 Hello, Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – Anne Lamott on how we endure in a crazy world, Mark Strand on the heartbeat of creative work, how Lewis Carroll can help us make email more civil, why playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity, and more – you can catch up right here. And if you're enjoying this, please consider supporting with a modest donation – every little bit helps, and comes enormously appreciated.
 Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) is one of humanity's most grounding yet elevating thinkers, his writing at once lucid and luminous. There is something almost prophetic in the way he bridges timelessness and timeliness in contemplating ideas urgently relevant to modern life a century earlier – from how boredom makes happiness possible to why science is the key to democracy. But nowhere does his genius shine more brilliantly than in What I Believe (public library).
Published in 1925, the book is a kind of catalog of hopes – a counterpoint to Russell's Icarus, a catalog of fears released the previous year – exploring our place in the universe and our "possibilities in the way of achieving the good life."
Russell writes in the preface:
 In human affairs, we can see that there are forces making for happiness, and forces making for misery. We do not know which will prevail, but to act wisely we must be aware of both.
One of Russell's most central points deals with our civilizational allergy to uncertainty, which we try to alleviate in ways that don't serve the human spirit. Nearly a century before astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser's magnificent manifesto for mystery in the age of knowledge – and many decades before "wireless" came to mean what it means today, making the metaphor all the more prescient and apt – Russell writes:
It is difficult to imagine anything less interesting or more different from the passionate delights of incomplete discovery. It is like climbing a high mountain and finding nothing at the top except a restaurant where they sell ginger beer, surrounded by fog but equipped with wireless.
Long before modern neuroscience even existed, let alone knew what it now knows about why we have the thoughts we do – the subject of an excellent recent episode of the NPR's Invisibilia – Russell points to the physical origins of what we often perceive as metaphysical reality:
What we call our "thoughts" seem to depend upon the organization of tracks in the brain in the same sort of way in which journeys depend upon roads and railways. The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin; for instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure.
Illustration from Neurocomic, a graphic novel about how the brain works
Nowhere, Russell argues, do our thought-fictions stand in starker contrast with physical reality than in religious mythology – and particularly in our longing for immortality which, despite a universe whose very nature contradicts the possibility, all major religions address with some version of a promise for eternal life. With his characteristic combination of cool lucidity and warm compassion for the human experience, Russell writes:
God and immortality ... find no support in science... No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any ground for either.
And yet, noting that the existence or nonexistence of a god cannot be proven for it lies "outside the region of even probable knowledge," he considers the special case of personal immortality, which "stands on a somewhat different footing" and in which "evidence either way is possible":
Persons are part of the everyday world with which science is concerned, and the conditions which determine their existence are discoverable. A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilized at death, and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.
A 1573 painting from Cosmigraphics—a visual history of understanding the universe. Click image for more.
But evidence, Russell points out, has little bearing on what we actually believe. (In the decades since, pioneering psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has demonstrated that the confidence we have in our beliefs is no measure of their accuracy.) Noting that we simply desire to believe in immortality, Russell writes:
Believers in immortality will object to physiological arguments [against personal immortality] on the ground that soul and body are totally disparate, and that the soul is something quite other than its empirical manifestations through our bodily organs. I believe this to be a metaphysical superstition. Mind and matter alike are for certain purposes convenient terms, but are not ultimate realities. Electrons and protons, like the soul, are logical fictions; each is really a history, a series of events, not a single persistent entity. In the case of the soul, this is obvious from the facts of growth. Whoever considers conception, gestation, and infancy cannot seriously believe that the soul in any indivisible something, perfect and complete throughout this process. It is evident that it grows like the body, and that it derives both from the spermatozoon and from the ovum, so that it cannot be indivisible.
Long before the term "reductionism" would come to dismiss material answers to spiritual questions, Russell offers an elegant disclaimer:
This is not materialism: it is merely the recognition that everything interesting is a matter of organization, not of primal substance.
Our obsession with immortality, Russell contends, is rooted in our fear of death – a fear that, as Alan Watts has eloquently argued, is rather misplaced if we are to truly accept our participation in the cosmos. Russell writes:
Fear is the basis of religious dogma, as of so much else in human life. Fear of human beings, individually or collectively, dominates much of our social life, but it is fear of nature that gives rise to religion. The antithesis of mind and matter is ... more or less illusory; but there is another antithesis which is more important – that, namely, between things that can be affected by our desires and things that cannot be so affected. The line between the two is neither sharp nor immutable – as science advances, more and more things are brought under human control. Nevertheless there remain things definitely on the other side. Among these are all the large facts of our world, the sort of facts that are dealt with by astronomy. It is only facts on or near the surface of the earth that we can, to some extent, mould to suit our desires. And even on the surface of the earth our powers are very limited. Above all, we cannot prevent death, although we can often delay it.
Religion is an attempt to overcome this antithesis. If the world is controlled by God, and God can be moved by prayer, we acquire a share in omnipotence... Belief in God ... serves to humanize the world of nature, and to make men feel that physical forces are really their allies. In like manner immortality removes the terror from death. People who believe that when they die they will inherit eternal bliss may be expected to view death without horror, though, fortunately for medical men, this does not invariably happen. It does, however, soothe men’s fears somewhat even when it cannot allay them wholly.
In a sentiment of chilling prescience in the context of recent religiously-motivated atrocities, Russell adds:
Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear, and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad.
Science, Russell suggests, offers the antidote to such terror – even if its findings are at first frightening as they challenge our existing beliefs, the way Galileo did. He captures this necessary discomfort beautifully:
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
But Russell's most enduring point has to do with our beliefs about the nature of the universe in relation to us. More than eight decades before legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser's exquisite proclamation – “If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be.” – Russell writes:
Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naïve humanism; the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy.
He admonishes against confusing "the philosophy of nature," in which such neutrality is necessary, with "the philosophy of value," which beckons us to create meaning by conferring human values upon the world:
Nature is only a part of what we can imagine; everything, real or imagined, can be appraised by us, and there is no outside standard to show that our valuation is wrong. We are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature. In the world of values, Nature in itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, deserving of neither admiration nor censure. It is we who create value and our desires which confer value... It is for us to determine the good life, not for Nature – not even for Nature personified as God.
Russell's definition of that "good life" remains the simplest and most heartening one I've ever encountered:
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Knowledge and love are both indefinitely extensible; therefore, however good a life may be, a better life can be imagined. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.
What I Believe is a remarkably prescient and rewarding read in its entirety – Russell goes on to explore the nature of the good life, what salvation means in a secular sense for the individual and for society, the relationship between science and happiness, and more. Complement it with Russell on human nature, the necessary capacity for "fruitful monotony," and his ten commandments of teaching and learning, then revisit Alan Lightman on why we long for immortality.
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 As a lover of unusual alphabet books and of intelligent, imaginative children's books that defy gender stereotypes,celebrate diversity, and counter bigotry, I was instantly taken with Work: An Occupational ABC (public library) by Toronto-based illustrator and designer Kellen Hatanaka – a compendium of imaginative, uncommon, stereotype-defying answers to the essential what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up question.
With a sensibility between mid-century children's books and Blexbolex, Hatanaka weaves bold graphics and soft shades into a tapestry of tender vignettes about people of all shapes, sizes, and colors. There is the K-9 officer (female) training her trusty dog on an obstacle course; the Butcher (heavy-set) chasing after a mischievous raccoon that got away with the sausage; the Naval Architect (female) oversees the construction of a large ship near the shore as the Oceanographer (female, dark-skinned) explores the marine world below the surface.
What emerges is an atlas of vocational possibility that offers a heartening antidote to our culture's stale menu of options for what constitutes a successful life; a toolkit that fortifies young readers against the malady anguishing so many modern grownups – the challenge of letting our life speak and defining our own success.
Hatanaka's depiction of women is especially emboldening – they aren't pinkwashed stick-figures and don't shy away from brawny or brainy pursuits.
Complement the immeasurably wonderfulWork, which comes from Canadian independent children's-book publisherGroundwood Books, with Maira Kalman'sdesign-history alphabet book, which was among the best children's books of 2014, and Oliver Jeffers's illustrated stories for the letters.
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 "Our human definition of 'everything' gives us, at best, a tiny penlight to help us with our wanderings," Benjamen Walker offered in an episode of his excellentTheory of Everythingpodcast as we shared a conversation about illumination and the art of discovery. Thirty years earlier, Carl Sagan had captured this idea in his masterwork Varieties of Scientific Experience, where he asserted: “If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.”This must be what Rilke, too, had at heart when he exhorted us to live the questions. And yet if there is one common denominator across the entire history of human culture, it is the insatiable hunger to know the unknowable – that is, to know everything, and to know it with certainty, which is itself the enemy of the human spirit.
The perplexities and paradoxes of that quintessential human longing, and how the progress of modern science has compounded it, is what astrophysicist and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser examines inThe Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning(public library).
Partway between Hannah Arendt's timelessmanifesto for the unanswerable questions at the heart of meaning and Stuart Firestein's case for how not-knowing drives science, Gleiser explores our commitment to knowledge and our parallel flirtation with the mystery of the unknown.
Artwork from Fail Safe, Debbie Millman's illustrated-essay-turned-commencement address on courage and the creative life.
What emerges is at once a celebration of human achievement and a gentle reminder that the appropriate reaction to scientific and technological progress is not arrogance over the knowledge conquered, which seems to be our civilizational modus operandi, but humility in the face of what remains to be known and, perhaps above all, what may always remain unknowable.
Gleiser begins by posing the question of whether there are fundamental limits to how much of the universe and our place in it science can explain, with a concrete focus on physical reality. Echoing cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz's eye-opening exploration of why our minds miss the vast majority of what is going on around us, he writes:
What we see of the world is only a sliver of what’s “out there.” There is much that is invisible to the eye, even when we augment our sensorial perception with telescopes, microscopes, and other tools of exploration. Like our senses, every instrument has a range. Because much of Nature remains hidden from us, our view of the world is based only on the fraction of reality that we can measure and analyze. Science, as our narrative describing what we see and what we conjecture exists in the natural world, is thus necessarily limited, telling only part of the story... We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery... It is the flirting with this mystery, the urge to go beyond the boundaries of the known, that feeds our creative impulse, that makes us want to know more.
A 1573 painting from Cosmigraphics—a visual history of understanding the universe
In a sentiment that bridges Philip K. Dick's formulation of reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away"with Richard Feynman's iconic monologue on knowledge and mystery, Gleiser adds:
The map of what we call reality is an ever-shifting mosaic of ideas.
[...]
The incompleteness of knowledge and the limits of our scientific worldview only add to the richness of our search for meaning, as they align science with our human fallibility and aspirations.
Gleiser notes that while modern science has made tremendous strides in illuminating the neuronal infrastructure of the brain, it has in the process reduced the mind to mere chemical operations, not only failing to advance but perhaps even impoverishing our understanding and sense of being. He admonishes against mistaking measurement for meaning:
There is no such thing as an exact measurement. Every measurement must be stated within its precision and quoted together with “error bars” estimating the magnitude of errors. High-precision measurements are simply measurements with small error bars or high confidence levels; there are no perfect, zero-error measurements.
[...]
Technology limits how deeply experiments can probe into physical reality. That is to say, machines determine what we can measure and thus what scientists can learn about the Universe and ourselves. Being human inventions, machines depend on our creativity and available resources. When successful, they measure with ever-higher accuracy and on occasion may also reveal the unexpected.
[...]
But the essence of empirical science is that Nature always has the last word... It then follows that if we only have limited access to Nature through our tools and, more subtly, through our restricted methods of investigation, our knowledge of the natural world is necessarily limited.
And yet even though much of the world remains invisible to us at any given moment, Gleiser argues that this is what the human imagination thrives on. At the same time, however, the very instruments that we create with this restless imagination begin to shape what is perceivable, and thus what is known, marking "reality" a Rube Goldberg machine of detectable measurements. Gleiser writes:
If large portions of the world remain unseen or inaccessible to us, we must consider the meaning of the word “reality” with great care. We must consider whether there is such a thing as an “ultimate reality” out there – the final substrate of all there is – and, if so, whether we can ever hope to grasp it in its totality.
[...]
Our perception of what is real evolves with the instruments we use to probe Nature. Gradually, some of what was unknown becomes known. For this reason, what we call “reality” is always changing... The version of reality we might call “true” at one time will not remain true at another.
[...]
As long as technology advances – and there is no reason to suppose that it will ever stop advancing for as long as we are around – we cannot foresee an end to this quest. The ultimate truth is elusive, a phantom.
To illustrate this notion, Gleiser constructs the metaphor after which his book is titled – he paints knowledge as an island surrounded by the vast ocean of the unknown; as we learn more, the island expands into the ocean, its coastline marking the ever-shifting boundary between the known and the unknown. Paraphrasing the Socratic paradox, Gleiser writes:
Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination – whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyway – but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.
Echoing Ray Bradbury's poetic convictionthat it's part of human nature "to start with romance and build to a reality," Gleiser adds:
This realization should open doors, not close them, since it makes the search for knowledge an open-ended pursuit, an endless romance with the unknown.
Gleiser admonishes against the limiting notion that we only have two options – staunch scientism, with its blind faith in science's ability to permanently solve the mysteries of the unknown, and religious obscurantism, with its superstitious avoidance of inconvenient facts. Instead, he offers a third approach "based on how an understanding of the way we probe reality can be a source of endless inspiration without the need for setting final goals or promises of eternal truths." In an assertion that invokes Sagan's famous case for the vital balance between skepticism and openness, Gleiser writes:
This unsettled existence is the very blood of science. Science needs to fail to move forward. Theories need to break down; their limits need to be exposed. As tools probe deeper into Nature, they expose the cracks of old theories and allow new ones to emerge. However, we should not be fooled into believing that this process has an end.
I recently tussled with another facet of this issue – the umwelt of the unanswerable – in contemplating the future of machines that think for John Brockman's annual Edgequestion. But what makes Gleiser's point particularly gladdening is the underlying implication that despite its pursuit of answers, science thrives on uncertainty and thus necessitates an element of unflinching faith – faith in the process of the pursuit rather than the outcome, but faith nonetheless. And while the difference between science and religion might be, as Krista Tippett elegantly offered, in the questions they ask rather than the answers they offer, Gleiser suggests that both the fault line and the common ground between the two is a matter of how each relates to mystery:
Can we make sense of the world without belief? This is a central question behind the science and faith dichotomy... Religious myths attempt to explain the unknown with the unknowable while science attempts to explain the unknown with the knowable.
[...]
Both the scientist and the faithful believe in unexplained causation, that is, in things happening for unknown reasons, even if the nature of the cause is completely different for each. In the sciences, this belief is most obvious when there is an attempt to extrapolate a theory or model beyond its tested limits, as in “gravity works the same way across the entire Universe,” or “the theory of evolution by natural selection applies to all forms of life, including extraterrestrial ones.” These extrapolations are crucial to advance knowledge into unexplored territory. The scientist feels justified in doing so, given the accumulated power of her theories to explain so much of the world. We can even say, with slight impropriety, that her faith is empirically validated.
A 1617 depiction of the notion of non-space, long before the concept of vacuum existed, found in Michael Benson's book Cosmigraphics—a visual history of understanding the universe
Citing Newton and Einstein as prime examples of scientists who used wholly intuitive faith to advance their empirical and theoretical breakthroughs – one by extrapolating from his gravitational findings to assert that the universe is infinite and the other by inventing the notion of a "universal constant" to discuss the finitude of space – Gleiser adds:
To go beyond the known, both Newton and Einstein had to take intellectual risks, making assumptions based on intuition and personal prejudice. That they did so, knowing that their speculative theories were necessarily faulty and limited, illustrates the power of belief in the creative process of two of the greatest scientists of all time. To a greater or lesser extent, every person engaged in the advancement of knowledge does the same.
The Island of Knowledge is an illuminating read in its totality – Gleiser goes on to explore how conceptual leaps and bounds have shaped our search for meaning, what quantum mechanics reveal about the nature of physical reality, and how the evolution of machines and mathematics might affect our ideas about the limits of knowledge.
For a fine complement, see Hannah Arendt on thinking vs. knowing and the crucial difference between truth and meaning and astrophysicist Janna Levin on whether the universe is infinite or finite, then treat yourself to Gleiser's magnificent conversation with novelist Marilynne Robinson – herself a thinker of perceptive and nuanced insight on mystery – on the existentially indispensable On Being:
GLEISER: To think of science as separate from spirituality to me is a big mistake... There is nothing that says that science should be dispassionate about the spirit or the life of the spirit. And to me it's quite the opposite. It's exactly because I feel very spiritually connected with nature that I am a scientist. And to write equations on a blackboard and to come up with models about how nature works is, in a sense, a form of worship of that spirituality.
[...]
ROBINSON: One of the things that is fascinating is that we don't know who we are. Human beings in acting out history describe themselves and every new epic is a new description of what human beings are. Every life is a new description of what human beings are. Every work of science, every object of art is new information. And it is inconceivable at this point that we could say anything final about what the human mind is, because it is demonstrating ... in beautiful ways and terrifying ways, that it will surprise us over and over and over again.
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 The human journey has always been marked by our quest to understand love in order to reap its fruits. We have captured that ever-shifting understanding in somebreathtakingly beautiful definitions. There is Susan Sontag, whomarveled in her diary: "Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love." There is Tom Stoppard, who captured its living substance in a most memorable soliloquy. There is Vladimir Nabokov, who defined it over and over in a lifetime of letters to his wife. But no formulation eclipses the luminous poetic precision of Rainer Maria Rilke in a passage from the classic Letters to a Young Poet (public library) – his correspondence with a 19-year-old cadet and budding poet named Franz Xaver Kappus, which also gave us Rilke on living the questions; a volume so iconic that it has sprouted a number of homages, from the poet's own lesser-known Letters to a Young Woman to Anna Deavere Smith's modern masterpiece Letters to a Young Artist.
In the seventh letter to his young friend, penned in May of 1904 and translated by M. D. Herter Norton, Rilke contemplates the true meaning of love and the particular blessings and burdens of young love:
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is – solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate – ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.
I consider Letters to a Young Poet a foundational text of our civilization and a life-necessity for every human being with a firing mind and a beating heart. Complement it with Rilke on the relationship between body and soul, how befriending our mortality can help us live more fully, andthe resilience of the human spirit, then revisit his own youthful ripening of love inhis love letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé.
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Stimulating, ennobling, deeply human conversations with Maira Kalman, Seth Godin, Dani Shapiro, Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Ware, Shepard Fairey, and more.
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"I belong to you... But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life."
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"Oh hell, it just boils down to: you just can't explain this sort of basic wonderful stuff to some adults."
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"We are embedded beings who create work in a social context, toiling shared soil in the hopes that our labor bears fruit. It is up to all of us whether this soil is enriched or depleted, whether it nurtures diverse and vital produce or allows predictable crops to take root and run rampant."
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"One can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes."
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"When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on."
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"Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening."
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"You may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist."
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The six psychological pillars of a satisfying life.
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The psychology of the perfect daily routine, how to criticize with kindness, the creative purpose of boredom, Kafka on what books do for the soul, and more.
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"The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion."
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"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
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"Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not."
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"The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow."
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"By a partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian."
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"This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?"
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