“I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act,” Seneca wrote two millennia ago as he contemplated gratitude and what it means to be a generous human being.
It is only from such a place of gratefulness that we can perform beautiful acts — from a place of absolute, ravishing appreciation for the sheer wonder of being alive at all, each of us an improbable and temporary triumph over the staggering odds of nonbeing and nothingness inking the ledger of spacetime. But because we are human, because we are batted about by the violent immediacies of everyday life, such gratitude eludes us as a continuous state of being. We access it only at moments, only when the trance of busyness lifts and the blackout curtain of daily demands parts to let the radiance in, those delicious moments when we find ourselves awash in nonspecific gladness, grateful not to this person, grateful not for this turn of events, but grateful at life — a diffuse gratitude that irradiates every aspect and atom of the world, however small, however unremarkable, however coated with the dull patina of habit. In those moments, everything sings, everything shimmers. In those moments, we are most alive.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins shines a playful sidewise gleam on this realest and most serious wellspring of gratitude in his 1998 poem “As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse,” found in his poetry collection Nine Horses (public library) and brought to life afresh, with a corona of radiance and a perfectly calibrated performance partway between wink and wonderment, by constant comedian and sometime StarTalk Radio co-host Chuck Nice at the third annual Universe in Verse, prefaced by his funny and poignant meditation on the personal gravity of gratitude and why being grateful is “one of the most powerful things that any one person can do.” Please enjoy:
AS IF TO DEMONSTRATE AN ECLIPSE
by Billy Collins
I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,
and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow
so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.
Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,
singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
Complement with Billy Collins’s homage to Aristotle, then savor other highlights from The Universe in Verse — my annual charitable celebration of the science and splendor of life through poetry: Patti Smith reading Emily Dickinson’s ode to how the world holds together, astronaut Leland Melvin reading Pablo Neruda’s love letter to the forest, astronomer Natalie Batalha reading Dylan Thomas’s cosmic serenade to trees and the wonder of being human, astrophysicist Janna Levin reading astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s staggering “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” and a breathtaking animation of Marie Howe’s poem “Singularity.”
In the spring of 1919, as the world was shaking off the debris and despair of its first global war, the queer Quaker astronomer Arthur Eddington left England to traverse seas and meridians and blood-stained borders in an ambitious expedition to observe a total solar eclipse in order to prove correct, at the risk of his own reputation, the controversial theory of a ridiculed German Jew. Eddington’s historic observation of totality confirmed his instinct, confirmed relativity, catapulted Einstein into global celebrity, revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and united war-torn humanity under the same sky of elemental, astonishing truth.
But however much the telescopic perspective might lavish us with self-transcendence, it is only a temporary transcendence — the human animal is not marrowed and tendoned to roam the vast vistas of universal truth for too long before growing paralyzed again by its invented parochial partialities.
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Solar Soap Bubble Set Series), 1955
Within a generation, as the world was being savaged anew by its most bloodthirsty war yet, the artist Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903–December 29, 1972) leaned on the cosmic perspective for a different kind of coherence, infusing astronomy into his visionary shadow boxes: reliquaries of the mundane washed up on the shoreline between memory and dream, discarded fragments of this world assembled into portals to another — a world of our world, yet more magical, more mystical, more immortal in its obsolescence.
Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set, 1949-1950 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
On a warm and clear summer Tuesday in 1941, as WWII is rendering the present unbearable and the future uncertain, Cornell voyages first into the human past and then into the remote consolations of spacetime in a journal entry included in the out-of-print treasure Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files (public library):
A suggestion of that wonderful feeling of detachment that comes over me every so often — a leisurely kind of feeling that seems to impart to the routine events of the day a certain sense of “festivity.”
[…]
Into the city and all the way up to the Museum of the American Indian to find it closed! Compensation in the buoyant feeling aroused by the buildings of the Geographic Society in their quiet uptown setting. An abstract feeling of geography and voyaging I have thought about before of getting into objects, like the Compass Set with map. A reminder of earliest school-book days when the world was divided up into irregular masses of bright colors, with vignettes of the pictorial world scattered, like toy picture-blocks.
To recompense the failed Native American art field trip, Cornell decides to head to the Museum of Natural History and forage for inspiration there. In a burst of spontaneity, after hours of copying Native designs into his sketchbook beneath an old oil painting of “an Indian princess” at the museum library, he decides to make his first visit to the museum’s now-iconic Hayden Planetarium, then just a few years old.
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Celestial Navigation), 1958. (U.S. Department of State / Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation)
Not yet aware of how that extemporaneous encounter would foment the future of his art — as we rarely are of our most catalytic inspirations the moment we encounter them i the wild — Cornell writes:
The Planetarium was another moving experience, especially on the second floor with its blue dome, silhouetted city sky-line fringing it, and the gradual appearance of all the stars in the night sky to music.
He finds himself tuning out the bland educational lecture — “there is enough reconstruction of the night atmosphere and really so well done, to offset it” — and lets his imagination voyage into the celestial splendor. In a deeply pleasing parenthetical wink, penned long before the world had awakened to Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to science, he adds:
(Yesterday I was trying to fit Hedy Lamarr into Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s pre-Raphaelite garden, without success. She was more at-one today with the night sky of the Planetarium. I wish she could have done the lecturing, with her wonderful detachment.)
Upon returning to Earth, he immediately moors the conceptual quickening of the cosmos to the empirical materiality of his art, already foraging for objects at the museum that would invoke the feeling-tone of the celestial spectacle, already constellating those objects into shadow-boxed poems in his mind’s eye to invite the same transcendent cosmic perspective:
The astronomical paraphernalia: charts, transparencies, broken meteors, and especially compass curios (also armillaries, telescopes, etc.) are intriguing. Arranged in cases in the hall around the circular hall. On the amid floor a particularly fine set of murals of the zodiac, picked out in white on blue. The nicest rendition of the Gemini I’ve seen.
Joseph Cornell, Solar Set (Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation)
Although the night sky had fascinated Cornell since childhood, it was this visit to the planetarium that made astronomy a centerpiece of his art for the remaining three decades of his life, both as an object-category to for his boxes and as a sensemaking framework for the miniature cosmogonies of meaning nested inside them.
Joseph Cornell, Observatory Series: Corona Borealis, 1950 (SFMoMA / Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation)
Nearly a century later, in another uncertain present amid another moment of cultural tumult, the endeavor to build New York City’s first public observatory emerged from the kindred sense that we may never know what child might step into the dome of possibility to become the next Eddington, what young artist might grow bewitched by the science and splendor of the cosmos through the telescope to become the next Cornell, or how many generations of human eyes and minds might look through the telescope to transcend the smallness of perspective that makes us draw imaginary lines of unbelonging beneath this boundless shared sky.
Goethe, who lived and died by the indivisibility of art and life, insisted that we ought to treat the works of others, however imperfect, the way we treat their actions — with “a loving sympathy.” And yet one of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others the loving sympathy and empathic understanding we demand for ourselves. When we lose the reins of our own character, when we lash out or sulk or act from a small dark place, we hasten to rationalize our actions as situational — we were too tired, too triggered, too threadbare with stress or vulnerability or loss. When others lose the reins of their character, we hasten to indict their misdeeds as constitutional, representative of a self rather than of a state.
Two centuries after Goethe — epochs that saw the birth of psychology as a systematic effort to do for our emotional fragility what philosophy has endeavored to do for our unwisdom and astronomy for our cosmic solipsism — the poetic astronomer of self-awareness Alain de Botton offers a calibration for the bifocal instrument of our sympathy in The School of Life: An Emotional Education (public library) — the wonderful handbook of self-refinement that gave us De Botton on existential maturity and what emotional intelligence really means.
Alain de Botton
In a section devoted to the most difficult and most rewarding form of generosity there is — what he calls “charity of interpretation” — De Botton writes:
At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone something that they may not entirely deserve and that it is a long way beyond the call of duty for us to provide: sympathy.
Like Kepler, who composed the world’s first true work of science fiction as a clever invitation for people to examine their own blind spots through the safe lens of observing the flagrant blind spots of imaginary others, De Botton invites such charity of interpretation toward others by reminding us how deeply it gladdens when we receive it ourselves. Defining this difficult, triumphal generosity of spirit as “an uncommonly generous assessment of our idiocy, weakness, eccentricity, or deceit,” he paints a portrait of what it looks like in others when they confer it upon the fragile and foibled parts of our own nature:
Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They must intimate that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They will remember that the person before them was once a baby too.
The charitable interpreter holds on also to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surface, along with the possibility of remorse and growth.
Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
In a passage evocative of that splendid Seamus Heaney verse — “On your way up, show consideration / To the ones you meet on their way down. / The Latin root of condescension / Means we all sink.” — De Botton adds:
Such is our proclivity for error and our vulnerability to reversals of fortune, we are all on the verge of needing someone to come to our imaginative aid. And therefore, if for no other reason, we have a duty to remain constant providers of generous interpretations of the lives of others. We must be kind in the sense not only of being touched by the remote material suffering of strangers, but also of being ready to do more than condemn and hate the sinful around us, hopeful that we too may be accorded a tolerable degree of sympathy in our forthcoming hour of failure and shame.
Complement this fragment of the thoroughly resaning School of Life — which was among the finest books of its year — with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility, then revisit De Botton on what makes a good communicator, why our partners drive us mad, the psychological paradox of sulking, and his lovely letter to children about reading as a portal to self-understanding.
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