Perspectivist*

The most popular painting in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on Van Gogh’s Cypresses (until 27 August) is undoubtedly Starry Night. It is on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, where it is normally a major attraction, surrounded by admirers.

My husband reads to me every night before we go to sleep. We deliberately choose books that are familiar – oft-read children's classics make frequent appearances – so I do not worry about missing something important when I drift off.

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“The mind is its own place,” wrote Milton, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

Artists, like neuroscientists, are masters of visual systems. Through experimentation and observation, artists have developed innovative methods for fooling the eye, enabling flat canvases to appear three-dimensional, for instance.

We are living interludes, bookended between not yet and no more, each of us a random draw of the cosmic lottery, each allotted a sliver of spacetime in which to live out our lives as chance configurations of stardust suspended in time.

The best things in life we don’t choose — they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination — they happen unto us, like light falling upon that which is lit.

Aubrey Williams, an artist known for his interest in the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, painted a series of 30 abstract paintings of his symphonies and string quartets. Writing on the series in 1982, the art critic Guy Brett noted:

There is a peculiar existential loneliness that entombs us whenever we lose our sense of connection to the web of being — the self begins to feel like a twig torn from the tree of life, and something inside us withers with longing.

“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” Loren Eiseley wrote in his exquisite meditation on nature, human nature, and the meaning of life. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.

No-one knew I was autistic as a child but, looking back, there were a number of sensory clues. Apart from a tendency to repetitively stroke soft fabrics or run grains of sand through my fingers, I also found swirling and gentle rocking mesmerisingly soothing.

Traditionally, philosophers have appealed to the phenomenological similarity between visual experience and visual imagery to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between the perceptual and imaginative domains.

Fungi are the evolutionary cardinals of the Earth — the first to conquer it and the last to inherit it, composing the living substratum beneath every forest and every field and every backyard ecosystem.

When was the last time you felt truly connected to the sensations of your body and fully aware of the present moment? It is easy to get disconnected when listening to the demands of life.

In the late 1920s, a young working-class boy nicknamed Ritty spent most of his time tinkering in his "laboratory" at his parents' home in Rockaway, New York.

When my son was born with a congenital heart condition, like any parent, I felt lost. He required open-heart surgery and I felt overwhelming uncertainty for what the future might hold.