“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is said to have said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

But fairy tales also make us, children and grown children alike, kinder and more resilient by grounding us in the knowledge — a primal knowledge we unlearn as we grow up and grow frightened of feeling — that the terrible and the transcendent spring from the same source, that our capacity for sorrow and our capacity for love spring from the same source, that the measure of life’s beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the presence, persistence, and grace with which we face reality on its own terms.

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In 1920, in the middle of Ireland’s guerrilla war for independence, weeks before Bloody Sunday, a book both very new and very old appeared and swiftly disappeared into eager hands — a lyrical, lighthearted, yet poignant retelling of ancient Irish myths by the Irish poet and novelist James Stephens.

The ten stories in his Irish Fairy Tales (public library | public domain) transported readers away from the world of bloodshed and heartache, into another, where the worst and the best of the human spirit entwine in something else, transcending the human plane. A world where a fistful of blackberries is a more powerful weapon than a sword. Where humans shape-shift into animals and sprites, where promises of eternal loyalty are made, then broken in a heartbeat; where children are hurt, then saved and raised in the forest by benevolent strangers; where armies are defeated by venomous sheep and people are exiled over a lost game of chess; where people kindle kindness to one another across war lines and family feuds. A strange world where beauty and brutality coexist, a world savaged by its own strange sense of justice and saved by its own strange species of hope.

Carrying that world are sixteen exquisite color plates and two dozen black-and-white illustrations by Arthur Rackham (September 19, 1867–September 6, 1939), who lived through the First World War and died five days after the start of the second.

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Thirteen years after he revolutionized the technology and economics of book art with his now-iconic Alice in Wonderland illustrations and six years before his hauntingly beautiful take on The Tempest, Rackham magnifies the transportive enchantment of the stories with his visual poetics of shape and strangeness.

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Coursing through the stories is the recurring fantasy of mitigating the ills of human nature with the wide-brimmed benevolence of nature — again and again, humans transmogrify into other animals to find a foothold for justice, a touchstone of goodness and grace. (In the same era, across the Atlantic, the poetic naturalist John Burroughs was issuing his impassioned insistence that we need not escape into fantasy to have human nature salved and saved by nature and the artist Rockwell Kent was finding an antidote to violence in the wilderness, while his German peer Franz Marc was auguring the triumph of beauty over brutality in his staggering animal paintings across the war-torn hillsides of the French countryside.)

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In one of his most lyrical passages, Stephens animates the protagonist of the first fairy tale:

Old age again overtook me. Weariness stole into my limbs, and anguish dozed into my mind. I went to my Ulster cave and dreamed my dream, and I changed into a hawk. I left the ground. The sweet air was my kingdom, and my bright eye stared on a hundred miles. I soared, I swooped; I hung, motionless as a living stone, over the abyss; I lived in joy and slept in peace, and had my fill of the sweetness of life.

[…]

For long, long years I was a hawk. I knew every hill and stream; every field and glen of Ireland. I knew the shape of cliffs and coasts, and how all places looked under the sun or moon… Then I grew old, and in my Ulster cave close to the sea I dreamed my dream, and in it I became a salmon. The green tides of ocean rose over me and my dream, so that I drowned in the sea and did not die, for I awoke in deep waters, and I was that which I dreamed. I had been a man, a stag, a boar, a bird, and now I was a fish. In all my changes I had joy and fulness of life. But in the water joy lay deeper, life pulsed deeper… How I flew through the soft element: how I joyed in the country where there is no harshness: in the element which upholds and gives way; which caresses and lets go, and will not let you fall. For man may stumble in a furrow; the stag tumble from a cliff; the hawk, wing-weary and beaten, with darkness around him and the storm behind, may dash his brains against a tree. But the home of the salmon is his delight, and the sea guards all her creatures.

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Complement with these enchanting illustrations for Walter de la Mare’ fairy-poems by Rackham’s contemporary Dorothy Lathrop and the gifted teenage artist Virginia France Sterrett’s illustrations for old French fairy tales from the same era, then revisit the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lyrical and lovely case for fairy tales and the importance of being scared and J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fantasy.

This is the sixth of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.

As he was revolutionizing our understanding of reality, Albert Einstein kept stumbling over one monolith of mystery — why is it that while some things in physical systems change (and relativity is a theory of change: of how changes in coordinates give shape to spacetime), nature keeps other things immutable: things like energy, momentum, and electrical charge. And the crucial the puzzle: Why we cannot destroy energy or create it out of nothing — we can only transform it from one form to another in ever-morphing symmetries.

The revelation, which made Einstein’s general relativity possible, came from the mathematics of Emmy Noether (March 23, 1882–April 14, 1935).

Born into a Jewish family in rural Germany in 1882, the daughter of a mathematician, Emmy Noether showed an early and exquisite gift for mathematics: this abstract plaything of thought, this deepest language of reality. She excelled through all the education available to her, completing her doctorate in 1907 as one of two women in a class of nearly a thousand, shortly after the government had declared that mixed-sex education would “overthrow all academic order.”

For seven years, while Einstein was working out his theories, Noether was working without pay as a mathematics instructor at the local university. In 1915 — the year Einstein’s general relativity reframed our picture of reality — she finally received proper employment at the country’s premier research institution. At Göttingen University, where three centuries of visionary scientists have honed their science and earned their Nobels, Emmy Noether developed the famous theorem now bearing her name. Considered one of the most important and beautiful in all of mathematics, it proves that conservation laws rely on symmetry.

A generation after the women decoding the universe for paltry pay at the Harvard College Observatory under the directorship of Edward Charles Pickering became known as “Pickering’s Harem,” Emmy Noether’s mathematics students became known as the “Noether boys.”

In 1932, she became the first woman to give the plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians — the world’s most venerable gathering of brilliant abstract minds. Of the 420 participating mathematicians, Emmy Noether was the only woman. Another woman would not address the Congress until 1990 — the year the Hubble Space Telescope leaned on her physics to open its colossal eye into an unseen cosmos “so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” As of this moment in 2022, there has not been a third.

Months after Emmy Noether’s address, the Nazis banished Jewish professors from German universities. The position she had spent half a century and a lifetime earning was vanquished overnight.

Einstein sought refuge in Princeton — that epicenter of physicists and mathematicians of his and her caliber. But Princeton had no room for a her. Emmy Noether ended up at Bryn Mawr. Although she was invited as a guest lecturer on the request of the working scientists at Princeton, whose field would have been unimaginable without her contribution, the university overlords made her feel unambiguously unwelcome. Even this cheerful and uncomplaining woman, too in love with the abstract beauty of mathematics to have been thwarted by the systemic exclusion of the body carrying the mind, rued that it was “the men’s university, where nothing female is admitted.”

Symmetry now permeates our understanding of the universe and the language of physics. It is nigh impossible to publish any paper — that is, to formulate any meaningful model of reality — without referring to symmetry in some way. This was Emmy Noether’s gift to the world — a whole new way of seeing and a whole new vocabulary for naming what we see, which is the fundament of fathoming and sensemaking. What she gave us is not unlike poetry, which gives us a new way of comprehending what is already there but not yet noticed and not yet named. With her elegant, deeply original mathematics, which came to underpin the entire standard model of particle physics, Emmy Noether became the poet laureate or reality.

And yet, having devoted her life’s work to demystifying the conservation of energy, she too submitted to the dissipation awaiting us all — each of us a temporary constellation of particles assembled for a pinch in spacetime, an assemblage that has never before been and will never again will be, no matter the greatness and glory attained in the brief interlude of being succumbing to the ultimate mystery.

Emmy Noether died on April 14, 1935, after complications from a seemingly banal ovarian surgery. She had just turned 53.

Two weeks later, crowds gathered for a memorial at Bryn Mawr, where the great German mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Hermann Weyl delivered the memorial address. He opened it with a verse from “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892–October 19, 1950) — another woman ahead of her epoch in many ways, who frequently reverenced science in her poems about the rapture of reality.

Inspired by one of Millay’s most passionate loves — a young woman named Dorothy Coleman, who had died in the 1918 flu pandemic — the elegy was published a decade later in her collection The Buck in the Snow and now lives on in her exquisite Collected Poems (public library).

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1920s

In this special installment in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse, in memory of another irreplaceable constellation of atoms (without whom the modern landscape of scientific thought would not be what it is), I asked my darling friend and longtime collaborator in the poetic endeavors Amanda Palmer to bring Millay’s poem to life in a characteristically soulful reading, then invited another beloved friend — the prolific and Caldecott-decorated children’s book author and artist Sophie Blackall (who happens to be the maker of Amanda’s son’s favorite book) to animate it (in both senses of the word) with her characteristically soulful art, scored with a soulful original composition by English musician Tom McRae (who happens to be Sophie’s cousin):

DIRGE WITHOUT MUSIC
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Previously in the series: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith); Chapter 3 (trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell and the poetry of the cosmic perspective, with David Byrne and Pattiann Rogers); Chapter 4 (dark matter and the mystery of our mortal stardust, with Patti Smith and Rebecca Elson); Chapter 5 (a singularity-ode to our primeval bond with nature and each other, starring Toshi Reagon and Marissa Davis).

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote in the closing lines of his “Ode to a Grecian Urn” in the spring of 1819, in the spring of modern science. Humanity was coming abloom with new knowledge of reality as astronomy was supplanting the superstitions of astrology and chemistry was rising form the primordial waters of alchemy. Ten years earlier, when Keats was a teenager, Dalton had at last confirmed the existence of the atom — the great dream Democritus had dreamt civilizations earlier; the dream Aristotle, drunk on power and certitude, had squashed with his theory of the four elements. A beautiful truth buried in a Grecian urn and laid to rest, roused two thousand years later by the kiss of chemistry.

The story of our species is punctuated with a thousand analogous atoms of experience. Truth is beauty in the workings of the world, but in the workings of humanity, truth is often sleeping beauty. Even on the miniature timescale of our own lifetimes — these grunts in the story of the world — it can take us years or decades of hindsighted reflection to arrive at the truth of our experience, any experience, and all the more so the greater its complexity and its toll on us.

Two hundred springtimes after Keats, David Byrne explores this facet of the human condition in his felicitously uncategorizable book A History of the World (in Dingbats) (public library) — a playful yet poignant meditation, in words and drawings, on the human truths unveiled as the world came unworlded by the global pandemic that became the great shared experience of our lifetimes.

Radiating from the pages, delightfully designed and typeset by Alex Kalman, is Byrne’s buoyant vision for the new world, a world of magnified mutuality and widespread poetry of possibility; a vision for life not merely restored to how it used to be but reset, recalibrated, revitalized — life that is a little bit more alive.

In the first section, titled “Sleeping Beauty,” he writes with an eye to the history of the atom:

Throughout history, some ideas, connections, perspectives, and technologies have emerged, come into view, and then often go to sleep. Brilliant inventions, stories, and techniques can vanish from our view, sometimes for long periods, lying dormant until someone wakes them.

[…]

The list of sleepers is long. Like mountains and oceans, dark forests and remote landscapes, they surround us, interred, peaceful, and unrecognized. Concrete, steam engines, clocks — all created and forgotten.

Observing that this happens as much in art as in science — it happened to Blake, until Anne Gilchrist wrested him from Romantic obscurity; it happened to Bach, until Albert Schweitzer wrested him from classical obscurity — Byrne adds:

Surely even now many more lie slumbering among and around us. Some of them are known unknowns, like the missing works of Aristotle or Shakespeare — we know of their existence, but they are lost. Others are the unknown unknowns — works and insights so invisible to us that we have forgotten they existed.

Beautiful insights, marvels, and miracles lie everywhere, peacefully awaiting a gentle touch or recognition. As we emerge into a new world we may be able to finally remove our veils and see them all around us.

And so, dingbats — those odd glyphs born as meaningless graphical elements to give typesetters and printmakers in Keats’s era a way to liven up their layouts, which later took on a life of their own as an increasingly elaborate symbolic language, then morphed into an early computer font. The pictures in the book originated as a kind of visual library of dingbat-inspired drawings, which Byrne created for the digital-age typesetters and printmakers of the editorial team behind his boundlessly wonderful online journal Reasons to be Cheerful.

But, given his lifelong love of drawing, he soon found himself getting pleasurably carried away. “Once open, the faucet flowed,” he writes. What poured forth was a cross between Codex Seraphinianus and E.E. Cummings’s little-known philosophical line drawings.

In the time of COVID, these postmodern dingbats flooded his mind and his sketchbook with “thoughts about one’s body, one’s mental state, one’s priorities and values, one’s household routines, the world beyond one’s house or apartment,” about “what really matters” — his own thoughts, but thoughts he intuited others living through “this surreal, tragic, revelatory, and unsettling experience” were thinking, and others who had lived through other hardships over the millennia had thought.

Eventually, he noticed that the drawings were clustering into categories of thought and feeling. Themes began to emerge, contouring our collective fears and desires, mapping our transformation as we incline together toward a more possible and supranormative future that is not — for it cannot be, we learned — a mere recreation and renormalization of the past.

What emerges from these pictorial dispatches from our past selves to our future selves is a kind of abstract record of the feelings beneath and around and beyond the concrete events we so readily mistake for history. An excavation of the poetic truth beneath the facts. A truer history. (Lest we forget, history is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.)

At the center of the book is a subtle meditation on the power of the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works, what the world is and should be and could be — whatever shape these stories may take: “propaganda and parables, delight and deception, mystery and manipulation.”

Echoing James Baldwin’s penetrating insistence that “nothing is fixed” and Richard Powers’s electrically worded warning that “this fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is… not even the outline of a synopsis of notes toward a rough draft yet,” Byrne writes in the introduction:

The history of the world is a story we tell ourselves.

Though the permanency of writing has slowed the process, these stories we tell ourselves about the world are not fixed. They are ever and continually revised and changed. History is not what happened, but it is what we agree happened — shaped by our biases and self-serving interests.

Stories are lessons we send to ourselves — some remain vibrant and relevant while others are only useful for a moment. They serve myriad purposes that are often beyond our ken, for better or worse, and sometimes both at the same time.

In the second section of drawings, clustered around the subject of “fermentation” — a process of organic chemistry that destroys matter to release energy, from which Byrne draws an existential metaphor for “a kind of coming together, conjunction, and collaboration, resulting in merging and transformation” — he reflects:

It is the same in the realm of thought and feeling —
emotional fizziness and intellectual disruption.
Drunk on love and bubbling new insights.

We are not a brain in a box, separate from our bodies, our senses, and the billions of microbes that live within us.

Love, sex, desire, hunger, and the need to be together may make us less than rational.

We may live in a world of our own imagining, but it allows us to dance, sing, and do a thousand things that machines may never be able to do without programming.

In the third cluster, titled “Bridge to Mind,” he considers the assemblage of life-artifacts we all live with — those emblems of our past selves that we amass in the form of photographs and postcards and books and the small blue vial of golden confetti from the wedding of a long-dead friend — and ponders the eternal mystery of what makes us and our younger selves the “same” person despite a lifetime of physical, psychological, and situational changes. A generation after Joan Didion counseled that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” he wonders:

Who was I then? Would I like myself, even?
Would the person I’m with like me?
Is there forward momentum, as it seems to feel to us, or are we moving sideways?

Echoing Rilke’s century-old wisdom on the combinatorial nature of personhood and creativity, he adds:

Every book I’ve read, every street, face, and song. I’m made of people and things outside myself, beyond myself, and beyond my own control.

Here is the miracle.

In another section, under the cluster-heading “Cityhead,” he writes:

We live in a city in our heads. The buildings that surround us, along with our clothes and our hairstyles, we invented these things.

[…]

Everything in its right place, labeled and grouped according to elaborate and ever-changing criteria.

Only you can find the way — in the city in your head.

We replicate and impose these ways of categorizing and naming things on the outside world. Our template is our guard against chaos and an ever-changing filter.

The categories offer us both liberation and confinement. Geometries of freedom and hierarchies of restriction. Chaotic and organized, passionate and dissolute.

In the epilogue, echoing Baldwin’s abiding reminder that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” Byrne writes:

In the new world the rules have changed — or at least there is the possibility of change.

[…]

The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.

We can be different.

Complement A History of the World (in Dingbats) — the visual and somatic delights of which any summary and screen diminishes — with Byrne’s poetic celebration of the widest perspective with art by Maira Kalman (mother of this book’s designer, as it happens), then revisit Rebecca Solnit on rewriting the past’s broken stories for a more possible future.

April 16: Get Your Tickets

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy