Login
Rambling blog post alert: there isn’t a simple, straightforward way to tell the story of how I use Obsidian. This is going to be a bit of a winding post as I start to describe my setup and workflow. And there will be gaps because a) I don’t have time to write an omnibus description of this and b) you don’t want to read that anyway. I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but kept getting stuck by the scale of what was needed. So, forget that, here’s a first and incomplete blog post to get it started…
I migrated my 3,000+ notes from Apple Notes to Obsidian (following this howto) in December 2022, and spent some of the holiday break reorganizing the notes and learning about how Obsidian works. It took some time to figure out how to use the core features as well as to add plugins1 to make it work to support how I work.
Obsidian stores all notes as simple markdown files, so they’ll also work with other applications and will hopefully be pretty future-proof. As long as something can read text files, my notes will still work. Obsidian seems to have good longevity and adoption, but if it disappears there will be other ways to access my notes.
I invested hours into learning about using Obsidian with the Zettelkasten workflow. I now think of my notes more like a database than as a pile of pages. My Obsidian folder structure looks like this:
Collections is the Zettelkasten library - in my case, I created “nouns” as folders for articles, committees, ideas, institutions, organizations, people, profiles, topics, and vendors (so far).
Periodic has folders for daily, weekly, or monthly notes. I only really use the daily notes, and so far mostly for adding tasks to track outside of existing notes. I was hoping the daily/weekly/monthly notes would be useful to support reflective practice, but that hasn’t happened yet…
Resources is where all 2,900 attachment files referenced by notes - images, pdfs, etc - are stored.
Templates holds the template files that I can use to create notes of different types.
Utility is the folder with various dataview-powered note pages that make up the Map canvas.
Work is where most of my notes go - for meetings, consultations, projects, etc. There are over 2,000 notes in that folder, and its various sub-folders.
After spending a few months working in Obsidian, I’ve realized that this is the first time that I didn’t feel like taking notes was some kind of futile exercise in digital hoarding. I now regularly refer to notes, I can find connections between topics, and - for the first time in forever - I don’t feel like I’m missing things.
I started by creating a note called “Dashboard”, and adding some dataview code to list pending tasks and daily notes.
As an aside, the dataview plugin is what really transformed how I use my notes. It’s kind of like a simple SQL query to embed tables and lists within notes. It works with the Tasks plugin, so you can list all pending tasks, or all recently completed tasks, from all notes in the vault. And, from the embedded dataview list of tasks, you can check them as completed without having to go to the original note.
That worked well, but then Obsidian was updated to add a new Canvas feature. Canvas is kind of like a digital whiteboard tool - a bit like Miro - where you can add items (including notes and web pages) and lay them out as needed. I was having flashbacks of creating complex Cyberdog and OpenDoc documents from back in the ’90s.
I added my Dashboard note as an item on a “Map” canvas. And then created a few more notes using dataview code to list different items:
The live canvas works much better on a large 4K display, where all of the text is legible. From left to right, the blocks provide views for:
FreshRSS Question::This is a question…)Link::https://link-goes-here…)I keep the “Map” canvas pinned in a tab so it’s always handy, and it’s become my home base for work. I can see at a glance over 300 pieces of information.
As I’ve been using Obsidian, I’ve been adding wiki-style links between notes. And linking notes from meetings and projects to the Zettelkasten noun bucket notes like People, Institutions, Topics, etc. I’ll add placeholder notes for these if needed, which lets me link to them to start with, and then I’ll go back and fill in the stub later if I refer to it.
Obsidian has a “graph” view, visualizing notes as nodes, and links as edges or lines connecting the nodes. My graph view currently looks like this:
My graph doesn’t include all of my notes - especially older notes. Many are “orphans” without links to anything, so adding them to the graph would just add noise.
The live view displays the titles of each node when the cursor is over it, or you can set it to show all titles - but with this many nodes that just becomes a bunch of illegibly overlapping black text. I think the graph view is largely cosmetic - ooh! pretty pictures! - but it has given me some insight on which organizations I’m more actively using. EDUCAUSE has a large node because of how much we use the learning space articles. SCUP is smaller, because I’ve only been a member for a year now.
Another interesting insight - the light blue dots mostly along the top left are the People notes. And they are - of course - connected to each other and to the things we work on together.
Anyway. I’m really digging how I use Obsidian. That Map canvas is a game-changer for me, and I finally feel like my notes are actually useful for how I work.
over 30 plugins so far - I think that’s too many, but they seem to work well so far ↩︎
From the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”
Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.
This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes.
Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.”
There was a nurse there who said, “Maybe that’s not such a good idea, this patient is a recovering addict,” but the dental surgeon just ignored her and wrote the prescription and gave it to me.
I drove off. The Novocain was still strong, and once the actual brutal wrenching had stopped, I didn’t feel too bad. They’d given me a pamphlet about the dangers of dry socket. It said not to eat solid food. I thought, Well maybe I’ll get the prescription filled but I won’t use it.
It was surreal standing there at the CVS waiting for Percocet. I’d been clean for seventeen years, three months, and twenty-two days. No alcohol, no marijuana, no cocaine, no heroin, no Percocet, no Oxy, no Vicodin, no Ecstasy, no amphetamines. Nothing.
I took the bottle directly home and gave it to my wife. The amber bottle glowed in the sun. I put the Protocol into action.
The Protocol is what recovering addicts are supposed to do in a situation like this.
Give the medication to a friend or family member. Tell them to hide it and not to tell you where.
Even if you ask.
Take the medication only if you really, really need it.
You will probably lie to yourself about how much you need it.
Do you really need it? No.
No.
Okay, but
Take the medication exactly as prescribed.
Stop taking it while you are still uncomfortable.
Then tell the family member to flush it down the toilet.
I was in my office on the second floor of my house writing an email when the Novocain started to wear off. It wouldn’t be crazy to refer to my house as a mansion, I reflected just before the Novocain wore off. Things have gone pretty well for me since I got clean, I reflected before the Novocain wore off, looking around my spacious office. This place sure is a long way from the bare, metal shelf beds at the Cook County Jail on Twenty-Sixth and California. Or even from the relatively plush jails in the suburbs. To say nothing of the jails in Baltimore. At least the Cook County Jail didn’t smell like piss.
Then the Novocain wore off. I called my dad and said, “What the hell?” He chuckled. “I didn’t want to scare you,” he said. “You mean you knew it was going to be like this?” I was holding my face when I said it. My voice was a little muffled. I was maybe crying a little. “Yeah,” he said. I went down and told Lauren and she left the room and went to wherever she’d hidden the bottle and came back and gave me a pill.
I went and sat in front of my computer and played Slay the Spire. I felt the Percocet come on. I remember my dentist, the regular one, the one with the soft hands, saying once when I had a root canal that he didn’t prescribe opiates because he’d read somewhere that they didn’t remove the pain. They just made it so the pain didn’t matter.
That dentist understood nothing. It’s like saying there’s no point in flying to Florida to escape the winter, because it’s still winter in the place you left. It’s like saying there’s no point in cutting off this gangrenous limb, because the limb will still have gangrene after you cut it off.
When the Percocet wore off, I thought, Okay, I just needed a breather, I can deal with the pain by myself now. It’s not like it’s going to kill me. So I didn’t take any more Percocet the rest of that day, or that night when I couldn’t sleep because of the pain, or the day after. I ate my meals through a straw. I picked pieces of bone out of my gum.
“Is that normal?” Lauren asked, watching me hold up a sliver of bone from my gum.
I developed a kind of stoop. The pain wasn’t in my back. It wasn’t in my limbs, but I walked around stooped over. Unceasing pain makes you stoop. It makes you tired. You can feel yourself getting older. Those seconds and minutes you used to skip over, now you have to go all the way through them.
It’s a scientific fact that there’s no way to know exactly how long a single second is. It’s not like an inch. You can’t lay a second next to another second and see if it’s the same size. The truth is that seconds might be all kinds of different sizes. Ordinarily this is an abstract, philosophical kind of truth about the difference between time and space, but when you experience extended chronic pain, this truth loses its abstract quality and you understand that all seconds are not the same size and that there are long seconds, and there are longer seconds, and there are Very Long Seconds.
The next morning I asked Lauren for another pill. The bottle said to take one every four to six hours. I waited the full six hours before asking her for the next one. It wasn’t like I looked idly at the clock and thought, Wow, it’s been six hours already, time for my next dose. No. I was getting up from my chair at five hours and fifty-eight minutes. I was asking her at five hours and fifty-nine minutes. I had calculated that it took her approximately forty-five seconds to leave the room and come back with the pill. I gave her fifteen seconds extra. If she took sixteen seconds extra, it wouldn’t have been okay. I would have said something.
And it was as if all this time, inside my skull, a calloused old scabbed-over eyelid was slowly rising. There’s an eyeball inside my skull, and when it opens, my other eyes, my outside eyes, the eyes on my face, grow dim. This eyeball in my skull is made to see just one thing. It has only ever seen one thing, and now the ancient long-closed lid was slowly rising, and then it was up, and the eyeball was looking at the thing it was made to look at, and the thing was still there inside me, and the thing was the first time I ever did heroin.
That night, sitting next to Lauren watching a TV show while on Percocet, I felt no connection to her. It was as if all the nearly invisible connections, all the little threads that connect our nerves and memories and feelings to the people around us, all those fine filaments of perception that had slowly grown back over years of recovery—it was as if they’d all snapped, and I was floating in outer space. Sitting there next to her on the couch floating in space. In high orbit. Orbiting the eyeball inside my skull.
The next day, I stopped taking the Percocet. I was still uncomfortable. I was still in pain. It was no longer quite as bad, though, and as I was sitting there around four hours after the last dose, I thought, I have to stop this now.
I called my wife and I watched as she dumped the rest of the pills into the toilet and flushed it.
Okay. Breathe. I’d followed the Protocol; I was still clean.
Still recovering.
But the whiteness, the whiteness of the first time I did heroin, the whiteness of the memory disease, that whiteness, after so many years, when it filled the eyeball in the center of my skull … there was a second when my vision dimmed.
And it was like when all the sound goes out of a crowded room. And you can hear yourself breathing. And you think, Things aren’t what they seem. Houses, marriages, children, careers, can vanish.
The whiteness is real. It’s under those other things. Those other things are made of it—and look! Their outlines are starting to blur. They’re starting to turn white …
For the next couple of months, I went to more NA meetings than usual. The eyelid in my skull closed up again. It had only been open for a couple dozen hours, after all.
Call it the Pain Medication Paradox. That’s one aspect of the problem of addiction, a problem that has nothing to do with a stigma, nothing to do with anyone’s attitude. And maybe you’ll say, Well then, if it’s such a problem then just don’t take pain medication. Paradox solved.
Sure. How about you get a molar extracted, an extraction with “complications,” as the surgeon later described it when I went back, an “unusually difficult” extraction, how about you go through one of those and then you don’t get pain medication?
Pain is horrible. It’s inhumane. Literally dehumanizing. I was walking around like an ape on the second day. And opiates are still the only thing that works. We haven’t invented anything else that works. Should addicts be denied pain medication? Forced to writhe on the floor in pain for the crime of being born an addict? Is that progressive? Is that modern? Is that humane?
Okay, you say, so give the addicts pain medication if and when they really need it. Follow the Protocol, just like you did. You’re okay now, right? You just celebrated your twentieth year in recovery.
Yes, but what if things had been a little bit different for me? What if—on one of the innumerable occasions when someone offered me a drink—at a wedding reception, a Christmas party, an airplane ride, a dinner, a literary reading, a basketball game—what if on just one of those occasions, I’d reflected, Hey, I never really had a problem with alcohol. My problem was heroin, not alcohol, and I’ve had a long day, a hard day, a stressful day. Surely I can control my use of alcohol after twenty years, come on! Just one drink, just one little drink …
Or what if after being clean ten or fifteen years, I just decided to stop going to NA meetings? My wife has never seen me on dope. My daughter. My colleagues, my friends—none of them have ever seen me on dope. Why not stop going to meetings so much? There’s so much to do, life’s busy. It would be so easy to stop …
Or what if I got depressed? What if I just got depressed—depressed about the political situation, the climate, the state of literature, the state of the arts, the fact of death, the distance of my youth, hurtling away from me at lightning speed? I can barely see it anymore, a green blur in the distance. What if I finally just got really bummed out about the nature of time? And, like normal people when they get depressed, I stopped doing some things for a while. Took a little break. Stopped meditating, stopped exercising, stopped keeping my daily recovery journal, stopped reading recovery literature, stopped talking to recovering addicts …
What if I’d fallen prey to any of the innumerable things that cause recovering addicts to drift away from recovery? What if I hadn’t gone to a meeting in one or two or six or twenty months before walking into that dental surgeon’s office? What would have happened?
I can tell you what would have happened. It happened to a friend of mine. Call him George. He’d been clean for over ten years, stopped going to meetings. Things were going good for him. He didn’t need to go to meetings anymore. A year or two later he had some kind of medical procedure and took Percocet, and when the Percocet ran out, he found some dope and now he’s dead. Like the five addicts who will die as you read this, if you’re reading fast.
Let’s go further and imagine that I’d never really gotten into going to meetings at all. If that mysterious thing that I write about in my memoir, White Out, had never happened to me, and I’d never really given up trying to get high. Like millions of other addicts who are exposed to recovery but for whom, for whatever reason, that mysterious, maybe even mystical thing, never happens, and they never grasp that the only way out of addiction is also out of yourself.
A thousand little things, a thousand considerations of the most rational, the most progressive, the most reasonable kind can prevent a person from taking that step out of themselves, out of everything they know and are, out of the skull with the single interior eyeball, out of their mind. And if you don’t go out of that mind, you die.
As long as there’s a really effective way to stop pain, there will be addicts, and as long as there are addicts, many of them will die. That’s the kind of problem addiction is. And the Pain Medication Paradox is only one aspect of it. There are many others.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against the “Beat the Stigma” campaign. I wouldn’t be opposed to a new “Just Say No” campaign either. I’m for Suboxone treatment centers, halfway houses, twelve-step meetings, decriminalization, recriminalization, all of it. I’m not against doing anything or everything that helps. But don’t fool yourself. Addiction is a public problem. But it doesn’t have a public solution.
It has only private solutions. Unobjective solutions, nonscientific solutions. Solutions that speak in the first person.
From the foreword to White Out, to be republished by McNally Editions this month.
Michael Clune is the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of Gamelife, Writing Against Time, American Literature and the Free Market, and A Defense of Judgment.
As we await the next generation of engineered writing, of tools like ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs), it is worth pondering whether they will ever create truly great and unique prose, rather than the plausible-sounding mimicry they are currently known for.
By preprocessing countless words and the statistical relationships between them from million of texts, an LLM creates a multidimensional topology, a complex array of hills and valleys. Into this landscape a human prompt sets in motion a narrative snowball, which rolls according to the model’s internal physics, gathering words along the way. The aggregated mass of words is what appears sequentially on the screen.
This is an impressive feat. But it has several major problems if you are concerned about writing well. First, a simple LLM has the same issue a pool table has: the ball will always follow the same path across the surface, in a predictable route, given its initial direction, thrust, and spin. Without additional interventions, an LLM will select the most common word that follows the prior word, based on its predetermined internal calculus. This is, of course, a recipe for unvaried familiarity, as the angle of the human prompt, like the pool cue, can overdetermine the flow that ensues.
To counteract this criticism and achieve some level of variation while maintaining comprehensibility, ChatGPT and other LLM-based tools turn up the “temperature,” an internal variable, increasing it from 0, which produces perfect fidelity to the physics, i.e., always selecting the most likely next word, to something more like 0.8, which slightly weakens the gravitational pull in its textspace, so that less common words will be chosen more frequently. This, in turn, bends the overall path of words in new directions. The intentional warping of the topological surface via the temperature dial enables LLMs to spit out different texts based on the same prompt, effectively giving the snowball constant tugs in more random directions than the perfect slalom course determined by the iron laws of physics. Turn the temperature up further and even wilder things can happen.
Yet writing well isn’t about using less frequent words or having more frequent tangents. Great writing forges alternative pathways with intentionality. Styles and directions are not shifted randomly, but as needed to strengthen one’s case or to jolt the reader after a span of more mundane prose. For instance, my writing style for this newsletter, although less serious and less formal than my academic writing style, nevertheless is prone to use the phrase “for instance” and the word “nevertheless.” My sentences tend to be longer than those you might encounter in more casual writing, and I generally avoid starting a sentence with “Anyway,” or ending a sentence with an exclamation point. But sometimes, to underscore my argument, I do use an exclamation point!
Anyway, dialing up the temperature creates variability, leading to different responses to the same prompt; an improvement. But this hack is only on the output side of the LLM; by the time the snowball is rolling around, those hills and valleys are already firmly sculpted by the preprocessing of a distinct slate of texts. In other words, the input of the LLM has already been determined. With many of the LLM-based tools we are encountering today, those corpora are incredibly large and omnivorous. ChatGPT is an indiscriminate generalist in what it has read, because it wants to be able to write on virtually any topic.
Here again, however, there is an obvious issue. Good writing isn’t just the selection and ordering of words, the output; good writing is the product of good reading. Writers aren’t indiscriminate generalists, but tend to be rather choosy and personal about what they read. As humans they also have a fairly limited reading capacity, which means that their styles are highly influenced by idiosyncratic reading histories, by their whim. Good readers can often discern which writers a writer has read, as little stylistic quirks pop up here and there — a recognizable artisanal blend, mixed with some individually developed ingredients. It is hard to see how great writing can come from a model that is a generalist, or from a prompt asking for “a story in the style of” just one writer, or even from an LLM trained on a discerning, highbrow corpus, although each of those might have interesting, skillful outputs.
If we want our LLMs to be truly variable and creative, we would have to train the models not on a mass of texts or even the texts of a set of “good writers” (if we could even agree on who those are!), but on a limited, odd array of texts one human being has ingested over their lifetime, which they think about in relationship to their experience of life itself, and which they process and transform over time. And this begins to sound a lot like a story in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, in which a machine seeks to become a writer to impress human beings, and so it asks someone to assemble a library of great works, and the machine waits patiently for years while its human assistant, engrossed by what they are reading, piles up books next to a comfortable chair.
Subscribe to the Humane Ingenuity newsletter:
How the Big Bang gave us time, explained by theoretical physicist.
I haven’t written much over the years about what people call “productivity,” partly because I don’t have a lot to say. A few years ago I thought I would permanently be a Zettelkasten kind of guy, but then I discovered that I need different methods for different projects. But some things have remained constant:
I haven’t written about that third one before, but it’s really the key ingredient. Many people think that having the right note-taking tool is essential to productivity, but I don’t. Sometimes I make notes on my computer in text files; sometimes I write in notebooks (of various kinds and sizes); sometimes I make voice notes on my phone. I just use whatever happens to be easiest at the moment — though when my mind is overfull I always sit down with a notebook and hand-write my thoughts for at least an hour. But I could probably do that with a voice note just as well.
No, the tools don’t really matter to me, and I have learned not to fuss about them. What’s essential is scheduling time — I set aside an hour each Monday morning and a whole morning on or near the first of every month — to go over all of those notes and do a kind of self-assessment. I sit down with my notebook and my computer and ask: Where am I in my current projects? What did I accomplish last week? What do I need to think about further? Is there any research or reading I need to be doing? What should be my priorities this week (or this month)? That kind of thing.
I could have the best note-taking system in the world and I’d still be lost if I didn’t have regular periods for review and reflection.
Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed an unusual adaptation that shaped its destiny: Despite being a conifer — needle-leaved trees that are usually evergreen — it became deciduous, losing all of its needles during the months-long lightless winter to conserve energy, then growing vigorously in the bright summer months — the fastest-growing of the redwoods. With this uncommon competitive edge, it conquered large swaths of the globe, spreading the seeds of its handsome cones across North America and Eurasia. But when the global climate plunged into the Ice Age, its victory march came to an abrupt halt.
We know this because, at the peak of WWII, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki discovered fossils of this small, mighty redwood species. Nothing like it had ever been described in the botanical literature, so he deemed it extinct, naming it Metasequoia after its kinship to Earth’s most majestic tree.
The World War was still raging when a Chinese forester traveling through Central China in the winter of 1941 came upon a majestic old tree of a kind he had never seen before. There was a small shrine at its foot, where locals had been lighting votives and leaving offerings for decades. They called it, he learned, shui-sa, or “water fir,” for its love of moist soil — a name he had never heard before. Because the tree was already denuded of needles for its seasonal hibernation, he was unable to collect a proper specimen for identification — but he told other foresters and botanists of it, until word reached Zhan Wang, director of China’s Central Bureau of Forest Research.
Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the “water fir” as a Metasequoia.
Here was a living fossil — a lovely ghost of evolution that had somehow survived the unsurvivable.
Across the flaming divide that placed China and Japan on opposite sides of the World War, a small group of scientists had transcended the deadly artifice of borders and the ugliness of weapons to remind the world that the human longing for truth and beauty is greater than our foibles.
The first Chinese person to be awarded a Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University, Hu still maintained a relationship with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum — one of the world’s largest living museums of trees. As news of this ancient tree began making international headlines, lauded by journalists as a “living vestige of younger world,” “as remarkable as discovering a living dinosaur,” the director of the Harvard arboretum cobbled together funds for a collecting expedition in China across the ashen world — one of the last collaborations between Chinese and Western scientists before the Chinese Revolution dropped its leaden wall for decades.
As soon as the samples arrived at Harvard, the arborists planted several trees on Massachusetts soil — the first to grow in North America in more than two million years — and began distributing a kilogram of precious seeds to universities and botanical gardens across the globe. Hundreds of human hands from different nations and different creeds pressed them into moist soil, until this global effort to reanimate a ghost of evolution populated parks all over the world with Metasequoia.
Perhaps due to the rich orange color its feathery needles turn before falling, perhaps in homage to its improbable chance at a new day in the epochal calendar of existence, it became known as dawn redwood.
In the 1950s, a retired forester planted eight in Oregon; the fire chief of a California county planted one at the fire department headquarters; eventually, many more were seeded across California and the Pacific Northwest. In the 1970s, New York City community garden patron saint Liz Christy planted one at the iconic Bowery community farm-garden now bearing her name. Today, dawn redwoods rise from the heart of London and thrive in Istanbul’s arboretum. Three stand sentinel over Strawberry Fields — the John Lennon memorial in Central Park. In the final years of the twentieth century, it was declared “the tree of the century.”
The year of the living fossil’s discovery, Einstein’s voice unspooled from the British radio waves, passionate and accented, to make a case for “the common language of science” as the only impartial understanding that can save humanity from itself. Each dawn redwood rising from a patch of spacetime somewhere on this divided and indivisible world is a living monument to what is truest and most beautiful in the human spirit.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are,” Pablo Neruda observed in his soulful Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But paths are more than metaphors — they do lead places and, along the way, do reveal us to ourselves in ways inconceivable at the outset, unattainable at home.
That is what the poetic nature writer (and spell-writer, and songwriter) Robert Macfarlane explores in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (public library) — the final book in his trilogy on landscape as a lens on inner life, exploring “the relationship between paths, walking and the imagination” through his experience of walking more than one thousand miles along ancient paths, only to find himself delivered more fully in the present.
He writes:
Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own… Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people. Paths are consensual, too, because without common care and common practice they disappear: overgrown by vegetation, ploughed up or built over (though they may persist in the memorious substance of land law). Like sea channels that require regular dredging to stay open, paths need walking.
In consonance with Thomas Bernhard’s observation that “there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking,” he considers an ancient creative relationship:
The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature — a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
This natural narrative undertone to paths has an even deeper effect on the fundaments of the psyche, for in walking we get to reexamine the story of the self as the landscapes we move through mirror us back to ourselves, magnified and transformed. Macfarlane considers the particular rewards of trodden paths which generations have walked as channels of self-discovery:
These are the consequences of the old ways with which I feel easiest: walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape; paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing.
[…]
Paths run through people as surely as they run through places… I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can “enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.”
Complement with the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark’s wonderful prose poem “In Praise of Walking” — which Macfarlane led me to through a fractal branching of the literary path he treads — then revisit Macfarlane’s splendid inquiry into the wonderland beneath our feet.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
There is a phenomenon in forests known as inosculation — the fusing together of separate trees into a single organism after their branches or roots have been entwined for a long time. Sometimes, one of the former individuals may be cut or broken at the base, but it remains fully alive through its sinewy fusion with the former other. This is no longer symbiosis between two distinct organisms but a hybrid new organism fully sharing in the resources of life.
Everything alive has the potential for inosculation in one form or another. That, perhaps, is what the great naturalist John Muir meant when he observed that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” To be proper citizens of that universe is to recognize ourselves as particles of it, indelibly linked to every other particle — particles each minuscule but majestic with possibility; it is to recognize that, as Dr. King observed, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
Few have captured the responsibility and power of that mutuality more passionately, nor lived them more fully, than Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928–July 2, 2016).
In Conversations with Elie Wiesel (public library), the Biblical question Cain poses to God after killing Abel — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — becomes a lens on what makes for brotherhood in the broadest humanistic sense. Wiesel reflects:
We are all our brothers’ keepers… Either we see in each other brothers, or we live in a world of strangers… There are no strangers in a world that becomes smaller and smaller. Today I know right away when something happens, whatever happens, anywhere in the world. So there is no excuse for us not to be involved in these problems. A century ago, by the time the news of a war reached another place, the war was over. Now people die and the pictures of their dying are offered to you and to me while we are having dinner. Since I know, how can I not transform that knowledge into responsibility? So the key word is “responsibility.” That means I must keep my brother.
Whenever we quiet the voices of so-called civilization — the voices of selfing and hard-edged individualism — that sense of the interconnectedness of life and of lives becomes audible. And yet we are habitually deafened to it by a kind of desensitization — the kind the poet May Sarton so poignantly captured as she contemplated how to live with tenderness in a harsh world. Much of it, Wiesel observes, is a form of paralysis that comes from the sheer mismatch between the scale of the problems the world hurls at us and our individual locus of agency — a particular pathology of the information age, further exploited by the news media and their crisis-mongering. Wiesel considers the consequence:
We are careless. Somehow life has been cheapened in our own eyes. The sanctity of life, the sacred dimension of every minute of human existence, is gone. The main problem is that there are so many situations that demand our attention. There are so many tragedies that need our involvement. Where do you begin?
With an eye to a central problem of our time — how to live with wisdom in the age of information — he adds:
We know too much. No, let me correct myself. We are informed about too many things. Whether information is transformed into knowledge is a different story, a different question.
He traces the emotional attrition that happens when we are bombarded with news of crises and traumatic events — at first deeply moved and invested in allaying the suffering we see, we grow exhausted by trauma-sighting and help-canvassing, just as news of the latest calamity or injustice is piling atop the previous one:
You couldn’t take it. There is a need to remember, and it may last only a day or a week at a time. We cannot remember all the time. That would be impossible; we would be numb. If I were to remember all the time, I wouldn’t be able to function. A person who is sensitive, always responding, always listening, always ready to receive someone else’s pain… how can one live?
The antidote to this paralysis, Wiesel argues, is small action — a testament to Hannah Arendt’s conviction that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” A century and a half after Van Gogh insisted that “however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth… steps in and does something,” Wiesel insists on choosing from among the innumerable causes soliciting your attention and aid just one in which to get involved — an act seemingly small that, on the cumulative scale of humanity, moves the world.
The greatest challenge facing us all, however, is how to be with each other’s suffering. In consonance with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight that “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence,” Wiesel considers the wellspring of universal love and brotherhood:
I believe in dialogue. I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence. I would like my students to be presence whenever people need a human presence. I urge very little upon my students, but that is one thing I do. To people I love, I wish I could say, “I will suffer in your place.” But I cannot. Nobody can. Nobody should. I can be present, though. And when you suffer, you need a presence.
[…]
If there is a governing precept in my life, it is that: If somebody needs me, I must be there.
Couple this fragment of the wholly vitalizing Conversations with Elie Wiesel with Wiesel’s stirring Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, then revisit Nick Cave on the antidote to our existential helplessness and the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale on moral courage and our personal power.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
.jpg){kind=link}