Maria Popova's Blog, page 67
June 20, 2022
Humanity’s First Cosmic Gallery of Children’s Art: What the Youngest Members of Our Young Species Most Cherish About Life on Earth
“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity,” Richard Feynman wrote in his poetic ode to the wonder of life a decade before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics and two decades before these atoms of consciousness sent their most ambitious civilizational artwork toward the unknown reaches of the cosmos as the Golden Record sailed a...
June 18, 2022
The Only Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled
In the first days of a bleak London December in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits at Bunhill Fields, named for “bone hill,” longtime burial ground for the disgraceful dead. There, in what was now a dissenters’ cemetery, the English Poor Laws had ensured a pauper’s funeral for the man who had died five days earlier in his squalid home and was now being lowered into an unmarked grave. The man whose “Songs ...
Barry Lopez on Storytelling and His Advice on the Three Steps to Becoming a Writer
Without story, there is no self. For all human beings, internal narrative is the pillar of memory and identity. For the subset of our species who identify as writers, storytelling is the shape we give to our longing to comprehend and connect with the world. “Story...
June 17, 2022
The Human Kaleidoscope and the Unwritten Story of the World: “Radiolab” Creator Jad Abumrad’s Superb Caltech Commencement Address
Beginnings are a beautiful thing — beautiful and terrifying, marked by the wonder of the possible and the weight of the possible.
A beginning is a singular kind of freedom — a vector reaching toward a nebulous infinity of possible endings, yet bound to spear only one; a vector haunted by the knowledge that every littlest step taken along it takes us one way and ...
June 16, 2022
June 16, 1816: The Inception of Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s Prescient Warning About Reproductive Rights
In June 1816, five young people high on romance and rebellion — two still in their teens, one barely out, none beyond their twenties — found themselves in bored captivity at a rented villa on the shore of Lake Geneva as an unremitting storm raged outside for days. If they couldn’t have the dazzling spring days for which they had fled England, they would have long rambling nights of poetry readings and philosophical disquisi...
June 15, 2022
Twenty Reasons for Being
Twenty years ago today, Krista Tippett birthed the life-force that is On Being. It began as a small local public radio show and ended up as a beloved podcast making lives all over the world infinitely more livable and luminous. President Barack Obama gave her the National Humanities Medal for it. Millions gave her their hearts as she gave us the universe of hers.
It is a landmark moment for On Being as it shape-shifts into it...
June 14, 2022
Bronson Alcott on the Meaning of Family and How Our Friendships Humanize Us: His Ecstatic Diary Entry Upon His Daughter Louisa May’s Birth
Making a family, having a family — these are different things, and different things to different people. But whatever family means to us, in its haven we are in some primal sense making — and remaking — ourselves. It bears remembering that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
Bronson Alcott (November 2...
June 13, 2022
The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe
“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the anthropologist and philosopher of science Loren Eiseley wrote in his poetic meditation on life in 1960. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
The history of our species is the history of forgetting. Our deepest existential longing is the lo...
June 12, 2022
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”
There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that ...
The Grandmother, the Mermaid, and the Soul: Poet Elizabeth Alexander on How Literature Widens the Portal of the Possible
“Books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her 1969 love-poem to reading, after the love of books — the reading of them, the making of them — had made her the first black poet to with the Pulitzer Prize. “Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower.”
Meanwhile, seven hundred miles southeast, a seven-year-old girl with a flaming love of reading was asking her grandmother to tell again the story of the most da...
