Maria Popova's Blog, page 43

Loving the Tree of Life: Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality

“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.”

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” wrote Walt Whitman a century and a half before Richard Dawkins considered the luckiness of death as a radiant token of the improbable odds of having lived at all. Death — the harrowing fact of our mortality — is the central animating force of life, the one great terror for which we have devised the coping mechanisms of love and art. Everything we...

Practical Mysticism: Evelyn Underhill’s Stunning Century-Old Manifesto for Secular Transcendence and Seeing the Heart of Reality

“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

The great paradox of consciousness is that it constitutes both our entire experience of reality and our blindfold to reality as it really is. Forever trapped within it, we mistake our concepts of things for the things themselves, our theories for th...

Henry James on Losing a Mother

“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.”

“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman,” the visionary psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote as he considered the mother as a pillar of society. Having a mother is a lifelong complexity. Losing a mother, no matter the nature or duration of the relatio...

Heroism and the Human Search for Meaning: Ernest Becker on the Hidden Root of Our Existential Longing

“To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.”

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” And yet one of the supreme challenges of humans life is, to borrow Rilke’s lovely phrase, to “go to the limits of your longing” — to fully surrender to your suffering, to fully step into your hope and own your desire for...

Let Your Heart Be Broken

“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.”

We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling ...

How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Bertrand Russell counseled in his timeless advice on how to grow old. There is a lovely symmetry between this orientation to the winter of life and the na...

May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”

The matter that we know — the stuff we can see and touch — comprises a mere 5% of the universe. All the rest is dark matter. We can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t discern what it is made of or how it came to be. And yet dark matter is what holds galaxies together, what keeps the regular matter in place so that we may live.

I believe every creative practice is like that — only a small fraction o...

The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death

“To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her.”

Know as we might what actually happens when we die, we spend our lives trembling at the fact of our finitude, trying to wrest from it some greater poetic truth — something that slakes the soul’s thirst for meaning. Even the spiritual materialists among us are haunted by incomprehension at the cessation of consciousness — how can this entire carnival of wonder just, one d...

Magnolias and the Meaning of Life: Science, Poetry, Existentialism

On cruelty, kindness, and the song of life.

Pastel-colored apparitions of tenderness, magnolias are titans of resilience. They have been consecrating Earth with their beauty since the time dinosaurs roamed it, long before bees evolved to give our planet its colors, pioneering the exquisitely orchestrated pollination strategies by which perfect flowers survive.

Today, for a precious week in spring, they bloom to remind us that life is livable, then die to remind us that it must be lived.

Magno...

The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction

On inviting the state of being that “allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.”

I suspect our ability to ask the unanswerable questions that Hannah Arendt knew are the heartbeat of civilization is intimately related to our capacity for dwelling in a particular state of being beyond the realm of our compulsive doing. Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman c...