“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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“…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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]