A Sense of Doubt blog post #1522 - balance, Emily Dickinson on spring, and creativity

Satchel and Ellory via Liesel at Woodland airfield 1904.21

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1522 - Seneca on how to live with presence and balance the existential calculus of time; Emily Dickinson on spring; physicist Freeman Dyson on creativity


Just a share today.

Happy Easter.

A Stoic’s Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Balancing the Existential Calculus of Time Spent, Saved, and Wasted

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her abiding insistence on choosing presence over productivity. But how do we really spend our days? In our era, the average human lifetime will contain two years of boredom, six months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy.

This devastating arithmetic of time wasted versus time meaningfully spent may seem like a modern problem, but while the nature of our cultural technologies has undeniably exacerbated the ratio, the equation itself stretches all the way to antiquity, with only the variables altered. (Lest we forget, books were derided as a dangerous distraction in 12th-century Japan.)

That equation, and how to balance it more favorably toward a life of substance and presence rather than one of waste and want, is what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined at the end of his life in Letters from a Stoic (public library) — a collection of 124 letters he composed to his friend Lucilius, which also gave us Seneca on true and false friendship, overcoming fear, and the antidote to anxiety.

Seneca

Fittingly, the first letter addresses the most urgent subject haunting human life: time, and more particularly, the existential calculus of how we spend or waste the sliver of time allotted us along the continuum of being. Fifteen years after he composed his timeless treatise on filling the shortness of life with wide living, Seneca, now in his final years, counsels his friend:

Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands… Certain moments are torn from us… some are gently removed… others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness.

The most perilous carelessness, Seneca argues eighteen centuries before Kierkegaard bemoaned the absurdity of busyness and Walt Whitman contemplated what makes life worth living, is that of sliding through life in a trance of expectancy, always vacating the present moment in order to lurch toward the next — a kind of living death. He writes:

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands.

Therefore… hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, — time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

Art by Ohara Hale from Be Still, Life

Reflecting on how he himself practices what he is preaching, Seneca writes with Stoic self-awareness:

I confess frankly: my expense account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man… I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.

Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Complement this particular fragment of the timelessly rewarding Letters from a Stoic with Ursula K. Le Guin’s gorgeous ode to time, Bertrand Russell on the relationship between leisure and social justice, Margaret Mead on leisure and creativity, and Emerson on how to live with presence in a culture of busyness, then revisit Seneca on what it means to be a generous human being and his Stoic key to peace of mind. 

Spring with Emily Dickinson

Something strange blankets the city and the soul in the first days of spring. The weary, the rushed, even the dispossessed surrender to a certain nonspecific gladness. They smile at you, you smile at them — under the blessing rays of the vernal sun, we are somehow reminded of what we humans were always meant to be to each other and to this stunning, irreplaceable planet we share with innumerable other creatures. In attending to nature at its best and most buoyant, we suddenly attune to the best of our own nature. This, perhaps, is why the modern environmental conscience was jolted awake by the terrifying notion of a silent spring, bereft of birdsong and bloom.

That vernal exhilaration is what Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886), poet laureate of nature, celebrates in a letter to her brother Austin, composed in the spring of her twenty-third year, just as she was falling in love with the love of her life, whom Austin would soon marry. (This beautiful, harrowing tangle of heartstrings occupies a large portion of Figuring.)

Emily Dickinson at seventeen. The only authenticated photograph of the poet. (Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, gift of Millicent Todd Bingham, 1956)

On a May Saturday in 1853, Emily writes to Austin:

Today is very beautiful — just as bright, just as blue, just as green and as white, and as crimson, as the cherry trees full in bloom, and the half opening peach blossoms, and the grass just waving, and sky and hill and cloud, can make it, if they try… You thought last Saturday beautiful — yet to this golden day, ’twas but one single gem, to whole handfuls of jewels.

Enraptured by nature, Dickinson spent her days in a sunny bedroom wallpapered with botanical patterns, in a house surrounded by flowerbeds and blooming trees. I wonder if she saw the magnolias the way I do, taken with their bittersweet beauty — for a week or so a year, their blossoms stun with a splendor that vanishes always too soon, as if to remind us that everything we love eventually perishes and yet this perishability is not reason for sorrow but reason to love all the harder.

Pages from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium.

This eternal dance of love and loss animated Dickinson since the earliest age. Most of the flower specimens in the astonishing herbarium of her girlhood — an elegy for time and the mortality of beauty at the intersection of poetry and science — were collected in the spring, then meticulously pressed and arranged onto the pages of this curious catalogue of imagined immortality and bulwark against impermanence. This inescapable interplay between beauty and perishability, which lends life so much of its sweetness, is at the heart of Dickinson’s vast body of work — nowhere more intensely than in this poem devoted to spring, composed in the autumn of her life:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period —
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay —

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

Photograph by Maria Popova

Complement with Dickinson on making sense of loss and her ode to resilience, then revisit Neil Gaiman’s stirring poem paying tribute to the ecological and cultural legacy of Silent Spring.

 A Flash of Illumination on the Greyhound Bus: Physicist Freeman Dyson on Creative Breakthrough and the Unconscious Mind

“Invention,” Frankenstein author Mary Shelley wrote in contemplating how creativity works, “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos of existing inspirations, properly comprehended and reconfigured into something new. Einstein termed this reordering “combinatory play.” But it is a process mostly unconscious, the product of which — the creative breakthrough we call originality — cannot be willed. It arrives unbidden, with an abruptness that often startles the very mind to which it alights — an exhilarating startlement the French polymath Henri Poincaré called “sudden illumination.” It constitutes the third stage in Graham Wallas’s pioneering 1926 guide to the four stages of the creative process — a moment Wallas described as “the culmination of a successful train of association, which may have lasted for an appreciable time, and which has probably been preceded by a series of tentative and unsuccessful trains.”

A captivating account of one such moment of creative breakthrough comes from the great physicist Freeman Dyson (b. December 15, 1923) in Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (public library).

Freeman Dyson in his late twenties. (Photograph by Verena Huber-Dyson.)

At twenty-two, Dyson was elected Fellow at Trinity College — a position Newton had held a quarter millennium earlier. During his time at Trinity, where he lived in a room just below Wittgenstein’s, Dyson was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship that sent him to the United States in pursuit of a doctorate in physics. He landed at Cornell, where he quickly befriended Richard Feynman, not yet thirty himself. At the time, Feynman was working on a then-radical formulation of quantum electrodynamics based on his now-famous diagrams. His method was in rivalry with another, devised by Julian Schwinger. “The two ways of explaining the experiments looked totally different,” Dyson recalls, “Feynman drawing little pictures and Schwinger writing down complicated equations.”

Edward Tufte’s steel sculptures of Feynman’s diagrams.

In the spring of 1948, Dyson took a cross-country road trip with Feynman. They filled the time and distance with fiery conversation about physics punctuated by Feynman’s bittersweet memories of the love of his life, who had died three years earlier. Upon his return, Dyson headed to Ann Arbor to spend six weeks studying with Schwinger. He left Michigan for another cross-country trip, this time traveling by himself, with Feynman’s and Schwinger’s ideas swirling and bobbing around his head on the long bus journey. He was the only person to have been in close direct contact with both QED formulations and the minds of their originators.

Suddenly, in what Dyson terms a “flash of illumination on the Greyhound bus,” everything fell into place — he saw the equivalence of the two competing formulations with a clarity that had evaded everyone else, including Feynman and Schwinger themselves.

In a sentiment physicist and novelist Alan Lightman would come to echo decades later in his beautiful account of the out-of-body experience of creative breakthrough, Dyson writes in a letter from September 14, 1948:

On the third day of the journey a remarkable thing happened; going into a sort of semistupor as one does after forty-eight hours of bus riding, I began to think very hard about physics, and particularly about the rival radiation theories of Schwinger and Feynman. Gradually my thoughts grew more coherent, and before I knew where I was, I had solved the problem that had been in the back of my mind all this year, which was to prove the equivalence of the two theories. Moreover, since each of the two theories is superior in certain features, the proof of equivalence furnished a new form of the Schwinger theory which combines the advantages of both. This piece of work is neither difficult nor particularly clever, but it is undeniably important if nobody else has done it in the meantime. I became quite excited over it when I reached Chicago and sent off a letter to Bethe announcing the triumph. I have not had time yet to write it down properly, but I am intending as soon as possible to write a formal paper and get it published. This is a tremendous piece of luck for me, coming at the time it does.

Reflecting on this striking feat of unconscious processing — the same unconscious processing to which Bob Dylan attributes his best songwriting — Dyson adds:

It is strange the way ideas come when they are needed. I remember it was the same with the idea for my Trinity Fellowship thesis.

Illustration by Vladimir Radunsky for On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein by Jennifer Berne. Einstein believed that his best ideas came during his violin breaks, when he ceased thinking consciously about the physics problems he was tackling.

In a testament to Rilke’s conviction that “everything is gestation and then bringing forth,” Dyson incubated his insight for the next two weeks before bringing it forth formally. Upon returning to Cornell, he sat down to distill his Greyhound bus illumination in a paper. In a letter from September 30, he reports his feat of creation with his characteristic warm wit:

I was for five days stuck in my rooms, writing and thinking with a concentration which nearly killed me. On the seventh day the paper was complete, and with immense satisfaction I wrote the number 52 at the bottom of the last page.

In a lovely example of merited pride unmoored from ego and self-satisfaction, he adds:

It is impossible for me to judge at present whether the work is as great as I think it may be. All I know is, it is certainly the best thing I have done yet.

Less than a month after he submitted the paper to the prestigious science journal Physical Review, Dyson received a letter that it had been accepted in its entirety — a highly unusual decision in its rapidity. His paper, one of the longest the journal has ever published, had gone through the peer review process in record time. The first paper to make use of Feynman’s diagrams, it championed their power not merely as a computational tool but as a physical theory, inviting other scientists to appreciate their brilliance and splendor. It was a turning point for the acceptance of Feynman’s unorthodox ideas in the scientific community. Seventeen years later, Feynman and Schwinger would share the Nobel Prize “for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles” — a depth of consequence the twenty-four-year-old Dyson had been the first to demonstrate in a coherent and compelling way after his revelation on the Greyhound bus.

Dyson concludes the letter with a sentiment that captures the abiding thrill of the human impulse to conquer the unknown:

To arrive at the frontiers of physics is like breaking through a crust, after which one finds plenty of room to move in a lot of directions.

Maker of Patterns is a fascinating and deeply rewarding read in its totality, replete with Dyson’s insight into science, creativity, politics, love, and the complexities of being human. Complement this particular portion with Rilke on how inspiration strikes, physicist David Bohm on creativity, and neurologist Oliver Sacks on its three essential components, then revisit Dyson on the future of science and finding meaning in the randomness of life.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1904.21 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1387 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.