"We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go." | Continue reading
It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but i … | Continue reading
"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task." | Continue reading
"We need detachment... as much as we need engagement in our lives... transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear." | Continue reading
"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person." | Continue reading
"My life... runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment." | Continue reading
The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky e … | Continue reading
"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity." | Continue reading
"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning." | Continue reading
"I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation." | Continue reading
"Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world." | Continue reading
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light." | Continue reading
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the meas … | Continue reading
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy d … | Continue reading
“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?” In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations, science could tell us nothing about the spiri … | Continue reading
"To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.” | Continue reading
"You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative." | Continue reading
"I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time." | Continue reading
"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything." | Continue reading
It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of sufferin … | Continue reading
"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined." | Continue reading
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 b … | Continue reading
"Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds." | Continue reading
It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard to bear. Such sentiments are errors of prox … | Continue reading
"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves." | Continue reading
"Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came." | Continue reading
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own … | Continue reading
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in suc … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion … | Continue reading
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship." | Continue reading
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
"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." | Continue reading
"Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love." | Continue reading
This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass. With Leaves of Grass already printed — by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet’s own expense — Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon book into the common … | Continue reading
"You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love." | Continue reading
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars." | Continue reading
"If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others." | Continue reading
"If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God... he does not come to us from books, he lives within us... This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing." | Continue reading
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity." | Continue reading
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 extraordi … | Continue reading
"Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds." | Continue reading
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life … | Continue reading
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my … | Continue reading
The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ide … | Continue reading
"Everything impinges on everything else... Everything is potentially everywhere." | Continue reading
“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.” And yet we do go back, over and over. The tragic flaw of our species is the pr … | Continue reading