Maria Popova's Blog, page 15

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: Doris Lessing on the Antidote to Self-Righteousness and Our Best Hope for 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...

Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life

“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgentl...

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems t...

The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life

“Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child’s love — in The Velveteen Rabbit. Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise; this is a fundamental question: In a reality of matter, what makes life alive? A generation later, the Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman answered with a deeply original proposition: that life is best defined as freedom, that freedom is the boundary between inanimate matte...

The Science of Tears and the Art of Crying: An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals...

Emerson on the Singular Enchantment of Indian Summer (and a Better Term for These Luminous Liminal Days Today)

“There are days… wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony.”

For all the singular magic of autumn, there is also a singular enchantment to those unbidden days in it when summer seems to make a brief and bright return — as if to assure us that time is not linear but planar, that life will always recompense loss, that in the liminal we find the immanent and in the ephemeral the eternal.

No one has captured that enchantment more vivi...

The Strength of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy

“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet.”

“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her exquisite statement of belief, having lived through two World Wars and stood with the anarchists of the Spanish...

A Republic of the Sensitive: E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy

“I believe in… an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet.”

“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her exquisite statement of belief, having lived through two World Wars and stood with the anarchists of the Spanish...

Beautiful Bacteria: Mesmerizing Photomicroscopy of Earth’s Oldest Life-forms

For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see; thinking life impossible below 300 fathoms, because that was as far as we could reach — only to discover, as we wield our minds to develop prosthetic extensions of our senses, scales of complexity infinitely wider and vaster than we had imagined, full of wonders we could not conceive with our self-re...

18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian

Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle ...