“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb early work on love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

It is a handsome observation, an elemental truth we might glimpse — and be saved by glimpsing — in those rare moments of pure presence that dissolve all too quickly into what Borges knew to be true of human nature: that time is the substance we are made of.

As creatures made of time, we live in the present and the past and the future all at once, continually shaken by all the fears and hopes, all the anxieties and anticipations, that are the price we pay for our majestic hippocampus — that crowning glory of a consciousness capable of referencing its memories and experiences in the past, capable of projecting its goals and desire into the future, capable of the bleakest despair and of the brightest dreams.

This might be, as Elizabeth Gilbert observed in the wake of losing the love of her life, why love and loss have something elemental in common — each is “a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted,” one that “comes and goes on its own schedule… does not obey your plans, or your wishes [and] will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to.”

Out of this arises a basic equation we accept as a function of life, as an echo of the fundamental laws. We accept it unwittingly, or wittingly but unwillingly, but it is an entropic given indifferent to our assent: We love, then we lose. We lose our loved ones — to death or the dissolution of mutuality — or we lose ourselves. (This is also why flowers move us so.)

Vanish by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

But if we are lucky enough, if we are are stubborn enough, we love and we lose and then the loss opens us up to more love — different love, because each love is unrepeatable and irreplaceable — on the other side of grief; love unimaginable from the barren landmass of loss, love without which, once found, the world comes to feel unimaginable.

Because these are the two most all-consuming and all-pervading of human experiences, the labels in which we try to classify and contain them are bound to be too small — as with love, so with loss. (This is what Joan Didion captured in her classic observation that “grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”)

All of this, with all of its subtleties, comes alive on the pages of Lost & Found (public library) by Kathryn Schulz — part personal memoir, part existential inquiry into the two great universals of human life.

After hearing herself say “I lost my father last week” — her father, of whom she paints a boundlessly affectionate and admiring portrait as “part Socrates, part Tevye,” a gregarious and godlike figure with “a booming voice, a heavy accent, a formidable mind, a rabbinical beard, a Santa Claus belly, and the gestural range of the Vitruvian Man” — Schulz reflects:

Perhaps because I was still in those early, distorted days of mourning, when so much of the familiar world feels alien and inaccessible, I was struck, as I had never been before, by the strangeness of the phrase. Obviously my father hadn’t wandered away from me like a toddler at a picnic, or vanished like an important document in a messy office. And yet, unlike other oblique ways of talking about death, this one did not seem cagey or empty. It seemed plain, plaintive, and lonely, like grief itself. From the first time I said it, that day on the phone, it felt like something I could use, as one uses a shovel or a bell-pull: cold and ringing, containing within it both something desperate and something resigned, accurate to the confusion and desolation of bereavement.

Art from The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers — an illustrated fable about love and loss

She eventually realizes that the etymology of the word is in fact an apt analogue for the experience of loss:

The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in “forlorn.” It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from an even older word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object only appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and each other and has been steadily expanding ever since. This is how loss felt to me after my father died: like a force that constantly increased its reach, gradually encroaching on more and more terrain.

The most confounding aspect of grief is its fractal nature — the one great trunk of loss branches and twigs into the trivial, splintering reality into an infinity of losses until we come to look at the world (as that lovely verse by Lisel Mueller goes) “as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.” The small things we lose come to feel so precious that we dissolve into tears over the book that fell out of the bicycle basket on the way home, the trivial twig dragging with it the unbearable trunk. It is a universal experience, which Schulz captures with the splendid poetics of her particular mind:

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom during that difficult fall could I distinguish my distress over these other losses from my sadness about my father.

[…]

This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones.

Moving through her loss at a time when all of us, whatever the nature of our personal losses, were moving together through what scientists have now termed “ecological grief” — a mere century and half after the birth of ecology — she follows the fractal:

The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable; the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.

Pressed wildflowers from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, including species now endangered or extinct.

Because everything does suddenly feel so fragile — or, rather, because loss suddenly reveals that we are indeed “the fragile species” — grief itself becomes a kind of glue with which try to hold together the shattered pieces of our familiar world. In a passage of uncommon insight and sensitivity to what may be the most paradoxical and most underdiscussed aspect of loss, she writes:

Most people, I think, are at least a little afraid of ceasing to grieve. I know that I was. However terrible our sorrow may be, we understand that it is made in the image of love, that it shares the characteristics of the person we mourn. Maybe there was a day in your life when you were brought to your knees by a faded blue ball cap or a tote bag full of knitting supplies or the sound of a Brahms piano concerto… Part of what makes grief so seductive, then, is that it seems to offer us what life no longer can: an ongoing, emotionally potent connection to the dead. And so it is easy to feel that once that bleak gift is gone, the person we love will somehow be more gone, too.

Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too.

Liminal Worlds by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

Contemplating how our deepest losses might be so painful “not because they defy reality but because they reveal it,” she adds:

One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost — and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there… Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.

It is this harsh corrective to our sense of being central, competent, and powerful that makes even trivial losses so difficult to accept. To lose something is a profoundly humbling act. It forces us to confront the limits of our mind… It forces us to confront the limits of our will: the fact that we are powerless to protect the things we love from time and change and chance. Above all, it forces us to confront the limits of existence: the fact that, sooner or later, it is in the nature of almost everything to vanish or perish.

This, of course, collides with the most fundamental feature of our consciousness: its inability to parse its own negatios. Try as we might in the virtual reality of the mind, on some deep animal level, we simply cannot fathom the actuality of nonexistence, the ultimate void, what Emily Dickinson termed “the drift called the infinite.”

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.)

Because spacetime is the hammock in which everything exists but consciousness is both made of spacetime and the is loom of our imagination, to imagine the absolute nonexistence of consciousness — another’s, or our own — we must also imagine the total absence of spacetime. Our inability to do that is reflected in our euphemisms for dying: to “pass away,” as if the person is transported to some other place rather than entirely displaced from existence; to “run out of time,” as if time still exists for the dead, a dimension they happen to have directionally vacated along some vector pointing elsewhere.

A nowhere without elsewhere is simply beyond the grasp of human consciousness.

Schulz intuits this, locating that creaturely instinct in the cultural trope of the Valley of Lost Things — one of the seven valleys the protagonists of L. Frank Baum’s 1901 children’s novel Dot and Tot of Merryland visit after a runaway boat carries them away from the Land of Oz. She writes:

Although it often goes by other names, the Valley of Lost Things has haunted our collective imagination for centuries… in every context from autobiography to science fiction.

[…]

Part of the enduring appeal of this imaginary destination is that it comports with our real-life experience of losing things: when we can’t find something, it is easy to feel that it has gone somewhere unfindable. But there is also something pleasing about the idea that our missing belongings, unable to find their rightful owners, should at least find each other, gathering together like souls in the bardo or distant relatives at a family reunion. The things we lose are distinguished by their lack of any known location; how clever, how obviously gratifying, to grant them one… This may be the most alluring aspect of the Valley of Lost Things: it renders the strangeness of the category of loss visible, like emptying the contents of a jumbled box onto the floor. In my mind, it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning. It is this taxonomically outrageous population, shoes to souls to pterodactyls, that makes the idea of such a place so mesmerizing. Its contents have a unity and meaning based only on the single common quality of being lost, a kind of vast nationality, like “American.”

Art from The Osbick Bird by Edward Gorey

But while the Valley of Lost Things is at bottom sorrowful place — “the things we love are banished to it, and we ourselves are banished from it” — its melancholy has a mirror image in the ecstatic delight of finding things. Schulz writes:

What an astonishing thing it is to find something. Children, who excel at it — chiefly because the world is still so new to them that they can’t help but notice it — understand this, and automatically delight in it… Finding is usually rewarding and sometimes exhilarating: a reunion with something old or an encounter with something new, a happy meeting between ourselves and some previously missing or mysterious bit of the cosmos.

In some territory of our collective imagination, there there seems to be an analogous place we might call the Valley of Found Things, strewn the forgotten phone number, the time for an afternoon walk, the photograph of my beaming twenty-something father atop my beaming twenty-something mother’s shoulders in the Black Sea. Finding, too, is a fractal delight — the simple delight of finding a long-treasured something we had lost, or finding something we didn’t know existed, branches from that grand, all-consuming, all-transforming, reality-recalibrating delight we call love.

As with loss, so with love: Here too our our metaphors are woven of spacetime, bespeaking our inability to think and feel beyond it — we speak of “finding love,” as if love were stationed at some distinct location until (and here is another measure of time) we wander by to chance upon, something E.E. Cummings captured in that single perfect line: “love is a place.”

That place is precisely where Schulz found herself not long after her father’s death. She met (on Main Street in a small town, by a chance-fold of spacetime) and married (with all of their living parents and the bittersweet presence of her father’s absence: “a kind of commonplace memorial, a candle I don’t have to light because it is always bright with him”) the love of her life — a woman she came to love across the abyss of surface differences between them, differences past which she might not have plumbed the depths, had loss not reconfigured her world by shattering the bedrock of familiar reality to make space for the improbable, space for this stranger without whom spacetime came to feel unimaginable.

Art from The Osbick Bird by Edward Gorey

The second half of Lost & Found is as much a meditation on finding the most precious of human finds — which is never a possession — as it is a love letter to her wife, ending with a beautiful meditation on how these twin experiences illuminate the central truth of life:

That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories; the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.

[…]

Nothing about that is strange or surprising; it is the fundamental, unalterable nature of things. The astonishment is all in the being here. It is the turtle in the pond, the thought in the mind, the falling star, the stranger on Main Street… To all of this, loss, which seems only to take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.

“What is essential in the future is that every member of the family, even little children, should learn at whatever cost not to give way to wrong or to co-operate in it,” the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and Quaker peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale wrote as she considered the real building blocks of a livable world a decade into the Cold War.

If, a century and two World Wars before her, Baudelaire was right — he was — when he observed that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” and if it is true — it is — that we need a new kind of moral genius to build a more livable world without the wrongs of violence, then children might hold the building blocks of the building blocks.

After thirty years of working as a librarian and after seeing art education vanish from American schools over the decades, florist and poet Nancy Kangas began leading a poetry program as artist in residence at a preschool in Columbus, Ohio. She was quickly staggered by the plain, poignant ways in which children who could neither read nor write so readily named their hopes and fears — those elemental human longings coursing through the inner child that lives in each of us, deep beneath the strata of self-protective pretense we call adult personhood.

Nancy Kangas

As she got to know the children and their families, she also discovered that they were writing their poems with their lives — lives often strewn with hardship and violence and loss, but also irradiated by an innocent gladness and irrepressible hunger for connection, for beauty, for wonder.

She discovered that children are silent virtuosi of noticing — both the beauty and the terror that make life life — and noticing is the crucible of all poetry.

One of the preschool poets

After nearly a decade of teaching poetry to young children — and letting children teach her the poetics of reality seen with the clearest eyes — Kangas teamed up with documentary filmmaker Josh Kun in what became their lovely project Preschool Poets, inviting artists from around the world to animate eight of the children’s tenderest and most touching poems.

This is one of them — composed by Brayden, performed by Miracle, and animated by Ukrainian filmmaker and artist Stas Santimov.

BULLETS
by Brayden

Sit down, world
and relax
so you don’t have tornadoes.

Trees, color your leaves.

Relax, people. Go to sleep.

Relax, wolves. Lay down by the trees.

Relax, bullets from guns.
Stop shooting people.

Fire, eat wood.

Boundless gratitude to Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson — who animated Tracy K. Smith’s poetic serenade to our human hunger for truth and meaning from the second chapter of The Universe in Verse and who was one of the eight artists selected to animate the preschoolers’ poems — for pointing me to this immeasurably wonderful project, the documentary about which might just be the brightest spot in your day. Or year. (It was in mine.)

When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two hundred million years later, the baffled Darwin called this blooming conquest an “abominable mystery.”

When earthlings first realized that our Milky Way is not the cosmic whole but one galactic particle of the whole — one of unfathomably many galaxies, each abloom with billions of stars orbited by other worlds — the universe suddenly appeared “so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”

When it became clear that a mysterious substance is holding each galaxy together, keeping each world’s orbit a perfect corolla around the stigma of its star, we gave that substance a name befitting an abominable mystery: dark matter.

Along the way, we — thinking, feeling, meaning-hungry creatures — kept trying to make beauty of the truths we found, composing poems about flowers and poems about dark matter as we composed our equations and our theories.

Art by Ohara Hale for “Let There Always be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)”

Reality’s ability to continually baffle us with what we don’t yet know, and our willingness to continually plumb the unknown for new truth and beauty, even as it baffles and terrifies us, is the loveliest thing about being alive. Being alive together, as members of this boundlessly inquisitive and imaginative species, is the loveliest thing about being human.

That is what Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) — a scientist, poet, and perhaps my favorite writer about the native poetics of reality — explores throughout his altogether exquisite final essay collection, The Fragile Species (public library).

A galactic Lewis Thomas

In the opening essay, originally delivered as a talk in 1987 for the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard Medical School class, Thomas reflects on the splendid bafflements of science since he and his classmates parted ways in the prime of their lives half a century earlier. With his signature winking genius, he writes:

I cannot count the number of new items of ignorance I’ve picked up in fifty years; the list is simply too long. Instead, I have prepared another kind of list, shorter, more personally humbling, of some things I think I might have been learning more about if I hadn’t been so puzzled all those years by medicine itself. There are matters that I assume most other people my age comprehend nicely, and I never got round to studying.

The Federal Reserve System is at the top of my list. I’ve never known what it was or what it did or how it did it, and what is more I don’t want to be told. The same goes for the stock market, and for the bond market, and the word processor (one of which I actually possess and am baffled by), and the internal combustion engine, and the universe, black holes, galactic mirrors, those other universes, and space-time. Most of all, space-time. I cannot get ahold of it.

Art by Daniel Bruson for “My God, It’s Full of Stars”

With so fetching a wink, Thomas turns to the real object of his meditation: our native inability to comprehend how the same processes that begot these remote abstractions also begot the fleshy, feeling concreteness of us. There is something incredibly lovely about Thomas’s warm humor — here is man of extraordinary intellect, scientific erudition, and uncommon human sensitivity, inviting the rest of us, far more ordinary and modestly lettered, to join him in his gladsome bafflement at the seeming miracle of life:

I even have troubles of my own with evolutionary biology. Not first principles, mind you, not the big picture, mostly just the details. I understand about randomness and chance, and election, and adaptation, and all that, and I now know better than to talk, ever, about progress in evolution, never mind purpose. My problems come when I think about the earliest form of known life, those indisputable bacterial cells in rocks 3.7 billion years old, our Ur-grandparents for sure, then nothing but bacteria for the next two and one-half billion years, and now the chestnut tree in my backyard, my Abyssinian cat Jeoffry, the almost-but-not-quite free-living microbes living in all our cells disguised as mitochondria, and, just by the way, our marvelous, still-immature, dangerous selves, brainy enough to menace all nature unless distracted by music.

Leaning on his training as an etymologist — that is, an evolutionary biologist for the living organism of language — Thomas adds:

We need a better word than chance, even pure chance, or that succession of events, while still evading any notion of progress. But to go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness.

I like the word stochastic better, because of its lineage in our language. The first root was stegh, meaning a pointed stake in the Indo-European of 30,000 years ago. Stegh moved into Greek as stokhos, meaning a target for archers, and then later on, in our language, targets being what they are and aiming arrows being as fallible as it is, stokhos was adapted to signify aiming and missing, pure chance, randomness, and thus stochastic. On that philosophical basis, then, I’m glad to accept all of evolution in a swoop, but I’m still puzzled by it.

With great subtlety and sensitivity, Thomas then pirouettes to observe that this stochastic miracle of life across time exists only because death too exists. A generation before Richard Dawkins made his poetic point about the luckiness of death and an epoch after the grief-stricken Darwin, having lost his most beloved child, found personal solace in the scientific fact that the death of the individual is what fine-tunes evolution to ensure the survival of the species — “there is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote — Thomas dismantles the central logical fallacy beneath our species’ fantasies of immortality, be they retro-religious or techno-futuristic.

Jacob’s Dream by William Blake, 1805. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.)

With an eye to various speculative proposals — which have grown all the more various and more unsoundly speculative in the decades since — about hacking the entropy that frays at all matter in order to attain long-term preservation of information systems, including the information system of us, Thomas considers the inherent syllogism of such hopes:

If it had been arranged that way, we’d all still be alive forever but, in the nature of things, we would still be those same archaebacteria born 3.7 billion years ago, unable to make molecular errors, deprived of taking chances, and therefore never blundering into brains.

That is, if we could be immortal, we could not exist; if we were already perfect, we could not exist. It is only because we are mortal and imperfect, you and I and Dickinson and Darwin, that the sum of us, the galaxy of humanity drifting through impartial stars, goes on.

Although he had art on his mind, Van Gogh was contouring a deep scientific truth, a truth both existential and evolutionary, when he observed how inspired mistakes propel us forward.

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s century-old illustrations for French fairy tales. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

With his pliant logic and playful love of the human condition, Thomas considers the reflexive conclusion to which this awareness might lead the inattentive:

Nature is an immense mechanism, operating itself in accordance with the laws of physics. We, and our brains, are working parts of the machinery, having made our appearance here and having our existence because of the operation of those laws, set in place on what we like to see as the pinnacle by the beneficent operation of chance and quantum mechanics. Pure luck, indeterminate and intentionless, all the way.

But this, of course, is Lewis Thomas. And this, therefore, is not a case for vacuous materialism. This is Lewis Thomas, who often makes the deepest point by caricaturing its shallow opposite:

This view takes us a long distance toward understanding our place in nature, but not quite the full distance. We are still stuck with the problem of consciousness, and because of this not-quite-settled matter, we are stuck as well with the incessant questions with which our consciousness continues to plague us and disturb our sleep (for which also, by the way, we do not have a good explanation). Questions like: Are we the only creatures on the whole planet with real consciousness? Why is being being; why not nonbeing? Why should there be something, instead of nothing? How do you organize a life, or a society, in accordance with physical laws that forbid purpose, causality, morality, and progress, especially when you have to do so with brains that stand alive with these very notions? Where’s the fun in it?

Plate from An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as a print, as a face mask, and as stationery cards.)

In another essay from the book, in a passage from which the entire book borrows its title, Thomas writes at the peak of the Cold War and its menacing specter of nuclear catastrophe, which has since only changed costume as the ecological catastrophe menacing our own time:

This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works, or how I fit in. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error-prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that.

In a passage of extraordinary prescience, precisely in the context of our present ecological precariousness and what its only solution might be, Thomas adds as he considers our place in the family of life:

We are different, to be sure, but not so much because of our brains as because of our discomfiture, mostly with each other. All the other parts of the earth’s life seem to get along, to fit in with each other, to accommodate, even to concede when the stakes are high. They live off each other, devour each other, scramble for ecological niches, but always within set limits, with something like restraint. It is a rough world, by some of our standards, but not the winner-take-all game that it seemed to us awhile back. If we look over our shoulders as far as we can see, all the way past trillions of other species to those fossil stromatolites built by enormous communities of collaborating microorganisms, we can see no evidence of meanness or vandalism in nature. It is, on balance, an equable, generally amiable place, good-natured as we say.

We are the anomalies for the moment, the self-conscious children at the edge of the crowd, unsure of our place, tending to grabbiness… But we are not as bad a lot as some of us say… At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of a species’ adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like. Growing up is hard times for an individual but sustained torment for a whole species, especially as brainy and nervous as ours. If we can last it out, get through the phase…. we might find ourselves off and running again.

Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

What might save us from ourselves, Thomas intimates, is not our maturity but our mutuality:

We are more compulsively social, more interdependent and more inextricably attached to each other than any of the celebrated social insects… One human trait, urging us on by our nature, is the drive to be useful, perhaps the most fundamental of all our biological necessities. We make mistakes with it, get it wrong, confuse it with self-regard, even try to fake it, but it is there in our genes, needing only a better set of definitions for usefulness than we have yet agreed on.

Complement this fragment of The Fragile Species — which remains one of the finest, most fiercely humanistic and scientifically perspectival books I have ever read — with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and the forgotten visionary William Vogt, writing half a century before his ideas shaped the modern environmental movement, on our interdependence resilience, then revisit Lewis Thomas on our wiring for mutuality and his science-rooted existential meditation on the medusa and the snail — still the subtlest, sanest thing I have read about the eternal mystery of the self.

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy

The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story