We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindness. It has to do with their capacity to give, and also to receive. It has to do with their courage of uncertainty. And yet like all the great truths, the essence of a person, the goodness of a person, is both clear and ineffable. In the bleak Siberian winter of 1856, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) — thirty-five, dreaming… read article

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy."

Recovering the "forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence" alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.

Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won. We have dreamt up origin myths and cosmological models, built the Taj Mahal and the Large Hadron Collider, to fathom where we came from and where we are going. We have invented mathematics to describe the mystery we live in and poetry to describe the mystery we are. But beneath it all, we are born knowing — though we spend our lives unlearning — the elemental truth about us: A human being is a… read article

"The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart."

“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.”

It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of its own, folding like flesh, bending like mind. I pushed and despaired, pushed and despaired, until, exhausted and exasperated, I gave up and simply let my hands follow the momentum of the clay, saying “YES” to its will. And then, magic: I watched the vessel turn into what I could have never imagined, never created by force: an enormous seashell, a… read article

"The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia."

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."

"How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?"

"Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A: Living in fear."

There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wonder, like enchantment, is not something you can control or plan for or will — it is something that befalls you, overcomes you, pours upon you spontaneous and unbidden. Paradoxically, what makes such spontaneity possible is structure — an organizing principle for the hours of the day that makes room, and reserves it, for these moments of magic. This is not simple to configure and not… read article

"A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity."

Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca. The secret to these staggering feats is not brute force but strategy and synchrony. Beneath the shimmering surface that divides us from… read article

"Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life? Despite all the technologies of thought and feeling we have invented to divine an answer — philosophy and poetry, scripture and self-help — life stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival. Beneath the overstory of one hundred trillion synapses, the overthinking animal keeps losing its way in the wilderness… read article

The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others. We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation — religion to save us from our sins, therapy to save us from our traumas, marriage to save us from our loneliness — in order to salve our… read article

"Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair."

"It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little."

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most passionate letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Because we are social apes who descended from the trees and invented language to tell each other what we see, saying is a way of seeing. To name something is to instate it in the family of things, to make it a node in the relational web we call reality. A word can be a pinhole, pinching a vista of complexity… read article

"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life."

Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tells us back to ourselves, and like every story, it can be true or false. Love is the most powerful enchantment we know, the most transformative if true and the most dangerous if false. “When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it,” W.H. Auden observed in one of the most insightful things I have ever read, adding the haunting… read article

"It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"There are more things ... likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality."

To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly self-consistent — the impossibility of that is the price of our complex consciousness — but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself about who you are. There is a… read article

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to ourselves, helps us tell each other what it is like to be alive. It is not simple work, for its raw material is complexity. It is not easy work, for it demands a constant balancing act between passion and precision. Like most labors of the disciplined imagination we call creativity, it may not… read article

"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."

"Many of [life's] big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself."

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore.” Unlike her staunchly secularized contemporaries, who shuddered to speak of the soul for fear of being seen as anti-intellectual, Woolf devoted her life to communicating from and with “all these wayward parts… read article

Exploring the intersection of time and decision-making to shine a light on what it means to be human.

"I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing."

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes. Another time, on the train with a poet friend, none of the other passengers could have known that behind her faraway look she was doing the invisible labor that would eventually win her the Pulitzer. “Artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are,” the visionary theater director… read article

"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 hardest battle which any human being can fight."

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 to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by… read article

Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work. The notion of a “workaholic,” often worn as a badge on the lapel of the modern ego, presupposes someone who makes work the central axis of life at the expense of living. The very question of “work/life balance,” inherited from the industrial model of labor, asks us to live in parts — a portion of the person doing the working, another doing… read article

"Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing... is ours, except time."

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about… read article

We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma — losses painful precisely because it could be otherwise. We can lose people to death — losses painful because it can’t and never again will be otherwise. Of all our possible losses, the loss of a parent is the least evitable and the most complicated, for it is the most primal, most charged with the complexities… read article

Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the atmosphere of now, and yet our lives are the story we constellate from the signals of bygone experience across the sky of time. To be truly alive is to inhabit the… read article

There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and… read article

"If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked."

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust. But it is our true promises — those we have every intention of keeping — that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust. Even the most sincere promise… read article

"Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern... the whole world is a work of art... there is no Shakespeare... no Beethoven... no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself... You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow..."

In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collection that gave us his uncommonly insightful meditation on fairy tales, the language of fantasy, and why there is no such thing as writing “for children.” He did love the book, so he agreed. But after two years of uneasy work on it, he finally conceded it was a betrayal of his lifelong credo that editorial introductions are an intrusion on the reader’s joy in… read article

"There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking... Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust."

On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief.

"Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul."

How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world.

"By reaching beyond the brain... we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone."