Maria Popova's Blog, page 14

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of entropy or another, culminating with life itself. Suppose we agree that, as Rilke so passionately insisted, “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test a...

Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why They Flock in a V Formation

“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”

I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my airborne cage of metal and glass, I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly — really fly, the way birds do; if we were born not just seeing “the world all s...

There’s a Ghost in the Garden: A Subtle and Soulful Illustrated Fable about Memory and Mystery

One of the things no one tells us as we grow up is that we will be living in a world rife with ghosts — all of our disappointed hopes and our outgrown dreams, all the abandoned novels and unproven theorems, all the people we used to love, all the people we used to be. A ghost is a palpable presence of an absence charged with feeling, the contour of something half-known, half-remembered, half-forgotten — a halfway house between what we understand and what we cannot, between what we have let go an...

The Avenging Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create

“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering — thei...

The Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create

“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering — thei...

Kafka on Friendship and the Art of Reconnection

Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic notion of anam cara. We bring this knowledge, this mutual understanding, to every interaction with a true friend — that is what makes friendship satisfying, steadying, safe; it is what makes it, in Kahlil Gibran’s immortal words, a “field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.” And yet...

The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful Fable about the Difficult Question of How to Be Yourself

“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a generation after her. To care about the etymologies of words is to care about the origins of the world’s story about itself. To broaden and deepen the meanings of words, to celebrate — as David Whyte did — “their beautiful hidden and beckoning unc...

The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence

What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what we are actually feeling.

There are two ways of keeping that tension from breaking the heart — a surrender to the truth, or a falsification of feeling. When we don’t feel strong enough or safe enough to face our emotiona...

Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance

“Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.”

The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all t...

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on Redeeming Humanity

This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together.

This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the spirit — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul ab...