Maria Popova's Blog, page 61

The Unphotographable #5: Georgia O’Keeffe on the Grandeur of Machu Picchu and Peru’s Otherworldly Mountains

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 — every Saturday, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and...

Book of Questions: Pablo Neruda’s Poetic Reckonings with the Magic and Mystery of Life, Illustrated

“Do unshed tears wait in little lakes?”

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb meditation on the life of the mind, would mean to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

But our questions, besides having the power to civilize us, also have the power — perhaps even m...

A Chaos of Delight: Darwin on the Sublimity and Transcendence of Nature

“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”

Something about time with ancient trees and shimmering waters, time under star-salted skies and by sunlit horizons, takes us as far beyond ourselves as we can go in this world and at the same time returns us to ourselves clarified, magnified, more awake to the native poetry of reality between the bookends of life and death — perhaps because time in nature resets the brain’s De...

3 Things to Learn from a Child, 7 from a Thief: Bob Dylan’s Favorite Hasidic Teaching

On the value of remaining resolutely what you are.

Just before Christmas in 1977, the thirty-six-year-old Bob Dylan sat down for a long conversation with Jonathan Cott. Included in Cott’s endlessly wonderful book Listening: Interviews, 1970–1989 (public library), it remains Dylan’s most soulful and deepest-fathoming interview, replete with his reflections on vulnerability, the meaning of integrity, and the power of music as an instrument of truth.

One particular fragment of it has stayed with ...

Henry Miller on the Secret to Growth, in Art and in Life

“The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels.”

It may be that creativity is just the name we give to how we awaken ourselves from the slumber of near-living.

While working on his semi-autobiographical novel Tropic of Capricorn, published at the outbreak of WWII and banned in America for a quarter century, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–Ju...

The Everlasting Wonder of Being: How a Cold Cosmos Kindles the Glow of Consciousness

How we went from quanta packages to the laughter of children on a summer afternoon.

In his poetic ode to the wonder of life, the physicist Richard Feynman gasped at our improbable inheritance as “atoms with consciousness” — a lovely phrase that in so few words intimates the immense superstructure of matter and meaning, the way in which the austere realities of the physical universe undergird the warm loveliness of all that makes us human: love, art, wonder, beauty, Bach. There can be no genuine...

The Unphotographable #4: Iris Murdoch’s Portal to Transcendence, from the Sea to the Stars

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 — every Saturday, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and...

What Makes Us and What We Make: Kwame Anthony Appiah on the Mutability of Identity and the Limiting Lens of Cultural Appropriation

“We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.”

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his superb investigation of what he termed “the genes of the soul,” “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react...

The World Brain: H.G. Wells’s Prophetic 1930s Vision for the Internet and How to Fix Its Ugliest Present Breaking Point

“The world is a Phoenix. It perishes in flames and even as it dies it is born again.”

“Our minds are all threaded together,” the twenty-one-year-old Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in the first years of the twentieth century, “& all the world is mind.” A world war, an airplane, and a radio later, nearly half a century before the birth of the true Internet and eight years before Vannevar Bush imagined the personal computer, another far-seeing mind envisioned the revolutionary reality beyond Wo...

Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See

“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.”

“One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes.” This is true of any soul — our own, that of another, that of the world. It vanishes because whenever we look, we see not as reality is but as we are. We see the rest of nature — including each other — through eyes gauzed with preconception, our distracted vision blurred by the thousand thoughts that come alive...