Maria Popova's Blog, page 56

The Unphotographable #7: Richard Powers on the Majestic Mass Migration of Sandhill Cranes

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...

The Spirit of Revolt: The Radical Russian Dissident Prince Peter Kropotkin on How to Reboot a Complacent Society

“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.”

We see it in nature all the time — only when entropy hurls matter into chaos, into dissolution, can it be composted and reconstituted into entirely new life-forms, the autumn leaves becoming soil for spring’s crocuses. We see it, and still we forget that everything we call society — that complex organizing principle of human natures — is but a fractal of nature, obeying the same laws, pulsating ...

How to Move a Mind: Barry Lopez on the Power of Metaphor Over Data

What it takes “to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance.”

For all their ravishing beauty, numbers remain abstractions cold and austere without a foothold of similitude in the living world, the world of touch and sight, of things and thingness. Seven has no meaning to the human mind without an object — we need to know seven what in order to fathom its sevenness. This may be why ...

Women Holding Things: Artist Maira Kalman’s Tender and Quirky Ode to the Weight of the World and the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being

“There can never be enough time. And you can never hold on to it.”

“It troubled me,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “how an Atom fell and yet the Heavens held. The Heavens hold, and so do we. We hold still. We hold hopes. We hold our pain and the world’s pain. We hold each other. We hold up our values and hold down our tasks. We hold on, and this might be the single most defining feature of human life. We hold on.

In Women Holding Things (public library), artist Maira Kalman — an uncommon philosopher ...

Repentance, Repair, and What True Forgiveness Takes: Lessons from Maimonides for the Modern World

“Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.”

“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her splendid antidote to the irreversib...

16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian

Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace. I was a college student still shaken with the disorientation of landing alone in America at the tail end of my teens, a world apart...

Dostoyevsky in Love

“She cried, and kissed my hands, but she loves another.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) was twenty-seven when he was arrested for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime and sentenced to death. His sentence was repealed at the last moment, prompting him to pen an ecstatic letter about the meaning of life that evening. But he was not set free — instead, he served four years in a hard labor camp in Siberia.

Upon his release, the thirty-thre...

C.S. Lewis on Our Task in Troubled Times

“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

It bears repeating: Right now, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow ev...

James Baldwin on Reconciling Acceptance and Action

Notes on the change that begins in the heart.

My meditation teacher of many years often reckons with the difficult question of how we are to reconcile acceptance — the need to meet reality uncomplainingly on its own terms, so central to Buddhist philosophy, so central to all spiritual freedom — with activism in a world badly in need of repair.

Thinking about this paradox recently, I was reminded of a passage from the indispensable 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son (public library) by...

How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life

“The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”

It can pivot a hard day to remember that we are “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.” But for all of its innumerable glories, consciousness comes with a price that can be difficult to bear — consciousness, with its immense capacity for love, and for loneline...