wistful wish to have chosen more wisely and more courageously — the chance untaken, the love unleapt, the unkind word in the time for tenderness. Regret — the fossilized fangs of should have sunk into the living flesh of is, sharp with sorrow, savage with self-blame — may be the supreme suffering of which we are capable. It poisons the entire system of being, for it feeds on the substance we are made of — time, entropic and irretrievable. It tugs at our yearning for, in James Baldwin’s perfect words, “reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error” and stings with the reminder that eventually “one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed.”

Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird

There is, therefore, no mightier spell against unhappiness than moving through the present in a way that preempts regret in the future — with integrity, with humility, with wholeheartedness.

That is what George Saunders reckons with in some lovely passages from his prophetic 2007 essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (public library).

In one of those tangents that give the essay form its fractal splendor, he writes:

You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away… That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?

[…]

At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

In a sentiment he would later deepen in his moving 2013 Syracuse commencement address, he adds:

So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?

My mind, my limited mind.

The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways.

In a wonderful aside from another essay, he offers what may be the best recipe for breaking out of the mind’s recursive and limiting stories:

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

Couple with artist Maira Kalman’s illustrated meditation on how to find joy on the other side of remorse and Ellen Bass’s superb poem “How to Apologize,” then revisit George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty.

A version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review.

A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know.

Clouds are almost as old as this world, born when primordial volcanos first exhaled the chemistry of the molten planet into the sky, but their science is younger than the steam engine. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, still in his twenties, noticed that clouds form in particular shapes under particular conditions. He set out to devise a classification system modeled on the newly popular Linnaean taxonomy of the living world, naming the three main classes cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, then braiding them into various sub-taxonomies.

When a German translation reached Goethe, the polymathic poet with a passion for morphology was so inspired that he sent fan mail to the young man who “distinguished cloud from cloud,” then composed a suite of verses for each of the main classes. It was Goethe’s poetry, translating the lexicon of an obscure science into the language of wonder, that popularized the cloud names we use today.

Rachel Carson, 1951

A century and a half later, six years before Rachel Carson awakened the modern ecological conscience with her book Silent Spring and four years after The Sea Around Us earned her the National Book Award as “a work of scientific accuracy presented with poetic imagination,” the television program Omnibus approached her to write “something about the sky,” in response to a request from a young viewer.

This became the title of the segment that aired on March 11, 1956 — a soulful serenade to the science of the clouds, emanating Carson’s ethos 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.”

Although celebrated for her books about the sea, Carson’s literary career had begun in the sky. She was only eleven when her story “A Battle in the Clouds” — a tale inspired by her brother’s time in the Army Air Service during World War I — was published in the popular young people’s magazine St. Nicholas, where the early writings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and E. E. Cummings also appeared. Despite her family’s meager means — a neighbor would recall stopping by at dinnertime and finding the Carsons gathered around a single bowl of apples — she enrolled in a women’s college aided by a $100 scholarship from a state competition, intent on studying literature at a time when fewer than four percent of women graduated from a four-year university.

And then, the way all great transformations slip in through the backdoor of the mansion of our plans, her life took a turn that shaped her future and the history of literature.

To meet the college science requirement she had put off for a year, Carson took an introductory biology course. She found herself enchanted by both the subject and its teacher: Miss Mary Scott Skinker, who wore miniskirts, taught cutting-edge disciplines like genetics and microbiology, and gave enthralling lectures on evolution and natural history that awakened in her students an awareness of the interdependence of life that would never leave Carson. By nineteen, she had changed her major to biology. But she never lost her love of literature. “I have always wanted to write,” Carson told her lab partner late one night. “Biology has given me something to write about.” She was also writing poetry, submitting it to various magazines, receiving rejection slip after rejection slip.

Somewhere along the way, as she followed in Skinker’s footsteps to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Observatory, then worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writing reports her boss deemed far too lyrical for a government publication and encouraged her to submit to The Atlantic Monthly, Carson realized that poetry lives in innumerable guises beyond verse, that the task of science is to discover the “wonder and beauty and majesty” inherent in nature. A lifetime later, she would rise from the table she shared with the poet Marianne Moore to receive her National Book Award with these words:

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction; it seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

If there was poetry in her writing, Carson believed, it was not because she “deliberately put it there” but because no one could write truthfully about nature “and leave out the poetry.”

It was a radical idea — that truth and beauty are not in rivalry but in reciprocity, that to write about science with feeling is not to diminish its authority but to deepen it. Rachel Carson was modeling a new possibility for generations of writers to come, blurring the line between where science ends and poetry begins in the work of wonder.

That was the ethos she took to “the writing of the wind on the sky,” detailing the science of each of the main cloud classes and celebrating them as “the cosmic symbols of a process without which life itself could not exist on earth.”

After coming upon fragments of Carson’s long-lost television script via Orion magazine, the artist Nikki McClure — who, like Carson, grew up in nature, worked for a while at the Department of Ecology, and finds daily delight in watching birds under the cedar canopy by her home — was moved to track down the complete original and bring it to life in lyrical illustrations: Something About the Sky (public library) was born.

Known for her singular cut-paper art, with its stark contrasts and sharp contours, she embraced the creative challenge of finding a whole new technique for channeling the softness of the sky. Using paper from a long-ago trip to Japan and sumi ink she freely applied with brushes, she let the gentle work of gravity and fluid dynamics pool and fade the mostly blue and black hues into textured layers — a process of “possibility and chance.” Then, as she recounts in an illustrator’s note at the back of the book, she “cut images with the paper, not just from it”: “The paper and I had a conversation about what might happen.”

What emerges is a tender visual poem, as boldly defiant of category as Carson’s writing.

Although Carson never wrote explicitly for children, she wrote in the language of children: wonder. Among the boxes of fan mail at the Beinecke is a letter from a geology professor who, after comparing her to Goethe, told her how enthralled his eight-year-old son was with her words.

Less than a year after Something about the Sky aired, Carson adopted her twice-orphaned grand-nephew Roger — the small boy romping across McClure’s illustrations. In what began as an article for Woman’s Home Companion and was later expanded into the posthumously published book The Sense of Wonder, she wrote:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

Couple Something About the Sky with the animated story of how the clouds got their names, then revisit Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work and the ocean and the meaning of life.

“We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything we know about the nature of the universe that the experience of freedom — which is different from the fact of freedom — is fundamental to our humanity; it is precisely because we were forged by these impartial forces, these handmaidens of chance, that our choices — which always have a moral valence — give meaning to reality.

Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944. (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive.)

Arendt’s rigorously reasoned, boundlessly mobilizing defiance of helplessness and “the stubborn humanity of her fierce and complex creativity” come abloom in We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (public library) — Lyndsey Stonebridge’s erudite and passionate celebration of what Arendt modeled for generations and goes on modeling for us: “determined and splendid goodwill, refusing to accept the compromised terms upon which modern freedom is offered and holding out for something new.”

Stonebridge, who has been studying Arendt for three decades, writes:

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a “post-truth era,” she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind.

Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print.

In consonance with George Saunders’s lovely case for the courage of uncertainty and his insistence that possibility is a matter of trying to “remain permanently confused,” Stonebridge writes:

Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.

Having “escaped from the black heart of fascist Europe and its crumbling nation states,” having witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and the rise of totalitarian regimes around the world, Arendt never stopped thinking and writing about what it means to be human — an example of what she considered the “unanswerable questions” feeding our “capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

Celebrating Arendt as a “conservationist” who “traveled back into the traditions of political and philosophical thought in search of new creative pathways to the present,” Stonebridge reflects:

Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point. How can we think straight amidst cynicism and mendacity? What is there left to love, to cherish, to fight for? How can we act to best secure it? What fences and bridges do we need to build to protect freedom and which walls do we need to destroy?

In my own longtime immersion in Arendt’s world, I have often shuddered at how perfectly her indictment of political oppression applies to the tyranny of consumerist society, although Arendt did not overtly address that. In this passage from Stonebridge, one could easily replace “Nazism,” “totalitarianism,” and “the Holocaust” with “late-stage capitalism” and feel the same sting of truth:

Nazism was undoubtedly tyrannical, and self-evidently fascist in its gray-black glamour, racist mythology, and disregard for the rule of law. However, Arendt argued that modern dictatorship had an important new feature. Its power reached everywhere: not a person, an institution, a mind, or a private dream was left untouched. It squeezed people together, crushing out spaces for thought, spontaneity, creativity — defiance. Totalitarianism was not just a new system of oppression, it seemed to have altered the texture of human experience itself.

[…]

The moral obscenity of the Holocaust had to be recognized, put on trial, grieved, and addressed. But it could not be made right with existing methods and ideologies… You cannot simply will this evil off the face of the earth with a few good ideas, let alone with the old ones that allowed it to flourish in the first place. You have to start anew.

One of English artist Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

This belief that “we are free to change the world and to start something new in it” animated Arendt’s life — a freedom she located not in what she termed reckless optimism (the divested shadow side of Rebecca Solnit’s notion of hope as an act of defiance), but in action as the crux of the pursuit of happiness — what Stonebridge so astutely perceives as “the determination to exist as a fully living and thinking person in a world among others.” She writes:

Freedom cannot be forced; it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it.

Echoing Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” she adds:

Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human condition.

Couple We Are Free to Change the World — a superb read in its entirety — with James Baldwin on the paradox of freedom, John O’Donohue on the transcendent terror of new beginnings, and Bertrand Russell on the key to a free mind, then revisit Arendt on how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world, the power of being an outsider, and what forgiveness really means.