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Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private superstition: If I touched each of the vertical bars on every fence along my walk, no dog would die. Sometimes I ran to touch as many bars as possible in as little time as possible, the impact bruising and callusing my fingers. Dogs continued dying. I continued doing it.… read article
2 days ago

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More from The Marginalian

How to Be a Happier Creature

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our… read article

6 days ago 7 votes
The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror… read article

a week ago 8 votes
Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness. It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be… read article

a week ago 9 votes
Hold On Let Go: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time

Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people break people — and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence. A daily creative practice is a consecration of the… read article

a week ago 10 votes

More in literature

Horse and Runner

The post Horse and Runner appeared first on The American Scholar.

4 hours ago 1 votes
'Every Garden Is a Vast Hospital'

On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been so lush.  Because of the ample lighting I usually read while seated on the couch by the oversized front window. The garden is a comfort. Framed by the window, it’s like a slow-motion movie. The appeal is less aesthetic than – what? Metaphysical? I like to be reminded of life’s profusion and persistence, the opposite of sterility. There’s little difference between “weed” and “flower.” I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005): “What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”   A reminder that poets ought to know the names of wildflowers, according to Seamus Heaney. Not every poet would agree. I was looking for something in Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,500-page commonplace book kept between 1817 and 1832, when I happened on a passage from April 1826 that only Leopardi could have written:   “Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souf-france [suffering], each in its own way to some degree. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts.”   Leopardi’s understanding of biology is limited but his Zeitgeist remains consistent. He goes on for a full page turning a mini-Eden into a raging Hell:   “The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits. And that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.” It's almost as though Leopardi had read the crackpot bestseller The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first encountered Leopardi more than half a century ago in Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931). The Irishman refers to the Italian’s “wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Beckett quotes two lines from “A se stesso” (“To himself”): “In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio e ’spento.” (“Not only our hope / but our desire for dear illusions is gone.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi, Canti, 2010).   Melville, too, found a kindred spirit in Leopardi. In his 18,000-line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Part I, Section 14, “In the Glen,” he writes:   “If Savonarola’s zeal devout But with the fagot’s flame died out; If Leopardi, stoned by Grief, A young St. Stephen of the Doubt Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.”   [Zibaldone was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated into English by seven translators, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.]

3 hours ago 1 votes
{…} by Fady Joudah

Poems read aloud, beautifully The post {…} by Fady Joudah appeared first on The American Scholar.

yesterday 3 votes
The TERRAFORM print pamphlet is now available—here's what we earned

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2 days ago 4 votes