Highlights from our conversation:
• “The history of our species shows a pattern of mistaking the limits of the known for the limits of the knowable.”
• “I don’t subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don’t think it’s necessary to suffer in order to create. However, I believe that from our suffering comes the restlessness to find meaning, beauty, and wonder.”
• “Diaries are worth reading because they’re a record of how somebody pays attention.”
• “I started writing to figure out how to live, and I still do it for the same reason 20 years later.”
• Can AI make art? Maria says: “All writing that is truly moving is born of feeling and time. AI has neither; it’s an instantaneous, unfeeling delivery of pure information.”
• “AI will never possess genuine feeling; it will only have a simulacrum of it. Even if you attempt to make it suffer by writing a command to execute failure, it will already be succeeding at executing that failure. It will never understand what it means to collide with its own impossibility.”
• “We have reduced creative work and cultural matter to what we call ‘content,’ which presumes a container. The container is advertising.”
• “I do not agree with Keats, who accused Newton of ‘unweaving the rainbow.’ I think science deepens, brightens, and magnifies our appreciation of the phenomena around us.”
• “Poetry opens these back doors of consciousness, giving us access to our own experience, particularly to regions we can’t quite name or comprehend with the analytical mind.”
• “If you’re not a little embarrassed of who you were and how you lived, perhaps the process of growth isn’t quite working.”
• “Language tells thought how to move, and thought tells language how to bend.”
• On walking and writing: “I’ve written almost everything on foot, and then what I do at the keyboard is transcription.”
• “I don’t believe in epiphany. I believe in incremental revelation.”
David Perell (@david_perell)
Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words.
All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:37 Why writers should visit archives
04:39 Lessons from reading diaries
09:41 Letters vs diaries
11:35 Presence over productivity
18:30 How language shapes thought
19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry
36:46 Why college failed her
39:58 Reading to survive
41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick
43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes
47:32 Why AI can never make art
53:10 Stop calling it content
I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.
Video
— https://nitter.net/david_perell/status/2054581666992034286#m