Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPoetry “I Go Down to the Shore”: Natascha McElhone Reads Mary Oliver’s Spare, Splendid Antidote to Melancholy and Personal Misery Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaConsolation for the waves of sorry from the waves of the sea. “Let us… seek peace… near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry...
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaCulture Proust on the Essence of Creativity and the Hallmark of Artistic Genius Brain Pickings by Maria Popova“Genius [consists] in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.” The word empathy entered the popular lexicon in the early twentieth century as a term to describe the imaginative...
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaCosmicThe Sun, the Shadow, and the Unselved Self: Helen Macdonald on Eclipses as an Antidote to Ideologies of Otherness and a to Brain Pickings by Maria Popova“A total eclipse wreaks havoc on your sense of self, on rational individuality.” Just when you begin rueing that nothing original could possibly remain to be written about the cosmic spectacle of a total...
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaCultureThe Love of Life in the Face of Death: Keith Haring on Self-Doubt, the Fragility of Being, and Creativity as the Antidote Brain Pickings by Maria Popova“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the...
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPoetry Of Owls and Roses: Mary Oliver on Happiness, Terror, and the Sublime Interconnectedness of Life Brain Pickings by Maria Popova“The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.” “Go to the limits of your longing… Let everything happen to you: beauty...
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaJames Baldwin Coming Out in the Time of COVID: A 90-Year-Old Man’s Moving Conversation with His Daughter During the Quarantine Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaA touching elegy for what lives on the other side of lifelong heartbreak. “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...
