 Hey Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – the best art, design, and photography books of the year, how Rilke can help us befriend our mortality and live more fully, a tender wordless story about how we ennoble each other in friendship, 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 hugely appreciated.
 "One can't write directly about the soul," Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. Few writers have come to write about it – and to it – more directly than the novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, who describes himself as “a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts.” In his wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collectionWhat Are People For? (public library), Berry addresses with great elegance our neophilic tendencies and why innovation for the sake of novelty sells short the true value of creative work.
Novelty-fetishism, Berry suggests, is an act of vanity that serves neither the creator nor those created for:
 Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty – the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder. Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
Berry paints pride and despair as two sides of the same coin, both equally culpable in poisoning creative work and pushing us toward loneliness rather than toward the shared belonging that true art fosters:
There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair – done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision. Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much. The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life. For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. Who in loneliness can forgive?
Good work finds the way between pride and despair. It graces with health. It heals with grace. It preserves the given so that it remains a gift. By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
Echoing Thoreau's ode to the woods and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips's assertion that cultivating a capacity for"fertile solitude" is essential for creative work, Berry extols the ennobling effects of solitude, the kind gained only by surrendering to nature's gentle gift for quieting the mind:
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness...
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
The return from such humanizing solitude, Berry cautions, can be disorienting:
From the order of nature we return to the order – and the disorder – of humanity. From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it. One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human. And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.
In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.
Indeed, so deep is our pathology of human striving that even Thoreau, a century and a half ago, memorably despaired: "What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" But the value of such recalibration of our connectedness in solitude, Berry suggests, is that it reminds us of the artist's task, which is to connect us to one another. He returns to the subject of despair and pride, which serve to separate and thus betray the task of art:
The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so that the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.
[...]
Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?
[...]
But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.
To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure. It is despair that sees the work failing in one’s own failure. This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.
But Berry's most urgent point has to do with the immense value of "thoroughly conscious ignorance" and of keeping alive the unanswerable questions that make us human:
There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers. The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
In ignorance is hope. Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to. They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.
All of the essays in What Are People For? are imbued with precisely this kind of light-giving force. Complement it with Berry on what the poetic form teaches us about the secret of marriage, then revisit Sara Maitland on the art of solitude, one of the year's best psychology and philosophy books.
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NOTE: This article is of a length that most email programs can't handle, so it is truncated. You can read the full version, with all twenty selections, here.
After the year's best reads in science, children's books,psychology and philosophy, and art, design, and photography, here come the finest memoirs, biographies, and history books of the year – our most inviting bridge between past and present, personal and universal.
1. A LIFE WORTH LIVING
 "To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy," Albert Camus wrote in his 119-page philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. "Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question."One of the most famous opening lines of the twentieth century captures one of humanity's most enduring philosophical challenged – the impulse at the heart of Seneca's meditations on lifeand Montaigne's timeless essays and Maya Angelou's reflections, and a wealth of human inquiry in between. But Camus, the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature after Rudyard Kipling, addressed it with unparalleled courage of conviction and insight into the irreconcilable longings of the human spirit.
In the beautifully titled and beautifully written A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (public library | IndieBound), historian Robert Zaretsky considers Camus's lifelong quest to shed light on the absurd condition, his "yearning for a meaning or a unity to our lives," and its timeless yet increasingly timely legacy:
If the question abides, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or biographical interest. Our pursuit of meaning, and the consequences should we come up empty-handed, are matters of eternal immediacy.
[...]
Camus pursues the perennial prey of philosophy – the questions of who we are, where and whether we can find meaning, and what we can truly know about ourselves and the world – less with the intention of capturing them than continuing the chase.
Dive deeper with more on Camus's crusade for happiness as our moral obligation.
2. CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?
 "Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead," John Updike wrote in his magnificent memoir."So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?" It's a sentiment somewhat easier to swallow – though certainly not without itsancient challenge – when it comes to our own death, but when that of our loved ones skulks around, it's invariably devastating and messy, and it catches us painfully unprepared no matter how much time we've had to "prepare."
Count on another beloved New Yorker contributor, cartoonist Roz Chast, to address this delicate and doleful subject with equal parts wit and wisdom in Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir (public library | IndieBound) – a remarkable illustrated chronicle of her parents' decline into old age and death, pierced by those profound, strangely uplifting in-between moments of cracking open the little chests of truth we keep latched shut all our lives until a brush withour mortal impermanence rattles the lock and lets out some understanding, however brief and fragmentary, of the great human mystery of what it means to live.
The humor and humility with which Chast tackles the enormously difficult subject of aging, illness and death is nothing short of a work of genius.
See more here.
3. SUSAN SONTAG
 In addition to being a great personal hero of mine, Susan Sontag endures as one of the most influential intellectuals of the past century. But her most enchanting quality was a singular blend of fierce, opinionated intellect and vast emotional capacity– a mind not only aware of the world, but also of itself and its own vulnerability, coupled with a heart that beat with uncommon intensity and inhabited its fallible human potentiality fully, unflinchingly – not only a "professional observer" of life, per her memorable definition of a writer, but also an active participant in life, both public and private. Sontag lived with more dimension than most people are capable of even imagining, let alone comprehending, which rendered her at times revered, at times reviled, but mostly artificially flattened into the very labels she so deplored.
To capture Sontag's life and spirit by honoring her dimensionality, then, is a monumental task, but one which Berlin-based writer and art critic David Schreiberaccomplishes with enormous elegance in the long-awaited Susan Sontag: A Biography (public library |IndieBound).
Perhaps the most interesting narrative thread in Schreiber's story of Sontag explores how she claimed her place in culture and crafted her version of "the American dream," beginning with her conquest of New York:
In March 1959, Susan and her son, David, moved to New York. With her typical flair for self-dramatization, Sontag told interviewers that she arrived in the metropolis with only two suitcases and thirty dollars. Later it was seventy dollars, a somewhat more realistic amount that would be about $450 in today’s dollars. Because of the low rents in New York at the time, it would have been enough to make a start.
As Sontag told it, it sounds like a version of the American dream: a twenty-three-year-old single mother without resources moves to a huge and hostile city intending to live there as an author, filmmaker, and intellectual. And on her own and against all odds, she realizes her dream. There could not have been a better place than New York for Sontag to convert her fantasy of the bohemian life into reality. In this city, everything seemed possible for a young, ambitious woman.
But it wasn't merely a matter of ambition: Sontag possessed a rare talent to possess – people, places, social situations. Schreiber cites an account by one of Sontag's lifelong friends, the American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard:
Howard remembers what a natural Sontag was at making new contacts, striking up friendships, and meeting influential people. “She could be very, very nice – even seductive – to people she wanted something from. She just could not talk to stupid people.”
[…]
Sontag’s natural and self-confident contact with this exclusive society is all the more remarkable when one recalls how difficult it was to gain admittance. The gathering of New York’s high society of writers, artists, and intellectuals was an almost hermetically sealed world with strict criteria for admission.
[…]
Sontag seemed to exude an irresistible mixture of intelligence, hipness, sex, and beauty, so that, as she herself once said, she had Jasper Johns, Bobby Kennedy, and Warren Beatty all at her feet.
Dive deeper here.
4. MEANWHILE IN SAN FRANCISCO
 Although Meanwhile, in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words (public library | IndieBound) by illustrator extraordinaire andfrequent Brain Pickings contributorWendy MacNaughton may be "about" a city, in the sense that the raw inspiration was drawn from the streets of San Francisco, it is really about the city, any city – about community, about subcultures and belonging, about the complexities of gentrification, about what it means to have individual dignity and shared identity. In that sense, it is a collective memoir of community.
Like a modern-day Margaret Mead armed with ink and watercolor, not a critic or commentator but an observer and amplifier of voice, MacNaughton plunges into the living fabric of the city with equal parts curiosity and compassion, gentleness and generosity, wit and wisdom, and emerges with a dimensional portrait painted with honesty, humor, and humility.
Beneath the individual stories – of the bus driver, of the hipsters, of the old men in Chinatown, of the librarian, of the street preacher – lies a glimpse of our shared humanity, those most vulnerable and earnest parts of the human soul that we often overlook and dismiss as we reduce people to their demographic and psychographic variables, be those race or gender or socioeconomic status or subcultural identification. Embedded in these simple, moving stories is MacNaughton's tender reminder that there is no greater gift we can give each other than the gift of understanding, of looking and really seeing, of peering beyond the persona and into the person with an awareness that however different our struggles and circumstances may be, we are inextricably bonded by the great human longing to be truly seen for who we are.
See more here.
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7. WORN STORIES
 One of the most extraordinary things about human beings is that we weave our lives of stories, stories woven of sentimental memories, which we can't help but attach to our physical environment – from where we walk, creating emotional place-memory maps of a city, to howsmell transports us across space and time, to what we wear.
For artist and editor Emily Spivack, clothes can be an "evolving archive of experiences, adventures, and memories" and a powerful storytelling device. Since 2010, she has been meticulously curating a remarkable catalog of such wearable personal histories from the living archives of some of the most interesting minds of our time – artists and Holocaust survivors, writers and renegades, hip-hop legends and public radio personalities. In Worn Stories (public library), published by Princeton Architectural Press, Spivack shares the best of these stories – some poignant, some funny, all imbued with disarming humanity and surprising vulnerability – from an impressive roster of contributors, including performance artist Marina Abramovic, writerSusan Orlean, comedian John Hodgman, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, Orange Is the New Blackmemoirist Piper Kerman, artist Maira Kalman, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, and artist, writer, and educatorDebbie Millman.
The stories span a remarkable range – a traditional Indian shirt worn during a spiritual Hindu gathering turned kidnapping; the shoes in which Marina Abramovic walked the Great Wall of China while saying farewell to a soulmate; an oddly uncharacteristic purple silk tuxedo shirt that belonged to Johnny Cash, preserved by his daughter; and, among myriad other shreds and threads of the human experience, various mementos from the "soul loss" – as one contributor puts it – of love affairs ending.
Read some of the stories here, then hear Spivack's fascinating interview on Design Matters.
8. LETTERS TO VÉRA
 Long before Vladimir Nabokovbecame a sage of literature, Russia's most prominent literary émigré, and a man of widely revered strong opinions, the most important event of his life took place: 24-year-old Vladimir met 21-year-old Véra. She would come to be not only his great love and wife for the remaining half century of his life, but also his editor, assistant, administrator, agent, archivist, chauffeur, researcher, stenographer in four languages, and even his bodyguard, famously carrying a small pistol in her purse to protect her husband from assassination after he became America's most famous and most scandalous living author.
So taken was Vladimir with Véra's fierce intellect, her independence, her sense of humor, and her love of literature – she had been following his work and clipping his poems since she was nineteen and he twenty-two – that he wrote his first poem for her after having spent mere hours in her company. But nowhere did his all-consuming love and ebullient passion unfold with more mesmerism than in his letters to her, which he began writing the day after they met and continued until his final hours. They are now collected in the magnificent tomeLetters to Véra (public library) – a lifetime of spectacular contributions to the canon of literary history's greatest love letters, with intensity and beauty of language rivaled only, perhaps, by the letters of Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis and those of Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera.
In July of 1923, a little more than two months after they met, Vladimir writes to Véra:
I won't hide it: I'm so unused to being – well, understood, perhaps, – so unused to it, that in the very first minutes of our meeting I thought: this is a joke... But then... And there are things that are hard to talk about – you'll rub off their marvelous pollen at the touch of a word... You are lovely...
[...]
Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.
[...]
See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.
By November, his love has only intensified:
How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours – with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? ... I swear – and the inkblot has nothing to do with it – I swear by all that's dear to me, all I believe in – I swear that I have never loved before asI love you, – with such tenderness – to the point of tears – and with such a sense of radiance.
Devour more of Nabokov's exquisite love letters here.
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 Of all the imprisoning polarities and stereotypes in our culture, none is more pervasive than the imprisoning gender expectations we instill in kids from an early age. Even young Mark Twain took issue with them in his irreverent 1865 gemAdvice to Little Girls, and aNew Yorker cartoonist satirized them brilliantly a century later. Today, the situation is improving only slowly, only modestly, thanks to the occasional children's book encouraging young girls totranscend our gendered vocational stereotypes. But what about little boys who don't relate to society's prescription for how they should inhabit their own identity and don't understand why they aren't allowed to enjoy what little girls enjoy? As Erika Trafton wrote in hermoving meditation on gender identity, "This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball, trucks, and trains. This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous." And yet Andrew Solomon put it best in his superb book on parents, children, and the search for identity: "Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination."
That exercise is what writer and anti-bullying championChristine Baldacchino and illustrator Isabelle Malenfant explore with great warmth and tenderness inMorris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (public library) – another belated but wholly worthy addition to the year's best children's books, which tells the story of a sweet but misunderstood little boy derided and ostracized by his classmates because he loves wearing the tangerine dress in his classroom’s dress-up center.
Imaginative and wildly creative, little Morris likes to paint and sing and do puzzles while humming to himself. He loves the tangerine dress because its color "reminds him of tigers, the sun and his mother's hair"; he loves the sound it makes, too: "swish, swish, swish when he walks and crinkle, crinkle, crinkle when he sits down."
When the boys make fun of him and the girls jeer at the pink nail polish on his fingers, he pretends not to notice them, but his heart aches with anguish.
His classmates even shun him from the spaceship they are building – "Astronauts don't wear dresses," they scoff.
One day, Morris is so crestfallen over the ceaseless bullying that he begins to feel physically ill. (Indeed, psychologists are now finding that "social pain" has biological repercussions.) He is sent home, where he dreams up a grand space adventure with his cat Moo.
The next day, Morris takes out his brushes and paints a wild, vibrant picture of his dream, complete with a shiny space helmet for Moo. In the drawing, Morris is wearing his beloved tangerine dress riding atop a big blue elephant.
On Monday, Morris went to school with his painting rolled up in his backpack.
When he had the chance, he put on the dress that reminded him of tigers and the sun and his mother's hair.
Morris swish, swish, swished.
The tangerine dress crinkle, crinkle, crinkled.
His shoes click, click, clicked.
Morris felt wonderful.
The boys in his class are so enchanted by the space-world Morris dreamt up – a world into which he welcomes them – that they decide "it didn't matter if astronauts wore dresses or not" because "the best astronauts were the ones who knew where all the good adventures were hiding." With a quiet smile, Morris accepts their acceptance.
When snack time was over, Becky demanded the dress.
Morris told her she could have it when he was done with it.
"Boys don't wear dresses," Becky snipped.
Morris smiled as he swished, crinkled and clicked back to his spaceship.
"This boy does."
Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress is immensely heartening from cover to cover. It comes from Canadian independent children's-book powerhouseGroundwood Books, makers of such gems as Isabelle Arsenault's Once Upon a Northern Night and Liniers'sWhat There Is Before There Is Anything There. Complement it with the rest of this year's most wonderful children's books, then revisit Jennifer Finney Boylan’smemoir of transgender parenting.
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 The fact that we humans have such a notoriously hard time changing our minds undoubtedly has to do with the notion that "human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,"which belies the great robbery of the human experience – by calling ourselves beings, we deny our ever-unfolding becomings. Only in childhood are we afforded the luxury of inhabiting our becoming, but once forced to figure out who we want to be in life, most of us are so anxious about planting that stake of being that we bury the alive, active process of our becoming. In our rush to arrive at who we want to be, we flee from the ceaseless mystery of our becoming.
To show up wholeheartedly for our becoming requires doing one of the hardest things in life – allow the possibility of being wrong and incur the anguish of admitting that error. It requires that we grieve every earlier version of ourselves and endure the implicit accusation that if the way we do a certain thing now is better than before, then the way we did it before is not only worse but possibly – and this is invariably crushing – even wrong. The uncomfortable luxury of changing our mind is thus central to the courage of facing our becoming with our whole being.
This constant tussle could be especially difficult for artists, who imbue their creative work with an enormous amount of their being at the point of creation but must also include it in the ongoing record of their becoming. Hardly any figure in creative history has faced that anguishing moment of changing one’s mind for the sake of creative integrity, and faced it publicly, with more courage than John Steinbeck.
In September of 1936 – more than a quarter century before he was awarded the Nobel Prize – 34-year old Steinbeck witnessed a gruesome clash between the migrant workers and growers in a lettuce strike in California. "There are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born,” he despaired in a letter to his friend George Albee. Deeply invested in the fate of the migrant workers – who were also suffering from massive floods, had no help from the government, and lived in conditions over which Steinbeck repeatedly expressed compassionate outrage in his letters – he began working on a manuscript titledL’Affaire Lettuceberg. But over the two years that followed, it unraveled into an angry and rather bitter satire of Salinas leadership. Steinbeck was very much of the conviction that, as E.B. White eloquently put it many years later, a writer should "lift people up, not lower them down." And this text – a work of tearing down rather than building up – seemed to move young Steinbeck not closer but further away from the great champion of the human spirit he would one day become.
As soon as he finished the manuscript in mid-May of 1938, Steinbeck did something few people and perhaps even fewer artists are able to do: He murdered his darlings in a courageous letter to his editor, found in the altogether revelatory Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (public library | IndieBound). The missive is a masterwork of looking one's becoming in the eye and somersaulting one's entire being into a strenuous and seemingly backbreaking change of course for the sake of creative and spiritual integrity.
Steinbeck writes:
This is going to be a hard letter to write ... this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! these incidents all happened but – I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire.... I know, you could sell possibly 30,000 copies. I know that a great many people would think they liked the book. I myself have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the argument but I don’t like the book... Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly.
He attributes the misfire to a kind of creative complacency – another admission too anguishing for most of us to make – which made him forget that writing, as David Foster Wallace put it, is an art in which the horizon for self-improvement is infinite; forget the constant becoming that is any craft:
I had got smart and cocky you see. I had forgotten that I hadn’t learned to write books, that I will never learn to write them. A book must be a life that lives all of itself and this one doesn’t do that.
Steinbeck – who had just gotten significant critical acclaim for his warmup essays on the migrant workers' plight, published in The Nation – is also exquisitely aware of how blinding success can become to that essential incompleteness of an artist's creative journey:
I beat poverty for a good many years and I’ll be damned if I’ll go down at the first little whiff of success...
I think this book will be a good lesson for me. I think I got to believing critics – I thought I could write easily and that anything I touched would be good simply because I did it. Well any such idea conscious or unconscious is exploded for some time to come. I’m in little danger now of believing my own publicity...
Again I’m sorry. But I’m not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later.
Less than two weeks later, Steinbeck was already hard at work on The Grapes of Wrath – the iconic epic of the Great Depression that shines a light on the same uncomfortable and often gruesome subjects of class struggle, power, and oppression, but does so in a way that ennobles the characters, chooses dignity over depravity, and critiques a hopeless situation while granting hope. He gave himself a hundred days to finish the novel and recorded his creative process and personal journey in Working Days, which is in many ways as significant and rewarding as the novel it chronicles. The Grapes of Wrath earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize a year after its publication, became a cornerstone of his Nobel Prize two decades later, and endures as one of the most important works of social justice ever published in the English language.
Complement it with Steinbeck's unforgettable letter of advice to his teenage son on falling in love.
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In 2014, I poured thousands of hours and heaps of love into Brain Pickings, but also incurred some hefty practical expenses along the way that can't be loved away. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider helping me keep it going with a small donation. |
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In 2014, I poured thousands of hours and heaps of love into Brain Pickings, which will always remain ad-free, but also incurred some hefty practical expenses along the way that can't be loved away. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider helping offset those by becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donationof your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:  You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: 
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"Terrible things happen. And those are the things that we learn from... The amazing thing is that despite all... the human spirit still manages to survive, to stay strong."
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“It’s rather difficult, when one has MANY friends, to show loyalty to them all at the same time…”
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“You make relationships. One at a time. With the same painstaking attention to craft that you knew as a maker.”
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A playful celebration of the magic of language.
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Epistles on the fine art of "speeding truth into the world."
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A tender consolation for the disorienting journey of becoming a big sibling.
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How to instill an appreciation of the difference between "fact" and "poetic truth," in kids and grownups alike.
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How two titans faced off to shape the ideal of the modern metropolis.
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"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
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"We are made by the atoms and the stars... our matter and our form are determined by the cosmos of which we are a part."
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The science of why you can't resurrect a dead body but might be able to, sort of, in the future.
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