Maria Popova's Blog, page 46

The Dalai Lama’s Ethical and Ecological Philosophy for the Next Generation, Illustrated

“We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.”

“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity,” Rachel Carson told a class of young people in what became her bittersweet farewell to life, after catalyzing the modern environmental movement; she urged them: “You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to pro...

Radical Compassion and the Seeds of Change: The Dalai Lama’s Illustrated Ecological Philosophy for the Next Generation

“We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.”

“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity,” Rachel Carson told a class of young people in what became her bittersweet farewell to life, after catalyzing the modern environmental movement. She told them: “You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prov...

How to Grow Re-enchanted with the World: A Salve for the Sense of Existential Meaninglessness and Burnout

A shimmering reminder that “the magic is of our own conjuring.”

There are seasons of being when a cloak of meaninglessness seems to slip over you, over everything, muffling the song of life. It is not depression exactly, though the two conditions make eager bedfellows. Rather, it is a great hollowing that empties you of that vital force necessary for moving through the world wonder-smitten by reality, that glint of gladness at the mundane miracle of existence. A disenchantment we may call by ma...

Trust, Betrayal, and the Nexus of Mathematics and Morality: The Prisoner’s Dilemma Animated

Illuminating the pitfalls of the mind in felt and gingerbread.

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” Albert Camus wrote as he considered what it really means to be in solidarity with justice — an elegantly phrased reminder that the decisions we make today are the only fulcrum by which we move the outcomes of tomorrow. And yet the greatest pitfall of human consciousness might be our habitual forgetting of this fundamental fact.

In 1950, two mathematicians working...

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Consciousness and Our Search for Meaning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

An inquiry into the eternal enchantment of why the world exists.

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her exquisite reckoning with the life of the mind, would be to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

I have returned to this sentiment again and again in facing the haun...

Thoreau on Living Through Loss

“Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident.”

There is cosmic consolation in knowing what actually happens when we die — that supreme affirmation of having lived at all. And yet, however much we might understand that every single person is a transient chance-constellation of atoms, to lose a beloved constellation is the most devastating experience in life. It feels incomprehensible, cosmically unjust. It feels unsurvivable.

In the final years of his short and loss-riddled li...

How to Survive Hopelessness

“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.”

Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy. After a Japanese attack on a steamship during WWII killed his wife and young son, he left the navy and moved to Hong Kong, where he eventually met and married a nurse.

Together, they began a new life as dairy farmers in the English countr...

Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”

We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.

In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathi...

Dostoyevsky on Animal Rights and the Deepest Meaning of Human Love

“Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.”

“Love the earth and sun and the animals,” Walt Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life — advice anchored, like his poetry, in that all-enveloping totality of goodwill that makes life worth living, advice at the heart of which is the act of unselfing; poetry largely inspired by the prose of Emerson, who had written of the “secret sympathy which connects men to all the animals, and to all the inanimat...

The Balancing Monsters of Love: Leonard Cohen on What Makes a Saint

On loving the world enough to surrender to the laws of gravity and chance.

In the pre-scientific world, in the blind old world with its old language, we had a word for those people most awake to the sacred wonder of reality, most capable of awakening the native kindness of human beings — the kindness that flows naturally between us when we are stripped of our biases and liberated from our small, constricting frames of reference. That word was “saint.”

Saints still walk our world, though now we ...