Maria Popova's Blog, page 31

Wonder Beyond Why: The Majesty and Mystery of the Birds-of-Paradise

“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective.

This is the great astonishment: that we come from a lineage of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, that however precisely we may trace the causality of the forces and phenomena leading to the improbable f...

Poetic Ecology and the Biology of Wonder

“The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.”

“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her landmark treatise on the intelligence of emotions, “they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Two decades later, this elemental truth about the nature of living things has migra...

In the Dark: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Find the Light Behind the Fear

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark chamber is not raw reality but our hopes and fears magnified — a rendering not of the world as it is but as we are: frightened, confused, hopeful creatures trying to make sense of the mystery that enfolds us, the mystery ...

The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the Limits of Logic

“Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective, because through it a higher order of being is trying to express itself.”

“From Boole, with his Laws of Thought in the 1850s, to the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence at the present day,” Oliver Sacks wrote as he reckoned with consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning thirty years before chatGPT, “there has been a persistent notion that one may ha...

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.”

We are each born with a wilderness of possibility within us. Who we become depends on how we tend to our inner garden — what qualities of character and spirit we cultivate to come abloom, what follies we weed out, how much courage we grow to turn away from the root-rot of cynicism and toward the sunshine of life in all its forms: wonder, kindness, openhearted vulnerability....

How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Paradox of Doing the Right Thing

“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.”

“An honorable human relationship… in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,'” Adrienne Rich wrote, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

And yet if the two pillars of friendship and loving relation are truth and tenderness, as Emerson believed, something terrible and irreconcilable happ...

Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in considering the ideal environment for creative breakthrough.

All creative people, however public or performative their work may be, yearn for that contemplative space where the mind quiets and the spirit quickens. The ongoing challenge of the creative life is how to balance the outward sharing of one’s g...

The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality

“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.”

“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his pioneering work on transcendent experiences, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these othe...

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before her in his beautiful letter to a bereaved father.

We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity...

The Majesty and Mystery of Night Migration, in a Stunning Poem Turned to Music

“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his love letter to the hours of darkness, composed while flying alone over the Sahara Desert.

No aliveness animates the nocturne with more grandeur than the migration of birds. Every spring and fall, in the starlit corridor between the trees and the clouds, flocks of millions soar over dark deserts and oceans, cities and continents — feathered pilgrims of purpose and resilience, governed by se...