“By reaching beyond the brain… we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.” “Our minds are all threaded together,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the dawn of the twentieth century, “and all […]
A lyrical reminder that our terror and our tenderness spring from the same source. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is said to have said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But fairy tales also make us, children and grown children […]
“We share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe… We have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune.” In those seasons of […]
“We share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe… We have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune.” In those seasons of […]
A 90-second revelation in the heart, from humanity at its most purehearted. “What is essential in the future is that every member of the family, even little children, should learn at whatever cost not to give way to wrong or to co-operate in it,” the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and Quaker peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale wrote […]
“What an astonishing thing it is to find something. Children, who excel at it — chiefly because the world is still so new to them that they can’t help but notice it — understand this, and automatically delight in it.” “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb early work on love […]
“Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.” The thrill of childlike wonder never left Kathleen Lonsdale (January 28, 1903–April 1, 1971), who often ran the last few yards to her laboratory and took her mathematical […]
A song of praise for life and “the smallest possible once before once.” This is the fifth of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN […]
“Immortality is not a matter of more or less time.” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote as she weighed what gives meaning to our mortal lives in a stunning poem — one of the hundreds that outlived her as she returned her borrowed stardust to the […]
“We need a better word than chance… To go all the way form a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness.” When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two […]