“Obviously, if you don’t love life, you can’t enjoy an oyster,” Eleanor Clark wrote in the book that won her the National Book Award, published exactly 100 years after On the Origin of Species. For Darwin, these strange and quietly wondrous creatures furnished a different kind of enjoyment. He had come under their spell as a college student, accompanying two of his mentors as they waded into tidal pools to collect oyster specimens. By twenty-five, having fused the enchantment of oysters with his growing passion for the deep time of geology, he was exulting to a friend:

When puzzling about stratifications, etc., I feel inclined to cry “a fig for your big oysters, and your bigger megatheriums” [extinct prehistoric giant sloths].

As natural history, evolution, and anatomy began revealing the unsuspected complexity of this organism long perceived as incredibly simple — and, in consequence, treated more like a lifeless rock than like a creature — to “enjoy” an oyster in the culinary sense became a less carefree endeavor. The biologist and anatomist T.H. Huxley — Darwin’s greatest champion against the first tidal wave of dogmatic attacks on evolutionary theory — captured the dismantling of the convenient delusion:

I suppose that when the sapid and slippery morsel — which is gone like a flash of gustatory summer lightning — glides along the palate, few people imagine that they are swallowing a piece of machinery (and going machinery too) greatly more complicated than a watch.

Art from “The Oyster: A Popular Summary of a Scientific Study,” 1891. (Available as face mask, and stationery cards, benefitting the Billion Oyster Project.)

From the dawning scientific knowledge of the oyster, a different kind of enjoyment arose — a kind consonant with Richard Feynman’s Ode to a Flower. Here was a creature at once rugged and tender, like life itself. Here was an emissary of a primordial Earth that carries the ancestral root of consciousness — that crucible of our capacity for enjoyment — in its tiny brain and nervous system fringed with a dark mantle of myriad nerve endings ceaselessly scanning the environment for threat and dispatching signals to the brain to slam the shell shut.

Out of such simplicity arose cognition, consciousness, the emotional machinery of love. All these billions of years of evolution, and we still the same impulse animates our days and our songs — what to seal in, what to keep out, what to trust.

Art from “The Oyster: A Popular Summary of a Scientific Study,” 1891. (Available as a print, a face mask, and stationery cards, benefitting the Billion Oyster Project.)

But the history of our species is the history of convenient delusions — those willful blindnesses that allow us to live with ourselves: By the end of the nineteenth century, oysters were being sold by the bushel at three for a penny and eaten by the dozen at fine restaurants and street foodcarts alike. An entire industry of shuckers employed a whole new labor force. There were oyster-eating championships and champions who could open and eat 100 oysters in three minutes. Travelers remarked that in New York, “oysters in every size and variety of flavor are as cheap as oranges are at Havana.”

By the final decade of the century, early voices of dissent and ecological wakefulness were being raised. In the 1891 book The Oyster: A Popular Summary of a Scientific Study, the Johns Hopkins University zoologist William K. Brooks cautioned:

The fact, which for many years we strove to hide even from ourselves, [is] that our indifference and lack of foresight, and our blind trust in our natural advantages, have brought this grand inheritance to the verge of ruin. Unfortunately this is now so clear that it can no longer be hidden from sight nor explained away, and every one knows that, proud as our citizens once were of our birthright in our oyster-beds, we will be unable to give to our children any remnant of our patrimony unless the whole oyster industry is reformed without delay. We have wasted our inheritance by improvidence and mismanagement and blind confidence.

Gilded oyster from the cover of “The Oyster: A Popular Summary of a Scientific Study,” 1891. (Available as a print, a face mask, and stationery cards, benefitting the Billion Oyster Project.)

More than a century later, with the Atlantic Coast oyster beds overfished to the brink of ruin and entire marine ecosystems devastated by pollution, Mark Kurlansky picks up the admonition and hones it on an edge of optimism in his fascinating book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (public library). Lamenting that “the only thing New Yorkers ignore more than nature is history” — a statement as true if we substituted “Americans” (as a national identity) or “modern humans” (as a civilizational identity) for “New Yorkers” — he writes:

The history of New York oysters is a history of New York itself — its wealth, its strength, its excitement, its greed, its thoughtlessness, its destructiveness, its blindness and — as any New Yorker will tell you — its filth. This is the history of the trashing of New York, the killing of its great estuary.

New York is a city that does not plan; it creates situations and then deals with them. Most of its history is one of greedily grabbing beautiful things, destroying them, being outraged about the conditions, tearing them down, then building something else even further from nature’s intention in their place.

Writing nearly a decade before the founding of the Billion Oyster Project — one of the most inspired and inspiring restoration, conservation, and ecological education endeavors of our time — Kurlansky regards the extraordinary resilience of the oyster against a century of overfishing and pollution to envision a future in which the restoration of the oyster is both a function of and a catalyst for the restoration of our humbler and more harmonious relationship with the natural world:

A fresh oyster from a clean sea fills the palate with the taste of all the excitement and beauty — the essence — of the ocean. If the water is not pure, that, too, can be tasted in the oyster. So if someday New Yorkers can once again wander into their estuary, pluck a bivalve, and taste the estuary of the Hudson in all the “freshness and sweetness” that was once there, the cataclysm humans have unleashed on New York will have been at last undone.

For a lovely real-life helping of actionable optimism, join me in supporting the noble work of the Billion Oyster Project with a donation, then revisit the great marine biologist and epoch-making voice of ecological conscience Rachel Carson on science as a portal to our spiritual bond with nature and how the ocean illuminates the meaning of life.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos,” Frankenstein author Mary Shelley observed in contemplating how creativity works. All creative people recognize this chaos — the chaos of influences, inspirations, memories, and stimulations, cross-pollinating in the mind to germinate the seed of something we dare call original: our very own contribution to the world, tessellated of these myriad existing worlds we carry within us. Rilke knew this when we composed his exquisite meditation on inspiration and the combinatorial nature of creativity: “For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning… One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others… One must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window…” Whitman, too, knew it when he composed his tenets of creation: “All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.”

The influential photographer Edward Weston (March 24, 1886–January 1, 1958) articulates this elemental yet often unregarded, even deliberately evaded, truth of the creative life with uncommon splendor of sentiment in the out-of-print 1966 treasure The Daybooks of Edward Weston: Volume II, California (public library).

Edward Weston by Tina Modotti, 1924. (Museum of Modern Art)

In a diary entry from October 29, 1930 — the year he discovered his singular creative voice and began taking his now-iconic closeups of fruits and vegetables — Weston writes:

In this age of communication, through books, reproductions, exhibits brought from all over the world, who can be free from influence, — preconception? But — it all depends upon what one does with this cross-fertilization: — is it digested, or does it bring indigestion?

Reflecting on his own creative process at Point Lobos — the breathtaking natural reserve on the Big Sur coast of California, near where he lived for many years and where he took some of his most famous photographs — Weston echoes Montaigne’s disdain for the illusion of originality and Auden’s insistence on the crucial difference between authenticity and originality, and adds:

When I start out in the field, for instance at “The Point,” it seems to me no one could be more free from intention, preconception than I am: allowing whatever crosses my path to incite me to work — and working I do not think: of course there is one’s subconscious memory to draw upon, — all the events, all the eyes have seen in this life and how many more lives? to influence one. But no one starts alone, apart, — we only add to that which has gone before, we are only parts of the whole.

Even so, Weston observes, this morass of influences and existing ideas is sieved through one’s individual artistic sensibility to deliver the golden grains of genius by which a great artist leaves a mark upon the monolith of culture:

The “individual” adds more or combines more than the mass does, he stands out more clearly, a prophet, with a background, a future, and the strength, clarity to speak, — in his chosen way, — music — paint — words; a Bach or a Blake.

Edward Weston: Pepper No. 30 (1930)

More than a year later, Weston revisits the subject of inspiration in another diary entry, insisting that such combinatorial creativity is all the stronger if the influences come from fields other than one’s own — which, of course, is the founding ethos of Brain Pickings. He writes:

I feel that I have been more deeply-moved by music, literature, sculpture, panting than I have by photography, — that is by the other workers in my own medium. This needs explanation. I am not moved to emulate, — neither to compete with or imitate, these other creative expressions, but seeing, hearing, reading something fine excites me to greater effort, — (“inspires” is just the word, but how it has been abused!). Reading about Stieglitz, for instance, means more to me than seeing his work. Kandinsky, Brancusi, Van Gogh, El Greco, have given me fresh impetus: and of late Keyserling, Spengler, Melville, (catholic taste!) in literature. I never hear Bach without deep enrichment, — I almost feel he has been my greatest “influence.” It is as though, in taking to me these great conceptions of other workers, the fallow soil in my depths, emotionally stirred, receptive, has been fertilized.

Every page of The Daybooks of Edward Weston unspools a different flavor of insight into life and art, offered with tremendous self-awareness, humility, and generosity of spirit. Complement this particular fragment with Beethoven on idea-incubation and Oliver Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s transcendent epiphany about what it means to be an artist.

Two weeks after my fifteenth birthday, an otherworldly wave of darkness intercepted the sweltering August afternoon and plunged it into a surreal cool — the first total solar eclipse to sweep across Bulgaria since I was a small child. An hour earlier, the Moon’s shadow had swallowed the sun in southwest England for the first time since June 29, 1927.

On June 29, 1927, seven weeks after the publication of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) was smoking a cigar on a train carriage, traveling with her husband, her beloved teenage nephews, her great love turned lifelong friend Vita Sackville-West, and Vita’s husband. Woolf recorded what she saw and felt in vivid detail, with her uncommon gift for magnifying the smallest details of life into revelations about the largest questions of what it means to be human.

Virginia Woolf

Wedged in time between astronomer Maria Mitchell’s pioneering essay describing the 1869 total solar eclipse and Annie Dillard’s classic 1979 recollection of totality, Woolf’s account crowns the canon of eclipse literature with its exquisite limning of the world both exterior and interior in the midst of this celestial otherworldliness. It was later included in A Writer’s Diary (public library) — the indispensable posthumous volume that gave us Woolf on the creative benefits of keeping a diary, the consolations of growing older, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, and what makes love last.

Writing a generation after Mabel Loomis Todd penned the world’s first popular book on the science and splendor of eclipses, Woolf begins at the beginning of the strangeness:

Before it got dark we kept looking at the sky; soft fleecy… Then we had another doze…; then here was a level crossing, at which were drawn up a long line of motor omnibuses and motors, all burning pale yellow lights. It was getting grey — still a fleecy mottled sky… All the fields were auburn with June grasses and red tasselled plants none coloured as yet, all pale. Pale and grey too were the little uncompromising Yorkshire farms. As we passed one, the farmer and his wife and sister came out, all tightly and tidily dressed in black, as if they were going to church. At another ugly square farm, two women were looking out of the upper windows. These had white blinds drawn down half across them. We were a train of 3 vast cars, one stopping to let the others go on; all very low and powerful; taking immensely steep hills… We got out and found ourselves very high, on a moor, boggy, heathery, with butts for grouse shooting. There were grass tracks here and there and people had already taken up positions. So we joined them, walking out to what seemed the highest point looking over Richmond. One light burned down there. Vales and moors stretched, slope after slope, round us. It was like the Haworth country. But over Richmond, where the sun was rising, was a soft grey cloud. We could see by a gold spot where the sun was. But it was early yet. We had to wait, stamping to keep warm… There were thin places in the clouds and some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of these hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping — it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world — druids on Stonehenge; (this idea came more vividly in the first pale light though). At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue; and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over — this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out.

Total eclipse of 1878, one of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.)

In a sentiment Annie Dillard would echo half a century later in recounting how “the sun was going, and the world was wrong,” Woolf speaks to that profound, disquieting wrongness in which an eclipse washes our ordinary expectations of the world, our elemental givens of sensorial and perceptual reality:

We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature.

My photographs of the 2017 total solar eclipse in Oregon. (Available as a print and as a face mask.)

In consonance with Rachel Carson’s assertion that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Woolf reflects on how such displays of nature’s might arrest us into an acute awareness of our fragile, complex humanity:

One felt very livid. Then — it was over till 1999. What remained was the sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light, and colour. This for some time seemed a definitely welcome thing. Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness. How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it; being at the mercy of the sky; our own nobility; the druids; Stonehenge; and the racing red dogs; all that was in one’s mind.

A Writer’s Diary is replete with Woolf’s stunning insight into phenomena across the full spectrum of existence. Complement this particular portion with Maria Mitchell’s guide to how to watch a solar eclipse, then revisit Woolf on the nature of memory and the existential value of illusion.

Vintage Science Stationery Cards Benefitting the Nature Conservancy

The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story