Maria Popova's Blog, page 57

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.

The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the gre...

Art as Living Amends: Nick Cave on Creativity as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World

In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.”

The world reveals itself through our engagement with it — a truth as true in the “It for Bit” sense of physics as it in the Dzogchen sense of Tibetan Buddhism.

It is the fundamental truth of our human experience.

All cynicism is a denial of it.

All hope is a tribute to it.

This awareness pulsates throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — Nick Cave’s yearlong conver...

Nick Cave on Creativity as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World

In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.”

The world reveals itself through our engagement with it — a truth as true in the “It for Bit” sense of physics as it in the Dzogchen sense of Tibetan Buddhism.

It is the fundamental truth of our human experience.

All cynicism is a denial of it.

All hope is a tribute to it.

This awareness pulsates throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library) — Nick Cave’s yearlong conver...

Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song

“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”

In a lifetime of living in this body, I have known no more powerful a homecoming than music — nothing roots us more firmly into the house of being, nothing levitates us more buoyantly to that transcendent place beyond marrow and mind. Stripped of its nihilistic drama, there is an elemental cry of truth, for me at least, in Nietzsche’s pronouncement: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Even Edna St. Vincent Millay, for all ...

First Kiss: An Animated Ode to One of Life’s Great Felicities

“…if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist…”

“Like a bee that settles on the fragrant pistils of a flower, and sips in the nectar for honey, so should you sip in the nectar from between the lips of your love,” counseled an illustrated field guide to kissing the year my grandmother was born. Why we kiss continues to puzzle scientists. That we do is one of life’s great felicities.

That is what Tim Seibles celebra...

Sing, Don’t Scream: D.H. Lawrence on the Strength of Sensitivity

“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.”

We live in a culture that has warped strength from the measure of our interior tenacity into the magnitude of our forceful self-assertion. We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life — the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs — into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned ...

Artist Nina Katchadourian’s Otherworldly Plants Made of Trash and Tenderness

A haunting invitation to reckon with the relationship between nature and human nature, consumption and creativity, and the mind’s indomitable capacity for playful wonderment.

Life — the measure of our aliveness beyond mere existence — is largely of matter of how much beauty, how much meaning, how much improbable loveliness we can make from the scraps of our losses.

When artist Nina Katchadourian stared down her trash can in the middle of the lockdown, she was not looking to make art. She was ...

Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community

“To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience.”

The sunshine of life springs from twin suns. We may call them love and art. We may call them connection and creativity. Both can take many forms. Both, if they are worth their salt and we ours, ask us to show up as our whole selves. Both are instruments of unselfing.

It is often in the cradle of friendship — a word...

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

“Our foot’s in the door.”

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, the...

M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach

“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.”

“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in,” Rachel Carson wrote as she contemplated the loneliness of creative work after her unexampled books about the sea made her one of the most beloved writers of her time, “you will interest other people.”

She couldn’t have known it then, but across t...