Maria Popova's Blog, page 20

Your Voice Is a Garden: Margaret Watts Hughes’s Wondrous Victorian Sound Visualizations

“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with si...

Your Voice Is a Garden: Margaret Watts Hughes’s Wondrous Victorian Visualizations of Sound

“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with si...

How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than no...

The Proper Object of Love: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than no...

Trauma, Growth, and How to Be Twice as Alive: Tove Jansson on the Worm and the Art of Self-Renewal

“Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”

There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warn...

Grace Paley on the Countercultural Courage of Imagining Other Lives

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art and morality. There could be no such realization without imagination, which is our only instrument for fathoming what it is like to be somebody else — that most difficult triumph of unselfing. It is only through the imagination that we are capable of empathy — in fact, the modern sense of the word empathy came into use just over a ce...

What Makes Life Alive: Vasily Grossman on Consciousness, Freedom, and Kindness

“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones:

What is life?

Where does it begin and end?

What makes it alive?

But in the epochs since, having discovered muons and mitochondria, having discerned the elementary building blocks of matter and the synaptic infrastructure of the mind, we — “atoms with consciousness,” in physicist Richard Feynman’s poetic words — seem to be haunted all the...

What Makes Life Alive: Vassily Grossman on Consciousness, Freedom, and Kindness

“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones:

What is life?

Where does it begin and end?

What makes it alive?

But in the epochs since, having discovered muons and mitochondria, having discerned the elementary building blocks of matter and the synaptic infrastructure of the mind, we — “atoms with consciousness,” in physicist Richard Feynman’s poetic words — seem to be haunted all the...

An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days

I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously underappreciated, is coming to love someone who loves it. As we enter each other’s worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of being, magnify our sense of wonder, and wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply.

When the wonder of birds entered my world, I came awake to the notation of starlings on the street wires, to the house wre...

Beyond Either/Or: Kierkegaard on the Passion for Possibility and the Key to Resetting Relationships

“Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.”

Some of the most difficult moments in life are moments of having to choose between two paths leading in opposite directions — to tell or not to tell, to leap or not to leap, to leave of not to leave — each rife with losses (even if they are necessary losses) the pain of which you will feel acutely and with gains which yo...