Maria Popova's Blog, page 33

Octavia Butler on Religion and the Spirituality of Symbiosis

“On many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.”

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” quantum pioneer Niels Bohr wrote of the subjective reality in which we live out our human lives, as he distinguished it from the objective reality of the universe. But for all that religions have done to moor ...

The Warped Side of Our Universe: A Painted Epic Poem about the Dazzling Science of Spacetime

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost: “Space may produce new Worlds,” he wrote, and grow rife with them.

In the centuries since Milton, who lived through the golden dawn of telescopic astronomy and traveled to Italy to look through Galileo’s telescope, our understanding of space has changed profoundly — it is no longer the ethereal blank of religious cosmogonies but a fabric of energy and matter l...

Blue Is the Color of Desire: The Science, Poetry, and Wonder of the Bowerbird

For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue.

In a small clearing on the forest floor, the male weaves twigs and branches into an elaborate bower, which he decorates exclusively with blue objects — the blue tail-feathers of parakeets, blue flowers and berries, bones and shells so bleached by sun and sea as to appear bluish-white, and, in the past century, various souveni...

Alain de Botton on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind

“A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going.”

“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Milton wrote centuries before modern science came to illuminate how the mind renders reality — the mind, this sole lens we have on what the world is and what we are. The quality of our mind, then — the clarity of it, the composure of it — shapes the quality of our lives. Viktor Frankl knew this wh...

Starlings and the Magic of Murmurations: A Stunning Watercolor Celebration of One of Earth’s Living Wonders

Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, a million particles were swarming in unison without colliding. Except they were not particles — they were birds. Millions of them. A murmuration of starlings — swarm intelligence at its most majestic, emergence incarnate, a li...

17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)

Seven years into this labor of love, which had by then become my life and livelihood, I decided to set down some of the most important things I learned about living in the course of ...

How to Be a Living Poem: Lucille Clifton on the Balance of Intellect and Intuition in Creative Work and the Healing Power of Connection

“I didn’t graduate from college, which isn’t necessary to be a poet. It is only necessary to be interested in humans and to be in touch with yourself as a human.”

Every single thing we make, even the smallest, we make with the whole of who we are and what we have lived — with every impression and every memory, every love and every loss, consciously and unconsciously constellated into the creative act. A song encodes its maker’s entire history of feeling. An equation cannot describe why an apple...

Yellow Butterfly: A Moving Wordless Story About War, Hope, and Keeping the Light Alive

In his little-known correspondence with Freud about war and human nature, Einstein observed that every great moral and spiritual leader in the history of our civilization has shared “the great goal of the internal and external liberation of man* from the evils of war” as Freud insisted that the more we understand human psychology, the more we can “deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war.” In her timeless treatise on the building blocks of peace, the pioneering crystallographer...

To Be a Person: Jane Hirshfield’s Playful and Poignant Poem About Bearing Our Human Condition

“To be a person may be possible then, after all.”

A human being is a living constellation of contradictions, mostly opaque to itself. “Inward secret creatures,” Iris Murdoch called us in reckoning with the blind spots of our self-knowledge. “Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves,” philosopher Amélie Rorty wrote as she examined what makes a person — a self-conception shaped by our astonishing evolutionary inheritance, ...

The Rigor of Angels: Human Nature and the Nature of Reality

“What we are striving for lies inside us; we find ourselves in the world and the world in ourselves.”

“This is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information,” the visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote a generation before philosopher Iain McGilchrist asserted that the way we pay attention — the supreme participancy of consciousness in the universe — “renders the world what it is.”

It may be that consciousness evolved not so much to let the universe compreh...