How a refugee and a lesbian lifted humanity from the age of superstition to the age of reason and pioneered the subversive art of telling our own stories by our own truth. “To create today is to create dangerously,” Albert Camus told a gathering of young people at the peak of the Cold War, shortly […]
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.” “I function only by falling in love: with French and France; […]
“We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But… it shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.” The composite creation of a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a […]
An inspired signal from that sacred place where the spirit of wakeful action meets the bone of ancient wisdom. “Every story is a story of water,” Native American poet Natalie Diaz wrote in her stunning ode to her heritage, the language of the Earth, and the erasures of history. We ourselves are a story of […]
“In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.” I have learned that the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold. I have learned that most things in life are better and more beautiful not linear but fractal. Love especially. In a testament to Aldous […]
“Try to accept this fat red hurt is your starting point.” “Love your heart. For this is the prize,” Toni Morrison wrote in an exquisite passage from Beloved as she considered the body as an instrument of sanity, joy, and self-respect a century after William James asserted in his groundbreaking work on how our bodies […]
“If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageous, no one is going to do it for us.” A century after the trailblazing conservationist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” and half a century before Maya […]
The story of a forgotten visionary suspended between science and spiritual yearning, who inspired Kant and anticipated Hubble. Thomas Wright (September 22, 1711–February 25, 1786) grew up with a passion for learning and a speech impediment that made the rural English schoolroom a gauntlet. When he set about educating himself at home, his father declared […]
A rare and rapturous glimpse of the slow double embrace by which some of Earth’s tenderest creatures make more of themselves. In February 2018, I found myself on a friend’s fruit farm in Kauai, having gratefully escaped the short bleak days of Brooklyn winter to finish Figuring. Each day, being a creature of loops and […]
A bittersweet signal from the discomposing territory between reason and hope. This essay is excerpted from the thirteenth chapter of Figuring, titled “The Banality of Survival.” In the spring of 1849, ten years before On the Origin of Species shook the foundation of humanity’s understanding of life, the polymathic astronomer John Herschel — coiner of […]