Maria Popova on 20 Years of 'The Marginalian'

Maria Popova and The Marginalian

0:00Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strange-Hamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. If there's one person in the world today who knows how to make wonder a way of life, it's Maria Popova. Creator of the Marginalian, one of the world's great treasuries of knowledge and wisdom. One woman's reflections on a lifetime of learning and reading across an oceanic range. Art, science, philosophy, poetry, letters and diaries. It's my way of processing life and learning how to live. So, of course, it has to cover everything.

0:35Beneath the surface manifestations, we are all longing for the same things, fearing the same things. On the deepest substrate of existence, there's not that much variation between what human beings wish for and fear. I've been reading The Marginalian for almost as long as it's been around. I've bookmarked and shared so many of Maria's essays. Hannah Arendt on how to live with the fear of loss. Hermann Hesse on the soul beneath the self. Virginia Woolf on finding beauty in times of uncertainty.

1:08Every week, this publication is a refuge and an oasis. It is a remarkable body of work, especially because Maria does it all herself. There's no staff, no interns or assistants, no ads or AI, no sponsors, and no paywalls. You wonder how she makes it work. Well, she has one of the world's great minds and phenomenal energy. She started The Marginalian, originally called Brain Pickings, when she was either still in or just out of college. And at first, it was just a little email about a handful of interesting things she'd read that week.

1:40And she shared it with like seven friends. And didn't it then grow by word of mouth? Yeah, people started asking to add their wives and their boyfriends and their mothers and their kids. And this was still in the early days of the internet. You know, there were no giant blog platforms or off-the-shelf newsletter templates. And so she scrimped and she saved and she ate tuna fish for a month so she could take an evening computer class. And then with what she learned, she built her own online publication. And now The Marginalian is 20 years old this year. It's part of the Library of Congress's permanent web archive.

2:14But that's not all Maria's done. One of her ongoing projects is bringing science and poetry together. She's created a festival called The Universe in Verse, which paired stories about nature and scientific discoveries with poetry readings and music. She's written children's books and two massive books of history. But at the core of all of this, and I know that's the reason that you wanted to talk with Maria, is the way she foregrounds wonder. For Maria, wonder is not just a byproduct of existence, like some happy moment you stumble on.

2:47It's a discipline, a way of being that offers a path to meaning in a random and indifferent universe.

Life on Bainbridge Island

2:54Okay, so a quick word about what we're about to hear. This was recorded outdoors to a backdrop of birdsong and the occasional plane flying overhead. Maria, where are you right now? I am on Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington, off the coast of Seattle, which is where I live much of the time. I think of you as a New Yorker. I did not know you have this bicoastal existence, much less that you spend most of your time in the woods. Wow. And also, if you were to ever visit my home in New York, it does not feel like New York at all.

3:28My best friend calls it the Annex, which stands for the Annex to the Natural History Museum. And it's full of wood and stones and birds and bamboo outside. No other houses. Yes.

Tolkien and the nature of enchantment

3:43So, before we dive into talking about wonder, I wanted to give people a sense of what you do every week in The Marginalian. And I thought the best way would just be to start with one of the most recent essays, J.R.R. Tolkien, on how to fall in love with life. I really, really loved it. Will you walk us through it just a little bit? Like, how did you come to write it? Well, how I arrive at any one piece is very much a function of or kind of an intersection of the most elemental questions that we all live with, that I also live with.

4:21And whatever is going on in my life at that particular moment. And this essay you mentioned on Tolkien and enchantment is a variation on something I think and write about often because it's very present with me every day. And of course, it's very present with what you do, which is the sense of how do we maintain and nourish the sense of wonder given there are infinitely many reasons for despair in this world, this time we live in. And this is something of Tolkien's that I'd read a long time ago, but it just felt like what I needed to hear.

4:58What do you like so much about what he says? Well, I love the idea that alongside the ordinary world, there is this other dimension that we think of extraordinary that we contact every once in a while. But in some deep sense, it is more true. It is more fundamental than the so-called ordinary. It's the deeper reality and therefore more real. Yeah. Well, so one of the things that I liked so much that you pulled out of that Tolkien essay is this wonderful word that I didn't know, ruth.

5:34Ruth. Yeah, so you tell us it's a feeling of pity, anguish, grief. It's from an old English word. And he argues, Tolkien argues, that enchantment is a fusion of ruth and delight. In other words, a capacity for feeling life deeply in its full range. This is a mixture of your words and Tolkien's words. But the reason I like it so much and the reason I wanted to talk with you is because I do have this kind of sneaking feeling these days that our concept of wonder is getting thinned out.

6:09I did a quick search on Amazon of, you know, recent books on wonder. And not surprisingly, you know, there is an enormous number of new books out with wonder in the title in the self-help section. And I'm all for people feeling more wonder, but not when their title's like How to Feel More Awe in One Minute a Day. That really is a title. Oh, God. You're hitting on such a major thing I worry about and have watched happen in these 20 years of writing, mostly online.

6:46Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's talk about it. What do you see happening? There is a kind of commodification of experience. I don't mean to blame everything on it, but I do think a lot that's happening in the world has to do with Silicon Valley and their particular, you know, young tech bro way of thinking about the world. I remember, for example, 10 years ago or so, Silicon Valley discovered the Stoics. And all of a sudden there was, you know, 10 ways to grow your startup with help from Seneca.

7:21Oh, God, you're right. And suddenly Marcus Aurelius was everywhere. Exactly. And, you know, part of me does worry about this cheapening and thinning of those concepts. And part of me, the optimist in me, hopes that out of the, you know, 10,000 people who are going to go for the listicle and the easy version, there will be 5,000 or maybe five who will discover Seneca or Tolkien.

7:51And go deeper on their own because they have the urgency and the curiosity and the restlessness to go deeper. And I don't want to be all curmudgeon, you know, and say, well, you don't have the proper kind of wonder, you know, that's wonder, right, L-I-T-E. Right wonder and wrong wonder. Yeah, like I really don't want to do that. I feel very strongly that any kind of wonder is a gateway. But there is also a deeper, richer, more nuanced, more complicated form of wonder, I think.

8:27And so I thought I liked the Tolkien thing because I was thinking, well, you know, here's a guy who wrote one of the world's great tales of enchantment, but he didn't live a terribly enchanted life himself. You know, he's that generation. We don't know that. We don't know what goes on inside a person. We never know. So if you think about his outer circumstances, his mother died when he was 12, he fought in the trenches in World War I, he was at the Battle of the Somme, and then he begins creating this mythology.

8:59So how do you think about the relationship between the external circumstantial elements of a life and the internal arrangement of attitudes or sensibilities that make for enchantment? I think that an awful lot of the people you write about who have written really beautifully about wonder or enchantment or ways to hold on to joy have lived in very fraught and difficult circumstances, have lived during times when nations and cultures were falling apart.

9:38And I think that's not an accident, but I'm curious to know what you think. Well, I also, it's interesting, maybe you can hear a sound, which is the answer. So this morning I was walking through this absolutely, truly enchanted and enchanting forest. It's an old growth forest here, the sunlight coming through the autumn leaves, and all of a sudden this terrible, unnatural sound. And it was three supersonic jets flying extremely low in formation, and every creaturely fiber of your being, you know, bristles at that.

10:15And it was this reminder that at any moment, the world can fall apart. At any moment, it could be a world war, it could be a natural disaster, it could be whatever it is. And the thing about enchantment and wonder is that you can't store it, you can't bank it up for later use, which is why I think what you say about it being an entry point to something deeper is true. But paradoxically, because I think all the richest experiences do hold paradox within themselves, paradoxically, wonder is also an absolute is, meaning it's not in order to.

10:51It is a presence with what is right now in this moment that is the only region in which we actually live. Part of what's so, for me, frustrating with these self-help books is that they do instrumentalize it in the service of improving your life, improving your relationship, improving your business, whatever, you know, the modern myth of self-improvement may be. But wonder is also very much the antidote to that. It is right here, right now, this is all there is.

Growing up in communist Bulgaria

11:20So tell me, I think for people like me who've been reading you for a long time, there's always some curiosity about you. So you grew up in Bulgaria in the 1980s during the last years of communism, which must have been one of those grimmer times. I mean, children have a very beautiful and in some cases tragic way of normalizing whatever it is they're living with is just the reality. I didn't necessarily have a sense of it being awful.

11:54It was normal to, you know, watch my grandparents stand in line once a month for a bar of chocolate because there was a shortage and you could only get it at a certain time and everybody wanted it. It was normal to ration that chocolate for the remainder of the year in little squares. It was only one brand. It had a milk cow on the wrapper and it was like the greatest luxury. But I think paradoxically when you grow up with that sort of experience, it is a kind of privilege because you're unafraid of losing things or privation or the basic things that people in the developed West fear when they're choosing a life path or go into corporate banking or whatever it is.

12:38Many of these decisions are fear-based and I do think it's a real privilege to just not have that fear because it was the air that you were living in.

12:50Did the general atmosphere change much during the time that you were there? You came here when you were 19, I think, right? Well, one of the reasons I decided to study what I studied was that I was only five when communism fell and I remember that night, it was November, it was cold, it was late at night and we were on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian parliament. I was on my father's shoulders, thousands of people with lighters in the air singing Beatles song and encircling the parliament until the guys came out with their arms up, with their hands up.

13:26You know, the dictator and his posse just sort of surrendered to the people. And living through that makes you really, really not just believe but know that that is possible, that that happens, that the history of the world was made of that. And so it makes it a little bit easier to bear living through tyrannical times today because I do have faith in the people and the power of the people. But anyway, shortly after that, even as a child, I had this very simple but to me profound insight, which was that we went overnight from having one TV channel with the dictator every night at 8 p.m.

14:05from delivering the whatever propaganda he was delivering to having multiple TV channels and all of a sudden we had ads. We had ads because during communism, of course, there was no point in advertising anything because there was nothing, you know. And all of a sudden, commercial culture. And I remember thinking, wow, it's the exact same thing. It's selling stuff. It's just selling a different ideology, you know. And so as I grew up, I wanted to understand how words can move people, large masses of people can move minds.

14:43And can this manipulation tactic be used for good? Meaning, can we use the communication arts to actually incline people toward the better aspects of their nature as opposed to subservient misery? Hmm, hmm. Were you always in love with words? Because you were also a science and math kid from early on, I think. A math prodigy, in fact, right? Yeah. Well, I would not say prodigy. I was sufficiently good at it to be at the math academy in Bulgaria and to be doing European math Olympics.

15:19But I wasn't, you know, it's interesting. I'm sorry, European math Olympics sounds kind of prodigy-like. But all the kids in the math academy did it. And there were a few kids in our class who were, you know, one kid at 12 solved a 400-year-old theorem. And the rest of us were like, we can do this. This is interesting. I enjoyed math. It was play for me. You know, people think, oh, math is all about this sort of surety that there's an answer, you have to get to the answer. But to me, it was the opposite. It was this pliancy of the mind to find the way to the solution, right?

15:51But I just knew I wasn't going to be one of the great mathematicians because I didn't have that thing that whatever spark, vital spark, these two, it was two kids who were in our class who had that. And I do think it's healthy to recognize that and to be humbled by it because how beautiful that there are minds out there who exceed us by so many orders of magnitude. In any given field, there are those people.

Science, math, and philosophy

16:18Did science and math early on have any connection for you with philosophy? I mean, I'm sort of thinking that if you go back in history, the earliest scientists thought about using reason as their way to commune with the universe. You know, so you get Kepler and who thought God was a mathematician or Newton said God was a geometer. And in fact, they were called natural philosophers. The word scientist was coined in 1834 for Mary Somerville, the polymathic mathematician, because she had written this book about connections spelled with an exit, as they used to spell connections, of the physical sciences that touched many different sciences.

17:04And so they couldn't call her a mathematician, they couldn't call her a geologist or an astronomer. And so they based it on artist, an existing word, and they called her a scientist. And that was the birth of that term. But you're right, the Keplers and Newtons and all the rest of them were natural philosophers. And science in the 20th, early 21st century has often been a little more buttoned down. And so I think it's not an accident that we've felt like science and disenchantment have somehow gone hand in hand.

17:39But for you, it seems like science and math have really been a portal to wonder more often. Well, I really don't care for the, you know, old Keats argument. He accused Newton famously of unweaving the rainbow with his optics and saying that science takes the magic out of nature. I think it's a really puerile way of looking at things. Science is just our translation device for understanding the language of nature. And what can be more wonderful? I think the mistake people make is that they confuse the intimations of a truth with a final answer.

18:15And if the history of science tells us anything at all, it's that the history of our species is the history of mistaking the limits of our imagination, the limits of our knowledge for the limits of the possible. And over and over, nature surprises us. And then we have to redo our models and test them against reality. And that's the wonderful thing about science. You model what you think might be true. You test it against nature. And then you actually factor in what comes back. And then you change the model and you come closer and closer to that fundamental truth that may not be knowable because we are a function of it ourselves.

18:52It may not be knowable, but we can get glimpses of parts of it that to me are just so beautiful and so enchanting. Do you have favorite scientists? You've written about so many. I mean, I do favor the ones who are unafraid of feeling or writing with feeling about the natural world, about the wonders of nature. Rachel Carson, of course, probably more than anyone else. Lauren Isley and Lewis Thomas, who are paleontologists and entomologists and, you know, working very specific sciences,

19:25but also wrote poetry and wrote the most, most beautiful moving essays about being in contact with wonder through scientific inquiry. There's some chemists you introduced me to in your new book, Traversal. And now, of course, I'm blanking on their names, but are there any of them? Humphrey Davy, you're probably thinking about.

Humphrey Davy and scientific celebrity

19:46Yes, yes.

Humphrey Davy and scientific celebrity

19:47So Humphrey Davy was the world's first celebrity scientist. He worked in the golden age of chemistry and in the very first years of the 19th century, began giving these public lectures at the Royal Society, which were the first kind of science pop talks. And people would line up around the block and through the streets. And in fact, his lectures were the reason for the creation of London's first one-way street, because they just couldn't handle the amount of traffic. And you would see, you know, old men with their canes and mothers with their babies.

20:18Like, everybody went to listen to him talk about the science of volcanoes and animal electricity or just electricity in general. He named, discovered and named the element iodine. He created the Davy safety lamp, which, I mean, Humphrey Davy's experiments with nitrous oxide and other gases allowed him to develop a lamp that miners could use, because there were a lot of children employed in the mines at the time and gruesome deaths from explosions of the gasoline and the lamps they were using at the time.

20:53And so he developed this lamp that, first of all, changed the way that work was being done and saved the lives of probably hundreds of thousands of young children working there. And it's not because he set out to do that, but because he glimpsed a part of elemental truth that then gave him an insight into a very, very small use of it that had a very, very large impact. Wow. And I'm pretty sure there was a connection, wasn't there, between Humphrey Davy and, was it Percy Shelley?

21:24I mean, there's this whole group of poets and writers who are suddenly fascinated with some of the new chemicals and especially something like nitrous oxide. I mean, they're taking all kinds of things. Am I getting this right or am I missing? Right, right. Am I confusing stories? It's a little kind of moot in the sense that Traversal ended up being a 600-page book precisely because it explores the connective tissue between things. Yeah, there's a connection between Humphrey Davy and Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley, who's kind of the protagonist more so, and Whitman and Frederick Douglass.

21:57But the broader point, though, is that I love these golden threads that are woven through the world that are invisible for the most part, but hold it together. And every once in a while, when the sunbeam of attention or curiosity falls on one of them, it's exposed, and you're all of a sudden like, wow, I had no idea this was connected to this. But look at how it all holds together. I love that so much because it always feels to me as though there's this invisible web. We just can't see all of it.

22:29But, you know, what we call a coincidence is just hitting up one of those moments of connection that tempts us all the time. We get little glimpses and think, oh, my God, things are connected. And then, no, no, it's really all just chance. Life feels like we're oscillating back and forth between those two poles, chance and order or connection. Absolutely. Sorry, that wasn't really a question, was it? No, you know what? The only thing that makes interviews bearable is that it's a conversation between minds, and we get to weave connection together.

22:59So I'm all for that. Okay. All right. And we'll be right back with more about Mary Shelley, Maria's own art practices, the astonishing world of lichens, and how to put yourself in the path of wonder. Hey, it's Steve. I am so glad you're with us, and I have a favor to ask. This is a new podcast, and we're really hoping to reach more listeners.

23:30So we'd love for you to tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet, and it will really help when you give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. And if you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up at wondercabinetproductions.com. I'm Anne Strangehams talking with Maria Popova, the creator of The Marginalian, a beloved and wonder-infused online publication that blends art and science, history and poetry, and philosophy.

Mary Shelley and survival through writing

24:03And we are about to talk about one of Maria's heroines. You mentioned Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. She's 19. I'd kind of forgotten 19 when they're holed up in this castle writing ghost stories, and it's unbelievable that she wrote that then. But I'd forgotten there was so much more to the rest of her life. So tell us about Mary Shelley after Frankenstein. Well, I do find it both amusing and somewhat unfortunate that she's reduced to something she wrote as a teenager.

24:36And granted, it was absolutely visionary, and she was not your average teenager. But she did so much more with her life and her work. And some of it, to me, is better, actually. Like what? Well, I love the—first of all, the way she coped with all of her losses. I mean, it is worth saying that by the age of 26, this young woman had lost her mother at birth, her only biological sibling, the love of her life, and three children.

25:08I mean, we cannot imagine—we cannot begin to imagine what that's like. And she coped with each one of her losses and with the kind of mounting sense of helplessness, really, against life by writing. And her journal is so—there are passages of it that are absolutely lyrical and profound. It's her time in the natural world, which is what saved her. Her diaries from crossing the Alps are just absolutely extraordinary. But in the times of grief, they're very spare, they're very almost militaristic, and all it says is, right, period.

25:44Eight o'clock, right, period. Nine o'clock, right, period. And she wrote—she wrote hundreds of thousands of pages total, including several novels that are each like 400 pages long. Very autobiographical in a way, but also deeply philosophical. I love one called The Last Man, which I uncannily came upon in the spring of 2020. And it's a novel about a deadly global pandemic set in the 21st century that kills humanity one by one until the protagonist, the last man, is the only one remaining.

26:22And he wanders the museums of Rome, asking, what is the meaning of life? See, I'm going to cry. I'm just thinking about it. Why do we make arts? Why are we here? I mean, it's an absolutely beautiful novel. Yeah, Mary Shelley for you. I also find it really weirdly comforting, knowing that these apocalyptic fears that we have, people 100, 200 years ago had them, too. This is not new. We're not, you know, at this fresh moment staring at civilizational collapse.

26:57This is human. Yes, and I do think there's a real hubris and ahistorical arrogance by thinking we live in an especially bad time. Please, the Black Plague is not killing your children and your spouse or you. You're not in a concentration camp. You know, your life expectancy is not 35 years. I mean, come on. Do you know, I say this sometimes and people get mad at me. Well, people need some history lessons. I mean, James Baldwin wrote a gorgeous essay on Shakespeare and midway through it, in classic Baldwin fashion, writing about something, he's really writing about something else, which is how to live.

27:37In the middle of it all, he says, people think his time was easier than ours, but no time is easy if one is living through it. And I think we really need to not mistake the difficulty we experience conducting our lives, which is very real, for a kind of accurate historical validity of how difficult the time is. Because that's just the feeling of difficulty. You mentioned Mary Shelley taking solace in nature.

28:07I think that you also have strong feelings about connection to the natural world. Does that go way back for you as a child? Because you also spent some time in the mountains in Bulgaria, I think, right? Mostly.

Childhood memories and trapeze practice

28:21Most of my childhood was, I was raised largely by my grandparents. And they were elementary school teachers stationed by the government in these remote mountain villages that had very low literacy rates. And I was with them a lot of the time and in classic Eastern European fashion, very unattended as a child. I was on my own most of the time, kind of bushwhacking through the forest and collecting things and squatting to look at a wildflower for half an hour.

28:57You know, whatever children do. Once chased by a wild boar. Really? In the middle of it. Oh, God, yes. It was an interesting experience, I have to say, because it was this broad, open field across from the schoolhouse where my grandparents taught and where we lived. And it was encircled by a forest. And in the middle of the field, there was a lonely, scraggly plum tree, just literally like at the center of this open field. And I'm like walking through the field. And I see on the other side, the boar coming.

29:30And very quickly, I do the computation that I was closer to the center of the field and to the edge of the field in the schoolhouse, that if I tried to run backwards, I didn't have a chance, you know. But if I ran to the tree, meaning toward the boar, who's coming from the other side of the tree, I had a chance of maybe getting up the tree. And that's exactly what happened. I ran, I scrambled up the tree, and the boar was like snorting with his husks at the base of the tree. Oh, my God. How old were you?

30:00Yeah.

30:02I think I must have been five or six. Oh, my God. Maria.

30:09I love that experience. I know.

30:14So you and I actually met once before. I'm sure you wouldn't remember, but it was years ago. We had a quick dinner with Alan Lightman and Steve Paulson, my husband, in New York. It was after Steve had interviewed Alan Lightman. Yes, yes, with Alan's daughter in that tiny little restaurant, like low-level beneath. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, you were either just coming from or just going to trapeze practice. You were part of a trapeze troop or something, and I never met anybody who did trapeze before.

30:50Yeah. I mean, you know, Whitman said, if the body is not the soul, what is the soul? I mean, we live in our bodies. They are part of the work we do in this world. I mean, I've been an athlete my whole life. I start every day with a dozen pull-ups. It helps me clear my mind. It's just part of my creaturely process, I suppose.

31:14As it happens, I met somebody the other night who told me that his ex-wife and daughter are fanatical about trapeze. And I knew I was talking with you, and so I said, what is it that they love about trapeze? And he said, the weightlessness. Is that true for you, too? Well, I had never thought of that in particular. For me, it was an antidote to my tendency towards overanalyzing things. Because when you're up there, you are not a mind conducting a body.

31:49You are a body in conversation with gravity that is in complete integrated synchrony with the mind that is governing it. And you don't have the luxury of overthinking. You have to embody and think at the same time. And for me, it was very healing in terms of that integration that's not necessarily very easy. Did you get better at making fast, split-second decisions? Or did you become more certain? I mean, how did that bleed into the rest of your life?

32:21That's a great question. Well, I no longer do the trapeze. It just sort of burned itself out. But a lot of the trapeze practice did translate into my ordinary life in terms of, I suppose, being more respectful of time and timing. Because in trapeze, timing is everything. Motion and gravity are all in the service of time and timing. And it has made me more aware of that.

32:54In what way? I guess the very basic awareness that we are time. We're not in charge of time. We're in communion with time at our best, I think. Did you, thinking about time reminds me of the Marginalian piece that just dropped. I can't remember who you began with, but it winds up being about C.S. Lewis and structuring your life so that you can allow for more wonder. You know, this gets to the idea of putting yourself in the place where wonder can find you.

33:28And the paradoxical idea that you have to actually create some structure in order for that to happen. I mean, the column with C.S. Lewis was really very enlightening and amusing. I mean, he's very old school. Very old school. Tea must be taken. I don't remember exactly what he says. It's 4 p.m. And it can be taken with a book. 4 p.m. and it must be served immediately upon returning from the afternoon walk. Yeah, right. And it's always must be served. Exactly. It makes you wonder who are the women doing the serving for?

33:59Yeah, there's a lot of invisible structure holding up C.S. Lewis's life.

The astonishing world of lichens

34:06Yes. So what are the other pieces for you of your structure? What about artistic practice? Because you're a potter, right? You have a ceramics practice. Oh, yes. It's a very unfortunate manifestation of midlife crisis. This is what my best friend calls my maker mania, which includes woodworking, clay, embroidery, unreasonable amounts. I am still trying to figure out what it is they do for me. It came quite out of nowhere about a year and a half ago.

34:39They help me think and they also help me not think. Some of the most satisfying to me sentences I've written have come during those hours that I've been sanding wood or embroidering moss onto my sweater, walking in the forest, picking, you know, lichen for my lichen buttons that I make. Lichen buttons? And then it will come to me. Oh, yes. I have made, at this point, thousands of lichen buttons.

35:10Wait, what is a lichen button? I cast them in resin in the shape of a button and then I sew them onto clothes. So this means you collect lichen. Yes. Yes. Many species from almost every continent. From every continent? There's that much lichen? Almost every. Well, lichen exists on every continent. I just have not been to Antarctica. What do you like about lichen? Oh, my God. Everything. What's not to like about lichen?

35:41Okay, let's see. First of all, lichen can survive the most extreme environments on Earth and off Earth. It has been taken on the International Space Station, released into outer space, meaning unprotected, into cosmic radiation, taken back, returned to Earth, where it just carried on its merry life, procreating without any problems, like nothing happened. You're kidding. Lichen is the new cockroach. No, lichen is cockroaches plus, plus, plus.

36:13They also are the first organisms to come back after major wildfires and radiation exposure. And they don't need, they can reproduce asexually, meaning they don't need a mate. They could use one if they so chose, but they don't need one.

36:31What else? They grow 400 times more slowly than the moon is leaving us. Yes, the moon is leaving us, as everyone should know, PSA. Okay. And they're just absolutely beautiful. I feel so embarrassed. I don't even, are they plants? That is a very good question. And actually, the person who discovered the reproductive mechanism of lichen is Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit. No way. Oh, yes. Yes. And in fact, she could not present her research at Kew Gardens because she was a woman.

37:04And so her uncle, who was some sort of like dentist or some other faintly scientifically accredited guy, presented the research on her behalf. And everybody was so awed and applauded. At the end, he was like, surprise, guess who did it? And then the president of Kew Gardens just boldly took credit for it for 130 years. So she was only reinstated posthumously as the discoverer of this, which is that Linnaeus classified them as plants. However, they are, is what she discovered, a combination or a fusion between algae and fungi.

37:40I mean, those are two species that we're looking to for, I don't know, different kinds of technological salvation. Yes. Lichen have many ecological, pragmatic, and philosophical lessons. I love that. But do you lichen it?

38:01I had to. I had to. I have many lichen jokes in me. You haven't seen the first of it. It was part of the appeal of foraging. Because there's a particular kind of attention. Like we were talking about the idea of putting yourself in the place where wonder can find you. And I'm thinking about you hunting for lichen. And to me, what it reminds me of is times when, like when my kids were little, we used to go to Sanibel Island, one of the top 10 beaches in the world for shells.

38:31And it was intensely rewarding. I could spend hours just walking, identifying, and picking up different kinds of shells. And there's something about that particular kind of both focused but also soft attention that I find really pleasurable. I wonder if there's anything similar, if hunting for lichens sounds in any way like that. Well, I don't look for them. I come upon them, which I think is a very important quality of wonder, actually, that you can't will it.

39:05You can't orchestrate it. You just have to be receptive when it finds you. I do think, though, these are two different, equally interesting questions. The other one being about this very strange human impulse toward collecting. Classifying is one thing. We do collect things conceptually into categories, and that's how we make sense of the world. It helps us, but it also limits us because the moment we box something in, we make it a little bit too distinct. The line between where one ecosystem begins and ends and another begins, where one organism ends and another begins, is not as clear cut as, you know, a linear classification system.

39:43But I also do think there's something really lovely about collecting our amazements and saying, look, this amazed me. Admire my collection so you can experience some amazement too and know me through my amazements. I think that's wonderful. Well, you just described a wonder cabinet. I love that.

Libraries, books, and bird divinations

40:06Thank you. So I wanted to talk about finding wonder through books because you've told the story in other places about coming to the U.S. for the first time to go to college. I think it was UPenn. And you were in search of that classic liberal arts education, great books, great ideas, learning how to live, and instead discovered it was like 200-person lectures and PowerPoint slides. And you started going to go to the library and roaming the stacks, which sounds pretty magical to me. But what did you do there?

40:38Oh, it was actually extremely exasperating. The first thing I realized is that there's so much I don't know that most Americans do that I immediately felt this enormous intellectual, cultural debt of these people I'd never heard of who seemed to be part of the common canon of the English language world. But the library, it was self-help in a way for me. Not what I was reading, but the act of going. I was – it was hard. It was hard.

41:08You know, the culture shock was hard. I had very bad treatment-resistant depression. I didn't really know what was happening to me. I mean, it just was not a great time for me in college. It was very hard. And to read about people who have lived through, well, harder things, you know, perspective. Again, wonderful line from James Baldwin from an interview he did in 1953. He said, you think your pain and suffering are unique in the history of the world, and then you read.

41:39Yeah. Given what you write, given how many people's diaries you've read, how often you're quoting from people's letters, I guess I just kind of thought that you would have the classic romantic feeling about libraries and archives and touching the paper and the look of the old reading rooms. Nope. To me, that's the kind of unnecessary sentimentalizing of culture that I don't, you know. But I do want to say, though, this is an important point about modern culture that there is a huge – so we live in a time when people mistake what's on the internet for the totality of all there is, right?

42:20And the spectrum is from, you know, Chad GPT on the one end to the Beinecke Library on the other. But I think in the middle of it, the very rich middle of it, which is where I live, there's this enormous corpus of things that are not private archives that are in the public record, but they are in books that have fallen out of print. So I spend a lot of my time, and I will say a lot of my money – probably the biggest expense in my life is books in large part because a lot of them are out-of-print books, which are not cheap and not easy to find.

42:55So that is my version of archive. So what about – I mean, I'm thinking about your bird divinations, and, you know, I used to do or sometimes still do a book divination. I feel a little lost. Open a book, you know, randomly see what's there. And usually there is a phrase or something that pops into your mind. It's not like I think the universe has a message for me. I think there are ways that we can unlock our minds and let the unconscious out to play, and things like a book divination can help you do that.

43:34So then I was thinking about your bird divinations. Yeah, and just wondering if you do have this feeling of some playfulness around using words and other people's lines as a kind of oracle. Well, much of what you said is exactly what I wrote in my little introduction booklet to the divinations, precisely to prevent people from thinking this is an oracular practice.

44:05The universe does not care about the ongoingness of my puny transient life and does not give me personalized signs about how to handle my breakup, you know? That's not what's happening, but there is something really wonderful about using these side doors to our own consciousness to enter into whatever the pressing question is of the day

44:35in a way that is surprising, that is not laden with our preconditioned trigger-ready answers, which are the things that limit us actually in life are our certainties, right? And I love creative constraints. It's been very inspiring to me. So with the bird divinations, I took John James Audubon and John Elizabeth Gould's Natural Histories of Different Bird Species, and I would take the page or pages they wrote about a particular species,

45:09and only using those words in the scientific description, just see what formed in me, just see what formed. And then I would cut them out and lay them over the illustration of that bird. And again, it was self-help. I did it every single day for more than 100 days. And every time, my own unconscious told me what I needed to know and wasn't listening to in this kind of surprising language that wasn't really my own,

45:40but the sentiment was entirely my own. I also own your bird divinations, but I also kind of collect oracle decks for exactly that reason. Half of them I never use, but I just like seeing all the ways people have found to kind of evoke chance, I guess. It's something about chance. We're both afraid of it, and it also is the source of so much beauty somehow. I don't know if that makes sense. But it also is almost silly to have an attitude about chance or a feeling about chance, because we are children of chance.

46:18I mean, chance is how we exist, you know? And so to feel one way or another about it is almost anti-existential. Well, that seems like a good place to leave things.

46:31The nihilistic slash joyful, the joyful nihilist. Well, I said we wanted to get to a more nuanced kind of... Fantastic. I love it. ...richer idea of wonder, and I think, you know, wonder is not just, you know, oh, I found something beautiful in wonder. It needs to be shot through with the terror of the unknown, chance, paradox, chaos always lurking. That's the backdrop. Absolutely. Well, thank you for this wonderful... Thank you for talking. ...fractal, delightful, nourishing conversation.

47:02Maria Popova, on the 20th anniversary of The Marginalian, an online, wonder-infused portal onto the perennial human search for meaning. Sign up at themarginalian.org. And depending on your interests, look out for her poetry and science anthology, The Universe in Verse, or her brand-new book, Traversal, about the invisible connections in the history of science and art. Or one of my favorites, a children's book called The Snail with the Right Heart, A True Story.

47:36I'm Anne Strange-Hamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. We'll be back next week with my conversation with Roshi Joan Halifax about finding wonder in the most unexpected circumstances, even in the final moments of life. Thanks to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and digital producer, Mark Rickers. Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Versher, Vermont. Wherever you are, be well and stay in touch.