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Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on the Art of Presence and the “Moments...
In praise of “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” “Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains...
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19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living
We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life...
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Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park...
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get...
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Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship...
It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all...
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Matrescence: The Cellular Science of the Unself
One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the...
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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...
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Insomnia and the Secret Life of Ideas: Kafka on the Relationship Between...
Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is...
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Against Self-Improvement: Adam Phillips on the Danger of Treating Ourselves...
“So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us.” “I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a...
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Obsidian and the Birds: An Odyssey of Wonder from the Aztecs to the Quantum...
A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the...
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Miss Leoparda: A Painted Parable of How to Remake a World
When told that there are only two options on the table and when both are limiting, most people, conditioned by the option dispensary we call society, will choose the lesser of the two limitations. Some...
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The Strength to Remember and the Strength to Forget: James Baldwin on What...
“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.” It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our...
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Any Common Desolation
“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...
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How to Meet Your Mystery: Thomas Merton on Solitude and the Soul
“It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful...
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How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons...
John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom...
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The Half Room of Living and Loving
When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of...
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Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of...
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion,” Carl Sagan told his best interviewer. “That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.” We have...
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On Play
The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and...
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Walt Whitman on Owning Your Life
At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest...
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Carl Linnaeus’s Flower Clock
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had...
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Lights On: Consciousness, the Mystery of Felt Experience, and the Fundamental...
When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down...
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