Maria Popova's Blog, page 74
February 28, 2022
Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us
“Time is a dictator, as we know it,” Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003) observed in her soulful 1969 meditation on time. “Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive?”
If time is the substance we are made of, as Borges so memorably wrote the year the teenage Eunice Waymon began studying to become “the world’s first great black classical pianist” before she m...
February 24, 2022
Let There Always Be Light: Dark Matter and the Mystery of Our Mortal Stardust (Patti Smith Reads Rebecca Elson)
This is the fourth of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. Previously: Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Joan As Police Woman and Emily Dickinson); ...
February 23, 2022
The Atom and the Doctrine of Identity: Quantum Pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness
“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.” Those were the dawning days of quantum mechanics, just beginning to illuminate a whole new order of golden threads holding the world together, just beginning to reverse-engineer the loom with nothing more than the human mind. A decade after Woolf’s death, the Nobel-winning quantum pion...
February 22, 2022
Aloneness, Belonging, and the Paradox of Vulnerability, in Love and Creative Work
If we are not at least a little abashed by the people we used to be, the voyage of life has halted in the windless bay of complacency. This renders the interview a curious cultural artifact by design — a consensual homily of future abashment, etching into the common record who we were at a particular point in life, in ...
February 20, 2022
The Flower and the Meaning of Life
“To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her pre-ecological poem about ecology, “is profound Responsibility.”
A century later, in one of the most poetic and existentially ravishing children’s* books of all time, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made his hero’s central preoccupation the responsibility for a single flower — the Little Prince’s beloved rose: fragile and self-concerned, ferociously hungry for love, capable of such tenderness and su...
February 18, 2022
Achieving Perspective: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell and the Poetry of the Cosmic Perspective (David Byrne Reads Pattiann Rogers)
This is the third of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. Here are Chapter 1 (the evolution of life and the birth of ecology, with Emily Dickinson) and Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith).
THE ANIMAT...Achieving Perspective: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell and the Poetry of the Cosmic Perspective, with David Byrne
This is the third of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. Here are Chapter 1 (the evolution of flowers and the birth of ecology, with Emily Dickinson) and Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the human hunger to know the cosmos, with Tracy K. Smith).
THE ANI...February 16, 2022
John Lennon on the Satisfying Difficulty of Excellence and the Vital Role of Invisible Incubation in the Creative Process
“I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time, sometimes a very long time, before I set them down,” Beethoven, having revolutionized music with his stubborn devotion to making unexampled sound, told a young composer in reflecting on the role of incubation in his creative process. Two centuries after his death, psychology — a science not even a glimmer on ...
John Lennon on the Torture of Excellence and the Vital Role of Invisible Incubation in the Creative Process
“I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time, sometimes a very long time, before I set them down,” Beethoven, having revolutionized music with his stubborn devotion to making unexampled sound, told a young composer in reflecting on the role of incubation in his creative process. Two centuries after his death, psychology — a science not even a glimmer on ...
February 15, 2022
Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island
Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time.
For me, The Little Prince has been one, and Leaves of Grass, and I Put a Spell on You, and Spiegel im Spiegel. Wilderness (public library) by the pain...
