Maria Popova's Blog, page 32

A Tender Illustrated Celebration of the Many Languages of Love

That one mind can reach out from its lonely cave of bone and touch another, express its joys and sorrows to another — this is the great miracle of being alive together. The object of human communication is not the exchange of information but the exchange of understanding. If we are lucky enough, if we are attentive enough, communication then becomes a system for the transfer of tenderness. That we have invented so many forms of it — the language of words, the language of music, the language of f...

About War

“Outsiders who are not themselves immersed in pain should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only part of the terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders to help maintain a space for peace.”

It says something about our species that we have eradicated smallpox and invented vaccines and antibiotics for yellow fever and the Black Death, but war continues to plague us; that in the past century — this supposed pinnacle of enlightened modernity — war has...

The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and rapturous, unm...

Turning from Peril to Possibility: Ecological Superhero Christiana Figueres on the Spirituality of Regeneration

Few things have maimed the spirit of Western civilization more than the myth of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden — a deeply damaging story about human nature, damning us and our relationship to nature. Unthinkingly, we have perpetuated this story in our present narrative about our ecological predicament: The realities of climate change are measurable and menacing, but each time our mainstream narrative elevates peril over possibility, we are doing our own damning. To invert the narrative is...

The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important Quality of a Visionary

Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world and to invent languages for channeling that wonder — the wonder of the inner world, the language for which is art, and the wonder of the outer world, the language of which is science. Binding the two and translating betwe...

The Night, the Light, and the Soul: Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Enchanting Moonscapes

“That best fact, the Moon,” Margaret Fuller called it. “No one ever gets tired of the moon,” Walt Whitman wrote down the Atlantic coast from her, exulting:

Goddess that she is by dower of her eternal beauty, [the moon] commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands.

Centerpiece of our most ancient cosmogonies, our most groundbreaking revisions of the universe, and our most haunting poems, the Moon h...

May Sarton on Generosity

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel this truth deeply, daily — for nearly two decades of offering these writings freely, I have lived by the generosity of strangers.

It is especially gratifying to perpetuate the spirit of generosity if you have arrived at the ability to do so by way of struggle and privation. No one takes more joy in giving than those who come ...

The Lost Drop: An Illustrated Celebration of the Wonder of the Water Cycle and the Interconnected Ongoingness of Life

I remember when I first learned about the water cycle, about how it makes of our planet a living world and binds the fate of every molecule to that of every other. I remember feeling in my child-bones the profound interconnectedness of life as I realized I was breathing the breath of Aristotle and William Blake and Marie Curie, those exact molecules still lingering in the water vapor comprising the atmosphere that makes the whole world breathe — a living testament to Lynn Margulis’s observation ...

bell hooks on Love

“We can never go back… We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago… All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.”

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent half a century before Baldwin admonished that “loving anybody and being loved by ...

From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation

We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.

A generation a...