I remember singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the choir of the Bulgarian Math Academy as a child. I remember my awe at learning that across centuries of warring nationalisms, this piece of music, based on an old Schiller poem and born of Beethoven’s unimaginable trials, had become the official Hymn of Europe — a bridge of harmony across human divides. I remember wondering as I sang whether music is something we make or something we are made of.

That is what Pythagoras, too, wondered when he laid the foundation of Western music by discovering the mathematics of harmony. Its beauty so staggered him that he thought the entire universe must be governed by it. He called it music of the spheres — the idea that every celestial body produces in its movement a unique hum determined by its orbit.

The word orbit did not exist in his day. It was Kepler who coined it two millennia later, and it was Kepler who resurrected Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in The Harmony of the World — the 1619 book in which he formulated his third and final law of planetary motion, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. For Kepler, this notion of celestial music was not mere metaphor, not just a symbolic organizing principle for the cosmic order — he believed in it literally, believed that the universe is singing, reverberating with music inaudible to human ears but as real as gravity. He died ridiculed for this belief.

Half a millennium after his death, our radio telescopes — those immense prosthetic ears built by centuries of science — detected a low-frequency hum pervading the universe, the product of supermassive black holes colliding in the early universe: Each merging pair sounds a different low note, and all the notes are sounding together into this great cosmic hum. We have heard the universe singing.

To me, this is what makes music so singular — the way it bridges the cosmic and the human, the ephemeral and the eternal. It is at once the most abstract of the arts, made of mathematics, feeling, and time, and the most concrete in its inescapable embodiment — we sing because we have a body, this bittersweet reminder that we are mortal, and we sing to celebrate that we are alive. Alongside love, music may be our best way of saying “yes” to life, and to our life together — I know from the most etymologically passionate person in my life that the Latin root of the word person means “to sound through,” in turn implying a listener: We sound through to something other than ourselves. When we speak, when we sing, when we channel this sound wave of the soul, we reach beyond the self and partake of the great harmonic of belonging.

That harmonic comes alive with uncommon beauty and ecstatic tenderness in Marie Howe’s poem “Hymn.”

Found in her altogether magnificent New and Selected Poems (public library) and animated here by the talented Ohara Hale (who has previously animated Patti Smith reading Rebecca Elson and Joan as Police Woman singing Emily Dickinson), the poem is an “Ode to Joy” for our own time and for the epochs to come, sonorous with what is best in us, sounding through the possible.

HYMN
by Marie Howe

It began as an almost inaudible hum,
low and long for the solar winds
     and far dim galaxies,

a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,
a song without words for the snow falling,
     for snow conceiving snow

conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,
the hum turning again higher — into a riff of ridges
     peaks hard as consonants,

summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows
     the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking

waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:
the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming: some of us rising
     as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down

as it turned into dark; as each of us rested — another woke, standing
among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;
     we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,

left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,
in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,
     in the mud of the shanty towns, breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we
found our true place singing in a million
     million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be:
     the song growing louder and rising.
          (Listen, I too believed it was a dream.)

Complement with Marie Howe’s stunning poem “Singularity,” honoring Stephen Hawking, then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe.

Love is a giver and a plunderer, the way it both anneals the self and alters it, the way it moors our wholeness and maps our incompleteness. At its heart is the ecstatic, disorienting recognition that our world is unfinished, that by entering the world of the other we broaden and magnify our own, that in the end there is no world — only a flowing exchange of energy, through which we become more entirely ourselves.

In this transformation, we partake of the miraculous.

The pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) explores this miraculous, world-remaking aspect of love in a passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (public library | free ebook) — the 1902 masterwork based on his Gifford Lectures about science, spirituality, and the human search for meaning, which also gave us James on the four features of transcendent experiences.

Falling Star by Witold Pruszkowski, 1884. (Available as a print.)

Building on his revolutionary 1884 theory of emotion, James observes that feeling is what gives valence and meaning to experience — without it, “no one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective.” Seeing love as “the most familiar and extreme example of this fact,” he considers its power and its choicelessness:

If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.

Precisely because it lives beyond the reach of reason, love is never attained by willful effort, cannot be bargained for or earned — it is a gift and a miracle that comes unbidden as birdsong, total as a galaxy.

Reflecting on these deepest of human emotions, James writes:

If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic conditions. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts — gifts to us, from sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always nonlogical and beyond our control.

The limitations of logic are why we so profoundly fail to imagine what lies on the other side of love’s transformation. The self-limitation of control is the cage of howling loneliness that keeps us from the freedom necessary for love — for love is “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms,” in Octavio Paz’s unforgettable definition. That mysterious aspect of love — unreachable by logic and reason, impervious to will and control — is why our choice in love is largely an illusion, why our slender margin of choice contains only the courage and patience with which we face its trembling uncertainty and choose to love anyway.

Complement with Kahlil Gibran on the courage to weather the uncertainties of love and Christian Wiman on love and the sacred, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention (because, lest we forget, love is “the quality of attention we pay to things.”)

How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives?

Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet.

The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder of reality through science and poetry — occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive.

BUT WE HAD MUSIC
by Maria Popova

Right this minute
across time zones and opinions people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poems

while

at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
     of oblivion.

Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.

I know this.

And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is     enough

to stand here
for an irrevocable minute
     agape with wonder.

It is     eternity.

At 7PM EST on April 7, tune into the livestream of the 2024 Universe in Verse, celebrating the science and wonder of eclipses, to hear Nick tell the ecliptic story of marrying the love of his life, alongside a constellation of other dazzling humans bringing to life the science of gravity and relativity, tides and black holes, the formation of the Moon and the chemistry of the Sun, through poems and stories that help us meet reality on its own terms and broaden the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.

Couple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from a previous season of The Universe in Verse, then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the antidote to our existential helplessness.

A celebration of the wonder of reality through science winged with poetry.

DETAILS + FREE LIVESTREAM