Hi!

How are ya?

I was feeling anxious and introspective, so I turned to The Marginalian for some research on the human soul, as one does. Here’s what I found out about you and me.

SOME INSPIRATION

If you don’t know, The Marginalian is a brilliant newsletter by Maria Popova that I have been reading for years and years. While not personal in the way that, say, my blog is, it is deeply personal in that it continuously discusses what it means to be human. And what’s so cool about that, is that it does so through the lens of not just poetry and art and literature, but science. Popova will combine the philosophy of love and the birth of our universe in one, mind-boggling article.

Which is pretty cool when you consider that human beings are also both science and emotion, body and mind, all rolled into one. We think we need to separate the two, that science must oppose poetry, but Popova reveals that to be a lie. Naturally, this appealed to me as a teenager who was obsessed with both English and astrophysics, and it’s been a gem in my inbox ever since. It is by no means a light, breezy read, but it is always deeply moving and thought-provoking.

Particularly, when dealing with matters of existentialism, as the one I read this morning did so eloquently. Titled “Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living”, this was exactly the kind of thing I needed to fill the inspirational void my that professor abandoned me with this week.

THE MIRACLE OF YOU

“What exists is precious not because it will one day be lost but because it has overcome the staggering odds of never having existed at all…”

-Maria Popova The Marginalian

I’m a hyper-productive person. I don’t say this for an applause, and I actually resent it a bit that that is our culture’s response, I say it in order to explain why I get so anxious. I thrive off of to-do lists and productivity, which is great, when there are things to do. But on the off days, I struggle, no matter how much I need them. I feel like I need to be doing something all of the time. Based off of how many of you loved the “human-doing versus human-being” mantra, I think that you might too.

Which is why I love quotes like this. It’s why I love looking at the stars or standing in front of the ocean. It’s a reminder of how strange it is that we are even here, and how precious of a thing it is to just be sitting on the earth, breathing. Do you ever think about all of the little things that had to happen just for you to be born? My grandmother likes to tell us the stories of her youth, of the different guys she could have married, different lives she could have led. My brother always says how odd it feels to hear about those other possible lives, as if she is playing with the odds of our existence. Each turn of her life had to go a certain way for my father to have been born, let alone my brother and I. The butterfly effect and all that. Completely mind-blowing.

THE POETRY OF PHYSICS

I was also particularly struck by these words from Alan Lightman on the concept of continuity after death, because, obviously.

“A hundred years from now, I’ll be gone, but many of these spruce and cedars will still be here…The rocks and ledges on the shore will be here, including a particular ledge I’m quite fond of…Sometimes, I sit on that ledge and wonder if it will remember me.

“I find a pleasure in knowing that a hundred years from now, even a thousand years from now, some of my atoms will remain in this place where I now lie in my hammock. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand…Some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people. Some will become parts of other lives, other memories. That might be a kind of immortality.”

“The cosmos will grind on for eternity long after we’re gone, cold and unobserved. But for these few powers of ten, we have been. We have seen, we have felt, we have lived.”

-Alan Lightman

Who knew a physicist could be so painfully poetic?

I think that what is so brilliant about what Lightman does here is that he combines hard science with human emotion, something that I was told to stop doing in my high school physics class. I didn’t care about calculating the distance to a star, I cared about how that distance got there. I wanted to know how stardust got into our veins, not the formula for its circumference. My teacher wasn’t really on board with that plan and so you can imagine the fun year that we had together. I think that if you dug up my old class notes there would still be lines of poetry etched into the margins.

REMEMBER ME

I also love how Lightman voices the desire to be remembered, that desire that I just wrote another post on. Only he doesn’t just want to be remembered by a friend, but by the planet itself. I think that’s so gorgeous because unlike the mortal human mind, this earth can do that. It can hold our atoms for as long as it keeps turning. It won’t ever let us go, not completely, not yet. Little bits and pieces of our existence remain embedded in the fabric of humanity, if only through the atoms that we share. How insane is that?

Because isn’t it the most natural thing ever to not want to die? Our minds will do anything to not believe that there is nothing on the other side of this life. It’s a romantic endeavor to do as Lightman did and wonder, sometimes, while sitting on a ledge of the earth, if that ledge will remember you. This is a scientist, a mathematician, a brilliant knower of cold, dead facts that he adheres to as the concrete of life, and he is here writing about his hope that a ledge remembers him sitting upon it. Here he is, trying to avoid nothingness. Isn’t that just the essence of us all?

THE HEART OF LIFE

“We share something in the vast corridors of this cosmos we find ourselves in. What exactly is it we share?….the ability to witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence…”

-Alan LIghtman

He goes on to ask what it is that unites humanity beyond our basic biological functions and arrives at the idea that the most precious, profound thing that we all share is the ability to stop and marvel at the world around us. I think of Oliver Sacks telling Bill Hayes during their New York City love affair that the most we can do is to write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time. And about Mary Oliver writing in Upstream that attention is the beginning of devotion and a dozen other quotes that I wrote my college applicant essays around and still have memorized like my own name.

These are the things that I remember when I feel that I need to be running around the rat race of society all of the time. These are the words that come to me and remind me that my primary function on this planet might simply be to just pay attention to it. We seem to have a natural inclination towards this that transcends all differences.

Earlier today, for example, I was walking through the park when an old man speaking another language stopped to photograph the plane landing just over our heads. Prior to him doing this, I was looking at him and thinking of how different he looked from me, of how differing our lives must be. But then he raised that camera. I might not have been able to understand what he was saying, but I could understand that. We didn’t need to speak the same language to both be drawn to that plane soaring into the city skyline. We were both witnessing and reflecting on a spectacle of our existence. And in an instant, I felt strangely connected to him for that.

Love, m.

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