“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.”A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its discomposing unlikeness to anything you have known before. Down, down you go into the depths of the unconscious, dark and fertile with the terror and longing that make for suffering, the surrender that makes for the end of suffering, not in resignation but in faith. It is then that the still, small voice of the soul begins to sing; it is then that the trapdoor becomes a portal into a life larger, truer, and more possible — a kind of rebirth.Nobel laureate Louise Glück (April 22, 1943–October 13, 2023) captures the essence of such experiences, the way they sober us to being mortal and to being alive, with an image of piercing originality in the title poem of her 1992 collection The Wild Iris (public library).THE WILD IRISby Louise GlückAt the end of my sufferingthere was a door.Hear me out: that which you call deathI remember.Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.Then nothing. The weak sunflickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to surviveas consciousnessburied in the dark earth.Then it was over: that which you fear, beinga soul and unableto speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earthbending a little. And what I took to bebirds darting in low shrubs.You who do not rememberpassage from the other worldI tell you I could speak again: whateverreturns from oblivion returnsto find a voice:from the center of my life camea great fountain, deep blueshadows on azure sea water.Couple with Ursula K. Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain, then revisit Glück’s love poem to life at the horizon of death.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.