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Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem
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 does by the Burying…
Wendell Berry on Where Our Loved Ones Gone Go
To love is to sign a contract with loss. To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even when the slender…
How to Harness Your Existential Wanderlust
"Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you... until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that."
Albert Camus on Stubbornness and Creativity
"There is no greatness without a little stubbornness... Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity."
The Relationship Between Comedy, Democracy, and AI
“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds,” Viktor Frankl wrote in recalling the role of humor as a lifeline to sanity and survival in the Holocaust. Humor is a fundamental human freedom…
Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing
Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process…
Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones
How to become an "antischolar" in a culture that treats knowledge as "an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order."
The Generosity of Selfishness: C.S. Lewis on How to Be Interesting
Our lives are defined not by what we have but what we give — on what and whom we spend our energy and time, how we share our material possessions and our mental powers, what we do with our gifts. “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in…
The Souls of Animals
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” Here was…
No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on Loss and the Meaning of Life
"We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
The Founding Father of Neuroscience on Solitude, the Search for Truth, and the Ideal Environment for Breakthroughs
"Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!"
I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio the Consciousness of the Body
"Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity."
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."
The Art of Advancing with Age: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."
Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
In 1824, studying a set of large fossil bones discovered in a quarry near Oxford two centuries earlier, the English theologian, geologist, and paleontologist William Buckland kept looking at the fragment of the lower jaw. Something didn’t add up. As he examined it more closely, he realized these…
Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Moving Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a Lifetime of Sorrow in the Making
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude
"There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone."
Meteor of Joy: The Young People’s Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations
Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent than any of our…
Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song
"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."
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