Hey bob sefcik! If you missed last week's edition – George Saunders on the power of kindness, Pixar's co-founder on failure and why fostering a fearless culture is the key to trailblazing creative work, Anna Deavere Smith on what self-esteem really means, and more – you can catch up right here. And if you're enjoying this, please consider supporting with a modest donation – every little bit helps, and comes enormously appreciated.
In 1973, more than two decades after a young woman wrote to Albert Einstein with a similar concern, one man sent a distressed letter to E.B. White, lamenting that he had lost faith in humanity. The beloved author, who was not only a masterful letter-writer but also a professional celebrator of the human condition and an unflinching proponent of the writer's duty to uplift people, took it upon himself to boost the man's sunken heart with a short but infinitely beautiful reply, found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (public library) – the wonderful collection based on Shaun Usher's labor-of-love website, which also gave us young Hunter S. Thompson on how to live a meaningful life.
White's missive, penned on March 30, 1973, when he was 74, endures as a spectacular celebration of the human spirit:
Dear Mr. Nadeau:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man's curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
Every single epistle in Letters of Note is soul-stretching beyond measure. Sample the book further with this timeless wisdom on how to find your purpose in life, then explore more of White's wit and wisdom with his ideas on the writer's responsibility in society and the future of reading, his timely admonition about sponsored content, and his moving obituary for his dog Daisy.
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Once in a long while, a children's book comes by that is so gorgeous in sight and spirit, so timelessly and agelessly enchanting, that it takes my breath away. The Lion and the Bird (public library) by French Canadian graphic designer and illustrator Marianne Dubuc is one such rare gem – the tender and melodic story of a lion who finds a wounded bird in his garden one autumn day and nurses it back to flight as the two deliver one another from the soul-wrenching pain of loneliness and build a beautiful friendship, the quiet and deeply rewarding kind.
Dubuc's warm and generous illustrations are not only magical in that singular way that only someone who understands both childhood and loneliness can afford, but also lend a mesmerizing musical quality to the story. She plays with scale and negative space in a courageous and uncommon way – scenes fade into opacity as time passes, Lion shrinks as Bird flies away, and three blank pages punctuate the story as brilliantly placed pauses that capture the wistfulness of waiting and longing. What emerges is an entrancing sing-song rhythm of storytelling and of emotion.
As an endless winter descends upon Lion and Bird, they share a world of warmth and playful fellowship.
But a bittersweet awareness lurks in the shadow of their union – Lion knows that as soon as her broken wing heals, Bird will take to the spring skies with her flock, leaving him to his lonesome life.
Dubuc's eloquent pictures advance the nearly wordless story, true to those moments in life that render words unnecessary. When spring arrives, we see Bird wave farewell to Lion.
"Yes," says Lion. "I know."
Nothing else is said, and yet we too instantly know – we know the universe of unspoken and ineffable emotion that envelops each and beams between them like silent starlight in that fateful moment.
The seasons roll by and Lion tends to his garden quietly, solemnly.
Summer passes slowly, softly.
Wistfully, he wonders where Bird might be. Until one autumn day…
…he hears a familiar sound.
It is Bird, returning for another winter of warmth and friendship.
The Lion and the Bird is ineffably wonderful, the kind of treasure to which the screen and the attempted explanation do no justice – a book that, as it was once said of The Little Prince, will shine upon your soul, whether child or grown-up, "with a sidewise gleam" and strike you "in some place that is not the mind" to glowing there with inextinguishable light.
The book comes from Brooklyn-based independent picture-book publisher Enchanted Lion, which has given us such immeasurable delights as Mark Twain's Advice to Little Girls, Alessandro Sanna's The River, Blexbolex's Ballad, Øyvind Torseter's The Hole, and Albertine's Little Bird.
Complement it with another ode to childhood and loneliness from Enchanted Lion, the resurrected vintage gem Little Boy Brown, illustrated by the great André François.
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"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," Annie Dillard memorably wrote in reflecting on why presence matters more than productivity. "On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it," Henry Miller asserted in his beautiful meditation on the art of living. And yet we spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves with overplanning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness.
In a chapter of the altogether indispensable 1843 treatise Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (public library), the influential Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855), considered the first true existentialist philosopher, explores precisely that – how our constant escapism from our own lives is our greatest source of unhappiness.
Kierkegaard, who was only thirty at the time, begins with an observation all the timelier today, amidst our culture of busy-as-a-badge-of-honor:
Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy – to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.
(It's worth remembering, here, that "busy is a decision" – one we constantly make, and often to our own detriment.)
In a latter chapter, titled "The Unhappiest Man," he returns to the subject and its deeper dimension:
The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.
He considers how the very architecture of our language perpetuates our proclivity for absence:
The unhappy one is absent. But one is absent when living in the past or living in the future. The form of expression is important, for it is evident, as philology also teaches us, that there is a tense that expresses present in the past, and a tense that expresses presence in the future; but the same science also teaches us that there is a pluperfect tense in which there is no present, as well as a future perfect tense with the same characteristics. These are the hoping and remembering individuals. Inasmuch as they are only hoping or only remembering, these are indeed in a sense unhappy individuals, if otherwise it is only the person who is present to himself that is happy. However, one cannot strictly call an individual unhappy who is present in hope or in memory. For what one must note here is that he is still present to himself in one of these. From which we also see that a single blow, be it ever so heavy, cannot make a person the unhappiest. For one blow can either deprive him of hope, still leaving him present in memory, or of memory, leaving him present in hope.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss
Kierkegaard goes on to explore these two key forms of escapism from presence, via hope and via memory:
Consider first the hoping individual. When, as a hoping individual (and of course to that extent unhappy), he is not present to himself, he becomes unhappy in a stricter sense. An individual who hopes for an eternal life is, indeed, in a certain sense an unhappy individual to the extent that he renounces the present, but nevertheless is strictly not unhappy, because he is present to himself in the hope and does not come in conflict with the particular moments of finitude. But if he cannot become present to himself in hope, but loses his hope, hopes again, and so on, then he is absent from himself not just in the present but also in the future, and we have a type of the unhappy. Though the hoping individual does not hope for something that has no reality for him, he hopes for something he himself knows cannot be realized. For when an individual loses hope, and instead of becoming a remembering individual, wants to remain a hoping one, then we get this form.
Similarly if we consider the remembering individual. If he finds himself present in the past, strictly he is not unhappy; but if he cannot do that but remains constantly absent from himself in a past, then we have a form of the unhappy.
Memory is pre-eminently the real element of the unhappy, as is natural seeing the past has the remarkable characteristic that it is gone, the future that it is yet to come; and one can therefore say in a sense that the future is nearer the present than is the past. That future, for the hoping individual to be present in it must be real, or rather must acquire reality for him. The past, for the remembering individual to be present in it, must have had reality for him. But when the hoping individual would have a future which can have no reality for him, or the remembering individual remember a past which had had no reality for him, then we have the genuinely unhappy individuals. Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment. The unhappiest one will always, therefore, be found among the unhappy rememberers.
For a potent antidote, pair this with Alan Watts on how to live with presence and Anna Quindlen on how to live rather than exist, then see Albert Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons.
Either/Or is a consciousness-expanding read in its entirety. Complement it with Kierkegaard on the relationship between creativity and anxiety.:: MORE / SHARE ::
"You can only go with loves in this life," Ray Bradbury memorably proclaimed. Whether love be bewitching or tormenting, whether pondered by the poets or scrutinized by the scientists, one thing is for certain – it is art's most powerful and enduring muse, fuel for the creative process more potent than anything the world has known. A poignant testament to this, and a fine addition to history's most beautiful reflections on love, comes from iconic painter Vincent van Gogh in My Life & Love Are One (public library) – a lovely slim 1976 book that traces "the magic and melancholy of Vincent van Gogh" by culling his thoughts on love, art, and turmoil from his letters to his brother Theo, which were originally published in 1937 as the hefty tome Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh. The title comes from a specific letter written during one of the painter's periods of respite from mental illness, in which he professes to his brother: "Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one."
In one letter, Van Gogh extols the grounding, self-soothing quality of love's intrinsic wisdom:
Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.
It was certainly an armor he needed – he lived his life in poverty, and the residents of the town where he settled in his final years petitioned to have him evicted from the artist commune he shared with Paul Gauguin and two other artists, on account of his madness. He soon moved into an asylum, where he continued to paint. Another letter to Theo rings with the paradoxical poignancy of desperation and resilience:
What am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.
'Self-Portrait with Straw Hat' by Vincent van Gogh, winter 1887/1888
And what a heart it was. In a different letter, Vincent relays to Theo the consciousness-expanding capacity of love – which Kierkegaard so eloquently captured – at the dawn of a new love affair:
Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my chance is slight or great? I mean, must I consider this when I love? No, no reckoning; one loves because one loves. Then we keep our heads clear, and do not cloud our minds, nor do we hide our feelings, nor smother the fire and light, but simply say: Thank God, I love.
To be sure, Van Gogh has the prudence to recognize that friendship is at least as great a gift as romantic love. In another letter, he tells Theo:
Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored.
And in another still:
Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.
This all-inclusive approach to love – this casting of a wide net of affections – is something Van Gogh believed wholeheartedly, and something Ray Bradbury would come to echo a century and a half later in telling aspiring writers, "I want your loves to be multiple." Vincent writes to Theo:
It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!
And later:
The best way to know God is to love many things.
Van Gogh sees the human capacity for love as integral to the creative process:
In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart.
Van Gogh's first sketchbook from The Secret Museum
Indeed, it is this capacity for love – for living from one's heart – that sustains the artist through struggle and rejection. In another letter, Van Gogh writes:
I believe more and more that to work for the sake of the work is the principle of all great artists: not to be discouraged even though almost starving, and though one feels one has to say farewell to all material comfort.
For Van Gogh, this heart-first approach to art and life was the root of all that is worthy. In another letter to Theo, he articulates what might well be his deepest underlying credo:
Do you know that it is very, very necessary for honest people to remain in art? Hardly anyone knows that the secret of beautiful work lies to a great extent in truth and sincere sentiment.
Though long out of print, surviving copies of My Life & Love Are One are still findable and very much worth the hunt. Complement it with a peek inside Van Gogh's never-before-revealed sketchbooks, then revisit Susan Sontag on love.
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"Imagine immensities. Pick yourself up from rejection and plow ahead. Don't compromise," Debbie Millman advised in her magnificent meditation on what it takes to design a good life. But how does one resist compromising one's creative ideals when straining to meet the practical essentials of survival? An uncompromising answer comes from one of the greatest creators humanity has ever known.
In 1932, the famed Hungarian photographer Brassaï, nicknamed by Henry Miller "the eye of Paris," was asked to photograph Picasso's sculptures, which at the time were practically unknown, for the first issue of the pioneering surrealist art review Minotaure, edited by André Breton. Picasso had just turned fifty. While already an established artist, he was still on the cusp of achieving worldwide acclaim.
But when Brassaï arrived at 23 rue La Boétie and entered Picasso's studio, he quickly realized that beyond his modest photographic assignment lay a much greater reward – an invitation into Picasso's private world and the gift of intimate perspective into his singular mind. After each session, Brassaï would return home and carefully record his talks with Picasso on scraps of paper, which he'd then stuff into a giant vase – not with the intent of future publication, but with the intuition that Picasso's thoughts on life and art would be enormously valuable to posterity. This went on for thirty years, over the course of which the two got to know each other – intellectually, creatively, spiritually – while they explored together such timelessly alluring subjects as the ego, the creative process, the role of romantic infatuation in art, and a universe more.
In 1964, Brassaï – who was as talented a writer as he was a photographer – reached into his vase and decided to make his affectionate records of these dimensional tête-à-têtes public in the remarkable volume Conversations with Picasso (public library).
Picasso by Brassaï
One of these conversations took place on May 3, 1944. Though Brassaï was by then a successful commercial photographer – the very reputation by which he had entered Picasso's life – he had dabbled in drawing twenty years prior, and had shown Picasso some of his early art. On that particular spring afternoon, Picasso expressed his admiration for Brassaï's gift for drawing, insisted that he must have an exhibition, and began probing the photographer about why he had abandoned the pencil. Despite Brassaï's success as a photographer, Picasso saw the relinquishing of any sort of talent – in this case, drawing – as creative cowardice, as compromising, as selling oneself short of fulfillment. Never one to bite his lip, he gave Brassaï a piece of his mind. While unsolicited, his words ring with timeless advice to all struggling artists on the importance of long-run perseverance and faith in one's sense of purpose:
When you have something to say, to express, any submission becomes unbearable in the long run. One must have the courage of one's vocation and the courage to make a living from one's vocation. The "second career" is an illusion! I was often broke too, and I always resisted any temptation to live any other way than from my painting… In the beginning, I did not sell at a high price, but I sold. My drawings, my canvases went. That's what counts.
When Brassaï protests that few artists are gifted enough to be successful, citing something Matisse had once told him – "You have to be stronger than your gifts to protect them." – Picasso counters by bringing down the ivory tower and renouncing the myth that "art suffers the moment other people start paying for it." Unlike those who maintain that commercial success is the enemy of creative integrity – including such well-meaning idealists as Sherwood Anderson – Picasso was sensitive to the layered, dissonant nature of the issue. He understood the fragility of the creative impulse as a serf of the human ego – an ego that thrives, much to our dismay and inner turmoil, on constant positive reinforcement. He tells Brassaï:
Well, success is an important thing! It's often been said that an artist ought to work for himself, for the "love of art," that he ought to have contempt for success. Untrue! An artist needs success. And not only to live off it, but especially to produce his body of work. Even a rich painter has to have success. Few people understand anything about art, and not everyone is sensitive to painting. Most judge the world of art by success. Why, then,leave success to "best-selling painters"? Every generation has its own. But where is it written that success must always go to those who cater to the public's taste? For myself, I wanted to prove that you can have success in spite of everyone, without compromise. Do you know what? It's the success I had when I was young that became my wall of protection. The blue period, the rose period, they were screens that shielded me.
Picasso translates this ethos of not compromising from the ideological to the pragmatic as he sends Brassaï off with some practical advice on selling his drawings:
Don't price them too high. What matters is that you sell a large number of them. Your drawings must go out into the world.
Brassaï and Picasso
Conversations with Picasso is an absolute treasure in its entirety, the brilliance of which Henry Miller captures in the preface:
In some inexplicable way it seems to me that the spirit which animates Picasso can never be fully accounted for by his work, no matter how prodigious it may be. Not that I deny the greatness of his work, but that the man himself is and will remain far greater than anything or everything which he accomplishes with his hands. He is so much more than the painter, sculptor, or whatever he may choose to be while breathing is in him. He is outsized, a human phenomenon.
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"Because of the dog's joyfulness," Mary Oliver wrote in her exquisite Dog Songs, "our own is increased. It is no small gift." Dogs have inspired literature, been muses to art, and garnered the label of "genius." But the true gift of Dog – the gentle and ineffable essence of dogness – remains precisely that capacity for unselfconscious joyfulness. In a world obsessed with productivity, Dog might be our greatest gateway to pure presence.
That's exactly what British singer, songwriter, and guitarist Nat Johnson captures with equal parts playfulness and poignancy in her single Dog – an homage not to Dog as a creature or a pet but as a disposition to the world, a way of life.
Oh, yes, and there's an impossibly wonderful animated music video for added delight:
Complement Dog, which is also available on iTunes and Bandcamp, with this lovely animated adaptation of Bob Dylan's If Dogs Run Free, then revisit Jim Homans's breath-stopping meditation on what dogs are for.
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