Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Bruce Lee, chance, love, black holes, constraint as a catalyst of creativity, and a whisper of Whitman. I have moved through this fourteenth year of Brain Pickings — a devastating year for the world we share, a discomposing year for my private world — by leaning on the writings and wisdom […]
Why our instinctive efforts to salve another’s sadness tend to only deepen their helpless anguish and broaden the abyss between us and them — and what to do instead. “Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted,” Elizabeth Gilbert reflected in the wake of losing the love of her life. “Grief […]
A song of praise for “all souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different… all nations, colors… all identities that have existed or may exist… all lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future.” We live our lives by tidal forces — vast oceanic waves of change and chance sweeping us together, […]
“In time of struggle… all people think about love.” “My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?” Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) asks with the large forthright eyes of her words in one of the most beautiful and penetrating books ever written on any subject. “What is your face like, your […]
“The final and absolute test of good government is the well-being and contentment of the people — not the extent of empire or the abundance of the revenue and the trade.” The polymathic British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (January 8, 1823‐November 7, 1913) is best known as the man evolution left behind. While Wallace arrived […]
“Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well.” Decades before Simone de Beauvoir contemplated how chance and choice converge to make us who we are from the fortunate platform of old age, the eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath — who never reached that fortunate […]
A humanistic love letter to who and what we are, together on this lonesome, wild, and wondrous rock adrift around a common star. When the Voyager sailed into the unknown to take its pioneering photographic survey of our cosmic neighborhood, Carl Sagan petitioned NASA to indulge his inspired, entirely unscientific, entirely poetic idea of turning […]
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) wrote to his law partner three weeks before his thirty-third birthday. […]
An ancient antidote to our greatest vulnerability from the great Buddhist teacher and Zen elder Thich Nhat Hanh. “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events […]
A painted dance in praise of the best we can do. In the final years of a long life animated by optimism as a catalyst of democracy and the spring of action toward justice, Walt Whitman’s aged baritone unspools from the only surviving recording of his voice to read a verse from one of his […]