Brain Pickings

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement a

Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that magnifies the concerns of the present, not through the telescope that squints at the distant reaches of the future, but through a periscope that rises above the surface of the mainstream to see past the horizon of the era’s givens, into the possibilities of tim

We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, o

“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else … may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.” “I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak once said in an interview. “I don’t write for children,” he told Colbert. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” This sentiment — the idea that designating certain types of lite

At the hazy dawn of the twentieth century, through the byways of mental meandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein arrived at a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office — a new relationship between space and time, the warp and weft of a single fabric that hammocks energy and matter into the lucid dream of reality. It took years for Arthur Eddington’s dramatic eclipse expedition to confirm Einstein’s theory by watchi

It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have given shape to in laws and labels, weights and balances, hierarchies and categories. It has served us well, this instinct to categorize in order to contain, giving us music, the laws

“In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism.” I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destru

“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook one spring day in 1840. “It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena. It is apt to create a substance where at first there was a mere shadow… It is best not to strive to interpr

The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and extraordinary passion, may have taken less time had she not needed to supplement her paltry elementary schoolteacher income by tilling potato fields and pruning plum trees in rural Bulgaria. Born in the final years of the soverei

“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” Few are those whose contribution to humanity — be it art, or music, or literature, or some other enchantment — fills the heart with uncontainable gratitude for their very existence. Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) — one of the greatest poets of all time, and perhaps the greatest of our time — is one such blessing of a writer. She, the patron saint of paying compassio

“These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.” Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which you return again and again, and which returns you to your life refreshed each time. For me, The Little Prince has been one, and Leaves of Grass, and I Put a Spell on You, and Spiegel im Spiegel. Wil

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins. Leafing through the ballots, one other name appear

How a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor co-created the modern concept of empathy. Empathy, an orientation of spirit decidedly different from sympathy, has become central to our moral universe. We celebrate it as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, and the gateway to reaching our highest human potential — a centerpiece of our very humanity. And yet this conception of empathy is a little more than a century old and originated in art: It only entered the

“I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” “Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” proclaimed a 1924 guide to the art of living. That one of the greatest scientists of our time should be one of our greatest teacher in that art is nothing short of a blessing for which we can only be grateful — and that’s precisely what Oliver Sacks (July 9

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and ra

“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized ti

“We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.” Tucked into a corner of the Library of Congress is the Densmore Collection of cylinder phonographs — a bygone medium containing the living songs of an ancient culture. In the early twentieth century, the U.S. government continued its assault on Native Americans by demanding they relinquish their tribal languages and belief systems, teach their c

It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The anci

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More o

“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.” “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited with proclaiming, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Intelligence, of cours