Maria Popova's Blog, page 94

Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Love Letter to Photographer Nickolas Muray, Who Took Her Most Famous Portrait

“Through your words I feel so close to you that I can feel your laughter, so clean and honest.”

In the hottest month of 1913, the Stockinger Printing Company in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hired as a colorist and engraver a twenty-one-year-old Hungarian artist who had just arrived in America as a refugee with $25 and an Esperanto dictionary in his pocket. Having grown up looking in on the fencing academy in his neighborhood that only the privileged could attend — a separation the boy saw as emblemati...

The Decades-Old Classic That Became the Ultimate Pandemic Poem

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

I will never forget the day I first encountered, in the midst of heartache, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911–October 6, 1979) — a poem I have lived with for years, a poem that has helped me live.

Composed when Bishop was sorrowing after a separation from her partner, Alice Methfessel, it is a staggering poem about love and loneliness, about the feigned fearlessness and forced levity we put on like an armor, like a costume, to cope with th...

Mass, Energy, and How Literature Transforms the Dead Weight of Being: Jeanette Winterson on Why We Read

“Books read us back to ourselves… The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined.”

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka wrote to his childhood friend just as he was setting out on a life of making and honing axes of words. I have always been struck by his metaphor — by both the exquisite truth of its tenor and the awful violence of its vehicle. A good book is indeed a profound transformation and, yes, the...

Murmuration: A Stunning Animated Poem About Our Connection to Nature and to Each Other

A collaborative praise song for “indifference banished by love.”

In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm the sky like living constellations on their way to roost for the night, and writes:

We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black ...

Murmuration: A Stunning Animated Poem About Our Connection to Nature and Each Other

A collaborative praise song for “indifference banished by love.”

In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm the sky like living constellations on their way to roost for the night, and writes:

We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black ...

Confucius on Good Government, the 6 Steps to a Harmonious Society, and Self-Discipline as the Key to Democracy

“Things have roots and branches… If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed.”

Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that “the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius (551–479 BCE) recognized the indelible link between personal and political morality, recognized that interpersonal kindness is the foundation of social justice, recognized that democracy — a form of...

The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin Hubble Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe

“We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of world it is.”

In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard College Observatory to measure and catalogue the brightness of stars when she began noticing a consistent correlation between the luminosity of a class of variable stars and their pulsation period, between ...

Einstein on the Political Power of Art

“Nothing can equal the psychological effect of real art — neither factual descriptions nor intellectual discussion.”

“Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her arresting 1972 address on art as a force of resistance. “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art,’” Chinua Achebe told James Baldwin in their superb forgotten conversation at the close of that decade, “are the same people who are quite happy with th...

Dotspotting Expressionist Science: What the Mysterious Color-Markings on Storm Drains Have to Do with Rachel Carson’s Legacy and the War on a Deadly Virus

Strange signals from the lacuna between street art and microbiology.

I noticed them first in my neighborhood — dots of paint hovering over the grate of the storm drain in a blue-green spectrum punctuated by white. I noticed them probably because I had been writing about the wondrous science of the color blue and my brain had formed, as brains tend to, a search image for its present preoccupation.

At first I took them for mindless spray-can tests by a street artist getting ready to graffiti a...

Loops, the Limits of Language, the Paradoxical Loneliness of “I Love You,” and What Keeps Love Alive

“The very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, loops I often retrace multiple times in a single walk. This puzzles people. Some simply don’t get the appeal of such recursiveness. Others judge it as dull. But I walk to think more clearly, which means to traverse t...