Maria Popova's Blog, page 55

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...

Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska’s Poem “Love at First Sight,” Illustrated

“Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.”

Some of us call it chance; those less at peace with the randomness that governs the universe may call it “God.” But however we name it, there are moments in life when we feel its workings deeply and seek to make meaning out of them — that is part of our creaturely inheritance as the sensemaking species, the pattern-seeking animal. Hindsight is the enchanted loom on which we weave the pattern of...

Nick Cave on Music, Mystery, and the Relationship Between Vulnerability and Freedom

“There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things…. and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.”

“Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” And yet, with our reflex for teleological thinking — that childish grab at “I know!” — we...

The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular

“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.”

The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness. We may know that uncertainty is the crucible of creativity, we may know that uncertainty is the key to democracy and good science, and yet in our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few thing...

The Temple of Flora: Stunning Illustrations of Flowers Inspired by Erasmus Darwin’s Radical Scientific Poem About the Sexual Reproduction of Plants

“If thou art perfectly at leisure… walk in, and view the wonders of my enchanted garden.”

A century before Emily Dickinson wrote that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Erasmus Darwin (December 12, 1731–18 April 18, 1802) — Charles’s grandfather and his great influence on evolutionary ideas — set out “to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratioci...

How to Be a Swimmer in the Stream of Time: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Antidote to Disorientation and Isolation

“The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist.”

To take the vaster perspective of time and space is always an act of resistance to seeing the present as islanded in time — the depiction menacing us from TV screens and news headlines. But it is also a deeply disorienting experience, for it plunges us into the immensity of being, asking us to learn to swim in the stream of time — or else we sink into our isolated smallne...

The Woman Who Saved Native Song

“We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.”

Tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress is the Densmore Collection of cylinder phonographs — a bygone medium containing the living songs of an ancient culture.

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. government continued its assault on Native Americans by demanding they relinquish their tribal languages and belief systems, teach their children English, a...

Reclaiming Our Human Potential in the Age of Technological “Progress”

“People now use less than half their potential forces because ‘Progress’ has deprived them of the incentive to live fully.”

A generation after the trailblazing cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict insisted that “there is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem,” heralding instead “the great diversity of social solutions” that different cultures have devised for the same common human proble...

How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”

But we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we...

Beethoven and the Art of Amends

“When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.”

In the late 1780s, as the air of revolution was swarming Europe, the young Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) took improbable refuge in Bonn as a piano teacher to a kindly widow’s children. Her husband had died trying to save court documents in a fire when she was twenty-seven and had never remarried, raising their four children by herself — children she w...