Maria Popova's Blog, page 50

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower: Rilke’s Timeless Spell for Living Through Difficult Times

“What is it like, such intensity of pain?”

There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear beco...

On Mothers

“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.”

One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.

It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact, and a life’s triumph t...

Maya Angelou on Writing and Our Responsibility to Our Creative Gifts

“I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.”

“Be a good steward of your gifts,” the poet Jane Kenyon urged in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life ever committed to words. Our gifts come unbidden — that is what makes them gifts — but with them also comes a certain responsibility, a duty to live up to and live into our creative potential as human beings. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James Baldwin admonishe...

The Neurophysiology of Enchantment: How Music Casts Its Spell on Us

“Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”

“Music,” the trailblazing composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on the peoples of the world, because they all understand and love it… And when they find themselves enjoying and loving the same music, they find themselves loving one another.” But there is something beyond humanistic ideology in this elemental truth — something woven into the very structure and sensorium of our ...

How Our Story Ends (and How to Begin Rewriting It): Richard Powers on Planetary Death and Life as Our Force of Resistance

Reawakening to the rapture and responsibility of “a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.”

In a universe governed by randomness and impartial laws, chance has been kind to us — a kindness so immense it feels like a benediction. Here we are, drifting through the austere blackness of pure spacetime on a planet just the right distance from its home star to have an atmosphere and water and warmth for life. And what life! A cornucopia of creatures moving through lushness...

Seneca on Creativity: Lessons from the Bees

How to ferment our natural gifts into nectar for the world.

A founding credo of The Marginalian is what I long ago termed combinatorial creativity — the idea that everything of beauty and substance we contribute to the world is composed of myriad influences and inspirations acquired in the course of being alive and awake to ideas, unconsciously composited into something new. Rilke understood this when he considered what it takes to create, and Einstein understood it when he placed “combinatory ...

The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning and Purpose of Hope

“Hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe.”

We hope, we despair, and then we hope again — that is how we stay afloat in the cosmos of uncertainty that is any given life. Just as the universe exists because, by some accident of chance we are yet to fathom, there is more matter than antimatter in it, we exist — and go on existing — because there is more hope than despair in us. “Hope,” the great Czech dissident p...

May Sarton on How to Live with Tenderness in a Harsh World

“We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys.”

This world is radiant with beauty. This world is also capable of bone-chilling brutality and the small, corrosive daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow. For a sensitive person to live with the duality, to keep the light aflame without turning away from the darkness that needs illuminat...

Love, Music, Solitude, and How to Be More Alive: The Best of The Marginalian 2022

From Emily Dickinson to Bruce Springsteen, by way of galaxies and gardening.

It is an annual tradition to look back on the year’s readings and sieve the most nourishing — a tradition all the more vital and vitalizing in stormy years, when these oases of light are all the more precious.

Here is the usual composite “best” of the year — a hybrid of the pieces I poured the most heart into writing and the pieces most widely read and shared by those whose hearts they touched.

* * * The Eternal Lyr...

Nick Cave on the Antidote to Our Existential Helplessness

Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life.

We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both. Forged of the dust of dying stars, we move through a universe of impartial laws with our dreams and desires, passionate pawns in the hands of grand-master chance, daily watching the world spin counter to our wishes, daily watching ourselves bend against our own will.

How, against the backdrop of this co...