My poet friend Marie Howe gives the students in her ecopoetry class a lovely assignment: At the outset of the semester, each young poet is asked to name the animal they find most repulsive, then to learn everything they can about it โ scientifically, historically, culturally. By the conclusion of the course, they have to…
โNothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness,โ Leo Tolstoy โ a man of colossal compassion and colossal blind spots โ wrote while reckoning with his life as it neared its end. โPractice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize youโre already in heaven now,โ…
โPlace and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,โ the trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote into the void of self-elected obscurity decades before her work was posthumously rediscovered as a rare masterpiece of landscape poetics irradiated by the human search for meaning. A generation later, another trailblazing woman…
โAfter you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on โ have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear โ what remains?โ the aging Walt Whitman asked in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth living while recovering from a paralytic stroke, then answered: โNature…
โFearlessness is what love seeks,โ Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb 1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. โSuch fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the futureโฆ Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.โ…
When I am sad, I like to imagine myself becoming a tree. Branches that bend without breaking, fractal with possibility, reaching resolutely toward the light. Roots touching the web of belonging beneath the surface of the world, that majestic mycelial network succoring and nurturing and connecting tree to tree โ connection so effortless, so imperturbable,…
โTo create today is to create dangerously,โ Albert Camus told a gathering of young people at the peak of the Cold War, shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize. โThe question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police…
The composite creation of a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor, the word empathy in the modern sense only came into use at the dawn of the twentieth century as a term for the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art, into a world of feeling and experience other than…
โLove your heart. For this is the prize,โ Toni Morrison wrote in an exquisite passage from Beloved as she considered the body as an instrument of sanity, joy, and self-respect a century after William James asserted in his groundbreaking work on how our bodies affect our feelings that โa purely disembodied human emotion is a…
This essay is excerpted from the thirteenth chapter of Figuring, titled โThe Banality of Survival.โ In the spring of 1849, ten years before On the Origin of Species shook the foundation of humanityโs understanding of life, the polymathic astronomer John Herschel โ coiner of the word photography, son of Uranus discoverer William Herschel and nephew…
โA book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,โ 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 โ by both the exquisite truth of its tenor and the awful violence…
I will never forget the day I first encountered, in the midst of heartache, โOne Artโ by Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911โOctober 6, 1979) โ 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…
In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt โ one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote โ 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…
I noticed them first in my neighborhood โ 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…
Blue, Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of humanityโs most beautiful reflections on our planetโs primary hue, is โthe color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from hereโฆ the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world,โ a world of many blues โ a pioneering 19th-century…
