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favorite reads
10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings
10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings

The Writing of "Silent Spring": Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to
Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power
The Writing of Silent Spring: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to
Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power

16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016

16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016

Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin's Rare Conversation on Forgiveness
and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility
A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwins Rare Conversation on Forgiveness
and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility

Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate
Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate

Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and
What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and
What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and
Disease
The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and
Disease

Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the
Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the
Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Philosopher Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering
It
Philosopher Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering
It

Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her
Advice to Writers
Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her
Advice to Writers

An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with
Presence
An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with
Presence

Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher's Timely 1948

Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism
Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosophers Timely 1948
Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

Friedrich Nietzsche on Why a Fulfilling Life Requires Embracing Rather than Running
from Difficulty
Friedrich Nietzsche on Why a Fulfilling Life Requires Embracing Rather than Running
from Difficulty

How to Love: Legendary Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mastering the Art of
"Interbeing"
How to Love: Legendary Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mastering the Art of
Interbeing

How to Neutralize Haters: E.E. Cummings, Creative Courage, and the Importance of
Protecting the Artist's Right to Challenge the Status Quo
How to Neutralize Haters: E.E. Cummings, Creative Courage, and the Importance of
Protecting the Artists Right to Challenge the Status Quo

SEE MORE
labors of love
Famous Writers' Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized

7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated

Anas Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman

Anas Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman

Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts

Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton

The Holstee Manifesto

The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks

Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work

If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in you
will interest other people.
BY MARIA POPOVA

Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work

Many of the titans of literature have left, alongside a body of work that models
powerful writing, abiding advice on the craft that examines the source of that
power. Unrivaled among them in the combination of cultural impact and sheer
splendor of prose is Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907April 14, 1964) the Promethean
writer and marine biologist whose 1962 masterwork of moral courage, Silent Spring,
ignited the modern environmental movement.

Nowhere does Carsons writing philosophy, of which she never published a formal
statement, come to life more vividly than in the 1972 out-of-print treasure The
House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (public library) a portrait of Carson, drawn
from her previously unpublished papers and letters, by Paul Brooks, who worked
closely with her as editor-in-chief at Houghton Mifflin during the publication of
The Edge of the Sea and Silent Spring.
Rachel Carson, 1951
A generation after Virginia Woolf contemplated the relationship between loneliness
and creativity, Carson echoed the lament at the heart of Hemingways Nobel Prize
speech and observed upon accepting one of the many writing awards she won:

Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even
happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of
creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject
alone. He* moves into a realm where he has never been before perhaps where no one
has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening.

In a sentiment that calls to mind choreographer Martha Grahams notion of the

divine dissatisfaction driving all creative work, Carson adds:

No writer can stand still. He continues to create or he perishes. Each task

completed carries its own obligation to go on to something new.

Like Einstein, Carson made an unwearying effort to answer as much as she could of
the voluminous fan mail she received, but her most touching correspondence is with
a young aspiring writer by the name of Beverly Knecht a blind girl hospitalized
with what would turn out to be a terminal illness. After devouring The Edge of the
Sea on Talking Books an early audiobook program initiated by the Library of
Congress and the American Foundation for the Blind in the 1930s Beverly sent
Carson a letter of affectionate appreciation. Carson wrote back:

I hope you can realize the very deep and lasting pleasure your letter gave me. In
my writing, I have always tried not to lean on illustrations (of which most of my
books have had few) but to create in words an image that would register clearly on
the eyes of the mind. You make me feel I may have succeeded.

Illustration by Anne Herbauts from What Color Is the Wind?, a serenade to the
senses inspired by a blind child
In a letter to another young woman with whom Carson felt a deep kinship of spirit,
she returns to the subject of loneliness as a necessary condition for creative
work:

You are wise enough to understand that being a little lonely is not a bad thing.
A writers occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness
is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to
be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of
loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich
and peculiarly satisfying.

More than anything, however, Carson held up work ethic and integrity of vision as
the most vital requirements for being a successful writer. In a sentiment which
James Baldwin would come to echo decades later in his thoughts on the relationship
between talent and discipline, and which Hemingway had articulated in his advice on
the art of revision, she tells her young correspondent:

Given the initial talent writing is largely a matter of application and hard
work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have
said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually
means many, many revisions.

Carson adds a thought that parallels my own animating ethos since the inception of
Brain Pickings more than a decade ago:
If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the
chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.

enchanters
Diagram of my gradation of great writing
In previously contemplating what constitutes great nonfiction, I placed writers in
a hierarchy of explainers, elucidators, and enchanters, the latter class being
exceedingly rare and exceedingly rewarding to read. Carson was the twentieth
centurys science-enchanter par excellence, whose writing was governed by her
belief in the magic combination of factual knowledge and deeply felt emotional
response. Todays finest science writers authors like Oliver Sacks, Janna Levin,
Alan Lightman, Diane Ackerman, and James Gleick, who convey the inherent poetry of
the universe in uncommonly enchanting prose have some of Carsons blood coursing
through the pulse-beat of their books.

Carson, who made an art of illuminating nature beyond scientific fact, resented the
notion that science is somehow separate from life. Our only means of upending the
conventions and belief systems we resent is by modeling superior alternatives, and
that is precisely what Carson did with her 1937 masterpiece Undersea, which
pioneered a new way of writing about science with a strong lyrical sensibility,
revealing the native poetry of nature. The piece became the seed for Carsons 1951
bestseller The Sea Around Us, which won her the National Book Award. In her
acceptance speech, she took head on the obtuse convention one enduring to this
day that writing about science belongs in a special compartment of literature:

The materials of science are the materials of life itself. Science is part of the
reality of living; it is the what, the how, and the why of everything in our
experience. It is impossible to understand man without understanding his
environment and the forces that have molded him physically and mentally.

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the
aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction; it seems to me, then,
that there can be no separate literature of science.

Rachel Carson at her microscope and her typewriter

With an eye to the deliberate stylistic choices she made in how she wrote about the
sea choices highly unusual for their time, which steered nonfiction toward an
epoch-making new aesthetic direction she adds:

My own guiding purpose was to portray the subject of my sea profile with fidelity
and understanding. All else was secondary. I did not stop to consider whether I was
doing it scientifically or poetically; I was writing as the subject demanded.

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and
beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not
there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it
is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write
truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

She took up the subject again in a letter written a few years after the publication
of The Sea Around Us:

The writer must never attempt to impose himself upon his subject. He must not try
to mold it according to what he believes his readers or editors want to read. His
initial task is to come to know his subject intimately, to understand its every
aspect, to let it fill his mind. Then at some turning point the subject takes
command and the true act of creation begins The discipline of the writer is to
learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

Later, during the writing of Silent Spring, Carson would reflect on the writers
ultimate task:

The heart of it is something very complex, that has to do with ideas of destiny,
and with an almost inexpressible feeling that I am merely an instrument through
which something has happened that Ive had little to do with it myself.

She would then tell her beloved, Dorothy Freeman, in the same letter:

As for the loneliness you can never fully know how much your love and
companionship have eased that.

Art by Isol from Daytime Visions

During her final revisions of Silent Spring, as she navigated the anguishing late
stages of metastatic breast cancer, Carson addressed a friends concern that the
books focus on pesticides would eclipse the splendor of the planet she was trying
to protect. Acknowledging for the first and only time the dual motive power of
moral outrage and fidelity to beauty that had animated her as she composed her
masterpiece, she wrote:

I myself never thought the ugly facts would dominate, and I hope they dont. The
beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my
mind that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. I
have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could if I didnt at least
try I could never again be happy in nature. But now I can believe I have at least
helped a little. It would be unrealistic to believe that one book could bring a
complete change.

Carson died eighteen months after Silent Spring was published and never lived to
see herself proven wrong as it catalyzed the modern environmental movement by
mobilizing the public conscience and effecting major government reform in
environmental policy nothing less than a complete change in culture and
consciousness, proof that unrelenting idealism is in the end the mightiest realism.

Complement the thoroughly wonderful The House of Life with Carsons prescient
protest against the governments assault on science and nature and her almost
unbearably touching farewell to her beloved, then revisit other timeless advice on
writing from Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin,
Umberto Eco, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Thanks, Amanda

donating = loving
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find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member
with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good
dinner.

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In Praise of Writing Letters: Sam Shepard on the Irreplaceable Splendors of the

Epistolary Art
An ode to the art of relationship sculpted in time.
BY MARIA POPOVA

In Praise of Writing Letters: Sam Shepard on the Irreplaceable Splendors of the

Epistolary Art

A letter should be regarded not merely as a medium for the communication of

intelligence, advised a nineteenth-century guide to the art of epistolary
etiquette, but also as a work of art. Virginia Woolf made a beautiful case for
letter writing as the humane art and Lewis Carroll proposed that it be governed
by a set of rules which, if applied to todays dominant communication media, would
make the whole of modern life kinder and more humane.

A century after the golden age of the epistolary art began to set as the letter
commenced dying its incremental death by telegraph, telephone, and email, the
polymathic playwright Sam Shepard (November 5, 1943July 27, 2017) both enacted and
explicitly extolled its unsetting splendors in Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam
Shepard and Johnny Dark (public library) the magnificent volume of his
correspondence with his dearest friend, former father-in-law, and spiritual
brother, which also gave us Shepard on love.

Johnny Dark and Sam Shepard in 1982, Mill Valley, California. (Photograph courtesy
of University of Texas Press.)
In the late summer of 2010, four decades into their correspondence, 66-year-old
Shepard writes to Dark:

Dear John,

One thing I realize I love about the letter as a form is that its conversation;
always available. You can just sit down any old morning & have a conversation
whether the persons there or not. You can talk about anything & you dont have to
wait politely for the other person to finish the train of thought. You can have
long gaps between passages days can go by & you might return & pick it up again.
And the great difference in all other forms of writing is that it is dependent to a
large extent on the other person. Its not just a solo act. Youre writing in
response to or in relationship to someone else over time. I think thats the key
over time. Were very lucky, I figure, to have continued the desire to talk to
each other by mail for something like 40 years. But then again, what else were we
going to do? It is probably the strongest through-line Ive maintained in this
life.

Counting his letters as not only a part of his body of work but an essential part
of the same meaning-making that animates his art, Shepard adds:

Everything else seems to be broken except, of course, my other writing which has
been with me constantly since about 1963. Ill never forget the elation of
finishing my first one-act play. I felt Id really made something for the first
time. Like the way you make a chair or a tale. Something was in the world now that
hadnt been there before.

He ends the letter with the very thing that makes the epistolary art so singularly
powerful its ability to transport the recipient to the senders world and welcome
one consciousness into the felt experience of another:

Another beautiful morning here. Dew on the pasture. Horses grazing. Its a
Kentucky Bluegrass postcard. Just a hint of fall in the air, the humidity has
lifted & its like somebody just pulled a big heavy blanket off yr shoulders.

Two Prospectors is a magnificent read in its entirety. Complement this particular

fragment with the illustrated epistles of great artists, then dive into my ever-
expanding library of uncommonly beautiful letters.

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The Paper-Flower Tree: An Illustrated Ode to the Courage of Withstanding Cynicism

and the Generative Power of the Affectionate Imagination
A lovely reminder that we perceive the world not as it is but as we are.
BY MARIA POPOVA

The Paper-Flower Tree: An Illustrated Ode to the Courage of Withstanding Cynicism

and the Generative Power of the Affectionate Imagination

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green
thing which stands in the way As a man is, so he sees, William Blake wrote in his
spectacular 1799 defense of the imagination. More than a century and a half later,
illustrator and designer Jacqueline Ayer (May 2, 1930May 20, 2012) offered a
beautiful allegorical counterpart to Blakes timeless message in her 1962
masterpiece The Paper-Flower Tree (public library) a warm and whimsically
illustrated parable about the moral courage of withstanding cynicism and the
generative power of the affectionate imagination.

As vibrant and vitalizing as the tales Ayer imagines in her childrens books is her
own true story. Born to first-generation Jamaican immigrants in New York City,
Jacqueline grew up in the Coops a communist-inspired cooperative for garment
workers in the Bronx. Her father, a graphic artist and the founder of the first
licensed modeling agency for black women, taught her to draw. Her mother, a sample
cutter, imbued her with an uncommon aptitude for pattern and color. In the 1940s,
Jacqueline enrolled in Harlems iconic public High School of Music & Art, whose
alumni include cartoonist Al Jaffe, graphic designer Milton Glaser, and banjoist
Bela Fleck.

After graduating from Syracuse University with a degree in fine art, she continued
her studies in Paris, where she became a fashion illustrator and starred in a
Dadaist film alongside Man Ray. Her singularly imaginative artwork attracted the
attention of designer Christian Dior and Vogue Paris editor Michel de Brunhoff, who
procured for her an appointment as fashion illustrator for Vogue in New York.
There, she supplemented her meager salary for those were the days before the
Equal Pay uprising that revolutionized the modern workplace, and she was a woman of
color by illustrating for the department store Bonwit Teller alongside young Andy
Warhol.

Jacqueline Ayer at work

Three years later, Jacqueline went back to Paris on vacation and fell in love with
Fred Ayer a young American who had just returned from Burma and had grown
besotted with the cultures of the East. The couple got married and began traveling
through East Asia until they finally settled in Thailand, where Ayer raised her two
daughters and drew incessantly as she traversed the strange, hot, fragrant
wonderland of Bangkok on foot along the sidewalks, on scooter in the streets, on
boat via the canals. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, she launched the
fashion and fabric company Design-Thai, which printed her vibrant designs onto silk
and cotton using traditional Thai craftsmanship.

Jacqueline Ayer with her daughter Margot

Ayer spent the remaining years of her life translating her distinctive aesthetic
into home furnishings for New York and Londons glamorous department stores,
working for the Indian government under Indira Gandhi to help develop the countrys
traditional textile crafts, and creating childrens books of uncommon beauty and
emotional intelligence. She was only thirty-one when she won the 1961 Gold Medal of
the Society of Illustrators, considered the Oscars of illustration.

Jacqueline Ayers 1961 Society of Illustrators medal

The Paper-Flower Tree, originally published in 1962 and now lovingly resurrected by
my friends of Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion, is one of four
books about Thailand Ayer wrote and illustrated, like Tolkiens Mr. Bliss, for her
own children.

It tells the story of a little girl named Miss Moon, who lives under the enormous
blue sky of rural Thailand and wanders the horizonless rice fields with her baby
brother.

One day, a most unusual sight punctuates the noonday torpor of the village. Ayer
writes:

Miss Moon saw a little man in the distance, puffing and blowing as he walked slowly
along. He carried over his shoulder a bamboo stick, on which were tied colored bits
of paper that fluttered in the wind.

Mesmerized by the burst of color, Miss Moon asks the elderly stranger, addressing
him with the respectful and affectionate grandfather, where he is headed and what
marvel he is carrying.

Returning Miss Moons affection, the old man addresses her as little mouse and
explains that he is following the road to wherever it takes him, carrying a paper-
flower tree. Ayer writes:

Miss moon smiled. She loved the tree. It was then she knew she had to have one.

How pretty it is! she said to the old man. All those paper flowers twinkling in
the sun. I wish I had a tree like that one.

One copper coin will buy you two flowers. If one of them has a seed, the old man
said, who knows? Perhaps you can plant it perhaps you can grow a tree for
yourself.

But Miss Moons heart sinks, for she has not a copper coin. The benevolent stranger
meets her sadness with a smile and gives her a paper flower to keep the smallest
one on his tree, but adorned with a tiny black bead on a string a seed.

He instructs her:

Plant it perhaps it will grow. I make no promises. Perhaps it will grow. Perhaps
it will not.

Miss Moon thanked the old man. Thank you for my tree.

Its not a tree yet; its only a flower, and a paper one at that, he replied as he
waved goodbye.
Much of what makes the story so wonderful is the magical realism of this deliberate
interpolation between reality and make-belief the characters themselves dip in
and out of the river of consciousness on the shores of which they are co-creating
the half-real, half-imagined miracle of the paper-flower tree, as if to assure us
that splendor and delight are only ever the response of consciousness to the world
and not a feature of the world itself, no less real, no less splendid or
delightful, for being born out of the uncynical imaginations of kindred spirits.

When the old man continues on his open-ended journey, Miss Moon diligently plants
the paper-flower seed, builds it a tiny roof to shield it from the unforgiving sun,
then begins waiting and watching for it to sprout.

Days and weeks go by, seasons turn, the rice fields change color. Life in the
village continues its usual cycle, until a whole year passes with no paper-flower
tree. The other villagers mock Miss Moons hopefulness. You cant possibly grow a
tree from a bead, they scoff. Youre wasting your time, they jeer responses
reminiscent of Leonard Bernsteins thoughts on the failure of imagination at the
heart of cynicism. But Miss Moon remains enchanted by the memory of the beautiful
paper-flower tree and resolutely hopeful in her enchantment.

One day, a ramshackle truck rumbles down the road, tooting its horn and kicking up
dust.

It rolled into the little village, and rickety, rackety, crash bam it came to a
stop.

A strange little brown man, dressed in flashy, raggy tatters, hopped up like a bird
to the top of the truck.

The odd fellow announces at the top of his lungs that his troupe of musicians and
dancers will entertain the people of the village in exchange for a few silver
coins.

But then Miss Moon spots amid the performers her old friend the man with the
paper-flower tree. She rushes over and asks grandfather if he remembers her. Of
course he remembers the little mouse. When she laments the fate of her infertile
seed, the old mans face grows sad as he reminds her that he never promised it
would grow:

I only said it might grow. Perhaps it wont, and then again, perhaps it will.

As the spectacle of the circus unfolds into the warm night until the moon sets
drums and cymbals, dancers and clowns, flowing silks and tattered costumes Miss
Moon drifts off to sleep in her own bed and dreams of bright-light colors and rice
fields filled with paper-flower trees.

When she rises with the sun, awakened by the smell of her mothers cooking, she
steps into the dawn to find aglow in the morning breeze a paper-flower tree.
Just then, she sees the rickety circus truck huffing and puffing away from the
village. She runs after it, shouting excitedly at the old man that she finally got
her paper-flower tree.

He smiled and waved as the old truck rumbled and roared away.

Goodbye, little mouse! he called.

When Miss Moon shows her treasured tree to the other villagers, they dismiss her
enthusiasm with the same cynicism its just the old mans paper flowers on a
stick, they say and hasten to remind her that its impossible to grow a tree from a
bead. But Miss Moons radiant joy is undimmed by the cynics their failure to see
the tree as real is their own tragic limitation, and hers is a sovereign joy.

Complement The Paper-Flower Tree with other courageous and imaginative treasures
from Enchanted Lion Cry, Heart, But Never Break, The Lion and the Bird, Bertolt,
and This Is a Poem That Heals Fish then revisit Umbrella by Japanese illustrator
Taro Yashima, a kindred-spirited gem from the same era serenading time,
anticipation, and the art of waiting.

Illustrations and archival images courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; book

photographs by Maria Popova

donating = loving
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes me hundreds of hours each month. If you
find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member
with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good
dinner.

MONTHLY DONATION
? $3 / month
? $5 / month
? $7 / month
? $10 / month
? $25 / month
START NOW
ONE-TIME DONATION
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

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newsletter
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and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.

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A Stoics Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety

There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we
suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
BY MARIA POPOVA

A Stoics Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety

The truth is, we know so little about life, we dont really know what the good
news is and what the bad news is, Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet
during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. The whole process of
nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and its really impossible
to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, Alan Watts wrote a
generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain
or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of
events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be
bad news. In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of
worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, worries that have a real
foundation, occupying possibly 8% of the total.

A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably
aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of
this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our
psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century
Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon
insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as
Letters from a Stoic (public library) the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us
Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.

seneca
Seneca
In his thirteenth letter, titled On groundless fears, Seneca writes:

There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer
more often in imagination than in reality.

With an eye to the self-defeating and wearying human habit of bracing ourselves for
imaginary disaster, Seneca counsels his young friend:

What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may
be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will
never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before
they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in
the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.

Day 63
Illustration by Mara Sanoja from 100 Days of Overthinking
Seneca then offers a critical assessment of reasonable and unreasonable worries,
using elegant rhetoric to illuminate the foolishness of squandering our mental and
emotional energies on the latter class, which comprises the vast majority of our
anxieties:

It is likely that some troubles will befall us; but it is not a present fact. How
often has the unexpected happened! How often has the expected never come to pass!
And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your
suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives; so look forward meanwhile
to better things. What shall you gain by doing this? Time. There will be many
happenings meanwhile which will serve to postpone, or end, or pass on to another
person, the trials which are near or even in your very presence. A fire has opened
the way to flight. Men have been let down softly by a catastrophe. Sometimes the
sword has been checked even at the victims throat. Men have survived their own
executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the
meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.

Art by Catherine Lepange from Thin Slices of Anxiety: Observations and Advice to
Ease a Worried Mind
Sixteen centuries before Descartes examined the vital relationship between fear and
hope, Seneca considers its role in mitigating our anxiety:

The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs
that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful
meaning; or it fancies some personal grudge to be more serious than it really is,
considering not how angry the enemy is, but to what lengths he may go if he is
angry. But life is not worth living, and there is no limit to our sorrows, if we
indulge our fears to the greatest possible extent; in this matter, let prudence
help you, and contemn with a resolute spirit even when it is in plain sight. If you
cannot do this, counter one weakness with another, and temper your fear with hope.
There is nothing so certain among these objects of fear that it is not more certain
still that things we dread sink into nothing and that things we hope for mock us.
Accordingly, weigh carefully your hopes as well as your fears, and whenever all the
elements are in doubt, decide in your own favour; believe what you prefer. And if
fear wins a majority of the votes, incline in the other direction anyhow, and cease
to harass your soul, reflecting continually that most mortals, even when no
troubles are actually at hand or are certainly to be expected in the future, become
excited and disquieted.

But the greatest peril of misplaced worry, Seneca cautions, is that in keeping us
constantly tensed against an imagined catastrophe, it prevents us from fully
living. He ends the letter with a quote from Epicurus illustrating this sobering
point:

The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to
live.

Complement this particular portion of Senecas wholly indispensable Letters from a

Stoic with Alan Watts on the antidote to the age of anxiety, Italo Calvino on how
to lower your worryability, and Claudia Hammond on what the psychology of suicide
prevention teaches us about controlling our everyday worries, then revisit Seneca
on making the most of lifes shortness and the key to resilience when loss does
strike.

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