In Transit: Neil Gaiman Reads His Touching Tribute to the

Lonely Genius Arthur Eddington, Who Confirmed Einstein’s

Relativity
“To see the world beyond the skies, to know the mind behind the eyes…”

BY M A R I A P O P OVA

“You have got a boy mixed of most kindly elements, as perhaps Shakespeare might say. His rapidly and clearly
working mind has not in the least spoiled his character,” a school principal wrote at the end of the nineteenth
century to the mother of a lanky quiet teenager who would grow up to be the great English astronomer Sir
Arthur Stanley Eddington (December 28, 1882–November 22, 1944) and who would catapult Albert Einstein
into celebrity by confirming his relativity theory in his historic eclipse expedition of May 29, 1919.

The centennial of that landmark event, which revolutionized science and united a war-torn humanity under one
sky of cosmic truth, was the subject of the third Universe in Verse — the charitable celebration of science through
poetry I host each spring at Pioneer Works — and as has been our annual tradition, we had the great honor of an
original poem for the occasion by one of the great storytellers of our time: Neil Gaiman.

Arthur Eddington
Born into a family descended from the first Quakers and stretching back four generations of farmers, Stanley —
as his mother and sister always called him — learned the multiplication table before he could read and tasked
himself with counting the letters of the Bible. By the age of ten, this unusual child who was and would remain
very much his own person had observed most of the sky with a 3-inch telescope his headmaster had loaned him.

At twenty, after winning a series of mathematics competitions and scholarships, Eddington entered Trinity
College, where he was immediately immersed in the cult of Newton. His peers would later remember him as
extremely quiet and reserved, exuding formidable powers of concentration. (Later in life, his awkwardness and
aloofness would make some of his students perceive him as arrogant.) In 1904, while Einstein was finalizing his
special relativity, the 22-year-old Eddington became the first second-year Trinity student to rise to the top of the
undergraduate student body in mathematics — a position known as Senior Wrangler and regarded at the time as
“the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain.”

Two of Eddington’s photographs from his historic eclipse observation,

proving Einstein right and Newton wrong.

At Trinity, Eddington met Charles Trimble. A classmate who also came from a working-class background, this
pensive-looking youth with gentle features and neatly combed black hair soon became his most intimate friend.
Eddington was an avid cyclist and usually rode alone, but he began going on long rides with Charles, talking
about mathematics and literature. Only in Charles’s company, he deviated from his Quaker discipline and took
the occasional cheerful drink, smoked the occasional cigarette, went to the theater and the newborn cinema.

Charles eventually took a mathematics post and spiraled into mental illness. Eddington never married, never
had another intimate bond. He lived out his days with his sister, Winifred, who also never married. I picture him
Turing-like — in his genius, in his misapprehended awkwardness, in his loneliness and heartbreak.

That invisible private side to the public genius is what Gaiman takes up with empathic perceptiveness and great
tenderness in his poem, celebrating what he calls these “twin suns” of Eddington’s life and, through the
diffraction that is all great art, celebrating the twin suns of the public self and the private self, of genius and
loneliness, of intellectual heroism and emotional heartbreak, that shine in varying degrees on every human life.

The Universe in
Verse: Neil Gaiman
reads "In Transit," his
tribute to Arthur
Eddington
from Maria Popova
08:13
IN TRANSIT (for Arthur Eddington)
by Neil Gaiman

1.

To find the many in the one

he sweated under foreign skies
to see the stars behind the sun.

So space and time were now undone

reality was undisguised.
We found the many in the one.

There is no photograph, not one,

that shows the mind behind the eyes.
He saw the stars behind the sun.

Not with a sword, or knife, or gun,

a simple picture severed ties.
He found the many in the one.

Light bends around us. So we run,

as gravity reclassifies
the stars we saw behind the sun.

To see the world beyond the skies,

to know the mind behind the eyes,
To find the many in the one
he showed us stars behind the sun.

2.

Unfucked, or anyway retiring,

in the awkward sense. Retirement will never be an option.
The gruff gentleman with the cap who understands
what the numbers mean
remembers a bicycle ride when he was younger.
 The smoke of the cigarettes he does not smoke kicks at his lungs
mixing with the buzz of the booze he doesn’t ever drink
a convivial pint after the ride into the country gave him such a thirst.
And afterwards they lay on their back in the stubble
staring up at the stars. Together. All the stars

Countable as the words in a Bible,

countable as the hairs on his friend’s head,
all accountable, and that is why they never truly touched.
The shadow of prison or disgrace perhaps moving between them
like the shadow of an eclipse.

And, in another life, at another time,

to see the stars behind the sun,
he takes his photographs
fighting the cloud cover. Becoming
the thing that happened in Principe.
when he proved that the German was right,
that light had weight,
half a year after the Armistice.
A populariser, but not courting popularity.

Somewhen a boy is counting stars.

Somewhen a man is photographing light.
Somewhen his finger strokes the stubble on another’s cheek,
and for a moment everything is relative.

Complement with Gaiman’s superb original poems from the first two years of The Universe in Verse — “The
Mushroom Hunters” (2017), a subversive celebration of the history of women in science, which won the Rhysling
Award for Best Long Poem; and “After Silence” (2018), a tribute to the life and legacy of Rachel Carson — then
revisit the touching, improbable story of how Eddington confirmed relativity.

For more wonder and beauty from The Universe in Verse, savor astrophysicist Janna Levin reading “A Brave and
Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman, and
“Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich, Regina Spektor reading “Theories of Everything” by the astronomer, poet, and
tragic genius Rebecca Elson, Amanda Palmer reading “Hubble Photographs” by Adrienne Rich, and astronomer
Natalie Batalha reading “Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Losing the Birds, Finding the Words: Eve Ensler’s

Extraordinary Letter of Apology to Mother Earth
“I am the reason the birds are missing… I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin,
bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am
mycelium, petal pistil and stamen… I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder.
I am an impulse and an order.”
BY M A R I A P O P OVA

“Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the
natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” the visionary marine biologist
and lyrical author Rachel Carson wrote as she was making ecology a household
word and getting ready to awaken the modern environmental conscience with
her epoch-making book Silent Spring.

Silent Spring was titled after the book’s most chilling chapter, detailing the
gruesome mass deaths of songbirds in pesticide-assaulted habitats, inspired by a
verse from a classic ballad of heartbreak by Carson’s favorite poet, John Keats —
“The sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing!” — for she saw no
greater heartbreak than the deadly silencing of Mother Nature. In her bittersweet
farewell to the world — Carson never lived to see her work inspire the creation of
Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency — she beckoned posterity, beckoned us, to face our “grave
and sobering responsibility [which] is also a shining opportunity”; to “go out into a world where mankind is
challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of
itself.”

Image via the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

We have failed to rise to her challenge. We have failed our origins and our very humanity. In the decades since
Carson’s death, 3 billion birds have vanished. Just vanished. And as species seem to be falling off the face of the
Earth, their names are falling out of the dictionary, out of our consciousness, out of children’s imaginations. If
“finding the words is another step in learning to see,” then losing the words is ceasing to see — a willful
blindness to our own responsibility, which thrusts us blindfolded on the steep and winding path to redemption.

Playwright, activist, and V-Day founder Eve Ensler — who is perhaps as close as an artist can get to being a
cultural superhero: redeemer of the unspeakable, voice of the unspoken, instrument not only of social change
but of that “revelation in the heart” (to borrow Leonard Cohen’s lovely phrase) where all change begins — lifts
the blindfold in an extraordinary letter of apology to Mother Earth. Ensler composed the letter as an addendum
of sorts to her altogether magnificent book The Apology (public library), read it at Bioneers, then kindly granted
me the honor of premiering it to the Brain Pickings ecosystem.

She contextualizes her courageous self-inspection in the disquieting mirror of personal responsibility, where any
atonement must begin:

After I finished writing The Apology, a book in which I wrote a letter from my father to myself apologizing
and exploring, explaining in detail all the ways he had abused and harmed me, I realized there was an
 apology I needed to make — an apology that would force me to confront my deepest sorrow, guilt and
shame, an apology that I had been avoiding since I moved out of the city to the woods where I now live with
the oaks, locust and weeping willows, Lydia the snapping turtle, running spring water, foxes, deer, coyotes,
bears and cardinals and my precious dog, Pablo. It is my offering to you. It is my apology to the Earth,
herself.

The letter, consonant with Whitman’s insistence that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the
stars,” evocative of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Please Call Me by My True Names,” is a masterwork of empathy,
that highest measure of consciousness. Its gift is the selfsame gift for which the Trappist monk and teacher
Thomas Merton thanked Rachel Carson in his gorgeous letter of appreciation after reading Silent Spring — the
gift of civilizational self-awareness.

Eve Ensler (Photograph: Paula Allen)

Ensler writes:

Dear Mother,

It began with the article about the birds, the 2.9 billion missing North America birds, the 2.9 billion birds
that disappeared and no one noticed. The sparrows, black birds, and swallows who didn’t make it, who
weren’t ever born, who stopped flying or singing or making their most ingenious nests, who didn’t perch or
peck their gentle beaks into moist black earth. It began with the birds. Hadn’t we even commented in June,
James and I that they were hardly here? A kind of eerie quiet had descended. But later they came back.
The swarms of barn swallows and the huge ravens landing on the gravel one by one. I know it was after
hearing about the birds, that afternoon I crashed my bike. Suddenly falling, falling, unable to prevent the
catastrophe ahead, unable to find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. I fell and spun
and realized I had already been falling, that we have been falling, all of us, and crows and conifers and ice
caps and expectations — falling and falling and I wanted to keep falling. I didn’t want to be here to witness
everything falling, missing, bleaching, burning, drying, disappearing, choking, never blooming. I didn’t
want to live without the birds or bees and sparkling flies that light the summer nights. I didn’t want to live
with hunger that turned us feral or desperation that gave us claws. I wanted to fall and fall into the deepest,
darkest ground and be finally still and buried there.

But Mother, you had other plans. The bike landed in grass and dirt and bang, I was ten-years-old, fallen in
the road, my knees scraped and bloody. And I realized that even then nature was something foreign and
cruel, something that could and would hurt me because everything I had ever known or loved that was
grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. Even then I had
already been exiled, or so I felt, forever cast out of the forest. I belonged with the broken, the
contaminated, the dead.
 Maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee and elbow, or the dirt embedded in my new jacket, maybe it was the
shock or the realization that death was preferable to the thick tar of grief coagulated in my chest, or maybe
it was just the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheel still spinning without me. Whatever it was.
It broke. It broke. I heard the howling.

Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn and the
butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling
with methane. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning or islands
drowned in water.

I didn’t see you, Mother. You were nothing to me. My trauma-made arrogance and ambition drove me
to the that cracking pulsing city. Chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally
prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong. Oh my Mother, what contempt I had for you. What did
you have to offer that would give me status in the market place of ideas and achieving? What could your
bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or greenness I could not receive or bear. I reduced
you to weather, an inconvenience, something that got in my way, dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city
boots with salt. I refused your invitation, scorned your generosity, held suspicion for your love. I ignored all
the ways we used and abused you. I pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be
tamed and controlled — that you were out to get us.

I press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing me in and out. I have missed you, Mother. I
have been away so long. I am sorry. I am so sorry.

I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of
this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal pistil and stamen. I am branch and hive and trunk and
stone. I am what has been here and what is coming. I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder.
I am an impulse and an order. I am perfumed peonies and the single parasol tree in the African savannah. I
am lavender, dandelion, daisy, dahlia, cosmos, chrysanthemum, pansy, bleeding heart and rose. I am all
that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered and all that has been left alone. I am all your
missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born. I am daughter. I am caretaker. I am fierce defender. I am
griever. I am bandit. I am baby. I am supplicant. I am here now, Mother. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours.

Eve Ensler

Complement with “After Silence” — Neil Gaiman’s stunning poem celebrating Rachel Carson’s legacy and
culture-shifting courage — and Ensler on how a tree saved her life, then visit Cornell University’s Ornithology
Lab to see what you, my fellow naked ape, can do to help save the birds, whose salvation is inseparable from our
own. For, in the poetic words of the naturalist John Muir — one of Carson’s great heroes — “when we try to pick
out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings

More fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.
BY M A R I A P O P OVA

On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. It was then, and continues to
be, a labor of love and ledger of curiosity, although the mind and heart from which it sprang have changed —
have grown, I hope — tremendously. At the end of the first decade, I told its improbable origin story and drew
from its evolution the ten most important things this all-consuming daily endeavor taught me about writing and
living — largely notes to myself, perhaps best thought of as resolutions in reverse, that may or may not be useful
to others.

Now, as Brain Pickings turns thirteen — the age at which, at least in the Germanic languages, childhood tips to
adolescence; the age at which I first competed in the European Math Olympics; the legal marriage age in my
homeland; the number of British colonies that germinated the United States; the number of moons revolving
around Neptune; a handsome prime number — I feel compelled to add three more learnings from the past three
years, which have been in some ways the most difficult and in some ways the most beautiful of my life; the years
in which I made the things of which I am proudest: created The Universe in Verse, composed Figuring, and finally
published, after eight years of labor, A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

With dad, year 0

Here are the initial ten learnings, as published in 2016, which I continue to stand and live by:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for
“negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an
opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas
of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We
then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own
reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding
to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology,
or, above all, yourself.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige
is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work
not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel
life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning
and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the
things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially,
with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a
 human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued.
To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an
opportunity to exchange them.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in
particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us
when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience
float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential
stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important,
sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment,
dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined
about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as
some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure
of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your
sanity, from which all else springs?
5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as
important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only
custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you
are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that
measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or
that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very
capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it,
“how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful
Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently
overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth —
as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve
reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a
culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic
unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative
influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a
beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on
to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already
infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and
consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line
between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to
believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat
GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last
great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is
“to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency,
whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by
 consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the
superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant
in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism
often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that
great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of
reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and
spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth,
decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than
construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with
sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit,
continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to
cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

And here are the three new additions, which refine some of the subtler ideas and ideals contemplated above:

11. A reflection originally offered on the cusp of Year 11, by way of a wonderful poem about pi:
Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them
against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth
from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more
to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the
figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.
12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire
life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the
rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of
beautiful lives.
13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest
relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most
disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles
and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by
which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness
and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental
understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and
again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

And since Brain Pickings is the public record of what I privately think and feel and worry and wonder about daily,
here is a time machine of thought and feeling via thirteen of the pieces I have most enjoyed writing these past
thirteen years:
1. The More Loving One

2. Big Wolf & Little Wolf: A Tender Tale of Loneliness, Belonging, and How Friendship Transforms Us

3. How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

4. The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good
Marriage

5. Love, Lunacy, and a Life Fully Lived: Oliver Sacks, the Science of Seeing, and the Art of Being Seen

6. Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair

7. Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

8. The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient
Truth to Power

9. Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers
10. Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

11. Patti Smith on Time, Transformation, and How the Radiance of Love Redeems the Rupture of Loss

12. Salvation by Words: Iris Murdoch on Language as a Vehicle of Truth and Art as a Force of Resistance to
Tyranny
 13. A Brave and Startling Truth: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist
Poem That Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan

The Weighing
A well to the groundwater of our strength.

BY M A R I A P O P OVA

“All you have is what you are, and what you give,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a
philosophical novel contemplating suffering and getting to the other side of pain.
“If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me,” W.H. Auden wrote
in a philosophical poem contemplating the courage to love more, to give more, in
the face of even the most heartbreaking and elemental disparity of passions.

Perhaps the deepest measure of our character, of our very humanity, is how much
we go on giving when what we most value is taken from us — when a loved one
withholds their love, when the world withdraws its mercy. That is what Jane
Hirshfield — herself a rare poet with a philosopher’s eye to existence, and an
ordained Buddhist — explores in her stunning poem “The Weighing,” originally
published in 1994, later included in her soul-salving poetry collection The Beauty
(public library), and read here by astrophysicist and poetic thinker Janna Levin:

brainpicker

Astrophysicist Janna …

1:00

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 THE WEIGHING
by Jane Hirshfield

The heart’s reasons

seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

For more of Hirshfield’s resuscitory poetics, savor her wisdom on creativity and her poems “Optimism” and “On
the Fifth Day,” then revisit Janna Levin reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou, “Hymn to Time”
by Ursula K. Le Guin, and “The More Loving One” by W.H. Auden.

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