[Sundaycommunity] Fwd: Catholic Network for Women's Equality Fwd: Leonard Cohen on the antidote to anger and the meaning of resistance, Doris Lessing on breaking the prisons we have chosen to live in, loving words

[Catherine Walther]

So beautifully written by a true preacher of Truth.
Enjoy, Catherine


*From: *The Marginalian by Maria Popova <newsletter at themarginalian.org>
*Subject: **Leonard Cohen on the antidote to anger and the meaning of
resistance, Doris Lessing on breaking the prisons we have chosen to live
in, loving words*
*Date: *November 17, 2024 at 12:00:27 AM EST
*To: *
*Reply-To: *The Marginalian by Maria Popova <newsletter at themarginalian.org>

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reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you
know.Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=caa6736995&e=3b5837fdb5>

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=307da2314e&e=3b5837fdb5>

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to
helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our
political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty,
touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the
longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be
a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying —
children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a
world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous
impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the
history of the world.

Leonard Cohen
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1153ea7ee9&e=3b5837fdb5>
 (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=53780d8a44&e=3b5837fdb5>
 about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam
on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found
in his *Book of Longing*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=5789f56f3c&e=3b5837fdb5>
 (*public library*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b7ec8a41a5&e=3b5837fdb5>)
— the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over
the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.

Leonard Cohen (courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust)

In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which
people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of
their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People
will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of
just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for
Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The
sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.

In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and
inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light
between us
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c6f0848ddd&e=3b5837fdb5>
 and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.

Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece
from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all
times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal
or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority,
about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.

Complement with Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetic antidote to anger
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=2028fefff6&e=3b5837fdb5>
 and Erich Fromm’s psychological antidote to helplessness and disorientation
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=6eba682018&e=3b5837fdb5>,
then revisit Leonard Cohen on the constitution of the inner country
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f9276cd5c3&e=3b5837fdb5>
 and what makes a saint
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f717b7eb6d&e=3b5837fdb5>
.
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Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable
about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself
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“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving
recording of her voice
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9839dde56b&e=3b5837fdb5>
 — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of
being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin
wrote
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 a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care
about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen
the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4c6337c55d&e=3b5837fdb5>
 — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty,” is to broaden and
deepen life itself. It is of words that we build the two great pylons
propping up our sense of reality: concepts and stories. Without the concept
of a table, you would be staring blankly at the assemblage of incongruent
surfaces and angles. Without arranging the facts and events of your life
into a story — that narrative infrastructure of personhood
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e21373d856&e=3b5837fdb5>
 — it would not be you looking out of your eyes. To know yourself is to
tell a congruent story of who you are, a story in which your concept of
yourself coheres even as it evolves. Without this central organizing
principle of selfhood, life would be a continuous identity crisis.

Crisis, of course, is important — it is, as Alain de Botton writes in his
deeply assuring meditation on the importance of breakdowns
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e6f5d9fa8d&e=3b5837fdb5>,
“an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere
basis.” There come times when the tedium and turmoil of being yourself
become too much to bear, exasperate you, exhaust you, make you wish to be
someone else, send you searching for a different organizing principle. (It
takes some living to reach that point, which is why midlife can be such a
time of tumult and transformation
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=60bcb57038&e=3b5837fdb5>
.)

We live and die with these questions, rooted in our earliest childhood, in
those first reckonings with what makes us ourselves, those first
experiments in self-acceptance. They are deep and difficult questions,
but Oliver
Jeffers
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=921a0a5969&e=3b5837fdb5>
 and Sam Winston bring great playfulness and delight to them in their second
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b1b740f91e&e=3b5837fdb5>
 collaboration, *The Dictionary Story*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d09db04bc7&e=3b5837fdb5>
 (*public library*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4e0bf4888c&e=3b5837fdb5>)
— a charming fable about the yearning for inner congruence and the
existential exhale of self-acceptance, and a love letter to language
carried by Oliver’s joyful paintings, his singular hand-lettering, and
Sam’s symphonic collage compositions.

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f1ff0a599a&e=3b5837fdb5>

The story begins on the bookshelf, where “most of the time, all the books
knew what they were about” — except one book. Because she contains “all the
words that had ever been read, which meant she could say all the things
that could ever be said,” Dictionary is perpetually unsure of herself, her
organizing principle not coherence but alphabetic order, the words in her
not a story but a list.

It is often the most unexpected and improbable things that save us from
ourselves: An Alligator suddenly leaps from the A pages and, ravenous for a
snack, heads to the D pages for a Donut, who, not wanting to be eaten,
darts across the alphabet.

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4fadab2fe4&e=3b5837fdb5>

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1eadab745e&e=3b5837fdb5>

A chaos of delight ensues as other words come alive as other characters — a
Ghost, a Cloud, a Queen, a Tornado, the Moon — each trying to understand
their part in the confusing story writing itself through their animacy.

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ec03da31cd&e=3b5837fdb5>

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=973c18dc3b&e=3b5837fdb5>

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=45c782a906&e=3b5837fdb5>

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Dictionary’s thrill at finally having a story unfold on her pages turns
into terror as things get out of hand. Suddenly, her natural order starts
to look a whole lot more desirable than this unbridled disarray of
characters with incompatible desires. (And who hasn’t felt the discomposing
overwhelm of trying to make too many changes to the story of life all at
once, to harmonize the discord of conflicting desires, only to end up in
even deeper incoherence.)

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=138e39bbb0&e=3b5837fdb5>

In the end, Dictionary calls on her friend Alphabet to restore her to
herself — a lovely reminder that the greatest gift a friend can give is to
sing back to you the song of yourself when you forget it.

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f5cc77d4a4&e=3b5837fdb5>

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1cd44cc31d&e=3b5837fdb5>

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=490b902aac&e=3b5837fdb5>

Couple *The Dictionary Story*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a71b2d3a6d&e=3b5837fdb5>
 with Oliver and Sam’s previous collaboration, *A Child of Books*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=4eae40c1fd&e=3b5837fdb5>,
then revisit *The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d68c70953d&e=3b5837fdb5>
 — John Koenig’s uncommonly wonderful invented words (based on real
etymologies from around the world) for what we feel but cannot name, words
like *maru mori* (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”) and
*apolytus* (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person”).
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donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of
dollars keeping *The Marginalian* going. For seventeen years, it has
remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I
have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman
labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes
your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its
sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the
difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly
donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.
 one-time
donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation
in any amount.
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<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7beb734de5&e=3b5837fdb5>.*Prisons
We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on Redeeming Humanity
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This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants,
leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within
them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract
from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes
us and keeps us human, and human together.

This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the
spirit
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=00a8189115&e=3b5837fdb5>
 — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul
above the self, unselfing
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0562249d32&e=3b5837fdb5>
 us into seeing each other, into remembering, as James Baldwin told
Margaret Mead in their epochal conversation
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a224836914&e=3b5837fdb5>,
that “we are still each other’s only hope.”

Born in Iran months after the end of the First World War and raised by
farming parents in present-day Zimbabwe, *Doris Lessing* (October 22,
1919–November 17, 2013) was still a girl when she sensed something deeply
wrong with the unquestioned colonial system of her world, with the
oppression that was the axis of that world. By the time she was a young
woman — a time when our urge to rebel against the broken system is fiery
but we don’t yet have the tools to rebel intelligently, don’t yet know the
right questions to ask in order to tell whether the answer we are holding
up as an alternative is any better or worse — she rebelled by embracing
Communism as “an interesting manifestation of popular will.” Working by
that point as a telephone operator in England, she joined the Communist
Party. “It was a conversion, apparently sudden, and total (though
short-lived),” she would later recall. “Communism was in fact a germ or
virus that had already been at work in me for a long time… because of my
rejection of the repressive and unjust society of old white-dominated
Africa.” It didn’t take her long to see the cracks in Communism. She left
the party, discovered Sufism, grew fascinated with the nascent field of of
behavioral psychology and its revelatory, often disquieting findings about
the inner workings of the mind, of its formidable powers to act and its
immense vulnerabilities to being acted upon. But she found no ready-made
answer to the problem of social harmony.

And so, in that way artists have of complaining by creating, she devoted
her life — almost a century of life, a century of world wars and violent
uprisings, of changes unimaginable to her parents — to asking the
difficult, clarifying questions that help us better understand what makes
us human, how we allow ourselves to dehumanize others, and what it takes to
cohere, as individuals and as societies. At 87, she became the oldest
person to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for writing that “with
scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation
to scrutiny.”

In 1985, months after I was born under Bulgaria’s Communist dictatorship,
Doris Lessing delivered Canada’s esteemed annual Massey Lectures, later
adapted into a series of short essays under the haunting title *Prisons We
Choose to Live Inside*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=a59e904c96&e=3b5837fdb5>
(*public library*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=d7a238d517&e=3b5837fdb5>)
— a searching look at how it is that “we (the human race) are now in
possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do
not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives,” lensed
through a lucid faith that we have all the power, urgency, and dignity we
need to choose otherwise, to use what we have learned about the worst of
our nature to nurture and magnify the best of our nature, to figure out
“how we behave so that we control the society and the society does not
control us.”

One of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s original watercolors for *The Little
Prince*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=fbbb1941f6&e=3b5837fdb5>.
(Morgan Library & Museum)

In a sentiment Rebecca Solnit would echo three decades later in her modern
classic *Hope in the Dark*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=107443e125&e=3b5837fdb5>,
Lessing writes:

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think
of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality,
stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that —
a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I
think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely
because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice —
or if we notice, belittle — equally strong forces on the other side, the
forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

To be realistic about our own nature, Lessing argues, requires
attentiveness to both of these strands — the destructive and the creative.
This is the cosmic mirror Maya Angelou held up to humanity in her stunning
space-bound poem
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=39c3083bb6&e=3b5837fdb5>,
urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” An epoch
before her, Bertrand Russell — also a Nobel laureate in Literature, though
trained as a scientist — reckoned with our twin capacities
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=786859a648&e=3b5837fdb5>
 to define them in elemental terms — “We construct when we increase the
potential energy of the system in which we are interested, and we destroy
when we diminish the potential energy.” — and in existential terms:
“Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but
construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more
satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”

Our sanity, Lessing observes, lies in “our capacity to be detached and
unflattering about ourselves” — and in the understanding that our selves
are not islanded in time but lineages of beliefs and tendencies with roots
much longer than our lifetimes, not sovereign but contiguous with all the
other selves that occupy the particular patch of spacetime we have been
born into. It is vital, she insists, that we examine ourselves — our
selves, and the constellation of selves that is our given society — from
various elsewheres.

Art by Felicita Sala from *A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1be106a29f&e=3b5837fdb5>
.

This is why we need writers — those professional observers, in Susan
Sontag’s splendid definition
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=aedd5b8ccc&e=3b5837fdb5>,
whose job it is to “pay attention to the world” and shine the light of that
attention on every side of the kaleidoscope that is a given culture at a
given time. A decade after Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb reckoning with
the role of literature in democracy
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9d0354d2ce&e=3b5837fdb5>
 that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art
tends to clarify,” Lessing writes:

In totalitarian societies writers are distrusted for precisely this reason…
Writers everywhere are aspects of each other, aspects of a function that
has been evolved by society… Literature is one of the most useful ways we
have of achieving this “other eye,” this detached manner of seeing
ourselves; history is another.

Because we are the future of our own past, the posterity of our ancestors,
looking back on history from our present vantage point offers fertile
training ground for looking forward, for shaping the world of tomorrow.
Lessing writes:

Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful
convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next.
There is no epoch in history that seems to us as it must have to the people
who lived through it. What we live through, in any age, is the effect on us
of mass emotions and of social conditions from which it is almost
impossible to detach ourselves.

[…]

There is no such thing as my being in the right, my side being in the
right, because within a generation or two, my present way of thinking is
bound to be found perhaps faintly ludicrous, perhaps quite outmoded by new
development — at the best, something that has been changed, all passion
spent, into a small part of a great process, a development.

Doris Lessing, 1950s. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

In consonance with Carl Sagan’s admonition against “the sense that we have
a monopoly on the truth”
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=3c98c07142&e=3b5837fdb5>
 and with Joan Didion’s admonition against mistaking self-righteousness for
morality
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=9b6f0cfc1d&e=3b5837fdb5>,
Lessing offers:

This business of seeing ourselves as in the right, others in the wrong; our
cause as right, theirs as wrong; our ideas as correct, theirs as nonsense,
if not as downright evil… Well, in our sober moments, our human moments,
the times when we think, reflect, and allow our rational minds to dominate
us, we all of us suspect that this “I am right, you are wrong” is, quite
simply, nonsense. All history, development goes on through interaction and
mutual influence, and even the most violent extremes of thought, of
behaviour, become woven into the general texture of human life, as one
strand of it. This process can be seen over and over again in history. In
fact, it is as if what is real in human development — the main current of
social evolution — cannot tolerate extremes, so it seeks to expel extremes
and extremists, or to get rid of them by absorbing them into the general
stream.

Looking back on the colonialist Zimbabwe of her childhood, on the
“prejudiced, ugly, ignorant” attitudes of the ruling whites, she reflects:

These attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though
the merest glance at history would have told them (and many of them were
educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their
certitudes were temporary.

At the center of Lessing’s inquiry is the paradox of how seemingly
sound-minded, kind-hearted people get enlisted in ideologies of oppression.
Kierkegaard had written
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=67985e0005&e=3b5837fdb5>in
the Golden Age of European revolutions — those idealistic but imperfect
attempts to unify fractured feudal duchies into free nations, attempts that
modeled the possibility of a United States of America — that “the evolution
of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the
individual apart from the crowd,” that “truth always rests with the
minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because…
the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no
opinion.” An epoch and a world order later, Lessing considers how regimes
of terror take hold:

Nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically. But there is
always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the
future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be
thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and
not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.

Art by Jeska Verstegen from *Bear Is Never Alone*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=b00fe42f30&e=3b5837fdb5>
 by Marc Veerkamp

The mess we have made, she intimates, may be the most effective teaching
tool we have — a living admonition against doing the same, a clarion call
to rebel by doing otherwise:

Perhaps it is not too much to say that in these violent times the kindest,
wisest wish we have for the young must be: “We hope that your period of
immersion in group lunacy, group self-righteousness, will not coincide with
some period of your country’s history when you can put your murderous and
stupid ideas into practice. “If you are lucky, you will emerge much
enlarged by your experience of what you are capable of in the way of
bigotry and intolerance. You will understand absolutely how sane people, in
periods of public insanity, can murder, destroy, lie, swear black is white.”

As for us, here in the roiling mess, our sole salvation lies in learning to
“live our lives with minds free of violent and passionate commitment, but
in a condition of intelligent doubt about ourselves and our lives, a state
of quiet, tentative, dispassionate curiosity.” Lessing writes:

While all these boilings and upheavals go on, at the same time, parallel,
continues this other revolution: the quiet revolution, based on sober and
accurate observation of ourselves, our behaviour, our capacities… If we
decided to use it, [we may] transform the world we live in. But it means
making that deliberate step into objectivity and away from wild
emotionalism, deliberately choosing to see ourselves as, perhaps, a visitor
from another planet might see us.

Art by Diana Ejaita from *Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=1f2053917f&e=3b5837fdb5>
 by poet Aracelis Girmay

This, in fact, was the conditional clause in Baldwin’s words to Mead — in
order to be “each other’s only hope,” he said
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ae27cead81&e=3b5837fdb5>,
we ought to be “as clear-headed about human beings as possible.” This, too,
was Maya Angelou’s conditional optimism for humanity: “That is when, and
only when, we come to it” — to that “Brave and Startling Truth,”
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=814915a3df&e=3b5837fdb5>
 balanced on the fulcrum of our conflicted capacities, “that we are the
possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”
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