The Creative Power of Uncertainty: Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
"Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous ‘I don't know.’"
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artculturecreativityphilosophypoetryWislawa SzymborskawritingpoliticspsychologybooksWendell BerryBuddhismStephen BatchelorBarry Lopez
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Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its healthy
The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back."
Barry Lopez on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place."
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness
"If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration."
The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigat
How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commo
The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form
"If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world."
The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing
"...only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."
How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love
"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come... We live everything as it comes, without warning."
A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.” We know that loving anything or anyone is a
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How a Forgotten Medieval Woman Gave Groups of Birds Their Strange Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, c
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