Maria Popova's Blog, page 60

The Enigma of the Eel: The Elusive Science of Earth’s Most Mysterious Creature

“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.”

No one knows why they go the way they go, which is always one way, or how they get there, which is not really a there, for the Sargasso Sea is not really a sea but a patch of open ocean bounded by four mighty currents, with no clear borders, named for the brown Sargassum algae that rise from its basin like a magic forest at the bottom of the world and cover its surface with miles-...

Leo Tolstoy on the Obsolescence of the State as a Form of Government and the Antidote to Violence

“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.”

“To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears,” Octavia Butler wrote in her searing admonition about choosing our leaders. “To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.” But in some deep animal sense, to be led at all is to risk handing one’s own moral conscience over to an...

Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation

“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.”

“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives.

When relationships collapse under the weight of life,...

Astronomy as Existential Calibration: A Poetic Manifesto for Science from Two Centuries Before the Golden Age of Space Telescopes

“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.”

On March 13, 1781, the Solar System bloomed a new planet: The polymathic astronomer John Herschel, who would later coin the word photography, discovered Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun — an icy blue gas giant spinning on its side twofold farther than Saturn.

The Voyager‘s farewell photograph of Uranus. (Photograph courtesy of NASA.)

With the help of hi...

The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing

“…only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names — Susan Cain calls it “the bittersweet...

How Money Was Born: The Small Seashell and the Fierce Maldivian Queen That Made the Modern World

How humanity turned another species into its first specie.

Money began as a language for expressing gratitude and became the lever of the extraction economy — the currency of aggregate human entitlement. In the golden dawn of modern capitalism, Henry Miller — passionate, idealistic, and broke — sang the thrush song of warning: “The dilemma in which we find ourselves today is that no matter how much we increase the purchasing power of the wage-earner he never has enough.” A century hence, the di...

Beegu: A Tender Illustrated Parable About the Loneliness of Feeling Alien in an Unfeeling World

For all the hopeful creatures.

There are a thousand and one ways to feel alien in this world — some of them blatant (my legal status in the country to which I have devoted my entire adult life is “resident alien”) and some subtle (who hasn’t known those days when everything appears to be alright, but the sky of the mind feels profoundly askew?) Mostly, we go through this world alien to each other — even with our maximal empathic understanding, the abyss between any two consciousnesses is so imm...

Loneliness and the Trinity of Creativity: Ada Lovelace, the Poles of the Mind, and the Source of Her Imaginative Powers

“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”

What an odd expectation, both hopeful and heedless of logic, that minds capable of reaching far beyond the horizon of the common imagination should be of common constitution and even emotional topography. We can only ever have the faintest map of another’s internal reality. It is hard enough to reconstitute the ...

Wisdom Engines: A Visual Meditation on Consciousness, the Elasticity of Time, and the Nature of Happiness

A humming serenade to the “awareness of awareness” from which our creative restlessness springs.

“When you are thoroughly able to understand these diagrams and the truths they inculcate,” the eccentric Victorian psychologist Benjamin Betts wrote of his geometric diagrams of consciousness, “when you look at any forms of humanity it will not be at their outward appearance, neither at their hapless struggles after vanities, but at their unhappy Ideal.”

The longing to give shape to all that troubl...

The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life

“One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us.”

In early September 1947, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910–November 13, 1952) watched the love of her life fade to black.

Michael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, h...