Reads by Maria Popova
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”
Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.
The Solace of Open Spaces
“There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration… Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”
Dismantling the Dogmas of Life and Death: How the Forgotten Prodigy William James Sidis Presaged the Quantum Undoing of Time and Thermodynamics
“There is no way of telling whether we are living organisms in a positive universe, or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe.. The difference is really one merely between the two directions of time, and, though those two directions are opposite to each other, they have no physical properties which are in any way different.”
Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost
“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…”
The Cello and the Nightingales: Beatrice Harrison and How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Empathy for Nature
An improbable celebration of the three most interesting things in life, the things that make it worth living: nature, human nature, and their cross-pollination in music.
The Grandmother, the Mermaid, and the Soul: Poet Elizabeth Alexander on How Literature Widens the Portal of the Possible
How a poem made a life and a life a poem.
The Art of Living: The Contemplative Cartoonist Grant Snider’s Illustrated Love Letter to Noticing and Manifesto for Self-Liberation from Striving
The consolation of clouds, the secret lives of leaves, and the yearning to be more fully human.
The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree
“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne.”
The Power of the Bittersweet: Susan Cain on Longing as the Fulcrum of Creativity
In search of the most transcendent solution to “the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”
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