How Victorian astronomy helped decode the secret language of the seas. “Words are events, they do things, change things… they feed energy back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her uncommon ode to the magic of real communication. “They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” For […]
“Your imagination… is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence… a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.” Two years before she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom with her devotedly honed gift for mathematics to compose the world’s first computer program in a 65-page footnote, Ada Lovelace postulated in a letter that […]
“Whosoever… is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits… or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than… to compose himself to the learning of some art or science.” Epochs before modern neuroscience came to locate the crucible of consciousness in the body, centuries before William […]
A posy of subtle illumination from the garden of life. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” wrote Rumi. “Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.” Eight centuries later, we go on spending our lives trying to win something we don’t fully understand but are constantly defining, and we go on betting on […]
“Nothing in the upper world can compare with the luxury of this nether realm of the sea, with its colors, its atmosphere of mystery, of poise, and tranquility.” “Contemplating the teeming life of the shore,” the poetic marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote as she reckoned with the ocean and the meaning of life, “we have […]
“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive […]
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Decades into his long life, the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.” A generation later, the […]
“Let them not say: we did not see it. We saw.” The story goes that when a newspaper mistakenly printed his obituary in 1888, the Swedish entrepreneur and inventor Alfred Nobel, very much alive, was so horrified to see himself remembered as the “tradesman of death” for his inventions of dynamite and ballistic that he […]
“It has no shape but can take any shape… You can touch it, but you cannot hold it… It can slip through your fingers, like it’s nothing at all. But life would be unthinkable without it.” “If you turn your back to the blues and deny your dependence on them,” Ellen Meloy wrote in her […]
Life-tested wisdom on how to live from James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt. If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was right — he was — that philosophy is the art […]