Maria Popova's Blog, page 42

Love and Fear: A Stunning 17th-Century Poem About How to Live with the Transcendent Terror of Love

“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.”

Love is both the tenderest mirror and the cruelest. How much and how well we show up for love reflects what we believe ourselves worthy of. What we desire reflects what we believe we deserve. What we long for reflects both our limitations and our restless yearning to transcend them. In love’s mirror, we are revealed to ourselves, stripped of the ego’s flattering self-image, our vulnerabilities and inadequacies laid bare — a revelation laced with th...

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but… the prime moral privilege.”

The measure of growth is not how much we have changed, but how harmoniously we have integrated our changes with all the selves we have been — those vessels of personhood stacked within the current self like Russian nesting dolls, not to be outgrown but to be tenderly incorporated. T...

The Paradox of Free Will

The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin observed in recognizing how limited our freedom is and how illusory our choices, for he knew that “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

And yet we move through the world with an air of agency, without which life would feel unlivable — a gauntlet of...

Stunning Century-Old Illustrations of Tibetan Fairy Tales from the Artist Who Created Bambi

Soulful art from stories that speak “to the childhood of all times and all races.”

We spend our lives yearning for three things above all else: love, meaning, and magic — all else is a compound of these building blocks. Of the them, the third is both the most elusive and the most readily available in the daily landscape of life, if only we know how to look.

In the final year of his twenties, two decades before he created the beloved Bambi character for Disney, the artist and naturalist Maurice ...

How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love

“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.”

Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of...

The Last Wonder: D.H. Lawrence on Death and the Best Lifelong Preparation for It

“Know thyself, and that thou art mortal. But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal.”

“To study philosophy is to learn to die,” Montaigne wrote in his most famous essay as he reckoned with how to live. Indeed, we spend our lives learning to die while trying to bear our mortality, using our religions and our materialism to look away from the great unknown, to fill with myths and negations what is undeniably the supreme mystery on the other edge of existence. We may know what happens to our p...

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Brought to Life in a Spanish Flashmob of 100 Musicians

A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy and transcendence.

Imagine what life would be like if lived, in May Sarton’s lovely phrase, with “joy instead of will.” That is what Beethoven imagined, and invited humanity to imagine, two centuries ago in the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony, known as “Ode to Joy” — an epochal hymn of the possible, half a lifetime in the making.

In the spring of 2012, the Spanish city of Sabadell set out to celebrate the 130th anniversary o...

The Heart of Matter: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on Bridging the Scientific and the Sacred

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”

“Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” Ronald Johnson wrote in a stunning prose poem. How it did — how we became, in the poetic words of the physicist Richard Feynman, “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity” — may be the supreme mystery of existence. And yet here we a...

The Double Flame: Octavio Paz on Love

“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

We love to forget ourselves, but also to remember what we are: mortal creatures lustful of meaning, radiant with life, eternally alone and eternally longing for home — home in ourselves and home in each other. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote in his exquisite recko...

Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?'”

“The mind is its own place,” wrote Milton, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” But in an age when machines can simulate, with the sheer force of computation, mind-things like poems, is the mind still a sovereign place? What heavenly and hellish creations can it alone make that no algorithm can reproduce or mimic?

I read in Milton’s words th...