The 12 kinds of time, the science of what made you you (with a dazzling poem read by David Byrne), an illustrated ode to love's secret knowledge

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [The Marginalian]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — the great blue heron and our search for meaning, a Morgan conversation series, the art of making space, the science behind Hilma af Klint's art — you can catch up [right here](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( — for seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. [From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne]( We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God — the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common center to form the first star: an immense ball of gas, at the core of which was a hydrogen sphere that eventually reached pressures of millions of atmospheres and heated up to millions of degrees. These extreme conditions triggered a new phenomenon in the cosmos — the first [nuclear fusion]( reactions: When two hydrogen atoms collide with immense force, neutrons are transferred from one nucleus to the other, making some atoms larger. After a series of such collisions, a nucleus with two protons forms and the second element — helium — is born. As the star ignites, illuminating the austere darkness of pure spacetime surrounding it, it keeps burning its hydrogen to make more helium. The fusion accelerates, forging carbon, then neon, then oxygen, and so forth across the periodic table, turning the star into a kind of onion with layers of fusion reactions. Most of the first twenty-six elements in the periodic table — the elements composing almost everything we can touch and see — were created by nuclear fusion in individual stars. If you could tag any individual atom in your body and follow it backward in time, across all the other matter it composed before it became yours — your mother’s body, the food your mother ate, the soil in which that food grew, the geologic strata ground down by the oceans to make that soil — you could trace it all the way back to the core of a particular star that lived and died billions of years ago: an actual atom that is now in you, having prevailed over the infinite probabilities by which it could have ended up in someone else. To this Rube Goldberg machine of chance you owe all of your particularity — alter any part of that cosmic genealogy, and you would have ended up as someone else. Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( The victory march of our particularity against probability comes alive in a short, dazzling poem by Ruth Stone (June 8, 1915–November 19, 2011). Stone was six and enchanted by her grandmother’s dictionary when she began writing poetry. She was eight-four and the grandmother of seven when she received major recognition as a poet. By the time she died, having lived nearly a century and survived her husband’s suicide, she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award with her singular poems bridging the domestic and the cosmic, lensing the world of love and loss, of rapture and regret, through the world of galaxies and particles — poems shimmering with the spirit of [The Universe in Verse]( (which is now [a book](. This poem, found in [What Love Comes To]( ([public library]( — Stone’s final poetry collection, published just before her death at age 96 — was read at the seventh annual Universe in Verse by David Byrne. STRINGS by Ruth Stone We pop into life the way particles pop in and out of the continuum. We are a seething mass of probability. And probably I love you. The evil of larvae and the evil of stars are a formula for the future. Some bodies can thrust their arms into a flame and be instantly cured of this world, while others sicken. Why think, little brother like the moon, spit out like a broken tooth. “Oh,” groans the world. The outer planets, the fizzing sun, here we come with our luggage. Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum. Follow the continuum forward into the science of [what happens when we die]( then revisit David Byrne’s animated reading of Pattiann Rogers’s magnificent poem [“Achieving Perspective,”]( with art by Maira Kalman, and Nick Cave’s animated reading of [“But We Had Music.”]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [An Illustrated Ode to Love’s Secret Knowledge]( When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for knowledge — a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not yourself and a lively interest in its interiority. Bertrand Russell captured this in his [essential distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge,”]( for it is only by means of love that we get to know anything deeply — a landscape, a person, the world — and it is love that beckons forth our own secret knowledge of what makes life worth living. That is what poet [Aracelis Girmay]( and her artist sister Ariana Fields explore in [What Do You Know?]( ([public library]( inspired by the closing lines of Sharon Olds’s tender poem “Looking at Them Asleep.” (“When love comes to me and says / What do you know? I say This girl, this boy.”) Page by page, love comes to the farmer and the seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and the stars, asking each what they know, and their answers come simple and profound like a child’s question. When love comes to the well and asks, What do you know, it says, I know thirst, I know abundance. I know depth, I know darkness. When love comes to the ash and asks, What do you know, the ash says, I know the secrets between the volcano and the sky. It says, I know wandering, and I know the language of fire. When love comes to courage and asks, What do you know, courage says, I know speaking, even though I am afraid, and I know the daily work of keeping on. The constellations know “the story of distance and the language of light,” the rocks know “that change is possible, even if it takes a million years,” the land knows “the laughter of children who run below the birds” and “the joy of going on and on and on.” What emerges is a glowing sense that love is not something we do but something we are, something the world is, something vaster than space and older than time. Aracelis and Ariana as children Couple [What Do You Know?]( with [Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way]( also by Girmay, then revisit [Mary’s Room]( — a brilliant thought experiment about the limits of knowledge. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [The Consolations of Chronodiversity: Geologist Turned Psychologist Ruth Allen on the 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive]( “I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem [“Possibilities.”]( Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here suspended between the time of insects and the time of stars, our transient lives bookended by not yet and never again. Time baffles us with its elasticity, the way it [slows down when we’re afraid and speeds up as we age](. It harrows us with its stagnancy, the way [waiting twists the psyche](. It haunts us with its [demand for meaning](. Time is the breath in the lungs of life, the marrow in the skeleton of space, [the substance we are made of]( “Time is a river which sweeps me along,” Borges bellows down the hallway of eternity, “but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” But while we have no control over time itself, we do have a choice in how we orient to it, how we inhabit the moment, how we own the past and open to the future — a choice that shapes our entire experience of life, that ossuary of time. And just as it bears remembering that [there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives]( it bears remembering that there are infinitely many ways of being in time. In her altogether wonderful book [Weathering]( ([public library]( geologist turned psychotherapist Ruth Allen explores some of them as different ways of anchoring into our own existence. Art by Harvey Weiss from [Time Is When]( by Beth Youman Gleick A generation after Paul Goodman taxonomized [the nine kinds of silence]( Allen taxonomizes the kinds of time in a celebration of what she calls chronodiversity: Time is so diverse, and experienced so differently between subjects in the present, that any prolonged effort to constrain what time is falls apart. There is the time of insects who live no more than a day, and the time of tortoises that outstrip our own. There is the time that for me is saved, but for you wasted. There is the time that can never be equal in an unequal world, where you can relax and I have to work or vice versa. There is the time we experience in chronological order (or chronos) but there is also the qualitative experience of “everything in its own time” time in the moment (or kairos). There is time as it is experienced at altitude, which is different from time at sea level, and there is the time that shifts and bends with longitude. There is the slow time of youth when ideas and experiences are rushing clear and fast like spring water, creating an endless and expansive present, and Christmases that never come, and the fast time of elderhood when a lack of novelty speeds life up, racing forward like an arrow to a target without hesitation or deviation. There is the time of our psychological experience, the relative time of Einstein, and now also an entropic time rooted in what physicist Carlo Rovelli calls our “quantum ignorance.” “When we have found all the aspects of time that can be spoken of, then we have found time,” Rovelli declares. For now, then, we do not know time. Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as [a print]( and as [a wall clock]( Drawing on the work of Marcia Bjornerud — another [uncommonly insightful geologist]( — and her concept of timefulness, Allen considers how living into and between these different kinds of time can help us be more fully alive and more meaningfully connected (which is, in the end, the only thing that redeems our mortality). She adds: Time is not a resource we have for cashing in. True timefulness… is to live in awareness of the dynamic and unpredictable array of times that co-exist within one life, as well as the intersubjective nature of time between all individuals. To live it well, we may need to break the temporal norms altogether and finally come to terms with time as entirely relational and contingent upon each other in specific and localised ways. In this way, time becomes unique among individuals who co-create its meanings and who give it vibrancy and liveness through their interaction with each other. Dive deeper — into the subject and into the body of time itself — with [200 years of reflections on time]( from some of humanity’s greatest minds, from Kierkegaard to Nina Simone, then savor the lovely vintage children’s book [Time Is When](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. SIDEWISE GLEAMS [A RECORD]( From one of my favorite musicians and favorite human beings, a nocturne about love and loss — what else is there? — and a reckoning with our collective disorientation, part hymn to holding on and part benediction of letting go. Order/listen [here](. [A CONVERSATION SERIES]( To celebrate the centennial of The Morgan Library & Museum — one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most influential works in the history of creative culture — I have chosen several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as springboards for larger conversations about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative women I know: poet Marie Howe, artist and podcaster Debbie Millman, children's book author and artist Sophie Blackall, and composer Paola Prestini. We will be investigating questions like the nature of time and self, the art of observation and the art of vision, the relationship between memory and self-forgetfulness in creative work, and the power of being an outsider, lensed through Whitman and Dickinson, The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland, the invisible women in the margins of classical music and the hidden philosophy in the margins of children's books. [Tickets here](. [A BOOK]( Peek inside [here](. [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week. The Marginalian NOT RECEIVING MAIL 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](