“Anyone with any degree of mental toughness,” artist Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in contemplating life and the art of setting priorities, “ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least.” It’s a beautiful thought, and yet a strange and discomfiting one as we grow increasingly accustomed and even entitled to the simple, miraculous conveniences of modern life. I think of O’Keeffe each time I catch myself, mortified, on the brink of fury over a wifi outage aboard an airplane — centuries of physics and privilege converging into a superhuman capability we’ve come to take for granted — and then I quickly reach for Seneca as the ultimate vaccine against this humiliating hubris.

Two millennia before O’Keeffe, the great Roman philosopher — a man of timeless wisdom on how to stretch life’s shortness by living wide rather than long — took this point to its exquisite extreme in a letter to his friend Lucilius Junior, found in the altogether indispensable Letters from a Stoic (public library).

Writing in the month of December — a season of supreme Roman bacchanalia and intemperate festivities — Seneca offers his friend a recipe for moral resilience and constancy of mind:

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.

[…]

Let the pallet be a real one, and the coarse cloak; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for our needs.

Seneca tempers this advice with a reality-check of privilege — for it is, after all, a luxury of the privileged to practice this as an occasional elective exercise in character-building rather than a trying daily circumstance of life:

There is no reason, however, why you should think that you are doing anything great; for you will merely be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of poor men are doing every day. But you may credit yourself with this item, — that you will not be doing it under compulsion, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it permanently as to make the experiment from time to time. Let us practice our strokes on the “dummy”; let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard. We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.

[…]

So begin, my dear Lucilius, to … set apart certain days on which you shall withdraw from your business and make yourself at home with the scantiest fare. Establish business relations with poverty.

Letters from a Stoic remains a foundational text of character, essential for anyone looking to transcend the myriad hubrises of our humanity. Complement this particular portion with Albert Camus on strength of character, Emerson on the key to true personal growth, Nietzsche on why difficulty is essential for a fulfilling life, and Martha Nussbaum on agency and victimhood, then revisit Seneca on the shortness of life.

In the summer of 1865, just after he began writing Crime and Punishment, the greatest novelist of all time hit rock bottom. Recently widowed and bedeviled by epilepsy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) had cornered himself into an impossible situation. After his elder brother died, Dostoyevsky, already deeply in debt on account of his gambling addiction, had taken upon himself the debts his brother’s magazine. Creditors soon came knocking on his door, threatening to send him to debtors’ prison. (A decade earlier, he had narrowly escaped the death penalty for reading banned books and was instead exiled, sentenced to four years at a Siberian labor camp — so the prospect of being imprisoned was unbearably terrifying to him.) In a fit of despair, he agreed to sell the rights to an edition of his collected works to his publisher, a man named Fyodor Stellovsky, for the sum of his debt — 3,000 rubles, or around $80,000 in today’s money. As part of the deal, he would also have to produce a new novel of at least 175 pages by November 13 of the following year. If he failed to meet the deadline, he would lose all rights to his work, which would be transferred to Stellovsky for perpetuity.

Only after signing the contract did Dostoyevsky find out that it was his publisher, a cunning exploiter who often took advantage of artists down on their luck, who had purchased the promissory notes of his brother’s debt for next to nothing, using two intermediaries to bully Dostoyevsky into paying the full amount. Enraged but without recourse, he set out to fulfill his contract. But he was so consumed with finishing Crime and Punishment that he spent most of 1866 working on it instead of writing The Gambler, the novel he had promised Stellovsky. When October rolled around, Dostoyevsky languished at the prospect of writing an entire novel in four weeks.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871

His friends, concerned for his well-being, proposed a sort of crowdsourcing scheme — Dostoyevsky would come up with a plot, they would each write a portion of the story, and he would then only have to smooth over the final product. But, a resolute idealist even at his lowest low, Dostoyevsky thought it dishonorable to put his name on someone else’s work and refused.

There was only one thing to do — write the novel, and write it fast.

On October 15, he called up a friend who taught stenography, seeking to hire his best pupil. Without hesitation, the professor recommended a young woman named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. (Stenography, in that era, was a radical innovation and its mastery was so technically demanding that of the 150 students who had enrolled in Anna’s program, 125 had dropped out within a month.)

Twenty-year-old Anna, who had taken up stenography shortly after graduating from high school hoping to become financially independent by her own labor, was thrilled by the offer — Dostoyevsky was her recently deceased father’s favorite author, and she had grown up reading his tales. The thought of not only meeting him but helping him with his work filled her with joy.

The following day, she presented herself at Dostoyevsky’s house at eleven-thirty, “no earlier and no later,” as Dostoyevsky had instructed — a favorite expression of his, bespeaking his stringency. Distracted and irritable, he asked her a series of questions about her training. Although she answered each of them seriously and almost dryly, so as to appear maximally businesslike, he somehow softened over the course of the conversation. By the early afternoon, they had begun their collaboration on the novel — he, dictating; she, writing in stenographic shorthand, then transcribing at home at night.

For the next twenty-five days, Anna came to Dostoyevsky’s house at noon and stayed until four. Their dictating sessions were punctuated by short breaks for tea and conversation. With each day, he grew kinder and warmer toward her, and eventually came to address her by his favorite term of endearment, “golubchik” — Russian for “little dove.” He cherished her seriousness, her extraordinary powers of sympathy, how her luminous spirit dissipated even his darkest moods and lifted him out of his obsessive thoughts. She was touched by his kindness, his respect for her, how he took a genuine interest in her opinions and treated her like a collaborator rather than hired help. But neither of them was aware that this deep mutual affection and appreciation was the seed of a legendary love.

In her altogether spectacular memoir of marriage, Dostoevsky Reminiscences (public library), Anna recounts a prescient exchange that took place during one of their tea breaks:

Each day, chatting with me like a friend, he would lay bare some unhappy scene from his past. I could not help being deeply touched at his accounts of the difficulties from which he had never extricated himself, and indeed could not.

[…]

Fyodor Mikhailovich always spoke about his financial straits with great good nature. His stories, however, were so mournful that on one occasion I couldn’t restrain myself from asking, “Why is it, Fyodor Mikhailovich, that you remember only the unhappy times? Tell me instead about how you were happy.”

“Happy? But I haven’t had any happiness yet. At least, not the kind of happiness I always dreamed of. I am still waiting for it.”

Little did either of them know that he was in the presence of that happiness at that very moment. In fact, Anna, in her characteristic impulse for dispelling the darkness with light, advised him to marry again and seek happiness in family. She recounts the conversation:

“So you think I can marry again?” he asked. “That someone might consent to become my wife? What kind of wife shall I choose then — an intelligent one or a kind one?”

“An intelligent one, of course.”

“Well, no… if I have the choice, I’ll pick a kind one, so that she’ll take pity on me and love me.”

While we were on the theme of marriage, he asked me why I didn’t marry myself. I answered that I had two suitors, both splendid people and that I respected them both very much but did not love them — and that I wanted to marry for love.

“For love, without fail,” he seconded me heartily. “Respect alone isn’t enough for a happy marriage!”

Their last dictation took place on November 10. With Anna’s instrumental help, Dostoyevsky had accomplished the miraculous — he had finished an entire novel in twenty-six days. He shook her hand, paid her the 50 rubles they had agreed on — about $1,500 in today’s money — and thanked her warmly.

The following day, Dostoyevsky’s forty-fifth birthday, he decided to mark the dual occasion by giving a celebratory dinner at a restaurant. He invited Anna. She had never dined at a restaurant and was so nervous that she almost didn’t go — but she did, and Dostoyevsky spent the evening showering her with kindnesses.

But when the elation of the accomplishment wore off, he suddenly realized that his collaboration with Anna had become the light of his life and was devastated by the prospect of never seeing her again. Anna, too, found herself sullen and joyless, her typical buoyancy weighed down by an acute absence. She recounts:

I had grown so accustomed to that merry rush to work, the joyful meetings and the lively conversations with Dostoyevsky, that they had become a necessity to me. All my old activities had lost their interest and seemed empty and futile.

Unable to imagine his life without her, Dostoyevsky asked Anna if she would help him finish Crime and Punishment. On November 20, exactly ten days after the end of their first project, he invited her to his house and greeted her in an unusually excited state. They walked to his study, where he proceeded to propose marriage in the most wonderful and touching way.

Dostoyevsky told Anna that he would like her opinion on a new novel he was writing. But as soon as he began telling her the plot, it became apparent that his protagonist was a very thinly veiled version of himself, or rather of him as he saw himself — a troubled artist of the same age as he, having survived a harsh childhood and many losses, plagued by an incurable disease, a man “gloomy, suspicious; possessed of a tender heart … but incapable of expressing his feelings; an artist and a talented one, perhaps, but a failure who had not once in his life succeeded in embodying his ideas in the forms he dreamed of, and who never ceased to torment himself over that fact.” But the protagonist’s greatest torment was that he had fallen desperately in love with a young woman — a character named Anya, removed from reality by a single letter — of whom he felt unworthy; a gentle, gracious, wise, and vivacious girl whom he feared he had nothing to offer.

Only then did it dawn on Anna that Dostoyevsky had fallen in love with her and that he was so terrified of her rejection that he had to feel out her receptivity from behind the guise of fiction.

Is it plausible, Dostoyevsky asked her, that the alleged novel’s heroine would fall in love with its flawed hero? She recounts the words of literature’s greatest psychological writer:

“What could this elderly, sick, debt-ridden man give a young, alive, exuberant girl? Wouldn’t her love for him involve a terrible sacrifice on her part? And afterwards, wouldn’t she bitterly regret uniting her life with his? And in general, would it be possible for a young girl so different in age and personality to fall in love with my artist? Wouldn’t that be psychologically false? That is what I wanted to ask your opinion about, Anna Grigoryevna.”

“But why would it be impossible? For if, as you say, your Anya isn’t merely an empty flirt and has a kind, responsive heart, why couldn’t she fall in love with your artist? What if he is poor and sick? Where’s the sacrifice on her part, anyway? If she really loves him, she’ll be happy, too, and she’ll never have to regret anything!”

I spoke with some heat. Fyodor Mikhailovich looked at me in excitement. “And you seriously believe she could love him genuinely, and for the rest of her life?”

He fell silent, as if hesitating. “Put yourself in her place for a moment,” he said in a trembling voice. “Imagine that this artist — is me; that I have confessed my love to you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would you answer?”

His face revealed such deep embarrassment, such inner torment, that I understood at long last that this was not a conversation about literature; that if I gave him an evasive answer I would deal a deathblow to his self-esteem and pride. I looked at his troubled face, which had become so dear to me, and said, “I would answer that I love you and will love you all my life.”

I won’t try to convey the words full of tenderness and love that he said to me then; they are sacred to me. I was stunned, almost crushed by the immensity of my happiness and for a long time I couldn’t believe it.

Fyodor and Anna were married on February 15, 1867, and remained besotted with one another until Dostoyevsky’s death fourteen years later. Although they suffered financial hardship and tremendous tragedy, including the death of two of their children, they buoyed each other with love. Anna took it upon herself to lift the family out of debt by making her husband Russia’s first self-published author. She studied the book market meticulously, researched vendors, masterminded distribution plans, and turned Dostoyevsky into a national brand. Today, many consider her Russia’s first true businesswoman. But beneath her business acumen was the same tender, enormous heart that had made loving room within itself for a brilliant man with all of his demons.

Anna Dostoyevskaya by Laura Callaghan from The Who, the What, and the When

In the afterword to her memoir, Anna reflects on the secret to their deep and true marriage — one of the greatest loves in the history of creative culture:

Throughout my life it has always seemed a kind of mystery to me that my good husband not only loved and respected me as many husbands love and respect their wives, but almost worshipped me, as though I were some special being created just for him. And this was true not only at the beginning of our marriage but through all the remaining years of it, up to his very death. Whereas in reality I was not distinguished for my good looks, nor did I possess talent nor any special intellectual cultivation, and I had no more than a secondary education. And yet, despite all that, I earned the profound respect, almost the adoration of a man so creative and brilliant.

This enigma was cleared up for me somewhat when I read V.V. Rozanov’s note to a letter of Strakhov dated January 5, 1890, in his book Literary Exiles. Let me quote:

“No one, not even a ‘friend,’ can make us better. But it is a great happiness in life to meet a person of quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views who, while always remaining himself and in no wise echoing us nor currying favor with us (as sometimes happens) and not trying to insinuate his soul (and an insincere soul at that!) into our psyche, into our muddle, into our tangle, would stand as a firm wall, as a check to our follies and our irrationalities, which every human being has. Friendship lies in contradiction and not in agreement! Verily, God granted me Strakhov as a teacher and my friendship with him, my feelings for him were ever a kind of firm wall on which I felt I could always lean, or rather rest. And it won’t let you fall, and it gives warmth.”

In truth, my husband and I were persons of “quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views.” But we always remained ourselves, in no way echoing nor currying favor with one another, neither of us trying to meddle with the other’s soul, neither I with his psyche nor he with mine. And in this way my good husband and I, both of us, felt ourselves free in spirit.

Fyodor Mikhailovich, who reflected so much in so much solitude on the deepest problems of the human heart, doubtless prized my non-interference in his spiritual and intellectual life. And therefore he would sometimes say to me, “You are the only woman who ever understood me!” (That was what he valued above all.) He looked on me as a rock on which he felt he could lean, or rather rest. “And it won’t let you fall, and it gives warmth.”

It is this, I believe, which explains the astonishing trust my husband had in me and in all my acts, although nothing I ever did transcended the limits of the ordinary. It was these mutual attitudes which enabled both of us to live in the fourteen years of our married life in the greatest happiness possible for human beings on earth.

Complement the wholly enchanting Dostoevsky Reminiscences with Frida Kahlo’s touching remembrance of Diego Rivera, Jane Austen’s advice on love and marriage, and philosopher Erich Fromm on what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving, then revisit Dostoyevsky on why there are no bad people and the day he discovered the meaning of life in a dream.

“One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824. But two centuries later, amid a workaholic culture in which we busy ourselves wresting who we are from what we do, we have completely inverted the relationship. We no longer know how to be without doing, having rendered notions of work-life balance vacant of meaning. For those fortunate enough to have a so-called “dream job” — more often than not, driven personalities animated by uncompromising motivation — the paradox can be even more disorienting: While being your own boss grants tremendous freedoms, it also means that in walking this path of your own making, you are taking marching orders from the most demanding, most critical, most merciless boss possible. If John Dewey was right a century ago in his memorable assertion that “to find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness,” why do we find ourselves so frequently unhappy, trapped in the hamster wheel of accomplishment and approval, even if it is one of our own making — especially if it is one of our own making? From behind the screen of hard work, good work, we come to feel hard and good ourselves. But when the screen is lifted, what remains? Forget grandeur — we are suddenly disabused of our delusions of adequacy.

That’s what writer, television titan, and overachievement patron saint Shonda Rhimes addresses in her spectacular TED talk based on her memoir, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person (public library). It’s a rousing meditation on the paradox of self-made success, how we synthesize our sense of self from our work, what happens when a dream job loses its dreaminess, and how we can save ourselves from the maze of productivity by getting lost in presence.

It’s talk all the more moving in the context of a central pillar of Rhimes’s identity — her self-admitted marrow-deep introversion. (I relate.) And yet here is a woman of confidence so crystalline — a rare thing indeed among artists, our culture’s most professionalized self-doubters — that when the humility comes, you know in your bones it isn’t false humility. You recognize it instantly as the other strand in the double helix of which a Real Person‘s spiritual DNA is woven.

What do you do when the thing you do — the work you love — starts to taste like dust? … If the song of my heart ceases to play, can I survive in the silence?

Complement with German philosopher Josef Pieper’s magnificent and timely 1848 manifesto for why leisure is the basis of culture, Parker Palmer on the six pillars of the wholehearted life, and Anne Lamott on ending the tyranny of living by other people’s standards.

“Newton was so right about so many things,” cosmologist Janna Levin wrote in her magnificent meditation on madness and genius, “that it seems ungenerous to dwell on where he was wrong.” And yet in his day, even his most revolutionary rightness — especially his revolutionary rightness — was met with ungenerous opposition by his smaller-spirited peers. Chief among them was the English polymath Robert Hooke, whose famous rivalry with Newton resulted in humanity’s finest metaphor for how knowledge grows.

Science writer extraordinaire James Gleick, in his biographical masterwork Isaac Newton (public library), calls Hooke “Newton’s most enthusiastic antagonist,” his “goad, nemesis, tormentor, and victim.” Hooke, generally known for his curmudgeonly temperament and cynical disposition, reserved an especially caustic contempt for Newton, whose youthful genius aggrieved Hooke and aggravated his vain ego.

Where Hooke presented his ideas with unabashed hubris, Newton delivered his with humility — even if it was at times a false humility, for he too was a man animated by great ambition and in possession of a robust ego, it still stemmed from a hard realism about the fact that knowledge progresses not toward the definitive but toward the infinite.

Where Hooke bombastically proclaimed in his treatise on microscopes that “there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry,” Newton reported his own experiments on microscopy with the grounding caveat that the future would bring new instruments capable of magnifying four thousand times more powerfully, eventually making even the atom visible. Hooke, of course, was wrong and Newton right — something evidenced by our still-evolving understanding of matter five centuries later.

Newton’s humility sprang from an early and formative understanding of how knowledge builds upon itself, incrementally improving upon existing ideas until the cumulative adds up to the revolutionary. From a young age, he kept a commonplace book — a gift from his father, in which he copied passages from the books he read and supplemented them with extensive notes of his own, thus transmuting existing knowledge into original ideas. He named it his “Waste Book” — a testament to usefulness of useless knowledge and the combinatorial nature of creativity, or what his twentieth-century counterpart, Albert Einstein, would come to call “combinatory play.” This ability to originate by way of connection became the basic infrastructure of Newton’s mind — his singular superpower of perception.

Gleick writes:

When he observed the the world it was as if he had an extra sense organ for peering into the frame or skeleton or wheels hidden beneath the surface of things. He sensed the understructure. His sight was enhanced, that is, by the geometry and calculus he had internalized. He made associations between seemingly disparate physical phenomena and across vast differences in scale. When he saw a tennis ball veer across the court at Cambridge, he also glimpsed invisible eddies in the air and linked them to eddies he had watched as a child in the rock-filled stream at Woolsthorpe. When one day he observed an air-pump at Christ’s College, creating a near vacuum in a jar of glass, he also saw what could not be seen, an invisible negative: that the reflection on the inside of the glass did not appear to change in any way. No one’s eyes are that sharp… He communed night and day with forms, forces, and spirits, some real and some imagined.

Hooke was different. The friction between the two men began even before Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672. The previous year, the Society, where Hooke was curator of experiments, asked for a demonstration of the reflecting telescope Newton had invented three years earlier — known today as a Newtonian telescope, this then-revolutionary optical device for astronomical observation was significantly smaller than the refracting telescope that preceded it did and used two curved mirrors instead of a lens to form an image by reflecting light. The invention led Newton to develop an entire theory of colors (which would later inspire Goethe’s theory of color and emotion).

Hooke immediately pounced on Newton’s ideas, dismissing them as mere “hypothesis” — a term Newton found particularly offensive. Hooke also boasted in private correspondence with members of the Royal Society that he had invented an even smaller and more powerful telescope himself three years before Newton, but hadn’t bothered to actually build it on account of the Great Plague that ravaged London at the time.

‘Robert Hooke’ at home by Rita Greer

Fifteen months after he was elected to the Royal Society, Newton decided to withdraw from public debate — the incessant obstructionism by Hooke and other critics, who still remained merely epistolary bullies he was yet to meet in person, had started to wear down his sanity. Gleick writes:

He had discovered a great truth of nature. He had proved it and been disputed. He had tried to show how science is grounded in concrete practice rather than grand theories. In chasing a shadow, he felt, he had sacrificed his tranquillity.

But the private rivalry persisted. In 1675, Hooke alleged to have discovered what we now know as diffraction — the way light bends around a sharp edge. At the time, the nature of light was a mystery — some, like Descartes, considered it a particle, while others, like Hooke, thought it the product of motion. Because if an obstacle like an edge could stand in light’s path and bend it, diffraction supported the motion model, implying that light is a wave rather than a particle. (Today, we know that light can be both a particle and a wave, depending on how we measure it.)

“Beams of Light Through Glass” by pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott from her 1958 creative collaboration with MIT, Physical Sciences Study Project

This development excited Newton but, his mind by now an enormous commonplace book of knowledge, he recalled having read about diffraction experiments by a French Jesuit theologist, who built upon earlier ideas by a Bolognese mathematician — long before Hooke claimed the invention. He similarly challenged Hooke’s claims to originality in other aspects of the properties of light, urging the Royal Society to “cast out what [Hooke] has borrowed from Des Cartes or others.”

This recognition of the incremental, combinatorial character of knowledge came naturally to Newton, but even though the invention of the Gutenberg press two centuries earlier embodied it perfectly, it was still radical at the time. Gleick writes:

The idea of knowledge as cumulative — a ladder, or a tower of stones, rising higher and higher — existed only as one possibility among many. For several hundred years, scholars of scholarship had considered that they might be like dwarves seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but they tended to believe more in rediscovery than in progress.

This notion was particularly infuriating to Hooke, who saw any connection of his ideas to earlier ones not as a natural function of how science progresses but as an affront to his originality. He hungered to be seen as a giant — not as a dwarf who stood on the shoulders of giants — but hid his egomaniacal impulses behind the pretense of deference. He assured Newton that he was uninterested in a feud, that their experiments “aim both at the same thing which is the Discovery of truth” and as “two hard-to-yield contenders,” they should be able to “both endure to hear objections.”

And so, in their epistolary sparring, Newton’s famous metaphor was born — between pats of politesse, he delivered his legendary slap. Calling Hooke a “true Philosophical spirit,” he invited him to sort out their differences in private correspondence rather the public debate. In a letter penned on February 5, 1675, Newton wrote:

What’s done before many witnesses is seldome without some further concern than that for truth: but what passes between friends in private usually deserves the name of consultation rather than contest, & so I hope it will prove between you & me.

[…]

What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.

Isaac Newton’s famous letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Hooke, who as far as it is known never replied, maintained an antagonistic attitude toward Newton for the remainder of his life. However vast his intellect may have been, he revealed himself as far from a giant, for it is the mark of a small spirit to hide behind one-directional criticism while fleeing from intelligent two-way discourse.

As for the metaphor itself, it too is a meta-testament to Newton’s point — although he popularized it and immortalized it in his iconic language, it originated at least five centuries earlier and underwent several transmutations, including a famous one in Robert Burton’s 1621 masterpiece The Anatomy to Melancholy.

Gleick considers how Newton’s famous proclamation frames his paradoxical life and immensely far-reaching legacy:

Isaac Newton he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he did not believe it. He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. He was chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.

Solitude was the essential part of his genius. As a youth he assimilated or rediscovered most of the mathematics known to humankind and then invented the calculus — the machinery by which the modern world understands change and flow — but kept this treasure to himself. He embraced his isolation through his productive years, devoting himself to the most secret of sciences, alchemy. He feared the light of exposure, shrank from criticism and controversy, and seldom published his work at all. Striving to decipher the riddles of the universe, he emulated the complex secrecy in which he saw them encoded…

“I don’t know what I may seem to the world,” he said before he died, “but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Gleick’s Isaac Newton (public library) remains not only one of the finest biographies ever written, but a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand how the modern world as we know it came into view. Complement it with Hegel on knowledge and the true task of the human mind.

Exactly a year after John Keats (October 31, 1795–February 23, 1821) extolled the joys of being single, he fell in love. Fanny Brawne wasn’t beautiful by conventional standards, but she possessed enchanting erudition, a pair of intense blue eyes, and a disarming smile. Suddenly, Keats found himself ablaze with the ferocious temporary madness that infatuation inflicts upon the human heart, consumed with thoughts of his beloved and utterly unable to embody the now-legendary notion of “negative capability,” which he had coined two years earlier — the ability to rest into the unknown and not force outcomes upon uncertainty. What greater an impossibility for a heart that desires assurances of everlasting love, that demands nothing less than eternity?

In a letter to Fanny, penned in October of 1819 and found in his altogether magnificent Selected Letters (public library), Keats channels this commonest of human passions with uncommon potency and elegance of sentiment:

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else — The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my Life — My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you — I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again — my Life seems to stop there — I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving—I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love — Your note came in just here — I cannot be happier away from you — ’T is richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion — I have shudder’d at it — I shudder no more. I could be martyr’d for my Religion — Love is my religion — I could die for that — I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet — You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more — the pain would be too great — My Love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever

John Keats

Fanny and John remained engaged and in love until his tragically untimely death of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. The three years of their betrothal were among the most poetically productive for Keats.

His Selected Letters is a timelessly enchanting read in its totality. Complement with particular excerpt with the glorious love letters of James Joyce, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Ludwig van Beethoven, James Thurber, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Frida Kahlo, then revisit the paradoxical psychology of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in love.