Figures of Thought: Krista Tippett Reads Howard Nemerov’s Mathematical-Existential Poem About the Interconnectedness of the Universe

A splendid song of praise for the elemental truth at the heart of all art, science, and nature.

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote in one of his most beautiful poems in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as humanity was coming awake to the glorious interconnectedness of nature — to the awareness, in the immortal words of the great naturalist John Muir, that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything...