2025-06-25 10:22:45
At the end of her trailblazing life, having swung open the gate of the possible for women in science with her famous comet discovery, astronomer Maria Mitchell confided in one of her Vassar students that she would rather have authored a great poem than discovered a comet.
A century later, a little girl named Vera had a flash of illumination while reading a children’s book about Maria Mitchell: her nightly pastime of gazing wondersmitten at the stars outside her bedroom window could become a life’s work, work that would culminate in one of the greatest revelations in the history of science.
Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter by studying the rotation of galaxies. “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” she reflected in her most personal interview — a playful echo of Keats’s poignant postulate that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
A decade after Vera Rubin returned her borrowed stardust to the universe, the observatory named in her honor opens its oracle eye to the cosmos and blinks back at us the mysteries of ten million bright galaxies. Atop one of the first images captured by the VRO’s 8.4-meter telescope — 678 exposures of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae taken over the course of seven hours, two trillion pixels of cosmic truth combined into a single gasp of beauty — I have remixed the text of the National Science Foundation press release into a poem using my bird divination process:
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2025-06-22 06:49:14
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone.
Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock.
Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain.
Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge.
Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.
A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”
Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.
OH, LOVELY ROCK
by Robinson JeffersWe stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.
A generation later, another great poet displaced from the bedrock of belonging by another world war tried to make sense of being human by turning to stone:
STONE
by Charles SimicGo inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill —
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.
And although we are “creatures shaped by the planet’s rocky logic,” we are also creatures shaped by the myriad mercies of time, saved over and over by the leap beyond logic that is trusting time.
FORGIVENESS
by Maria PopovaMay the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-06-20 00:10:33
The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect).
Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti, aged thirty-two, decides to write a book “against” death, defying it without denying it, this shadow of life that is also its spark, the very thing that makes it shimmer with aliveness. He would work on it for the next half century until his own death, filling two thousand pages with reflections and aphorisms posthumously distilled into The Book Against Death (public library).
Perhaps Canetti’s reckoning with death is so virtuosic in articulating the potency and poignancy of life because it keeps inverting the lens from the microscopic to the telescopic and back again as he mourns his mother and mourns the world. Everything is suddenly personal, his suffering a fractal of the suffering and everyone else’s suffering a mirror image of his own.
Coming to feel that “with every destroyed city a piece of his own life falls away,” he searches for the borders of compassion and finds none:
Am I Nuremberg? Am I Munich? I am every building in which children sleep. I am every open square across which feet scurry.
And yet alongside this overwhelming brokenness, so universal and therefore so intimate, is also a greater wholeness that he is, as all visionaries are, able to glimpse through the ruins:
Above the shattered world there stretches a pure blue heaven, which continues to hold it together.
It is this blue, this color of longing for life, that saturates the meaning of life amid the darkness of death. Three years into the war, he vows:
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death.
Not everyone, not even the great minds, had Canetti’s defiance. “We must love one another or die,” W.H. Auden had entreated humanity in one of the greatest poems ever written as the war was breaking out, and then, in what may be the most poignant one-word revision in the history of literature and one of the saddest in the history of the human spirit, he had rewritten that epitaphic last line in the wake of the war: “We must love one another and die.” While Auden was ceding his optimism, Muriel Rukeyser — as great a poet and a greater spirit — was celebrating a different vision of life beyond notions of triumph and defeat in one of the greatest books ever written: “All the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”
Canetti shares her lens on the political, but for him it is polished with the most deeply personal. In an entry from June 1942, he writes:
Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true.
[…]
Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.
Echoing Ernest Hemingway (“No one you love is ever dead,” he had written in a stirring letter of consolation to a bereaved friend) and echoing Emily Dickinson (“Each that we lose takes part of us / A crescent still abides / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides,” she had written in her reckoning with love and loss upon her own mother’s death), Canetti contemplates the immortality of love in the living:
The souls of the dead are in others, namely those left behind… Only the dead have lost one another completely.
In the prime of his life, he is already facing the losses that loom over anyone who loves:
I want anything to do with fewer and fewer people, mainly so that I can never get over the pain of losing them.
Not knowing that in the decades ahead he would lose the love of his life, marry again and lose her too, lose his younger brother, lose a retinue of friends — some to mass murder, some to suicide, some to the entropy that will take us all if we are lucky enough to grow old — he writes from the fortunate platform of his healthy thirties:
We carry the most important thing around inside ourselves for forty or fifty years before we risk articulating it. Therefore there is no way to measure all that is lost with those who die too early. Everyone dies early.
And yet his mother’s death is precisely what awakened Canetti to life — his own life and the life of the world. (“Death is our friend,” Rilke had written when Canetti was a teenager, “precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”) Beneath it all pulsates his unflinching intimacy with the elemental reality of living:
We do not die of sadness — out of sadness we live on.
At the crux of Canetti’s disquisition on the menace and meaning of death is a passionate inquiry into what it means to be alive. A decade before Edward Abbey contemplated how to live and how (not) to die and a decade after Simone de Beauvoir composed her resolutions for a life worth living, Canetti itemizes the priorities of a good life:
To live at least long enough to know all human customs and events; to retrieve all of life that has passed, since we are denied that which will come; to pull yourself together before you disappear; to be worthy of your own birth; to think of the sacrifices made at the expense of others’ every breath; to not glorify suffering, even though you are alive because of it; to only keep for yourself that which cannot be given away until it is ripe for others and hands itself on; to hate every person’s death as if it were your own, and to at last be at peace with everything, but never with death.
Complement these passages from The Book Against Death with a heron’s antidote to death, then revisit Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness, Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, and Alan Lightman on what happens when we die.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-06-17 21:21:53
Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates our losses of perspective, nothing consecrates these transient lives bookended by not yet and never again, more than broadening our time horizon until the vista of our own lives becomes not a discrete point but part of a great continuity — one that comes alive in this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:
THE WHOLE OF IT
by Hannah FriesIf you step back, you can see it all
on the horizon: your mother’s death, the children
grown, their smooth eyelids crossed with veins
like saffron filaments. Further still, and see
your smiling grandmother treading the cold ocean,
tiny lakes in her collarbones, your great-
great grandchildren drawing their names
in the sand with sticks. The seas
rising and falling, ice scraping the earth,
and pockets of life surviving — lee sides, hot springs,
protected places. First light on the first day
of your life, and first light of first stars.
And in this way, every death, each apparent ending,
might, in the mind of spacetime, be woven
into one memory, so that always is
this tree, and the long days of falling in love
over the intricate pattern of bark and leaf,
and the first green cell learning to swallow sun.
Couple with Hannah’s magnificent poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on befriending time.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-06-13 07:11:18
The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love.
It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme.
We need silence.
We need solitude.
The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls.
Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee “red-cheeked and glowing with life” and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that “keeps shining, like a candle in the fog.”
He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality:
The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I’ve never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an “occasion for unselfing,” in Iris Murdoch’s lovely term, is no small gift — one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson’s lovely term, “active surrender.” We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery — which is “not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop” but “active and thrumming, almost palpable” — and it comes to him redoubled:
Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.
[…]
Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
And then the world intrudes — his mother is felled by stroke, a fire consumes his home, a pandemic engulfs the globe. But what silence and solitude end up teaching him, end up teaching anyone who enters them, is that what seems like an assault on our best laid plans, an obstacle along the way of life, is the way itself: experiences that wake us up from “sleepwalking through life” and bring us closer not only to ourselves but to each other. Iyer writes:
In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them.
[…]
As the days mount in silence, I’m quickly freed of most of my preconceptions. A monk, I see, is not someone who wishes to live peacefully and alone; in truth, he exists in a communal web of obligations as unyielding as in any workplace, and continuing till his final breath.
In the fathoming of silence, he learns that “the best in us lies deeper than our words.” In the austerity of the monastic life, he learns that “luxury is defined by all you don’t need to long for,” that retreat “is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection.” He reflects:
One kind of asceticism comes in the letting go of certainties, and of any notion that you know more than life does.
There is but one possible action out of that realization: surrender, which he discovers it the only point of being there — “simply, systematically picking apart every inconstancy to remind us that we cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.”
In the end, we are reminded that to be in silence, to be in solitude, to be in surrender amid a fragile world is not defeatism but an act of courage and resistance, not escapism but the widest-eyed realism we have:
Some nights, of course, I still wake up in the dark, unable to sleep… Chaos and suffering seem endless. Then I recall the sun burning on the water far below and feel part of something larger in which nothing is absolute or final.
[…]
I watch the golden light of early morning irradiate the hills, while valleys remain in deepest shadow. I turn to see the sun scintillant on the ocean in the distance, the sky so sharp and blue I can make out the ridges in the islands far beyond.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2025-06-12 03:31:38
Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of the situation, the complexity of the wider context, what it’s like to be the other person) with the will to be right. Our duels of self-righteousness can be fought over whose turn it is to take out the trash or who should govern the country, they can take place on the scale of the planet in the language of nuclear weapons or on the scale of the kitchen table in the code language of lovers, but they are always a betrayal of our deepest humanity — the capacity to understand, the longing to be understood, the knowledge that everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they’ve got and the cards they’ve been dealt.
Corinna Luyken, maker of tender and thoughtful illustrated aids for living, animates the absurdity of these duels with playfulness and charm in The Arguers (public library).
The story begins as a bickering over whether a brush or a comb would better detangle the king’s beard and ends up, in the wildfire way of righteousness, as an argument about everything and a national sport.
Soon they argued all the time,
until no one could remember
when the arguing had started
or over what,
or by whom.
They argue with each other and with the flowers and the stones.
They grow so skilled at it — “they could argue forward and backward, right side up and upside down… in fog and sun and sleet and snow” — that the king and queen decide to hold a contest for their nation or arguers.
On the day of the contest, things take an unintended turn.
The story ends with a wink, but is at heart a warning: arguing is counterfeit problem-solving, an argument is a barricade against understanding, and self-righteousness is a fist you open to find your kindness crushed.
Couple The Arguers with philosopher Daniel Dennett on how to criticize with kindness, then revisit Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.