Maria Popova's Blog, page 54

Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’”

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin observed as he offered his lifeline for the hour of despair. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also a...

How the Eel Almost Became America’s Thanksgiving Food

“At night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat & sweet.”

We habitually underestimate just how much chance and choice converge to make us who we are, as individuals and as cultures.

In the midsummer of 1620, the Mayflower set sail from England for America with 102 desperate optimists aboard seeking refuge from religious persecution in the New World, along with about thirty crew. By the time it dropped anchor at Cape Cod ...

The Poetic Science of the Aurora Borealis

“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.”

On the evening of February 19, 1852, a scientist at the New Haven station of the nascent telegraph witnessed something extraordinary:

A blue line appeared upon the paper, which gradually grew darker and larger, until a flame of fire followed the pen, and burned through a dozen thicknesses of the prepared paper. The paper was set on fire by the flame, and produced considerable smoke. The current then subsided as gradually as it came on...

What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About the Aurora Borealis: How the Northern Lights Work and How We Solved the Science of the Cosmic Spectacle

“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.”

On the evening of February 19, 1852, a scientist at the New Haven station of the nascent telegraph witnessed something extraordinary:

A blue line appeared upon the paper, which gradually grew darker and larger, until a flame of fire followed the pen, and burned through a dozen thicknesses of the prepared paper. The paper was set on fire by the flame, and produced considerable smoke. The current then subsided as gradually as it came on...

What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About the Aurora Borealis

“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.”

On the evening of February 19, 1852, a scientist at the New Haven station of the nascent telegraph witnessed something extraordinary:

A blue line appeared upon the paper, which gradually grew darker and larger, until a flame of fire followed the pen, and burned through a dozen thicknesses of the prepared paper. The paper was set on fire by the flame, and produced considerable smoke. The current then subsided as gradually as it came on...

How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers

“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.”

All societies are both the creators of their myths and are created by them. All artists are the makers and remakers of our myths of meaning — myths we co-create whenever we engage with art. The best of them transmigrate across societies and epochs, naming what is difficult to name and difficult to bear, touching other lives — often lives wildly different from the artist’s — with that luminous longing for elemental truth that is the...

M.C. Escher on Creativity and Grasping the Largest Mystery Through the Immense Beauty of the Very Small

“What is that so-called reality; what is this theory other than a beautiful but primordially human illusion?”

Nothing shapes our experience of reality, and nothing limits it, more than our frames of reference. Every transcendent achievement of perspective is the product of a shift in the frame of reference, as is the hard-earned glory of maturity.

Few artists have recognized this more clearly and made of that recognition a more enchanting plaything than M.C. Escher (June 17, 1898–March 17, 197...

Le Monde de la Mer: Stunning 19th-Century French Illustrations of the Wonders of the Sea

Dive into “the world of the sea in its luxury and its agitations.”

In 1866, the year the young German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology while working on his otherworldly illustrations of jellyfish, a kindred book appeared across the artificial divide of ecosystems that is the national border — a lavishly illustrated volume by the French naturalist and physician Christian Horace Benedict Alfred Moquin-Tandon, former Director of the French Academy of Sciences, published under...

Nature Is Always Listening: The Science of Mushrooms, Music, and How Sound Waves Stimulate Mycelial Growth

What playing music has to do with the happiness of the forest.

Fungi are the evolutionary cardinals of the Earth — the first to conquer it and the last to inherit it, composing the living substratum beneath every forest and every field and every backyard ecosystem. Each cubic inch of mycelium compresses eight miles of fine filaments folded unto themselves — the original superstrings of this terrestrial universe. Wildly unlike us, they are inseparable from our creaturely inheritance. Since the ...

The Unphotographable: Jack Kerouac’s Soaring Diary Entry About Self-Understanding and the Elemental Vastness of the Windblown World

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...