going through any period of reading with the intention of selecting one’s favorite books is a curious two-way time machine: one must collect the memory of a past and filter it through the sieve of an indefinite future in an effort to discern which books have left an imprint on consciousness deep enough to last a lifetime. Of the many books I read in 2016, these are the sixteen that moved me the most deeply and memorably. And since I’m with Susan Sontag, who considered reading an act of rebirth, I invite you to review the annual favorites of 2015, 2014 and 2013.
the lonely city
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life as she contemplated how solitude enriches creative work. It’s a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrace solitude, it can be tremendously lonesome-making to those for whom loneliness has contracted the space of trust and love into a suffocating penitentiary. For if in solitude, as Wendell Berry memorably wrote, “one’s inner voices become audible [and] one responds more clearly to other lives,” in loneliness one’s inner scream becomes deafening, deadening, severing any thread of connection to other lives.
You are reading: Brain pickings best books 2016
how to break free from that prison and re-inhabit the space of trust and love is what olivia laing explores in the lonely city: adventures in the art of being alone ( public library) – an extraordinary more than memories; a kind of memoir-plus-plus, halfway between helen macdonald’s h is for hawk and virginia woolf’s diary; A lyrical account of going through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of solitude as “a populated place: a city unto itself.”
after the sudden collapse of a romance marked by extreme euphoria, laing left his native england and took his broken heart with him to new york, “that island brimming with gneiss, cement and glass”. the bone-deep, daily loneliness she experienced there was paralyzing in its all-consuming potency and, paradoxically, a strange invitation to vitality. indeed, his choice to leave home and wander in a foreign city is itself a rich metaphor for the paradoxical nature of loneliness, animated by equal parts restlessness and stupor, capable of turning one into a willful wanderer and a catatonic recluse at once, but somehow a vitalizing laboratory for self-discovery. he found that the well of loneliness could “lead one to consider some of the biggest questions of what it is to be alive.”
she writes:
there were things that burned me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated era. what does it mean to be alone how do we live, if we are not intimately committed to another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if it’s not easy for us to talk? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is seen as deviant or damaged, if we are sick or not blessed with beauty? And technology is helping with these things? Does it bring us closer or does it trap us behind the screens?
Wracked by this acute emotional anguish, Laing seeks solace in the great patron saints of loneliness in 20th-century creative culture. From this eclectic tribe of loners, which includes Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Hujar, Billie Holiday, and Nan Goldin, Laing chooses four artists as his companions to chart the terra incognita of loneliness: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, henry darger, and david wojnarowicz, who had “wrestled both in their lives and in their work with loneliness and the problems that come with it.”
Laing examines the particular, pervasive form of loneliness in the eye of a city aswirl with humanity:
Imagine yourself standing by a window at night, on the sixth, seventeenth, or forty-third floor of a building. the city is revealed as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and others flooded with green or white or golden light. inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. you can see them, but you can’t reach them, which is why this common urban phenomenon, available in any city in the world on any given night, gives even the most social a shiver of loneliness, its uncomfortable combination of separation and exposure.
You can feel lonely anywhere, but there’s a particular flavor of loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. one might think that this state was the antithesis of urban life, of the massive presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel the feeling of internal isolation. it is possible, even easy, to feel lonely and unfrequented in oneself while living side by side with others. cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness does not necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or scarcity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as possible. may be possible. is desired. unhappy, as the dictionary says, as a result of being without the company of others. It’s no wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.
There is, of course, a universe of difference between loneliness and loneliness: two radically different inner orientations towards the same outer circumstance of lack of company. We speak of “fertile solitude” as a developmental achievement essential to our creative ability, but solitude is sterile and destructive; wraps in apathy the will to create. More than that, it seems to point to an existential flaw: a social stigma whose nuances Laing beautifully addresses:
loneliness is hard to confess; too hard to categorize. Like depression, a state you often come across, it can be deeply ingrained in a person’s fabric, as much a part of their being as laughing easily or having red hair. on the other hand, it can be transitory, coming and going in reaction to external circumstances, such as loneliness following a bereavement, a breakup, or a change in social circles.
Like depression, melancholy or restlessness, it is also subject to pathologization, to be considered a disease. It has been emphatically said that solitude serves no purpose…perhaps I am wrong, but I do not believe that any experience which is such an important part of our common lives can be completely meaningless, without a richness and value of some sort. Type. .
dive deeper here.
hope in the dark
I think a great deal about what it means to live with hope and sincerity in the age of cynicism, about how we can continue standing at the gates of hope as we’re being bombarded with news of hopeless acts of violence, as we’re confronted daily with what Marcus Aurelius called the “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”
I have not found a more lucid and luminous defense of hope than the one launched by rebecca solnit in Hope in the Dark: Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities (Public Library ) — a lean, powerful book that has become more relevant and poignant in the decade since its original publication in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, recently reissued with a new introduction by solnit.
We lose hope, Solnit suggests, because we lose perspective — we lose sight of the “accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes” which constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past, a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation punctuated by occasional tumult. She writes:
there are moments when it seems that not only the future but also the present are dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by nightmares like global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and justice, and transformed by things we could not have dreamed… we need to hope in the realization of our own dreams, but also recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imagination.
One of the most unique, civically significant, and poetically powerful voices of our time, emanating echoes of virginia woolf’s luminous prose and adrienne rich’s unflinching political conviction,
solnit looks back into the seemingly distant past as she watches forward into the near future:
The moment is long past, but the despair, defeatism, cynicism and amnesia and assumptions from which they often spring have not been dispersed, even when the wildest and most unimaginably magnificent things have happened. there is a lot of evidence in favor of the defense…progressive, populist and grassroots electorates have had many victories. popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. and the changes we have experienced, both wonderful and terrible, are amazing.
[…]This is an extraordinary time full of vital and transformative movements that could not be foreseen. it is also a nightmarish moment. total commitment requires the ability to perceive both.
participate more fully here.
upstream
To read Mary Oliver is to be read by her — to be made real by her words, to have the richest subterranean truths of your own experience mirrored back to you with tenfold the luminosity. Her prose collection Upstream: Selected Essays (public library) is a book of uncommon enchantment, containing Oliver’s largehearted wisdom on writing, creative work, and the art of life.
in a particularly satisfying piece of the volume, titled Power and Time,” oliver writes:
the artist who works and concentrates is an adult who rejects the interruption of himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work, who is therefore responsible for the work… serious interruptions of work, therefore, they are never the inopportune, joyful, even loving interruptions that come to us from another.
[…]It’s six in the morning and I’m working. I am clueless, reckless, inattentive to social obligations, etc. it is as it should be. the tire is punctured, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. the poem is written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. I’m not to blame either. my responsibility is not with the ordinary, nor with the opportune. does not include mustard, or teeth. it does not extend to the lost button, nor to the beans in the pot. my allegiance is to the inner vision, whenever and however it comes. if I have a meeting with you at three, rejoice if I’m late. be even happier if I don’t quite get there.
there is no other way to do a work of artistic value. and the occasional success, for the fighter, is worth everything. the most repentant people on earth are those who felt called to creative work, who felt their own creative power restless and revolted, and gave it neither power nor time.
for a richer taste of this feast for the mind, heart, and spirit, watch oliver on how books saved his life and time, the task of the artist, and the central commitment of creative life.
black hole blues
In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (public library), which crowns the year’s finest science books, cosmologist and novelist Janna Levin tells the story of the century-long vision, originated by Einstein, and half-century experimental quest to hear the sound of spacetime by detecting a gravitational wave. This book remains one of the most intensely interesting and beautifully written I’ve ever encountered — the kind that comes about once a generation if we’re lucky.
everything we know about the universe so far comes from four centuries of vision: of looking into space with our eyes and their prosthetic extension, the telescope. now begins a new way of knowing the cosmos through sound. the detection of gravitational waves is one of the most significant discoveries in the entire history of physics and marks the beginning of a new era as we begin to hear the sound of space: the likely portal to mysteries so unimaginable to us today as galaxies and nebulae. and pulsars and other cosmic wonders were for early astronomers. Gravitational astronomy, as Levin elegantly puts it, promises a “score to accompany the silent film mankind has compiled of the history of the universe from still images of the sky, a series of frozen snapshots captured over the past four hundred years since Galileo first pointed a crude telescope at the sun.
Surprisingly, Levin wrote the book before the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory (ligo), the monumental instrument at the center of the story, decades in the making, detected a ripple in the fabric of space-time caused by the collision of two black holes in the fall of 2015, exactly a century after Einstein first saw the possibility of gravitational waves. so the story it tells is not one of triumph but one of climbing, which makes it all the more charming, because ultimately it’s a story about the human spirit and its incredible tenacity, about why human beings choose to dedicate all his life. to activities strewn with unimaginable obstacles and plagued by frequent failures, uncertain rewards and little public recognition.
Indeed, what makes the book interesting is that it tells the story of this monumental discovery, but what makes it charming is that Levin approaches it from a rather unusual perspective. she’s a working astrophysicist studying black holes, but she’s also an incredibly talented novelist, an artist whose medium is language and thought itself. this is not a popular science book, but something much higher in her artistic vision, impeccable dexterity of language, and sheer delight in prose. The story is structured almost like a series of short, integrated novels, with each chapter dedicated to one of the key scientists involved in Ligo. With Dostoevskian insight and nuance, Levin paints a psychological, even philosophical, portrait of each protagonist, revealing how intricately intertwined genius and foibles are in the fabric of personality and how profoundly human science ultimately is.
she writes:
Scientists are like those levers or knobs or those usefully screwed boulders on a climbing wall. as the wall is a cemented material made by mixing knowledge, which is a purely human construction, with reality, which we can only access through the filter of our mind. there is an important search for objectivity in science, nature and mathematics, but still the only way to climb the wall is through individual people, and they come in details… so the climb is personal, an effort truly human, and the actual expedition is pixelated into individuals, not platonic forms.
To sample this wonderful uncategorized book, watch Levin on the story of the tragic hero who pioneered gravitational astronomy and how astronomer Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars.
time travel
Time Travel: A History (public library) by science historian and writer extraordinaire James Gleick, another rare enchanter of science, is not a “science book” per se, in that although it draws heavily on the history of twentieth-century science and quantum physics in particular (as well as on millennia of philosophy), it is a decidedly literary inquiry into our temporal imagination — why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the deepest mysteries of our consciousness. I consider it a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst.
Gleick, who examined the origin of our modern anxiety about time with remarkable foresight nearly two decades ago, traces the invention of the notion of time travel to H.G. Wells’s 1895 masterpiece, The Time Machine. Although Wells, like Gleick, like any renowned physicist, knew that time travel was a scientific impossibility, he created an aesthetics of thought that had never existed before and has shaped modern consciousness ever since. Gleick argues that the art that produced this aesthetic, an entire canon of time-travel literature and film, not only permeated popular culture, but even influenced some of the greatest scientific minds of the last century, including Stephen Hawking, who once cleverly organized a party for the weather. travelers and when no one showed up he considered the impossibility of time travel proven, and john archibald wheeler, who popularized the term “black hole” and coined “wormhole”, both key tropes of time travel literature.
gleick considers how a scientific impossibility can become such fertile ground for the artistic imagination:
Why do we need to travel through time, when we already travel through space so fast and far? for the mystery story. out of nostalgia for hope. to examine our potential and explore our memories. to counteract regret for the life we live, the only life, one dimension, from start to finish.
wells’s time machine revealed a twist in the road, an alteration in the human relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced each other: the electric telegraph, the steam railway, Lyell’s earth sciences and Darwin’s life sciences, the rise of archeology from antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, scientists and philosophers were poised to understand time in a new way. and so were we all. time travel blossomed into culture, its loops, twists, and paradoxes.
I wrote extensively about gleick’s unusually pleasant book here.
the view from the cheap seats
Neil Gaiman is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time, unequaled at his singular brand of darkly delightful fantasy. His long-awaited nonfiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats (public library) celebrates a different side of Gaiman. Here stands a writer of firm conviction and porous curiosity, an idealist amid our morass of cynicism who, in revealing who he is, reveals who we are and who we can be if we only tried a little bit harder to wrest more goodness out of our imperfect humanity. An evangelist for the righteous without a shred of our culture’s pathological self-righteousness, Gaiman jolts us out of our collective amnesia and reminds us again and again what matters: ideas over ideologies, public libraries, the integrity of children’s inner lives, the stories we choose to tell of why the world is the way it is, the moral obligation to imagine better stories — and, oh, the sheer fun of it all.
Among the many gems in the collection, which include Gaiman’s meditations on why we read and the power of cautionary questions, is a particularly timely short piece titled “Credo,” in which Gaiman writes:
I think it’s hard to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.
I think you can contrast your own ideas with the ones you don’t like. that he must be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, enrage, mock, sing, dramatize and deny.
I don’t think that burning, murdering, blowing people up, smashing their heads with stones (to get the bad ideas out), drowning them, or even defeating them will serve to contain the ideas you don’t like. ideas spring up where you don’t expect them, like weeds, and they’re just as hard to control.
I believe that suppressing ideas propagates ideas.
read more here.
stay still
“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation,” pioneering researcher Rosalind Cartwright wrote in distilling the science of the unconscious mind.
Although I lack early childhood memories, I do have one rather eidetic memory: I remember standing in front of the barren elephant yard at Sofia Zoo in Bulgaria, at the age of three or so, dressed in a polka dot sweater of cotton. I remember narrowing my eyes with a frown as the malnourished elephant behind me churned up dirt in the air in front of his communist-stamped concrete building. I don’t remember the temperature, although from the memory of my outfit I deduce that it must have been summer. I don’t remember the smell of the elephant or the feel of the earth on my skin, although I do remember my grimace.
For most of my life, I clung to that memory as the only surviving mnemonic fragment of my early childhood self. And then one day, when I was in my early twenties, I discovered an old photo album hidden in the back of my grandmother’s closet in Bulgaria. It contained dozens of photographs of me, from birth to age four, including one that featured that very vignette, down to the finest detail of what I believed to be my memory of that moment. there I was, frowning in my polka dot sweater with the elephant and the cloud of dust behind me. In an instant, I realized that I had been holding on to a prosthetic memory: what I remembered was the photograph of that day, which must have been shown to me at some point, and not the day itself, of which I have no other recollection. the question—and what a Borgesian question—remains whether one should rather have such a prosthetic memory, constructed entirely of photographs held together in artificial cohesion, than have no memory at all.
See Also: Lawrence Block – Book Series In Order
this disconcerting parallax of personal history is what the photographer sally mann explores in yet: a memory with photographs (public library), a lyrical but not sentimental meditation on art, mortality, and the gap between memory and myth, buttressed by what mann calls his “long preoccupation with the betrayal of memory” and “the truth of memory, which is scientific and objective truth as a pearl is like a piece of sand.”
In a sentiment that calls to mind Oliver Sacks’s exquisite elucidation of how memory works, Mann writes:
Any of my memories that hadn’t crumbled to dust must now surely have been altered by the passage of time. I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you shouldn’t go back to it too often, since each time you revisit it, you irrevocably alter it, remembering not the original impression left by the experience but the last time. you remembered it with small differences that slip in each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but rather distances us.
I had learned over time to meekly accept whatever betrayal memory might throw at me, allowing my mind to polish its own beautiful lie. By distorting the information it is supposed to keep secure, the brain, to its credit, will often bow to some instinctive aesthetic wisdom, imparting to the events of our lives a coherence, logic, and symbolic elegance that is either not present or not quite as obvious. obvious in the unlikely. sloppy, sloppy of what we’ve actually been through.
Nearly half a century after Italo Calvino observed that “the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself,” Mann traces this cultural pathology — now a full epidemic with the rise of the photo-driven social web — to the dawn of the medium itself. Reflecting on the discovery of a box of old photographs in her own family’s attic, she echoes Teju Cole’s assertion that “photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses” and writes:
As early as 1901, Émile Zola telegraphed the threat of this relatively new medium, pointing out that you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it. what zola perhaps also knew or intuited was that once photographed, what you had “really seen” would never again be seen by the eye of memory. it would be forever cut off from the continuum of being, a mere splinter, a light and translucent bit of the fat life of time; elegiac, one-dimensional, immediately assuming the amber quality of nostalgia: an instant memento mori. photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial overlays, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood photos in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering”, I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.
read more here.
anger and forgiveness
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their terrific forgotten conversation about forgiveness and the difference between guilt and responsibility. “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” philosopher David Whyte echoed half a century later in contemplating anger, forgiveness, and what maturity really means. And yet the dance of anger and forgiveness, performed to the uncontrollable rhythm of trust, is perhaps the most difficult in human life, as well as one of the oldest.
The moral choreography of that dance is what philosopher martha nussbaum explores in Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Public Library).
Nussbaum, who has previously examined the intelligence of the emotions and whom I consider the most incisive philosopher of our time, argues that despite anger’s long cultural history of being seen as morally justifiable and as a useful signal that wrongdoing has taken place, it is a normatively faulty response that masks deeper, more difficult emotions and stands in the way of resolving them. Consequently, forgiveness — which Nussbaum defines as “a change of heart on the part of the victim, who gives up anger and resentment in response to the offender’s confession and contrition” — is also warped into a transactional proposition wherein the wrongdoer must earn, through confession and apology, the wronged person’s morally superior grace.
nussbaum describes the central features and paradoxes of anger:
anger is an unusually complex emotion, as it involves both pain and pleasure [because] the prospect of retribution is pleasant…anger also involves a double reference: to a person or persons and to an act…the focus of anger is an act imputed to the target, which is taken as wrongful damage.
Injuries can also be the center of grief. but whereas mourning focuses on the loss or harm itself, and lacks a goal (unless it is the person lost, as in “I mourn so-and-so”), anger begins with the act that dealt the damage, viewing it as being intentionally inflicted by the target, and then as a result one becomes angry and one’s anger is directed at the target. anger, then, requires causal thinking and some understanding of right and wrong.
[…]Notoriously, though, people sometimes get angry when frustrated by inanimate objects, which presumably can’t act wrong… In 1988, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article on “Anger from vending machines”: fatal ones, as a result of angry men kicking or rocking machines that had taken their money without dispensing the drink. (The fatal injuries were caused by machines falling on the men and crushing them.)
Underlying this tragicomic response lies a combination of personal insecurity, vulnerability, and what Nussbaum calls status damage (or what Aristotle called demotion), the perception that the wrongdoer has lowered the social status of the wronged, conspiring to produce a state of infuriating helplessness. Anger, Nussbaum argues, is how we seek to create an illusion of control where we feel none.
She writes:
Anger is not always, but very often, it is a status injury. and status harm has a narcissistic flavor: instead of focusing on the wrongfulness of the act as such, an approach that could lead to concern about similar wrongful acts in general, the status-angered person focuses obsessively on himself herself and her position. in front of others.
[…]We are prone to anger to the extent that we feel insecure or out of control about the aspect of our goals that has been attacked, and to the extent that we expect or desire control. anger aims to restore lost control, and often achieves at least an illusion of it. To the extent that a culture encourages people to feel vulnerable to slight and belittlement in a wide variety of situations, it encourages the roots of status-focused anger.
Nowhere is anger more acute, or more damaging, than in intimate relationships, where the stakes are high. because they are so central to our flourishing and because our personal investment in them runs deeper, the potential for betrayal there is enormous and therefore enormously vulnerable. Crucially, Nussbaum argues, intimate relationships involve trust, which is based on unavoidable vulnerability. she considers what trust really means:
trust… is different from mere dependency. one can trust an alarm clock, and to that extent feel disappointed if it fails to do its job, but one does not feel deeply vulnerable or deeply invaded by the failure. Likewise, one can trust a dishonest colleague to continue lying and cheating, but that is precisely the reason not to trust that person; instead, one will attempt to protect oneself from harm. trust, on the other hand, implies opening oneself to the possibility of betrayal, therefore to a very deep form of damage. it means relaxing the self-protective strategies with which we usually go through life, attaching great importance to the other’s actions over which one has little control. it means, then, to live with a certain degree of impotence.
Is trust a matter of belief or emotion? both, in complexly related ways. trusting someone, one believes that he will fulfill his commitments and, at the same time, values those commitments as very important for one’s flourishing. but that last evaluation is a key building block of a range of emotions, including hope, fear, and, if things go wrong, deep grief and loss. confidence is probably not identical to those emotions, but in normal life circumstances it is often enough for them. one also often has other emotions related to a trusted person, such as love and concern. although one does not typically decide to trust deliberately, the willingness to be in the hands of another person is a kind of choice, since one can certainly live without that kind of dependency… living with trust implies a deep vulnerability and a certain helplessness, which can easily veer into anger.
read more here.
non-prohibited pleasures
The English psychoanalytical writer Adam Phillips has written with beguiling nuance about such variousness of our psychic experience as the importance of “fertile solitude,” the value of missing out, and the rewards of being out of balance. In Unforbidden Pleasures (public library), he explores our paradoxical desires and the topsy-turvy ways we go about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
in the collection’s landmark essay, titled “against self-criticism,” phillips traverses the space-time of culture to rebel and pay homage to susan sontag’s masterpiece against interpretation, examining “our virulent self-criticism and predatory”. [it] has become one of our greatest pleasures.” type:
in addressing the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a certain narrowing of the repertoire; and in which we praise everything we can.
but we have become so indoctrinated in this consciousness of self-criticism, both collectively and individually, that we have become reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, perfectly captured this pathology: “there is only one thing for sure: one’s own inadequacy”). phillips writes:
Self-criticism, and the self as critic, are essential to our meaning, our image, of what we call ourselves.
[…]nothing makes us more critical, more confused, more suspicious, horrified, or even mildly amused, than the suggestion that we should drop all this unrelenting criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. or at least that self-criticism should stop having the power over us that it does.
read more here.
the course of love
“Nothing awakens us to the reality of life so much as a true love,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother. “Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp?” philosopher Martin Heidegger asked in his electrifying love letters to Hannah Arendt. “Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.” Still, nearly every anguishing aspect of love arises from the inescapable tension between this longing for transformative awakening and the sleepwalking selfhood of our habitual patterns. True as it may be that frustration is a prerequisite for satisfaction in romance, how are we to reconcile the sundering frustration of these polar pulls?
The many sharp facets of this question are those explored by alain de botton in the course of love (public library): a meditation on beautiful and tragic tenderness and frailties of the human heart, both disconcerting and reassuring in its psychological insight. at bottom it is a lament—or, perhaps, a warning against—how the classical romantic model has sold us a self-defeating set of beliefs about the most essential and nuanced experiences of human life: love, falling in love, marriage, sex. , children, infidelity, trust.
A sequel of sorts to his 1993 novel On Love, the book is bold bending of form that fuses fiction and De Botton’s supreme forte, the essay — twined with the narrative thread of the romance between the two protagonists are astute observations at the meeting point of psychology and philosophy, spinning out from the particular problems of the couple to unravel broader insight into the universal complexities of the human heart.
indeed, as the book progresses, one gets the distinct and surprisingly pleasant sense that de botton has sculpted the love story around the sturdy armor of these philosophical musings; that the essay is the raison d’être of fiction.
In one of these contemplative interstitials, de botton writes:
maturity begins with the ability to intuit and, over time and without defensiveness, admit our own follies. If we are not regularly deeply ashamed of who we are, the journey to self-knowledge has not begun.
For a better experience of the book, devour these portions that explore why our partners drive us crazy, what makes a good communicator, and the paradox of sulking.
the brave girl
In 1885, a young woman sent the editor of her hometown newspaper a brilliant response to a letter by a patronizing chauvinist, which the paper had published under the title “What Girls Are Good For.” The woman, known today as Nellie Bly, so impressed the editor that she was hired at the paper and went on to become a trailblazing journalist, circumnavigating the globe in 75 days with only a duffle bag and risking her life to write a seminal exposé of asylum abuse, which forever changed legal protections for the mentally ill. But Bly’s courage says as much about her triumphant character as it does about the tragedies of her culture — she is celebrated as a hero in large part because she defied and transcended the limiting gender norms of the Victorian era, which reserved courageous and adventurous feats for men, while raising women to be diffident, perfect, and perfectly pretty instead.
author caroline paul, one of the first women on the san francisco firefighting force and pilot of an experimental aircraft, believes not much has changed in the century since then, that Beneath the surface of progress, our culture still warns girls about “the insidious language of fear” and boys about bravery and resilience. She offers a clever and imaginative antidote in Brave Girl: Epic Adventure Escapes for Your Life (Public Library): part memoir, part manifesto, part aspirational workbook, aimed at pre-teen girls but addressed to eternal people. , genderless spirit of adventure in all of us, exploring what it means to be brave, to persevere, to break the tyranny of perfection, and to laugh at oneself while setting out to do the seemingly impossible.
Illustrated by Paul’s partner (and frequent collaborator), artist and photojournalist Wendy Macnaughton, the book features sidebar celebrations of diverse “female heroes” from nearly every background imaginable, from famous trailblazers like Nellie bly and astronaut mae jemison to little-known adventurers like climbing botanist marie antoine, prodigy climber ashima shiraishi and pilot and skydiver bessie “queen bess” coleman.
A masterful memoirist who has previously written about what a lost cat taught him about finding human love and what it’s like to be a twin, Paul structures each chapter as an exciting micro-memoir of a particular adventure from his own life: building a pirate ship out of milk cartons as a teenager and triumphantly sinking it in the rapids, mastering a challenging type of paragliding as a youngster, climbing and nearly dying on the formidable Mount Denali as an adult.
Let me make one thing clear: Throughout the book, Paul does a remarkably thoughtful job of drawing the line between adventure and recklessness. its brushes with disaster, rather than extolling indifference, are the book’s greatest gift precisely because they decondition the notion that an adventure is the same as an achievement, that one must be perfect and foolproof in every way to live. a daring adventure. and brave life. Instead, by chronicling his many missteps throughout his early jumps, he assures the young reader again and again that acknowledging mistakes is not a drain on one’s courage, but rather an essential component of success. same. after all, the fear of humiliation is perhaps the underlying all fear, and in our culture of stubborn sanctimoniousness, there are few things we resist more steadfastly, to the detriment of our own growth, than looking foolish for being wrong. The brave, Paul reminds us, stumble and fall, often in public, but get back up and jump again.
Indeed, the book is a living, living testament to psychologist Carol Dweck’s seminal work on “fixed” vs. “growth” mindsets: proven evidence that courage is not the fruit of perfection but of of tenacity versus fallibility, fertilized by the choice (and it is a choice, Paul reminds us over and over again) to get up and dust yourself off every time.
But Paul wasn’t always an adventurer. she reflects:
He had been a shy and fearful child. many things had scared me. older children second grade. the old lady across the street. be called in class. the book where the wild things are. woods at dusk. the way the bones in my hand crisscrossed.
being scared was a terrible feeling, like sinking into quicksand. my stomach cramped, my feet felt heavy, my head itched. fear was a whole-body experience. for a shy kid like me it was overwhelming.
let me pause here to point out that caroline paul is one of the most extraordinary human beings i know: a modern day horsewoman, shackleton, amelia earhart and hedy lamarr all rolled into one, and since she is also a brilliant writer, the humor The self-deprecating commentary that pervades the book has a deliberate purpose: to make sure that no one is born a modern-day Amazon, Shackleton, Amelia Earhart, and Hedy Lamarr all in one, but that determination can become that if challenged, to admit the possibility of imperfection and shame, and see those results as part of the adventure rather than a failure to achieve.
That’s exactly what Paul does in the adventures he recounts. After all, it’s time to replace that sad Victorian map of a woman’s heart with a modern map of a girl’s fearless spirit.
read and see more here.
hidden figures
“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?” astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in American science, admonished the first class of female astronomers at Vassar in 1876. By the middle of the next century, a team of unheralded women scientists and engineers were powering space exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Meanwhile, across the continent and in what was virtually another country, a parallel but very different revolution was taking place: In the segregated South, a growing number of black female mathematicians, scientists and engineers were leading early space exploration and helped us win the cold war at nasa’s langley research center in hampton, virginia.
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Long before the term “computer” came to mean the machine that dictates our lives, these extraordinary women worked as human “computers”: highly skilled professional calculators, who thought mathematically and computationally for a living and for their country. when neil armstrong walked on the moon, his “giant leap for mankind” had been driven by women, particularly katherine johnson, the “computer” who calculated the launch windows for apollo 11 and who received the presidential medal of freedom for part of president obama at age 97 in 2015, three years after the award was given to john glenn, the astronaut whose flight path had made johnson possible.
In Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (public library), Margot Lee Shetterly tells the untold story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our cultural leaps and since sidelined by the selective collective memory we call history.
she writes:
Just as islands (isolated places with rich and unique biodiversity) have relevance to ecosystems everywhere, the study of seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events of the past yields unexpected connections and insights about life modern.
Set against a sobering cultural backdrop, shetterly captures the enormous cognitive dissonance evoked by the very notion of this black math:
before a computer became an inanimate object and before mission control landed in houston; before sputnik changed the course of history, and before naca became nasa; Before the Supreme Court case Brown v. The Topeka Board of Education established that separate was not in fact equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Echoed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial West Langley’s computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also women.
shetterly grew up in hampton, which called itself “spacetown usa”, amidst this archipelago of women who were her neighbors and teachers. Her father, who had built his first rocket as a teenager after seeing the launch of Sputnik, was one of Langley’s African American scientists at a time when words we now shudder to hear were used instead of “African American.” “. like him, the first five black women to join langley’s research staff in 1943 entered a segregated nasa, although, as shetterly points out, the space agency was among the most inclusive workplaces in the country, with more four times the percentage of black scientists. and engineers than the national average.
Over the next forty years, the number of these pioneering black women multiplied to more than fifty, revealing the mycelium of a major tidal wave. Shetterly’s favorite Sunday school teacher had been one of the first computers: a retired NASA mathematician named Kathleen Land. and so shetterly, who considers herself “as much a product of nasa as the moon landing,” grew up believing that black women simply belonged in science and space exploration as a matter of course; after all, they populated her father’s workplace and her city. , a town in whose church “mathematicians abounded”.
Embodying the wisdom of astronomer Vera Rubin on how modeling expands the scope of possibilities for children, it clearly reflects this normalizing and stimulating power of example:
Building 1236, my father’s daily destination, contained a Byzantine complex of gray government cubicles, scented with the adult scents of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. his fellow engineers, with their scruffy style and absent-minded manner, seemed like exotic birds at a sanctuary. we kids were given mounds of discarded 11×14 continuous-format computer paper, printed on one side with cryptic sets of numbers, the blank side a canvas for crayon masterpieces. women occupied many of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat at typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and consulted with my father and other men in the office over the piles of documents that littered their desks. That so many of them were African-American, many of them my grandmother’s age, seemed to me simply part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
[…]The community certainly included black English teachers, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, mechanics, black janitors and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, realtors and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a a bunch of black mary kay salesmen. however, as a kid, I knew so many African-Americans who worked in science, math, and engineering that I thought that’s what blacks did.
Read more here.
become wise
“Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her beautiful meditation on the power and magic of real human conversation. “They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” Hardly anyone in our time has been a greater amplifier of spirits than longtime journalist, On Being host, and patron saint of nuance Krista Tippett — a modern-day Simone Weil who has been fusing spiritual life and secular culture with remarkable virtuosity through her conversations with physicists and poets, neuroscientists and novelists, biologists and Benedictine monks, united by the quality of heart and mind that Einstein so beautifully termed “spiritual genius.”
In his interviews with the great spiritual geniuses of our time, Tippett has cultivated a rare space for reflection and redemption in the midst of our reactionary culture, a space framed by his generous questions exploring the meaning of life. In Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into Mystery and the Art of Living (Public Library), Tippett distills more than a decade of these conversations across disciplines and denominations into a source of wisdom on the most elemental issues of the being human, questions about happiness, morality, justice, well-being and love, reanimated with a new vitality of intuition.
At the core of Tippett’s inquiry is the notion virtue — not in the limiting, prescriptive sense with which scripture has imbued it, but in the expansive, empowering sense of a psychological, emotional, and spiritual technology that allows us to first fully inhabit, then conscientiously close the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be.
explores five main fertilizers of virtue: words, the language we use to tell the stories we tell about who we are and how the world works; flesh: the body as the birthplace of all virtues, rooted in the idea that “the way we inhabit our senses proves the mettle of our souls”; love, a word so abused that it has been emptied of meaning, but that gives meaning to our existence, both in the most private and in the fabric of public life; faith — tippett left a successful career as a political journalist in divided berlin in the 1980s to study theology not to be ordained but to question power structures and examine the foundations of the moral imagination through the spiritual wisdom of the ages ; and hope: an orientation of mind and spirit that is not based on blinders of optimism, but on a lucid lens on the possible provided by active and unwavering reach.
tippett, who has spent more than a decade blending spirituality, science and the human spirit and received the national humanities medal for it, considers the raw material of his work: the power of questions “as social art and civic tools”:
If I haven’t learned anything else, I’ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a powerful use of words. questions get answers in their likeness. the answers reflect the questions that rise or fall to answer. therefore, while a simple question may be just what is needed to get to the heart of the matter, it is difficult to answer a simplistic question with anything other than a simplistic answer. it is difficult to transcend a combative question. but it’s hard to resist a generous question. we all have in us to ask questions that invite honesty, dignity and revelation. there is something redemptive and life-giving about asking better questions.
read more here.
abundance
For decades, Annie Dillard has beguiled those in search of truth and beauty in the written word with the lyrical splendor and wakeful sagacity of her prose. The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library) collects her finest work, spanning such varied subjects as writing, the consecrating art of attention, and the surreal exhilaration of witnessing a total solar eclipse.
in a beautiful article from 1989 titled “a writer in the world”, dillard writes:
people like the same things better. a writer, however, when looking for subjects does not ask what he loves most, but what is the only thing he loves at all… why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you mention, about your fascination with something that no one else understand? because it depends on you. there is something that seems interesting to you, for a reason that is difficult to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you start you were made and put here to give voice to this, your own wonder.
and yet this singular voice is refined not by stubborn flight from all that has been said before, but by a deliberate immersion in the best of it. Like Hemingway, who insisted that aspiring writers should metabolize a certain set of essential books, Dillard advises:
The writer studies literature, not the world. he lives in the world; he can’t miss it. if he ever bought a hamburger or took a flight on a commercial airliner, he spares his readers a report of his experience. he is careful what he reads, because that is what he will write. he is careful what he learns, because that is what he will know.
the writer consequently reads out of his time and place.
The most significant animating force in great art, argues Dillard, is the artist’s will to hold nothing back and to create, always, with an unflappable generosity of spirit:
one of the few things i know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, everything, immediately, always. don’t hoard what looks good for a later place in the book, or for another book; Give it, give it all, give it now. the very urge to save something good for a better place later is the cue to spend it now. something else will come up later, something better. these things are filled from behind, from below, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to oneself what one has learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. whatever you do not give freely and abundantly is lost to you. you open your safe and find ashes.
read more here.
when breath becomes air
All life is lived in the shadow of its own finitude, of which we are always aware — an awareness we systematically blunt through the daily distraction of living. But when this finitude is made acutely imminent, one suddenly collides with awareness so acute that it leaves no choice but to fill the shadow with as much light as a human being can generate — the sort of inner illumination we call meaning: the meaning of life.
That tumultuous turning point is what neurosurgeon paul kalanithi narrates in when breath becomes air (public library), also among the best science books of the Year: His poignant memoir of being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the peak of a career full of potential and a life full of vitality. Halfway between Montaigne and Oliver Sacks, Kalanithi weaves philosophical reflections on his personal journey with stories from his patients to illuminate the one thing we have in common, our mortality, and how he spurs us all, in a painstaking and monumental way, to pursue a meaning life.
What emerges is an exceptionally insightful, candid, and sobering revelation of how much our sense of self is tied to our sense of potential and possibility: the selves we’d like to become, the ones we work tirelessly to become. be. who are we, then, and what remains of “us” when that possibility is suddenly cut off?
A generation after surgeon Sherwin Nuland’s foundational text on confronting the meaning of life while dying, Kalanithi sets out to answer these questions and their myriad fractal implications. He writes:
at thirty-six, he had reached the top of the mountain; I could see the promised land, from Gilead to Jericho and the Mediterranean Sea. I was able to see a beautiful catamaran in that sea that Lucy, our hypothetical children, and I would go out on weekends. I could see the tension in my back relax as my work schedule relaxed and life became more manageable. I could see myself finally becoming the husband I promised to be.
and then the unthinkable happens. recounts one of the first incidents in which her former identity and his future destiny collided with jarring violence:
my back got terribly stiff during the flight, and by the time I got to grand central to catch a train to my friends’ house upstate, my body was shaking with pain. Over the past few months, I had had back spasms of varying intensity, from just plain ignorable pain to pain that made me stop talking to grind my teeth to pain so bad I curled up on the floor and screamed. this pain was on the more severe end of the spectrum. I lay on a hard bench in the waiting room, feeling my back muscles contract, breathing to control the pain (the ibuprofen wasn’t touching this), and naming each muscle as it contracted to stave off tears: Erector spine, rhomboids, latissimus dorsi, piriformis…
a security guard approached. “sir, you can’t lie here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, gasping for words. “bad…back…spasms.”
“you can’t lie down here yet.”
[…]I got up and limped to the platform.
Like the book itself, the anecdote tells of something bigger and far more powerful than the story itself; in this case, our cultural attitude toward what we consider to be the failings of our bodies: pain and, ultimately, death. we try to dictate the terms in which these perceived failures can occur; make them conform to the desired realities; to subvert them by will and stupid denial. We do all this because, deep down, we consider them inadmissible, in ourselves and in others.
read more here.
pinocchio
“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them,” Albert Camus wrote. Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, observed a century earlier as she contemplated the nature of the imagination and its three core faculties: “Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently… that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us.”
This “discovery faculty” of the imagination, which brings to life both the most captivating myths and the deepest layers of reality, is what animated the Italian artist alessandro sanna one afternoon in winter when he caught a glimpse of a most unusual tree branch from the window of a moving train, a branch that looked like a sentient human silhouette, mid-fall or mid-embrace.
As Sanna cradled the lovely image in her mind and began to draw it, she realized that something in the branch’s “body language” reminded her of a small, frail, terminally ill child she had known during her childhood. visits. to the pediatric hospital of Turin. Contemplating this common ground of tender fragility, Sanna’s imagination leapt to a central myth of her nation’s storytelling: the story of Pinocchio.
in pinocchio: the origin story (public library), astonishingly beautiful and tender, also among the most beautiful illustrated books of the year, sanna imagines an alternative prequel to the beloved story, a myth without words of the genesis of the wood that became Pinocchio, radiating a broader cosmogony of life, death, and the transcendent continuity between the two.
A fitting continuation of the river: sanna’s exquisite visual memoir of life on the po river in northern italy, reflecting on the seasonality of human existence, this imaginative masterpiece dances with the cosmic unknowns that overshadow the human life and the human mind with its enormity: questions such as what is life, how did it start and what happens when it ends.
origin myths have been our oldest sense mechanism for extracting meaning from these still unanswered, perhaps unanswered, questions. But instead of an argument with science and our secular sensibilities, the lyrical celebration of the Sanna myth embodies Margaret Mead’s insistence on the importance of poetic truth in the age of fact.
the tree is an organic choice for this unusual cosmogony; After all, trees have inspired centuries of folktales around the world; A 17th-century English gardener marveled at how “they speak to the mind, tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons,” and Hermann Hesse called them “the most penetrating preachers.”
It is a pity and a strange consolation that sanna’s bright, cheery watercolors and her masterful subtlety of scale do not fully translate on this screen: her analogical and deeply human art is of a different order, almost from a different time . , and yet fabric of the timeless and the eternal.
see more here.
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