In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge – fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses.
He is not handsome, but looks as the author of his books should look: a little strange and odd, as if not of this earth.
Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover – in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal – what lies beneath the surface of the human label. What we recognize as beauty may be a language for encoding truth, a memetic mechanism for transmitting it, as native to the universe as mathematics – the one perceived by the optical eye, the other by the mind’s eye.
This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely – something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.
Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of time.
This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations – the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being.
In a sentiment of remarkable prescience in the context of climate change denial half a century later, Carson articulated the formidable task before her: It is a great problem to know how to look at unpleasant facts that might have to be dealt with if one recognized their existence.
She was beginning to realize that no amount of genius ever compensates for, nor excuses, a paucity of kindness, integrity, and unconflicted devotion.
To be a revolutionary is to be in possession of an imagination capable of leaping across the frontier of the familiar to envision a new order in which what is gained eclipses the ill-serving comforts of what is lost.
Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one’s competences.
We are who we are in large part because of where we are and when we are. But lives of courage and consequence remap the locus of spirit and possibility for generations to come.
Some loves lodge themselves in the tissue of being like mercury, pervading every synapse and sinew to remain there, sometimes dormant, sometimes tortuously restive, with a half-life that exceeds a lifetime.
The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.
If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it.
We can no more claim all credit for our achievement than deflect all blame for our impediments.
Life is infinitely more interesting when considered for the questions it raises rather than for the answers it bestows.
If it is worthy – the book, as the love – and if we are lucky, it reflects us back to ourselves magnified yet transformed.
I was learning about it along the way, often through reading, often from people and ideas marginalized by culture, erased by the collective selective memory we call history.
In the darkest times, we are the most starved for delight – for the self-permission for delight.
It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.
Where does it live, that place of permission that lets a person chart a new terrain of possibility, that makes her dare to believe she can be something other than what her culture tells her she is, and then become what she believes she can? How does something emerge from nothing?