Maria Popova's Blog, page 113

Between Mechanics and Magic: Ross Gay on the Body as an Instrument of Thought and the Delights of Writing by Hand

In praise of the manual-mental “loop-de-looping we call language.”

The late, great neurologist and poetic science writer Oliver Sacks spent his entire life writing only by hand — an act he considered “an indispensable form of talking to [oneself].” In his wonderful reflection on the psychology of writing and what his poet-friend Thom Gunn taught him about creativity, Sacks observed how “ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.”

This singular interplay between the manual and the...

Consolation for Sorrow from King Arthur’s Court: Merlyn’s Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down

“Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

In his wonderful contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, Yo-Yo Ma tells children about how books helped him survive his own childhood, listing King Arthur among his three great heroes; as a young boy born in France to Chinese parents, trying to find his mooring as an immigrant...

What You Need to Be Warm: Neil Gaiman Reads His Humanistic Poem for Refugees, Composed from a Thousand Definitions of Warmth from Around the World

“Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place, to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.”

“There is a huge abyss within every mind. When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves,” the late, great Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue wrote as he channeled ancient Celtic wisdom on belonging. But given this mooring is already difficult enough a triumph in...

The Spirit of the Woods: Poet and Painter Rebecca Hey’s Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations for the World’s First Encyclopedia of Trees

From the weeping willow to the oak, a watercolor serenade to the science and poetics of our ancient silent companions.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees,” William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter a quarter millennium before scientists began to see the molecular poetry of what trees feel and how they communicate.

Perched partway in time between Blake’s time and ours, and partway in...

Kahlil Gibran on Befriending Time

“The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness, and knows… that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.”

I have been thinking about time lately, as I watch the seasons turn and wait for a seemingly endless season of the heart to set; I have been thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s lovely “Hymn to Time” and its kaleidoscopic view of time as stardust scattered in “the radiance of each bright...

The Art of Centering: Potter and Poet M.C. Richards on What She Learned at the Wheel About Non-Dualism, Creative Wholeness, and the Poetry of Personhood

“Centering is a verb… an ongoing process… a way of balancing, a spiritual resource in times of conflict, an imagination… an alchemical vessel, a retort, which bears an integration of purposes, an integration of levels of consciousness.”

Looking back on the first thirteen years of Brain Pickings, I termed my thirteen most important life-learnings “fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.” But how exactly do we locate our center and master its osmotic balance between fluidity and solidity?...

Figures of Thought: Krista Tippett Reads Howard Nemerov’s Mathematical-Existential Poem About the Interconnectedness of the Universe

A splendid song of praise for the elemental truth at the heart of all art, science, and nature.

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote in one of his most beautiful poems in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as humanity was coming awake to the glorious interconnectedness of nature — to the awareness, in the immortal words of the great naturalist John Muir, that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything...

The Interconnectedness of the Universe in Verse: Krista Tippett Reads “Figures of Thought” by Howard Nemerov

A splendid song of praise for the elemental truth at the heart of all art, science, and nature.

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote in one of his most beautiful poems in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as humanity was coming awake to the glorious interconnectedness of nature — to the awareness, in the immortal words of the great naturalist John Muir, that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything...

The Best of Brain Pickings 2019

Love, poetry, friendship, solitude, and lots of trees.

In this annual review, following the annual selections of the year’s loveliest children’s books and overall favorite books, “best” is as usual a composite measure of what I most enjoyed thinking and writing about over the course of the year, and what you most ardently read and shared.

It has been curious to observe, in this most difficult year of my life, the patterns that emerge — strong women’s voices, the healing power of nature, of...

How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe

How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

This essay is adapted from Figuring.

This is how I picture it:

A spindly middle-aged mathematician with a soaring mind, a sunken heart, and bad skin is being thrown about the back of a carriage in the bone-hollowing cold of a German January. Since his youth, he has been inscribing into family books and friendship albums his personal motto, borrowed from a verse by the ancient poet Perseus:...