Maria Popova's Blog, page 39

The Power of Being a Heretic: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Critical Thinking, Emotional Imagination, and How to Rehumanize the World

“If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination… begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling.”

When the Inquisition persecuted Galileo for advancing the rude truth that Earth is not the center of the universe, the charge against him was heresy — the same charge on which Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for her crusade for political reform. We have had many words for heretics over...

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.”

It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the s...

How People Change: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Essence of Freedom and the Two Elements of Self-Transcendence

“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.”

“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change,” Octavia Butler wrote in her poetic insistence that “God is Change.” And yet, dragged by the momentum of our lives, we ossify into identities and habit-loops, harder and harder to reconfigure, more and more haunted by the paradox of personal transformation. If we are not careful enough, not courageous enough, we may c...

Look Up: The Illustrated Story of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Who Laid the Groundwork for Measuring the Universe

How a brilliant woman rose against the tide of her time to fathom the mysteries of space.

Long before they could vote, the women known as the Harvard Computers shaped our understanding of the universe with their prolific and precise astronomical calculations. Among them was Henrietta Swan Leavitt (July 4, 1868–December 12, 1921), who singlehandedly measured and catalogued more than 2,000 variable stars — stars that pulsate like lighthouse beacons. Along the way, she discerned a correlation betw...

Fox and Bear: A Tender Modern Fable About Reversing the Anthropocene, Illustrated in Cut-Cardboard Dioramas

An antidote to the civilizational compulsions that rob human nature of nature.

When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” And yet, both as a species and as individuals in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic culture, we are living under the tyranny of more — a civilizational cult we call progress. We have forgotten who we would be, and what our world would look like, if instead we lived under the benediction of enoug...

Reason and Emotion: Scottish Philosopher John Macmurray on the Key to Wholeness and the Fundaments of a Fulfilling Life

“The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it.”

We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. And yet the more we learn about how the mind constructs the world, the more we see that our ex...

The Work of Happiness: May Sarton’s Stunning Poem About Being at Home in Yourself

“What is happiness but growth in peace.”

In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing. And yet happiness is as much a matter of how we...

A Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music

“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.”

“A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is the most indescribable of the arts, and that may be what makes it the most powerful — the creative force best capable of giving voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of con...

Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being

An invitation to “a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world” and an exultation at “earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves.”

Joy is not a thing of the will, not subject to control and conquest. It comes when we least expect it, like a murmuration of starlings across the evening sky. It stays for as long as we are able to stay openhearted to the tender transience of life. Anaïs Nin knew this when she contemplated its elusive nature, and Beethoven knew it wh...

An Antidote to the Anxiety About Imperfection: Parenting Advice from Mister Rogers

“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.”

Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough — so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else’s innermost desires and slaking them, seems like a superhuman feat. And yet the entire history of our species rests upon it — the scores of generations of parents who, despite the near-impossibility of...