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…
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In the 1850s, Emily Dickinsonโs passionate first love shaped her uncommon body of work for a lifetime to come, shaped the spare and searing poems that would go on animating lives for generations to come. In the 1950s, Rai Weiss fell in love with a pianist, fell in love with his loverโs passion for music,…
Thinking lately about what it means to have the right heart, which intimates the question of what it means to tend to oneโs own heart rightly, I was reminded of a passage from what may be the loveliest, truest, most quietly transcendent thing ever written about the art of growing older: โThe main thing is…
In the bleak winter of 1922, a โhurricane of the spiritโ swept the ailing and downtrodden Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875โDecember 29, 1926) into a rapture of creative vitality. Within a week, he had written his now-iconic Sonnets to Orpheus and completed the suite of ten elegies he had begun a decade earlier amid…
I have moved through this fourteenth year of Brain Pickings โ a devastating year for the world we share, a discomposing year for my private world โ by leaning on the writings and wisdom of the long-gone for succor, for calibration of perspective, for the beauty that makes life livable. Of the few books published…
โMy one reader, you reading this book, who are you?โ Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913โFebruary 12, 1980) asks with the large forthright eyes of her words in one of the most beautiful and penetrating books ever written on any subject. โWhat is your face like, your hands holding the pages, the child forsaken in you,…
Decades before Simone de Beauvoir contemplated how chance and choice converge to make us who we are from the fortunate platform of old age, the eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath โ who never reached that fortunate platform, her life felled by the same conspiracy of chance and choice โ contemplated these indelible forces in the guise of…
โFearlessness is what love seeks,โ Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. 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 This notion of presence…
Goethe, who lived and died by the indivisibility of art and life, insisted that we ought to treat the works of others, however imperfect, the way we treat their actions โ with โa loving sympathy.โ And yet one of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others…
โA leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,โ the young Walt Whitman sang in one of the finest poems from his Song of Myself โ the aria of a self that seemed to him then, as it always seems to the young, infinite and invincible. But when a paralytic…
Twenty-four centuries after Pythagoras contemplated the purpose of life and the meaning of wisdom as he coined the word philosopher to mean โlover of wisdom,โ Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819โMarch 26, 1892) contemplated the meaning of personhood and the measure of wisdom as he revolutionized the word poet to stand for โlover of life.โ Tucked…
Reverie and reckoning with our relationship to nature between the branches and the birds. By Maria Popova Ever since we climbed down from the trees, we have been looking up to them to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. โNothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree,โ Hermann Hesse…
โYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.โ By Maria Popova The history of the world is the history of telling others who and what we are โ from tribal markings to national flags to family crests to pronoun-specifying email signatures. Every war that…
Trees are unworded thoughts, periscopes of perspective. They are both less alive than we think and more sentient than we thought. In them, we see what we are and see what we can be. From them, we draw our best metaphors for love, for art, for happiness. Crowning the canon of branched reflections on what…
