Living, Dying, Making Connections, and Living With It All

[Image: “Danse Macabre,” by Rodolfo Pace. Found on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!)

From whiskey river:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

(Richard Dawkins [source])

Although that passage (as whiskey river noted) was excerpted from Dawkins’ book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that wasn’t where the whiskey river blogger(s) encountered it. Instead, they apparently crossed paths with it at the estimable blog/newsletter called brain pickings.

Contemplating even a single brain pickings post at length can induce a sort of stupor — a mix of awe, secondhand exhaustion, mental overstimulation… It’s possible to subscribe to it, and certainly deserves any pennies you can spare, because it represents the work of a single person, Maria Popova — who also has a day job, and writes regularly for such “lightweight” media outlets as The New York Tmes, The Atlantic… I cannot imagine what her daily schedule must be. (On the other hand, she freely discusses her regimen when interviewed by those same publications. She makes it sound so inconsequentially casual and off-the-cuff that one must conclude: This young woman seriously needs to get her modesty engine in for an overhaul.)

At the core of her brain pickings work: a phrase which, she says, she picked up from elsewhere — combinatorial creativity. (Einstein used the phrase “combinatorial play” — an appealingly lightweight way of saying the same thing.) Her role, she says elsewhere, is that of an “interestingness curator… someone who digs out interesting cross-disciplinary content in a way that allows people to become interested in things they didn’t know they were interested in until they discovered them.”

Anyhow, an essential component of any brain pickings post is its, well, its assemblage — Popova concentrates on a single work by a single writer, painter, sculptor, but apparently she has not just a hard-working modesty machine but an automatic idea-magnetizer as well: she sticks works together from all over, all disciplines, multiple artists…

Consider: in the entry which cites the Dawkins passage, Popova also refers (at least glancingly) to a handful of earlier posts of hers, covering or mentioning in passing:

• Jorge Luis Borges,
• Milan Kundera,
• “French novelist, poet, and philosophical pamphleteer Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917),”
• the late Emily Levine (standup comic, public speaker, writer, actress, and a friend of Popova’s),
• the poet Anna Belle Kaufman,
• Marcus Aurelius,
• Montaigne,
• Charles Darwin,

…and so on and so forth — each a multi-branching rabbit hole of its own, generously illustrated with art and photography (much of it her own). Here’s one of those connected bits, from a post in September, 2012 — a bit crafted by a notoriously cranky sufferer of a cancer which would eventually kill him:

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application to my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed to write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.

(Christopher Hitchens [source])