“Things have roots and branches… If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed.” Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that “the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius (551–479 BCE) recognized the […]
“We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of world it is.” In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard […]
“Nothing can equal the psychological effect of real art — neither factual descriptions nor intellectual discussion.” “Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her arresting 1972 address on art as a force of resistance. “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics […]
Strange signals from the lacuna between street art and microbiology. I noticed them first in my neighborhood — 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 […]
“The very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, […]
“The day ends. The night falls. And in between… there is the blue hour.” Blue, Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of humanity’s most beautiful reflections on our planet’s primary hue, is “the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here… the color of longing for the distances you never arrive […]
…with a side of Virginia Woolf’s elated infatuation. “Tell me nothing of rest,” the young Beethoven bellowed when he began losing his hearing, resolving to “take fate by the throat” despite his disability. A century later, another trailblazing composer of uncommon artistic ability took her own fate by the throat as she faced the same […]
Voluptuaries of geometry and color, elaborate living urns, lavish lampshades for the place of some sea god, miniature Hindu temples, gorgeous drag queens of the deep, otherworldly amphoras from the bottom of this spectacular world. A century-old annual report by one of the greatest public-good institutions our civilization has produced — New York’s Cooper Union, […]
“Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.” In the 1850s, Emily Dickinson’s 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 […]
A subtle celebration of the terrifying tenderness that makes life barely survivable but also makes it worth living. “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum observed in contemplating how to live with our […]