“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 […]
“For this we go out dark nights, searching… for signs of unseen things… Let there be swarms of them, enough for immortality, always a star where we can warm ourselves.” This is the fourth of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder […]
The metaphysical made physical in a symphonic celebration of imagination, collaboration, and the human heart. “Time is a dictator, as we know it,” Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003) observed in her soulful 1969 meditation on time. “Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive?” If time is […]
“The over-all number of minds is just one.” “Our minds are all threaded together,” the twenty-one-year-old Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in the first years of the twentieth century, “& all the world is mind.” Those were the dawning days of quantum mechanics, just beginning to illuminate a whole new order of golden threads […]
Wisdom on the elementary particles of the creative life and our shared humanity from Alain de Botton, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Alexander, and other visionaries of our time. If we are not at least a little abashed by the people we used to be, the voyage of life has halted in the windless bay of complacency. […]
A look into “the very heart of nature’s double nature.” “To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her pre-ecological poem about ecology, “is profound Responsibility.” A century later, in one of the most poetic and existentially ravishing children’s* books of all time, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made his hero’s central preoccupation the responsibility for a […]