An Antidote to Helplessness and

Disorientation: The Great Humanistic

Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm
on Our Human Fragility as the Key to Our
Survival and Our Sanity
“Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this
potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic
changes in our way of organizing society.”

BY M ARIA POPOVA

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution

conscious of its own miraculousness — a
consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have
paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our
fundamental improbability but of our staggering
fragility, of how physiologically precarious our
survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our
sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have
evolved a singular faculty that might just be the
crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.

Hope — and the wise, effective action that can

spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy
sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and
despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because
we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that
the choices we make can impact the outcomes.
 Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters
to a Young Reader.

How to harness that uniquely human paradox in living more empowered lives in
even the most vulnerable-making circumstances is what the great humanistic
philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980)
explores in the 1968 gem The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
(public library), written in an era when both hope and fear were at a global high, by a
German Jew who had narrowly escaped a dismal fate by taking refuge first in
Switzerland and then in America when the Nazis seized power.

Erich Fromm

In a sentiment he would later develop in contemplating the superior alternative to

the parallel lazinesses of optimism and pessimism, Fromm writes:

Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the
direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason. But the nature of hope
 is often misunderstood and confused with attitudes that have nothing to do
with hope and in fact are the very opposite.

Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene made his poetic case for our sense
of mortality as the wellspring of meaning in our ephemeral lives, Fromm argues
that our capacity for hope — which has furnished the greatest achievements of our
species — is rooted in our vulnerable self-consciousness. Writing well before
Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant unsexing of the universal pronoun, Fromm (and all of
his contemporaries and predecessors, male and female, trapped in the linguistic
convention of their time) may be forgiven for using man as shorthand for the
generalized human being:

Man, lacking the instinctual equipment of the animal, is not as well equipped
for flight or for attack as animals are. He does not “know” infallibly, as the
salmon knows where to return to the river in order to spawn its young and as
many birds know where to go south in the winter and where to return in the
summer. His decisions are not made for him by instinct. He has to make them.
He is faced with alternatives and there is a risk of failure in every decision he
makes. The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand
his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition, and by the
hope that he will not fail even though he has no guarantee for success. He has
no certainty; the only certain prediction he can make is: “I shall die.”

What makes us human is not the fact of that elemental vulnerability, which we
share with all other living creatures, but the awareness of that fact — the way
existential uncertainty worms the consciousness capable of grasping it. But in that
singular fragility lies, also, our singular resilience as thinking, feeling animals
capable of foresight and of intelligent, sensitive decision-making along the vectors
of that foresight.
 Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. (Available as a print.)

Fromm writes:

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it.
He has to find principles of action and decision making which replace the
principles of instinct. He has to have a frame of orientation that permits him
to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent
actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and
being hurt, but also against another danger that is specifically human: that of
becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against
the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.
The human being, born under the conditions described here, would indeed go
mad if he did not find a frame of reference which permitted him to feel at
home in the world in some form and to escape the experience of utter
helplessness, disorientation, and uprootedness. There are many ways in
which man can find a solution to the task of staying alive and of remaining
sane. Some are better than others and some are worse. By “better” is meant a
way conducive to greater strength, clarity, joy, independence; and by “worse”
the very opposite. But more important than finding the better solution is
finding some solution that is viable.

Art by Pascal Lemaître from Listen by Holly M. McGhee

As we navigate our own uncertain times together, may a thousand flowers of sanity
bloom, each valid so long as it is viable in buoying the human spirit it animates.
And may we remember the myriad terrors and uncertainties preceding our own,
which have served as unexpected awakenings from some of our most perilous
civilizational slumbers. Fromm — who devoted his life to illuminating the inner
landscape of the individual human being as the tectonic foundation of the political
topography of the world — composed this book during the 1968 American
Presidential election. He was aglow with hope that the unlikely ascent of an
obscure, idealistic, poetically inclined Senator from Minnesota by the name of
Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with the infamous Joseph McCarthy, who
stood for just about everything opposite) might steer the country toward precisely
such pathways to “greater strength, clarity, joy, independence.”

McCarthy lost — to none other than Nixon — and the country plummeted into
more war, more extractionism, more reactionary nationalism and bigotry. But the
very rise of that unlikely candidate contoured hopes undared before — hopes some
of which have since become reality and others have clarified our most urgent work
as a society and a species. Fromm writes:

A man who was hardly known before, one who is the opposite of the typical
politician, averse to appealing on the basis of sentimentality or demagoguery,
truly opposed to the Vietnam War, succeeded in winning the approval and
even the most enthusiastic acclaim of a large segment of the population,
reaching from the radical youth, hippies, intellectuals, to liberals of the upper
middle classes. This was a crusade without precedent in America, and it was
something short of a miracle that this professor-Senator, a devotee of poetry
and philosophy, could become a serious contender for the Presidency. It
proved that a large segment of the American population is ready and eager for
Humanization… indicating that hope and the will for change are alive.

Art from Trees at Night by Art Young, 1926. (Available as a

print.)

Having given reign to his own hope and will for change in this book “appealing to
the love for life (biophilia) that still exists in many of us,” Fromm reflects on a
universal motive force of resilience and change:

Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be
mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of
organizing society… One cannot think in terms of percentages or probabilities
as long as there is a real possibility — even a slight one — that life will prevail.
Complement The Revolution of Hope — an indispensable treasure rediscovered half
a century after its publication and republished in 2010 by the American Mental
Health Foundation — with Fromm on spontaneity, the art of living, the art of
loving, the art of listening, and why self-love is the key to a sane society, then revisit
philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and
Rebecca Solnit on the real meaning of hope in difficult times.

Rebecca Solnit on Growing Up, Growing

Whole, and How We Compose Ourselves
“Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude
was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is
growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.”

BY M ARIA POPOVA

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up,”

Maya Angelou wrote in her stirring letter to the
daughter she never had. “We carry accumulation of
years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally
our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent
and shy as magnolias.” In that same cultural season,
from a college commencement stage, Toni Morrison
told an orchard of human saplings that “true
adulthood is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard
won glory.”

It is tempting, for it is flattering, to think of

ourselves as trees — as firmly rooted and resolutely
upward bound; as creatures destined, in Mary Oliver’s lovely words, “to go easy, to
be filled with light, and to shine.” But even if the highest compliment a great poet
can pay a great woman is to celebrate her as a human tree, we are not trees — we
don’t branch and root from a single point, we don’t grow linearly; we disbark
ourselves at will, at the flash and flutter of a heart, self-grafting every love and loss
we live through; our growth-rings are often ungirdled by self-doubt, by regress, by
the fits and starts by which we become who and what we are: fragmentary but
indivisible. The difficulty of growing up, the hard-won glory of it, lies in the self-
tessellation.
 Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the
Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

That is what Rebecca Solnit explores in a passage from Recollections of My

Nonexistence (public library) — her splendid memoir of longings and
determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating
the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.

Three quarters into the book and half a lifetime into her becoming, Solnit writes:

Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that
there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the
fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with
craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid
dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that
the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like
fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.

The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit
together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit
at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough
to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being,
finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and
then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires,
at least if we’re lucky.
 Art from Trees at Night by Art Young, 1926. Available as a
print

Complement this fragment of Solnit’s wholly vitalizing Recollections of My

Nonexistence with philosopher Alain de Botton on the measure of existential
maturity and poet Ross Gay on what it means to grow up, then revisit Solnit’s
increasingly timely antidote to the defeatism of despair in difficult times and her
wonderful letter to children about reading as self-creation and self-consolation.

Figuring Forward in an Uncertain Universe

Consolations from the cosmic scheme.

BY M ARIA POPOVA

We make things and seed them into the world, never

fully knowing — often never knowing at all —
whom they will reach and how they will blossom in
other hearts, how their meaning will unfold in
contexts we never imagined. (W.S. Merwin captured
this poignantly in the final lines of his gorgeous
poem “Berryman.”)

Today I offer something a little apart from the usual,

or sidelong rather, amid these unusual times: A
couple of days ago, I received a moving note from a
woman who had read Figuring and found herself
revisiting the final page — it was helping her, she
said, live through the terror and confusion of these uncertain times. I figured I’d
share that page — which comes after 544 others, tracing centuries of human loves
and losses, trials and triumphs, that gave us some of the crowning achievements of
our civilization — in case it helps anyone else.

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a

poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate
sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black
hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can
swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced,
every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known — an entropic
spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.

In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white
dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into
the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler
had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a
symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on
a distant blue dot.

But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are
planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later,
migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people
live and people die — in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as
latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
 I will die.

You will die.

The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will
return to the seas that made us.

What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.

Against Aloneness in the Web of Life: Ernst

Haeckel, Charles Darwin, and the Art of
Turning Personal Tragedy into a Portal to
Transcendence
An antidote to isolation by way of tiny marine creatures and a
broken Romantic heart.

BY M ARIA POPOVA

In the waning winter of 1864, Charles Darwin opened a package that stopped his
breath. “It is one of the most magnificent works which I have ever seen,” he exulted
in his response to the sender — a young, still obscure German marine biologist by
the name of Ernst Haeckel (February 16, 1834–August 9, 1919), who would go on to
coin the word ecology a century before the great marine biologist Rachel Carson
made it a household word in catalyzing the environmental movement. Haeckel
would become a naturalist, a philosopher, and the greatest champion of Darwin’s
evolutionary ideas; he would name and describe thousands of previously
undiscovered animal species; he would coin and crown an entire kingdom,
Protista.
 Stephoidea by Ernst Haeckel. Available as a print.

Barely thirty, impelled by the peculiar boldness that comes from personal despair
so grave that one feels one has nothing left to lose, Haeckel had decided to share
with the esteemed and controversial Darwin the work to which he had devoted
years: his studies of radiolarians — tiny single-cell marine organisms with mineral
skeletons of striking geometries — in two handsome folio volumes, which Haeckel
had illustrated with delicate, detailed, hauntingly beautiful copper-etched
drawings.

Acanthometra by Ernst Haeckel. Available as a print.

Haeckel had come under the spell of radiolaria during his yearlong scientific
studies and travels in Italy at the age of twenty-five — the year Darwin published On
the Origin of Species — and had since diverted all of his scientific passion and
artistic training toward these miniature masterworks of nature. “I had no idea that
animals of such low organization could develope such extremely beautiful
structures,” Darwin gushed. He ended his rapturous reply to Haeckel with these
bittersweet words:

I hope you are able to work hard on science & thus banish, as far as may be
possible, painful remembrances.
The painful remembrance: On the day of Haeckel’s thirtieth birthday the previous
month, Anna Sethe — the love of his life, whom he was finally about to marry upon
receiving his first gainful academic appointment, after a four-year engagement —
died suddenly, of a ruptured appendix. Haeckel — who considered himself
“decidedly a ‘Leptoderm,’ that is, ‘thin-skinned,’” and therefore susceptible to
“much more suffering and, also, more intense joy than the run of men” — was
unpeeled by grief. “Dark melancholy has replaced my former cheerful joy in life,”
he confided in Darwin, aware of the elder scientist’s own devastating experience of
loss.

Anna Sethe and Ernst Haeckel shortly before her death.

The search for transcendence became Haeckel’s survival mechanism for this
fathomless personal tragedy — the transcendence he found in nature, in its
breathtaking complexity and breathtaking simplicity, in its every microscopic
detail magnified to reveal millennia of meticulous craftsmanship and refinement
by the forces of evolution.

A century and a half after they so enchanted Darwin, French artist Zöe Almon Job
has set Haeckel’s radiolaria drawings in motion and in thought in a lovely animated
reflection on the relationship between aloneness and togetherness, on the delicate
symbioses of nature and their subtler existential undertones illuminating the
totality of being, in which even the most isolated existence is an emissary of our
natural interconnectedness.
Complement with the great naturalist John Muir, a contemporary of Haeckel’s, on
the transcendent interconnectedness of nature and poet Howard Nemerov’s
Haeckel-like geometric-existential poem about the interconnectedness of the
universe, then revisit these stunning and sensual illustrations of cephalopods from
the world’s first encyclopedia of deep-sea creatures, by a contemporary and
compatriot of Haeckel’s.

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