Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tells us back to ourselves, and like every story, it can be true or false. Love is the most powerful enchantment we know, the most transformative if true and the most dangerous if false.“When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it,” W.H. Auden observed in one of the most insightful things I have ever read, adding the haunting admonition: “All true enchantments fade in time… A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.”False enchantments are those we cast upon ourselves — by confusing love and longing, by mistaking the myths of our culture for our own truths, by replaying the patterns that keep breaking our hearts. True enchantments come unbidden, take us by surprise, defy wish and will. True love, then, is a kind of enlightened enchantment — haunted, yes, by the fundament of loss, but redeemed by how it sharpens and magnifies our contact with life, how it allows us, paradoxically, to touch the bare skin of reality and tremble with bewilderment that such a wonder is possible.Art from Reweaving the RainbowIn Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (public library), anthropologist and ecological philosopher Patrick Curry offers a field guide to the difficult discernment of the true from the false, treating love as both a special case of and a fulcrum for our arts, both love and art being a way of “adding to, while partaking of, the creative processes of life itself.”In a sentiment that conjures up that lovely line from The Velveteen Rabbit — “Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you.” — he writes:Enchantment is not something you do; it’s something that happens to you. Its opposite is thus will and all its relations… When and where you are trying to make something happen, or make someone (including yourself) do something — or when you are the object of those desires — enchantment is absent.It is absent because then you are in projection, in a transactional paradigm, exerting an effort in order to be repaid by a desired end. Curry writes:Enchantment is fundamentally relational. It is wonder at, or enchantment by, another… Apprehending the enchanting other, one is apprehended by them.[…]The other party in this process can be anyone or anything: a human being, another animal, a plant, a place, a sight, sound, smell, taste, texture, or even an idea. But we are a particular kind of being — not random, infinitely variable or, in that self-flattering delusion, universal – so enchantment tends to happen in certain domains: principally love, art, religion, food and drink, learning, sport, humour, and nature.Paradoxically, the engine of enchantment is not similarity but complementarity, which implies difference. It is the hand that touches another across the abyss between us. A generation after Mary Oliver contemplated how differences bring couples closer together, Curry observes:Enchanted relationship takes place as an encounter, typically across a gap of difference. The boundaries remain, but in being bridged they cease to matter… transcended in connection. When that happens, you are in enchantment’s realm: the more-than-human, which includes but also exceeds the human. However, friendship — less showy than erotic love — can run just as deep, and is often more enduring.With an eye to Wallace Stevens’s koan-like pronouncement that “in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of reality,” Curry reflects:William James once asked of a scenario where Jack is deeply in love with Jill, whom everyone else sees as perfectly ordinary: who sees her more as she truly is? He answered, surely it is Jack; he apprehends a truth about Jill which is inaccessible to the rest of us. That is why enchantment doesn’t have the qualities of a dream, or a spell, but rather of reality. Indeed, enchanted reality is more real than either ordinary reality or dreams, which are daylight reason’s inversion but not its opposite. In this sense, enchantment is our baseline natural condition while, as Stevens says, so-called realism “is a corruption of reality.”This dreamlike quality also means that enchantment is impervious to the workings of the will, untouchable by the commands and petitions of our ordinary waking consciousness:Because no one is in charge, enchantment is wild, unbiddable. That inconvenient truth means that although it can be invited, it cannot be created, commanded, or managed.Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)This aspect of enchantment may be the supreme reminder that we are children of chance, a felicitous accident of atoms. We may have the illusion of choice — an illusion Adrienne Rich so poignantly ventriloquized in her insistence that “no one’s fated or doomed to love anyone” — but it is only ever an illusion, one James Baldwin so poignantly annihilated when he observed that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.” Unable to bear that something as indifferent as chance may steer the course of our lives, we give it a valence and call it fate. But the feeling of fatedness is simply a measure of our hunger for meaning. Curry writes:In the sharpest possible contrast with the boredom, despair and ultimately nihilism of serious disenchantment… experiences of enchantment are intensely meaningful. On that account, they are also fateful… Even refusing the enchantment — difficult, but possible — is fateful, because you always do it too late; you have already been affected, so the refusal too will prove momentous… When one is enchanted, and the world therefore overflows with fateful meaning, we could say that one is living mythically.This is where Amy Lowell’s taxonomy of myths, facts, and poetic truth is useful — because in enchantment, while living mythically, one is also living more truthfully; in enchanted love — which Curry defines as “the unpossessive love of another” — one is loving more truly. In such love, “the movement starts with delight but exceeds it” — something it shares with music. The parallel is apt, for the etymology of the word itself — from the Latin, then Old French en chantment — means “to be in a song.” This may be why a musician’s relationship to the music offers the finest field guide to the unpossessive love at the heart of true enchantment. Curry quotes the virtuosic Irish fiddler Martin Hayes:To get to the essence of music, I more often spend time talking about it and hoping for it than achieving it… It’s when I finally accept that I’ve completely missed the point, and that I don’t really get it, that I have this moment when I get it. And of course I want to put my arms around it, I want to put it in a bottle, I want to keep it, I want to store it, I love it, and I can’t. And I have to let go of it again.Nick Cave — whose three-decade relationship with his wife Susie may be the truest love I know — echoes this in his breathtaking book-length love letter to her:Through the countless words I have written about Susie, in song and prose… Susie remains as much a mystery to me now as when I first saw her.All true enchantment may be just this — an ongoing encounter with the mystery of the other, which can never be possessed in words or ideas, only held in wonder.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. 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