Maria Popova's Blog, page 10

Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park Ranger Who Inspired Generations

The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occ...

19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living

We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life could have forked at every littlest choice we ever made. But while chance deals the cards we can’t control — the time and place we are born into, the parents and patterns of culture we grow up with, the genes and pigments and neurotransmitters we are woven of — how we choose to play the hand makes...

Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on the Art of Presence and the “Moments of Being” That Make You Who You Are

In praise of “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of my favorite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his classic on anxiety that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of etern...

Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on Reaping the “Moments of Being” That Make You Who You Are

In praise of “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of my favorite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his classic on anxiety that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of etern...

How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love

“The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love.”

“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow insisted in his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight ...

The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”

The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, bru...

An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them

Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation — a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another.

And yet, in steps too unc...

Reworldling Humanity: E.B. White’s Magnificent 1943 Response to a Politician Who Wanted to Make the Pacific Ocean an American Lake

On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an...

Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World

“What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.”

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capabl...

The Lily vs. the Eagle: D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Balancing Intimacy and Independence in Love

If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you see. It is, in this sense, not a phenomenon that happens unto you but a creative act. The poet Robert Graves knew this: “Love is not kindly nor yet grim, but does to you as you to him,” he wrote as a young man a lifetime before the old man came to define love as “a recognition of truth, a recognition...