Maria Popova
speaker
931 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Maria Popova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, I'm doing a very poor job of – what were they called?
Graphic movies.
Look for them.
They're so moving.
They're so tender.
Anyway, the point is, with my long history of cutting up things, I like creative constraint.
I like language.
I woke up one day with a very clear, mysterious idea in that combinatorial way the mind has of, you know, putting things together, you know, to know how the new thing came, of taking my favorite 19th century ornithological books.
I love 19th century illustration, natural history, astronomy, ornithology, all of that.
And so what I would do is every night I would look through one of these books and let a bird call out to me visually, the art, right?
And I was using, obviously, John James Audubon's Birds of America, John and Elizabeth Gould's Birds of Europe and other, you know, but most of these two.
Then I would read the ornithological description of that species in the book, in the same book, and let the language percolate in my mind and go to sleep and see what the nocturnal unconscious would do in shuffling.
And then in the morning, I would reread it and pull out words and phrases and rearrange them into this little koan or, you know, the divination from the bird.
And it was always so surprising what came because it was my own mind making it.
But somehow it surprised me.
I mean, that's a strange thing about consciousness, that you can surprise yourself.
Yes.
I mean, it's more that I've increasingly come to recognize how it's always played such a huge part.
And then I have hubristically taken credit for it as conscious decisions.
That the world beyond myself is far more interesting than the self.
Showing 401–420 of 931 · page 21 of 47
← Previous
Next →