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[Find an audio version of this blog on Spotify, here]
“No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people.” That’s the way Maria Popova begins a particularly poetic section of her writing, a section that speaks a profound and enlightened wisdom against the bigoted intolerance of the Far Right’s regressive social politics. Love is a power that can move heaven and earth, but religious and social fundamentalism fears that power and locks people’s bodies and souls inside narrow expressions of love, stifling the heart-song love longs to sing through us, leaving us dull to its universal music, leaving us longing for the melody we somehow sense exists, the harmony that can make us whole. And this is the great tragedy: love wants to set us free but we’d rather crucify it—and those who celebrate it and those who seek it—rather than allow love to disturb and transform our lives and liberate our bodies and souls.
This is the great irony, of Christianity, for example: for all its talk of love, it keeps crucifying those who, like Jesus, want to love without the artificial limits religion places on the many kinds of love we feel. “Such loves,” Popova will go on to say, “oceanic loves, vast and deep and wholly unfathomable to any shoreline observer — are luminous private miracles undimmed by the tattling irrelevance of the public.”
Maria Popova is one of the world’s great contemporary writers. She’s a polymath who reads more books a week than I read in a year, then writes essays about them for her online journal she calls, The Marginalian. It’s an odd name for a journal today, but the oddness of her self description says a lot about her.
She’s a public intellectual who loves books, ideas, and nature and the possibility that great ideas can create great souls who can tend the grandeur of the world and possibly turn the tide of awfulness and hate that seems hell-bent on destroying us all. She loves life and anything that contributes to a well-lived life. And her online journal seems to me to be the way she makes public her own private affection—her lifelong habit of engaging writers, living and dead, by scribbling in the margins of the books she reads. I imagine she did this as a kid; I picture her growing up in her native Bulgaria, book on her lap, sitting beneath some great tree, circling words, writing in the margins, flagging words and images and ideas she loves and arguing with the author about things she doesn’t like or understand. Older now, and astonishingly well read, these scribblings become an learned commentary that weaves together her own wisdom, the wisdom of the author she’s reading, and the wisdom of all those other writers she’s read whose ideas form some kind of constellation of meaning around what she’s reading now.
There isn’t a single essay she writes that I don’t try to read. Each of them is a remarkable education. And though she’s considerably younger than I am, I consider her one of my keenest and most valuable teachers.
Her writing is not only intelligent, it’s soulful, and always poetic.
By “soulful,” I mean that her writing is not just for the head, it’s for the heart; there’s a fathomless depth to what she says. And because it has such depth, it is poetic—for poetry has neither a floor nor a ceiling; it transcends both, opening what otherwise would be closed.
Poetry uses words not merely to convey ideas, but as symbols and vehicles for deeper, more soulful truth. This is why religious clergy have distrusted prophets and mystics and often vilified them. Poetry is like love; it’s explosive, subversive, and works against all forms of legalism that tries to inhibit and control us.
This episode’s poetic selection is an example of the way her poetic language works to express ideas in ways that explode, subvert, and challenge systems of power, especially where power, entrenched, excludes, marginalizes, and therefore dehumanizes. In this episode’s poetic selection, Popova is challenging the social systems and moral conventions that regulate who can love whom.
Just prior to the selection I’ll read, she’s reflecting on the way scientific luminaries Maria Mitchell and Ida Russell were drawn together at a time when their loving of each other was strictly forbidden, or the way Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were forced to deny their love and take a more conventional path of love respectable to the prying eyes of the public, tamed by religious and social orthodoxy, and therefore stifled, muted, and tragically tamed.
Her poetic challenge is once again vital in this age of regressive and restrictive social and political forces—from the Supreme Court to far right take over of local school boards—that deny lovers their right to love those their bodies and souls long to love.
Her words have personal meaning to me. My sons are gay and their ability to love is under threat again and we seem to be on a path to overturn so many of the hard fought freedoms we, perhaps naively, thought were now permanent fixtures of a more enlightened society. I worry for them and their partners. I worry for all of us—for if love is limited to only some of us, it’s limited for all of us.
Here now is Maria Popova’s edgy poetic prose. It’s brought immense comfort and conviction and courage in my life and turned me toward a fuller and freer experience of love. And her clarity offers a stinging and necessary rebuke to those today who would narrowly define love according to their fear-based values, those who fail to give love the freedom it deserves if love is to be worthy of the mysterious vastness love is and must always be:
“No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people, often not even the people themselves, half-opaque as we are to ourselves. The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse — to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos — but it is also a limiting one: In naming things, we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable — varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again — cannot begin to contain the richness of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them. Such loves — oceanic loves, vast and deep and wholly unfathomable to any shoreline observer — are luminous private miracles undimmed by the tattling irrelevance of the public.”