![\"Why](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.themarginalian.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/seriousface_mooallem.jpg?fit=320%2C480&ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cA life of patient suffering\u2026 is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write,\u201d the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson<\/a> shortly before her untimely death. \u201cIt is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.\u201d<\/p>\n Suffering is the name we give to how we live with life\u2019s imperfection, and with our own \u2014 which is so often the wellspring of our profoundest suffering. How we bear this imperfection, what we make of it, is our great living poem. <\/p>\n This awareness pulsates throughout the essay collection Serious Face<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) by Jon Mooallem<\/strong> \u2014 one of the finest magazine journalists of our time, and one of the most original storytellers<\/a>. He writes in the preface:<\/p>\n Twenty years years ago, I was working at a small literary magazine in New York City, screening the bulging slush pile of poetry submissions for anything that the editors might be interested in publishing. Please know that passing judgment on all these people\u2019s poems made me queasy. I was twenty-two years old, not especially well-read, and my only previous full-time employment had been as a kosher butcher. I could only like what I liked. Also, I was extraordinarily sad. My father had died a year earlier, and the grief and bewilderment I\u2019d kept tamped down were beginning to burble upward. I felt alone. I felt lost. And I was fixated on figuring out why everything was so hard, what I was doing wrong. Some evenings, I\u2019d walk the fifty-eight blocks home from the office, excessively serious-faced, wrenching my mind around like a Rubik\u2019s Cube, struggling to make it show a brighter color.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And then, from among the thousands of poems whose literary merit he was uncomfortably tasked with brokering, one stopped him up short: \u201cFrost on the Fields\u201d by Eric Trethewey, no longer alive; one particular line in it crowning the lyric of landscape: <\/p>\n Why are we not better than we are?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This would become the animating question of Jon\u2019s life, as a writer and as a human being; a question that each of the essays whispers or bellows, none more poignantly than one titled by a kindred question: \u201cWhy These Instead of Others?\u201d \u2014 his account, across the abyss of twenty years, of a trip to the remote reaches of Alaska he took with two of his college friends in the spring of life. <\/p>\n An epoch after Rockwell Kent voyaged there to find the crux of creativity<\/a>, the three young men arrived into a realm of remoteness so discomposing to their city consciousnesses as to appear entirely alien:<\/p>\n As the boat that delivered us vanished, the drone of its engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off, it became unthinkably quiet on the beach, and the largeness and strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent\u2026 It felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth\u2019s atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we weren\u2019t in space. We were on earth \u2014 finally, really on earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But this transcendent idyll was soon interrupted by the brute impartiality of nature \u2014 a boom, then a crash, then faster than the speed of reason, a colossal tree atop one of the three friends. (Incidentally, also named Jon.) <\/p>\n They managed to radio for help. After firing a flaccid flare, they began fearing they were undiscoverable in the uncharted wilderness far inland from their camp. All they knew was that they had to keep him conscious until help arrived, pinned as he was by the tree in an icy creek, hypothermia on top of all the internal bleeding that was no doubt flooding his system. <\/p>\n By some animal instinct, kneeling over the other Jon, this one leaned on the semi-automation of his mind:<\/p>\n What can a person say? I had two literature professors in college who made us memorize poems. You never knew when some lines of verse would come in handy, they claimed. One liked to brag that, while traveling through Ireland, he found that if he spat out some Yeats at a pub, he could drink for free. This is how I wound up reciting a love poem to Jon.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That poem was \u201cThe Shampoo\u201d<\/a> by Elizabeth Bishop. He moved on to Auden\u2019s \u201cThe More Loving One.\u201d<\/a> Then some Robert Frost, some Kay Ryan. He recounts: <\/p>\n Jon and I would spend about an hour and a half together alone on the forest floor. I ran through everything in my quiver\u2014Kay Ryan, A. R. Ammons, Michael Donaghy\u2014padding each poem with little prefatory remarks, while Jon said nothing, just signaled with his eyes or produced a sound whenever I checked in. I felt like a radio DJ playing records in the middle of the night, unsure if anyone was listening. And here\u2019s one about owls by Richard Wilbur, I would tell Jon, and off we would go.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He was unsure \u2014 how can anyone be sure? \u2014 that he was doing the best thing, that he couldn\u2019t do something better, be better. But it was the best he had. <\/p>\n The other Jon survived, and lived to remember the poetry on the forest floor as a serene moment amid the terrifying uncertainty and the adrenalized pain. Reflecting on the experience, now both of them twice the age they were then, this Jon writes:<\/p>\n Even my reciting those poems, which to me had always felt like a moment of utter helplessness, became, in Jon\u2019s telling, a perfect emblem of that streak of serendipitous problem-solving. \u201cYou conveyed a calmness,\u201d he told me recently.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This was poetry as time-dilation and poetry as prayer \u2014 a way to keep a drifting mind anchored in the questions that daily keep us from sleeping and quicken the creative restlessness we call art, we call meaning. One way to answer that long-ago question: with this tenderest testament to how, sometimes \u2014 and mostly when life boughs us to our knees on the forest floor of crisis \u2014 we are<\/em> better, better than we ever thought we could be while coasting in the illusory safety of our daily lives. <\/p>\n Moved by the improbable way in which a stranger\u2019s poem had helped Jon save his friend\u2019s life and had shaped his own, I asked him to read it for us half a lifetime after his chance encounter with it in the submissions pile of his entry-level job, with a side of Bach:<\/p>\n\n Complement with Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019s lifeline of a poem<\/a> and Mary Oliver on how books saved her life<\/a>, then revisit the strikingly kindred story of how Oliver Sacks saved his own life by reciting poetry<\/a>.<\/p>\n For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings<\/em><\/a> for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 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 lending a helping hand with a donation<\/a>. Your support makes all the difference.<\/p>\n The Marginalian<\/em> has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect<\/a>. Like? Sign up.<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201c\u2026a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time.\u201d \u201cA life of patient suffering\u2026 is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write,\u201d the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson shortly before her untimely death. \u201cIt is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 12:55:21","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.themarginalian.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/rockwellkent_moonlightwinter.jpg?resize=680%2C567&ssl=1\")
<\/a>\n
\n
\n
\n
\ndonating = loving<\/h3>\n
\nnewsletter<\/h3>\n