Yo-Yo Ma on What Our Descendants Will Inherit

Earlier this month, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma turned seventy—an event that led him to mirror on not simply his personal previous but in addition the planet’s future. In a letter to followers, he wrote, “In the present day, I’m frightened. Within the yr 2100, my youngest grandchild will likely be 76. She will likely be assembly a world I can’t see. I ponder what the world will likely be like then?” Not way back, Ma despatched us suggestions for 3 books which have contributed to his considering on this theme—books that interrogate timeless elements of human nature, our advanced relationships to 1 one other, and our entanglement with the pure world. (He explores a few of these topics on his latest podcast, “Our Widespread Nature,” which premièred on WNYC final week.) Every ebook, he exhibits, affords a special form of steering on the best way to domesticate a greater world for our descendants.

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

I’m drawn to Marcus Aurelius lately as a result of studying him focusses my considering, aligns my priorities, and jogs my memory that there are specific human values that endure throughout millennia—that attempting to apply the virtues of knowledge, justice, braveness, and temperance is one of the best hope I’ve to steer a balanced life in our impermanent, ever-changing world.

“Meditations” was written as a personal journal, not meant for public consumption. It’s made up of Marcus Aurelius’s recommendation to himself, produced maybe as an antidote to being consistently surrounded by and subjected to the temptation and corruption of life as Emperor. It’s a reminder to look inside ourselves for objective and which means. Marcus Aurelius believed that happiness comes from the within, that it derives from cultivating dignity and compassion somewhat than from exterior success. I really feel that is exactly the form of humanism that society is lacking at the moment.

Indigo

by Jenny Balfour-Paul

Once I was at school, the topics I studied have been compartmentalized in such a method that after I graduated, I didn’t understand how interconnected the world was (and has all the time been). It has given me a lot pleasure to find these connections, and “Indigo” offered many such revelations—studying how a plant turned a dye, how a dye turned a shade desired all around the world, and the way that shade modified habits, constructed economies, and spurred creative creation. Even at the moment, the denim your denims are comprised of is likely to be spun from cotton grown in Asia, its identify derived from the French metropolis the place blue serge material originated (“de Nîmes”), dyed with indigo that was as soon as value greater than its weight in gold. This straightforward material is current all through world historical past, from Biblical occasions to at the moment, from India to Africa, the Center East, Europe, Asia, South America. “Indigo” gave me perception right into a dynamic that has turn into like a mantra for me: that if you happen to look deeply sufficient at any object, any story, any music—irrespective of how acquainted—you’ll discover the world.

Studying “Indigo” impressed me to work with New York Public Faculties to create a program for sixth graders which might assist them see a number of the interconnections that it took me so a few years to find, equipping them with a way of the various threads that hyperlink individuals, cultures, centuries, continents, people, and nature. In this system, my colleagues and I labored with college students to develop indigo, make dye, after which create wearable objects. It was one of many hardest and most rewarding occasions of my life.

Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

It takes actual virtuosity to write down throughout shifting scales and views, as Harvey does on this novel. One second, the Earth is Mom Earth, giver of life; within the subsequent, it’s only a tiny blue dot. In the identical method, Harvey sends the reader lurching from the mundane to the life-altering—a failed try to warmth up garlic ends in the space-station cabin reeking for weeks; an astronaut reels after studying of their mom’s sudden dying. The reader’s concern strikes from the survival of the six astronauts to the cell cultures of their onboard lab, which, by one calculus (they could yield lifesaving scientific developments), could possibly be thought-about extra helpful than the lives of the six astronauts.

“Orbital” offers me hope. I really feel that, at the moment, we’d like this type of encompassing imaginative and prescient—one which understands the smallest element and the most important image, that may transfer effortlessly between evaluation and empathy, that acknowledges the person and the planet on the similar time, and that acknowledges people as a part of nature and our survival as inseparable from the well being of the Earth.