Trees are unworded thoughts, periscopes of perspective. They are both less alive than we think and more sentient than we thought. In them, we see what we are and see what we can be. From them, we draw our best metaphors for love, for art, for happiness.

Crowning the canon of branched reflections on what it means to be human is the poem “Being but Men” by Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).

Written in 1939 — a time when we were all “men,” a time when Thomas was only twenty-five — and posthumously included in the indispensable Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), it came alive anew at the 2020 Universe in Verse, celebrating fifty years of Earth Day, in a reading by astronomer Natalie Batalha, who spearheaded NASA’s Kepler mission and its search for habitable worlds outside our solar system and who prefaced her reading with a personal reflection as poetic as the poem:

BEING BUT MEN
by Dylan Thomas

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

Complement with astronaut Leland Melvin — one of a handful of humans in the history of our species to have seen Earth’s trees from the dwelling place of the stars — reading Pablo Neruda’s love letter to the forest, Mary Oliver’s poem “When I Am Among the Trees,” and Annie Dillard on what mangrove trees teach us about our search for meaning in an impartial universe, then revisit a rare recording of Dylan Thomas reading his iconic poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” along with the story behind it — a poem popularized among a new generation by the final scene of Interstellar, a film entertaining in science fiction the possibilities Natalie’s work in science holds for our shared future as sojourners in space.

Savor more highlights from The Universe in Verse — a charitable celebration of science and the wonder of nature through poetry — here.

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success,” Thoreau wrote in his lovely case for defining you own success. But in the century and a half between his time and ours, we have increasingly shifted our definitions of success from the immaterial to the material, from the interior to the exterior, from the private to the public. And in that shift, we have incurred a peculiar and perilous blindness to the moral and humanistic dimensions of success — to how being a good human being and a good member of a community, of a society, of humanity itself factors into being a successful individual.

A mighty antidote to the blind cult of success came from Theodore Roosevelt (October 27, 1858–January 6, 1919) in his superb Sorbonne address, originally delivered in Paris on April 23 of 1910 under the title “Citizenship in a Republic” and later published as “Duties of the Citizen” in the 1920 volume Roosevelt’s Writings (public library) — the same twenty-seven-page masterpiece of a speech that gave us Roosevelt on the cowardice of cynicism and the courage to create rather than tear down.

Theodore Roosevelt

The qualities Roosevelt ascribes to good citizenship are the selfsame qualities that define success in any meaningful realm of human endeavor, be it art or science or entrepreneurship:

The good citizen in a republic must realize that the ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and that he also must have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.

And yet efficiency alone, Roosevelt cautions, is not only insufficient but can even be dangerous to society if aimed at an ethically unsound end. To borrow Schopenhauer’s excellent distinction between talent and genius — “Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target… which others cannot even see.” — the genius of the good citizen and the successful individual, for Roosevelt, is predicated not merely on hitting the target well, but on hitting the right kind of target in a moral sense. He writes:

Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from Pinocchio: The Origin Story

Nearly a century before Carl Sagan called for moving beyond “us” vs. “them” by bridging conviction with compassion, Roosevelt adds:

In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.

Art by Maurice Sendak from We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy

With an eye to the most dangerous embodiment of success as self-interest unmoored from social and moral responsibility, Roosevelt issues an admonition of chilling prescience in the context of a Trumped society:

Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic… It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess… If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.

Complement this particular portion of Roosevelt’s Writings with Georgia O’Keeffe on success and public opinion, Dostoyevsky on creative integrity and success, and Victorian novelist Amelia E. Barr’s nine rules for success, then revisit Susan Sontag on what it means to be a decent human being.

After the glorious accident of having been born at all, there are myriad ways any one life could be lived. The lives we do live are bridges across the immense river of possibility, suspended by two pylons: what we want and what we make. In an ideal life — a life of purpose and deep fulfillment — the gulf of being closes and the pylons converge: We make what we want to see exist.

This interplay is what Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) explores throughout Parable of the Talents (public library) — the second part of her oracular Earthseed allegory, which also gave us Butler’s acutely timely wisdom on how (not) to choose our leaders.

Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world.

More than a century after Walt Whitman — another rare seer of truths elemental and eternal, another poetic prophet of the world to come, who made what he wanted to see exist and in making it helped bring that world about — wrote that “there is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,” Butler writes:

Self is.

Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self
invents its own reasons for being. To shape God, shape Self.

[…]

All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them
Will determine who you become.

Butler’s sentiment is only magnified by knowing that the word desire derives from the Latin for “without a star,” radiating a longing for direction. It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.

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

To become, of course, is no easy task — to become, that is, what you yourself desire to be, without mistaking your culture’s or your idols’ or your lover’s desires for your own. E.E. Cummings knew this when he wrote half a century before Butler that “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” You win the fight, Butler intimates, by the clarity of your purpose and the perseverance with which you pursue it:

If you want a thing — truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.

To want what you want so fiercely, to love it so absolutely, is not a personal indulgence in hubris or delusion — it is, Butler affirms, the mightiest antidote to the terrors of being alive and, in consequence, the fuel for your most generous contribution to the world:

Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.

Enlivening as this notion might be, even more enlivening is its manifestation in the shared struggle — for at its best, the art born of these private obsessions in the crucible of the Self goes on to touch other Selves, dissolving the isolating illusion of separateness and aloneness to furnish, in Iris Murdoch’s lovely phrase, “an occasion for unselfing.”

Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings