Maria Popova's Blog, page 69

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...

Octopus Blues and the Poetry of the Possible

An ode to unbreaking our hearts by widening our lenses on reality.

To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live. But with our creaturely capacity for wonder comes a responsibility to it — the recognition that reality is not a singularity but a plane. Each time we presume to have seen the whole, the plane tilts ever so slightly to reveal new vistas of truth and new horizons of mystery, staggering us with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment, framed by ...

The Age of the Possible

The poetry of perspective, in unimagined shades of blue.

To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live. But with our creaturely capacity for wonder comes a responsibility to it — the recognition that reality is not a singularity but a plane. Each time we presume to have seen the whole, the plane tilts ever so slightly to reveal new vistas of truth and new horizons of mystery, staggering us with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment, framed by our parochi...

The Stoic Key to Kindness

“Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface.”

All human lives are too various and alive with contradiction to be neatly classed into the categories in which we try to contain the chaos of life, and yet we spend so much of our own unclassifiable lives classing the lives of others. One measure of kindness might be the unwillingness to crush complexity into category, the refusal to lash others with ...

Poet Mark Doty on Connection and Creativity

“We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union… We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed.”

“I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all,” poet Diane Ackerman wrote in her sublime Cosmic Pastoral, “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.”

This continues to strike me as a fine way to go through life — per...

Haunting Cyanotype Portraits of Flowers by Artist Rosalind Hobley

Roses are blue, violets are ultraviolet, and beauty is made of chemistry and light.

“To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her finest poems, “is profound responsibility.”

When Dickinson was a teenager, across the Atlantic, the self-taught botanist Anna Atkins pioneered another art-form for celebrating nature — visual poetry of a kind the world had never before encountered. Her stunning cyanotypes of sea algae engraved her onto our common record as the first person to illustrate a bo...

Catching the Light of the World: The Entwined History of Vision and Consciousness

“The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world… To see, to hear, to be human requires… our ceaseless participation.”

“For this we go out dark nights, searching for the dimmest stars, for signs of unseen things,” the uncommon-minded astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson wrote in her sublime ode to darkness and light. But even down here on Earth, our search for light unfolds amid unseen things — radiant realities beyond the creaturely limits of our vis...

Iris Murdoch’s Pocket History of the Five Phases of Freedom, in Literature and Life

“Freedom is our ability to rise out of history and grasp a universal idea of order which we then apply to the sensible world.”

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin wrote in one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. At the same time, across the Atlantic, Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) was aiming her uncommonly penetrating intellect at the history of art — and literary art in particular, with its pinnacle in the novel — as an instrum...

How to Live with Fear and What It Means to Love: A Tender Meditation in Ink, Watercolor, and Wonder

“Nothing beats kindness… It sits quietly beyond all things.”

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” the Proust Questionnaire asked David Bowie. “Living in fear.” Partway in time between Proust and Bowie, the young Hannah Arendt examined the eternal paradox of how to love and live with fear in her earliest published work, observing: “Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Henc...

Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing

“Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world… For the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time.”

“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief,” Emily Dickinson wrote as she calibrated love and loss. But she did not mean that it is good to rumina...