Maria Popova's Blog, page 109

Virginia Woolf on Finding Beauty in the Uncertainty of Time, Space, and Being

Calibration and consolation for those moments when it seems impossible that we should ever again recompose the worlds broken fragments into a harmonious whole.

How should we like it were stars to burn with a passion for us we could not return? asked W.H. Auden in one of the greatest poems ever written a subtle, playful, poignant meditation on what it takes to go on living to go on making poems and symphonies and equations, to go on loving when faced with something so much vaster than we...

Stillness as a Form of Action: Tocqueville on Cataclysm as an Antidote to Cultural Complacency and a Catalyst for Growth

There are periods during which human society seems to rest This pause is, indeed, only apparent, for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for [individuals]; they are all advancing every day towards a goal with which they are unacquainted.

Even when nothing is happening, something is happening. This is a difficult fact for the human animal to fathom especially for us modern sapiens, who so ardently worship at the altar of productivity and so readily mistake busyness for...

This Is Chance: The Story of the 1964 Alaska Earthquake and the Remarkable Woman Who Magnetized People into Falling Together as Their World Fell Apart

What is safety, anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens.

We might spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins, but we save them by experiencing ourselves our selves, each individual self as the still point of the turning world, to borrow T.S. Eliots lovely phrase from one of the greatest poems ever written. And yet that point is pinned to a figment our...

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Walt Whitman’s Stunning Serenade to Our Interlaced Lives Across Space and Time

It avails not, time nor place What is it then between us? It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, the dark threw its patches down upon me also.

How few artists are not merely the sensemaking vessel for the tumult of their times, not even the deck railing of assurance onto which the passengers steady themselves, but the horizon that remains for other ships long after this one has reached safe harbor, or has sunk the horizon whose steadfast line orients generation after generation,...

The Otherworldly Beauty of Jellyfish: How Ernst Haeckel Turned Personal Tragedy into Transcendent Art in the World’s First Encyclopedia of Medusae

A story of transmuting the grief of one life into a celebration of the grandeur of Life.

I hope you are able to work hard on science & thus banish, as far as may be possible, painful remembrances, Charles Darwin wrote in the spring of 1864 to a young and obscure German correspondent who had just sent him two folios of his stunningly illustrated studies of tiny single-celled marine organisms a masterwork that enchanted Darwin as one of the most majestic things he had ever seen.

But Ernst...

Terror, Tenderness, and the Art of Buoyancy in Despair: How Ernst Haeckel’s Personal Tragedy Begot His Stunning 19th-Century Drawings of Jellyfish

A story of transmuting the grief of one life into a celebration of the grandeur of Life.

I hope you are able to work hard on science & thus banish, as far as may be possible, painful remembrances, Charles Darwin wrote in the spring of 1864 to a young and obscure German correspondent who had just sent him two folios of his stunningly illustrated studies of tiny single-celled marine organisms a masterwork that enchanted Darwin as one of the most majestic things he had ever seen.

But Ernst...

An Antidote to Helplessness and Disorientation: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Our Human Fragility as the Key to Our Survival and Our Sanity

Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society.

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically...

Rebecca Solnit on Growing Up, Growing Whole, and How We Compose Ourselves

Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up, Maya Angelou wrote in her stirring letter to the daughter she never had. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias. In that same cultural...

Figuring Forward in an Uncertain Universe

Consolations from the cosmic scheme.

We make things and seed them into the world, never fully knowing often never knowing at all whom they will reach and how they will blossom in other hearts, how their meaning will unfold in contexts we never imagined. (W.S. Merwin captured this poignantly in the final lines of his gorgeous poem Berryman.)

Today I offer something a little apart from the usual, or sidelong rather, amid these unusual times: A couple of days ago, I received a moving note...

Against Aloneness in the Web of Life: Ernst Haeckel, Charles Darwin, and the Art of Turning Personal Tragedy into a Portal to Transcendence

An antidote to isolation by way of tiny marine creatures and a broken Romantic heart.

In the waning winter of 1864, Charles Darwin opened a package that stopped his breath. It is one of the most magnificent works which I have ever seen, he exulted in his response to the sender a young, still obscure German marine biologist by the name of Ernst Haeckel (February 16, 1834August 9, 1919), who would go on to coin the word ecology a century before the great marine biologist Rachel Carson made...