Brainpickings

“Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games.” The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want but knowing what we want, for it requires the whole blooming buzzing confusion of knowing who and what we are — the great question we are always answering with our lives

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” “In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed

“In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.” Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of the human world with its echo chamber of judgments and opinions — a kind of rerooting in one’s deepest self-knowledge, a relearning of how to simply be oneself, one’s most

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” “Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped,” Carl Sagan urged in his beautiful and timely case for moving beyond us vs. them and marrying conviction with compassion. But what does kindness mean, really, and how does it manifest? The measure of true kindness — which is different from nicety, different from politeness — is

One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the Andes towered over me like the stone thrones of gods, snow-capped over the oracle eye of the glacial lake, blue as Uranus, their scale so incomprehensible you are no longer a person but a particle, a mote of dust in the eye of eternity; the trees are no lo

“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place… do the next thing with diligence and devotion.” In recent seasons of being, I have had occasion to reflect on the utterly improbable trajectory of my life, plotted not by planning but by living. We long to be given the next step and the route to the horizon, allaying our anxiety with the illusion of a destination somewhere beyond the vista of our present life. But the hardest real

“Come with me. I’ll teach you the flowers and the stars.” Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we long for — tenderness to salve our bruising contact with reality, to warm us awake from the frozen stupor of near-living. Tenderness is what permeates Platero and I (public library) by the Nobel-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (December 23, 1881–May 29, 1958) — part love le

You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal. I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum (public library) flits

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

“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so that we may sieve the salient from the infinite, equipped it with attention so that we may narrow the aperture of perception to take in only what is relevant to us from the immense vista of now. The astonishing

Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of entropy or another, culminating with life itself. Suppose we agree that, as Rilke so passionately insisted, “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimat

In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed to be a writer since childhood, she seized the chance to learn from one of the world’s greatest storytellers. After a decade as a struggling obscure writer, Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894)

Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, in a whisper that soon became a symphony, life arose to give us such ceaseless wonders as the ghost pipe and the ginkgo, the bowerbird and the eye of the scallop. Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate t

Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather than a natural function of being alive, of feeling life deeply and living it fully. All our sorrows have been wasted if we have not learned to suffer and to be surprised by the door at the end of our suffering, on the other wide of which is simply the world, which keeps on worlding. It is not heali

Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks of character and conduct, comporting themselves in a manner painfully inferior to what you know them to be capable of. What to do? The problem of whether and how people change is the eternal problem of being alive. Changing our own ways of being is difficult enough, prey enough to paradox and peril; c

“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denia

Elizabeth Bishop’s memorial service opened with a reflection by her partner Alice — whose near-loss inspired one of the greatest poems ever written — that included what Elizabeth had always told her was “the only sensible advice she ever heard,” from a man she never met — one of her two favorite authors. Sydney Smith By the time a friend’s teenage daughter begged his advice on how to cope with a visitation of the darkness we now call depression, the Ang

When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the qu

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet. When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in soli

“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.” Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child. Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriend Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one o