Maria Popova's Blog, page 106

When Did Time Really Begin? The Little Loophole in the Big Bang

A pleasurable warping of the figuring faculty to contemplate what was there before the before.

“Time says ‘Let there be,'” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote shortly before her death in her splendid “Hymn to Time,” saluting the invisible dimension that pervades and encompasses the whole of life: “the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance.”

But what does time say of the time before there was anything to l...

Poet and Philosopher David Whyte’s Gorgeous Letter to Children About Reading, Amazement, and the Exhilaration of Discovering the Undiscovered

A celebration of the delicious enchantment of the very first time.

I remember the feeling of first seeing the Moon through the small handheld telescope my father had smuggled from East Germany — how ancient yet proximate it felt, how alive, as though I could glide my six-year-old finger over its rugged radiance — the feeling of electric astonishment at something so surprising yet so inevitable, something that seemed to have always been waiting there just for me to discover it. I remember next h...

Nothing Is Fixed: James Baldwin on Keeping the Light Alive Amid the Entropic Darkness of Being, Set to Music

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

“Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic, unexampled 1937 essay Undersea as she incubated the ideas that wou...

Wonder and the Sacred Search for Truth: Ann Druyan on Why the Scientific Method Is Like Love

An invitation “to feel more intensely the romance of science and the wonder of being alive right now, at these particular coordinates in spacetime, less alone, more at home, here in the cosmos.”

“We, this people, on a small and lonely planet / Traveling through casual space / Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns / To a destination where all signs tell us / It is possible and imperative that we learn / A brave and startling truth…” So begins Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to ...

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.

To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy, Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. Everything else is childs play; we must first of all answer the question.

Sometimes, life...

One Fine Day: David Byrne Performs His Hymn of Optimism and Countercultural Anthem of Resistance and Resilience with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus

I complete my tasks, one by one. I remove my masks, when I am done..

In the spring of 2019, when David Byrne (b. May 14, 1952) took the stage at the third annual Universe in Verse to read a science-inspired love poem to time and chance titled Achieving Perspective, I introduced him as one of the last standing idealists in our world a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a...

Ursa Major: Elizabeth Gilbert Reads a Poignant Forgotten Poem About the Big Dipper and Our Cosmic Humanity

A two-verse love letter to the night sky fixture which our eyes must lean out into time to catch, and die in seeing.

For as long as we have been raising enchanted eyes to the night sky that is, for as long as we have been the conscious, curious, wonder-stricken animals recognizable as human we have marveled at seven bright stars outlining the third largest constellation in the Northern hemisphere, and humanitys most beloved one. Ursa Major Latin for the great she-bear has enraptured the...

The Great Barrier Reef: Stunning 19th-Century Illustrations from the World’s First Encyclopedia of One of Earth’s Most Vibrant and Delicate Ecosystems

A symphonic hymn for our planets lushest underwater wonderland.

While the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel was salving his fathomless personal tragedy with the transcendent beauty of jellyfish, having enraptured Darwin with his drawings, his English colleague William Saville-Kent (July 10, 1845October 11, 1908) was transcending his own darkness on the other side of the globe with the vibrant, irrepressible aliveness of the Great Barrier Reef and its astonishing creatures.

Anemones from...

Love Beyond Label: Lisel Mueller’s Tender Poem About the Lush, Unclassifiable Bond Between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

A lovely antidote to the rude, irrelevant question of our age, the hollow assumption that the event of two bodies meshing together establishes the degree of love.

Among the handful of things I have learned about life with the calm, quiet clarity of elemental knowing is one that bears repeating: The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a...

Kierkegaard on the Spiritual and Sensual Power of Music, the Essence of Genius, and the Key to a Timeless Work of Art

If Mozart ever became wholly comprehensible to me, he would for the first time become wholly incomprehensible to me.

Without music life would be a mistake, Nietzsche bellowed his unmistakable baritone of buoyant nihilism into the vast chorus of great thinkers extolling the singular power of music.

A year before his birth, Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813November 11, 1855) another thinker of soaring lucidity, unafraid to plumb the darkest depths for the elemental truths took up the subject...