Maria Popova

With the optics splitting the visible spectrum into the light and Keats thought the rainbow was no longer magical and we think it only magnifies the magic, right?

Yes.

That's right.

We have a free sub stack and you can just follow along.

Be careful because it becomes very dangerous because then you stop actually reading the thing and your mind keeps making divinations.

Right.

So Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted an enormous amount of sulfur into the atmosphere and essentially created a cloud cover over Earth that spread around the whole planet and resulted in what was then called the year without a summer.

So, you know, the thames froze in the middle of summer.

Every orchard was decimated by frost and endless rains and no crops, no food, no sustenance.

And a number of things happened.

First, it was the beginning of the understanding that the Earth is a single organism, that an event on one side of the world can impact another.

I mean, this was in Indonesia.

North America, the United States of America, was devastated.

There was no fruit, no grain, no nothing.

And this global famine resulted in a number of things.

A cholera epidemic that killed Mary Shelley's half-brother.

but also the people who find that the best way to complain is to create.

So one of them was a German man named Karl Dreis, or he was born von Dreis, but he dropped the von because he didn't want to be a rich kid.

So he essentially tried to solve the problem of the fact that horses were dying because there was no hay to feed the horses, so people couldn't have transportation anymore.

I mean, it's