There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness. It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive. I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).KISSby Ellen BassWhen Lynne saw the lizard floatingin her mother-in-law’s swimming pool,she jumped in. And when it wasn’tbreathing, its body limp as a babydrunk on milk, she laid it on her palmand pressed one fingertip to its silky breastwith just about the force you needto test the ripeness of a peach, only quicker,a brisk little push with a bit of spring in it.Then she knelt, dripping wet in her Doc Martensand camo T-shirt with the neck ripped out,and bent her face to the lizard’s face,her big plush lips to the small stiff jawthat she’d pried apart with her opposable thumb,and she blew a tiny puff into the lizard’s lungs.The sun glared against the turquoise water.What did it matter if she saved one lizard?One lizard more or less in the world?But she bestowed the kiss of life,again and again, untilthe lizard’s wrinkled lids peeled back,its muscles roused its own first breathand she set it on the hot cementwhere it rested a momentbefore darting off.Couple with Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk on storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poems “Any Common Desolation” and “How to Apologize.”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.