Transcript

Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson.

Anne Strainchamps: If there's one person in the world today who knows how to make wonder a way of life, it's Maria Popova.

Steve Paulson: Creator of The Marginalian, one of the world's great treasuries of knowledge and wisdom,

Anne Strainchamps: One woman's reflections on a lifetime of learning and reading across an oceanic range – art, science, philosophy, poetry, letters and diaries.

Maria Popova: It's my way of processing life and learning how to live. So, of course, it has to cover everything. Beneath 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.

Anne Strainchamps: 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. Every week, this publication is a refuge and an oasis.

Steve Paulson: 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.

Anne Strainchamps: 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, shared with seven friends.

Steve Paulson: And didn't it then grow by word of mouth?

Anne Strainchamps: Yeah, people started asking her to add their wives and their boyfriends and their mothers. This was still in the early days of the internet, there were no giant blog platforms or off-the-shelf newsletter templates. So she scrimped and saved and 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.

Steve Paulson: And now The Marginalian is 20 years old this year. It's part of the Library of Congress's permanent web archive. But that's not all Maria's done. One of her ongoing projects is bringing science and poetry together. She created a festival called The Universe in Verse, which paired stories about nature and scientific discoveries with poetry readings and music.

Anne Strainchamps: She's written children's books and two massive books of history.

Steve Paulson: But at the core of all of this, and the reason that you wanted to talk with Maria, is the way she foregrounds wonder.

Anne Strainchamps: For Maria, wonder is not just a byproduct of existence, like some happy moment you stumble on. It's a discipline, a way of being that offers a path to meaning in a random and indifferent universe.

Steve Paulson: Okay, 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.

Anne Strainchamps: Maria, where are you right now?

Maria Popova: I am on Bainbridge Island in the state of Washington, off the coast of Seattle, which is where I live much of the time.

Anne Strainchamps: I think of you as a New Yorker! I didn’t know you'd have this bi-coastal existence, much less that you spend most of your time in the woods.

Maria Popova: And also, if you were to ever visit my home in New York, it does not feel like New York at all. My best friend calls it the Annex, which stands for the Annex to the Natural History Museum. It’s full of wood and stones and birds and bamboo outside, and no other houses.

Anne Strainchamps: So before we dive into talking about wonder, I wanted to give people a sense of what you do every week in The Marginalian. I thought the best way would be to start with one of your most recent essays, “J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall In Love With Life.” Will you walk us through it just a little bit? How did you come to write it?

Maria Popova: 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, and 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, 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, in this time we live in. This is something of Tolkien's that I'd read a long time ago, but it just felt like what I needed to hear.

Anne Strainchamps: What do you like so much about what he says?

Maria Popova: I love the idea that alongside the ordinary world, there is this other dimension that we think of as 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.

Anne Strainchamps: One of the things I liked that you pulled out of that Tolkien essay is this wonderful word that I didn't know – ruth. It’s from an old English word meaning pity, anguish, grief. And Tolkien argues that enchantment is a fusion of ruth and delight. In other words, a capacity for feeling life deeply in its full range. And the reason I like it so much – which is also why I wanted to talk with you – is because I have the sneaking suspicion that our concept of wonder is getting thinned out. Before talking with you, I did a quick search on Amazon of recent books about wonder, and not surprisingly, there’s an enormous number in the self-help section. And I'm all for people feeling more wonder, but not with titles like “How to Feel More Awe in One Minute a Day.” That’s a real book title, by the way.

Maria Popova: 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.

Anne Strainchamps: So let's talk about it. What do you see happening?

Maria Popova: 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 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 were titles like, “Ten Ways to Grow Your Startup with Help from Seneca.”

Anne Strainchamps: And suddenly Marcus Aurelius was everywhere.

Maria Popova: Exactly. And, part of me worries about the cheapening and thinning of those concepts. And another part – the optimist in me – hopes that out of the 10,000 people who are going to go for the listicle, there will 5,000 or maybe just five, who will discover the real Seneca or Tolkien and go deeper on their own because they have the urgency and curiosity and restlessness to go deeper.

Anne Strainchamps: And I don't want to be all curmudgeonly and say, “well, you don't have the proper kind of wonder! Your version is wonder-lite.”

Maria Popova: Right wonder and wrong wonder, yeah.

Anne Strainchamps: I feel very strongly that any kind of wonder is a gateway. But there is a deeper, richer, more nuanced, more complicated form of wonder, I think. And I liked the Tolkien thing because, 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.

Maria Popova: But we don't know that! We don't know what goes on inside a person. We never know.

Anne Strainchamps: Yes, but 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.

Maria Popova: So 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?

Anne Strainchamps: 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, during times when nations and cultures were falling apart, and I think that's not an accident. But I'm curious to know what you think.

Maria Popova: Well, it's interesting – and maybe you can hear a sound [plane flies overhead], which is the answer. So this morning I was walking through this absolutely, truly enchanted and enchanting forest, an old growth forest here. There was sunlight coming through the autumn leaves, and then all of a sudden the terrible, unnatural sound of three supersonic jets flying extremely low in formation. And you know, every creaturely fiber of your being bristles at that. 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.

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 hold paradox within them – paradoxically, wonder is also an absolute, meaning it's not "in order to." It is a presence, right now in this moment, which is the only region in which we actually live. And part of what's so 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 the modern myth of self-improvement may be. Wonder is very much the antidote to that. It is right here, right now, this is all there is.

Anne Strainchamps: For people like me who've been reading you for a long time, there's always some curiosity about your own personal trajectory. You grew up in Bulgaria in the 1980s, during the last years of communism, which must have been one of those grimmer times?

Maria Popova: I mean, children have a very beautiful and in some cases tragic way of normalizing whatever it is they're living with as just the reality. So I didn't necessarily have a sense of it being awful. It was normal to 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. There was only one brand, with a picture of a milk cow on the wrapper and it was 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 of privation – the kind of fears that drive people in the developed West to go into something like corporate banking when they're choosing a life path. Many of those decisions are fear-based. And I do think it's a real privilege to not have that fear, because it was just the air that you were living in.

Anne Strainchamps: Did the general atmosphere change much during the time that you were there? You came here when you were 19, I think, right?

Maria Popova: 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 and late at night and we were on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament, and I was on my father's shoulders. Thousands of people with lighters in the air were singing Beatles songs

and encircling the Parliament, until these guys came out with their hands up and the dictator and his posse surrendered to the people. Living through that makes you not just believe but know that that is possible, that can happen, and in fact the history of the world is made of that. It’s a little bit easier to bear living through capitalism and tyrannical times today, because I do have that faith in the power of the people.

But 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 delivering propaganda every night at 8 p.m, to having multiple TV channels. And all of a sudden we had ads. During communism, of course, there was no point in advertising anything, and now all of a sudden we had commercial culture. And I remember thinking, wow, it's the exact same thing. It's selling stuff. It's just selling different stuff, with a different ideology.

And so as I grew up, I wanted to understand how words can move people, how large masses of people can move minds. And can this manipulation tactic be used for good? Meaning, can we use the communication arts to incline people toward the better aspects of their natures – as opposed to toward subservient misery.

Anne Strainchamps: Were you always in love with words? Because you were a science and math kid from early on, I think. A math prodigy, in fact?

Maria Popova: 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.

Anne Strainchamps: I'm sorry, European Math Olympics? That sounds kind of prodigy-like!

Maria Popova: But all the kids in the math academy did it. I mean there were a few – like this one kid who at 12 solved a 400-year-old theorem – but the rest of us were not like that. I enjoyed math, it was play for me, but I knew I wasn't going to be one of the great mathematicians because I didn't have that vital spark. There were only two kids in our class who did. I 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 orders of magnitude – in any given field, there are those people.

Anne Strainchamps: Did science and math have any connection for you with philosophy, early on? Because if you go back in history, the earliest scientists thought about using reason as a way to commune with the universe. So you get Kepler, who thought God was a mathematician, or Newton who thought God was a geometer.

Maria Popova: 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 a book about connexions – spelled with an x – about the physical sciences, which touched many different sciences. So they couldn’t call her a mathematician or a geologist or an astronomer. So, basing it on the existing word “artist,” they called her a “scientist.” That was the birth of that term. But you’re right, the Keplers and Newtons and all the rest were natural philosophers.

Anne Strainchamps: Science in the 20th and early 21st centuries has been more buttoned-down, and we’ve come to think that science and disenchantment have somehow gone hand in hand. But for you, it seems like science and math have more often been a portal to wonder.

Maria Popova: Well, I really don’t care for the old Keats argument. He famously accused Newton of “unweaving the rainbow” with his optics, saying that science takes the magic out of nature. I think that’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? The mistake people make is that they confuse the intimations of a truth with the final answer. 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 with the limits of the possible. Over and over, nature surprises us – and then we have to redo our models and test them against reality. That’s the wonderful thing about science: you model what you think might be true, you test it against nature, you factor in what comes back, and then you change the model. And you come closer and closer to the fundamental truth, which may not be knowable! We are a function of it ourselves, so it may not be knowable. But we can get glimpses of parts of it, which to me are just so beautiful and so enchanting.

Anne Strainchamps: Do you have favorite scientists? You’ve written about so many.

Maria Popova: I do favor the ones who are unafraid of writing with feeling about the natural world and the wonders of nature. Rachel Carson probably more than anyone else. Loren Eiseley and Lewis Thomas, who were paleontologists and entomologists but also wrote poetry and the most beautiful, moving essays about being in contact with wonder through scientific inquiry.

Anne Strainchamps: There are some chemists you introduced me to in your new book, Traversal. I'm blanking on their names right now, but any that come to mind?

Maria Popova: You’re probably thinking about Humphry Davy.

Anne Strainchamps: Yes, that’s the one!

Maria Popova: Humphry 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 public lectures at the Royal Society, which were the first science pop talks. People would line up around the block to hear him, in fact his lectures were the reason for the creation of London's first one-way street, because they couldn't handle the amount of traffic otherwise. You would see old men with their canes and mothers with their babies – everybody went to listen to him talk about the science of volcanoes and animal electricity, or just electricity in general. He discovered and named the element iodine. His experiments with nitrous oxide led him to create the Davy safety lamp, a lamp that miners could use. There were a lot of children employed in the mines at the time and gruesome deaths from explosions of the gas and the lamps they were using. And so he developed this lamp that saved the lives of probably hundreds of thousands of young children working there – not because that’s what he set out to do, but because he glimpsed a part of elemental truth, which gave him an insight into a very, very small use of it that had a very, very large impact.

Anne Strainchamps: And I'm pretty sure there was a connection, wasn't there, between Humphry Davy and, was it Percy Shelley? This whole group of poets and writers who are suddenly fascinated with some of the new chemicals and especially nitrous oxide. Am I getting this right?

Maria Popova: Traversal ended up being a 600-page book precisely because it explores the connective tissue between things. Yeah, there's a connection between Humphry Davy and Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. And also Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. 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, but look at how it all holds together!

Anne Strainchamps: I love that, because it always feels to me as though there's this invisible web surrounding us. We can’t see it all, but what we call a coincidence is just one of those moments of connection. Life often feels like oscillating back and forth between those two poles: chance, and order – or connection.

Maria Popova: Absolutely.

Anne Strainchamps: Sorry, that wasn't really a question, was it?

Maria Popova: The only thing that makes interviews bearable is that it's a conversation between minds and we get to weave our own connections together. So I’m all for that!

Anne Strainchamps: 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.

Steve Paulson: 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. So 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.