An essay you can handle

Life leans forward.

A short walk through my philosophy: one idea, one question and eight bearings.

By John StoszkowskiAdapted from my A Short Book of Syntropology

Tap the dandelion.

A note before you start.

Most people have no appetite for abstract, difficult philosophy. Who could blame them? Calling philosophy a way of life doesn’t get you very far. You still have to choose one, then work out how the hell to live it.

I’ve spent a large part of my life reading books in search of answers. I’ve learned a lot. I’m often as baffled as ever. But some ideas follow you out of a book. They turn up while somebody is talking, or when a familiar decision stops looking so obvious.

I’ve gathered them into eight bearings. Each points towards something I think is worth attending to, and names a familiar way of getting stuck. You’ll recognise some of the traps. Busyness passes for involvement. A tidy operation can hide how little anyone inside it is free to do.

I recognise these things because I do them.

Take your time with whatever stays with you. Argue with what doesn’t hold up. Whatever time I have left, I mean to live well. This is some of what I’ve picked up on the way.

John

The idea

Leave a cup of coffee on the counter and it goes cold.

The heat drifts off into the room and never finds its way back.
This is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics. Left to themselves, things run down.
Living things hold their shape anyway. Often in remarkably elaborate forms.
A wound heals. A tree adds another ring. Your body repairs itself while you’re busy thinking about what’s for tea.
None of this breaks the law. Living things take in energy from their surroundings and pay for their order in heat and waste.

A cup of coffee

A tree, adding a ring

Leave them both a while

The word

I use syntropy, from the Greek syn, together, and tropos, turning.

syntropy noun: The gathering and organising that keeps life going and lets it grow new capacities.
syntropology noun: The philosophy built on that idea.
syntropising verb: The practice of putting it to work.

Tidiness isn’t the measure, though.

Order versus disorder doesn’t capture it.

Two scenes side by side: an untended garden overflowing with plants, flowers and a bee; and a perfectly tidy room of chairs in straight rows where one person sits, saying nothing. — **Leave a garden untended** and it fills with flourishing life. Your plan is falling apart and something else is thriving.

**A perfectly orderly room** can be a place where nobody dares say what they think. Everything is in its place, and nothing can happen.

Order is worth what it makes possible.

Living things also break down what they can no longer use. Renewal costs something and involves loss. A relationship may need to end. An idea you’ve defended for years may need to go.

Sometimes more life needs something to come apart.

So syntropy is order that leaves life somewhere to go.

Most advice about living well concentrates on managing yourself. I keep asking about the conditions you live in and help to make, for yourself and for others.

The question

If you remember one question from all this, make it this:

Is this making more life, or less?

Ask it of a habit, a relationship, or the way you spent yesterday.

Activity isn’t the same as more life. Neither is growth: tumours grow. And pleasure alone can’t settle it either. Some of the moments that matter most really hurt.

By more life I mean something you can check.

Does this help you notice more of what’s happening, and respond to it?
Does it give something room to grow, or protect what would otherwise be lost?

When you feel sure of the answer, ask this:

For whom, and at whose expense?

An arrangement can work beautifully for one person and wear another out. These questions won’t make decisions easier. They tend to turn up what you’d rather not see. That’s what they’re for.

A painted portrait of Anaïs Nin, seated in a blue gown with a fur collar — Portrait of Anaïs Nin by Natashia Troubetskoia, about 1932. CC0.

The eight bearings

Eight places to ask the question.

Each bearing is a place to ask the question. Each trap is what it looks like when the honest answer is less, though it can feel like more.

Choose a bearing, or just keep scrolling.

Bearing 1 of 8

Unfinishedness

Trap The settled view

Nothing alive is finished.

That includes you and the person sitting opposite you.

We’re quick to turn descriptions into identities. An introvert. A bad egg. A crap golfer. What happened once, or a few times, becomes who somebody is.

We need these shortcuts. We’d never get through breakfast if everything had to be understood fresh. But leave a description uncorrected long enough and it sets. Then the map starts telling the territory what it’s allowed to become.

The bearing

Unfinishedness

Being unfinished doesn’t excuse you from deciding. You still commit and live with the consequences. What stays open is your willingness to think again.

I can plant my strawberries without pretending to control June.

The trap

The settled view

The settled view is at its most comfortable when it’s about us. We love turning our history into a sentence. I’m just not someone who…

Sometimes that sentence is wisdom. Sometimes it’s a tiny prison with good grammar.

Daft Punk on stage in their robot helmets, lit from behind — Photo: Sony Music Entertainment, CC BY 4.0

A daft punky thrash

Before Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo played in a band called Darlin’. In 1993, Melody Maker critic Dave Jennings described one of their tracks as “a daft punky thrash”.

Melody Maker · 1 May 1993

“a daft punky thrash”

Bangalter and de Homem-Christo took two words from the review and named their new project after them. A put-down became raw material. The music they made gave the words a new meaning.

A description isn’t a verdict.

Bearing 2 of 8

Gathering

Trap Scatter

You become what you keep attending to.

A living thing can’t respond equally to everything around it. It selects. A plant turns towards light. An animal notices one movement in the grass and ignores a thousand others.

Life gathers itself around what matters. We do too. Care about something and you start seeing details that were there all along. Gather yourself around grievance and the world is endlessly generous with evidence. Learn a craft and the invisible starts turning up everywhere.

The woodworker sees grain. The musician hears timing. The gardener notices that one leaf.

The bearing

Gathering

Gathering is a harder discipline. You have to disappoint possibilities. Leave some messages unanswered. Let certain things happen without you. Stay with something after the novelty has stopped doing the work.

The trap

Scatter

Scatter looks productive. It arrives as forty tabs, seven priorities, half a conversation and the strange conviction that checking your phone while someone speaks still counts as listening.

You can spend a whole week touching things without really meeting any of them.

Forty tabs

Close them until one is left.

40 open

Gathering can go wrong too. An obsession holds a life together by shutting almost everything else out. A walk without a destination, or a conversation you hadn’t planned, can show you what all that concentration was missing.

Charles Darwin in old age, with a long white beard and a broad-brimmed hat — Charles Darwin by Elliott and Fry, 1881, public domain. The Sandwalk: photo by Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Sandwalk at Down House: a gravel path curving through woodland — Charles Darwin by Elliott and Fry, 1881, public domain. The Sandwalk: photo by Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0.

A heap of flints

Soon after moving to Down House in 1842, Charles Darwin made a sandy path around a small wood in the far corner of his grounds. He walked it most days for the rest of his life.

At one turn he kept a heap of flints. Each time he came round, he kicked one out onto the path. The flints kept count, so he didn’t have to.

No laps yet

The path went nowhere. It brought him back, lap after lap, to whatever he was turning over: barnacles, orchids, earthworms, the origin of species. Some of those questions stayed with him for decades.

Going round in circles is underrated.

Jocelyn Bell in 1967, in glasses, smiling — Jocelyn Bell, 1967. Photo: Roger W Haworth, CC BY-SA 2.0

A bit of scruff

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a research student at Cambridge, was checking a new radio telescope’s output by hand: about 120 metres of paper chart every four days. Among the markings she noticed what she called “scruff”, a signal that didn’t match interference or anything known.

A strip of chart paper with a long, regular trace; one stretch is different, and it has been circled in amber.

She kept going back to it. It turned out to be the first known pulsar, a collapsed star sending regular pulses across space. Before there was a discovery, there was something awkward on the chart.

What doesn’t fit deserves another look.

Bearing 3 of 8

Coherence

Trap Rigid control

Every living thing has to hang together somehow.

The question is how its differences fit. Your heart doesn’t get better by behaving like your liver.

The same goes for a life. You can care deeply about your work and still want an afternoon where nothing gets done. Coherence lets the parts of a life answer to one another, so no single concern has to silence the rest.

The bearing

Coherence

You can hear living coherence. Disagreement changes the conversation instead of ending it. People act without waiting for permission and stay alert to what their action means for others.

In an orchestra, a good conductor helps musicians hear one another.

The trap

Rigid control

Set the language. Approve every decision. Make disagreement expensive. Before long, the place looks wonderfully aligned.

Underneath, people stop exercising judgement. They learn to wait. The person at the centre becomes indispensable and starts mistaking dependence for coherence.

A test for Monday morning

If you’re responsible for other people, at work or at home, here’s a test.

Since you took charge, are more people acting on their own judgement, or fewer?

If fewer, the place may look aligned while it slowly loses the judgement it runs on.

A queue of six people waiting outside a single office door

The queue outside her door

A founder prided herself on being available. Every decision found its way to her desk, and she answered them all, quickly and well.

She tried an experiment. For a month, whenever someone brought her a decision, she asked what they would do and then let them do it.

The first fortnight was uncomfortable, and two calls went badly. By the third week the queue outside her door had shortened, and people had started talking to each other first. At the end of the month she said the company felt bigger, though nobody new had been hired.

Being needed is easily mistaken for being useful.

Names and identifying details have been changed.

Herbie Hancock at a keyboard on stage — Herbie Hancock: photo by Werner Nieke, CC BY 2.0. Miles Davis: photo by William P. Gottlieb, public domain.

Miles Davis with his trumpet — Herbie Hancock: photo by Werner Nieke, CC BY 2.0. Miles Davis: photo by William P. Gottlieb, public domain.

The wrong chord

During a concert in the 1960s, Herbie Hancock played a chord so wrong he thought he’d wrecked the performance. Miles Davis took a breath, then played a line that made the chord sound right.

The chord had already sounded. Nobody could take it back. What Davis played next changed what it meant. Hancock said later that Miles hadn’t heard it as a mistake. He heard it as something that had happened, and answered it.

What happens next can change what just happened.

Bearing 4 of 8

Energy

Trap Glorified depletion

A portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips

For about three years, I looked as though I was in the best shape of my life. But I felt terrible.

I’d done everything the people explaining how to get healthy told me to do. I looked disciplined, and the mirror said it was working. When I felt worse, I assumed I wasn’t trying hard enough. So I pushed harder. I got leaner, and took feeling worse as proof I was getting somewhere.

Eventually, the biologist Ray Peat’s work on energy and metabolism made me question the whole project. I’d become more interested in making my body meet a specification than in paying attention to the life I was living in it.

That’s an easy mistake to make well beyond the gym.

This is my own story. It isn’t a diagnosis, or evidence that any dietary approach works the same way for everyone.

The bearing

Energy

Nothing gets built for free. A wound needs energy to heal. Thinking burns fuel. So does staying patient when you’d rather say the first stupid thing that comes into your head.

Rest is part of the point. There should be something left for the pleasure of being here.

The trap

Glorified depletion

We admire people who keep going. We’re less curious about what keeping going is costing them, or whether they’re allowed to stop.

That’s glorified depletion: exhaustion worn as proof of commitment.

We spend enormous effort bracing: anticipating trouble, managing impressions, holding ourselves together through another hard week. Sometimes that’s necessary. But brace for long enough and there’s nothing left for anything else. More discipline isn’t always the answer. Sometimes it’s the conditions that need changing.

Richard Feynman at a lectern, adjusting a microphone — Richard Feynman. Public domain.

Just for the fun of it

At Cornell after the war, Richard Feynman found physics had gone stale. He decided to stop worrying whether his work mattered and play with it instead.

Soon after, someone in the cafeteria tossed a plate into the air. Feynman watched it wobble and spin, and worked out the equations for fun.

When Hans Bethe asked what the point was, Feynman said: “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” He later traced the work that won him a Nobel Prize back to that wobbling plate.

Some energy only comes back through play.

Bearing 5 of 8

Participation

Trap Spectating

A portrait photograph of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Some things can only be known from inside.

You can read every book ever written about painting. At some point you still have to put paint on paper and watch it do something you didn’t plan.

No psychology textbook contains your friend. No map contains walking through the place in the rain. Reality keeps some of itself back from the spectator.

From the outside you can analyse. Compare. Advise. Keep your clothes clean.

Take part and reality gets a vote. Some of your ideas turn out to be wrong. You misjudge the timing. The material resists.

The bearing

Participation

Take part and reality gets a vote. Somebody reacts in a way you didn’t expect. You’re changed by the contact, which is why it feels risky.

Either way, something has to be allowed to answer back.

The trap

Spectating

Spectating is so much easier. Books and other people’s accounts can take us further than our own experience ever could.

They go wrong when the explanation replaces the looking. Before long, knowing the account feels like knowing the thing.

Barbara McClintock at her microscope in 1947 — Barbara McClintock, 1947. Smithsonian Institution, public domain.

One crop a year

From 1941, Barbara McClintock grew maize at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. She followed each plant from seedling to harvest. “I know every plant in the field,” she told her biographer.

Maize only gives two crops a year, and she found even that too fast. To see everything there was to see, one crop was all she could handle. Watching that closely, she saw genes do something almost nobody thought possible: they moved.

When she presented the work in 1951, it met more puzzlement than understanding. In 1983, after moving genes had turned up in bacteria and beyond, she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

It took the spectators decades to catch up.

A small town square with trees, two benches and a game of boules, people at home in it — Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. Photo: GSAPPstudent, CC BY-SA 4.0

Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal at a lectern — Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. Photo: GSAPPstudent, CC BY-SA 4.0

Leave the square alone

In 1996, Bordeaux asked the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal to improve Place Léon Aucoc, a small square with trees, benches and a pétanque pitch. They spent time there, watching and talking to the people who used it.

The square, they concluded, already had what a redesign struggles to create. People were at home in it. So they proposed almost nothing.

Renew the gravel. Care for the trees. Clean it more often.

Paying attention had changed the brief.

Before changing a place, notice what already has a life there.

Bearing 6 of 8

Freedom

Trap Licence

A portrait photograph of Simone de Beauvoir

We picture freedom as an empty diary.

No boss. No rules. No commitments. Nobody telling you what to do. Sometimes that’s freedom. Sometimes it’s a Tuesday afternoon with no idea what to do with yourself.

Lifting a restriction can matter enormously. But permission alone doesn’t give you the means to act.

Put somebody who’s never played music in front of a piano. Eighty-eight keys, and not one of them opens anything. Almost infinite permission. Very little freedom.

Now sit a concert pianist at the same keys. Same constraints. A different universe.

Play a key or two. Then swap who’s sitting at it.

Freedom is capacity: the moves actually open to you. And capacity has to be built.

The bearing

Freedom

Practice turns the impossible into the available. A commitment buys the time and trust to reach what endless fresh starts never will.

Choosing closes doors. You give something up and a deeper range appears.

The trap

Licence

Licence asks what you’re allowed to do and stops there. Freedom goes on to ask whether you can stand behind what you’re doing it for.

When someone lacks the means to act, telling them they’re free is abandonment with better branding.

But we don’t build capacity alone. Beauvoir asks for more. The room you make for yourself can’t be your only concern. Other people need room to decide what their lives are for, especially when it inconveniences you.

Django Reinhardt playing guitar, a cigarette in his mouth — Django Reinhardt. Photo: William P. Gottlieb, public domain.

Two fingers

In 1928, the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was badly burned in a caravan fire. The two smallest fingers of his left hand, the hand that presses the strings, were left curled and barely usable. It wasn’t clear he would play again.

His brother Joseph brought him a guitar. Over the months that followed, Reinhardt rebuilt his technique around what he had left. He played his solos with two fingers, running his lines up and down the neck where they could manage.

By 1934 he was co-leading the Quintette du Hot Club de France with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli.

He built his freedom out of what the fire left.

Henri Matisse in 1933, in glasses and a dark suit — Henri Matisse, 1933. Photo: Carl Van Vechten, public domain.

A garden on the wall

In his last years, Henri Matisse was often too ill to go out. So he made a garden indoors. Assistants painted sheets of paper. Matisse cut leaves, birds and fronds from them, and the assistants pinned the shapes to his walls, moving them until he was satisfied.

The result, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, spreads across two walls. He described it as a garden he could walk in.

Freedom doesn’t have to mean doing it alone.

Bearing 7 of 8

The Not-Yet

Trap The forecast as fate

A forecast tells you what’s likely to happen if conditions hold. That’s useful, until you forget the conditions can change and that you might be one of the things changing them.

The German philosopher Ernst Bloch gave a new name to what hasn’t happened yet but could grow out of what’s happening now. He called it the Not-Yet.

An honest conversation may be possible in a friendship that couldn’t have sustained it a year ago. An interest you keep returning to may be ready to become a serious commitment. These are possibilities with a foothold.

An acorn has possibilities, but not every possibility.

Given suitable conditions, it can become…

Given suitable conditions, it can become an oak. But the tree isn’t packed inside it in miniature. Its shape comes from a life spent growing somewhere.

It will not become a fox.

There’s direction without a complete script. This is part of what I mean when I say life leans forward. The future is open, but not equally open in every direction.

The bearing

The Not-Yet

Hope looks at what those conditions allow, and which of them could change. Some possibilities need a skill you don’t have yet, or another person.

Plenty of what you can’t do alone comes within reach with help.

The trap

The forecast as fate

The probable quietly becomes the whole of the possible. That’s the forecast as fate.

None of this guarantees anything. Evidence and criticism still matter. They’re how you tell a real possibility from a wish.

We’re more complicated than acorns. We can question our purposes and change some of what shapes us. But we still start somewhere, with the abilities, people, and limits we’ve got. You don’t need the whole future worked out before you take part. What you do is part of what shapes it.

Tony Rinaudo in a field of young trees — Tony Rinaudo. Photo: Tony Rinaudo, CC BY-SA 4.0

The forest underground

In the early 1980s, the agriculturalist Tony Rinaudo was working in Niger, where tree planting kept failing. One day he looked properly at something he’d passed many times.

What seemed a small bush was a tree growing back from a stump. Under the bare land, the roots were still alive. Working with farmers, he spread a simple practice: choose the strongest shoots, prune them, protect them. It has since spread far beyond Niger.

The next beginning may have roots already.

Bearing 8 of 8

Aliveness

Trap Wellness theatre

A portrait photograph of Albert Schweitzer

This is where the other seven bearings have to earn their place. What difference do they make to the life being lived?

Aliveness is harder to display.

You recognise it in a conversation that becomes more honest than anyone expected, or an evening that runs long because nobody wants to leave. A room or a piece of music can have it too.

But all this would have gone badly wrong if aliveness became one more standard that tired or suffering people fail to meet. Nobody has to become more capable to deserve care.

Sitting with someone who is dying may open no grand future. It can still make the life being lived less lonely. That counts as much as starting something new. So does tending what’s already here.

The bearing

Aliveness

Schweitzer puts each of us among other lives. They have a claim on our attention even when they’re no use to us.

Can other people speak freely? Does something fragile receive the care it needs? Are you leaving room for lives whose purposes differ from yours?

The trap

Wellness theatre

We’ve got good at collecting the appearance of vitality. The retreat. The app. The photograph beside an expensive lake.

None of it is foolish in itself. It just makes it easy to avoid looking at the rest of the day. You can meditate every morning and make everyone around you miserable.

Your own life belongs among them too. Look after it, without treating everyone else as fuel for keeping yourself going.

Cicely Saunders, smiling, in a cardigan and pearls — Cicely Saunders. Photographer unknown, CC BY-SA 4.0

A window in your home

In 1947, Cicely Saunders was working as a hospital almoner in London when she met David Tasma. He was forty, a Polish Jew from Warsaw, and dying of cancer.

She recited psalms she knew by heart and offered to read to him. He told her he only wanted what was in her mind and in her heart. When he died in February 1948, he left her £500 and a sentence: “I’ll be a window in your home.”

She later said it took her nineteen years to build the home around the window. St Christopher’s Hospice opened in south London in 1967, with a window dedicated to him.

The last weeks of a life are still life.

Bruno Latour in glasses and a patterned scarf, in front of bookshelves — Bruno Latour. Photo: KOKUYO, CC BY-SA 4.0

Before you go

These bearings are easy enough to agree with on the page.

The test comes later, when you’re tired, or certain you’re right, or being rewarded for something that’s quietly making your life smaller. I don’t expect to stop needing reminders.

One of these ideas may stay with you. A question returns during a conversation. You notice yourself reaching for an old description of someone. Something you’d dismissed becomes worth another look.

That’s enough to begin with. You don’t have to remake your life before you change one thing in it.

March

Nothing on the plot looks like much yet.
Last year’s blackberries lean
over a skin of ice on the water butt.

Under an upturned bucket
the rhubarb’s coming, pink as a knuckle,
pushing at the dark it was given.

Somebody’s tipped a trailer of muck by the gate.
Everyone wants some. By Sunday it’ll be gone,
forked out between the plots
and turned in, rotting into next year.

I crouch and lift the bucket for a look,
then put it back.
Not yet.

A poem from my allotment.

For the curiousA map of syntropologyThe philosophy behind the bearings. It’s denser than what came before, and you can skip it without missing anything you need.

OntologyWhat’s reality like?

Syntropology begins with process and relation. What appears to be a finished thing is often an activity continuing through time, dependent on what surrounds it. Living coherence has to be sustained and renewed.

“Immanent teleology” names an idea used here: direction can arise through the organisation of a living process, in relation to its surroundings, without requiring an externally imposed script. This doesn’t guarantee a particular destination.

EpistemologyHow do we come to know?

Our understanding is partial and open to correction. Abstraction makes things intelligible, but can conceal what it leaves out. Participation supplies forms of understanding that description alone can’t provide.

Neither experience nor intuition is beyond question. We need other perspectives, evidence, and the willingness to revise an account that no longer fits.

AxiologyWhat’s worth valuing?

I value ways of living that sustain, deepen, or protect meaningful participation. Greater order, growth, or efficiency doesn’t automatically serve those ends.

This is a commitment about what matters. It can’t simply be read off a law of physics.

EthicsWhat does that ask of us?

Attend to what your actions make possible for other life, including what they damage or prevent. Your own needs matter, but they don’t settle everyone else’s.

There will be conflicts and unavoidable losses. A concern for life means examining them honestly. Good intentions don’t make the costs disappear.

PraxisHow is the philosophy lived?

Syntropising means participating in the formation and care of arrangements that support life. It includes beginning and building, but also maintaining, repairing, and sometimes bringing something to an end.

The consequences remain open to examination. An action doesn’t become syntropic simply because we call it that.

AestheticsWhat might help us recognise aliveness?

Beauty can be experienced as a richness of relation: something holds together without exhausting what there is to notice. A familiar place or work of art can continue to disclose more.

This experience deserves attention. It doesn’t, by itself, establish truth or goodness.

Social lifeHow do we live together?

How do shared arrangements affect the people participating in them? Do they develop judgement and enable cooperation? Can responsibilities be questioned? What happens to someone who needs support?

A group can look coherent without serving the lives inside it.

The metaphysical horizonWhat remains unsettled?

Syntropology treats becoming as open to possibilities that our present descriptions can’t exhaust. You may give this a naturalistic or spiritual interpretation.

It doesn’t require literal causation from the future or a predetermined cosmic destination. Life leans forward names an orientation towards possibility. It makes no promise of progress.

The Syntropy Squad

The thinkers I keep going back to.

Put them in one room and they’d probably argue all night, but each of them saw how life gathers itself and grows. If one catches you, start there.

The paintings are mine. The one-line summaries are my own readings. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. He’s here for his thinking on chatter and technique; that record isn’t excused.

Keep going

A Short Book of Syntropology

Eight bearings for finding your way towards more life.

Everything here comes from it, cut down. The book has the rest, with a note on every source, and you can read it over lunch.

Buy the book on Amazon

My author royalties go to the Great North Air Ambulance Service.

Thanks for reading this far. If one of these bearings stays with you, I’d like to hear which one, and where it turned up.

John

Notes and sources

The connections drawn between these works, and the applications made here, are my own. The full notes are in the book.

The idea

Paul Peter Urone and Roger Hinrichs, Physics (Houston: OpenStax, 2020), section 12.3, “Second Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy”.
Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), chapter VI, “Order, Disorder and Entropy”.
Living organisation is compatible with the second law of thermodynamics. My use of syntropy is philosophical; it doesn’t propose a competing physical law.

The question

Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (Paris: Edward W. Titus, 1932), p. 20. The quotation is often attributed to her diaries; it comes from this early book.

1 · Unfinishedness

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), chapter I, p. 7. The epigraph is an excerpt from a longer sentence about conscious existence.
Dave Jennings, review of Shimmies in Super 8, Melody Maker, 1 May 1993. Dorian Lynskey, “Daft Punk: the midas touch”, The Observer, 19 May 2013. Jennings’s phrase describes the Darlin’ track “Cindy So Loud”.

2 · Gathering

William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), volume I, chapter XI, “Attention”, p. 402.
Francis Darwin, “Reminiscences of My Father’s Everyday Life”, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), volume I, chapter III.
S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, “Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?”, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 302 (1977). She was Jocelyn Bell at the time of the discovery.

3 · Coherence

Heraclitus, as quoted in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W. D. Ross, book VIII, chapter 1, 1155b.
Herbie Hancock with Lisa Dickey, Possibilities (New York: Viking, 2014).
Names and identifying details in the founder story have been changed.

4 · Energy

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The Voice of the Devil”, plate 4. Blake’s line is a poetic provocation.
Ray Peat, Generative Energy (1994).
Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), “The Dignified Professor”.

5 · Participation

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), Preface.
Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983). Keller’s portrait of McClintock as isolated has been questioned, notably by Nathaniel Comfort in The Tangled Field (2001); the story here avoids the stronger claims about her neglect.
Lacaton & Vassal, project description, “Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux, 1996”.

6 · Freedom

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), part II, “Personal Freedom and Others”.
Michael Dregni, Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Accounts give different dates for the fire in late 1928, so only the year is used.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, collection entry for Henri Matisse, The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952).

7 · The Not-Yet

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), volume I, Preface.
Tony Rinaudo, The Forest Underground (2021).

8 · Aliveness

Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, translated by John Naish (London: A. & C. Black, 1923), “The Ethic of Reverence for Life”.
Cicely Saunders, oral history interview with John Liebeskind, 11 August 1993, John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection, UCLA. Cicely Saunders, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1981. “Dame Cicely Saunders”, obituary, BMJ, 2005.

Before you go

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004), p. 246.

For as long as we’re here, we have some part in what happens next.

Is this making more life, or less?

Life leans forward.

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