I have moved through this fourteenth year of brain harvests, a devastating year for the world we share, a year of decay for my private world, leaning on the writings and wisdom of those long gone to help me, to gauge the perspective. , for the beauty that makes life livable. Of the few books published this year that I read (far fewer than ordinary years), here are twenty that I trust will bring such splendor and succor to succeeding generations. think of the selection not as a hierarchy but as a bookshelf, organized by an internal logic that need not make sense to anyone outside the home and mind in which the bookshelf is suspended.
I am not and have never been a reviewer of books — a person who surveys the landscape of literature with the goal of evaluating its features. I am and have always been a solitary sojourner who relishes curious excursions hither and thither, guided by a thoroughly subjective inner compass, wandering the wilderness of words by pleasant deviations from the common trail.
You are reading: Brain pickings best books
These are my steps.
intimations
Reading Zadie Smith is always a rapture, but it has been especially rapturous to press the mind’s ear to her Intimations (public library) this year — a slender collection of six symphonic essays spanning love, death, justice, creativity, identity — everything worth thinking about and writing about, everything we live with and live for.
The book was inspired by Smith’s first encounter with the classical meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which she relied on to steady herself in these shaky times but which failed to make her a Stoic, propelling her forward, like the gaps and flaws of the world make us restless creators, to do what satisfies unfulfilled need: a contemporary counterpart to these ancient private meditations of timeless public resonance. (We cannot, we must not, after all, expect a white male monarch, however penetrating his view of human nature, whatever the similarities of that elemental nature between cultures and civilizations, to speak for and for all humanity. humanity throughout all time. )
In the laconic foreword, Smith reflects on the essential insight the Meditations gave her in failing to give her practical succor:
talk can only be useful. and writing means being heard.
These insinuations that he allows us to listen to are irrefutable proof that the art of each artist is his defense mechanism, his flotation device for the wake of uncertainty that we call life, proof that a great artist makes a raft out of it big enough to fit more of us. , robust enough to carry us through the cascades of time and understanding.
to prove the book, all proceeds from the author go to the equitable justice initiative and the new york covid-19 emergency relief fund, here’s smith on love, habit and creativity.
why there are no fish
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (public library) by Radiolab alum and Invisibilia co-creator Lulu Miller is a surprising book, an unclassifiable book — my kind of book. It appears to be, and to an impressive scholarly extent is, about David Starr Jordan — the founder of Stanford University, a brilliant ichthyologist and a deluded eugenicist. But while his strange and cautionary story backbones the book, it is ribbed with larger ideas: questions about the vain and touchingly human impulse to manufacture order out of elemental chaos, about the colossal blind spots that plague even the greatest visionaries, about the limiting yet necessary artifice of categories by which we attempt to navigate a world of continua and indivisibilia, about our pursuit of timeless truth against the backdrop of our own inevitable and heartbreaking temporality.
miller writes in the splendid prose poem of an introduction:
Imagine the person you love the most. imagine them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it annoys them that people sign their emails with a single initial instead of having to press four extra keys to get the job done:
Chaos will overtake them.
Chaos will crack them apart from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or it will tear them apart from the inside, with the riot of their own cells. chaos will rot your plants, kill your dog and rust your bike. it will decay your most precious memories, it will bring down your favorite cities, it will destroy any sanctuary you can build.
It’s not if, it’s when. chaos is the only sure thing in this world. the master who governs us all. my scientist father taught me early on that there is no escaping the second law of thermodynamics: entropy only increases; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.
An intelligent human accepts this truth.
An intelligent human being doesn’t try to fight it. But one spring day in 1906, a tall American with a walrus mustache dared to challenge our master.
his name was david starr jordan and in many ways it was his day job to fight chaos. he was a taxonomist, the kind of scientist tasked with bringing order to the earth’s chaos by discovering the shape of the great tree of life, that branching map said to reveal how all plants and animals are interconnected. his specialty was fish, and he spent his days sailing the world in search of new species. new clues that he hoped would reveal more about the hidden blueprint of nature.
The dazzling scientific story — the story of why the very notion of fish as a category of creature is entirely invented, uncorroborated by nature — becomes a lens for questioning the broader binaries we have accepted as givens, as fundaments of nature rather than the human artifacts that they are. It becomes the framework for a tender personal story, part meditation and part memoir — an elegy for Miller’s father and everything he taught her about navigating the world, a reckoning with the dangerous detours she took in navigating her own heart, a love letter to its unexpected port in the woman who became her wife.
selected works of audre lorde
This is the precarious balance of a thriving society: exposing the fissures and fractures of democracy, but then, rather than letting them gape into abysses of cynicism, sealing them with the magma of lucid idealism that names the alternatives and, in naming them, equips the entire supercontinent of culture with a cartography of action. “Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Mary Shelley wrote as she championed the courage to speak up against injustice two hundred years ago, amid a world that commended itself for being civilized while barring people like Shelley from access to education, occupation, and myriad other civil dignities on account of their chromosomes, and barring people just a few shades darker than her from just about every human right on account of their melanin.
sheley blended her novels with the exquisite prose poetry of conviction, of a vision that saw far beyond the horizons of her time and led generations along the vector of that vision to change the status quo into new frontiers of possibilities. A century and a half after her, audre lorde (February 18, 1934-November 17, 1992), another woman of rare courage, conviction and power of vision, broadened another horizon of possibilities by the power of his words and his meteoric life. Lorde was a poet both literally in his most impressive and greatest Baldwinian sense: “the poets (by which I mean all the artists),” his contemporary and co-worker in the realm of culture wrote. james baldwin, “it is finally the only people who know the truth about us. the soldiers do not. the statesmen do not… only the poets.” Lorde understood the power of poetry, the power of words turned into meaning and turned into truth, the truth about who we are and who we are capable of being, and he wielded that power to bring an imperfect world closer to its full potential. understanding lives with a more focused force than in her 1977 manifesto of an essay “poetry is not a luxury,” which opens the selected works of audre lorde (public library) — the excellent collection of poetry and prose, edited and with a foreword by the unstoppable roxane gay.
Lorde, who resolved to live her life as a burst of light as she faced her death, and so lived it, writes:
The quality of the light with which we scrutinize our lives has a direct relationship with the product that we live and with the changes that we hope to achieve through those lives. it is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and bring it to life. this is poetry as illumination, because it is through poetry that we give names to those ideas that are, even the poem, nameless and formless, about to be born, but already felt. that distillation of experience from which true poetry springs from thought, as sleep gives birth to concept, as feeling gives birth to idea, as knowledge gives birth to (precedes) understanding.
Looking at how poetry uniquely tempers us by bringing us into intimate contact with those parts of ourselves we least understand and therefore fear most, Lorde adds:
As we learn to endure the intimacy of scrutiny and flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power in our living, those fears that govern our lives and shape our silences begin to lose your control over us.
For more on the book, see Lorde on the courage to feel as an antidote to fear.
yes to life
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”
Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment, but as a gauntlet thrown down with the raw brutality of living.
That same year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist viktor frankl (March 26, 1905-September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million other human beings stripped of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead of considering them unworthy of life. some survived by reading. some through humor. some by chance. most did not. frankl lost his mother, his father and his brother in the mass murder in the concentration camps. his own life was saved by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.
A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning.
as our collective memory always tends towards amnesia and erasure, especially of periods marked by the shame of civilization, these existential infusions of sanity and lucidity were exhausted and soon forgotten. eventually rediscovered—as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean on the wisdom of the past tested in life—they are now published in English for the first time as yes to life: despite everything (public library).
In a sentiment that bellows from the halls of history to the great vaulted temple of eternal truth, he writes:
everything depends on the individual human being, no matter how small the number of like-minded people there may be, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively realizing the meaning of life in his or her own being.
read more here.
the autobiography of alice b. toklas
It is not often that one encounters a great love letter to a great love, composed by someone outside the private world of that love, serenading it across the spacetime of epochs and experiences. In my many years of dwelling in the lives and loves and letters of beloved artists, scientists, and writers, I have encountered none more splendid than The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Illustrated (public library) by Maira Kalman — an artist who uses her paintbrush the way Stein used her pen, as the instrument of an imagination tilted pleasantly askance from the plane of common thought.
gertrude stein published the autobiography of alice b. toklas in 1933, when she was fifty-nine and alice fifty-six. she had written it at an astonishing pace the previous fall. Just as Alicia disguised her memoir of her love as a cookbook, Gertrude disguised hers as an “autobiography” of her beloved signed by her lover. It was not, of course, Alice’s autobiography, or even her biography; rather, it was the biography of their love, of early twentieth-century paris, of the community of visionary artists and writers that surrounded the couple and who came to be known as the lost generation, a term coined by gertrude stein, already They met, in every sense of the term, in the drawing rooms of Alice and Gertrude.
The book begins, naturally, not with Alice’s birth, but with her fateful first meeting with Gertrude and her coral brooch on the day thirty-three-year-old Alice arrived in Paris as an American expatriate, a moment that was finally told in such deep sentiment in the pages of her slender current autobiography, buoyed by a mourning that never left her in the twenty “empty” years in which she outlived the love of her life.
kalman presents the book with his sober and unique poetics:
Alicia met Gertrudis. gertrudis met alice. gertrude with her great body. great presence alicia, a little bird with a mustache. and that was that. a coup de foudre as we say. Gertrude wrote this book of his life through Alice’s eyes. and here it is (happily) with paintings to illustrate how it went.
savor more here.
black hole survival guide
“I see that the elementary laws never apologize,” Walt Whitman wrote in the golden age of observational astronomy. “The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place” — an astonishing sentiment by a rare seer who bent his gaze half a century beyond his era’s horizons of knowledge. Not long after Whitman’s death, the mind outpaced the eye to see, not with a telescope but with mathematics, those “dark suns” — those cinches in the basic fabric of reality that confound space, confound time, and confirm Whitman’s augury that “the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified.”
Denied and ridiculed for decades by some of the century’s most titanic minds, black holes began as a mathematical calculation: tentative, treacherous, transcendent. suddenly reality broke and reality was beautiful.
The immense ripples of that calculation are what astrophysicist janna levin explores in the black hole survival guide (public library), peppered with magnificent ghostly paintings of the artist and fellow whitman celebrant lia halloran — a poetic primer on relativity, paperback like the leaves of grass second edition, which whitman redesigned to wear on the chest and in which he declared that “the known universe has a lover complete and that is the greatest poet.”
The cheeky title — we learn quickly that nothing can escape a black hole except the black hole itself, slipping out of the very reality its existence warps — is soon revealed as a clever conceit, a Trojan horse for some serious, scrumptious science that bends our basic assumptions. What emerges is a lyrical and authoritative story of strangeness as a portal to truth, tracing how black holes went from “the unwanted product of the plasticity of space and time, grotesque and extreme deformations, grim instabilities” to “a laboratory for the exploration of the farthest reaches of the mind,” things that are no-things and in their non-thingness “undermine notions of reality, but ameliorate the pain with a mind-searing vision of nature.”
Black holes are so magnetic largely because they challenge our animal intuitions about reality, about the totality of everything. she writes:
When you’re chasing a black hole, you’re not looking for a material object. a black hole may masquerade as an object, but it is actually a place, a place in space and time. better: a black hole is a space-time.
[…]eliminate the impression of the black hole as a dense mass of matter. accept the black hole as a bare event horizon, a curved and empty space-time, a scarce emptiness… a glorious emptiness, an empty place, a sober and extreme scenario, markedly austere but, yes, capable of withstanding great dramas when the stage is busy. black holes are a place in space and they hide their secrets.
Undergirding the century-long quest to unravel those secrets is a testament to the fundaments of creativity — a celebration of deliberate constraint as the fulcrum of revolutions. In a sentiment evocative of the last line in the late, great astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson’s gorgeous poem “Explaining Relativity,” she writes:
Limits are the scaffolding that enables creativity. limits can be worthy adversaries galvanizing our best, most inventive and most agile natures.
Radiating from this lyrical odyssey of science, from this wild passion for understanding, is the subtle and stubborn insistence that elementary laws are not something separate from us, not seductive abstractions, not playthings of the mind, but which are the making and unmaking of us creatures that create meaning, creatures that came together from particles that came together in molecules that came together in minds capable of analyzing information, capable of extracting conjectures about elementary laws from it, capable of writing poems and postulates about the nature of reality and our place in it. What we think, and how we think, is our only means of survival.
IF YOU COME TO EARTH
When the Voyager sailed into the unknown to take its pioneering photographic survey of our cosmic neighborhood, Carl Sagan petitioned NASA to indulge his inspired, entirely unscientific, entirely poetic idea of turning the spacecraft’s cameras back on Earth from the outer edges of the Solar System. That grainy, transcendent photograph of our “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” became the central poetic image of his now-iconic Pale Blue Dot meditation on our cosmic place and destiny, which in turn inspired Maya Angelou’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” — the staggering poem that flew to space aboard the Orion spacecraft, inviting a fractured humanity to reach beyond our divisive ideologies and see ourselves afresh “on this small and drifting planet,” to face our capacities and contradictions, and finally see that “we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.”
a generation later, this spirit burns again in if you come to earth (public library) of sophie blackall, one of the most beloved creators of illustrated books of our time and one of those rare artists, so few in a given generation, whose work of great talent and great tenderness will surely be appreciated for ages to come.
Told in the form of a letter from a child to an extraterrestrial visitor, one boy in particular named Quinn, whom Sophie met while traveling the world with UNICEF and Save the Children, and whose unusual imagination fostered her own, The story is populated by drawings of other real-life children she met on her travels in India, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a particular class of twenty-three children she befriended in a Brooklyn public school, and your own real-life friends and neighbors. Buoyed by children’s wild, wonderful, and moving ideas about the most important things to communicate about our unlikely and miraculous world to one visitor from another, the book exudes the spirit of the traveler’s golden record: a poetic capsule of humanism and creation. collaborative meaning. , whose true purpose is not to encode for some other interstellar, but to decode for us who and what we are.
see more here.
book
See Also: Best 10 Emotional Romance Books That Will Make You Cry – A. M. Kusi Novels
The poetry of Jane Hirshfield — a poet of optimism and of lucidity, a champion of science and an ordained Buddhist, a poet who could write “So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance,” a poet who can balance and steady us against those times when we “go to sleep in one world and wake in another” — has salved and saved my life again and again across many seasons and epochs of being. Her collection Ledger (public library) has been nothing less than a lifeline this year.
for proof, here’s hirshfield reading one of the poems from the book, “today, another universe”, in the 2020 universe in verse:
today, another universe by jane hirshfield
arborist has determined: senescent beetle canker accelerated by drought but in any case not pruning not treatable should not be shored up.
and so on.
the branch from which the hawks and their companions shout.
the trunk where the ant is.
the eighty-foot playground of the red squirrels.
the cambium bark sap of pine needles cluster.
Japanese patterns the ink net.
the spot on certain fish.
Today, for some, a universe will vanish. first loudly, then just another silence.
the silence of the after, once the theater has been emptied.
of bewilderment behind the glacier, the species, the star.
something else, on the scale of accelerated things, will replace it,
this hole of light in the light, the bewildered birds straying around it.
evening flights
Five years after H Is for Hawk, which was among my favorite books of its year and remains among my favorite books of all years, Helen Macdonald returns with Vesper Flights (public library) — a cabinet of curiosities containing forty-one essays of kaleidoscopic subject range, from mushrooms to bird migration to Mars, focused by Macdonald’s singular sensibility of reverencing the natural world on its own terms and at the same time drawing from it illuminations of human nature and the human world — an essay about fungi and foraging exposing how the categories we superimpose on a complex world in order to comprehend it become blinders of understanding; an essay about the murmurations of starlings parlaying into a moving micro-memoir of Macdonald’s encounter with a young Syrian refugee; an essay about solar eclipses contouring questions of the self as a function of time and place rather than an inherent totality of being, casting a sidewise gleam of insight into the puzzling psychology of denial by which our species remains unwilling to course-correct its ecologically catastrophic course.
Macdonald writes in the introduction:
Someone once told me that every writer has a theme that underlies everything they write. it can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my theme is love, and more specifically love for the brilliant world of non-human life that surrounds us. Before I was a writer, I was a historian of science, which was a revealing occupation. We tend to think of science as pure, objective truth, but of course the questions it has posed to the world have been quietly and often invisibly modified by history, culture and society. my work as a historian of science revealed to me how, unconsciously and inevitably, we have always seen the natural world as a mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own vision of the world and our own needs, thoughts and hopes. many of the essays here are exercises in interrogating such human ascriptions and assumptions. Above all, I hope that my work will be about something that seems to me of the greatest possible importance in our current historical moment: finding ways to recognize and love difference. the attempt to see with eyes that are not yours. understand that your way of seeing the world is not the only one. to think what it could mean to love those who are not like you. to rejoice in the complexity of things.
[…]What science does is what I wish more literature would do as well: show us that we live in an exquisitely complicated world that isn’t just about us. it does not belong to us alone. never has.
rejoice in some of the complexity here.
tove’s letters
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” says Too-ticky, trying to comfort the lost and frightened Moomintroll under the otherworldly light of the aurora borealis.
a decade after tove jansson (August 9, 1914 – June 27, 2001) dreamed up his iconic moomin series, one of those works of philosophy disguised as children’s books, populated by characters with the soul the wisdom of the little prince, the cordial sincerity of winnie-the-pooh and the irreverent curiosity of the peanuts: he dreamed of too-ticky, the wise man of moominvalley, affectionate, eccentric and almost unbearably adorable.
too-ticky shone into jansson’s artistic imagination from the same spark that galvanized emily dickinson’s poetry: his adoration for the woman who was already becoming the love of his life, the woman he was already loving. writing, “I long to read more in your book.”
At the 1955 Christmas party of Helsinki’s Artists’ Guild, Jansson found herself drawn to the record player, impelled to take over the evening’s music. Another artist — the Seattle-born Finnish engraver, printmaker, and graphic arts pioneer Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä — was impelled to do the same. They shared the jubilant duty. I picture the two of them at the turntable, sipping spiced wine in rapt, bobbing deliberation over which of the year’s hits to put on next — the year when rock and roll had just been coined, the year of Nat King Cole’s “If I May,” Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House,” and Doris Day’s “Love Me or Leave Me.” I picture them glancing at each other with the thrill of that peculiar furtive curiosity edged with longing, having not a glimmering sense — for we only ever recognize the most life-altering moments in hindsight — that they were in the presence of great love, a love that would last a lifetime. Tove was forty-one, Tooti thirty-eight. They would remain together for the next half century, until death did them part.
the tender delirium of their early love and the magmatic core of their lifelong devotion emanate from the pages of letters from tove (public library), the wonderful collection of jansson’s correspondence with friends, family, and fellow artists, encompassing his musings on the creative process, his exuberant appreciation for the natural world and the best in human beings, his unwavering love for tooti. what emerges, above all, is the radiant warmth of her personality: this person of such unusual imagination, affectionate humor, and stubborn vitality of spirit, always so completely herself, that when she was young she had told her mother :
I have to free myself if I want to be free in my painting.
read more here.
the biggest lantern
Decades before Simone de Beauvoir contemplated how chance and choice converge to make us who we are from the fortunate platform of old age, the eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath — who never reached that fortunate platform, her life felled by the same conspiracy of chance and choice — contemplated these indelible forces in the guise of free will, writing in her journal that “there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention.”
Two generations later, maria konnikova entered this eternal enigma through an unlikely path half chosen and half by chance, emerging with insights into the paradoxes of chance and control that none of the two paths alone could have allowed.
having devoted five years of doctoral work, with the creator of the famous marshmallow experiment as his adviser, to designing and conducting psychology experiments to test how people control perception in situations dictated by pure chance shapes decision-making and outcomes, life was suddenly thrown into a much more intimate empiricism. A period of successive losses made her the sole breadwinner of a family when a mysterious illness ravaged her body without warning, gnawing away at the foundations of consciousness.
In the midst of this maelstrom, he became interested in the world of poker. she entered it as a psychologist in a philosophical investigation: how often are we really in control when we think we are, how do we navigate uncertain situations with incomplete information, and how can we separate the product of our own efforts from the strokes of randomness that govern the universe ? she emerged as an unexpected master of the game, master of her own mind in a whole new way.
The record of that experience became The Greatest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (Public Library): An inspired investigation into “the fight for the balance on the spectrum of luck and control in the lives we lead and the decisions we make”, halfway between the memoir, the introduction to the psychology of decision making and the playbook for life.
Having previously written about the psychology of confidence through the lens of con artists and the psychology of creativity through the lens of Sherlock Holmes, she takes the same singular approach of erudition and perspicacity to the improbable test-bed of poker, lacing her elegant primers on probability and game theory with perfectly illustrative invocations of Dostoyevsky, Epictetus, Dawkins, Ephron, Kant.
more than half a century after w. Yo. b. Beveridge observed in The Undervalued Treasure The Art of Scientific Inquiry that “although we cannot deliberately conjure up that will-o’-the-wisp, chance, we can be alert to it, prepared to recognize it, and take advantage of it when it comes.” is coming”, he writes:
Such is life: you can do what you do, but in the end, some things remain stubbornly out of your control. you can’t calculate silly bad luck… my reasons for getting into poker in the first place were to better understand the line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t, and here was a strong – redacted lesson if ever there was: you can’t fool random.
[…]Real life is not just about modeling the mathematically optimal decisions. it is about discerning the hidden, the exclusively human. it’s about realizing that no amount of formal modeling will be able to capture the whims and surprises of human nature.
dive in here.
be water, my friend
“Do you need a prod? / Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” Mary Oliver asked in her stunning love poem to life, composed in the wake of a terrifying diagnosis. “Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, / and remind you of Keats, / so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, / he had a lifetime.”
think of keats when you need that push to live: keats, who died at the height of his poetic powers, and had already given humanity more truth and beauty in his short life than most would if he had the eternity. Or think of Bruce Lee (November 27, 1940 – July 20, 1973), another rare poet of life, who also pursued truth and beauty, albeit in a radically different medium; who was also killed by chance, that supreme puppeteer of the universe, at the peak of his powers; who also left a legacy that shaped the sensitivity, worldview and vigil before the life of generations.
On the bench across from Bruce Lee’s tombstone in Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery, where he is buried alongside his son, also chance-slain in youth, these words of tribute appear: “The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.” They are often misattributed to Lee himself — perhaps because of the proximity, perhaps because they radiate an elemental truth about his life. The animating ethos of that uncommon life comes newly alive in Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee (public library) by his daughter, Shannon Lee, titled after his famous metaphor for resilience — a slender, potent book twining her father’s timeless philosophies of living with her own reflections, drawn from her own courageous life of turning unfathomable loss into a path of light and quiet strength.
Try Lee’s musings on death and what it means to be an artist of life, nested within the little-known story of how he fought, in the last year of his life, to bring the dragon into what was converted. .
the lost spells
“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” the young Whitman sang in one of the finest poems from Song of Myself — the aria of a self that seemed to him then, as it always seems to the young, infinite and invincible. But when a paralytic stroke felled him decades later, unpeeling his creaturely limits and his temporality, he leaned on the selfsame reverence of nature as he considered what makes life worth living:
after having exhausted what there is in business, politics, coexistence, love, etc., and having found that none of these finally satisfies or wears down permanently, what is left? nature remains; to bring out from their sleepy recesses, the affinities of a man or a woman with the outdoors, the trees, the fields, the changes of the seasons, the sun by day and the stars of the sky by night.
In extent and size, our human lives unfold between the scale of leaves and the scale of stars, in the midst of a miraculous world born of a myriad of fortuitous events, any one of which, though slightly different, could have caused a lifeless rock. world, or no world at all: no trees and no songbirds, no whitman and no nina simone, no love poems and no love, just an earth-sized patch of pure space-time, cold and stark.
The moment one realizes this, it seems nothing less than elemental sacrilege not to spend our days, these alms of chance, in a state of perpetual ecstasy for every living thing we meet, not to revere every oak tree and every owl. and every blade of grass like a living blessing.
a century and a half after whitman, the writer robert macfarlane and the artist jackie morris, two nature poets in the broadest Baldwinian sense, compose one of those living blessings in lost spells (public library). A charming companion to their first collaboration: The Lost Words, an illustrated dictionary of poetic spells reclaiming the language of nature as an inspired act of courage and resistance after dozens of world-related words were dropped by the Oxford Children’s Dictionary. natural: this lyrical invocation in verse and watercolor summons the spirit of the living things that make this planet a world, the creatures whose lives mark seasons and measure epochs: the splendid “hooligan gang” of swifts that have traversed deserts and oceans to filling the sky each spring, the old oak “stubbornly holds its ground” year after year, century after century.
a century after the great nature writer henry beston insisted that we need “a wiser and perhaps more mystical view of animals,” noting how “in a world older and more complete than ours move finished and complete, endowed with extensions of the senses that we have lost or never reached, living by voices that we will never hear”, macfarlane and morris bring us the mystery and wisdom of wild things as a complement and consolation of our meek incompleteness.
red fox
I’m a red fox, how do you see me?
a flower of rust at the edge of your vision, the shadow slipping through a hole in the hedge, my two green eyes in the blast of your headlights, a handful of feathers, the tip of a brush.
see more here.
how to carry water
Sparer than Dickinson, bolder than Whitman, and absolutely singular, Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936-February 13, 2010) has been a pillar for generations of readers and a progenitor to generations of writers. Toni Morrison found her poetry “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude,” poetry that “embraces dichotomy and reaches for an expression of our own ambivalent entanglements.”
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (Public Library), curated by poet Aracelis Girmay and supported by readers through Kickstarter, collects two hundred of Clifton’s most powerful poems, from from hymn classics like “won’t you celebrate with me” to various newly discovered poems never before published.
To sample these subtle seductions of atomized complexity, here is poet Terrance Hayes reading one of my favorite poems by Lucille Clifton in the 2nd Annual Universe in Verse, with a charming introductory meditation honoring her for the “Literary Lion” that she was and it captures how profoundly she shaped the life of literature between raising six children:
chopping vegetables by lucille clifton
See Also: Audiobooks narrated by David Walliams | Audible.com
twisting them around I hold their bodies in an obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. kale and kale stretch against each other strangely away from my kissing hand and iron bedpan. the pot is black, the cutting board is black, my hand, and just for a minute the vegetables roll black under the knife, and the kitchen twists dark on its spine and I taste in my natural appetite the bond of living things everywhere. /p>
draw on the walls
Growing up in Bulgaria, one of my most cherished objects was also one of the first fragments of American culture to enter our home after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Iron Curtain — a small square desk calendar in a clear plastic clamshell, containing twelve illustrated cards, each vibrantly alive with tiny black-contoured figures dancing in various jubilant formations amid a festival of primary colors. I would look up to savor its mirth between math equations and domestic disquietudes. However gloomy a day I was having, however sunken my child-heart, these figures would transport me to a buoyant world of sunlit possibility. I knew nothing about their creator beyond the name on the back of the clamshell: Keith Haring (May 4, 1958-February 16, 1990). I knew nothing about the bittersweet beauty of his courageous life, nothing about the tenacious activism behind his art, nothing about the enormous uninterrupted chain of human figures bonded in kinship, which he had painted on the remnants of the very wall whose collapse had placed this miniature monument to joy on my desk.
nearly three decades later, having swapped bulgaria for brooklyn through some unlikely existential stunts, i came across haring’s work again on a magnificent mural he had painted for a youth club in new york city in the his late twenties, not long before his death, that my friends from the pioneering work had resurrected and brought to our neighborhood. the same wave of irrepressible joy poured into the adult heart from the twenty-five-foot wall as it had poured into the child’s heart from the five-inch calendar. I grew up attuned to the echoes of his sensibility bellowing down the corridor of time, reverberating strongly in the work of established artists in my own community.
long before moving to brooklyn in search of his own calling, poet matthew burgess had a parallel experience of haring’s world-expanding art, which he first encountered on a christmas album cover at the age of fourteen, living behind the golden curtain of suburban southern california as a budding artist and young gay man trying to find himself. “For those of us who grew up before the internet became ubiquitous, a sparkling snippet of the outside world can feel like an important discovery and calling,” Burgess writes in the author’s note for what became her serenade to the artist. that opened minds. and a world of possibilities for so many.
A decade after teaching poetry in public schools, Burgess encountered Haring’s work again at a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. After fascinating hours in the galleries, she entered the museum’s bookstore and went home with a copy of Haring’s published diaries, which she promptly devoured. In her pages, she realized that the special native sympathy between children and the art of haring is not an accident of her line and color, but the very center of her spirit. In an entry from July 7, 1986, Haring writes:
children know something that most people have forgotten. children have a fascination with their daily existence that is very special and it would be very useful for adults if they could learn to understand and respect it.
Having previously made up The Huge Little Thing, one of my favorite books of 2015: the wonderful illustrated biography of e.e. cummings, another artist who so passionately believed that “it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are,” burgess felt compelled to invite young people into the unique art of keith haring and the great heart from which it sprang. And so drawing on walls: a story of keith haring (public library) was born, a splendid addition to the most inspiring illustrated biographies of culture heroes.
burgess’s tender words, harmonized by the exuberant art of muralist and illustrator josh cochran, follow young keith from his childhood in a small town in pennsylvania, drawing at the kitchen table with his father and wetting the palms of his little sister’s hands in paint to turn into a handprint mobile, on his unlikely journey to new york city.
see more here.
this is the opportunity
We might spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins, but we save them by experiencing ourselves — our selves, each individual self — as “the still point of the turning world,” to borrow T.S. Eliot’s lovely phrase from one of the greatest poems ever written. And yet that point is pinned to a figment — our fundamental creaturely sense of reality is founded upon the illusion of absolute rest.
on good friday march 27, 1964, thousands of people in anchorage, alaska, broke free of their most elemental certainties about reality, safety, the thousands of little sanities with which we plague this moving world to make it livable.
at 5:36 p.m. m., as the afternoon sun crept lazily toward the horizon, that quiet daily assurance that the earth moves intact on its constant axis along its unyielding orbital path, the streetlights began to sway, and then to fly. the pavement beneath them opened up like an accordion, then ripped open, swallowing cars and spitting them out again. the walls unraveled and closed again before incredulous eyes that had not yet calculated, because it was beyond the computational power of everyday consciousness what was happening.
Buildings rippled “up and down in sections, just like a caterpillar,” in one observer’s recollection, before ripping apart and crumbling completely like the brittle simulacra of safety that buildings are. Inside them, books toppled from their shelves to take rapid turns levitating from the floor, flames engulfed school science labs as chemicals crumpled together, and cast-iron pots of moose stew jumped off kitchen stoves.
The city’s power grid was broken and uprooted: in the sub-zero cold, in the descending darkness, all power was cut.
When people tried running for their lives, they found their basic biped function furloughed — the Earth hurled each step back at them, tossing their center of gravity like a marble around a child’s cupped hand.
water levels rose as far away as south africa. i imagine my grandparents’ well in bulgaria rippling in the middle of the night as they slept soundly under their rhodope wool blankets, having celebrated my mother’s second birthday in the hours before anchorage’s birth.
At 9.2 on the richter scale, the quake was more powerful than any previously measured, so violent that, as one seismologist put it, “it made the earth ring like a bell.” Just as the collision of two black holes ripples the fabric of space-time with such brutality that it sounds like a gravitational wave, two tectonic plates had collided in slow motion for millennia, building up a pressure that finally, on that early spring afternoon, resounded. the planet itself and the anchor broken down to a level of trauma that would devastate the community, then shake it to discover its own completely unfathomable wellsprings of resilience, solidarity, and generosity.
was driving to the local bookstore with one of her three children, a woman who would emerge as the unlikely hero of not only the community’s survival, but also its transformation through tragedy. As her world fell apart, she magnetized people to come together.
Genie Chance (January 24, 1927-May 17, 1998) is the protagonist of Jon Mooallem’s uncommonly wonderful book This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together (public library). Driving the heart of this scrupulously researched and sensitively told story about a singular event at a particular time in a particular place is the timeless, universal pulse-beat of assurance, suddenly rendered timely to the point of prophetic — the assurance that comes from the lived record of communities surviving cataclysms even more savaging than our own and emerging from them stronger, more closely knit, more human.
read more here.
until the end of time
“Praised be the fathomless universe, for life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,” Whitman wrote as he stood discomposed and delirious before a universe filled with “forms, qualities, lives, humanity, language, thoughts, the ones known, and the ones unknown, the ones on the stars, the stars themselves, some shaped, others unshaped.” And yet the central animating force of our species, the wellspring of our joy and curiosity, the restlessness that gave us Whitman and Wheeler, Keats and Curie, is the very fathoming of this fathomless universe — an impulse itself a marvel in light of our own improbability. Somehow, we went from bacteria to Bach; somehow, we learned to make fire and music and mathematics. And here we are now, walking wildernesses of mossy feelings and brambled thoughts beneath an overstory of one hundred trillion synapses, coruscating with the ultimate question: What is all this?
that is what the physicist and mathematician brian greene explores with great elegance of thought and poetic sensibility in till the end of time: mind, matter and our search for meaning in a evolving universe (public library). Nearly two centuries after the word scientist was coined for Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville when her groundbreaking book On Connecting the Physical Sciences brought together the separate disciplinary streams of scientific inquiry into a single river of knowledge, Greene draws on his own field, various other sciences, and no small amount of philosophy and literature to examine what we know about the nature of reality, what we suspect about the nature of knowledge, and how these converge to cast a sideways glare on our own nature. With rigorous scientific rigor and an uncommon sensitivity to the poetic syncopations of physical reality, he addresses the questions that rage through the cave of bone above our shoulders, the cave against whose walls Plato flashed his timeless thought experiment by investigating the puzzle more enduring: how are we? ever sure of reality? — a question that turns the mind into a rube goldberg machine of other questions: why is there something instead of nothing? how did life come about? what is conscience? What is the most important fact of the universe?
Although science is Greene’s raw material in this fathoming — its histories, its theories, its triumphs, its blind spots — he emerges, as one inevitably does in contemplating these colossal questions, a testament to Einstein’s conviction that “every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist.” Looking back on how he first grew enchanted with what he calls “the romance of mathematics” and its seductive promise to unveil the timeless laws of nature, he writes:
Creativity constrained by logic and a set of axioms dictate how ideas can be manipulated and combined to reveal unshakeable truths.
[…]The appeal of a law of nature could be its timeless quality. but what drives us to seek the timeless, to seek qualities that can last forever? perhaps it all stems from our singular awareness that we are anything but timeless, that our lives are anything but forever.
[…]We arise from laws that, as far as we know, are timeless, and yet we exist for a very brief moment of time. we are guided by laws that operate regardless of the destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. we are shaped by laws that seem to require no underlying reason, and yet we persistently search for meaning and purpose.
dive in here.
all colors of light
One of the most bewildering things about life is how ever-shifting the inner weather systems are, yet how wholly each storm consumes us when it comes, how completely suffering not only darkens the inner firmament but dims the prospective imagination itself, so that we cease being able to imagine the return of the light. But the light does return to lift the darkness and restore the world’s color — as in nature, so in the subset of it that is human nature. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” Loren Eiseley wrote in one of the greatest essays ever written. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
We forget, too, how much of the miracle of life lies in the latitude of the spectrum of experience and our dance across it, how much of life’s vitality radiates from the contrast between the various hues, between dark and the light. after all, there is something eminently uninteresting about a perpetually blue sky. van gogh knew this when he saw “the drama of a storm in nature, the drama of pain in life” as essential fuel for art and life. Coleridge knew this when he huddled in a hole to contemplate “the power and ‘eternal bond’ of energy” in his momentous encounter with a violent storm.
The life-affirming splendor of the inner and outer spectrum is what Japanese poet and picture book author hiroshi osada and artist ryoji arai celebrate in >all colors of light: a book about the sky (public library), translated by david boyd: a tender serenade to the elements that unfolds into a lullaby, inviting ecstatic wakefulness to the fullness of life, inviting a serene surrender to sleep.
Born in Fukushima just as World War II broke out, Osada composed this understated, lyrical book on his eightieth birthday, after living through unimaginable storms. I can’t help but read it in tandem with Pico Iyer’s poignant meditation on autumnal light and the search for beauty in impermanence, drawn from his many years in Japan. radiating more than color, radiating sound, a kind of buzzing vitality, arai’s almost synaesthetic art only amplifies this sense of solace in the drama of the elements, this sense of change as a portal not to terror but to transcendent serenity .
see more here.
relaxation
“Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality,” Patti Smith wrote in Year of the Monkey, one of my favorite books of 2019 — her exquisite dreamlike book-length prose poem about mending the broken realities of life, a meditation drawn from dreams that are “much more than dreams, as if originating from the dawn of mind.”
as i leaf through the unwinding (public library) by english artist and writer jackie morris, this quiet masterpiece strikes me as the pictorial counterpart of smith’s book: a miraculous little book that belongs , and beckons you to find your own belonging, in the “library of lost dreams and half-imagined things.”
its beautifully painted pages sing echoes of virginia woolf: “life is a dream”. it is the awakening that kills us. he who steals our dreams steals our life.” — and whisper an invitation to relax the tensions of waking life, to follow a mysterious woman and an all-knowing great white bear — two creatures bound by absolute trust and absolute love — as they search for wild dreams, “dreams.” containing the scent of deep green moss, lichen, the place where a tree’s roots penetrate the earth, old stone, the dust of a moth’s wings.”
what emerges is a love story, a story of hope, a story out of time, out of constraint, out of the narrow artificial boundaries by which we try to contain the wild wonderland of reality because we are too scared to live wonders. afflicted.
while a sober and poetic story accompanies each pictorial sequence, halfway between fairy tale and magical realism, the text is just an outline around one of the innumerable possible shapes and shades that each dreamscape invites of watercolor: each year in painting, each an accomplished Rorschach test for the poetic imagination that gives our waking hours the iridescent glow that makes life worth living.
In the twelfth dreamscape, titled “The Truth: Bear Dreams,” the enchanting woman whispers into the soft, warm ear of the sleeping bear:
If I told you that my love for you is like the spaces between the notes of a wren’s song, would you understand? would you perceive that my love is therefore hardly present, almost nothing?
or would you feel how my love is enveloped by the richest and wildest song? And if I said that my love for you is like the time when the nightingale is absent from our twilight world, would you hear it as a silence? any? Loveless? or as a preview of that rich current of music, which fills heart, soul, body, mind?
and, if I said that my love for you is like the breath of a hare, would you feel that it is transitory? something so light?
or would you see it as something that gives life?
wild?
something that fills the blood and makes the hare run?
see more here.
memories of my absence
“I am convinced that most people do not grow up,” Maya Angelou wrote in her stirring letter to the daughter she never had. “We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.” In that same cultural season, from a college commencement stage, Toni Morrison told an orchard of human saplings that “true adulthood is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory.”
It’s tempting, because it’s flattering, to think of ourselves as trees, firmly rooted and resolutely heading upwards; as creatures destined, in the beautiful words of mary oliver, “to go easy, to be full of light and to shine”. but even if the greatest compliment a great poet can pay a great woman is to celebrate her as a human tree, we are not trees, we do not branch out and take root from a single point, we do not grow linearly; we disembark at will, to the lightning and the flutter of a heart, self-grafting each love and each loss that we experience; our growth rings are often untied by doubt, by regression, by the ups and downs by which we become who and what we are: fragmentary but indivisible. the difficulty of growing, the hard-earned glory, lies in self-tessellation.
That is what Rebecca Solnit explores in a passage from Recollections of My Nonexistence (public library) — her splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.
Three quarters of the book and half a life after turning, solnit writes:
growing, we say, like trees, like altitude is all there is to gain, but much of the process is being completed as fragments are put together, patterns are found. Human babies are born with skulls made up of four plates that have not yet coalesced into a solid dome so that their heads can be compressed to pass through the birth canal so that the inner brain can expand. the seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers intertwined, like arctic rivers meandering through tundra.
the skull quadruples in size in the early years, and if the bones come together too early, they restrict brain growth; and if they are not fully woven, the brain is left unprotected. open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life should be too. we make a collage of ourselves to be, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then we integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with their beliefs and desires, at least if we are lucky.
See Also: Favorite Slow Burn Romance Novels – She Reads