Maria Popova's Blog, page 34

A Stone Is a Story: An Illustrated Love Letter to Deep Time and Earth’s Memory

We are denizens of an enormous pebble drifting through the cosmic ocean of pure spacetime — a planet made a world largely by its rockiness. Rock gave us mountains and beaches, bridges and kitchen countertops, gave us the first Promethean fire that sparked civilization. A rock is a reliquary of the story of life on Earth — the open face of a canyon, its lined strata exposing evolutionary epochs; the fossil undusted on the forest trail, embodying the haunting truth that “we are all potential fossi...

Roxane Gay on Loving vs. Being in Love and the Mark of a Soul Mate

“It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.”

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” Baldwin cautioned a generation later as he himself reckoned with the work of love.

Because the stakes a...

Milan Kundera on Animal Rights and What True Human Goodness Really Means

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test… consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals.”

“Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals,” Dostoyevsky admonished in his largehearted case for animal rights.

A quarter century before him, on the other side of the world, Whitman instructed in his radiant advice on life to “love the earth and sun and the animal...

The Importance of Trusting Yourself: Nick Cave on the Relationship Between Creativity and Faith

“There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things.”

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand,” the poetic physicist Alan Lightman wrote in his magnificent recollection of his transcendent encounter with a young osprey. A generation before him, in differentiating it from belief, Alan Watts defined faith as “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn ...

Octavio Paz on Freedom

“Without freedom, what we call a person does not exist.”

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin admonished as he considered how we imprison ourselves, for he knew just how limited our freedom is and how illusory our choices. And yet we must move through the world with a feeling of freedom, necessary for our sense of agency, for making our existential helplessness bearable, for making our lives of consequence. More than that, freedom — the sense of it, no matt...

After Love: Maxine Kumin’s Stunning Poem About Eros as a Portal to Unselfing

It is one of the hardest things in life — discerning where we end and the rest of the world begins, negotiating the permeable boundary between self and other, all the while longing for its dissolution, longing to be set free from the prison of ourselves. That is why we cherish nature and art, those supreme instruments of unselfing, in Iris Murdoch’s lovely phrase; that is why happiness, as Willa Cather so perfectly defined it, is so often the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete a...

Ursula K. Le Guin on Change, Menopause as Rebirth, and the Civilizational Value of Elders

“Into the space ship, Granny.”

“God is Change,” Octavia Butler wrote, wresting the poetic truth from the scientific fact that entropy is the ruling law of the universe.

We know that everything changes, that everything passes, transitions from one state to another, from one stage to another — and yet, in our irrational longing for permanence, we try and try to hedge against change, denounce it as deterioration, dread it as a prelude to death.

Nowhere is this dread more acute than in the change...

I Touched the Sun: A Tender Illustrated Fable About How to Find and Bear Your Inner Light

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays.

In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran wrote in the same era: “Nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.”

That search comes ablaze with uncommon tenderness in I Touched ...

I Touched the Sun: A Tender Illustrated Parable About How to Find and Bear Your Inner Light

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays.

In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran wrote in the same era: “Nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.”

That search comes ablaze with uncommon tenderness in I Touched ...

Center of the Universe: Non-Speaking Autistic Poet Hannah Emerson’s Extraordinary Poem About How to Be Reborn Each Day

“Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there.”

In their strange cosmogony predating Copernicus by two millennia, the ancient Greek scientific sect of the Pythagoreans placed at the center of the universe a ball of fire. It was not hell but the heart of creation. Hell, Milton told us centuries and civilizations later, is something else, somewhere else: “The mind is its own place,” he wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n...