Maria Popova's Blog, page 68

The Solace of Open Spaces

“There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration… Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”

We live amid and inside emblems of the touching longing for permanence that both defines us and defies reality: our houses, these haikus of brick and hope so easily discomposed by a tremor of the earth or a tempest of the sky; our homes, so easily hollowed by death or indifference; our bodies, these boarding houses for stardust. All along, ...

The Art of Living: The Contemplative Cartoonist Grant Snider’s Illustrated Love Letter to Noticing and Manifesto for Self-Liberation from Striving

The consolation of clouds, the secret lives of leaves, and the yearning to be more fully human.

“The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time,” Montaigne wrote half a millennium ago as he reckoned with how to live, before we had fully forgotten the finitude of our time and the preciousness of presence, before we had made of our four thousand weeks a conveyor belt of productivity.

Epochs later, the contemplative cartoonist and Incidental Comics creator Grant ...

Dismantling the Dogmas of Life and Death: How the Forgotten Prodigy William James Sidis Presaged the Quantum Undoing of Time and Thermodynamics

“There is no way of telling whether we are living organisms in a positive universe, or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe.. The difference is really one merely between the two directions of time, and, though those two directions are opposite to each other, they have no physical properties which are in any way different.”

“Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges wrote in his exquisite refutation of time an epoch before we time-substantiated creatures came to discover the staggeri...

The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree

“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne.”

“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees, “no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except ...

The Day Hermann Hesse Found the Meaning of Life in a Tree

“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne.”

“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees, “no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except ...

Hermann Hesse on Trees and the Meaning of Life

“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne.”

“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees, “no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except ...

Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost

“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…”

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife.

On this world, space has produced “atoms with consciousness,” in the lovely phrase of the later poet Richard Feynman. Minds. A world rife with minds, as various as they are numerous.

Elsewhere in his seventeenth-century epic of philosophy in blank verse, Milton...

The Power of the Bittersweet: Susan Cain on Longing as the Fulcrum of Creativity

In search of the most transcendent solution to “the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”

“Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness… to let the form be felt.. but let the whole be sombre,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother as he exulted in the beauty of sorrow — not in that wallowing way some have of making an identity of their suffering, not in the way our culture has of fetishizing the tortured genius myth, but in the way of Whitman, wh...

The Cello and the Nightingales: Beatrice Harrison and How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Empathy for Nature

An improbable celebration of the three most interesting things in life, the things that make it worth living: nature, human nature, and their cross-pollination in music.

In the high summer of 1977, 100 years after Thomas Edison devised the first technology for recording and reproducing sound, the Voyager reached the poetic gesture of its Golden Record into the cosmos, carrying the universal language of our species — a Navajo night chant and a Bach fugue, a millennia-old Chinese song and a Beeth...

The Cello and the Nightingales: How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Experience of Empathy for Nature

An improbable celebration of the three most interesting things in life, the things that make it worth living: nature, human nature, and their cross-pollination in music.

In the high summer of 1977, 100 years after Thomas Edison devised the first technology for recording and reproducing sound, the Voyager reached the poetic gesture of its Golden Record into the cosmos, carrying the universal language of our species — a Navajo night chant and a Bach fugue, a millennia-old Chinese song and a Beeth...