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Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order. In the extreme conditions of the kiln, which can reach the temperature of a red star, chemistry and chance converge to make a third glaze… read article
The two great tasks of the creative life are keeping failure from breaking the spirit and keeping success from ossifying it. If you do attain success by the weft and warp of hard work and luck, it takes great courage to resist becoming a template of yourself that replicates whatever has garnered you acclaim in the past, continually lowering and lowering your willingness to take risks, narrowing and narrowing your locus of curiosity — that elemental building block of creativity. In 2005, while working as a designer at a branding agency, Debbie Millman — my onetime partner, now closest friend… read article
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth… read article
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love… read article
The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple: everything. We bring everything we are and everything we have lived to every smallest creative act — every experience, every dream, every memory, every unremembered impression, every unconsciously absorbed influence. The great bewilderment is that we can only access a fraction of our own everythingness — most of it dwells in the recesses of the mind and the… read article
More in literature
If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would say, “Go outside and blow the stink off.” My parents took a kid reading as a reproach, something unnatural and probably unhealthy – one more reason for me to be secretive. When I was twelve, getting a room of my own with a door that locked was a godsend. Three years ago I wrote about a poem by Walter de la Mare titled “Books” published in the July 1906 issue of The Bookman. It includes the lines: “Books—to wax solid on, to wane less fat; / To grasp what long-gone Wisdom wondered at.” Now I find he published another poem with the same title and collected it in one of his books for children, This Year: Next Year (1937). The 289-line poem is composed in rhyming couplets and begins: “A boy called Jack, as I’ve been told, Would sit for hours — good as gold — Not with a pie, like Master Horner, And plums, for dainties, in his corner. But silent in some chosen nook. And spell-bound — by a story-book!” In my case it wasn’t always stories. I also favored biographies and nature guides. I read about people like Mark Twain and Marie Curie, and learned to identify butterflies, trees and wildflowers. I saw no disconnect between what I read and what I experienced in the real world. Today, that’s basically an article of faith, one of the reasons I so dislike the way most academics treat literature, as though books were cadavers and they were pathologists. Jack’s mother in the poem echoed mine: “How often his mother would sigh, and cry — / ‘Up, Jack, and put that trumpery by! / See, Spring is in the sky! / The swallow is here, the thorn’s in blow — / Crimson, pink, and driven snow; / Lambs caper in the fields . . .” We didn’t have a lot of lambs in Cleveland but the message was identical. Jack, you see, “In books found marvellous company, / Wonder, romance, and mystery.” De la Mare cites fairy tales (Andersen, Grimm) and nursery rhymes, the earliest texts most kids encounter, followed by Gulliver’s Travels (bowdlerized, of course), the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe. Nice to see the poet reproducing my boyhood reading list fifteen years before I was born. De la Mare lends Jack a sort of poet’s apprenticeship: “Never believe it! What Jack read Refreshed his senses, heart, and head. Words were to him not merely words — Their sounds rang sweet as bells, or birds; Nor could he tell, by any test, Whether he loved — he once confessed — Their music, or their meaning, best.” Dela Mare reminds us that books are more than escape, for children and adults -- an understanding that trivializes the power of reading. Sure, they fill idle moments, and that’s perfectly respectable. Consider de la Mare’s closing lines: “This seems to me at least to hint. That if we give what wits we have To Books, as Jack himself them gave — To all we read a willing slave — The while we dream, delight, and think. The words a precious meat and drink. And keep as lively as a spink. There’s not much harm in printer’s ink.” A spink, by the way, is a finch, often the chaffinch. A lovely phrase in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “Like a summer flye or Spinxes winges, or a raigne bow of all colours.”
On jellyfish babies, my father’s pain, and the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific The post After the Fallout appeared first on The American Scholar.
Sometimes two people will stand next to each other for fifteen years, both feeling out of place and alone, like no one gets them, and then one day, they look up at each other and say, “Oh, there you are.”
