Maria Popova's Blog, page 8

Carl Jung on Creativity

The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple: everything. We bring everything we are and everything we have lived to every smallest creative act — every experience, every dream, every memory, every unremembered impression, every unconsciously absorbed influence. The great bewilderment is that we can only access a...

How to Be More Alive: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Breaking the Trance of Near-living

The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life that gasp you awake from the trance of near-living induced by the system of waste and want we call civilization.

Inside the system, these opportunities for raw aliveness are not easily found — they must be sought, seized, and then surrendered to.

At four-thirty in the afternoon of June 17th, 1914, a month bef...

Lights On: Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental Music of Reality

When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world.

Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I r...

Carl Linnaeus’s Flower Clock

“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world.

The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote:

When man...

Walt Whitman on Owning Your Life

At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary c...

On Play

The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same).

Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Ei...

Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of Australian Artist Shane Drinkwater

“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

We have wielded our tools of reason at the mystery — theorems and telescopes, postulates and particle colliders — but the best tool we have invented for cutting through our confusion remains an instrument of love and not of reason: We make art.

Long before we understood how stars made souls and what happens...

The Half Room of Living and Loving

When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists.

Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself f...

How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on the Three Demons of Creative Work

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best ...

How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons of Creative Work

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best ...