“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” It happens so rarely because we so often choose the wrong person to be our savior, so often try to save someone not wanting to be saved. But the saviors, the true saviors, do live among us — they are what John Berger called “the avenging heroes,” what Leonard Cohen called “the balancing monsters of love.” Tender and exuberant at the same time, The Lighthouse Keeper (public library) by Mexican writer Eugenio Fernández Vázquez and artist Mariana Villanueva Segovia tells the story of one such savior who looks over the stormy ocean from his lonely tower, shining his lonely light into the shoreless sea of night, always there to help those who have lost their way, those not waving but drowning, always embracing “everyone he finds floating lost and alone.”Page after vibrant page, we see the lighthouse keeper throw lifelines for the body and the soul. (I think of Patti Smith, who in her moving recent memoir recounts once trying to move into a defunct lighthouse; I think of how she became a lighthouse keeper anyway — it is the artists who keep us from losing our way in the dark, who save us over and over from drowning.)Pulsating beneath that immensity of kindness is the uneasy question of what saves the savior: How does one who gives so much to so many replenish that vital energy in order to go on giving? “Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world,” wrote the Indian poet and philosopher Tagore (whom Segovia’s lighthouse keeper greatly resembles in likeness). So it is that a relationship is revealed to be what sustains the savior’s spirit: The Moon “casts her spell from above” to nourish him, but who also needs his tenderness in turn, with that life-magnifying reciprocity that marks every deep and durable relationship; the Moon, who vanishes but always returns, ever-changing and eternal, like every great love. If you too could use a lighthouse in these dark times, here is one.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.