Marginalia and the Yin-Yang of Reading and Writing by Maria Popova The bibliophile’s property rights, or why the osmosis of agreement and disagreement belongs in a book’s margins. The acts of reading and writing have always been intertwined, a kind of fundamental yin-yang of how ideas travel and permeate minds. Marginalia — those fragments of thought and seeds of insight we scribble in the margins of a book — have a social life all their own. But what is the future of marginalia in the age of the ebook? Yet, digital platforms aside, hardly anything captures both the utilitarian necessity and cultural mesmerism of marginalia better than this excerpt from the classic How to Read a Book, originally written by Mortimer Adler in 1940 and revised with Charles van Doren in 1972: When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. HT reddit books Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr
Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Psychologist Angela Duckworth on Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success by Maria Popova “Character is at least as important as intellect.” Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of young Mozart’s upbringing to E. In this short video from the MacArthur Foundation, Duckworth traces her journey and explores the essence of her work: We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on this problem. In the exceedingly excellent How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (public library) — a necessary addition to these fantastic reads on education — Paul Tough writes of Duckworth’s work: Duckworth had come to Penn in 2002, at the age of thirty-two, later in life than a typical graduate student. The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves. Duckworth began her graduate work by studying self-discipline. This is where grit comes in — the X-factor that helps us attain more long-term, abstract goals.
Consciousness is Not a Computation In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort. But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the universe is in fact a computer. In this article, I explain why. My primary argument for this is that consciousness is not computable. Consciousness is More Fundamental Than Computation If the universe is a computer, it would have to be a very different kind of computer than what we think of as a computer today. However, it’s not that simple. The problem is that conscious is notoriously elusive, and may not even be something a computer could ever generate. In fact, I don’t think consciousness is an information process, or a material thing, at all. There are numerous arguments for why consciousness may be fundamental. Physics and Cosmology. Beyond Computation
Bird by Bird: Anne Lamott’s Timeless Advice on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity by Maria Popova “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) is among my 10 favorite books on writing — a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. I started writing when I was seven or eight. So she found refuge in books, searching for “some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in [her] head.” I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. But, one might wonder, why? Donating = Loving
How to Find Fulfilling Work By Maria Popova “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,” wrote Dostoevsky, “all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” Indeed, the quest to avoid work and make a living of doing what you love is a constant conundrum of modern life. In How to Find Fulfilling Work (public library) — the latest installment in The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living, which previously gave us Philippa Perry’s How to Stay Sane and Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex — philosopher Roman Krznaric (remember him?) explores the roots of this contemporary quandary and guides us to its fruitful resolution: Never have so many people felt so unfulfilled in their career roles, and been so unsure what to do about it.
Swami Vivekananda on the Secret of Work: Intelligent Consolation for the Pressures of Productivity from 1896 by Maria Popova “Every work that we do… every thought that we think, leaves such an impression on the mind-stuff…” In December of 1895, the renowned Indian Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda, then in his early thirties, traveled to New York, rented a couple of rooms at 228 West 39th Street, where he spent a month holding a series of public lectures on the notion of karma — translated as work — and various other aspects of mental discipline. They attracted a number of famous followers, including groundbreaking inventor Nikola Tesla and pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James, and were eventually transcribed and published as Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action (public library) in 1896. Among the most timeless of them is one titled “The Secret of Work,” in which Vivekananda examines with ever-timely poignancy the ways in which we mistake the doing for the being and worship the perspirations of our productivity over the aspirations of our soul. Donating = Loving
Curiosity and Wonder Are My Religion: Henry Miller on Growing Old, the Perils of Success, and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart by Maria Popova “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… you’ve got it half licked.” “On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry Miller wrote in reflecting on the art of living in 1939, “depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.” Over the course of his long life, Miller sought ceaselessly to orient himself toward maximal fruitfulness, from his creative discipline to his philosophical reflections to his exuberant irreverence. More than three decades later, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Miller wrote a beautiful essay on the subject of aging and the key to living a full life. Miller begins by considering the true measure of youthfulness: He later adds: I have very few friends or acquaintances my own age or near it. If you have had a successful career, as presumably I have had, the late years may not be the happiest time of your life. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Here are 89 Life Hacks That Will Make Your New Year So Much Better As you go into the New Year, remember that things can be better than previous years. Maybe you'll get a raise, date someone new or even adopt an adorable pet to welcome into your family. But, if you fail at all of those things (sorry, if you do, but the chances are you may), here are life hacks that you can use to make your 2014 a lot better. Alan Lightman on Our Yearning for Immortality and Why We Long for Permanence in a Universe of Constant Change by Maria Popova A heartening perspective on mortality by way of the physics of the cosmos and the poetics of the night-blooming cereus cactus. “We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms,” Alan Watts wrote in contemplating how our ego keeps us separate from the universe. “It is almost banal to say so,” Henry Miller observed, “yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.” But banal as it may be, it is also intolerably discomfiting to accept, which is why we retreat into our hallucination — we resist change, we long for immortality, and we cling to the notion of the self, despite its ever-changing essence, as anxious assurance of our own permanence in an impermanent universe. Alan Lightman (Photograph courtesy of MIT) It was a perfect picture of utter joy, and utter tragedy. Physicists call it the second law of thermodynamics. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr