Brainpickings

War is an ism — nationalism, dogmatism, capitalism — paid for by an is: the living beingness of human beings made a sacrificial offering to an ideology so powerful it has quelled the two things that make us most human: compassion and critical thinking. “Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so,” the visionary Kathleen Lonsdale wrote in what remains the

“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct.” “Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother in a beautiful letter about talking vs. doing and the human pursuit of greatness. “The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.” But what stands between the impulse for

“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” “We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives. When relationships collapse u

“You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive.” The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of

You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life. Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy fo

“Life [exists] only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.” “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver observed in her magnificent memoir of love and loss, “is only a report.” In Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (public library) — an extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of li

“In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.” I have learned that the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold. I have learned that most things in life are better and more beautiful not linear but fractal. Love especially. In a testament to Aldous Huxley’s astute insight that “all great truths are obvious truths but not all obvious truths are great truths,” the polymathic mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (Nove

We spend our lives searching for portals to the possible. They are rarely gates swung open for us by some great hand. Often, they are where we least expect them — in the chance encounter, in the small unconscious choice, at an inconvenient moment, in a quiet corner of the quotidian. Oftener still, they are the cracks where we have broken — broken the story, broken the ego, broken the pattern. If we are attentive enough and present enough, the shy light of curiosity is enough to begin

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.” “As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,” Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) counseled in his 1935 Esquire compendium of writing advice, addressed to an archetypal young correspondent but based on a real-life encounter that had taken place a year earlier. In 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson set out to meet his literary hero, hoping to

“The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom… is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.” “I have always had a quarrel with this country not only about race but about the standards by which it appears to live,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead as they sat down together to reimagine democracy for a post

“Sometimes I’m sad and I don’t know why. It’s just a cloud that comes along and covers me up.” “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion wrote after losing the love of her life. “The people we most love do become a physical part of us,” Meghan O’Rourke observed in her magnificent memoir of loss, “ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.” Those wildly unexpected dimensions of grief and the

“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.” A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its discomposing unlikeness to anything you have known before. Down, down you go into the depths of the unconscious, dark and fertile with the terror and longing that make for suffering, the surrender that makes for the end of suffering, not in resignation but in faith. It is then t

One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly

“Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person.” “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life as she contemplated how solitude enriches creative work. It’s a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrac

Against the morphological backdrop of the rest of nature, a giant pink bird on stilts sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll’s imagination. And yet flamingos came out of evolution’s laboratory, surprising and inevitable as the neocortex, so extravagant in their improbability that a group of them is called a flamboyance. But the flamboyance of flamingos does not come from within — it is acquired the way experience and life-history color a person. The story of how pink trave

In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.” The world reveals itself through our engagement with it — a truth as true in the “It for Bit” sense of physics as it in the Dzogchen sense of Tibetan Buddhism. It is the fundamental truth of our human experience. All cynicism is a denial of it. All hope is a tribute to it. This awareness pulsates throughout Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library)

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything t

“All you have is what you are, and what you give.” Simone Weil considered it the highest existential discipline to “make use of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us.” George Bernard Shaw saw suffering as our supreme conduit to empathy. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca observed before offering his millennia-old, timeless antidote to anxiety. And yet we do suffer and the pain incurred, whatever the suffering is grounded in, is real

Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more. Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — tr

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces i