← How I Write
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- [00:00]
A
Maria Popova writes one of the Internet's best personal blogs. It was originally called Brain Pickings, now it's called the Marginalian. And it's there that she's published more than 6 million pages worth of writing. And it's become such a treasure that the Library of Congress said, hey, we want to make this part of our permanent archive. But this conversation is about so much more than that. It's about how to live and how to see and how to turn to books for wisdom when you're confused and. And comfort when you're suffering. But how is it that we can read and learn in order to improve our lives? Well, that's the driving question behind this conversation. Before we got started, you kind of tapped me on the knee and you said, hey, less time on LinkedIn, more time in archives. So I want to hear about what it is that you love about archives.
- [00:49]
B
Oh, God. Well, there's so many kinds of archives. First of all, I love the radical reminder that the Internet is not all there is. I mean, the Internet is this kind of surface level of the ocean, of the common record of human thought and wisdom and knowledge. And we think if you can't find it on the Internet, it doesn't exist. And it's like insane to me because there's so much that has been thought, felt, written, created, drawn, that dwells in university basements and libraries, and it has shaped the present we live in more profoundly than the 40 year depth that's the Internet. I mean, with some exceptions of public domain things and this and that, but still so much. I mean, tiny example, and you can multiply that by several million, because how many such institutions there in the world? The 92nd Street Y here in New York, one of the most revered literary institutions. They were the first to host many, like Pablo Neruda's first U.S. appearance. They hosted. Susan Sontag's first big lecture. They hosted. Where is that stuff? It is on reels in their basement, not digitized. Nobody knows it's there unless you go and, you know, spend time with it. These are real events in the history of the world and history of the creative universe that are erased from the simulacrum of memory that is the Internet.
- [02:22]
A
How do you. I've spent zero time in archives, so I'm curious, like, what do I do if I want to spend more time in archives? Do I call Jane at the 92nd Street y? Do I look up best archives in New York City? Do I go to the New York Public Library?
- [02:37]
B
What do I do? I mean, I don't do it for just sort of like, oh, I'm gonna go explore. I usually do it for research. A lot of the things I write are extremely research heavy. Like, I don't do just the kind of surface Wikipedia page. I want the primary source materials. I have a book that came out recently that was seven years, because for each of the people in it, I devoured all, all of their existing writings, public and private. Going to the Library of Congress for all of Walt Whitman's notebooks. Going to the Bodleian Library at Oxford for all of Mary Shelley's journals. Because it is first of all, extremely hard to render the reality of a person across time and across consciousnesses. It's very hard to speak for someone else. But when it's a 200 year gap, it's a real responsibility to do it honorably, to do it as accurately as you can, you know, and if you only go to what's preserved digitally, you're gonna really misrepresent a life. I mean, it's not a small thing. So a lot of my time in archives is just to better understand the people I'm trying to understand. Yeah. But for your practical question about how to approach institutions. So there's a huge range in how institutions handle their archives. Some of them really want them explored. So the New York Public Library actually has an amazing thing. I don't know if they still do, but until a few years ago, they had a thing called after hours. And it's about once a month where they would, different archivists would bring out in a little gallery things in the archive that are not in public view usually. And then you can talk like the Copernicus's book, they have one of the four existing Copernican, you know, the heliocentric universe. And they would be in the room, the archivists, and they would tell you about it. You know, Lewis Carroll's diaries. And I think more institutions can do that.
- [04:40]
A
Diaries. What has made you love reading diaries and writing one every single day?
- [04:47]
B
I used to write a nightly journal until several years ago. You know, it's interesting. I was recently. I spent time in very remote nature, several months. And I got there thinking, okay, I need a daily thing. I'm very regulated by having a daily practice. So besides writing, I do many other things. Like I do ceramics, I work with wood. And I always have like a daily thing. And I got there and I had this strange thought. Oh. The literary form I've always most enjoyed is diaries. In the kind of diary that starts with observation and ends with contemplation. So more like Thoreau than Anais Nen, you know. And it's the one form I've never written. I've written introspective personal journals, but not starting with observation of the external world. So as a practice, I ended up doing a daily such a thing in my four months in Patagonia. And it was incredibly rewarding because it is this conversation between the mind and the world that there's no more direct way to do it, where you're literally taking something in that is outside of the self and then giving its meaning and interpretation, taking a unit of truth, of objective reality, and turning it into a unit of meaning. And to me, that's a beautiful thing.
- [06:12]
A
And I mean, you're also writing it just for you, which strangely, is what I love about reading other people's diaries so much, is they're so sincere, they're so authentic, because almost by definition, the performative mask comes off. It's the one place where it doesn't exist.
- [06:30]
B
Well, there's so much to say about that. A lot of people wrote knowing they were going to publish their diaries, their diaries. So an East Ninh, probably the most professionalized diarist in the history of literature, how many 14 volumes of her diaries she knew. And then on top of that, the diaries that come to see Light of Day have been edited, sometimes by the person if they're living, very rarely, usually by their heirs or by the estate. So we do get many layers of filtering of the actual lived experience with historical diaries that are more than 200 years old. They're a little more reliable just because they come from the actual notebooks. And people were not really doing publication in this exhibitionist way that the 20th and 21st century, the age of memoir, there was no such thing really at the time.
- [07:22]
A
How would you distinguish between diaries and memoir?
- [07:27]
B
I mean, memoir is just the Instagram version of the diaries. But, you know, it's interesting that in the past, up until the end of the 19th century, memoir was used as the term meant somebody else writing to commemorate somebody who died. So, for example, when Margaret Fuller died, Emerson wrote Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, that other people contributed to it. So it was kind of other people remembering the person as opposed to the person self reporting their life. And then it changed.
- [08:01]
A
And that's different from biography how?
- [08:04]
B
Well, because it's not a birth to death. They're impressions. Impressions of someone in recounts meeting them at a dinner party. Somebody recounts what it was like to go to school with them. You know, It's a. I guess it's a composite biography, but it's not a kind of linear and complete telling of a life history.
- [08:23]
A
What diaries have really touched your heart?
- [08:31]
B
Well, I mean, I love Walden. You know, people say whatever they say, but. But I just, I love Thoreau and more of his notebooks do not just Walden. I spent about seven years immersed in Mary Shelley's world. Her. Her journals and diaries are extraordinary. Extraordinary. The person I've encountered in my 20 years of reading who is endured the most loss. Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley. By the end of her 20s, she had lost her mother at birth. Her mother died, complications giving birth to her only sibling, the love of her life, and three of her own children. I mean, imagine being in your 20s and having lived with that through that. And her diaries to me would. What makes a diary so wonderful that it's a record of how someone pays attention. And her extraordinary discipline of paying attention to beauty and wonder that so clearly saved her from all that grief, from all that loss. It's a beautiful thing to witness. Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer.
- [10:09]
A
Diaries versus letters.
- [10:12]
B
Oh, well, in some ways exactly the same, in some ways completely different. I mean, a conversation with me versus a conversation with yourself in the shower, what's the difference?
- [10:25]
A
A lot.
- [10:25]
B
Well, there you go. But there will be some recursive parts that are just part of who you are that come out in both places. Right. You can't not be yourself. And it comes out in both the diaries and the letters. And depending on the person, some of the letters can be very performative, meaning a Persona speaks, not the person speaks. And some of the letters can be very open hearted. That is the same person who's on the pages of that person's journal.
- [10:56]
A
What strikes me about both diaries and letters is just that they're less polished and refined than other forms of writing. And often there's a kind of honesty that emerges that's really nice to read, which is ironic because a lot of times when I'm doing writing, when I'm trying to publish something, I really focus on the polish and refinement because I'm like, I feel like that's what the world needs. And yet, as a consumer, I often crave exactly the opposite.
- [11:23]
B
I'm drawn to the letters that are more consistent with the person's formal writing. So, for example, Virginia Woolf's letters are not unpolished. I mean, she thought so deeply about every phrase and every comma, and it feels very her. And I think maybe that's just how her mind worked. Maybe it's not that it's polished. Maybe she just thought in complete, extraordinary sentences in her inner monologue in the shower. You know, I don't know. But I love letters that are both intimate because it is a conversation with another human being and kind of beautiful, beautifully crafted.
- [12:02]
A
In all the reading that you've done, are there certain writers whose practices and their approach to the craft, are there certain writers who you've said, wow, I really like the way that they approach this.
- [12:13]
B
You know, it's so interesting. I have been asked many times about routines and all that. I'm. I'm not terribly interested in that. I can't think of anyone that I thought, oh, isn't that a cool. You know, there's the anecdotal stuff people enjoy. Oh, it sit well, wrote in a coffin, that kind of thing. But I don't necessarily think there's a great correlation between how you do it and what it is you do. I think everyone needs to just find how their mind works best and give it the space and time and shape and form and practice to do its work. So the mechanics is not that interesting to me.
- [12:53]
A
I like in your year end review, one of the bullets is presence over routine and more of presence. And you know what?
- [13:02]
B
It wasn't though, over productivity.
- [13:04]
A
It was presence over productivity. That's exactly what it was. And I thought that was a really beautiful way to frame it because I
- [13:09]
B
do have many routines in my life that are routines of presence. I mean, I spend a lot of time in nature. I walk four hours a day. I like rhythm, I like regularity, it regulates me. But it's not in the service of producing stuff. Of course, a lot comes out of it. I always say I've written almost everything on foot, and then what I do at the keyboard is transcription.
- [13:34]
A
What do you do on your walks?
- [13:35]
B
I think I sometimes try not to think. So things can kind of flow in and do the silent work that is incubation and the kind of combinatorial play that the mind does without our participation. Einstein's term. I mean, I started writing in order to figure out how to live, and I still do it. For the same reason, 20 years later,
- [14:00]
A
your writing for me was like this place. Your writing to me embodies kind of what we've lost about the Internet, actually. Because I remember when I would go on brain pickings, when you called it that, I would go on and I would just follow the hyperlinks and it was like a world of wonder that I could like slip and slide and kind of slap dash between. And it was. I feel like you introduced me to all these new worlds.
- [14:25]
B
I think it's just how the mind works. No, don't you think? It's an association machine and these hyperlinks are how we think. We're having this conversation. We're jumping from one thing to another. It's essentially a hyperlink to another field of ideas, another notion, another concept. And it's very, you know, it's interesting. The Internet has kind of failed where encyclopedias have succeeded, which is discovery, not search, because you can only search for what you know you're looking for. But discovery, which is that place of self surprise where you find your own blind spots and delight in them. You know, I grew up with my grandmother's library of very many encyclopedias. I would pull one out because I wanted to learn about Burundi. And I would open it and then next to it would be some sort of beetle that I'd never heard of and wouldn't have known to search for because I didn't know it existed, but it would be right there. And I think the Internet, I mean, it's interesting, AI is trying to compensate for that, but actually still in a predictive way, because algorithms can only ever be predictive. And the most exciting things about life, about growth, about intellectual discovery or the unpredictable parts of us.
- [15:46]
A
How much in your work do you feel like you want to insert yourself in your work versus kind of offer an objective view of.
- [15:53]
B
There is no objective view of anything. It does not exist. No, I write to understand my own life. So in a way, even if it reads impersonal, I am still in it. I am the lens. And it's very moving to me that other people read it, but that's not why it's written. You know, it's because I'm grappling with something in my life that I don't have a better way of metabolizing or comprehending.
- [16:20]
A
My sense of your writing is that there was, in your process, at least in writing the marginalian and building it up over many years, there was a sense of planning for the editorial calendar, for what you were going to read, 00.
- [16:34]
B
Exactly. Zero.
- [16:35]
A
Back then, there was.
- [16:36]
B
I've never planned a thing. So I have a huge backlog, meaning things that I've wanted to write about that are maybe more research intensive or need more time and thought, and I don't manage. So I keep a log of what I mean to write about, but it's not like editorial or calendar. And I would dip in whenever I have more time or feel like revisiting something. And it's been interesting too, because now that file is 20 years old and I can scroll down and be like, oh, in 2016, I wanted to write about Susan Sontag's list of likes and dislikes. Just such an interesting thing of things fading and salience and an interest. Or sometimes resurfacing is even more interesting,
- [17:24]
A
like resurfacing your own work.
- [17:26]
B
Resurfacing things that I had abandoned, unexplored. Just ideas that I wanted to explore and never got to, and then coming back to them 10 years later. And of course, then having 10 years more of contextual, you know, hyperlinks of the mind to bring to them and then revisiting them in a totally different way.
- [17:46]
A
You know, you keep mentioning the hyperlink because I do think it is, as I was prepping for this, it is like the fundamental unit that I think makes the world that you've created a world that it is surfing between these different ideas and allowing us to basically play. Like, I always thought about brain pickings as a sense of play. It was like brain pickings and Wikipedia. It was like the place that I would go, places I'd go to play.
- [18:10]
B
I hate that name.
- [18:11]
A
What?
- [18:11]
B
The whole name. Brain pickings.
- [18:13]
A
Brain pickings.
- [18:13]
B
Oh.
- [18:13]
A
Why?
- [18:15]
B
I was 21. You know, we don't really have puns in Bulgaria. We don't have kind of wordplay in that way. So I was very excited about wordplay in America and named it the Silly. Just. It's so silly. And also, you know, at the time I was studying, one of the things I was studying was cognitive psychology is very much about the mind. And the more I've lived, the more anti Cartesian I've become. I don't think our experience is entirely mental or cognitive. And I don't think it's what we pick for the brain that defines what we become. There's so much more experience that is embodied and emotional and just integrated.
- [18:57]
A
Mm. Do you feel like words then aren't able to capture that? Or do you feel like you do capture it but through metaphor and not as direct?
- [19:09]
B
The latter. Yeah, the latter. You Know language. I mean, it's so interesting. The limits of words, I think about them a lot. Language is a vessel for thought that shapes the contents. And so the great revelation of Einstein was that spacetime is the fabric of the universe, and in it, spacetime, the bend of spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to bend. And language is the fabric of the mind, the fabric of culture. Language tells thought how to move, and thought tells language how to bend. So it's a kind of circular process that is self limiting.
- [19:57]
A
Do you buy the Wittgenstein line that the limits of our language is the limits of our world?
- [20:03]
B
I think the limits of our language are the limits of our description of the world. And the great danger is mistaking the description for the reality it describes.
- [20:13]
A
The map is not the territory.
- [20:14]
B
Exactly.
- [20:16]
A
Yeah. Poetry. What was the line that you had? Let me get this up. Let me read this to you. Unlike the prose of letters pinned to the physical and emotional reality of the present, in poetry, the imagination is allowed to travel between fact and fantasy, to traverse present, past and future, so that the reader, and perhaps even the writer, is never quite sure nor need ever ask to what extent the images evoked correspond to the intersection of matter and moment we call reality.
- [20:48]
B
Wow. I don't remember writing this, but it's very much what I believe. I mean, this is back to our conversation about language, right? That clearly these are things I feel inside. And at some point in my life, I've given it that particular form that now I cannot even recall. So what was it that I chose those particular words? And if I had to express that feeling or thought or concept today, I would frame it in a different way, but it would be the same substance. I'm fascinated by that. Yes. Poetry. I am a late comer to poetry. For many years, I dismissed it the way we dismiss things in which we're not literate. I have no education in poetry. And then I met this wonderful person, Emily Levine. She was a comedian, philosopher of science, great lover of poetry. We met across the aisle on a transatlantic flight coming back from Europe. And much to the discontentment of the whole cabin, we talked the entire way. Yes. And she was in her 70s, I was in my 20s. And she. It kind of became apparent that I kind of don't much care for poetry. And she loved it. It shaped the way she thought it shaped. I mean, she had the associative mind where she would leap from Hannah Arendt to Stoicism to. I mean, just, you know, so one day she lived in California and I was here. She visited and we went to a cafe in Chelsea, like one of those packed Sunday afternoon cafes. And we somehow got a table and she said something or other and I rolled my eyes once again about poetry. At which point Emily gripped the edge of the table, rose to her full height of 4.4 and began reciting the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock with that line, do I dare to disturb the universe? And she's in sad depth. She went to the Harvard Theater School. So she was like a real performer.
- [22:47]
A
It was like a full on soliloquy.
- [22:49]
B
So she sat down and I looked around. People put down their drinks that were like applauding and this packed, you know, this never happens in New York. And of course my universe was disturbed. I said, okay, there's something here. So she decided she was going to educate me. And she started sending me a poem a day poem that she loved with just like a few lines about why she loved it. And yeah, I mean, and then she got very ill very suddenly. And I started taking her in her final months to. We called them poetry retreats. So we would rent a cabin in Northern California near where she lived and we would go with one or two other friends for a weekend and just read poetry and talk about the universe. And as a consequence of my relationship with her, I started because talk about integrating new experiences into our existing framework. I started seeing the parallels between poetry and science and also the complementarity in how we understand reality and how we bridge truth and meaning. So it is because of her that I ended up doing for seven years a show called the Universe and Verse where I would bring poetry and science together and, you know, thousands of people would come and listen about the discovery of dark matter as Patti Smith is reading a poem about dark matter, you know, that kind of thing.
- [24:11]
A
Tell me more about how you saw the connection between the two.
- [24:14]
B
Well, science expands or enables us to meet reality on its own terms. The discipline of science is about meeting reality on its own terms. And poetry helps us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. And between the two, between truth and meaning is really the sum of human experience.
- [24:40]
A
Yeah, as you were saying that I was thinking about light and that the concept of light in terms of light waves and whatever's going on there is so different from how I see the spiritual concept of light, which is goodness and beauty and righteousness, whatever you want to call it. And I've been thinking a lot about this, about how in the modern world. We have gained an understanding of the scientific ways that things work, but often lost our understanding of the meaning of those very things and the wonder inside of it.
- [25:21]
B
I don't think the wonder is an antipode to the scientific understanding. I think having a greater understanding of how starlight travels and the electromagnetic spectrum and optics makes the rainbow all that more wondrous. I do not stand with Keats, who, you know, accused Newton of unweaving the rainbow with his science. I think it deepened and brightened and magnified our appreciation of the phenomena around us to have this other layer of understanding.
- [25:51]
A
So, like with a bird, understanding the aerodynamics of flight or whatnot, you see? No, like a pure sense of.
- [25:58]
B
It doesn't take the magic. For me, it makes it all the more astonishing that an anatomical design can prevail over gravity in such a magical way. But I will say science will never tell you the meaning of a bird. And I also think it's dangerous to search for the meaning of a bird. There is no meaning of a bird. There's only an encounter between us and what is not ourselves. Right. This practice of unselfing. And the moment we try to find meaning in something that is not ourselves, that's also a danger.
- [26:35]
A
Unselfing.
- [26:36]
B
Unselfing. This is actually. I love that notion. Iris Murdoch, to talk about extraordinary novelists who are also other minds. She's probably one of my three favorite philosophers, but also a beautiful novelist. She used the word unselfing in a kind of almost as an aside in. She has a book called Existentialists and Mystics that you would, I think, appreciate, given what you just said about the light. And she talks about how art and nature, our encounters with art and with the natural world, are occasions for unselfing. And I read this maybe 10, 15 years ago, and it has never let me go because it immediately landed. So true. When I spend time in Patagonia or in the woods where I live, it is absolutely the work of unselfing and then kind of absorbing external reality in a way that changes my internal reality so that I can then give it shape in the writing as something that is not just me, you know, I
- [27:43]
A
don't know if this is what you meant by unselfing, but as you were using that word, I was thinking about how when you're in a state of just full awe and wonder, there's a sense of clarity that you have. And I think that what happens with awe is the self is so reduced, so minimized, it's basically evaporated, if only for a snap of a finger, that for once you can see that thing clearly. And that's a lot of what awe is, is. It's like the purity of perception because the self isn't in the way perception,
- [28:16]
B
but also connection, this belonging to something other than larger than yourself, that it's all one thing. And you're suddenly transported to this oneness.
- [28:26]
A
Do you feel that a lot when you read?
- [28:29]
B
When I read, no. I feel that a lot in the natural world. I feel very much like I'm just a creature among creatures. And I become so much less interested in the stories that we call self. I mean, a self is a story. And also most of our suffering as human beings is a problem of selfing, this spiral that burrows inward and inward and inward to the exclusion of the outside world.
- [29:03]
A
Do you feel that in writing? Do you feel. I mean, people talk about flow, but there might be another word that you feel sometimes.
- [29:09]
B
Yes. When I disappeared into these enormous rabbit holes, you know, spending five days learning about the eye of the scallop, which is amazing, by the way.
- [29:22]
A
The eye of a scallop?
- [29:23]
B
Well, it's not one eye. It's many eyes that the scallop has, and they're extraordinary like the scallop that we. Unfortunately, yes. Good luck eating them. Again with knowing about the eye, which has these extraordinary hexagonal crystals that are not known anywhere else in nature. But they do look like the mirrors on the James Webb space Telesco. And also they're so beautiful. They look like tiny, bright cobalt blue blueberries along the rim of the mantle of the scallop.
- [29:53]
A
Wow.
- [29:53]
B
I know. I do eat them. I mean, now I, I now I can't. You know, in my past life, I have eaten the James Webb Space telescope.
- [30:05]
A
Can you take me back to. What was the woman's name who you met on the airplane?
- [30:09]
B
Emily Levine.
- [30:10]
A
Emily. So, Emily, so can you take me back to what she showed you about poetry that you hadn't seen before? Like, in what way did she open your eyes?
- [30:20]
B
That's a beautiful question. I guess she showed me that poetry opens these back doors of consciousness where we get access to our own experience in ways particularly to the regions of experience we can't quite name or comprehend with the analytical mind. But it opens this back door where we can then be in them, be present in them, and, as you say, metabolize them, even in a different way. That's not analytical. It gives shape, it gives voice, it gives a foothold on our own experience.
- [30:59]
A
I've been thinking a lot of the difference between looking and seeing. And I think a lot of what poetry is doing is taking us from a place of looking to a place of seeing.
- [31:08]
B
Oh, that's. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [31:11]
A
And in doing that, sometimes it'll actually open up portals of sight that we didn't know we had. So let me. That's a big statement. So let me just be super concrete. William Blake has that line, to see the world in a grain of sand, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand. Right.
- [31:28]
B
I mean, he was a complete. He was such a shepherd of attention. My favorite line of his comes from a letter to one of his patrons. And he says, a tree that moves some to tears is to others a green thing that stands in the way as a man is. So he sees. Exactly.
- [31:54]
A
Wow. Yeah. You talk a lot about William Blake. What is it that you love about him?
- [32:00]
B
He was. Well, he was a radical. He was an absolute radical. He was an entrepreneur, and he was a person who really didn't care about expectation or convention. He cared about truth as he felt it, as he saw it, and giving shape and voice to that. And it didn't matter to him that people thought he was a lunatic. It didn't matter because he lived in truth.
- [32:30]
A
He could paint, too.
- [32:32]
B
Yeah, wasn't bad.
- [32:34]
A
I had this experience at the Brooklyn Museum a few months ago. There was a Monet in Venice exhibit. And I've always liked Ruskin's writing. It was always. It's wonderfully visual and vivid, but I didn't know how detailed his sketches were. And that kind of the bilingual writer painter is something I see a lot in, like, 17th, 18th, 19th century.
- [33:02]
B
But it wasn't just writer painter. So Ruskin wrote beautifully about drawing as a way of seeing. And a lot of the scientists, I mean, so Galileo dismantled our present conception of the. Or our past conception of the universe because he had been trained in perspective drawing. And so when the first telescopes came out, this is the 1610s, give or take, there was an Englishman whose name was Thomas, I forget his name, his last name, who also drew the moon. He looked through a telescope and drew a map of the moon, but he had not been trained in perspective, which originated in the Arab world and had moved to Italy, but had not yet gone to England. So he drew this, like, two dimensional black and white sketch that looked like Swiss cheese. That was his moon. Galileo drew that famous image of the phases of the moon. You know, that is perspective and shaded. And that was actually profound because all of a sudden, the Moon became not this ethereal body of immaterial magic out there by the gods, but rugged and material as the Earth. And this was anti dogma in every way. It was not in the heavens. It was made of the same matter as the, the ground we walk on. And you could only see it because you could see the craters, you could see the dimension, you could see the ruggedness, the materiality of the world, the celestial body. Because Galileo was trained in this particular style of art and many, many scientists, I mean, this is an extreme example, obviously that caused cultural change. But even on a day to day basis, a lot of the botanists, naturalists, ornithologists, astronomers up to the end of the 19th century, they illustrated their own work. There wasn't this specialization and fragmentation of our way of seeing, right? Our way of looking and our way of seeing have become completely specialized so that we no longer see the full picture in that way because we've been trained to see the optics, see the mechanics, see the aesthetics, see the, you know, whatever specialty you are, that's what you see. But also the language of science used to be the same as the language of poetry. So I don't know why, but a few months before my 40th birthday, I decided, I mean, per my need of daily, a daily practice, I decided to start taking 19th century ornithological, my favorite 19th century ornithological books. And every day I would take, every night I would look at an image, pick a drawing of a bird from, from those books which I've digitized and read the ornithological description of the bird. And I would sleep and then in the morning, in the morning I would take certain words would kind of bubble up and I would make these little poems and cones over the artwork. And first of all, the delight of, I mean Audubon and the Goulds, these great ornithologists of 19th century, the language they used was just so touching. They would use words like bewildering or, you know, and I made a hundred of these and they became this deck of cards that I called an almanac of birds. Divinations for uncertain days. Only out of the joy of this other time where people saw the world more completely in a way. The poets went to scientific lectures, the scientists read many of them, wrote poetry in their journals. It was so much more integrated. I don't think there was this kind of disciplinary boundary that this is one way of seeing and this is another way of seeing. And you have to choose because the world was a lot more unitary.
- [37:14]
A
It is Pretty wild. I mean, now if you think of what it means to go to college, you basically have to make a fundamental choice. There's like a fork in the road. I'm either gonna do the thing that makes me money but will not feed my soul, or the thing that feeds my soul but will not make me money.
- [37:31]
B
And either way, you still have to declare a major and choose a way in which you're gonna do whichever one of these things you chose. I mean, I started my project, which at the time was called Brain Pickings, when I was in college, because I felt so betrayed by the promise of the liberal arts education. I mean, I had come. I grew up in Bulgaria, I went to high school in Bulgaria. And I came to the US not easily, believe me, for that liberal arts promise, which I thought was going to teach me how to live, how to be a person in the world. And instead I was shoved into this factory model education with the 400 person lecture hall and the standardized testing, and I was being taught how to take tests, not how to live. And I felt trapped. There was no going back. I was working four jobs to pay for this deeply disappointing experience. Started keeping a record of. I went to the library at night. I went on the early Internet. It wasn't that early, but it was like, you know, the early 2000s Internet. I would walk the streets of Philly and, you know, wander into bookstores and whatever I did to just trying to grab at some foothold on how to live. And I kept a record of it for myself. And that was the beginning of my site.
- [38:54]
A
So if I said, if I bestowed upon you some grand sum of money and a building in New York City for your own liberal arts education, how would you structure it?
- [39:07]
B
Well, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do a factory model education. I think people need to be in the world and live and read and be and contact each other and contact reality and just keep testing their hypotheses against reality with some help from prior times and lives of people who have managed to live somewhat full, honorable lives in the past. There's a wonderful Life magazine interview with James Baldwin from May of 1963. And in it he says, you think your pain and suffering are alone in the history of the world. And then you read, Wow. I mean, I started reading for that reason, too. I mean, I was having a really hard time in my 20s, really hard time on so many levels. And I needed that assurance. And some of the first things I really, really devoured were diaries and biographies, a lot of biographies. People I'd never heard of who. Then I learned a little bit about and thought they were so interesting. Then I would go get the biograph and it would comfort me so much to read about how they suffered.
- [40:25]
A
You use the word devoured, and I think that's such a good word that when you said that, the image that came to my mind was, you know, like when you're hiking in the desert and you're so thirsty and you finally get some water and you just drink and drink and gulp and gulp, and you're like, I forgot that water could taste so good. There have been times in my life, whether it's suffering through something or a problem, and it's like you find the right book, the right person for that moment, and you devour their writing.
- [40:53]
B
But isn't it so true, too, that the right moment, that reading is a relationship between you, the author, and time? Totally time, yeah. I mean, I've looked back on some things I've written so passionately about, like, 10, 15 years ago, and I'm like, eh. And conversely, I would revisit some things and they would. I would feel them even more deeply or they would give me another layer of metabolism. Right. For my present experience, there are certain books that to me, I reread often and always give me something new.
- [41:29]
A
It speaks to the fluidity of self.
- [41:31]
B
Absolutely. Absolutely.
- [41:33]
A
With seasons, with years, with emotions, hormones, whatever it is you want to call it. But that, as much as anything, is some of the best proof I have for how fluid the self can be, is how much you can either be drawn to things that you've written and worked so hard in the past or be almost repulsed by them.
- [41:55]
B
I mean, I think if you're not a little bit embarrassed of who you were and how you lived, maybe the process of growth is not quite working.
- [42:08]
A
Describe for me the process of epiphany. Like, for you, is it a. I
- [42:11]
B
don't believe in epiphany. Really? No.
- [42:14]
A
How come?
- [42:15]
B
I believe in incremental revelation. I mean, I have experienced epiphanies. It's not that they don't exist, but I don't believe what they say, meaning they don't stick. For me, it would be a glimpse for a moment that I get really excited about, and then it has to integrate with everything else that predates it in order for it to stick. And epiphanies are just these shiny little distractions that don't really change much for me.
- [42:43]
A
Change much? Meaning that they don't.
- [42:44]
B
They don't change much afterwards that much of Your process, much of your life, much of your mind, they are like a kind of curtain parting to reveal this really bright light. But when the light dies down, you see that there's just the world as you know it. My experience of the most profound transformations, for me, intellectually, creatively, personally, have only been incremental. So the difference between metamorphosis and transformation, it's never, for me, metamorphosis. It's always transformation. Well, have you had epiphanies that have profoundly changed your subsequent way of doing something or thinking about something?
- [43:31]
A
I'm trying to. The answer is definitely yes. I'm trying to think of an example right now.
- [43:38]
B
I guess where I struggle with epiphany is that many times I've had the experience of maybe suddenly or incrementally, whatever, seeing, let's say, a pattern that I have being like, oh, my God, I do this revelation. But then the gap between recognizing it and changing it or doing something about it is wide and slow and deep, and there's so much that goes into it. So the revelation itself doesn't have the effect of an existential epiphany in the sense of it changes your life, it changes your perspective on your life, but it doesn't really overnight. I mean, that's what I mean about epiphany. I don't think it's overnight. You can have the instinct, insight, but then what makes the transformation is work.
- [44:25]
A
What I want to do is I want to go through some. Some quotes that I really like and from others that you've shared, and I want to get your reactions to that. Okay, all right, first one. Oscar Wilde. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public and that the public art to him is non existent.
- [44:48]
B
I'm having a very cynical reaction to it right now. This is something from, like I've written about in 2012 or God knows, it was a long time ago. I think in an ideal world, every artist would like to think they're creating out of sheer creative vitality and being a channel for this greater force. And I mean, Oscar Wilde was a dandy. He dressed up, he performed. His quotes were quotable, his thoughts were quotes. In the moment you make an aphorism, it's already for an audience. It's not. You don't make aphorisms for yourself in the shower. So, you know, I think it's okay for us to live with ambivalence between our aspirational self and our actual self. I think maybe, maybe with the exception of William Blake, there is no artist who's impervious to reception and audience in the sense of other, you know. But I do think to me, a truly creative person can hold that lightly and create authentically.
- [45:55]
A
Despite that, despite making for others, despite
- [45:59]
B
knowing there will be someone else experiencing, despite knowing the work will be approved or disapproved, lauded or criticized, that there will be a feedback loop, you can be aware of that, but not let it change what you make and how you make it.
- [46:15]
A
Yeah, Tchaikovsky. A self respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.
- [46:25]
B
Yes, this is from a letter to his patron, Nadej Devon Meck. And it was about him being too slow with some concerto. And it's him kind of defending, he's almost writing to himself saying, I don't have the right to say the muse is not with me and therefore I'm not delivering. I have to just show up for the work. And so he's assuring her that he has work ethic and he's not waiting around for inspiration and that he's on it basically. And I believe that, I think the whole thing of inspiration. Of course there are times when you're more creatively sparkly and times when you're not. But showing up has its own effect of opening the portal.
- [47:10]
A
You really do realize over the course of time that the fundamental difference in terms of both the quality and the quantity of your output really comes down to showing up. But on a day to day basis it does not feel like that at all.
- [47:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think in any creative practice you have to be okay with your own mediocrity or your own inconsistency. Because every day you show up, it's not going to all be great, you know, but the fact that you're making something counts for your own, even your own sanity, your own self respect, your own growth as a. Whatever you are a writer, a woodworker, you know, I think that's how you become better, by doing more and accepting that not all of it is going to be great.
- [47:59]
A
As you look at the world right now, with the rise of, with everyone talking about AI with AI coming into writing, in what ways does that excite you and in what ways do you feel averse to it?
- [48:12]
B
I have no real contact with or experience with AI, so I'm probably not the right person to ask about it. Strengths. I will say I was horrified when somebody wrote to me about those bird divination cards and said, I need to know if AI was involved in this. Because that moment she asked I could see how it can. You could give Audubon's ornithological writings and say to the AI, make a poem in the style of Maria, and it'll give you something. And nobody but me will know, because that one thing that only the artist has access to is the feeling out of which something was created. AI Will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI Will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn't suffered. I mean, AI has not the capacity to suffer. Because even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it'll already be succeeding at executing failure. It will never know what it's like to collide with its own impossibility. So AI can only ever succeed. And without suffering, what kind of true art can there be?
- [49:32]
A
That that is what the essence of art is.
- [49:35]
B
I'm not. I don't subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don't think it's necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness to find meaning, to find beauty, to find wonder, to give voice and shape to what we feel. That can be so lonely. I mean, I guess it goes back to the question, why do we read? And if we read, to be moved and to be changed. I think there are ways to change intellectually, which is with information. And AI can do that. AI can tell me about the Eye of the scallop. Without me spending many days in many scientific journals and papers. It can give me a pretty good enough. But had I not spent all those days, I wouldn't have written about it with feeling. And I think all the writing for me that moves me is made of feeling in time, of which AI has neither. It's an instantaneous, unfeeling delivery of pure information.
- [50:42]
A
There's no soul.
- [50:44]
B
How do you define soul?
- [50:47]
A
It is like the anima. It is like the fundamental unit of life.
- [50:54]
B
And what is it made of?
- [50:57]
A
It's something that's beyond material that I can't explain. But I think that that is like the core thing of life. Once you, like, reduce and reduce and reduce. It's like the soul is the fundamental thing that is alive inside of a human being. And then I think, above the soul is like the spirit. And if the soul dies, the spirit dies. But I think that you can have. Be dispirited, but still have a soul that's alive.
- [51:24]
B
Hmm. Very ambivalent about the soul because I do believe in the laws of physics. I do believe that reality is knowable. But I also. I think the function of what we call soul is real. Whatever it's made of, whatever it is. And the part that I worry about is that today most people live on the level of the self and not the level of the soul, which is the costume of personality over the soul. That's what the self is. And I don't find that terribly interesting.
- [51:56]
A
The costume of personality, That's a good turn of phrase. Explain that.
- [52:01]
B
It's the performance of personhood, not the essence of personhood, the self. And, you know, today, most people lead with identities and opinions, which I think are the least interesting, least true parts of people, because they're the most mutable and the least anchored in what you call the soul. And yet our culture is just all about that.
- [52:31]
A
Interesting. You are ambivalent because you had the. I love that word. That's a word I love ambivalent to kind of be strong on both sides. Because you started by saying, I'm skeptical of the soul, but then you ended by saying, that's sort of the core thing.
- [52:45]
B
Yeah, well, I'm skeptical that it's immaterial. I do believe fundamentally that the universe is knowable. I'm not one of those people that will say, well, there's always going to be mystery that's beyond the reach of knowability. I think the history of our species is mistaking the limits of the known for the limits of the knowable. And over and over, discoveries have surprised us. And the region of the known has grown and grown and grown. And I do think it's knowable. I think we're very far from discovering what that is, that very real thing that we live with that we can tell is true and there. But I think it's a cop out to say, oh, it's like we will never know what it's made of. It's this, like, mystical stuff. No, we just haven't gotten there.
- [53:38]
A
I do have one more quote. Yes, bring it, Susan Sontag. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
- [53:54]
B
I mean, I love that because she wrote that. Long before we used that horrific word content to describe cultural material today, this was like, long before the social web and the Internet as we know it. And yet we have reduced creative work, cultural matter to what we call content, which presumes a container. And in a way, it's an accurate description. Because the container is advertising. This is what carries the modern Internet. And we're making everything creative subservient to that. It's the content of the package that is being sold. And I just hate that I'm allergic to the word content.
- [54:40]
A
So the thing that bothers you, bothers you the most about it, is that it's units of information that are created in order to drive attention to.
- [54:50]
B
To the container, to the ads. Yes, yes. The content is used to sell the container, which is your attention in the advertising. I mean, obviously I'm very in an extreme because I've never had advertising on my site, which is a pretty radical choice on the Internet for 20 years of it. But unfortunately, the course that the web has taken has been toward reducing human beings to eyeballs and writing to content.
- [55:29]
A
Is this part of the reason that you've moved towards books?
- [55:31]
B
I think it's a vicious cycle. I don't want to end on a cynical note. As the old lady who's been online for 20 years, I do think because content is rewarded in certain ways. Clickbait, which works because it sells pages, and they want to sell pages because they want to sell ads. There's been more and more and more kind of a shallowing of cultural material as the Internet has moved more and more toward clickbait and listicles and 10 ways to, you know. And I just find that unsatisfying. I'm not moving away from it on moral grounds, although I don't agree with a lot of the business choices Silicon Valley has made. I'm just moving away from it as a human being who doesn't find it compelling. I think every artist's art is a coping mechanism for whatever it is they're living through. Thoreau has written beautifully about the love of nature. Anna Eastman has written beautifully about erotic love. Alan Lightman writes beautifully about our love of knowledge, of illumination, of the universe. And I think I do write a lot about love because I have not figured it out. I've had wonderful relationships, have wonderful relationships, but in some sense, I feel that that is the great mystery, how to love each other better. I mean, that's what we're here for, right?
- [57:00]
A
Other people.
- [57:02]
B
Each other. Each other, too.
- [57:04]
A
Yeah. Maria, thank you so much.
- [57:07]
B
Thank you.
- [57:08]
A
It was good to meet you.
- [57:09]
B
You too.