YOU WANT A PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLE to give you some motivation to get out of the bay in which you’re an old ship, rusting. You want the clarity, the rigor, and the strength of philosophy to give you a reason to do what you have to do next. But ever since I read your letter I have been thinking about poetry — specifically a poem by Mark Doty called “Visitation.” In the poem, a man hears that a young humpback whale is stuck in a nearby harbor. The man is depressed, grieving something or someone. What he is grieving is unnamed in the poem. The world is “dark upon dark, any sense / of spirit an embattled flame / sparked against wind-driven rain / till pain snuffed it out.” He assumes the whale is experiencing the same pain; it is stuck in the bay, helpless, its ability to navigate its way out confused by sonar or who knows what human technologies and environmental atrocities. [...]

. . . even I
couldn’t help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.

And the last lines, which I have been wanting to write to you since I read your letter:

What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?