“I choose the time of bugs to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her pretty poem “Prospects.” Our preferences, after all, hardly matter to time —…
Think about a world of fixed wars and lethal plagues, a world with out eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Think about being a gifted little one in that world, figuring out…
Among the many nice salvations of my childhood have been the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our subsequent door neighbor — a geologist working for the Bulgarian Ministry…
“Each atom belonging to me pretty much as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what could be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our…
One September daybreak on the verge of a major life change, sitting on my poet buddy’s dock, I watched an awesome blue heron rise gradual and prehistoric by way of…
“Allow us to love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for individuals who don’t love one another will not be separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation…
Wanting again on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of darkish matter, astronomer Vera Rubin mirrored: “I typically ask myself whether or not I might be finding out galaxies…
“I’ve at all times felt {that a} human being may solely be saved by one other human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one in all his best essays. “I’m conscious…
It takes an amazing sobriety of spirit to know our depths and our limits, to know the place we finish and the remainder of the world begins. And it’s usually…
In her beautiful space-bound ode to the human situation impressed by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “touring by means of informal house previous aloof…
