A playful and poignant what-if for the planet. This is the eighth of nine installments in the animated interlude 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 previous installments here. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER EIGHT The […]
“Time renders most individual moments meaningless… but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux.” In her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key, the trailblazing philosopher Susanne Langer defined music as “a laboratory for feeling and time.” But perhaps it is […]
“The calm deposition of the rings… has gone on millimeter by millimeter for millennium after millennium — advancing ripples in the tide of time.” “A tree is a little bit of the future,” Wangari Maathai reflected as she set out to plant the million trees that won her the Nobel Peace Prize. But a tree […]
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” This is the seventh of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. (The live season is back on.) See the previous […]
“To love anybody is to expect something from him, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in someway to make it possible for him to fulfill this expectation.” The capacity for hope is not merely a hallmark of human consciousness — it is the supreme umbilical cord between […]
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her short, stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives. To become precious — that is the work of […]
“When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star… beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is.” When Nietzsche weighed our human notion of truth, he regarded it as […]
Aristotle, Alice, and a back flap. “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote as he contemplated the meaning of life in one of humanity’s greatest works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. The challenge, of course, is that what is essential — about the totality of life, as about […]
“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” This is the sixth of nine installments in the animated interlude 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 […]
“The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote in the closing lines of his […]