Maria Popova on-- Virginia Woolf on Soul
Maria Popova via The Marginalian
”It is an ongoing mystery: what makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Endora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to quantum foam.
The best shorthand we have for it is soul.”
She then introduces this quote from VW
Virginia Woolf:
Maria Popova-- Change is Inevitable
“It can only be so — a person is less like a star, whose very chemistry, the source of its light, changes profoundly over its life-cycle, and more like a planet, like this planet, whose landscape changes over the ages but is always shaped by the geologic strata layered beneath, encoding everything the planet has been since its birth.”
Maria Popova
Alexandra Horowitz on Paying Attention
Dark Night of the Soul
“There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light.”
Maria Popova, from The Marginalian
Maria Popova; Bloom
Art by Kris Wahlder
“Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.
But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love.
Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar. Once there were fruit, plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade: sweetness for a lift to a mate. Animals savored the sugars in fruit, converted them into energy and proteins, and a new world of warm-blooded mammals came alive.
Without flowers, there would be no us.
No poetry.”
Maria Popova, The Marginalian
