A rose is a rose is a revolution. In his thrice-revised and expanded autobiographies, Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Bailey, recounts changing his surname multiple times to cover his fugitive trail. When the time came to settle on a permanent name, he invited the man in whose home was taking refuge — a free black man […]
How our cosmic improbability confers dignity and meaning upon our shared existence. “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller, who lived to nearly 100, wrote in her gorgeous poem “Immortality” a century and a half after a young artist pointed the world’s largest telescope at the cosmos to […]
“We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart… If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.” It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths — and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to […]
“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.” This essay is adapted from Figuring. In June of 1952, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service received a letter of resignation from its […]
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” We, none of us, choose the century we are born in, or the skin we are born in, or the chromosomes we are born with. We don’t choose the incredibly narrow band of homeostasis within which we can be alive at all — in bodies […]
A resaning antidote to one of the most dangerous and damaging romantic myths in our culture. All love is asymmetry. Since love is not a state but a skill to be mastered, not a noun but a verb, all loving is the skillful harmonizing of asymmetries across the scales of personhood and preference between those […]
“Within every color lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture… The right words can come only out of the perfect space of a place you love.” “The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness; the green water of the coastal areas, […]
“Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern.” “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” Mark Strand wrote in his splendid poem “The Everyday Enchantment of Music,” touching on the materiality of that enchantment: Music is matter dancing in the mind. Music has a profound spiritual […]
“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief.” Grief is the shadow love casts in the light of loss. The grander the love, the vaster the shadow. So much of who we are — who we discover ourselves to be — takes shape in that umbral space as we fumble for some edge to hold […]
Encounters with the beautiful and the sublime in the science of “the single most dangerous object known to humanity.” On July 13, 1862, while a young experiment in democracy was being ripped asunder by its first Civil War, The Springfield Republican reported a strange and wondrous celestial sighting in the undivided sky, as bright as […]