 Hey Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – why "psychological androgyny" is key to creativity, Bruce Springsteen's favorite books, the elusive art of inner wholeness, Neruda's life as an illustrated love letter to language, 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.
 "Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments,"Alan Lightman wrote in hissublime meditation on science and spirituality,"and at others to ride the passion and exuberance."In his conversation with E.O. Wilson, the poet Robert Hass described beauty as a "paradox of stillness and motion." But in our Productivity Age of perpetual motion, it's increasingly hard – yet increasingly imperative – to honor stillness, tobuild pockets of it into our lives, so that our faith in beauty doesn't become half-hearted, lopsided, crippled. The delicate bridling of that paradox is what novelist and essayist Pico Iyer explores in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (public library | IndieBound) – a beautifully argued case for the unexpected pleasures of "sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it," revealed through one man's sincere record of learning to "take care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world."
Iyer begins by recounting a snaking drive up the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles to visit his boyhood hero – legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. In 1994, shortly after the most revealing interview he ever gave, Cohen had moved to the Mt. Baldy Zen Center to embark on five years of seclusion, serving as personal assistant to the great Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, then in his late eighties. Midway through his time at the Zen Center, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the Dharma name Jikan – Pali for "silence." Iyer writes:
 I’d come up here in order to write about my host’s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was. I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who’d been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.
Cohen, who once described the hubbub of his ordinary state of mind as "very much like the waiting room at the DMV," had sought in the sequestered Zen community a more extreme, more committed version of a respite most us long for in the midst of modern life – at least at times, at least on some level, and often wholeheartedly, achingly. Iyer reflects on Cohen's particular impulse and what it reveals about our shared yearning:
Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life – an art – out of stillness. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. His name in the monastery, Jikan, referred to the silence between two thoughts.
[...]
One evening – four in the morning, the end of December – Cohen took time out from his meditations to walk down to my cabin and try to explain what he was doing here.
Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment” he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity.”
Was he kidding? Cohen is famous for his mischief and ironies.
He wasn’t, I realized as he went on. “What else would I be doing?” he asked. “Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.”
Typically lofty and pitiless words; living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn’t diminished his gift for golden sentences. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.
Iyer beholds his encounter with Cohen with the same incredulous amazement that most of us modern cynics experience, at first reluctantly, when confronted with something or someone incomprehensibly earnest, for nothing dissolves snark like unflinching sincerity. For Cohen, Iyer observes, the Zen practice was not a matter of "piety or purity" but of practical salvation and refuge from "the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows." Iyer writes:
Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions. “Nothing touches it,” Cohen said, as the light came into the cabin, of sitting still... Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.
But the paradox thickens the closer we get to its source. The kind of stillness Cohen bows to is a capacity most reliably acquired through meditation. And yet even though meditation is our greatest gateway to everyday transcendence, most adults in the West don't practice it. The second most common reason nonpractitioners have against meditating is that they don't have the time to do it – not enough time to learn to live with presence. (The most common reason to resist, of course, is people's protestation that they simply can't do it or aren't cut out for it, which is merely the time argument by a guise of greater denial – it simply means that they haven't put in the time to get good at it; there is a reason it's termed a meditation practice – mastering it obeys the same basic principles of attaining excellence as any skill.)
A century after Bertrand Russell admonished that the conquest of leisure and health would be of no use if no one remembers how to use them, Iyer paints an empirical caricature of the paradoxical time argument against stillness. Citing a sociological study of time diaries that found Americans were working fewer hours than they were 30 years earlier but felt as if they were working more, he writes:
We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off – our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
As most of us would begrudgingly admit, not without some necessary tussle with denial and rationalization, the challenge of staying present in the era of productivity is in no small part a product of our age itself. Iyer captures this elegantly:
Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.
Much like we find ourselves by getting lost, Iyer suggests, we inhabit the world more fully by mindfully vacating its mayhem:
Going nowhere ... isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Annie Dillard's memorable notion of "unmerited grace [that] is handed to you, but only if you look for it," Iyer considers the rewards that beckon us from that space of stillness:
It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere – by sitting still or letting my mind relax – that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.
With a wink of wisdom that would've made William James proud, Iyer adds:
It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.
The Art of Stillness, which comes from TED Books, is a wonderful read in its entirety. Complement it with Alan Watts on happiness and how to live with presence, Rebecca Solnit's magnificent field guide to getting lost, Annie Dillard on presence vs. productivity, and some thoughts on wisdom in the age of information.
:: MORE / SHARE ::
 Beyond having written one of the finest books on writingever published, Anne Lamott embraces language and life with equal zest, squeezing from the intersection wisdom of the most soul-stretching kind.Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (public library |IndieBound) shines a sidewise gleam at Lamott's much-loved meditations on why perfectionism kills creativity and how we keep ourselves small by people-pleasing to explore the boundless blessings of our ample imperfections, from which our most expansive and transcendent humanity springs.
In an especially enchanting essay titled "The Book of Welcome," Lamott imagines a scripture that was never written, a set of guidances and assurances that would avail us of haven from one of our most anguishing pathologies – the sense that we fall short, that we are undeserving of happiness, that we are unlovable and undesired; a sense instilled in many of us by "not having been cherished for who we are, by certain tall, anxiously shut-down people in our childhood homes." She writes:
The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can't save us, that welcome – both offering and receiving – is our source of safety. Various chapters and verses of this book would remind us that we are wanted and even occasionally delighted in, despite the unfortunate truth that we are greedy-grabby, self-referential, indulgent, overly judgmental, and often hysterical.
Somehow that book "went missing"... We have to write that book ourselves.
Illustration from Hug Me by Simona Ciraolo
We write that book, Lamott suggests, in large part through our friendships – those delicate yet supremely secure embraces of welcome, woven of what Emerson memorably termed"truth and tenderness." We nurture these voluntary relationships to heal from the involuntary ones that failed to nurture us when we were coming unto ourselves. Lamott writes:
The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.
[...]
They liked to think their love was unconditional. That's nice. Sadly, though, the child who showed up at the table for meals was not the child the parents had set out to make. They seemed surprised all over again. They'd already forgotten from breakfast.
The parental units were simply duplicating what they'd learned when they were small. That's the system.
It wasn't that you got the occasional feeling that you were an alien or a chore to them. You just knew that attention had to be paid constantly to their moods, their mental health levels, their rising irritation, and the volume of beer consumed. Yes, there were many happy memories marbled in, too, of picnics, pets, beaches. But I will remind you now that inconsistency is how experimenters regularly drive lab rats over the edge.
Illustration from Little Boy Brown
And when "the system" does eventually drive us over the edge, we drop – if we're lucky, if we allow ourselves to fall with grace – into the ungrabby, ungreedy, wholly welcoming arms of those we learn to call friends. Lamott recounts her own crash when, in her thirties, she got sober:
A few women in the community reached out to me. They recognized me as a frightened lush. I told them about my most vile behavior, and they said, "Me too!" I told them about my crimes against the innocent, especially me. They said, "Ditto. Yay. Welcome." I couldn't seem to get them to reject me. It was a nightmare and then my salvation.
It turns out that welcome is solidarity. We're glad you're here, and we're with you. This whole project called you being alive, you finding joy? Well, we're in on that.
Allowing that, Lamott observes, is a massive undertaking, a "big adjustment" that requires a "rebalancing of the soul." But once we do, the book of welcome rewrites your story:
Trappings and charm wear off... Let people see you. They see your upper arms are beautiful, soft and clean and warm, and then they will see this about their own, some of the time. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event ever happened – me in your life, you in mine.
Two parts fit together. This hadn’t occurred all that often, but now that it does, it’s the wildest experience. It could almost make a believer out of you. Of course, life will randomly go to hell every so often, too. Cold winds arrive and prick you: the rain falls down your neck: darkness comes. But now there are two of you: Holy Moly.
A master of the touchpoint between wit and wisdom, Lamott adds to the poignant a wink of the playful:
The two nonnegotiable rules are that you must not wear patchouli oil – we’ll still love you, but we won’t want to sit with you – and that the only excuse for bringing your cell phone to the dinner table is if you’re eagerly waiting to hear that they’ve procured an organ for your impending transplant.
Small Victories is an enormously ennobling read in its entirety. Complement it with Lamott on how to handle those who refuse to welcome us, then revisit Aristotle on the art of human connection, Andrew Sullivan on why friendship is a greater gift than erotic love, and C.S. Lewis on true friendship.
:: MORE / SHARE ::
 As a lover of imaginative and intelligent alphabet books and of absolutely everything Maira Kalmandoes, I find the letters of the alphabet and the words they make insufficient to express the boundless wonderfulness of Kalman'sAh-Ha to Zig-Zag (public library | IndieBound) – the children's-book counterpart of her magnificent My Favorite Things, which began as a companion to an exhibition Kalman curated to celebrate the anticipated reopening of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
In this ABC gem – which doubles as a design-history primer full not of snobbery and self-important art-speak but of a playful celebration of uncertainty and imperfection – Kalman culls thirty-one objects from the museum's collection and strings them together into a tour of the alphabet, with her characteristic quirk, candor, and exuberant creative curiosity as the loving guide.
Her unusual selections, often of seemingly mundane artifacts, bespeak her extraordinary gift for finding magic in "the moments between the moments between the moments." The accompanying words emanate from a beautiful wanderer's mind and a spirit that is so clearly generous and kind.
There is the "itsy-bitsy nail" in I; the beautiful embroidered pocket in P, which offers the pause-giving factlet that "a long time ago, women didn't have pockets in their clothes"; the clever play on continuity that offers "terrible news" in T as a painting of burnt toast accuses the antique toaster in Q ("Quite the toaster!) of malfunction.
The last letter winks at Kalman's wonderfulPrinciples of Uncertainty:
The final spread in the story offers a sweet message of embracing imperfection – a gentle reminder for all ages that, as Anne Lamott memorably put it, "perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people":
But the end is not really the end – perhaps the most touching and empowering part of the book is its postscript of sorts. In the closing pages, Kalman tells the heartening story of Nellie and Sally Hewitt – the two young women who founded the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum:
They loved to sing and dance. They were just a little bit wild. A little bit.
They had sharp eyes. The kind of eyes that really LOOK at things.
One day they decided to collect the things they loved, and create a museum. And they really did it. Which is a lesson to be learned. If you have a good idea – DO IT.
Ah-Ha to Zig-Zag is an absolute delight in its entirety. Complement it with its indispensablegrownup counterpart, then revisit Kalman'schildren's-book collaboration with Lemony Snicket and this fantastic short documentaryabout Kalman's work and spirit.
:: MORE / SHARE ::
 "Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it," Lucinda Williams sang from my headphones into my heart one rainy October morning on the train to Hudson."What seems cynicism is always a sign, always a sign..." I was headed to Hudson for a conversation with a very different but no less brilliant musician, and a longtime kindred spirit – the talented and kindAmanda Palmer. In an abandoned schoolhouse across the street from her host's home, we sat down to talk about her magnificent and culturally necessary new book, The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help (public library | IndieBound) – a beautifully written inquiry into why we have such a hard time accepting compassion in all of its permutations, from love to what it takes to make a living, what lies behind our cynicism in refusing it, and how learning to accept it makes possible the greatest gifts of our shared humanity.
I am partial, perhaps, because my own sustenance depends on accepting help. But I also deeply believe and actively partake in both the yin and the yang of that vitalizing osmosis of giving and receiving that keeps today’s creative economy alive, binding artists and audiences, writers and readers, musicians and fans, into the shared cause of creative culture. "It’s only when we demand that we are hurt," Henry Miller wrote incontemplating the circles of giving and receiving in 1942, but still seem woefully caught in the paradoxical trap of too much entitlement to what we feel we want and too little capacity to accept what we truly need. The unhinging of that trap is what Amanda explores with equal parts deep personal vulnerability, profound insight into the private and public lives of art, and courageous conviction about the future of creative culture.
The most urgent clarion call echoing throughout the book, which builds on Amanda's terrific TED talk, is for loosening our harsh and narrow criteria for what it means to be an artist, and, most of all, for undoing our punishing ideas about what renders one a not-artist, or – worse yet – a not-artist-enough. Amanda writes of the anguishing Impostor Syndrome epidemic such limiting notions spawn:
People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.
There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.
But in the history of creative genius, this pathology appears to be a rather recent development – the struggle to be an artist, of course, is nothing new, but the struggle to believe being one seems to be a uniquely modern malady. In one of the most revelatory passages in the book, Amanda points out a little-known biographical detail about the life of Henry David Thoreau – he who decided to live the self-reliant life by Walden pond andmemorably proclaimed: "If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal – that is your success.”It is a detail that, today, would undoubtedly render Thoreau the target of that automaticprivilege narrative as we point a finger and call him a "poser":
Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live "by his own means" in a little 10-foot x 15-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought over a basket of freshly-baked goods for him, including donuts.
The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expanse of transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting onto his threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom brought him just doesn't jibe with most people's picture of him of a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking back-to-the-woods folk-hero.
If Thoreau lived today, steeped in a culture that tells him taking the donuts chips away at his credibility, would he have taken them? And why don't we? Amanda writes:
Taking the donuts is hard for a lot of people.
It's not the act of taking that's so difficult, it's more the fear of what other people are going to thinkwhen they see us slaving away at our manuscript about the pure transcendence of nature and the importance of self-reliance and simplicity. While munching on someone else's donut.
Maybe it comes back to that same old issue: we just can't see what we do as important enough to merit the help, the love.
Try to picture getting angry at Einstein devouring a donut brought to him by his assistant, while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity. Try to picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly helping the sick.
To the artists, creators, scientists, non-profit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept the help, in whatever form it's appearing,
Please, take the donuts.
To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band,
Take the donuts.
To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer ... living on less than $700 a month who went on to marry a best-selling author who she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can't break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please....
Everybody.
Please.
Just take the fucking donuts.
But Thoreau, it turns out, got one thing right inhis definition of success, which emanates from Amanda's words a century and a half later:
The happiest artists I know are generally the ones who can manage to make a reasonable living from their art without having to worry too much about the next paycheck. Not to say that every artist who sits around the campfire, or plays in tiny bars, is “happier” than those singing in stadiums – but more isn’t always better. If feeling the connection between yourself and others is the ultimate goal it can be harder when you are separated from the crowd by a 30-foot barrier. And it can be easier to do – though riskier – when they’re sitting right beside you. The ideal sweet spot is the one in which the artist can freely share their talents and directly feel the reverberations of their artistic gifts to their community. In other words, it works best when everybody feels seen.
As artists, and as humans: If your fear is scarcity, the solution isn’t necessarily abundance.
But here is where it gets hairy. The strange and disorienting thing is that even the best-intentioned of us sometimes deploy the donuts dismissal in its various guises. As I took the above photo of Amanda with her new iPhone – the model released mere days earlier – I, a longtime and vocal proponent of undoing the toxic myth that being a true artist necessarily requires being a starving artist, was suddenly gripped with the anguishing sense that some part of me had instantly, almost automatically put on a Fraud Police hat. But why shouldn't she, an artist supported directly by her audience, have the latest iPhone? Why should this trigger a twinge of questioning authenticity rather than a celebration of all the earned love from fans that makes it possible?
To think that we all do it is at once terrifying and comforting.
In fact, Amanda herself does it. In one of the most poignant passages in the book, she recalls doing this very thing to her own mother – a hardworking and accomplished freelance computer programmer in an era when women in the field frequently got raised eyebrows and rarely got raises. Amanda relays the conversation, which took place after two glasses of wine twenty years later:
You know, Amanda, one thing always bothered me. Something you said when you were a teenager.
Oh, no. I was a terrible teenager, an angst-fest of hormones and nihilism.
Um....what?
She can do this imitation of me as a teenager that makes me want to crawl under a table. She did it now.
You said: 'MOM, I’m a REAL ARTIST. You're NOT.'
Then she added, more kindly: You know you, Amanda, you were being a typical teenager.
I winced, and felt my neck tighten and my teeth grit down into mother-fight-or-flight mode.
She continued, But you know. You would say: ‘I’m an ARTIST...fuck you, mom! What do you know?! You're just a computer programmer.’
[…]
And then my mother said something that absolutely demolished my defensiveness. I don't think, in all the years I’ve known her, that I’ve ever heard her sound more vulnerable.
You know, Amanda, it always bothered me. You can't actually see my art, but... I’m one of the best artists I know. It’s just... nobody can ever see the beautiful things I made. Because you can't hang them in a gallery.
Then there was a pause.
I took in my own deep breath.
God, mom. Sorry.
And she laughed and her voice turned cheerful again.
Oh, don’t worry, sweetie. You were thirteen.
[...]
In all my rock-and-roll years of running around, supporting people,advocating for women, giving all these strangers and fans permission to “embrace their inner fucking artist,” to express themselves fully, to look at their work and lives as beautiful, unique creative acts, I’d somehow excluded my own mother.
[...]
I thought about her work that I couldn't possibly comprehend, about the actual creative work she had done. All that delicate, handmade lace-like programming she did into the dead of night... and how insanely proud she felt when it worked, and the true... beauty of that. And the sadness, too, because nobody ever, you know, clapped for her at the end of the night.
The kind of work Amanda's mother had been doing all those years is what so many artists – by the true, soul-bound definition – do every single day, the kind of work David Foster Wallace found at the heart of heroism as he wrote of the "minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer." That a thirteen-year-old girl would dismiss her brilliant mother's heroism says less about the girl and more about the culture.
This is what we do – we dismiss. And when we ordain ourselves as the Fraud Police, we are always thirteen – especially on the internet, the vast majority of which is inherently thirteen.
In this excerpt from our conversation, the full footage of which you can watch at the bottom, Amanda and I toss the proverbial donut back and forth as we explore how and why we do this – why we deny others the label "artist" and deny ourselves the donuts in order not to detract from our own artistness:
Amanda learned how to get off the nail during her early days working as a living statue in the streets of Boston to scrape together a living – work that was constantly dismissed by strangers and self-appointed Fraud Police officers as not-work, or not-real-enough work. That experience, which she recounts beautifully in her TED talk, gave her vital insight into the deepest trenches of the impulse that finally drives us to get off the nail and take the donuts:
As I moved through my life as a statue and later as a musician, I started to understand:
There’s a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen.
When you are looked at, your eyes can be closed. You suck energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open, and you are seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and you generate energy. You create light.
One is exhibitionism, the other is connection.
Not everybody wants to be looked at.
Everybody wants to be seen.
The magical thing that happens when we choose to give and when we let ourselves receive is that we step into a widening circle of seeing. This, indeed, is what makes the book's closing pages so powerful as Amanda recounts watching a living statue in the streets of Melbourne:
He was crouched in a gargoyle pose; his body was completely purple, in a costume that clung to his skin. His face was covered with an intricate handmade mask, which revealed just his eyes, and whose little glued-on mirrors made his muzzle look like more like a disco-ball. He was majestic, dragon-like, beautiful. When a stranger put money in his cup, he encouraged people to pat him as he made serpentine movements of pleasure. It was nearly dawn, and I wondered how long he’d been working there.
Jetlagged and tired from touring, she leans on a tree across the street and watches him as groups of drunken young people taunt and jeer at him. And then, she dials back the time machine of her own life-experience – for where else does empathy live? – and shares with him an exquisite moment of humanity:
As I crouched down and put in a two-dollar coin, I looked into his eyes. He stopped for a moment. Then he lowered his head.
It was odd. He froze in that position and I stayed there, on my bent knees, waiting to see what would happen.
Then his whole back started slowly shaking.
He raised his head back up and I looked into his eyes, which were brimming with tears.
We crouched there, for a moment, face to face.
I reached my hand out to touch his cheek, before taking him into my arms.
He buried his head in the crook of my neck, shaking and sobbing without a sound.
I closed my eyes. I tightened my arms around him. He tightened, too.
The drunken crowd who had just been tormenting him stared at us, and went silent.
We stayed, attached, on our knees, for what felt like two or three minutes.
I held him. He held me.
He finally raised his head and looked at me, through the slit in his mirrored mask, with his wet, red eyes. I hugged him, chest to chest, and felt his breath slow down.
I whispered in his ear, Get back to work.
The Art of Asking is an immeasurably heartening read from cover to cover. In this long and wide-ranging conversation, filmed by the wonderful Allan Amato, who also took the book cover photograph, Amanda and I meander across various facets of creative culture, the artist's journey, and the uncomfortable art of accepting help, from what compassion really means to the soundest psychological strategies for handling self-appointed Fraud Police officers and capital-c Critics to the challenges of sharing a life with another human being, however great the love between the two.
:: MORE / SHARE ::
If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a small donation. |
|
|
| |
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes lots of time, thought, resources, and love each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of 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: 
|
"The dream of a house can be the eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were living."
|
Steven Johnson explains how glass, tin, and mercury converged on a Venetian island in the 15th century to fundamentally change the way we look at ourselves.
|
"And it is so simple... You will instantly find how to live."
|
A gentle reminder that to be somebody's favorite thing in the world requires a certain quality of thingness.
|
"In a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind."
|
|
"Tales are powerful instruments and should be wielded skillfully."
|
"The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities."
|
"Choice is a signature of our species. We choose to live, sometimes we choose our own death, but most of the time we make choices just to prove choice is possible. Above all else, we value the right to choose one’s destiny."
|
"A library is no place for three lost mice."
|
"Deliberate, conscienceless mendacity, the acceptance of falsehood and hypocrisy, is the most dangerous of all sins."
|
The four most reliable telltale signs of the 10 to 200 lies we tell and are told each day.
|
"The most successful scientist thinks like a poet ... and works like a bookkeeper."
|
"You do not know what wars are going on down there, where the spirit meets the bone."
|
|
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기