Maria Popova's Blog, page 18

Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference Between Love, Sympathy, and Solidarity

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love.

Half a century after Whitman’s atomic theory of belonging and half a century before Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the meaning of solidarity in his visiona...

The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest Form of Faith

“We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.”

Looking back on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of dark matter, astronomer Vera Rubin reflected: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”

Far from a mere diversion of the senses, beauty may just be the dialogue between nature and human nature — our mos...

The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem

In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And wh...

Joy as a Force of Resistance and a Halo of Loss, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem

In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And wh...

Making Space: An Illustrated Ode to the Art of Welcoming the Unknown

It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the gap between knowledge and mystery that we discover wonder. Every act of making space is in some sense a creative act and an act of faith. And yet in its open-endedness and indeterminacy, in its courtship of uncertainty, it challenges our most basic instincts about how to govern our lives, unsettli...

Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston observed of other animals two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery reflected on her encounters with thirteen different animals to insist that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.”

An epoch before Beston and Montgomery — before ...

From the Labor Camp to the Pantheon of Literature: How Dostoyevsky Became a Writer

“I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities.”

Aristotle believed that everyone’s true calling lies at the crossing point of their natural talent and the world’s need. But this simple, seductive equivalence breaks down as soon as we account for the myriad factors that go into the cultivation of natural talent and the myriad doors of opportunity that may open or close between the gifted and the world. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutio...

Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way: A Tender Lunar Fable about the Stubborn Courage of Making the Impossible Possible

“But we will have to find a way to live, as people do.”

We are lucky accidents of chemistry and chance, children of choices made for us by the impartial forces that set the first atoms into motion and by the human partialities that have shaped this latest blink of cosmic time we call history. The astonishing thing is that not one human being who ever lived has chosen the body, brain, place, or time to be born into, and yet in the narrow band of freedom between these chance parameters, we must f...

How to Wait Better: The Psychology of Missing and Withstanding Absence

On “the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs.”

With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening human experiences, and one of the great arts of living. To wait for something is to value it, to want it, to yearn for it, but to face its absence, its attainment forestalled by time and circumstance. All true waiting — which is different from abstinence, delayed gratification, and other forms of...

How to Miss Loved Ones Better: The Psychology of Waiting and Withstanding Absence

On “the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs.”

With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening human experiences, and one of the great arts of living. To wait for something is to value it, to want it, to yearn for it, but to face its absence, its attainment forestalled by time and circumstance. All true waiting — which is different from abstinence, delayed gratification, and other forms of...