Seven years after the improbable idea of cross-pollinating poetry and science came abloom on a Brooklyn stage in a former warehouse built in Whitman’s lifetime, after it traveled to the redwoods of Santa Cruz and the sunlit skies of Austin, The Universe in Verse has become a book — fifteen portals to wonder, each comprising an essay about some enchanting facet of science (entropy and dark matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers), paired with a poem that shines a sidewise gleam on these concepts (Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath, Tracy K. Smith and Marie Howe).

It was a joy to write, and a joy to collaborate with two of the most thoughtful and talented people I know: The print book features original art by Ofra Amit (who painted my favorite piece in A Velocity of Being), and the audiobook features my favorite voice in the universe — the magnificent Lili Taylor.

For a sense of the spirit of it, here is my introduction as it appears in the book:

We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.

The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a festival of wonder: stories from the history of science — the history of our search for truth and our yearning to know nature — told live onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems — those emblems of our search for meaning and our yearning to know ourselves. Year after year, thousands of people gathered to listen, think, and feel together — a congregation of creatures concerned with the relationship between truth and beauty, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite.

Poetry may seem an improbable portal into the fundamental nature of reality — into dark matter and the singularity, evolution and entropy, Hubble’s law and pi — but it has a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity. Through it, other scales of time, space, and significance — scales that are the raw material of science — can enter more fully and more faithfully into our worldview, depositing us back into our ordinary lives broadened and magnified so that we can return to our daily tasks and our existential longings with renewed resilience and a passion for possibility.

Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it; a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.

The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry comes out October 1 and is now available for pre-order. A portion of my author’s proceeds goes toward a new Universe in Verse fund at The Academy of American Poets, supporting poets who steward science and celebrate the realities of nature in their work.

It is a strange thing, desire — so fiery yet so forlorn, aimed at having and animated by lack. In its restlessness and its pointedness, so single of focus, it shares psychic territory with addiction. Its Latin root — dē + sidus, “away from one’s star” — bespeaks its disorientation, its rush of longing, which we so easily mistake for love. And yet, when unplugged from the engine of compulsion and possession, desire can be a powerful clarifying force for the hardest thing in life: knowing what we want and wanting it unambivalently, with wholehearted devotion and fully conscious commitment. In this aspect, desire is not a simulacrum of but scaffolding for love. It shares a strand of that same Latin root with consider, for it is only through consideration — of our own soul’s yearnings and the sovereign soul of the other — that we can truly love.

How to tell love from desire and how to make of desire a stronghold of love is what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) explores in On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (public library) — the posthumous collection of his superb newspaper essays challenging our standard narratives and touching self-delusions about who we are and what we want, anchored in the recognition that “people are the most complicated and elusive objects in the universe.”

Lee Miller and Friend by Man Ray. Paris, 1930.

In a passage that calls to mind Auden’s haunting meditation on true and false enchantment, Ortega considers how our slippery grasp of reality shapes our experience of love:

It would be outlandish to conclude that, after being consistently wrong in our dealings with reality, we should hit the mark in love alone. The projection of imaginary qualities upon a real object is a constant phenomenon… To see things — moreover, to appreciate them! — always means to complete them… Strictly speaking, no one sees things in their naked reality. The day this happens will be the last day of the world, the day of the great revelation. In the meantime, let us consider our perception of reality which, in the midst of a fantastic fog, allows us at least to capture the skeleton of the world, its great tectonic lines, as adequate. Many, in fact the majority, do not even achieve this… They lead a somnambulant existence, scurrying along their delirium. What we call genius is only the magnificent power… of piercing a portion of that imaginative fog and discovering behind it a new authentic bit of reality, quivering in sheer nakedness.

Love, Ortega argues, can uniquely pierce the veil of delirium and reveal a greater truth, unlike “inactive sentiments” like joy and sadness, to which desire is akin:

[Joy and sadness] are a sort of coloration which tinges the human being. One “is” sad or he “is” happy, in complete passiveness. Joy, in itself, does not constitute any action, although it may lead to it. One the other hand, loving something is not simply “being,” but acting toward that which is loved… Love itself is, by nature, a transitive act in which we exert ourselves on behalf of what we love.

Illustration by Japanese artist Komako Sakai for a special edition of The Velveteen Rabbit

In consonance with Iris Murdoch’s magnificent definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Ortega observes that the essence of love is an “intense affirmation of another being, irrespective of his attitude toward us.” With an eye to all the things we mistake for it — “desire, curiosity, persistence, madness, sincere sentimental fiction” — he admonishes against the culturally conditioned error of measuring the magnitude of love by the intensity of violent emotion it stirs in us, drawing a crucial distinction between falling in love, as a transient altered state of consciousness drunk on dopamine, and loving, as a continuous mode of being:

Love is a much broader and profound operation, one which is more seriously human, but less violent. All love passes through the frantic zone of “falling in love”; but, on the other hand, “falling in love” is not always followed by genuine love. Let us, therefore, not confuse the part with the whole.

[…]

The more violent a psychic act is, the lower it is in the hierarchy of the soul, the closer it is to blind physical mechanism, and the more removed from the mind. And, vice versa, as our sentiments become more tinged with spirituality, they lose violence and mechanical force. The sensation of hunger in the hungry man will always be more violent than the desire for justice in the just man.

We are always, of course, trapped by the limitations of language in communicating the limitless. Observing the difficulty of using a single term to encompass “the most varied fauna of emotions” — the love of science or art, the love of a lover or a child, the love of a country or a cause — and the fact that any term becomes unwieldy when tasked with conveying too many disparate things, Ortega considers what the defining feature of love might be:

Love, strictly speaking, is pure sentimental activity toward an object, which can be anything — person or thing. As a “sentimental” activity, it remains, on the one hand, separated from all intellectual functions — perception, consideration, thought, recall, imagination — and, on the other hand, from desire, with which it is often confused. A glass of water is desired, but is not loved, when one is thirsty. Undoubtedly, desires are born of love; but love itself is not desire. We desire good fortune for our country, and we desire to live in it because we love it. Our love exists prior to these desires, and the desires spring from love like the plant form the seed.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

Desire is often so difficult to distinguish from love because it is rooted in longing, but longing exists only in absence and evaporates at the moment of attainment, while love grows more saturated the more presence and energy it is given. A generation before the poet J.D. McClatchy contemplated the contrast and complementarity of desire and love, Ortega writes:

Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something (“possession” meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction. Love, on the other hand, is enterally unsatisfied. Desire has a passive character; when I desire something, what I usually desire is that the object come to me. Being the center of gravity, I await things to fall down before me. Love… is the exact reverse of desire, for love is all activity. Instead of the object coming to me, it is I who go to the object and become a part of it. In the act of love, the person goes out of himself. Love is perhaps the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward something else. It does not gravitate toward me, but I toward it… Love is gravitation toward that which is loved.

[…]

In loving we abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves, and virtually migrate toward the object. And this constant state of migration is what it is to be in love.

And yet, he concedes, desire can bloom into love:

One may sometimes grow to love what he desires: we desire what we love, because we love it.

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

The distinction between desire and love, Ortega observes, goes beyond that between the static and the active. Even more crucially, there is the distinction between possession and affirmation, between greed and generosity:

Desire enjoys that which is desired, derives satisfaction from it, but it offers nothing, it gives nothing, it has nothing to contribute… Love, on the other hand, reaches out to the object in a visual expansion and is involved in an invisible but divine task, the most active kind that there is: it is involved in the affirmation of its object.

[…]

Loving is perennial vivification, creation and intentional preservation of what is loved… a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it and positively affirming its being.

Couple with Ortega on how the people we love reveal us, then revisit French philosopher Alain Badiou on why we fall and how we stay in love, Thich Nhat Hanh on how to love, and Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss.

“The true artist,” Beethoven wrote in his touching letter of advice to a young girl aspiring to be an artist, “is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.” The choreographer Martha Graham called this particular shade of sadness “divine dissatisfaction.” It is something quite different from the small mean voice of the internal critic — it is rather a matter of “making your unknown known,” as Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in her magnificent letter of advice on the creative life to the young Sherwood Anderson, “and keeping the unknown always beyond you”; a matter of unselfing into something larger while remaining authentically oneself. Creativity, after all, is just our best sensemaking mechanism for what this is and what we are. We create — a poem or a theorem, a novel or a song — in order to explain the world to ourselves and explain ourselves to the world.

Because we are half-opaque to ourselves, because we are bathing in the mystery and confusion of consciousness amid a universe governed by forces beyond the reach of our control and comprehension, the work of art is cratered with exasperation and self-doubt, with failures and false starts. And yet the very existence of this cathedral of truth and beauty we call culture is evidence that somehow, again and again, through depressions and wars, pandemics and heartbreaks, artists have managed to keep faith in the creative process, to keep showing up for the mundane work that makes the magic, that makes the meaning, that makes life livable and more alive.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s preliminary drawings for The Little Prince, 1943. (Morgan Library and Museum.)

The strange self-salvation by which artists do that is what magazine editor turned painter Adam Moss explores in The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing (public library) — a revelatory window on the creative process at the crossing point of the mystical and the methodical through conversations with and reflections by some of the most beloved artists of our time — poets, painters, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, architects, chefs — each centered on how a particular work came to be. What emerges is “a celebration of the art that happens when instinct meets rigor,” resinous with the passion and persistence necessary for making any idea come aflame with life.

A century after Graham Wallace pioneered the first systematic theory of the stages of the creative process, Moss — a self-admitted “freak for the zealous pursuit of the better” — reflects on the psychological common thread across these investigations:

Art requires access to the imagination, a notoriously difficult place to visit. The imagination fuels an idea. The artist acts urgently, often impulsively, on that idea but brings conscious rigor to the evaluation of what the imagination has spewed. Ultimately, experience, intellect, insight, and drive enable them to shape the work and then to edit it over and over, until that idea has been turned into a finished work. Each stage — the imagining, judging, and shaping — is important; one way or another, each entered these conversations… Influences are absorbed and thrown over… Constraints and circumstances (timing, luck, allies) create structures that allow accidents to happen. Along the way, there is making and destroying, self-sabotage, doubt and despair, but the unifying fact of this book is that successful creators do not give up, even when the thwarting seems insurmountable.

This unrelenting persistence is what prompted Albert Camus to write as passionately as he did about the importance of stubbornness of creative work, which Nobel laureate Louise Glück echoes in speaking with Moss about the making of her strange and splendid poem “The Wild Iris” shortly before her death:

The really hard thing about writing is how much patience you need to have. I mean, you can will things, but whenever I’ve tried to do that, the poem just goes to hell. Becomes a contrivance. An arrangement made with a mind instead of a discovery. If you want a discovery that will surprise you, too, you just have to wait… What’s needed is not diligence or intelligence. What’s needed is an intervention of something outside yourself, better than yourself, but with access to yourself… The gift I have is stubbornness. And patience.

Virginia Woolf’s writing table by Maira Kalman from Still Life with Remorse

Because, as the psychiatrist Eric Berne observed, “the eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” and because, as Borges knew, time is the substance of we are made of, one thing that emerges again and again is the importance of understanding your chronobiology and putting it in the service of the work. (The question of how artists structure their time is its own canon, sending an entire branch of social science in search of the psychology of the ideal daily routine for creative work). Michael Cunningham considers a temporal structure common to many writers:

I need to write first thing in the morning. I need to segue from sleep and dreams directly into this invented world of mine because part of the deal is maintaining, for several years, your belief in this world, and if I were to even run a few errands before I got to work, I’d get derailed. I’d get so lost in the realness of the real world that when I turned on the computer and looked at what I’d been writing, I’d think, ‘Well, this isn’t as deep as the dry cleaner’ — or the drugstore, or wherever else I’ve just been.

I write for about four, five hours, after which there’s nothing there anymore. But I also learned that for me it was going to be much more helpful to think in terms of time spent, as opposed to page limit — because if you just have to produce words and you write too much of what you know isn’t working — and there are those days — then you are in danger of losing faith in your book. But if I am in my chair, ready to write whatever arrives — ten pages or one sentence — I’ve fulfilled my commitment.

Emily Dickinson at work. Detail from art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse.

Although there are unifying themes, each conversation offers a particular tessera for the psychic mosaic of creative work — from poet Marie Howe (who discusses the making of her stunning poem “Singularity”), the urgency of self-forgetfulness as an antidote to the self-consciousness at the root of our suffering; from musician Moses Sumney, the transmutation of loneliness into fuel for the creative force on the other end of which is connection; from novelist Michael Cunningham, the capacity for self-surprise and the willingness to let the work take you where you couldn’t have willfully gone; from composer Stephen Sondheim, the fusion of “meticulous precision with a remarkable flexibility”; from artist Kara Walker, the importance of feeling new to yourself at the outset of each project, however predicated on your expertise it may be; from broadcaster Ira Glass, the wearying but necessary will to be always at war with mediocrity; from filmmaker Sofia Coppola, the inevitability of self-doubt and the willingness to endure it in order to better understand yourself through the creative process; from chef Samin Nosrat, the vital balance of beginner’s mind and pattern recognition honed on experience; from composer Nico Muhly, the importance of embracing your particularity and finding your own planet, even if it is “a planet most people will never live on.”

Another of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s preliminary drawings for The Little Prince. (Morgan Library and Museum.)

The Work of Art is a magnificent read in its entirety, lush with ephemera from the understory of creativity — discarded drafts, handwritten journal pages, preliminary sketches and prototypes, notes from the subconscious scribbled in the middle of the night. Complement it with Nick Cave on the role of faith in creativity, Lucille Clifton on the vital balance of intellect and intuition in making art, Rilke on the relationship between love, eros, solitude, and creativity, and David Bowie’s advice to artists.