To begin with, this ability is a fundamental part of how we think—so fundamental that some people believe it is how we think. The philosopher David Hume, for one, held that all ideas emerge from conjunction, from linking one known component of the world to another. “All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience,” he wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. “When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.” One way to think new thoughts, then, is to make, quite literally, new connections. The nonsense poet Gelett Burgess had never seen a purple cow, but he had seen purple and he had seen a cow, and by combining them he thought up something wholly original. So, too, with other, more important conjunctions: not just women and children but women and suffrage; not just human and animal but human and rights. In the math of the mind, in other words, the most powerful operation might be simple addition. “Connect the dots,” we tell people when we want them to understand something; comprehension emerges when we can see the links between things.
But something else emerges under those conditions, too. If conjunction lies close to the origins of thought, as Hume believed, it also lies close to the origins of morality. The more closely we believe ourselves to be connected to other people, the more likely we are to hold ourselves at least partly responsible for their well-being. As our current turbulent era has made exceptionally clear, the actions we take or do not take—in the face of pandemics, prejudice, authoritarianism, resource use, climate change—affect even strangers, even those who live far away from us, sometimes even those who are not yet living at all. It is easy to ignore all those other people, to regard ourselves as linked only to our own family and community. Yet our moral power, like our intellectual power, comes from asserting connections that have previously been invisible or overlooked.
That is a solemn reason to nurture our sense of connection; and yet the more densely we are tied to others, the happier we are. Many of us have occasionally felt the world to be as Bishop describes it in her poem: disconnected, fragmentary, devoid of logic and meaning. And many of us have occasionally felt ourselves to be disconnected as well—felt that, whatever the state of the world, we stand apart from its workings, unable to muster interest in doing anything or, alternatively, convinced that nothing we do will matter. These are not pleasant feelings. To be disconnected is to be lonely, indifferent, estranged—in one way or another, cut off from the rest of humanity. As a psychological state, it is at best distressing and at worst dangerous, both for the people experiencing it and for those around them. One famous description of hell holds that it is a place where “nothing connects with nothing,” suggesting that the absence of attachment to the rest of the world is both an abdication of goodness and a form of suffering. By contrast, the more deeply connected we feel, the more fulfilling we typically find our lives.
These emotional and intellectual powers of conjunction are themselves conjoined in the domain of romance, since every experience of falling in love is both a bid for happiness and an act of imagining a new connection into being. Schoolkids in the throes of their first crush write “SH + JB” or “JM + MF” over and over in their notebooks (that plus sign, incidentally, having most likely evolved as a simplified form of the ampersand). It doesn’t matter if JB is uninterested and MF barely knows who JM is. In linking themselves to someone else, those infatuated kids both reflect an emotional reality and try to will into being a bond that did not previously exist.
Wonderfully, this sometimes works. Like purple cows and golden mountains, people can become linked by connections that emerge out of nowhere and gradually turn robust and enduring. That is how, over time, in their own hearts and to their friends and family, Margot and Isaac became Margot and Isaac, and Bill and Sandy became Bill and Sandy. And so, too, with C. and me: eventually, we could no longer imagine ourselves without that and between us.
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Here is what happened, unbeknownst to the two of us, just before our wedding began. While we were standing outside on the porch of a bed-and-breakfast, gazing now at each other and now at the lovely confluence of land and water and sky, happier than ever before in our lives and better dressed; while our friends and relatives were starting to take their seats in the rows of chairs set up a short distance down the point from where we stood; while the last of the little kids were corralled by their parents up toward those chairs and away from the temptations of hammock and Frisbee and water and dock; while our officiant was taking a final moment to look over her notes; while my niece was touching the soft curve of the petals in the basket of flowers she carried—it was while all this was happening that every cellphone in every shoulder bag and suit pocket of our assembled guests simultaneously blared out, in the most urgent tones imaginable, a tornado warning.
The sound wafted away from C. and me over the water. We had no idea that anything out of the ordinary was happening, apart from the obviously out-of-the-ordinary thing that was happening for us that day. Even if we had heard the warning, it would have seemed, as it did to our guests, impossible to believe. The sky that afternoon had the high, mild look of early summer, untroubled by clouds, three shades lighter than the cobalt water of the bay. The sun was shining forth like an irrepressible good mood, filling the cup of every tulip and daffodil, gilding the wheat-like tips of the marsh grass, making shifting little lakes of shade beneath the trees. The lightest of breezes ruffled the air; my wedding vows, set down upon a table, would not have blown away. The bay was lapping placidly against the rocks just beyond the little bower where soon we would be married. It was, in short, the kind of day that everyone dreams of for their wedding.
By then, C. and I had been dreaming of it from the moment on that Ash Wednesday evening when she had said yes. For much of the intervening time, though, we had only been dreaming of it: talking, not idly but in the abstract, about what kind of wedding we wanted to have. Virtually the only thing I was clear on from the beginning was that I didn’t want to elope, even though several friends of ours had done so, for understandable and in many ways admirable reasons. The fact that it was by far the most affordable option made it both economically and ethically appealing; the subsequent conversations C. and I had about weddings and resources, financial and otherwise, could fill the Talmud. This is a common kind of “and”: you want a lovely wedding in a beautiful place filled with all the people you love and delicious things to eat and drink, and you also want to spend your money wisely and responsibly and in ways that reflect your values and won’t make you go broke, and it would be nice if none of these goals were ever in conflict but, inevitably, they often are. Needless to say, this problem—of wanting multiple incompatible things, of feeling torn between our desires and our convictions—neither begins nor ends with nuptials.
But I had two overriding feelings that made a quick trip to the courthouse impossible, one brought about by grief, the other by love. On the day I proposed, my father’s memorial service was six months in the past, but I still sometimes felt like I was slumped in a chair in its exhausting aftermath, not yet changed out of my brand-new black suit. Life, I understood acutely, would give us plenty of reasons to come together in sorrow. And so it seemed to me incumbent on us to create reasons to come together in joy, as a gift to ourselves, our families, our friends, and, in some strange way, to the world itself, to its precarious balance of shining and terrible.