Maria Popova's Blog, page 9

How to Meet Your Mystery: Thomas Merton on Solitude and the Soul

“It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.”

“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny. “Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” On the one hand, destiny is a ramshackle concept, trembling with reverberations of det...

Any Common Desolation

“You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive.”

The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanw...

The Strength to Remember and the Strength to Forget: James Baldwin on What Makes a Hero

“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.”

It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly address...

Miss Leoparda: A Painted Parable of How to Remake a World

When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations.

Some will try to find a third option to put on the table; they may or may not succeed, but they will still be sitting at the same table.

The very few — those who refuse to mistake the limits of the permissible for the horizon of the possible — will build a whole new table, populating the fresh slate o...

Obsidian and the Birds: An Odyssey of Wonder from the Aztecs to the Quantum World

A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a peculiar confluence of chemistry, culture, and chance that unrinds the layers of reality to put us face to face with the mystery at its core.

Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the disc...

Against Self-Improvement: Adam Phillips on the Danger of Treating Ourselves as Pathological Patients in Need of a Cure

“So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us.”

“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a pseudonym in her superb century-old field guide to the art of knowing what you really want — that most difficult, most rewarding among the arts of living. It is hard to know what we want because, disquieted daily by “this sadness of never understanding ourselves,” it is hard to know who we are. T...

Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between Sleeplessness and Creativity

Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional regulation, and creativity. But the price we have paid for these crowning curios of consciousness has bee...

The Souls of Animals

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”

Here was “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” holding up a mirror to us creatures inhabiting an animal body complicated by a soul — that organ of want and worry which we ourselves invented to explain ...

Matrescence: The Cellular Science of the Unself

One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the bloody, sweaty flesh of another; the knowledge that your own flesh is made of someone else’s cells and genes, the fact of you a fractal.

While mothering can take many forms and can be done by many different kinds of people, the process of one organism generating another from the raw materials of i...

Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force

It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters...