Maria Popova's Blog, page 59

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...

Creativity at the End: Leonard Cohen on Preparing for Death

On that singular moment at the end of life when all creative energy is concentrated and consecrated.

“It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” wrote Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister — as she faced the end of life with uncommon grace and vitality.

A century-some after her, Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) echoed these sentiments and added to them his own depth as he reckoned with nearin...

A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

“For a moment of night,” Henry Beston wrote in his exquisite century-old love letter to darkness, “we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars — pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.”

No one has written more lusciously about that pilgrimage, nor undertaken it with more elemental daring, th...

A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on the Enchantment of Night as an Instrument of Self-Knowledge and Connection to the Living World

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

“For a moment of night,” Henry Beston wrote in his exquisite century-old love letter to darkness, “we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars — pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.”

No one has written more lusciously about that pilgrimage, nor undertaken it with more elemental daring, th...

Barry Lopez on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life

“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.”

“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she reflected on the relationship between nature and human nature. But what we call place — that unalloyed presence wit...

Virginia Woolf on the Courage to Create Rather Than Cater and the Remedy for Self-Doubt

“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.”

“The most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote as she distilled a lifetime of wisdom on creativity, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Nearly a century before her, the young Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) was yet to wander through her garden and arrive at her flower-fo...

Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence

“Our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and by imperceptible approaches.”

In its original Latin use, the word genius was more readily applied to places — genius loci: “the spirit of a place” — than to persons, encoded with the reminder that we are profoundly shaped by the patch of spacetime into which the chance-accident of our birth has deposited us, our minds porous to the ideological atmosphere of our epoch. It is a humbling notion — an antidote to the vanity of seeing our ideas as the a...

Emerson on How to Trust Yourself and What Solitude Really Means

“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way,” the young Whitman wrote of his momentous critique-walk with his greatest literary hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) — the walk from which the young poet wrested his wisdom on how to keep criticism from sinking your...

Fluid Becoming Solid Becoming Wonder: Artist Meghann Riepenhoff’s Otherworldly Cyanotype Prints of Ice Formation

A fluid serenade to this blue world, with a side of Rebecca Solnit.

Long ago, while visiting the photographic glass plates of nebulae and constellations at the Harvard College Observatory archives, I was overcome by the palpitations of paradox — how we think that photography immortalizes, while its very roots are in doing the opposite: making of the ephemeral an illusion of the eternal, razing us on the edge of our own transience as we gasp at the beauty of long-dead flowers and peer at the li...

The Banquet of Life: Some of the Finest Advice on Growing Old, Growing Young, and Becoming Your Fullest Self

“People ask: ‘Would you or would you not like to be young again?’ Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible… You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”

“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote as she considered how to keep life from becoming a parody of itself, while across the English Channel...