Kahlil Gibran on children and the parent's task, the story of the first surviving Moon photograph and the visionary 30-year-old who took it, and more

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Dear {NAME}, welcome to this week's edition of the [brainpickings.org]( newsletter by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's digest — an almost unbearably lovely vintage illustrated ode to friendship, the cognitive science and moral philosophy of whether your dog loves you, and more — you can catch up [right here](. And if you are enjoying this labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – I spend innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran]( [kahlilgibran_theprophet.jpg?fit=320%2C462]( In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to [“make this world worthy of its children.”]( Today, as we face a world that [treats its children as worthless]( we are challenged like we have never been challenged to consider the deepest existential calculus of bringing new life into a troubled world — what is the worth of children, what are our responsibilities to them (when we do choose to have them, for it is also [an act of courage and responsibility to choose not to]( and what does it mean to raise a child with the dignity of being an unrepeatable miracle of atoms that have never before constellated and will never again constellate in that exact way? [songoftwoworlds3.jpg] Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from [Song of Two Worlds]( by physicist Alan Lightman. A century ago, perched between two worlds and two World Wars, the Lebanese-American poet, painter, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) addressed these elemental questions with sensitive sagacity in a short passage from [The Prophet]( ([public library]( — the 1923 classic that also gave us Gibran on [the building blocks of true friendship]( [the courage to weather the uncertainties of love]( and what may be the finest advice ever offered on [the balance of intimacy and independence in a healthy relationship](. When a young mother with a newborn baby at her breast asks for advice on children and parenting, Gibran’s poetic prophet responds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable. [crescendo010.jpg] Art by Alessandro Sanna from [Crescendo](. Complement with Susan Sontag’s [10 rules for raising a child]( and [Crescendo]( — an Italian watercolor serenade to the splendid prenatal biology of becoming a being — then revisit Gibran on [authenticity]( [why we make art]( and his [gorgeous love letters]( to and from the woman without whom [The Prophet]( might never have been born. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Married Immortality and Impermanence]( This essay is excerpted and adapted from [Figuring](. [figuring_jacket_final.jpg]( 1847, the Harvard College Observatory acquired a colossal telescope dubbed the Great Refractor. It would remain the most powerful in America for twenty years. Enraptured by the imaging potential of the mighty instrument, observatory director William Bond befriended the daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple (September 10, 1822–April 10, 1891). Whipple thought of photography as a figurative art rather than a technical craft, but he applied it to the advancement of science. The two men began a series of collaborations that lit the dawn of astrophotography. [johnadamswhipple_greatrefractor.jpg?resize=680%2C451] John Adams Whipple and Harvard’s Great Refractor telescope. Four years into it, the thirty-year-old Whipple would awe the world with his stunning photographs of celestial objects — particularly his photographs of the Moon. Louis Daguerre himself had taken the first lunar photograph on January 2, 1839 — five days before announcing his invention, which marked the birth of photography — but his studio and his entire archive were destroyed by a fire two months later. Whipple’s remains the earliest known surviving photograph of the Moon — an image that continues to stun with its simple visual poetics even as technology has far eclipsed the primitive equipment of its photographer. [johnadamswhipple_moon.jpg?resize=680%2C892] The Moon by John Adams Whipple, February, 1852 (Harvard College Observatory) Whipple’s collaboration with Bond was the beginning of what would become the world’s largest collection of astrophotography plates at the Harvard College Observatory. From this vast visual library, a team of women known as [the Harvard Computers]( would wrest pioneering insight into the nature of the universe, patiently analyzing and annotating the glass plates that today number half a million. [johnadamswhipple_eclipse_Harvard.jpg?resize=680%2C785] Partial solar eclipse by John Adams Whipple (Harvard College Observatory glass plate collection) A year before his Moon photograph, Whipple had used the Great Refractor to make the first daguerreotype of a star: Vega, the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, object of one of Galileo’s most ingenious experiments supporting his proof of heliocentricity. An emissary of spacetime, Vega’s light reached the telescope’s lens from twenty-five light-years away to deliver an image of the star as it had been a quarter century earlier. When the pioneering astrophotographers of Whipple’s generation began pointing one end of the telescope at the cosmos and affixing the other to the camera, we could behold for the first time images of stars that lived billions of light-years away, billions of years ago, long dead by the time their light — the universe’s merchant of time and conquistador of space — reached the lens. Against the backdrop of the newly and barely comprehensible sense of deep time, the blink of any human lifetime suddenly stung with its brevity of being, islanded in the cosmic river of chaos and entropy, drifting, always drifting, toward nonbeing. [fourviews_whipple.jpg?resize=680%2C777] “Four Views of [the Solar Eclipse, August 1869]( by John Adams Whipple We say that photographs “immortalize,” and yet they do the very opposite. Every photograph razes us on our ephemeral temporality by forcing us to contemplate a moment — an unrepeatable fragment of existence — that once was and never again will be. To look at a daguerreotype is to confront the fact of your own mortality in the countenance of a person long dead, a person who once inhabited a fleeting moment — alive with dreams and desperations — just as you now inhabit this one. Rather than bringing us closer to immortality, photography humbled us before our mortal finitude. Florence Nightingale resisted it. “I wish to be forgotten,” she wrote, and consented to being photographed only when Queen Victoria insisted. I wonder about this as I stand amid the stacks of the Harvard College Observatory surrounded by half a million glass plates meticulously annotated by the hands of women long returned to stardust. I imagine the flesh of steady fingers, atoms spun into molecules throbbing with life, carefully slipping a glass plate from its paper sleeve to examine it. In a museum jar across the Atlantic, Galileo’s finger, which once pointed to the Moon with flesh just as alive, shrivels like all of our certitudes. Pinned above the main desk area at the observatory is an archival photograph of Annie Jump Cannon — the deaf computer who catalogued more than 20,000 variable stars in a short period after joining the observatory — examining one of the photographic plates with a magnifying glass. I take out my smartphone — a disembodied [computer of Venus]( mundane proof of [Einstein’s relativity]( instant access to more knowledge than Newton ever knew — and take a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. [anniejumpcannon.jpg?resize=680%2C510] Annie Jump Cannon at work The half million glass plates surrounding me are about to be scraped of the computers’ handwriting — the last physical trace of the women’s corporeality — in order to reveal the clear images that, a century and a half later, provide invaluable astronomical information about the evolution of the universe. There are no overtones of sentimentality in entropy’s unceasing serenade to the cosmos. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations of Owls and Ospreys]( [royalnaturalhistory_lydekker1.jpg?zoom=2&w=680]( his [glorious meditation on science and spirituality]( Alan Lightman writes beautifully of finding transcendent experiences in our quotidian existence — experiences like his life-altering half-second encounter with two baby ospreys. Indeed, birds of prey like ospreys, owls, hawks, eagles, and falcons have long possessed the human imagination. A fixture of fables and fairy tales — in other words, a symbolic centerpiece of our civilizational proclivity for [thinking with animals]( — they have continued to enchant storytellers and scientists alike. Nowhere does the transcendent magnificence of this avian family come more fully alive than in the fourth volume the the six-volume masterwork [The Royal Natural History]( ([public library]( | [public domain]( by English naturalist, geologist, and writer Richard Lydekker, originally published in 1893. The fifth chapter of the volume explores owls and ospreys, with engravings at once scientifically scrupulous and wonderfully expressive, emanating a warm celebration of the splendid biodiversity of our world. [twanyowl1.jpg?resize=680%2C729] Tawny owl. (Available [as a print]( [barnowls.jpg?resize=680%2C694] Barn-owls. (Available [as a print]( [snowylappowl.jpg?resize=680%2C708] Snowy owl and Lapp owl. (Available [as a print]( [uralowl.jpg?resize=680%2C669] Ural owl. (Available [as a print]( The beautiful art, of course, is but a complement to the scintillating science: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png][The] characteristic “owl-face” is due, firstly, to the forward direction of the eyes; and, secondly, to a circular disc of radiating feathers, more or less distinctly developed round each eye, and which may be bounded by a ruff of closely-set feathers. In common with many diurnal birds of prey, the owls have a short, stout beak, of which the upper ridge is strongly curved, and the tip deflected in a perpendicular direction ; at its base is a cere, usually covered with stiff bristles concealing the nostrils. The feet are furnished with strong, curved, and sharp claws, and have the fourth toe reversible. [shortearedowl.jpg?resize=680%2C677] Short-eared owl. (Available [as a print]( [scopslongearedowl.jpg?resize=680%2C567] Scops owl and long-eared owl. (Available [as a print]( [littleowl.jpg?resize=680%2C552] Little owl. (Available [as a print]( [hawkowl.jpg?resize=680%2C861] Hawk-owl. (Available [as a print]( [pigmyowl.jpg?resize=680%2C552] Tengmalm’s owl and pigmy owl. (Available [as a print]( [eagleowl.jpg?resize=680%2C683] Eagle-owl. (Available [as a print]( [burrowingowl.jpg?resize=680%2C574] Burrowing owl. (Available [as a print]( [osprey.jpg?resize=680%2C1027] Osprey and young. (Available [as a print]( Complement Lydekker’s [The Royal Natural History]( with this showcase of some of the rarest and most beautiful [natural history illustrations of the past 500 years](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](