Maria Popova's Blog, page 58

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: Arthur Rackham’s Haunting Illustrations for the Barrie Classic

“There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.”

In the first years of the twentieth century, a strange book titled The Little White Bird, or Adventures in Kensington Gardens enchanted readers with its fusion of whimsy and dark humor, its way of addressing adults in a way that honors the eternal child alive in each of us, and especially with one of its characters: a small boy named Peter Pan.

Four years later, six of its chapters sprouted a new book, not for adults ...

The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Philosophical Children’s Book About Love and Loss

“There had never been such a quiet day before. It was the quietest day in the world.”

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910–November 13, 1952) never did anything half-heartedly. When the love of her life fell mortally ill, she did the hardest thing in life — facing the death of a beloved while remaining a pillar for their passage — the best way she knew how: she wrote her a love letter in the form of a children’s book.

On the last day of spring in 1950, three years after Goodnight Moon had enraptur...

How to Make the Best of Life: A Visionary Victorian Recipe for Enduring Actualization

“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”

Even if we recognize the statistical-existential fact that death is an emblem of our luckiness, most living beings are emphatically averse to the idea of dying. Since the dawn of our species, in our poems and our psalms and our dreams of eternal life, we humans have been petitioning entropy for mercy, for exception, for a felicitous violation of the laws of physics. In prior ages, this was the task of rel...

How to Make the Best of Life: A Visionary Victorian Recipe for the Only Immortality

“We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.”

Even if we recognize the statistical-existential fact that death is an emblem of our luckiness, most living beings are emphatically averse to the idea of dying. Since the dawn of our species, in our poems and our psalms and our dreams of eternal life, we humans have been petitioning entropy for mercy, for exception, for a felicitous violation of the laws of physics. In prior ages, this was the tas...

Full Tilt: Dervla Murphy’s Fierce and Poetic Account of Traversing the World on Two Wheels in the 1960s

A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.”

In the early nineteenth century, the teenage Mary Godwin and her not-yet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley left England for the Continent, traveling by foot and by mule, on the wings of love and youth. Through their constant poverty and hunger, through the frequent accidents and illnesses, they slaked their souls on beauty — on the shimmering grandeur of mountains and river...

Mesmerizing Microphotography of the Hairs of Different Animals Under Polarized Light

A technicolor serenade to the variousness of this world.

Hair is one of the glories of our mammalian inheritance — thermoregulator, camouflage, sensor, and mating call rolled into one. We Homo sapiens can lose more than 100 hairs daily without going bald, because our bodies produce 100 feet of hair substance every day. Structurally, hair is a marvel, as varied as the vegetation of the tropical rainforest and as mesmerizing as the cellular structure of trees.

The Museum of Microscopy at Florida ...

Kierkegaard on How to Save Yourself

“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.”

All of our creative work is our coping mechanism for life. Art is just what we call our instruments of self-salvation. It may touch other lives, salve and save them even, but it is always at bottom a private lifeline.

Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) had barely set foot into his twenties when he began arriving at this recognition in his own ...

Kahlil Gibran on How Storms Catalyze Creativity

“A storm always awakens whatever passion there is in me. I become eager, and seek relief in work.”

I am standing on my Brooklyn rooftop watching enormous raindrops make a xylophone out of the wood planks as lightning splits the Manhattan skyline across the river of lead. It thunders — a low, drawn-out bellow. Swirling across the sky, as if to wash clean the slate of daily worries, the storm comes down with its existential ablution, booming and total. I think of Georgia O’Keeffe, who wrote to he...

Apple Meditation: John Burroughs on the Portable Philosophy of Humanity’s Favorite Fruit

“I think if I could subsist on you… I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent… I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around.”

Anything, when faced with unalloyed attention, becomes a mirror. But few things have served as a mightier magnifying mirror for humanity, and for the individual human being, than the apple. Its blossoms have been selected by countless generations of polli...

A Love Letter to the Apple

“I think if I could subsist on you… I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent… I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around.”

Anything, when faced with unalloyed attention, becomes a mirror. But few things have served as a mightier magnifying mirror for humanity, and for the individual human being, than the apple. Its blossoms have been selected by countless generations of polli...