Maria Popova's Blog, page 120

Ancestor Worship with Mother Nature: How Indigenous Death Rituals Illuminate the Web of Life

“For almost all oral cultures… the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born.”

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?” the poet Marie Howe asked in her sublime ode to our belonging with the universe.

My dear friend Emily Levine, who awakened my love of poetry long ago, entered the final stretch of her life with an uncommonly beau...

How to Find Your Artistic Voice: Ben Folds on Empathy, Creativity, and the Courage to Know Yourself

“What an artist has to offer is obvious to just about anyone else but the artist him- or herself.”

“The best that can be said of my life so far is that it has been industrious, and the best that can be said of me is that I have not pretended to what I was not,” the astronomer Maria Mitchell wrote in her diary at the apogee of her improbable and pathbreaking career as she was reflecting on the art of finding one’s purpose. A century later, in his wonderful advice to young artists, E.E. Cummin...

How Nature Works, in Stunning Psychedelic Illustrations of Scientific Processes and Phenomena from a 19th-Century French Physics Textbook

A scrumptious quest “to satisfy that invincible tendency of our minds, which urges us on to understand the reason of things.”

A century before the trailblazing photographer Berenice Abbott created her arresting visualizations of scientific processes and phenomena, the French mathematician, science writer, and liberal journalist Amédée Guillemin (July 5, 1826–January 2, 1893) enlisted gifted artists in illustrating his wildly popular science books. In consonance with the pioneering 19th-centu...

Viktor Frankl on Humor as a Lifeline to Sanity and Survival

“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

“When one is considering the universe,” Ella Frances Sanders observed in her lovely illustrated celebration of wonder, “it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.” Somehow, on our tiny beautiful planet adrift in a vast unfeeling universe, we have managed to create myriad causes...

20-Year-Old Lord Byron’s Moving Elegy for His Beloved Dog

“To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; / I never knew but one — and here he lies.”

“I am because my little dog knows me,” Gertrude Stein wrote. Who hasn’t found in the eyes of a beloved dog the most generous mirror, an infinity of love, and that soulful look that says, “If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled”? And who hasn’t known the sorrow — the biting, savaging sorrow — of seeing that look fade to vacant black?

Nearly two centuries before John Updike composed his hear...

Underland: An Enchanting Journey into the Hidden Universe Beneath Our Feet

“Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”

“To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water,” the great marine biologist and environmental hero Rachel Carson wrote in her 1937 masterpiece Undersea — a lyrical journey to what Walt Whitman had called “the world below...

Against the Slippery Slope of Injustice: Amanda Palmer Reads Wendell Berry’s Stunningly Prescient Poem “Questionnaire”

The road to moral hell is paved with gradual self-permission.

“Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, “most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the...

Against the Slippery Slope of Evil: Amanda Palmer Reads Wendell Berry’s Stunningly Prescient Poem “Questionnaire”

The road to moral hell is paved with gradual self-permission.

“Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, “most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” Under such conditions, counting ourselves among the few who refuse to comply has less to do with whether we believe ourselves to be good than it does with the...

Eating the Sun: A Lovely Illustrated Celebration of Wonder, the Science of How the Universe Works, and the Existential Mystery of Being Human

“When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.”

“I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” poet Diane Ackerman wrote in her Cosmic Pastoral, which so enchanted Carl Sagan — her doctoral advisor — that he sent a copy of the book to Timothy Le...

How to Punctuate with Style: Lewis Thomas’s Charming Meditation on the Subtleties of Language

“If you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.”

Theodor Adorno celebrated punctuation as the “friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language.” Mary Oliver jested that each writer has a lifetime quota of them, to be used judiciously. Indeed, the wielding of these tiny meaning-making symbols is a supreme test of a writer’s sensitivity to language as an instrument of sentiment and a labor...