Maria Popova

And she somehow got us a tiny little table.

And she said something or other again about poetry.

And I once again, in the full hubris of a 20-something, was like, oh, that's poetry.

And Emily gripped the edge of the table, rose to her full height of 4.5.

No, wait, 4.3.

She was shorter than me.

and began reciting the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that famous TSLA poem that has the line, do I dare to disturb the universe?

And then she sat down and I looked around and people had stopped mid-stride in this New York cafe and started applauding.

I mean, this like never happens.

And I thought, okay, maybe there is some power to this.

Maybe this stuff does disturb the universe.

And so after that day, Emily started sending me a poem a day that she loved just to educate me.

Maybe it was an advantage that I came to it so late and with such a beginner's mind, because all of a sudden it seemed so clearly another door to the same place, that it was so kindred to science, you know, the way that we use science to find the truth and we use poetry to give the truth meaning.

Neither can really, we can't really be fully alive without these two wings of life.

The immensity.

So I had just done a workshop around a very odd thing that I do that's so sideways to what I actually do, which is I woke up one day with the absurd idea, I don't know why, that I was going to take 19th century ornithological books that I love.

Oh, well, the other thing that had happened, I had just done a piece for the New York Times about the evolution of REM, because I had watched two night herons sleeping in the daytime in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

and wondered do they dream and i thought surely you can google that and you could not google that so i went down a rabbit hole of fmri and eeg studies and scientific papers from only the last 15 years i mean it's so new that we've studied the avian brain and i wrote this thing for the times it turns out they do dream it turns out they rehearse

song repertoires and flight in their sleep.

So in a way, evolution invented REM in the bird brain.