Maria Popova

You had me at trees →

Published August 4, 2023  ·  All posts on Aug 4  ·  

Trees often have my attention. I find myself thinking about the spot where a tree is standing. Whether its seed fell there, or someone planted it, that spot is it. The tree is simply going to stand there as the sun whips across the sky thousands of times. I imagine the tree turning its leaves quickly (in tree time) to catch what light it can during each flash overhead.

Intrigued by this unheard of species, Wang set out to see it for himself and to collect specimens, which he shared with colleagues. One of them was Hsen Hsu Hu. A diligent paleobotanist, he had read of Miki’s fossil discovery five years earlier. As soon as he saw the peculiar needle pattern, Hu recognized the “water fir” as a Metasequoia.

~ Maria Popova from, The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War – The Marginalian

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There’s a lot of interesting leaps in the story Popova shares. Across a war, across two cultures, but the vast time this tree has crossed is insane. We have fossils of this tree… and we still have the live tree. My mind boggles.

But mostly, Popova had my attention at trees.

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Self-understanding →

Published June 30, 2023  ·  All posts on Jun 30  ·  ,

I’m often paused, even paralyzed, by uncertainty. My hope is that this is a sign that I’ve developed some (originally absent, apparently) humility. I swing wildly between feeling confident in simply doing “the work” simply for the sake of experiencing the process, and panicking in the face of self-criticism for wasting my talents and resources. Literally, the only thing which saves me is the knowledge that it takes a significant amount of self-awareness to even think to write a paragraph such as this.

Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations — they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

~ David Bowie from, David Bowie on Creativity and His Advice to Artists – The Marginalian

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I’m not sure it’s terribly dangerous. But it’s certain that I get twitchy and restless if I go searching for others’ approval. It feels far better to sit down, shut up, and start. Actually, it’s really a double-negative: It feels far less worse to sit down, shut up, and start than it does to seek others’ approval for whatever it is I have the urge to work on.

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Extraneous as passing fiction →

Published May 5, 2023  ·  All posts on May 5  ·  ,

After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds the knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.

~ Beryl Markham from, A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night

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As if there’s anything I could write which would add to that.

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Ruh-roh… that’s me →

Published January 9, 2023  ·  All posts on Jan 9  ·  , ,

The ways in which we are all susceptible to drowning ourselves into drama, and what it takes to float free, is what Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores in her subtle, splendid 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea — the story of a talented but complacent playwright approaching the overlook of life, who is ultimately overcome by his tragic flaw: Despite his obsessive self-reflection (or perhaps precisely because of it), his egotism ultimately eclipses his creative spirit — that brightest and most generous part of us, the part rightly called our gift, the part that extends the outstretched hand of sympathy and wonder we call art and invites, in Iris Murdoch’s lovely phrase, “an occasion for unselfing.”

~ Maria Popova from Iris Murdoch on the Myth of Closure and the Beautiful, Maddening Blind Spots of Our Self-Knowledge

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I’m not a playwright—but the rest of that character seems too like me. “Drowning ourselves in drama…” “…obsessive self-reflection…” “…egotism ultimately eclipses his creative spirit…” Methinks The Sea The Sea would be a good cautionary tale for me to consume forthwith.

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Consistency →

Published December 17, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 17  ·  ,

If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.

~ Maria Popova

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How did this get lost? →

Published November 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Nov 11  ·  

I have taken as my province to restore to the light the art of exercise, once so highly esteemed, and now plunged into deepest obscurity and utterly perished… Why no one else has taken this on, I dare not say. I know only that this is a task of both maximum utility and enormous labor.

~ Girolamo Mercuriale from, The Science of Working Out the Body and the Soul: How the Art of Exercise Was Born, Lost, and Rediscovered

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That straight–up sounds like the opening of an Edgar Allan Poe novel about a man whose previously unheard of uncle bequeaths him a map to a dark continent . . . No wait. Giro there is talking about exercise. Enlightening installment from Popova, as usual.

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You had me at “tree” →

Published October 2, 2022  ·  All posts on Oct 2

“A tree is a little bit of the future,” Wangari Maathai reflected as she set out to plant the million trees that won her the Nobel Peace Prize. But a tree is also an enchanted portal to the past — a fractal reach beyond living memory, beyond our human histories, into the “saeculum” of time.

~ Maria Popova from, How to Face the Years with Confidence: The Mystery of the World’s Most Majestic Tree – The Marginalian

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I recently flew from Philadelphia to Seattle. At one point in the journey I gazed down at the Cascade Mountains from the miraculous perch of technology that is an airliner, staring silently at countless trees in countless valleys.

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Logical conclusions →

Published September 22, 2022  ·  All posts on Sep 22  ·  

In its original Latin use, the word genius was more readily applied to places — genius loci: “the spirit of a place” — than to persons, encoded with the reminder that we are profoundly shaped by the patch of spacetime into which the chance-accident of our birth has deposited us, our minds porous to the ideological atmosphere of our epoch. It is a humbling notion — an antidote to the vanity of seeing our ideas as the autonomous and unalloyed products of our own minds.

~ Maria Popova from, Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence – The Marginalian

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This is a delightful meander across time and authors.

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Saeculum →

Published July 31, 2022  ·  All posts on Jul 31

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.

~ Rebecca Solnit from, Rebecca Solnit on Trees and the Shape of Time – The Marginalian

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Trees are simply magical. Carl Sagan made a point in the original Cosmos series that everything uses the same basic machinery to read, and write using the same four “letters” of DNA. In a very real sense, trees are us with some different initial inputs. (Setting aside the more ephemeral, yet critical ways where we differ starkly from trees, like degree of consciousness, self-awareness, spirit, soul?) Stand next to an old enough tree and one is invariably transported to a higher level of thinking about being.

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The price of the ticket →

Published July 22, 2022  ·  All posts on Jul 22  ·  

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

~ James Baldwin from, The Light Between Us – The Marginalian

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I’m not sure how many things I’ve linked to over on Popova’s Marginalian project. By now you should be directly following it and reading everything she’s publishing. I’m frozen by indecision; there are so countless many superlative books, and Nothing Personal is yet another one. Drat!

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