Maria Popova's Blog, page 29

What Makes a Compassionate World: Sophie de Grouchy’s Visionary 18th-Century Appeal to Parents and Teachers

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective. Months shy of 100, Helen had been born into a world war, survived the Holocaust, and fled from Poland to America without speaking a word of English before becoming a professor of English literature for half a century.

I a...

The Fairy Tale Tree

Creativity is at bottom the combinatorial work of memory and imagination. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — every sight we have ever seen, every book read, every landscape walked, every love loved — become seeds for ideas we later combine and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we call our own. The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, a...

Sentimentality and Being Mortal: Poet Mark Doty on the Passionate Fragility of Our Attachments

How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyond why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the reason you love one and not another. The feeling trembling beneath the fact — the brutal knowledge that everything we love is irreplaceable yet will be lost: to dissolution and...

Blue Glass

Not long after writing about the bowerbird’s enchantment in blue, I walked out of my house and gasped at the sight of what looked like two extraordinary jewels sparkling on a bed of yellow leaves, right there on the sidewalk — chunks of cobalt glass, much larger than what a broken bottle would yield, luminous in the low afternoon light.

I held one up to the sun and gasped deeper.

For millennia — since long before cobalt became the blood diamond of the digital age, pillaged from the Earth by ch...

The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Recreated in Hauntingly Beautiful Flower Pigment Prints via a Victorian Imaging Process

On September 20, 1845, the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom the word scientist was coined — sent a letter to the polymathic English astronomer John Herschel, who six years earlier had coined the word photography for the radical invention of capturing light and shadow with chemistry. Somerville recounted her landmark experiments with an alternative image-making process, for which Herschel had laid the groundwork several years earlier.

Anthotype from This Ear...

The Two Souls Within: Hermann Hesse on the Dual Life of the Creative Spirit

“Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.”

Coursing through every civilization are the myths that shape what its people come to believe about reality and possibility. Some of them are healing and some damaging. Some are easy to recognize for...

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer. (This, of course, is why we have poetry.) It is the birthplace of the imagination and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist frie...

Love and the Sacred

“I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening.”

Every once in a while, the curtain of consciousness we mistake for reality parts and we glimpse what glows beyond it.

Some call it mystery.

Some call it God.

Some find it in the molecular structure of mycelium under a microscope.

Some in the color of the light after a summer storm.

Some in the gaze of an osprey.

Some in Bach.

Nowhere is our contact with the sacred more direct, or more disori...

A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

“Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.”

There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads is yet unwritten. Such moments come most readily at the beginning of something new.

To begin anything — a new practice, a new project, a new love — is to cast upon yourself a spell against stagnation. Beginnings are notation for the symphony of the possible in us. The...

Of Wonder, the Courage of Uncertainty, and How to Hear Your Soul: The Best of The Marginalian 2023

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.

In accordance with the annual tradition, here is the best of The Marginalian in hindsight — a Venn diagram of what I most loved writing and what readers most loved reading, spanning from the outermost reaches of the universe wh...