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T h e A n n i h i l a t i o n o f S p a c e a n d T i m e : R e b e c c a      

S o l n i t o n H o w M u y b r i d g e F r o z e t h e F l o w o f    

E x i s t e n c e , S h a p e d V i s u a l C u l t u r e , a n d C h a n g e d      

O u r C o n s c i o u s n e s s      

“ B e f o r e , e v e r y f a c e , e v e r y p l a c e , e v e r y e v e n t , h a d b e e n u n i q u e , s e e n o n l y      

o n c e a n d t h e n l o s t f o r e v e r a m o n g t h e c h a n g e s o f a g e , l i g h t , t i m e . T h e p a s t    

e x i s t e d o n l y i n m e m o r y a n d i n t e r p r e t a t i o n , a n d t h e w o r l d b e y o n d o n e ’ s o w n      

e x p e r i e n c e w a s m o s t l y s t o r i e s . ”    

B Y M A R I A P O P O V A          

The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky described the art

of cinema as “sculpting in time,” asserting that people go to the

movies because they long to experience “time lost or spent or

not yet had.” A century earlier, the English photographerEadweard Muybridge (April 9, 1830–May 8, 1904) exposed the

bedrock of time and devised the first chisel for its sculpting in

his pioneering photographic studies of motion, which forever

changed the modern world — not only by ushering in a

technological revolution the effects of which permeate and even

dictate our daily lives today, but also, given how bound up in

space and time our thinking ego is, transforming our very

consciousness. For the very first time, Muybridge’s motion

studies captured what T.S. Eliot would later call “the still point of 

the turning world.”

With her unparalleled intellectual elegance and poetic prose, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of 

that transformation in River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

(public library).

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E a d w e a r d M u y b r i d g e : T h e H o r s e i n M o t i o n      

Solnit frames the impact of the trailblazing experiments Muybridge conducted in the spring of 

1872, when he first photographed a galloping horse:

[Muybridge] had captured aspects of motion whose speed had made them as invisible as

the moons of Jupiter before the telescope, and he had found a way to set them back in

motion. It was as though he had grasped time itself, made it stand still, and then made it

run again, over and over. Time was at his command as it had never been at anyone’s

before. A new world had opened up for science, for art, for entertainment, for

consciousness, and an old world had retreated farther.

Technology and consciousness, of course, have always shaped one another, perhaps nowhere

more so than in our experience of time — from the moment Galileo’s invention of the clock

sparked modern timekeeping to the brutality with which social media timelines beleaguer us

with a crushing sense of perpetual urgency. But the 1870s were a particularly fecund zeitgeist of 

technological transformation by Solnit’s perfect definition of technology as “a practice, a

technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world.” She writes:

The experience of time was itself changing dramatically during Muybridge’s seventy-four

years, hardly ever more dramatically than in the 1870s. In that decade the newly invented

telephone and phonograph were added to photography, telegraphy, and the railroad as

instruments for “annihilating time and space.”

[…]

The modern world, the world we live in, began then, and Muybridge helped launch it.

[…]

His trajectory ripped through all the central stories of his time — the relationship to the

natural world and the industrialization of the human world, the Indian wars, the new

technologies and their impact on perception and consciousness. He is the man who split

the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of the atom.

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E a d w e a r d M u y b r i d g e : S e q u e n c e d i m a g e o f a r o t a t i n g s u l k y w h e e l    

w i t h s e l f - p o r t r a i t    

Shining a sidewise gleam at just how radically the givens we take for granted have changed

since Muybridge’s time, Solnit writes of that era in which a man could shoot his wife’s lover and

be acquitted for justifiable homicide:

In the eight years of his motion-study experiments in California, he also became a father,

a murderer, and a widower, invented a clock, patented two photographic innovations,

achieved international renown as an artist and a scientist, and completed four other

major photographic projects.

With the invention of cinema still more than a decade away, Muybridge’s shutters and film

development techniques fused cutting-edge engineering and chemistry to produce more and

better high-speed photographs than anyone had before. In a sense, Virginia Woolf’s famous

complaint about the visual language of cinema — “the eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the

brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think,”

she scoffed in 1926 — was an indictment of this new visual language of time and, indirectly, of 

Muybridge’s legacy. Had he not rendered time visible and tangible, Bertrand Russell may not

have proclaimed that “even though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate

of wisdom”; had his pioneering photography not altered our relationship to the moment, Italo

Calvino would not have had to issue his prescient lamentation that “the life that you live in

order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”

E a d w e a r d M u y r i d g e : A m a n s t a n d i n g o n h i s h a n d s f r o m a l y i n g      

d o w n p o s i t i o n      

In a testament to the notion that all creative work builds on what came before, Muybridge made

 

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significant improvements on the zoetrope — a rotating device, invented in 1834, which creates

the illusion of motion by presenting a series of spinning images through a slot. But alongside

the practical improvement upon existing technologies, he also built upon larger cultural leaps

— most significantly, the rise of the railroads, which compressed space and time unlike

anything ever had.

In 1872, the railroad magnate Leland Stanford — who would later co-found Stanford University

with his wife, Jane — commissioned Muybridge to study the gaits of galloping and trotting

horses in order to determine whether all four feet lifted off the ground at once at any point.

Since horses gallop at a speed that outpaces the perception of the human eye, this was

impossible to discern without freezing motion into a still image. So began Muybridge’s

transformation of time.

H o r s e i n M o t i o n : O n e o f M u y b r i d g e ’ s m o t i o n s t u d i e s    

c o m m i s s i o n e d b y S t a n f o r d      

With her penchant for cultural history laced with subtle, perfectly placed political commentary,

Solnit traces the common root of Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Muybridge:

Perhaps because California has no past — no past, at least, that it is willing to remember

— it has always been peculiarly adept at trailblazing the future. We live in the future

launched there.

If one wanted to find an absolute beginning point, a creation story, for California’s two

greatest transformations of the world, these experiments with horse and camera would be

it. Out of these first lost snapshots eventually came a world-changing industry, and out of 

the many places where movies are made, one particular place: Hollywood. The man who

owned the horse and sponsored the project believed in the union of science and business

and founded the university that much later generated another industry identified, like

Hollywood, by its central place: Silicon Valley.

It would be impossible to grasp the profound influence Muybridge and his legacy had on

culture without understanding how dramatically different the world he was born into was from

the one he left. Solnit paints the technological backdrop of his childhood:

Pigeons were the fastest communications technology; horses were the fastest

transportation technology; the barges moved at the speed of the river or the pace of the

horses that pulled them along the canals. Nature itself was the limit of speed: humans

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could only harness water, wind, birds, beasts. Born into this almost medievally slow

world, the impatient, ambitious, inventive Muybridge would leave it and link himself 

instead to the fastest and newest technologies of the day.

The first passenger railroad opened on September 15, 1830 — mere months after Muybridge’s

birth. Like any technological bubble, the spread of this novelty brought with it an arsenal of 

stock vocabulary. The notion of “annihilating time and space” became one of the era’s most

used, then invariably overused, catchphrases. (In a way, clichés themselves — phrases to which

we turn for cognitive convenience, out of a certain impatience with language — are another

manifestation of our defiant relationship to time.) Applied first to the railways, the phrase soon

spread to the various technological advancements that radiated, directly or indirectly, from

them. Solnit writes:

“Annihilating time and space” is what most new technologies aspire to do: technology

regards the very terms of our bodily existence as burdensome. Annihilating time and

space most directly means accelerating communications and transportation. Thedomestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel sped up the rate and volume of 

transit; the invention of writing made it possible for stories to reach farther across time

and space than their tellers and stay more stable than memory; and new communications,

reproduction, and transportation technologies only continue the process. What

distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not

live quite in the present or the local.

[…]

The devices for such annihilation poured forth faster and faster, as though inventiveness

and impatience had sped and multiplied too.

E a d w e a r d M u y b r i d g e : R u n n i n g f u l l s p e e d (     A n i m a l L o c o m o t i o n    

, 

P l a t e 6 2 )    

But perhaps the most significant impact of the railroads, Solnit argues, was that they began

standardizing human experience as goods, people, and their values traveled faster and farther

than ever before. In contracting the world, the railways began to homogenize it. And just associety was adjusting to this new mode of relating to itself, another transformative invention

bookended the decade: On January 7, 1839, the French artist Louis Daguerre debuted what he

called daguerreotypy — a pioneering imaging method that catalyzed the dawn of photography.

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With an eye to the era’s European and American empiricism, animated by a “restlessness that

regarded the unknown as a challenge rather than a danger,” Solnit writes:

Photography may have been its most paradoxical invention: a technological breakthrough

for holding onto the past, a technology always rushing forward, always looking backward.

[…]

Photography was a profound transformation of the world it entered. Before, every face,

every place, every event, had been unique, seen only once and then lost forever among the

changes of age, light, time. The past existed only in memory and interpretation, and the

world beyond one’s own experience was mostly stories… [Now,] every photograph was a

moment snatched from the river of time.

The final invention in the decades’s trifecta of technological transformation was the telegraph.

Together, these three developments — photography, the railroads, and the telegraph — marked

the beginning of our modern flight from presence, which would become the seedbed of ourunhappiness over the century that followed. By chance, Muybridge came into the world at the

pinnacle of this transformation; by choice, he became instrumental in guiding its course and,

in effect, shaping modernity.

E a d w e a r d M u y b r i d g e : C o c k a t o o f l y i n g (     A n i m a l L o c o m o t i o n     , P l a t e      

7 5 8 )    

Solnit writes:

Before the new technologies and ideas, time was a river in which human beings wereimmersed, moving steadily on the current, never faster than the speeds of nature — of 

currents, of wind, of muscles. Trains liberated them from the flow of the river, or isolated

them from it. Photography appears on this scene as though someone had found a way to

freeze the water of passing time; appearances that were once as fluid as water running

through one’s fingers became solid objects… Appearances were permanent, information

was instantaneous, travel exceeded the fastest speed of bird, beast, and man. It was no

longer a natural world in the sense it always had been, and human beings were no longer

contained within nature.

Time itself had been of a different texture, a different pace, in the world Muybridge was

born into. It had not yet become a scarce commodity to be measured out in ever smaller

increments as clocks acquired second hands, as watches became more affordable mass-

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market commodities, as exacting schedules began to intrude into more and more

activities. Only prayer had been precisely scheduled in the old society, and church bells

had been the primary source of time measurement.

Simone Weil once defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention,” and perhaps the

commodification of time that started in the 1830s was the beginning of the end of our capacity

for such attention; perhaps Muybridge was the horseman of our attentional apocalypse.

E a d w e a r d M u y b r i d g e : W o m a n r e m o v i n g m a n t l e      

Solnit considers the magnitude of his ultimate impact on our experience of time:

In the spring of 1872 a man photographed a horse. With the motion studies that resulted it

was as though he were returning bodies themselves to those who craved them — not

bodies as they might daily be experienced, bodies as sensations of gravity, fatigue,

strength, pleasure, but bodies become weightless images, bodies dissected and

reconstructed by light and machine and fantasy.

[…]

What they had lost was solid; what they gained was made out of air. That exotic new

world of images speeding by would become the true home of those who spent their

Saturdays watching images beamed across the darkness of the movie theater, then their

evenings watching images beamed through the atmosphere and brought home into a box

like a camera obscura or a crystal ball, then their waking hours surfing the Internet wired

like the old telegraph system. Muybridge was a doorway, a pivot between that old world

and ours, and to follow him is to follow the choices that got us here.

In the remainder of her rich and revelatory River of Shadows, Solnit goes on to follow the Rube

Goldberg trajectory of these choices, linking Muybridge and his legacy to aspects of our daily

lives ranging from the internet to how we inhabit our bodies. Complement it with Susan Sontag

on the aesthetic consumerism of photography, the revisit Solnit on how to nurture our hope in

times of despair, the rewards of walking, what reading does for the human spirit, and how

modern noncommunication is changing our experience of time, solitude, and communion.

A g a i n s t S e l f - C r i t i c i s m : A d a m P h i l l i p s o n H o w O u r    

I n t e r n a l C r i t i c s E n s l a v e U s , t h e S t o c k h o l m        

S y n d r o m e o f t h e S u p e r e g o , a n d t h e P o w e r o f    

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S y n d r o m e o f t h e S u p e r e g o , a n d t h e P o w e r o f    

M u l t i p l e I n t e r p r e t a t i o n s      

“ I n b r o a c h i n g t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f b e i n g , i n s o m e w a y , a g a i n s t s e l f - c r i t i c i s m , w e      

h a v e t o i m a g i n e a w o r l d i n w h i c h c e l e b r a t i o n i s l e s s s u s p e c t t h a n c r i t i c i s m . ”    

B Y M A R I A P O P O V A          

I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the

relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is

the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of 

reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops

mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the

destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered

resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement

address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this

fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical

complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active

reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction.

But cross it we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our

capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity

necessary for improving our shortcomings, instead berating and belittling ourselves for our

foibles with a special kind of masochism.

The undergirding psychology of that impulse is what the English psychoanalytical writer

Adam Phillips explores in his magnificent essay “Against Self-Criticism”, found in his

altogether terrific collection Unforbidden Pleasures (public library).

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O n e o f S a l v a d o r D a l í ’ s i l l u s t r a t i o n s f o r t h e e s s a y s o f M o n t a i g n e      

Phillips — who has written with beguiling nuance about such variousness of our psychic

experience as the importance of “fertile solitude,” the value of missing out, and the rewards of 

being out of balance — examines how “our virulent, predatory self-criticism [has] become one

of our greatest pleasures,” reaching across the space-time of culture to both revolt against and

pay homage to Susan Sontag’s masterwork Against Interpretation

. He writes:

In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to

imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the

alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the

repertoire; and in which we praise whatever we can.

Our masochistic impulse for self-criticism, he argues, arises from the fact that ambivalence is

the basic condition of our lives. In a passage that builds on his memorable prior reflections on

the paradox of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance, Phillips considers

Freud’s ideological legacy:

In Freud’s vision of things we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we

love; wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and

if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize when

we are frustrated — or when we are trying to describe our frustration, however obliquely

— and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa. Ambivalence does not, in the

Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings.

[…]

Love and hate — a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right

names for what we might want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings

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with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you

can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we

hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these

contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are

the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about

anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize

that someone or something has become significant to us… Where there is devotion thereis always protest… where there is trust there is suspicion.

[…]

We may not be able to imagine a life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time

criticizing ourselves and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in

play.

But we have become so indoctrinated in this conscience of self-criticism, both collectively and

individually, that we’ve grown reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the

great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured this pathology perfectly: “There’s only one thing

certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”) Phillips writes:

Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-

called selves.

[…]

Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, oreven mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless

criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should

cease to have the hold over us that it does.

But this self-critical part of ourselves, Phillips points out, is “strikingly unimaginative” — a

relentless complainer whose repertoire of tirades is so redundant as to become, to any objective

observer, risible and tragic at the same time:

Were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internalcritic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and

cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in

the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.

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O n e o f M a u r i c e S e n d a k ’ s i l l u s t r a t i o n s f o r t h e B r o t h e r s G r i m m        

f a i r y t a l e s    

Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind

of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:

We are continually, if unconsciously, mutilating and deforming our own character.

Indeed, so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we are like

without it. We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before

we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic). Or, to put it differently, we can

 judge only what we recognize ourselves as able to judge. What can’t be judged can’t be

seen. What happens to everything that is not subject to approval or disapproval, to

everything that we have not been taught how to judge? … The judged self can only be

 judged but not known. [We] think that it is complicitous not to stand up to, not to contest,

this internal tyranny by what is only one part — a small but loud part — of the self.

The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our

conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation

as an accurate and complete representation of reality:

Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits

of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and

enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself.

[…]

We consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we

are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being.

With an eye to Freud’s legacy and the familiar texture of the human experience, Phillips makes

his central point:

You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature

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— by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple

impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however

apparently compelling it is. Indeed, the implication is — and here is Freud’s ongoing

suspicion, or ambivalence, about psychoanalysis — that the more persuasive, the more

compelling, the more authoritative, the interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should

be. The interpretation might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no

limit can be set.

Here, the ideological wink at Sontag becomes apparent. Indeed, the Sontag classic would’ve

been better titled “Against an Interpretation,” for the essence of her argument is precisely that a

single interpretation invariably warps and flattens any text, any experience, any cultural

artifact. (How tragicomical to see, then, that a reviewer who complains that Phillips’s writing is

too open to interpretation both misses his point and, in doing so, makes it.)

What Phillips is advocating isn’t the wholesale relinquishing of interpretation but the

psychological hygiene of inviting multiple interpretations as a way of countering the artificialauthority of the superego and loosening its tyrannical grip on our experience of ourselves:

Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being

stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; it means assuming that to

believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and

indeed interpretation itself.

I l l u s t r a t i o n b y K a t e B e a t o n f r o m T o B e o r N o t T o B e        , a c h o o s e -    

y o u r - o w n - a d v e n t u r e r e i m a g i n i n g o f H a m l e t      

Cuing in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “genius of self-reproach,” Phillips considers the cowardice

of self-criticism:

Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea.

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[…]

The first quarto of Hamlet has, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” while the

second quarto has, “Thus conscience does make cowards.” If conscience makes cowards of 

us all, then we are all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience simply makes

cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and

they are clearly different, conscience makes something of us; it is a maker, if not of selves,

then of something about selves. It is an internal artist, of a kind… The superego … casts us

as certain kinds of character: it, as it were, tells us who we really are. It is an essentialist: it

claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a

mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the

consequences of our actions (when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that

most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation; no

apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive; no good is purely and simply

that).

Half a century after Eleanor Roosevelt’s memorable admonition that “when you adopt the

standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to

the extent of your surrender, less of a human being,” Phillips urges us to question the

superego’s despotic standards:

The superego is the sovereign interpreter… [It] tells us what we take to be the truth about

ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the

way it makes us suffer [and] take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary

quotient of self-disappointment. That every day we will fail to be as good as we should be;but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting

the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from.

Under this docile surrender to self-criticism, Phillips cautions, our conscience slips into

cowardice:

Conscience … it is the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that

prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us

from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being. So when Richard IIIsays, in the final act of his own play, “O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”, a

radical alternative is being proposed. That conscience makes cowards of us all because it

is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and

punitively forbidding part of ourselves; and yet this supposedly authoritative part of 

ourselves is itself a coward.

The most virulent and culturally contagious form of this cowardice, I would argue, is the

resignation of cynicism — a resignation Phillips traces to the punitive system at the root of our

culture’s moral framework, in which good behavior is incentivized largely through fear of punishment for bad behavior. This effort to foster the constructive by the destructive, he

suggests, ends up turning us on ourselves as our fear of punishment metastasizes into self-

criticism. (The cynic bypasses the constructiveness — that is, refuses to do anything about

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changing a situation for the better — and rushes straight to inflicting punishment, be it by

insult or condemnation or that most cowardly and passive-aggressive fusion of the two, the

eyeroll.)

Phillips returns to the central paradox, arguing for the importance of overinerpreting our self-

critical conscience:

How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed andcredulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it

akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as

an alternative to autocracy… We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms

of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This

doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more

complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn’t

useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as

spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, notoverinterpretation.

Our self-criticism, to be sure, couldn’t be entirely eradicated — nor should it, for it is our most

essential route-recalculating tool for navigating life. But by nurturing our capacity for multiple

interpretations, Phillips suggests, self-criticism can become “less jaded and jading, more

imaginative and less spiteful.”

Unforbidden Pleasures is a magnificent read in its entirety, exploring such strands of our

psychic complexity as desire, disappointment, indifference, and idealism. Complement this

particular portion with Albert Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed

prisons, then revisit Phillips on why our capacity for boredom is essential for a full life.

H o w D o Y o u M e a s u r e Y o u r L i f e : A r t i s t C a r r i e M a e      

W e e m s ’ s S t i r r i n g S V A C o m m e n c e m e n t A d d r e s s      

“ O p e n a n d a l e r t , y o u r e s p o n d s e n s i t i v e l y t o t h e w o r l d a r o u n d y o u , a n d i t    

c a u s e s y o u a g r e a t d e a l o f p a i n a n d t r e m e n d o u s t r e p i d a t i o n . B u t , o f c o u r s e ,  

t h e s e a r e t h e n a t u r a l b y p r o d u c t s o f a c l o s e l y e x a m i n e d l i f e . ”    

B Y M A R I A P O P O V A          

One of the most important creative voices of our time multidisciplinary artist and MacArthur

Fellow Carrie Mae Weems is to this day the only African American woman to have been given

a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. On May 18, 2016, Weems took the stage at Radio

City Music Hall, stood before the graduating class of New York’s School of Visual Arts, and

made a spectacular addition to the finest commencement addresses of all time — a meditation

on the measure of a life and the demands of making art, beginning as a sort of philosophical

prose poem and unfolding into a stirring multimedia mediation between the past and the

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future, exploring what the upheavals of our time mean for living a creative life in an

increasingly complex world.

Three days earlier, I had given a commencement address of my own, so I was in a particularly

raw and receptive state — Weems’s generous, piercing words went straight to heart. May they

do the same for you — transcribed and annotated highlights below.

Carrie Mae Weems: School of Visual Arts 2016commencement addressfrom Maria Popova

24:17

Half a century after Henry Miller considered the paradox of success and the measure of a life

well lived, Weems raises the most substantive question there is:

As we move through our lives, I want you to ask yourselves: How do we measure a life?

How do we measure a life — by what means and by what measure? Do you measure it inch

by inch, step by step, crawl by crawl? How will you measure you lives is the most

important thing — not only for you, students, but for all of us. I am asking myself this

question constantly: How do you measure a life?

[…]

Do you measure it day by day or year by year? Do you measure it by yesterday or by today?

Do you measure it by the miles walked or the mountains climbed or the valleys explored?

How do you measure your life?

By the dreams imagined or by the hopes dashed? By the wisdom of wise words spoken or

by the sorrow of silence? By the wealth accumulated or by the amount spent? By the

monument built or by the walls scaled? By defeats and/or by victories, large and small?

Do you measure it by the forgotten or the remembered? By all the near-misses and the

exhaustion, or by the ability to endure? How do you measure your life? … By the suffering

of friends and enemies alike? By the end or by the beginning? By those who walk with you

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to the very end of the precipice, by the friends gathered around you, by the support that

you are offered? How do you measure the life?

Whatever answer we may give, Weems intimates, it has something to do with wresting

meaning out of our impermanence:

I think about myself as dust in the wind, and I’m going to be here just for a hot second —

that’s about it. When you think about the vastness of the universe in which we dwell, weare dust in the wind — and yet we are here.

Contrasting the long history of inequality in how art by women and artists of color is valued

with the unprecedented fact that in less than a decade the United States will become a

“minority-majority” country, “moving from white to brown to a nation of dark-skinned people,”

Weems urges graduates to consider their individual role in making sense and making use of the

enormous, complex sociocultural changes we’re living through:

Now, everybody that is really, seriously thinking about what the future is, is really lookingat this profound cultural shift, profound ethnic shift, profound color shift… This is really

important stuff… We’ve entered into this exciting, extraordinary moment in time —

something that America has never seen before — unprecedented.

[…]

As artists, creative thinkers, how will you respond to this shifting sand, this shifting tide?

How will you use this moment to begin to craft new modes of thought and being and

purpose? As artists, what effect will this have on your creative output and even the courseof your exploration — the questions that you ask and how you ask those questions?

[…]

Responding to the shift will require, I think, extraordinary imagination … and deep, and

deep, and deep innovation… This is really your moment, absolutely — and you really must

seize it.

A century and a half after Thoreau considered what it takes to define one’s own success and half 

a century after e.e. cummings examined the agony of the artist, Weems offers:

I want to talk to you for a moment about success. I have no idea, really, what this means —

what this will mean for you — but I do know that, sooner or later, each and every one of 

you will have to determine for yourselves what success and what failure are. You will have

to establish your own standards — mine will not necessarily work for you.

Working as an artist is one of the most difficult things I do, and at the same time it’s the

only thing I can possibly do.

I want you to think about this for a moment, for now. I want you to think very, very deeply

and profoundly [about] what it is that you really want and what it is that you need in your

life, and what it is that you need from your practice. I do know what it needs from you: Art

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is demanding — it takes its toll on you in a very profound way.

[…]

Making art is extremely difficult, requiring tremendous courage, enormous sacrifice,

great risk… Knowing this, you nevertheless stand at the precipice and you leap into the

abyss, into the arms of uncertainty. Open and alert, you respond sensitively to the world

around you, and it causes you a great deal of pain and tremendous trepidation. But, of course, these are the natural byproducts of a closely examined life.

You work and you work and you work and you work and you work, and you are

determined to wrestle this thing to the ground, making art… But your vision is not yet

formed, your work does not yet bear that distinctive mark, your unique hand, your DNA…

In your despair, you toss and you turn, crying yourself to sleep night after night after

night, endlessly doubting, endlessly doubting your ability and sometimes feeling like a

motherless child. I have been there — I know. Searching high and low for your own voice,

for your own expressive utterance, you lead yourself down paths that dissipate… Confused

and fuzzy, you begin to imagine that all the forces of the world are conspiring against

you…

And yet, and still, the pursuit — that driving thing called art — hounds you, and you don’t

know any rest. And, determined to make a way out of no way every day, you rise up and

you hit it, own it, go into your studio… Art is a demanding mistress.

Weems ends by reminding graduates — this class of artists just coming abloom — that their

fate will often be forked by difficult but necessary choices, choices like those between

commercial pressures and creative integrity:

You have to make commitments. You have to decide who you are going to serve.

Complement Weems’s masterwork of the genre with other timelessly electrifying

commencement addresses: Joseph Brodsky’s six rules for winning at the game of life

(University of Michigan, 1988), Toni Morrison on the rewards of true adulthood (Wesleyan,

2004), George Saunders on the power of kindness (Syracuse University, 2013), Bill Watterson on

creative integrity (Kenyon College, 1990), Teresita Fernandez on what it really means to be anartist (Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013), Debbie Millman on courage and the creative

life (San Jose State University, 2013), Kurt Vonnegut on boredom, belonging, and our human

responsibility (Fredonia College, 1978), Tom Wolfe on the rise of the pseudo-intellectual (Boston

University, 2000), and Parker Palmer on the six pillars of the meaningful life (Naropa

University, 2015).

C o m p u t e r C r a s h e s B e f o r e C o m p u t e r s : W h e n J o h n      

S t e i n b e c k ’ s D o g A t e H i s M a n u s c r i p t    

“ T w o m o n t h s w o r k t o d o o v e r a g a i n … I w a s p r e t t y m a d b u t t h e p o o r l i t t l e      

f e l l o w m a y h a v e b e e n a c t i n g c r i t i c a l l y . ”    

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B Y M A R I A P O P O V A          

To write in the twenty-first century is to benefit from a number

of labor- and sanity-saving conveniences we’ve come to take for

granted — spellcheck, find-and-replace, the undo button. But

the greatest saving grace of the digital writer is the backup. We

often come to appreciate its glory the hard way — anyone who

has ever lost hours or days or weeks of work to a computer crash

knows intimately the anguishing interpolation between self-pity

and self-blame.

Before computers, backups were both harder and less necessary

— copies were laborious to make, but threats to a manuscript

were of a more elemental nature and thus came with much

lower probability: fires, floods, fits of rage. And yet they didcome, often in ways rather comical in their imporbability.

One of those comical tragedies of creative work befell John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–

December 20, 1968), a great proponent of the satisfactions of writing by hand, as he was in the

midst of writing his novella Of Mice and Men in the spring of 1936. The incident involved his

beloved dog — an Irish setter named Toby. (Steinbeck was among literature’s greatest pet-lovers

and, like E.B. White and like Mary Oliver, shared his entire life with dogs.)

In a May 27 letter to his editor, Elizabeth Otis, found in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public

library) — which also gave us the beloved writer on the difficult art of the friend breakup, his

advice on falling in love, and his spirited retort to racism — 34-year-old Steinbeck relays what is

both the then-equivalent of a tragic computer crash and a comical addition to the dog-ate-my-

homework canon of excuses.

After confirming the receipt of a check for $94 — the commission for a book review he had

written for an English publication — Steinbeck reports:

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Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup, left alone one

night, made confetti of about half of my [manuscript] book. Two months work to do over

again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow

may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms. I’m not sure is

good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter. But there’s

the work to do over from the start.

[…]

I should imagine the new little manuscript will be ready in about two months. I hope you

won’t be angry at it. I think it has some thing, but can’t tell much yet. I’ll get this off.

I hear the postman.

 John Steinbeck

S t e i n b e c k w i t h T o b y , 1 9 3 7 ( P h o t o g r a p h : B e a t r i c e K a u f m a n )    

Being a formidably disciplined writer, Steinbeck made good on his word and finished the

manuscript over the coming months. Of Mice and Men was published in 1937 and became his

first major critical success. It was adapted into a Hollywood film two years later and led to

Steinbeck’s memorable reflection on the dark side of success.

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters is a wonderful read in its entirety, full of the Nobel-winning writer’s

genial wisdom on literature and life. Complement it with Steinbeck on creative integrity,

writing and the mobilizing power of the impossible, and his prophetic dream about how

commercial media are killing creative culture, then revisit great writers’ reflections on loving

their pets.

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