“Mingle the starlight with your lives, and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” This is the third of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being. Here are Chapter 1 (the […]
Tag: Books
John Lennon on the Torture of Excellence and the Vital Role of Invisible Incubation in the Creative Process
“Every song I’ve ever written has been absolute torture… except for the ten or so songs the gods give you and that come out of nowhere.” “I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time, sometimes a very long time, before I set them down,” Beethoven, having revolutionized music with his stubborn devotion […]
Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island
“These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.” Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which […]
My God, It’s Full of Stars: An Animated Serenade to Hubble and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe
“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” This is the second of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being. Here is Chapter 1. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN […]
Rebecca Solnit on Trees and the Saeculum of Time
“Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.” Two hundred and two years after Walt Whitman’s birth, I traveled to the granite emblem of his life and death. Standing sentinel across from the tomb’s entrance are two towering […]
The Animated Universe in Verse, Part 1: The Origin of Life and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson
How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.” The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on […]
Pattern, Perspective, and Trust: Barry Lopez on Storytelling
“It is through story… that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” We are self-contradictory creatures moving through a discontinuous world, glimpsing only fragments of reality. The hallmark of our species, the […]
For Warmth: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetic Antidote to Anger
How to keep your soul from leaving you. “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the finest advice on growing older. “You must do this every […]
Publisher pauses printing of Anne Frank book after allegations of “shoddy” research
Enlarge / Otto Frank’s copy of an anonymous note he received, allegedly identifying the person who betrayed the Frank family. The note is offered as evidence that a Jewish leader named Arnold van den Bergh was the most likely culprit in The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan. (credit: YouTube/60 Minutes/CBS) Last month, we […]
The Light That Bridges the Dark Expanse Between Lonelinesses: James Baldwin on How Long-Distance Love Illuminates the Power of All Love
“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the […]