The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness.
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Tag: maria popova
The Universe as an Infinite Storm of Beauty: John Muir on the Transcendent Interconnectedness of Nature
the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his lovely prose poem about evolution.
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Nick Cave on Music, Mystery, and the Relationship Between Vulnerability and Freedom
“Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.
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The Temple of Flora: Stunning Illustrations of Flowers Inspired by Erasmus Darwin’s Radical Scientific Poem About the Sexual Reproduction of Plants
A century before Emily Dickinson wrote that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Erasmus Darwin (December 12, 1731–18 April 18, 1802) — Charles’s grandfather and his great influence on evolutionary ideas — set out “to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead
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How to Be a Swimmer in the Stream of Time: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Antidote to Disorientation and Isolation
To take the vaster perspective of time and space is always an act of resistance to seeing the present as islanded in time — the depiction menacing us from TV screens and news headlines.
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Philosopher Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering It
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh admonished in his terrific treatise on how to love — a sentiment profoundly discomfiting in the context of our cultural mythology, which continually casts love as something that happens to us
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C.S. Lewis on Our Task in Troubled Times
It bears repeating: Right now, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem.
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The Woman Who Saved Native Song
Tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress is the Densmore Collection of cylinder phonographs — a bygone medium containing the living songs of an ancient culture. In the early twentieth century, the U.S.
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How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully
“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”
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The Joy of Suffering Overcome : Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers About the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life
Aldous Huxley wrote of Beethoven’s Benedictus in his exquisite meditation on why music enchants us so. But he could have well been writing about Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) himself — a creator suffused with darkness yet animated by the benediction of light.
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Front Porch Reflections 
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