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Contact donating = loving newsletter View Full Site Every week since 2006, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings , which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. Your support really matters. MONTHLY DONATION ♥ $3 / month ♥ $5 / month ♥ $7 / month ♥ $10 / month ♥ $25 / month START NOW ONE-TIME DONATION You can also become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount: GIVE NOW BITCOIN DONATION Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel a recurring donation? Go here . Archives browse by subject culture books art psychology science philosophy history design illustration children’s books all subjects surprise me Sunday newsletter Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week’s most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children’s books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here’s an example . Like? Claim yours: midweek newsletter Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its fourteenth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces: ABOUT CONTACT SUPPORT SUBSCRIBE Newsletter RSS CONNECT Facebook Twitter Instagram Tumblr Also art sounds bites bookshelf The Universe in Verse Figuring A Velocity of Being Favorite Reads Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Earth’s Forests The Best of Brain Pickings 2019 Favorite Books of 2019 Favorite Children’s Books of 2019 How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe 13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert Rebecca Solnit’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel The Writing of Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone see more Labors of Love Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized 7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton The Holstee Manifesto The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks Muriel Rukeyser on the Wellspring of Aliveness and the Shared Source of Our Confusion and Our Power in Times of Turmoil Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” By Maria Popova It is such delicate work, such devoted work, the work of contouring the personhoods of persons who have imprinted the world with nothing less than revolutions of the mind, yet have left only faint traces of themselves as persons, unselved first by the nature of their revolutionary ideas — vast, abstract, lightyears beyond the solipsisms of the self — and then unselved again by the selective collective memory we mistake for history and its perennial failure at a foothold in the abstract beyond personhoods, beyond identities, beyond the narrow and unimaginative bounds of so-called human interest. There is quiet heroism to this work of rescuing from obscurity and erasure lives understanding which helps understand the entire eras in which they were lived and the fundaments of sensemaking the following epochs have taken as givens. Such is the work Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) did with Willard Gibbs: American Genius ( public library ). Muriel Rukeyser Rukeyser’s own genius came abloom in the dawn of her twenties, when her debut poetry collection, Theory of Flight , earned her the Yale Younger Poets Award — America’s longest-running literary accolade. She was not yet thirty when she composed her staggering more-than-biography of the father of physical chemistry, Willard Gibbs (February 11, 1839–April 28, 1903) — this odd and world-shifting bridge figure between classical mechanics and quantum physics, celebrated as the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, lauded by Einstein as one of the most original and important thinkers America ever produced, prophesied to outlive in remembrance all of his contemporaries except perhaps Lincoln, yet almost entirely forgotten by Rukeyser’s time. Like Eddington , Gibbs was a quiet, reserved genius — silent, inhibited, remote,” Rukeyser tells us — queer by all reasonable deduction; he never married and lived out his life in his sister’s home. Like Newton, who accomplished the greatest leap in science within the solitude of his plague quarantine , Gibbs imagined his revolution within the chamber of the mind, within a dense solitude — in silence, in isolation, in the years of rejection directly after the Civil War, when abstract work was wanted least of all, when the cry was for application and invention and the tools that would expand the great growing fortunes of the diamond boys.” And yet there he was, living closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit of America.” Willard Gibbs, 1855. (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.) Rukeyser’s enchantment with Gibbs became the crucible for her lifelong stewardship of the parallels between poetry and science , her astute and abiding insight into how they help hold the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear” and in doing so equip our imaginations to deal with our lives.” Published in 1942, Rukeyser’s majestic 446-page masterwork of antierasure grew from the seed of a fascination first germinated with her poem Gibbs,” written as WWII was beginning to cast its umbra of terror over all that is bright and beautiful in the human spirit, unpeeling from the hallways of time the image of every genius who ever lived as an irrelevance to this apotheosis of dumb destruction. It is always the poet’s task to defend the relevance of radiance, whatever its shape and subject, and so she did. From the life of Willard Gibbs, Muriel Rukeyser drew something larger, vaster, more...