Maria Popova's Blog, page 51

To a Wreath of Snow: Patti Smith Reads Emily Brontë

In praise of the “voiceless, soulless messenger” that comforts and sustains.

Everything we wish for, everything we plan for, is but a house of cards to be blown into oblivion by the slightest gust of chance. Somehow, we must live with this knowledge, stacking our days one over the other along the edge of life’s inherent uncertainty. In those moments when this elemental precariousness is exposed — by a global pandemic, by a personal loss, by a brush with some narrowly evaded inevitability — we ...

Music and the Price of What We Cherish: Margaret Atwood on the Bonds and Obligations of Creative Gifts

“Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.”

A decade ago, several years after I started writing The Marginalian (under the outgrown name Brain Pickings, in my twenties, while working four jobs), a musician friend gave me a book she said captured the animating spirit of my labor of love: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (public library) by the poet Lewis Hyde, published a year before I was born.

Like a generation of creative people, I devoured it wit...

Herbie Hancock’s Antidote to Burnout

“We usually define ourselves by what we do… There’s a big trip with all of that.”

We are makers of our own myths, but the more we live into them, the more we risk becoming their captives. All creativity rests upon unbelieving our own myths — seeing the world and our place in it afresh over and over, so that we may go on making what has not been made before, remaking ourselves in the process. Burnout is simply what a creative person experiences when they have begun believing their own myth too m...

Symbiosis and the Unself: Evolutionary Biologist Lynn Margulis on How Interbeing Shapes Life on Earth

“Living beings defy neat definition… We abide in a symbiotic world.”

It bears remembering that we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The puzzlement is so immense precisely because the boundary between us and not-us is profoundly permeable — we become ourselves through communion and conviviality with what is not us. This is as true existentially as it is evolutionarily, for symbiosis — not competition — is the mightiest propulsive force of evolution....

Ram Dass on Love

“To possess the key is to lose it.”

When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.

This is a difficult notion for the Western mind to grasp — too easy to mistake for the psychopathology of codependence, too quick to slip into the tyrannical Romantic ideal of merging.

At its heart is somet...

In Praise of Walking: A Poetic Manifesto for Our Simplest Instrument of Discovery, Transformation, and Transcendence

“That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.”

When you walk, you move more than the body — you move the mind, the spirit, the entire system of being. As you traverse spatial distance, you gain vital spiritual distance with which to see afresh the problems that haunt your day, your work, your life. Ideas collide and connect in ways they never would have on the static plane. Pains are left behind in the forward motion. D...

The Labyrinth of Consciousness: Walter Benjamin on Dreams and the Underworld of the Mind

Searching for the byway to the unconscious.

“The logic of dreams is superior to the one we exercise while awake,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote as she considered creativity and the nocturnal imagination. We know that in dreams consciousness hints at the nature of the universe, but we catch only flitting glimpses of what is revealed. And yet that unreckoned darkness is worth dwelling in, for in it we become differently — and perhaps more fully — ourselves.

That is what Wal...

Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Blind Spots of Sympathy

“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.”

It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy (which assumes knowledge of another’s experience), some of the most magical things in life come abloom. Those are the places we grow, and grow into — the openings that are our portals ...

The Unphotographable: Henry Williamson on the Transcendence of the Winter Sky After a Blizzard

Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and tran...

How to Savor Winter: A Century-Old Poetic Recipe for Bliss in the Bleakest Season

In praise of “the poetry of silence and darkness,” from which life emerges “fresher, fairer, sweeter for its long winter rest.”

Bleak and barren, winter is the season when nature is silently preparing to burst forth in spring — the grand incubator of life. Rilke saw a human equivalence when he celebrated winter as the time for tending to your inner garden. His contemporary Dallas Lore Sharp (December 13, 1870–November 29, 1929) — a former clergyman, whom the great John Burroughs lauded as Ameri...