Confucius on the 6 steps to good government and happiness, an animated poem celebrating our connection to nature and to each other, Hubble's legacy

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. Hello Reader! This is the weekly email digest of the daily online journal Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — loops, language, the paradoxical loneliness of "I love you," and what keeps love alive; Einstein on the political power of art; expressionist science — you can catch up right here. And if you missed the annual review of the best of Brain Pickings 2020, that is here. If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation – for fourteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours, made many personal sacrifices, and invested tremendous resources in Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: THANK YOU. Confucius on Good Government, the 6 Steps to a Harmonious Society, and Self-Discipline as the Key to Democracy Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that "the heart has got to open in a fundamental way," the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius (551–479 BCE) recognized the indelible link between personal and political morality, recognized that interpersonal kindness is the foundation of social justice, recognized that democracy — a form of government only just invented on the other side of the globe in ancient Greece, not to take root in his own culture for epochs — begins in the heart. Confucius. 1909 engraving, artist unknown. (Available as a print.) Centuries before the advent of Christianity and its central tenet of the golden rule, the Chinese sage pioneered the concept of compassion as a moral guiding principle — an ancient concept subtly yet profoundly different from empathy, which only entered the modern lexicon at the dawn of the twentieth century as a term for projecting oneself into a work of art. On his existential reading list of essential books for every stage of life, Tolstoy listed Confucius among the most mature reading. His teachings went on to influence millennia of poets, political leaders, and ordinary people seeking to live nobler, kinder, more empowered lives. Among them was the poet Ezra Pound (October 30, 1885–November 1, 1972) — a man of immense talent and immense blind spots, of sympathetic idealisms and troubling sympathies — who set out to translate and compile the most enduring teachings of the great Chinese sage. His 1927 more-than-translation earned Pound the $2,000 poetry prize of The Dial — the pioneering Transcendentalist magazine Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson had launched nearly a century earlier at the peak of their intense and complicated relationship, which shaped the history of modern thought. Pound used the funds to launch his own poetic-political magazine. The following year, his translation was published in book form as Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot / The Great Digest / The Analects (public library). In his prefatory note, Pound observed that China was tranquil and harmonious for as long as its rulers followed the teachings of Confucius, but dynasties collapsed into chaos and social catastrophe as soon as these principles were neglected. In a sentiment that applies as much to those ancient sociopolitical collapses as to the perils of the present, he writes: The proponents of a world order will neglect at their peril the study of the only process that has repeatedly proved its efficiency as a social coordinate. The Sage and the Banditti. 1887 woodcut, artist unknown. (Available as a print.) That process, as Confucius conceived it, was one of treating public good as a matter of personal goodness, rooted in a purity of heart and a discipline of mind. Noting that "things have roots and branches" and that "if the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed," the ancient Chinese sage outlines the six steps to a harmonious society: The [ancients], wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their own states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts. Wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories. Confucius. Colorized 1900 photogravure, artist unknown. (Available as a print.) This essential classification is the work of clarity and comprehension — we classify to understand and to order our priorities. Once this work is complete, Confucius counsels, the process is folded over and the six steps are retraced back to the original goal of good government: When things had been classified in organic categories, knowledge moved toward fulfillment; given the extreme knowable points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with precision… Having attained this precise verbal definition, they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having attained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when their states were well governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium. Complement with mathematician Lilian Lieber on how Euclid illuminates the roots of democracy and social justice and the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm on what self-love really means and how it anchors a sane society, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin's superb more-than-translation of Tao Te Ching and its ancient wisdom on the wellspring of personal and political power. Forward to a friend/Read Online/ donating=loving In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For fourteen 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 made your life more livable in any way last year, 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. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin Hubble Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard College Observatory to measure and catalogue the brightness of stars when she began noticing a consistent correlation between the luminosity of a class of variable stars and their pulsation period, between their brightness and their blinking pattern. At the same time, a dutiful boy cusping on manhood was repressing his childhood love of astronomy and beginning his legal studies to fulfill his dying father's demand for an ordinary, reputable life. That young man was Edwin Hubble (November 20, 1889–September 28, 1953). Upon his father's death, he would unleash his passion for the stars into a formal study of astronomy. After the interruption of a world war, he would lean on Leavitt's data to upend millennia of cosmic parochialism, demonstrating two revolutionary facts about the universe: that it is tremendously bigger than we thought, and that it is getting bigger by the blink. The law underlying its expansion would come to bear his name, as would the ambitious space telescope that would give humanity an unprecedented glimpse of a cosmos "so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back." Hubble's Law staggers the imagination with the awareness that even our most intimate celestial companion, the Moon, is slowly moving away from us every day, about as fast as your fingernails grow. This means that at some future point, the greatest cosmic spectacle visible from Earth will be no more, for a total solar eclipse is a function of the glorious accident that the Moon is at just the right distance for its shadow to cover the entire face of the Sun when passing before it from our vantage point — a shadow that will grow smaller and smaller as our satellite drifts farther and farther away. Before Hubble, the study of astronomy had already stunned the human mind with the awareness that this entire drama of life is a miracle of chance, unfolding on a common rocky planet tossed at just the right distance from its star to have the optimal temperature and optimal atmosphere for supporting life. Hubble sent the human mind spinning with the swirl of gratitude and terror at the awareness that it is all a temporary miracle. Author Isabelle Marinov and artist Deborah Marcero pay tender homage to Hubble's life and legacy in The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble (public library) — a splendid addition to the finest picture-book biographies of revolutionary minds, and one particularly dear to my own heart in light of my ongoing devotion to building New York City's first public observatory to cast the cosmic enchantment on future Hubbles and Leavitts, to make life more livable for the rest of us by inviting the telescopic perspective. The story begins with the moment the young Edwin's passion for stargazing is magnified by his first taste of astronomy when his grandfather gives him a telescope for his eighth birthday. That night, all Edwin wanted was to stay outside, looking up at the stars. Not even a birthday cake could lure him back inside. Out in the hills of Missouri, under the star-salted skies suddenly so much more proximate and alive, questions fill the wonder-stricken Edwin — questions that become a singsong refrain throughout the book as his life unfolds toward their answers. One night, watching "the Moon turn into a tangerine" with his best friend, Edwin explains the basic cosmic trigonometry of the lunar eclipse — he is already devouring every astronomy book he can find. But despite his ebullient passion for the science of the cosmos, Edwin bends to his traditionalist father's will and trundles down the safe, standard life-path of a high school teacher and basketball coach in Middle America. Only after his father's death (the story omits the larger, grimmer dream-interruption of the world's first global war) does Hubble pursue his dream to study astronomy, completing a degree and taking as his first job a position at Mount Wilson Observatory — home to the largest telescope in the world. Thinking. Wondering. Measuring. Calculating. On some days, his fingers and toes grew numb and tears froze his eyelashes to the telescope's eyepiece. But nothing could lure him back inside. It is there, looking through the colossal instrument night after cold night, that Hubble becomes obsessed with the Andromeda Nebula, then believed to be a swirl of gas and dust within our own galaxy. He begins suspecting it is not. With this powerful telescope, Hubble identifies previously unseen stars within Andromeda and, drawing on Leavitt's technique for calculating their distance, suddenly realizes that they were much, much father than previously thought — so far that they could not be within the Milky Way. Which meant that there were other galaxies in the universe beyond our own — a staggering revision of the limits of knowledge. At this point in the story, in a classic Enchanted Lion touch of thoughtful loveliness and delight, a gatefold expands into a paper spacetime of colorful swirling galaxies, rendering our Milky Way "no more than a small dot in an unimaginably vast universe." The story continues with an elegant primer on Hubble's Law and its humbling, thrilling implications about the universe and our place in it, ending with the inquisitive refrain that had animated the young Edwin's life and will go on animating the mind of the human animal for as long as we remain sentient creatures on an improbable living world amid a vast and wonder-strewn universe. Hubble's own words, evocative of Rilke's "Ninth Elegy," appear on the final page as an invocation and an invitation: We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of world it is. Complement The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars with What Miss Mitchell Saw — the lovely picture-book biography of Maria Mitchell, America's first female astronomer, whose epoch-making comet discovery helped her blaze the way for women in science — then revisit the astonishing true story of how Kepler laid the foundation of our understanding of the universe while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial. Illustrations by Deborah Marcero courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Photographs by Maria Popova. Forward to a friend/Read Online/ Murmuration: A Stunning Animated Poem About Our Connection to Nature and Each Other In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm the sky like living constellations on their way to roost for the night, and writes: We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun. It captures their almost celestial strangeness. Standing on the Suffolk coast a few years ago, I saw a far-flung mist of starlings turn in a split second into an ominous sphere like a dark planet hanging over the marshes. Everyone around me gasped audibly before it exploded in a maelstrom of wings. In a lovely echo of Richard Feynman's Ode to a Flower — his timeless, poetic insistence that knowing the science behind something beautiful doesn't rob it of enchantment but "only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe" — Macdonald unfurls the science behind the awe of murmurations: The changing shape of starling flocks comes from each bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme rapidity; their reaction time is less than a tenth of a second. Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching ninety miles per hour, making murmurations look from a distance like a single pulsing, living organism. Like all great essays, Macdonald's begins with an observation of one thing and becomes a meditation on another, taking one fragment of elemental reality and polishing it to shine a sidewise gleam on a larger existential reality — in this case, the murmuration of human refugees trying to find their way to safety and belonging amid a gasping world. Poet Linda France encountered Macdonald's essay during a climate writing residency at New Writing North. Inspired by Neil Gaiman's "What You Need to Be Warm" — his humanistic poem for refugees and the homeless, composed from thousands of definitions of warmth from around the world — she set out to compose a lyric murmuration, turning hundreds of crowdsourced verses into a single stunning poem, which artist Kate Sweeney then turned into a lyrical animated short film. Amplifying the poignancy of the project is its timing — it was created for the 2020 Durham Book Festival, while the human world was roosting in confused and frightened isolation, swarmed by a shared terror, suddenly more aware than ever that we are a single pulsing living dying organism. MURMURATION by Linda France 1 * Because we love watching the flock's precision glide        upstroke for height, tilt of wing spun mid-flight just for a moment               we're in the frenzied swirling rush               home for the winged        owls hoot their love through the dark                      chiffchaff creeps up stalks               fennel and flow dipper and wagtail               Arctic terns like darts geese honking              each note weighed a duck sits on top of the bowling club out king of the world        if you love the bird, don't cage it               we'll miss the starlings when April comes * on any high hilltop, breathing this air, this precious air, remember those who lost their breath        if you love the flower, don't pick it a sudden sweep of daisies in a green field like counting stars        losing count               starting over again more shades of green than words scream Life! life, damp grass between bare toes light passing through poppy petals the slow unfolding of a rose               home for the prickly, those that slither                      climb or crawl                             for us all        atom by atom        cell by cell        what else matters we cherish these conversations when the vetchling speaks the lavish eruption of nasturtiums, weaving ropes of white stems orange flowers        lush leaves               hearts burnt open        if you love wild things, let them be * follow the almost invisible path through the heather summer's easy grin, the slow smile of autumn gaze of winter starlight               isn't this how we learn not to fear change        the seasons               that mark time shape our lives        spangles of sunlight on a river        otters rippling the sting of cold sea on tight, red skin        we feel it all, drink it in and love it love honey, love bees the smell of dust, hot rain a damson tree        dripping purple fruits        love the kiss of a dandelion clock wind-suck and time disappears the pull of the moon        waves that crash with forgotten history               the rubbed edges of the world                      a spider crab scurrying sideways        we love the roaring isles        the taste of a peach        our neighbours busy in their vegetable patch        the daylit gate               tunnel of trees               those little paths one-person-wide               between hazel and ash               warm bark        in the city that birthed us        bright tufts that grow in the cracks * because we love the way dawn wakes up and switches night to day        the twist and fall               the surging sweeping joy of it all               the visceral thrill how dusk strips away the waste of worried days        as birds yield to their roost        and leave the night to moth and bat beyond day, beyond everything        we know we too are rock and star but now              on the tip of our tongue        even love's not enough 2 * At the midnight of the year utter darkness a million compasses fail and the starlings don't come empty sky no swallows, no swifts no summer nests in the eaves threads looped in the blue a blackbird that isn't there opens his throat into silence, thin air no golden note you wake to a dawn unheralded dusk, uninvited, doesn't know where to begin ghost calls echo in the trees dogs and deer stop barking rain forgets to fall its rhythm broken, lost oak and elm hold their breath you will never see another flower the stars' last vanishing act no words left 3 * April high tide hurls driftwood        oarweed               sea-glass a wreckage of shells tomorrow comes soon        how much would you pay to hear the sound of rain        or birdsong what if couldn't-care-less cared more and we let the murmur of change               change our ways hear the roots of trees                      whispering dark soil's cavernous memories        tectonic plates shift sit like a mountain all weathers in our hearts        what if our flutterings become feathers               the starlings lend us their wings till we trust enough               to fly together        synchronised       one vast voice all different, all the same               to mend our wounded earth ballads of continents crossed        comrades lost to storm or predator               the shockwave moving through the flock see how we flit        twist swell                                    dive co-mingle       co-exist       co-inhere belong together * imagine we're made of those slivers of sky        know all the colours of light hitch a ride on the bees' flight go to earth with badgers        small as Alice       catch the worm the keys of the ash        rise like a dandelion               the promise of a peony bud where heather meets heaven               home this is the patience of the albatross        a cormorant's hunger craning for a flash of silver        beneath the water the good omen of a crescent moon        milky stars               set in new stories meadow orchids        skeins of geese a chance to constellate honesty               justice escape heroic fantasies        gravity's boots so what if's rubbed out        and becomes what is                      the path between               then we can hear the hiss of rain * what is        is more than the ear can hear or eye see — we will never have this time again               can never rewind this moment all the maybes, all the small things        we touch               gentle, curious and let pass like fruit in season the secret language of earth                      underland of coal, uranium, oil               indifference banished by love power to the parliament of rooks it's just this       us        the people               our footsteps walking into all this wonder        every day through every weather               solidarity                      the planet's rage making a stand               for a different future it's just this               our words        building this home we share        these bridges nowhere else to go        here we are               turning over        this tainted page to start again        and healing the earth               the earth heals us our better place               not a destination a method        common ground * ask        what if words could fly               and this poem rose into the blueness                      a whirr of black italic wings breath by breath        a prayer               to give life back to life                      all of us        pieces of the world what if all the time we were searching        the sky               the birds        were watching for us what, if not cartwheeling        what, if not care               what, if not a cadence        like love               held lightly Complement with a stunning animated adaptation of Marie Howe's "Singularity" — a kindred-spirited poem about our creaturely and cosmic interconnectedness — and a young poet's staggering response to it, then revisit Hannah Arendt on identity and the meaning of refugee and Toni Morrison on borders, belonging, and the meaning of home. Forward to a friend/Read Online/ donating=loving In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For fourteen 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 made your life more livable in any way last year, 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. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 ALSO, NEW CHILDREN'S BOOK BY YOURS TRULY: The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer Street Brooklyn, NY 11231 Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list   update subscription preferences