Two readings of Camus argue the absurd leads to solidarity, while other pieces treat wisdom, song and even liver cells as things built through practice.
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In a 1945 interview, Camus calls the absurd a starting point and names frankness, freedom and justice as conditions for human understanding. story 1 ↓
Four Harvard professors' new book, The Practice of Wisdom, treats wisdom as a trainable skill, drawing on Chinese ritual, desert monks and Dickinson. story 2 ↓
Maria Popova reads Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing: music needs time, and time needs a body. story 3 ↓
Philosopher Joe Folley argues the self is built, and that Camus saw Sisyphus as half a philosophy, finished by The Plague. story 4 ↓
Muscle and liver cells in mice and people keep a lasting memory of exercise, and parents' training protected offspring for a year. story 5 ↓
1/5The Marginalian (Maria Popova)· Maria Popova· Oct 31
Camus in 1945: The Absurd Is a Starting Point, Not a Dead End
An interviewer asked Albert Camus whether a philosophy built on absurdity leads people to despair. He said no. Accepting the absurd should lead to revolt, and to honest, free and just communication between people.
Why it matters · The interview shows Camus, in his own words, getting from the bleak premise of his early book to the ethics of solidarity he wrote about later. It also answers the usual charge that his philosophy is nihilism.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 26 sec
1 · Camus's idea of the absurd
For Camus, the absurd is the clash between our hunger for meaning and a universe that gives no answer. The absurd lives in neither us nor the world alone. It lives in the confrontation between them.
2 · The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus published this essay in 1942. It opens by calling suicide the one serious philosophical problem. It ends with Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder uphill forever, whom Camus asks us to imagine happy.
3 · The Rebel
The Rebel came out in 1951. In it Camus argued that revolt against injustice creates solidarity: 'I rebel, therefore we exist.' The 1945 interview hints at this argument six years early.
2/5Nautilus· Kristen French· Oct 28
Four Harvard professors argue that wisdom is a practice, not a possession
In a Nautilus interview, three of the four Harvard professors behind a long-running wisdom course argue that wisdom comes in many forms. It is built through lifelong practices like ritual and solitude, and can't be found or handed over.
Why it matters · It reframes wisdom from a trait some people have into a skill anyone trains, and it takes seriously the risk of romanticizing other cultures.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · Aristotle's kinds of knowing
Aristotle separated theoretical knowledge (episteme), craft skill (techne) and practical wisdom (phronesis). Phronesis is the judgment to act well in particular situations, and it can't be reduced to rules. That makes it the classic model of wisdom as a skill.
2 · Ritual in Chinese thought
In Confucian tradition, ritual (li) covers formal ceremonies and everyday courtesies. Practicing them is meant to shape character and feeling, so ritual is a tool for moral self-cultivation rather than empty formality.
3 · Who Han Feizi was
Han Feizi was a Chinese philosopher of the third century BCE, associated with Legalism. He argued that the state should run society through strict laws, rewards and punishments rather than relying on anyone's personal virtue.
3/5The Marginalian (Maria Popova)· Maria Popova· Oct 31
Richard Powers's novel on how singing ties us to our bodies
Maria Popova reads passages from Richard Powers's 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing. She argues that music lives in the body, runs on time, and works as our best way of knowing ourselves.
Why it matters · It shows how a novelist can turn musical structure into prose that a reader feels in the body. It also lays out a compact idea: music depends on time, and time depends on having a body.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 31 sec
1 · Who Richard Powers is
Richard Powers is an American novelist known for mixing science and art in his fiction. His novel The Overstory, about trees, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Before writing novels he studied physics, and he plays music himself.
2 · The novel in brief
The Time of Our Singing (2003) follows a mixed-race American family from the 1930s to the 1990s. Delia, a Black singer from Philadelphia, marries a German-Jewish physicist who fled Europe. Their children grow up as classical musicians in a country obsessed with race.
3 · Intervals and polyphony
An interval is the distance between two pitches. The major third, perfect fourth and perfect fifth are the most basic consonant ones. Polyphony means several independent melodic lines sung at once, which is typical of medieval and Renaissance church music.
4/5Big Think· Joe Folley, Jonny Thomson· Oct 29
Philosopher Joe Folley argues the self is built, and Camus is misread
Talking with Jonny Thomson, philosopher Joe Folley argues there is no core self waiting to be found, only one you build through attention. He says modern life has turned that attention into a currency, and that readers stop at Camus's unfinished early work.
Why it matters · It links ideas that usually sit apart, mystical ethics, metrics culture, privacy and absurdism, into one argument about how a person actually comes to be who they are.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 31 sec
1 · Camus and the absurd
Albert Camus (1913–1960) described the absurd as the clash between our hunger for meaning and a universe that offers none. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) ends with Sisyphus forever pushing his boulder uphill, and Camus asking us to imagine him happy.
2 · Weil and Murdoch on attention
Simone Weil, a French mystic who died in 1943, and Iris Murdoch, the British novelist and philosopher, both treated attention as the root of ethics. For them, attending properly means quieting your ego so you can see another person or thing clearly.
3 · Authenticity in existentialism
5/5Nautilus· Diego Hernandez-Saavedra· Oct 29
Muscle and liver cells keep a lasting memory of past exercise
Exercise physiologists put mice through training, a break and retraining. Muscle and liver cells kept a record of the first round: retrained muscles grew faster and used fuel better. In mice, parents' exercise even protected their offspring.
Why it matters · It challenges the idea that only neurons and immune cells remember. If every cell can keep a record of what happened to it, that changes how we think about the body over a lifetime.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 34 sec
1 · Detraining
Stop exercising and fitness markers fall back toward where they started, often within weeks. Those markers include VO2 max, the most oxygen the body can use, plus muscle size and insulin sensitivity. Exercise guidelines stress consistency for this reason.
2 · Cells that remember
Biology has long given memory to two kinds of cells: neurons, which store it in their connections, and immune cells, which recognize pathogens they have met before. Most other cells were thought to respond to a signal and then go back to baseline.
3 · Ideas about muscle memory
In general research, there are two main theories for why muscle memory happens. One is that muscle fibers keep extra nuclei gained during training. The other is epigenetic marks, chemical tags on DNA that change which genes are active. This article doesn't say which one causes its findings.
Albert Camus, who gave the 1945 interview three years after publishing The Myth of Sisyphus.
In 1945, as World War II ended, a French journalist named Jeanine Delpech put a direct question to Albert Camus. He had built his 1942 essay 1 on the absurdity of life. Didn't that philosophy push people toward despair? Maria Popova, in The Marginalian, revisits his answer, which is printed at the end of his posthumous Lyrical and Critical Essays.
What Camus meant by "absurd"
For Camus, 2 is the clash between the human need for meaning and a world that offers none. Sisyphus opens by asking whether, once you see this, life is worth living. Camus's answer was to live anyway, drawing from the absurd "three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion." To many readers that sounded like 3, the view that nothing matters.
A step, not a dead end
Camus starts with a hedge: he can only speak for himself, and what he says is "relative." Then he argues that accepting the absurd is "one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end." It sparks a revolt that "can become fruitful." Thinking carefully about that revolt might recover "a relative meaning to existence," though it would be a meaning "always in danger." What he offers is a modest, human-made meaning that has to be maintained, not a cosmic one restored.
Three conditions
The core of the interview follows. In a world so absurd, Camus says, "we must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish." That needs three things:
Frankness, because "falsehood confuses things."
Freedom, because "communication is impossible with slaves."
Justice, because people must "feel a certain justice around them."
Note the shift. The three consequences in Sisyphus were about how one person lives. These three are about what people owe each other. Six years later this move from "I" to "we" became the thesis of 4, Camus's 1951 book on revolt and solidarity. He had worked for the Resistance press during the occupation, so lies and lost freedom were not abstractions to him.
An echo in Auden
Popova wonders whether Camus had read W.H. Auden's 1939 poem "September 1, 1939," with its lines "All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie" and "We must love one another or die." She offers no evidence that he had. The similarity of tone is the point.
The piece is brief and doesn't develop the argument beyond these quotes. Its value is the corrective it offers: Camus treats the absurd as a reason for honesty and solidarity, not for resignation.
In 1945, World War II was ending, and the French journalist Jeanine Delpech asked Albert Camus a pointed question. Three years earlier he had published 1, a philosophical essay built on the absurdity of human life. Didn't a philosophy like that incline people to despair? Maria Popova, writing in The Marginalian, pulls his answer from the end of the Lyrical and Critical Essays, a collection published after his death. The answer turns out to be a short map of where Camus's thinking was headed.
The problem the question pokes at
For Camus, "2" does not just mean the silly or the senseless. It is a specific clash. People crave reasons and coherence. The world gives them neither. The Myth of Sisyphus begins with its famous line that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, suicide. In other words: once you see that life has no built-in meaning, why go on?
Camus refused both easy exits. One was suicide. The other was what he called "3," the leap into a religious or metaphysical system that dissolves the absurd by decree. In the essay he wrote, "I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion." Delpech's worry is easy to see. To many readers, a philosophy that begins by admitting meaninglessness sounds like 4, the view that nothing matters.
Camus's answer: a step, not a destination
Camus starts with a hedge: "All I can do is reply on my own behalf, realizing that what I say is relative." Then he makes a structural point. Accepting the absurd is "one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end." What it produces is revolt, "a revolt that can become fruitful."
Here is how the argument moves:
Seeing the absurd clearly is required. Pretending the world makes sense would be dishonest.
That clarity provokes revolt, a refusal to accept the situation passively.
Thinking hard about revolt could uncover "ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence."
That meaning stays "relative" and "always in danger." It is never guaranteed and has to be kept up.
So Camus is not putting back the cosmic meaning that the absurd removed. He is offering a smaller, human-made meaning that has to keep earning its place.
Three conditions for understanding
The core of the interview comes next. In a world "whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable," Camus says, "we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish." He lists three conditions:
Frankness. "Falsehood confuses things." Lies make the world even harder to read than it already is.
Freedom. "Communication is impossible with slaves." A coerced person cannot really speak, so no understanding with them is possible.
Justice. People "must feel a certain justice around them."
These are the "three antidotes" in the piece's title. They differ from the three consequences in Sisyphus. Revolt, freedom and passion describe how one person lives with the absurd. Frankness, freedom and justice describe what people need from each other. The move from "I" to "we" is the real content of the interview. Six years later Camus made it the thesis of 5, his 1951 book on revolt and solidarity. Popova places the interview in that arc: in 1945 the ideas are "six years before he formulated" them fully.
The timing matters. Camus was speaking right after what Popova calls "the meaningless brutality of World War II." He had edited 6, a newspaper of the French Resistance, during the occupation. Lies and the denial of freedom were concrete things to him, so his conditions read as a direct reply to propaganda and occupation.
The Auden parallel
Popova adds a connection of her own. She wonders whether Camus had read W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939." Auden wrote it as war broke out, and it ends a stanza with: "All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie… / There is no such thing as the State / And no one exists alone… / We must love one another or die." Camus's "We must achieve this or perish" sounds very close to it. Both men describe honesty and mutual recognition as a matter of survival, not a nicety. Popova offers this only as a kinship of sentiment. She presents no evidence that Camus knew the poem.
What the piece does and doesn't give you
This is a short piece, mostly a frame around two quotations from the interview. It does not explain what an "analysis of revolt" would involve. It does not say how the three conditions might be achieved, or how they relate to Sisyphus's freedom and passion. For that you would have to go to The Rebel. The piece also skips the tension in Camus's position. A meaning "always in danger" is hard to live by, and his later political quarrels, notably with Jean-Paul Sartre over revolutionary violence, played out exactly in that space.
Still, the passage is a useful corrective. People who know Camus only through Sisyphus and his boulder often take him for a poet of resignation. In 1945 he describes the absurd as a test of honesty, and as a reason for solidarity rather than an excuse for despair.
Remember
Camus's three consequences of the absurd (revolt, freedom, passion) concern one person's life; his later three conditions concern relationships between people.
The meaning Camus offers is 'relative' and 'always in danger.' It is human-made and has to be kept up.
He calls lies and coercion obstacles to understanding itself, a view shaped by wartime propaganda and occupation.
For more than ten years, four Harvard professors from different fields have co-taught an undergraduate course on wisdom: historian of religions Michael Puett, physician-anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, theologian Stephanie Paulsell and historian Davíd Carrasco. Their new book, The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests, grows out of that course. In a Nautilus interview, three of them make one main argument: wisdom is a lifelong practice, not something you can possess.
Many wisdoms, one quest
Kleinman starts from Aristotle's 1, practical knowledge of how to live, which he sets apart from theoretical and technical knowledge. The authors call wisdom "plural": its forms depend on time, place and the kinds of suffering people face. What they think is universal is the search for it. Paulsell's test for students is a question Kleinman asked himself as a boy while watching a gentler child: "Could I be like that person and still be myself?"
Ritual breaks perspective
Puett draws on classical Chinese thought. To our experience, the world is capricious and has no clear rules, so wisdom comes down to training. Americans tend to see ritual as rules. Puett describes rituals designed to break habits instead. In one, a father and son swap roles, so each sees the world from the other's side. When they step out of the ritual, they may notice the harmful patterns their relationship has fallen into. The risk is that rituals harden into empty convention, so turning convention back into ritual takes deliberate work.
Solitude that leads to solidarity
Paulsell's chapter follows three people who sought solitude: 2, a fourth-century desert monk trying to shed anger; Emily Dickinson, whose withdrawal gave her room to write about 2,000 poems; and 3, a 20th-century Black theologian. Thurman argued that without a protected inner life you become vulnerable to people in power telling you who you are. Chosen solitude, he said, lets you "hear the sound of the genuine" in yourself, and only then can you hear it in others.
No magic herb
Kleinman warns against romanticizing other cultures as wiser. He tells of an anthropologist who insisted on seeing a village healer for a toothache and lost his two front teeth. "Here's the herb, there's the mushroom, and now you're wise. No, it's a practice."
On the present, Puett says the danger is no longer complacency. It is how people respond to crisis: by following leaders who scapegoat, or by rethinking things more openly, as some past crises prompted. Paulsell asks how anyone can hear the genuine when AI makes it harder to tell what is real. Kleinman's own lesson from the course is to "care for your memories." Sometimes that includes letting some of them fade.
For more than ten years, four Harvard professors from different fields have co-taught an undergraduate course on wisdom. Michael Puett is a historian of religions. Arthur Kleinman is a physician and medical anthropologist. Stephanie Paulsell is a theologian and literary scholar, and Davíd Carrasco is a historian and anthropologist. They have now turned the course into a book, The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests, with chapters on caregiving, solitude, self-understanding and transcendence. Kristen French interviewed Puett, Kleinman and Paulsell for Nautilus. The conversation keeps coming back to one claim: wisdom is something you practice, not something you have.
Wisdom in the plural
The book's introduction calls wisdom "plural". Its forms depend on time, place and the kinds of suffering people face. Kleinman takes his definition from Aristotle, who separated 1 (theoretical knowledge), 2 (craft skill) and 3 (practical knowledge of how to live). Kleinman thinks Aristotle ranked phronesis highest, and that is the kind he means. The authors stress that none of them claims to have mastered it. What they think is universal is the quest.
Paulsell recounts a story from the book. As a boy, Kleinman watched a gentler child and asked himself, "Could I be like that person and still be myself?" For Paulsell, that question is the model. Students shouldn't adopt a tradition wholesale. They should test whether a practice can live inside their own life.
Puett adds a premise from classical China. To our experience, the world is capricious and there are no clear norms. He says this is not a metaphysical claim. There may be absolute answers, but we don't know them. What remains is training: practices that repeatedly "break perspective" and expose the assumptions you have fallen into.
Ritual as a way to break habits
Puett's chapter, on the quest for the self, starts from the Chinese idea that we are all "born messes" of energies and desires. What we become depends on our practices and relationships. People who drift end up "deadened". People who work at it get better, though they never arrive.
His main tool will surprise many American readers: ritual. Americans tend to see ritual as rules that tell you what to do. In the Chinese tradition Puett describes, ritual does the opposite. In one example, a father and son enter a ritual space and swap roles, so each has to see the world from the other's side. The ritual doesn't make anyone wise. But when they leave it, they may notice the patterns their relationship has fallen into, including harmful ones, and that makes change possible.
French asks whether such rituals can go stale. Puett agrees that they can: the risk is always that rituals harden into conventions that change nothing. "The constant work is how do we make our conventions into rituals?" It can always be done, he says, but only as a deliberate project.
Solitude that leads back to others
French notes that almost every quest in the book ends in caring for others. Even Paulsell's chapter on solitude ends in solidarity. Paulsell follows three solitaries:
4, a fourth-century Christian desert monk, left cosmopolitan Alexandria and went further and further into the desert to free himself of anger and resentment. Praying while carrying those passions, he wrote, is like pouring water into a bucket full of holes.
Thurman also saw solitude's dark side: solitary confinement, and the isolation that segregation forced on people. But he held that chosen solitude is how we "hear the sound of the genuine" in ourselves. Without that, we can't hear it in others. That is the link from solitude to solidarity.
Against the romance of wisdom
French asks whether some cultures are wiser than others. The book closes with an interview with the Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger, who as a young woman felt India was wiser than New York. Kleinman says no culture is objectively wiser. What changes is which tradition moves a person at a given point in life, and a tradition that seems flat at 20 may matter a great deal at 30. As an anthropologist, he does claim one universal: he knows of no 6, the anthropologist's detailed field study of a community, that doesn't point to some quest for meaning.
He warns against romanticizing wisdom, using a story from The Innocent Anthropologist. (Kleinman places it in Burkina Faso in the 1960s. The book usually goes by that title is Nigel Barley's 1983 account of fieldwork in Cameroon. The article doesn't settle this.) In Kleinman's telling, an anthropologist with a toothache turns down the villagers' advice to see a city dentist and insists on the local healer, who knocks him down and pulls out his two front teeth. The lesson, Kleinman says, is that there is no "authentic" wisdom waiting to be collected that will change things by magic: "here's the herb, there's the mushroom, and now you're wise. No, it's a practice."
Crisis, AI and daily life
Puett writes that we live in the world of 7, a third-century BCE Chinese philosopher who favored governing through strong institutions. In Puett's view, powerful institutions and technologies lock us into rote patterns while we believe we are free individuals. When the book was written, he says, the danger was complacency. Now it is how we respond to crisis. One response, historically very effective at winning support, is to follow authoritarian leaders who blame scapegoats. History also offers crises that opened people up, and Puett calls the outcome this time "completely unpredictable." Paulsell treats wisdom as a human practice tied to dignity. Her open question is Thurman's: how do you hear the genuine when it is harder to tell what is genuine, including real intelligence from artificial?
Asked whether teaching the course changed them, Kleinman says it changed how he handles memory. He now thinks forgetting can sometimes be a wise way of caring for memories. He draws on what psychologists call 8: memories are prompted by cues outside the brain rather than stored only inside it. When Paulsell's father died near the end of one term, Kleinman told her it would be important "to care for your memories", not simply to remember her father. She says the phrase has become family wisdom.
The interview offers no method you could test. Its contribution is a framing: wisdom as plural, practiced, never finished, and easy to cheapen by romanticizing it.
Remember
Puett argues ritual can be a way to break habits: role-swapping rituals expose patterns we've stopped noticing.
Thurman saw solitude as protection against power: without an inner life, others define who you are.
Kleinman suggests caring for memories, which can include letting some fade, is itself a form of wisdom.
Cover of Richard Powers's 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing, the source of every quoted passage.1 / 2
Maria Popova's new essay on 1 is built almost entirely from passages of Richard Powers's 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing. Her argument is simple: music is the art that most completely roots us in our bodies, and it also carries us beyond them. Powers, she says, admits this better than any other writer.
The claim
Popova starts with two writers who ranked music above all else: Nietzsche ("Without music life would be a mistake") and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who said even poetry "is not what music is." She calls music a "homecoming" into "the house of being." In her view, any honest writer concedes that words come second.
Three scenes
The singer. Delia, a Black teenager in 1930s Philadelphia, sings in church. Powers writes that "the audience breathed with her, beating to her measure… Her listeners were in her, and she in them, so long as the notes lasted." Music here is a physical bond: breath and pulse shared across a room, lasting only as long as the sound.
The physicist. Delia marries a German-Jewish physicist who calls music "the language of time." Popova spells out what he means. Melody and rhythm only exist if you can tell one moment from the next. That makes music, in her words, "our supreme laboratory for feeling and time."
The boy. Their son hears a choir sing early sacred music at 2, the medieval-art museum in northern Manhattan. Without naming any technique, Powers describes how 3 (several independent melodies sung at once) is put together:
Two women start on one note.
One holds her pitch while the other rises a 4, then a fifth. Powers compares this to "my ribs straying away from one another."
Then the men copy the same opening "a 5 below."
Soon six voices are "repeating and reworking," like "midair acrobats," until the boy hears "something that sounds to me like freedom."
He has no words for any of it: "I know in my body what notes come next."
The point
The three scenes lead to the line Popova places at both the start and the end of the essay: "The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body." Music is made of time passing. A body is what feels time passing. Every song ends, and so does every listener.
What's missing
This is an appreciation, not a critical reading. Popova skips the novel's central subject, race in America, which is why this family's devotion to classical music carries so much weight in the book. She also doesn't name the piece the choir sings. What she offers is a set of well-chosen passages and a compact idea connecting music, time and mortality.
Maria Popova's latest essay on 1 is a short appreciation built around passages from Richard Powers's 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing. She doesn't review the novel. She uses it to make an argument she has circled for years: music is the art that most completely ties us to our bodies and, at the same moment, carries us out of them. The piece is mostly quotation. Its value is in which passages Popova chose and the thread that runs through them.
The claim
Popova opens with two writers who put music above everything else. One is Nietzsche ("Without music life would be a mistake"). The other is the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote that "even poetry… is not what music is." Popova's own phrasing is that music is a "homecoming." It roots us "into the house of being" and also lifts us "beyond marrow and mind." She then states her thesis: any writer honest enough will admit that words come second to music, and Powers admits it more beautifully than anyone.
The singer: music as possession of self and others
The first passage follows Delia, a teenager singing in a Philadelphia church in the 1930s. Powers writes that singing "might make more sense of life than living had to start with," and that she "nailed free-flying notes like a marksman nails skeet." The key image concerns the listeners more than the singer. "The audience breathed with her, beating to her measure… Her listeners were in her, and she in them, so long as the notes lasted."
On Popova's reading, this is music working as a physical bond. Breath, pulse and a held phrase are shared literally across a room. The phrase "so long as the notes lasted" points to her next theme: the bond only exists while time is passing.
The physicist: music as the language of time
Delia marries a German-Jewish physicist, a pianist who calls music "the language of time." Popova unpacks the phrase. Melody and rhythm need an arrow of time, the ability to tell one moment from the next. Without that, a melody would be a single smeared sound. That is why she calls music "our supreme laboratory for feeling and time": it is the art form made of nothing but ordered moments.
This is the hinge of the essay. A body is what experiences time passing, and music is time made audible. So the closing line Popova takes from the novel — "The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body" — draws the two together. Every piece ends, and so does every listener.
The boy: 2 described from the inside
The longest passage, and the most technically interesting, comes from the narrator. As a seven-year-old he hears a choir sing early sacred music at 3, the medieval-art museum in northern Manhattan that is built from parts of European monasteries. Powers describes the piece's structure in bodily terms without ever naming it. Read alongside the music theory, the passage is a close account of how 4 works:
One way to picture it (an analogy, not Powers's): a round like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," but with each new entry starting on a different note, and the lines free to stretch and drift instead of repeating exactly. Powers's own images are a firework peony and midair acrobats, "not one of them wavering, no one crashing."
The boy hears the result as "something that sounds to me like freedom." The texture supports this. Each line goes its own way, and the coordination between them is what lets that independence sound like order rather than noise. The child has no names for what he hears ("I know in my body what notes come next, even though I have nothing, yet, to call them"). That is Popova's point. Music is known in the body before it is known in concepts.
The narrator also looks back on the moment with adult regret. At seven he couldn't yet "tell ordinary beauty from once-only visits," and didn't know that a person might come across such a song "only once a lifetime."
What the piece does and doesn't do
This is an appreciation, not an analysis of the novel. Popova doesn't mention its central subject, race in America. That is the reason the family's music matters so much in the book, and the reason Delia's sons are trained in a European classical tradition that won't fully accept them. She also doesn't name the piece the choir sings, or say how the "decades and disillusionments" before the final line change its meaning. Readers who want the novel's argument about identity will need to read the book. What the essay offers is narrower: a well-chosen set of passages showing a novelist turning counterpoint into prose a reader can feel physically, and a three-step idea about music, time and the body.
Popova closes with pointers to related Marginalian pieces: the physicist-writer Alan Lightman on music and the universe, violinist Natalie Hodges on sound and feeling, and the story behind Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
Remember
Melody and rhythm need distinguishable moments, so music is essentially organized time, in a physicist character's words, "the language of time."
Powers describes Renaissance-style counterpoint (entries, imitation at a fourth below) entirely through images of breath, ribs and blood.
Popova's reading leaves out the novel's central subject, race in America, which gives the family's music its stakes.
Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre held that humans have no fixed essence and must define themselves through choices. Popular talk of 'being authentic' often flips this around, picturing a true inner self that you uncover.
Image: Big Think
In a long conversation with Big Think's Jonny Thomson, the philosopher and YouTuber Joe Folley makes one argument from several directions. There is no core self waiting to be dug up. You build a self, mostly through what you pay attention to, and modern life has shrunk our idea of attention.
Made, not found
Folley doubts the self has a fixed essence. Unless you believe in a religious soul, he thinks the best account of selfhood is "broad scale continuity", which he pictures as a winding path that still heads in one general direction. That is why he dislikes the popular idea of 1 as "burrowing down" to find your true core. Travellers who set out to "find myself," he says, should say they're going to make themselves. The freedom has limits, though. He doubts he could ever make boxing central to who he is.
Attention as a currency
Folley has been reading Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, two thinkers who treated attention as the foundation of ethics: a self-emptying that moves your ego out of the way so you can see others clearly. He argues that we now treat attention as something to trade for money or productivity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 2, a study of states of total absorption, became a productivity bible, and its point that flow is fulfilling in itself got lost. Folley calls this "epistemic impoverishment": a rich concept whittled down until some conversations can no longer happen.
A thicker idea of attention brings a thicker idea of distraction. Folley borrows C. Thi Nguyen's 3, where an easy-to-measure stand-in quietly replaces what you actually cared about. Someone who sets out to help people ends up chasing money without ever choosing to. Folley thinks this is far worse than a phone notification. Privacy matters too. Following Lowry Pressly's book The Right to Oblivion, he describes privacy as relief from the pressure to be "a definite thing," and so as room to experiment.
Camus, half-read
Most readers stop at Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. Drawing on John Foley's study of Camus, Folley argues that Camus saw it as half a philosophy. The book mostly says no. It rejects "4," the leap of faith people take to escape life's absurdity. It also claims, without arguing, that absurdism doesn't permit everything.
The Plague fills in the missing half. Doctors fighting an epidemic in the Algerian city of Oran achieve little, yet their effort and friendship still matter: "the one has become the many." Camus's later book The Rebel extends this into universal solidarity. Folley leaves one doubt open. Critics ask whether that later ethics is itself a leap of faith, and Folley isn't fully convinced by Camus's answer.
Joe Folley, who studied philosophy at Cambridge and runs the YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice, spent 45 minutes talking with Big Think's Jonny Thomson. The talk wanders, but it keeps returning to one argument. There is no hidden core self to dig up. A self gets built, mainly through what you attend to. And the way we now talk about attention has made it harder to see how that building happens. The second half applies this to Albert Camus, whose best-known book Folley thinks most readers mistake for the whole of his philosophy.
Make yourself, don't find yourself
Folley says he is "very sceptical of a kind of metaphysically thick sense of the self." Unless you accept a religious soul, the most sensible account of selfhood he can see is "broad scale continuity" rather than a fixed essence. So he is suspicious of today's popular idea of 1, which pictures "burrowing down into ourselves" to find a core. People who travel to "find myself", he says, should say they're going to make themselves. A three-month trip around Southeast Asia doesn't uncover a buried truth. It shows you how you react in many situations, and those reactions become material for the person you turn into.
That doesn't make the self infinitely flexible. Folley's example is boxing. Even if he suddenly wanted to, he doesn't think he has it in him to get good at it and make it central to who he is. His image is a winding path that still trends broadly in one direction. You face constraints, but there is real "wiggle room." He also notes that limits often help, the way artists tend to do well inside them.
Attention, thinned down
If attention is how a self gets made, it matters how we think about attention. Folley is reading Silvia Caprioglio Panizza's The Ethics of Attention, on Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. Both treat attention as a kind of self-emptying: getting your ego, with its distorting pull, out of the way so you can see what's actually in front of you. Weil linked this to loving your neighbour and "loving the order of the world." She described praying with total attention and feeling she had met Christ.
Folley argues that we, and he admits he used to do this too, now treat attention as something to trade for money or productivity. Even calls to "reclaim your attention" usually aim to get more done. His example is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 2, the psychologist's study of states of complete absorption. It has become a productivity bible, passed along as "a summary of a summary of a summary," while one of its main points, that flow is deeply fulfilling in its own right, has dropped away. Riffing on Miranda Fricker's term 3 (being wronged in your capacity as a knower), Folley calls this "epistemic impoverishment": a rich concept gets whittled down until we can no longer have certain conversations with it.
Value capture: distraction at the scale of a life
A thicker idea of attention brings a thicker idea of distraction with it. Folley draws on philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's concept of 4. You want something hard to measure, and you adopt an easy-to-measure proxy to track it. Because the proxy is visible and appealing, you slowly start optimising for it, and it takes the place of the original value. Folley's worked example: you start a career wanting to help people, money becomes the metric you follow, and years later you're chasing something you don't really want. Social media's version is 5, where you set out to make things you enjoy and end up "kidnapped by metrics."
Thomson objects that the drift could just as easily go from greed toward charity. Folley clarifies that Nguyen isn't objecting to value change as such. You can consciously decide your priorities have shifted. The target is the "sneaky replacement" you never chose and wouldn't endorse. Folley calls this kind of distraction "far more disastrous" than a phone notification.
Privacy as room to play
Building a self also needs a place to try things out. Folley cites Lowry Pressly's The Right to Oblivion, which values privacy partly as "repose": a break from the pressure to be "a definite thing." In public, people judge you, and one act turns into "the kind of person Jonny is." Thomson ties this to Sartre's idea of "6," which fixes you as an object in someone else's world. He describes his six-year-old son asking for privacy so he can practise expressions in the mirror. Folley's view is that you need both. A life made only of experiments rarely fulfils anyone, and neither does being stuck on one set of train tracks.
Some choices, Thomson points out, can't be trialled. He cites philosopher L.A. Paul's "7", decisions like becoming a parent that change who you are so much that you can't reason your way into them beforehand. Folley answers that some areas of life leave more room to experiment than others, and that obligations to other people constrain us, "even if only at the level of conscience."
On why sceptical, rational people often end up reading mystics, Folley's answer is that mystics rarely argue metaphysics, so non-believers can engage with them. Weil reportedly set aside the question of whether God exists when she was young and never returned to it. He finds mystical writers psychologically sharp. He points to a line from Julian of Norwich, in which Christ says, as Folley half-remembers it, if I could have suffered more for you, I would have — love measured by what's possible, not by what's needed.
Camus's unfinished philosophy
Is enjoying The Myth of Sisyphus a privileged belief? Folley says all thinking takes some stability: you can't reflect while starving. But existential questions don't belong only to the comfortable. Tolstoy fell into despair after writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Camus grew up in severe poverty with an illiterate mother, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis young, when that could mean an early death. His notebooks from his late teens are already full of death and absurdity.
Folley's main claim, drawing on John Foley's Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt, is that Camus treated The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger as only half his philosophy. Sisyphus is mostly a series of refusals. Above all it rejects "8," the leap of faith people take to escape the tension of the absurd. It asserts, without arguing, that absurdism doesn't mean everything is permitted. Yet its "absurd men" include Don Juan, a figure of "profound disregard for other people." In Camus's play Caligula, the assassins of a nihilist tyrant lack, within absurdist logic, any clear ethical ground to act on. Folley's own reading of the early work is that absurdism is a second-order attitude: you go on wanting things while knowing the wanting amounts to nothing.
The Plague builds what the early work leaves out. In the Algerian city of Oran, Dr Rieux and Tarrou run a ragtag volunteer force that, Camus says outright, achieves little. The book still holds that the effort was worth making, and that friendship and solidarity are what console them. It has the same shape as Sisyphus and his rock, but "the one has become the many." The Rebel (1951) pushes this toward universal human solidarity. Its reception led to Camus's break with Sartre. Folley thinks the two "talked past one another."
Folley leaves one question open. Sisyphus says absurdism is compatible with being almost anyone. The Rebel derives real ethical duties from it. Critics ask what keeps that later ethics from being a philosophical suicide of its own. Camus has an answer, Folley says, but he isn't "totally on board with it."
Remember
Value capture is a life-scale distraction: a measurable proxy quietly replaces the value you started with, without your choosing it.
Privacy is valuable partly as rest from being judged, which gives you room to experiment with who you are.
Camus's early absurdism mainly refuses things; the solidarity in The Plague and The Rebel is the half that builds.
Exercise physiologists led by Diego Hernandez-Saavedra report that muscle and liver cells keep a record of past training. When training starts again after a layoff, the body uses that record to get fit faster.
The old rule
Exercise has long been known to cut the risk of heart disease, diabetes, several cancers and early death. Its gains were also thought to fade. Stop training and your 1, muscle size and 2 drift back toward baseline within weeks, which is why guidelines stress consistency. The authors note that about 3 in 4 American adults can't train consistently. Yet coaches have long seen people who trained before get fit again faster than beginners.
Train, stop, train again
To test this, the team uses an "3" schedule in mice: four to eight weeks of training, a break with no exercise, then a second round. Retrained mice grew bigger muscles than first-timers, and the individual 4 grew too. In other words, the working cells themselves got larger.
Retrained muscle also matched energy production to demand better, drawing on fuel stores when they were most needed. That held even without further exercise and even on a high-fat diet.
The liver joins in
The liver fuels working muscle, and it remembers as well. In both mice and people who trained, stopped and retrained, the liver released more 5. These enzymes break down fats in the blood into a form that growing muscle can take up and burn.
Passed to the next generation
In mice, three to four weeks of endurance exercise by both parents protected their pups from poor blood sugar control and excess weight gain for a year after birth. How this works is unknown. Possible explanations include a longer time in the womb or better milk.
Every cell remembers?
Memory was once credited only to neurons and immune cells. Newer work shows skin stem cells remembering inflammation, which speeds later healing. Fat cells remember obesity after weight loss, which may drive the "6." The authors go further and propose that every cell remembers exercise. That is a claim they argue for, not one they've shown.
Caveats
The article doesn't explain how cells store this memory, how long it lasts, or how big the effects are. Most results come from mice. The authors stress that past training can't replace present training. It just means a break doesn't wipe the slate clean.
Exercise physiologist Diego Hernandez-Saavedra and his colleagues report that muscle and liver cells keep a lasting record of past training. The finding cuts against one of the most familiar rules of fitness. When that record is called on again, retrained muscles grow faster, use fuel better and hold on to some benefits even on a bad diet. In mice, exercise by the parents also protected their offspring.
The problem with "use it or lose it"
For about a century, exercise has been treated as one of the most reliable ways to lower the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, several cancers and early death. It has also been treated as temporary. When you stop training, your 1, muscle gains and 2 drift back toward baseline, often within weeks. Physical activity guidelines put consistency first for this reason.
Most people can't train consistently, though. The authors put the figure at about 3 in 4 American adults, kept out by injury, illness, pregnancy or work. If fitness truly reset each time, a returning athlete would start from scratch. Coaches and athletes say that doesn't happen: people who have trained before get fit again faster than people who haven't. The research asks whether that difference lives inside cells.
The experiment: 3
The team trains mice on an "ON-OFF-ON" schedule:
ON: four to eight weeks of training
OFF: a stretch of 4, meaning no exercise
ON: a second round of training
The design separates three stages of memory. The first stage is forming it. The second is keeping it through the break. The third is recalling it when exercise starts again. The main comparison is between retrained mice and mice training for the first time.
What the muscles showed
Retrained mice grew bigger muscles than mice with no training history. The individual 5 grew too. That detail matters. It means the working cells themselves got larger, not just the tissue around them.
The retrained muscle was also better at matching energy production to demand, drawing on energy stores when they were most needed. This ability lasted even without further exercise. It also held up when the mice ate a high-fat diet, which suggests earlier training still pays off when diet is working against it.
The liver remembers too
Working muscle needs fuel, and the liver supplies much of it during and after exercise. The team found that liver cells also store exercise memory and use it to feed muscle more efficiently. This finding came from both mice and people who trained, stopped and trained again. Their livers released more of a family of enzymes called 6. These enzymes break down lipids (fats) circulating in the blood into a form that muscle can absorb and burn as it grows.
The article doesn't give the size of the increase or the human study's design.
A memory passed to offspring
The most surprising claim is about the next generation. In mice, three to four weeks of endurance exercise by the mothers and fathers had lasting effects on their pups. Compared with the offspring of sedentary parents, these pups were protected against poor blood sugar control and excess weight gain for a full year after birth. That is a large share of a mouse's lifespan.
How this happens is unknown. The authors list a few hypotheses from the field. Maternal exercise might lengthen development in the womb, or it might improve the quality of the parents' milk. They say plainly that much remains to be discovered, including whether a lifestyle advantage really carries across generations.
A broader claim: every cell remembers
The authors place their results in a larger shift in biology. Neurons store memory in their connections, and immune cells recognize pathogens faster the second time. Every other cell was assumed to be memoryless. Recent work weakens that assumption:
Skin stem cells keep a record of inflammation, which lets them heal a new wound faster months later.
Human fat cells keep a record of obesity that lasts after substantial weight loss. That may explain the "7," where weight comes back quickly on a high-calorie diet.
From this, Hernandez-Saavedra and colleagues argue that every cell in the body remembers exercise, however little or much someone trains. That is a proposal, not something their data show. The questions they pose are how long these records last and whether storage could be lengthened or expanded.
What the article leaves open
This piece is a short summary of the team's research, republished from The Conversation, and it omits a lot:
Mechanism. It never says how a cell stores the record. In muscle research generally, the leading candidates are nuclei kept from earlier growth and 8 changes, meaning chemical tags that alter gene activity. The article doesn't say which one, if either, explains these results.
Duration. It gives no length for the detraining period, so we don't know how long a break the memory survives.
The authors are firm on one point: nothing in their data suggests past training can replace present training. Their aim is practical. They want to understand how cells learn, store and keep exercise memories, so guidelines can be written for people who can't train steadily. A layoff costs less than it seems to, but it still costs something.
Remember
Retrained muscle grew larger fibers and matched energy use to demand better, even on a high-fat diet.
The liver remembers too: retrained mice and people released more fat-processing enzymes to feed muscle.
The claim that every cell remembers exercise is the authors' proposal; the article gives no mechanism or effect sizes.
Emily Dickinson practiced a deliberately visible solitude, dressing in white and listening at doors. It gave her room to write about 2,000 poems as a 19th-century woman.
5, a 20th-century African American pastor and theologian whose grandmother had been enslaved, mattered most to Paulsell during the pandemic. He wrote about emotional "contagion", for example how his grandmother's dignity spread to others. For him solitude was not a leisure activity. It was "a matter of life and death." Without an inner life of your own, he argued, you are more open to manipulation by people in power who want to tell you who you are. His image is an inland sea, with an island, with an altar on it, guarded by an angel with a flaming sword.
Two voices begin in unison on "Keee," "as spreading and dimensionless as my father says the present is." The physicist's view of time comes back here.
The line splits. One woman holds her pitch while the other "rises a 5," which Powers calls "that first interval any child any color anywhere learns to sing." The higher voice then reaches a perfect fifth above. The lines "move like my chest… my ribs straying away from one another," then fall back into unison.
Imitation. Just as the two lines are about to meet again, "the men's lines come from nowhere, pair off, and repeat the splitting game, a 6 below." This is the standard device of Renaissance 7: a phrase stated by one group and copied by another at a different pitch.
Accumulation. Six voices are now "repeating and reworking," "syncopated, staggered, yet each with an eye on the other." The opening phrase is "keyed up, melted down, and rebuilt," and harmonies "pile up, disintegrate, and reassemble elsewhere."
Effect sizes. "Bigger muscles" and "higher levels" of enzymes come without numbers.
Humans. Apart from the liver enzyme finding, the results come from mice. A mouse's weeks and a person's years don't map onto each other neatly.
